Roadway death and injury: why everyone should care and what you can do to reduce risk | Mark Rosekind, Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Mark Rosekind. Mark is a safety, sleep, fatigue and policy leader with more than 30 years of experience enacting strategic, practical and effective database solutions that enhance safety and health in complex environments. He was the chief safety innovation officer at Zucs, an Amazon owned autonomous mobile company from 2017 to 2022 He was also appointed the distinguished policy scholar in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health between 2020 and 2022
Previously, he was appointed by President Obama as the 15th administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Before becoming the NHTSA administrator, he was appointed by President Obama and served as the 40th member of the National Transportation Safety Board, the NSTB, which you no doubt will recognize is the organization that is always investigating plane crashes, train crashes and other disasters.
Additionally, Mark previously directed the Fatigue Countermeasures Program at NASA Ames Research Center and was the chief of Aviation Operations Branch in the Flight Management and Human Factors Division.
He earned his bachelor's degree from Stanford and his master's and doctorate from Yale University and completed postdoctoral training at Brown University Medical School. In looking at what we internally call the death bars, which you've likely heard me talk about, which we use to identify what are the threats to our lifespan, you may recall that while the four horsemen generally get the lion's share of our attention, there's always this pesky fifth cause of death, which is deaths due to accidents. And while we typically speak about one subset of those, which are the accidents that are due to falls because they disproportionately increase later in life, there's one cause that seems relatively consistent throughout life, and that is accidental deaths due to transport. And so I wanted to do a deep dive into this topic because frankly, when I consider my own mortality over the next decade, this occupies a disproportionate share of what might account for my relative risk of death. And I know that for many of you listening, that is also true.
In this conversation, we obviously talk about Mark's background, which is quite unique and how it led him to be an expert in this. We look at the statistics of car crashes and how that's changed over time. We talk about the groups that are most at risk and the locations where most of these incidents take place. We then look at various things that can increase the risk, such as obviously being on your phone and being distracted the role of alcohol and cannabis, sleep deprivation and drowsiness, speed and weather. We talk about autonomous vehicles and new safety technology. And we talk about what pedestrians need to be aware of and what resources are available for people to learn more, especially parents. And this is something I'm thinking a lot about as my daughter is on the cusp of beginning to drive. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Rosekind.
Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining me here today. This is certainly a topic that I don't think gets enough attention given the consequences of it. It's also a topic that I think maybe people don't necessarily appreciate the frequency of such interactions. And I guess one of the things I'm hoping to understand today is how much of the nature of what we're gonna discuss today is under our control. I know that as I think about the things that are a threat to our lifespan, a number of these things are kind of out of our control, but many of them are actually in our control. Certain diseases, for example, like cardiovascular disease, are almost entirely within our control, and genes play a role, but your ability to sort of go above and beyond the genetic hand you're dealt is significant. But here, when it comes to accidental deaths, and as a subset of that, the role that fatigue plays in that, I wanna really explore this. But I think before we do, I think it's important that people really get a sense of you and your background. When we decided we wanted to spend time on this topic, it felt almost too good to be true that we discovered you and your work. The way things sort of work, Mark, is basically we sit around and brainstorm ideas that we wanna cover, and then we go out and look for an expert. That's 99% of our podcasts work in that way. I remember when Nick came to me and said, okay, you know, this is what we found. And I was like, wow, that seems amazing. We're gonna really answer a lot of questions I've always had. So tell us a little bit about your background, because the first thing that stood out to me was how at a very young age you lost your father.