So your kids call you dead. You don't ask them to call you Dr. Gottlieb in the house.

No one calls me Dr. Gottlieb, so that's inappropriate for me to be asking my wife and kids to call me that at home.

Okay, and you can call me Scott. Okay, all right, we'll call you Scott.

And I'll still tell my kids to call me Dr. Jenette.

That's Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration

from 2017 to 2019. Now he's on the board of Pfizer.

He has had a court side seat to our fight against COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

And I have a lot of questions for him from the Freakonomics Radio Network. Welcome to Freakonomics MD.

I'm Bob Ujena. I'm a medical doctor and an economist. And this is a show where we dissect

fascinating questions at the sweet spot between health and economics. Today we have a guest who

turned two of the biggest questions I've been curious about in the last year into a new book.

Questions I bet you have to Scott Gottlieb's new book is called Uncontrolled Spread.

Why COVID-19 crush this and how we can defeat the next pandemic? I should mention that we recorded

this conversation with Scott just a couple of weeks ago, but things move so fast these days.

There have already been some major milestones in the pandemic that we did not get a chance to talk

about. President Biden has rolled out new vaccine mandates. Vaccine makers are seeking approval

for doses that are designed for kids as young as five. The new variant has now been found in all

50 states in the US. But we're taking a step back in this conversation to focus on the early days

of the pandemic. Like what happened during the initial response? And how can we learn from experience

to handle public health crises better in the future? Before we dig into those two million dollar

questions, they're probably even multi-billion dollar questions. I had just a few other questions

about how this kid from New Jersey grew up to become the head of the FDA. The first step in that

...