Marty McCarrie, Commissioner of the FDA. Welcome to San Francisco.

Great to be here, Dave. Good to be with you.

Yeah, thanks. It's J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week in San Francisco

considered, I think, probably the biggest, most important biotech conference globally.

Very important week. So you're visiting this week for the conference?

Yeah. 120,000 people. Great conversations you hear from everybody. Just not enough time to meet with everybody you want to meet with, but it's a great time. Well, thanks for sitting down with me. You and I have gotten to know each other a little bit over the last year or so. Yeah. And I'm really excited to hear a little bit about how things are going. It's been almost a year since you've been in the role. I think maybe for our audience, you could share a little bit about how you got this role.

How did you get involved with this administration? How did you get connected with them? And maybe

we can go all the way back to your very outspoken views during the COVID pandemic.

And maybe how that brought attention to you and your philosophies that

drove this role. Yeah, so my interest in academia, I went to graduate school for public health

and served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, as I also had a clinical

practice in GI and cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins.

And my interest was always in the root causes of our healthcare system problems, from quality,

transparency, and price.

And in the work on price, I led sort of a national effort to try to get more price transparency

of hospital prices.

I wrote a book on it that did very well. It took me to the White House where they had read the book,

invited me in, and in that first Trump administration, we had a lot of great conversations.

And then they implemented the idea. And I was so impressed, this makes sense,

you know, we want common sense ideas. And so we got the hospital price transparency executive order signed by the president.

That's where I developed some of the relationships and got to know the folks.

And then when President Trump got reelected, he gave me a call days after the election.

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