The Surprising Habits That Matter Most for Health with Zeke Emanuel

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
Where has time gone? This is the sixth year of the Remarkable People podcast, and I thought maybe it's time to find a revenue model. So if you'd like to sponsor this podcast, please reach out to me. You will be able to reach an audience of highly educated, high income, open-minded, I would even say growth mindset minded people.
And I will even read the ads or the promotions inside the podcast. We're not just going to slap it on at the beginning and the middle and the end. I will do the reading. One caveat, I will not promote products and services that I do not like. So if you have a remarkable product or service, you are in the right place. Guy at guykawasaki.com.
This is Remarkable People.

**Zeke Emanuel** (0:57)
And we know, look, almost all of us know, preventing a disaster is often a lot cheaper than coming in after the fact. Unfortunately, preventing a disaster is not front and center on the news media right in front of us all the time. When you prevent it, no one sees it, and so they don't see the value of prevention. And that's a human psychological defect we have. But I think it's very important to be able to address it, and to be able to think, oh, if we don't do this, it's going to actually cost us more money.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:32)
Hello, everyone. It's Guy Kawasaki. Welcome to today's episode of the Remarkable People podcast. And we have the most remarkable of the three Emmanuel brothers, I hope, and his name is Zeke Emanuel, and he's an oncologist, a bioethicist, an author. I think in some, he's one of the most influential voices in the American healthcare policy.
And is that all true so far?

**Zeke Emanuel** (2:05)
I hope so.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:06)
Yeah, and you know what? He was a special advisor to President Barack Obama, and he's a big part of Obamacare. And he has a great new book out, and it has one of the cleverest titles for a health book. It's called Eat Your Ice Cream. Now, when we got the pitch for this book, I told Madisun, how can we not have a guy who has a book called Eat Your Ice Cream? Like, he doesn't hang around with Jeffrey Epstein, he's not tainted, he's not on 60 Minutes, he actually finished his residency. We gotta have this guy, oh my God.
So welcome to the show, Zeke Emanuel.

**Zeke Emanuel** (2:50)
Great, great to be here.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:53)
Let me explain, so he's one of three brothers. You're gonna correct me if I'm wrong, there are three brothers.
Brother number one is a Hollywood producer, brother number two was the chief of staff for Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago, and brother number three is our guest. So if I were a parent listening to this podcast, what would be going through my head right now is what was the Emanuel family secret? So was it Wheaties? Was it baby Einstein? Did you guys have creatine in your formula? Did you take Kuman? Like, describe growing up Emanuel.

**Zeke Emanuel** (3:33)
I can say all of that doesn't apply to us. Obviously, the genes are the genes. We don't control them. And we know that at least in some cases, different brothers have different genes. So that's not going to be the major factor.
I would say that there are two really important things. And then there's a lot of other things that are relevant. One important thing is my parents were very, very committed to social justice issues. My mom was heavily involved in civil rights for a white woman in the 50s and early 60s. That was very unusual. We would have a lot of civil rights organization meetings at the house, people planning protests. So we got a lot of that, as they say, in mother's milk.
My father was very heavily involved in getting lead paint removed from apartments because he was a pediatrician and he'd see kids who had the adverse, especially mental deficits produced by lead paint and got very active on that score as well. So the idea of doing good for others and trying to make the world a better place was something that we grew up with very much.
And my mom took us to a lot of protests. So we were at protests about civil rights, we were at protests about the Vietnam War. So that's one aspect. The other aspect that is very important was my mom was the antithesis of the helicopter parent.
She did not hover over us. She obviously wanted us to do well. She pushed us. But like when it came home from school, all right, go outside and play, be back at five o'clock. And so we had to take our own initiative. We had to plan what we were going to do. We had to negotiate, we had to resolve conflicts. I distinctly remember we had a playground in the middle of a block that we lived on. And my mom would take us there. She'd sit on the bench and not get involved. You guys go figure out what you're doing in the playground. It's your responsibility. And when we got older, we would play football on the street or we would do whatever. And again, a lot of socialization, a lot of initiative, a lot of solving problems. And that's really, really super important. And she wasn't there taking every barrier away, just ensuring our feelings weren't hurt, far from it. And we had to make do and push ourselves. So I think those are very important. The other thing is, I would say that our house was very much the center of a very, very constant collection of people, lots of socialization, lots of friends coming over, us going off with different people. So we're very comfortable talking and interacting with people. So all of that is critical.