Why Americans Pay So Much for Drugs: A Pharma CEO Exposes the System

We're talking about the large pharmaceutical companies that are delivering the drugs. The boards of the companies need to make a decision. Their purpose must be the patient. The purpose of our industry was fundamentally to try and better the lives of others, making that difference to the patient. Today we're joined by Jeremy Levine, a South African-born physician, medical doctor, and one of the most influential leaders in global biopharmaceuticals. His journey to the top of medicine is anything but ordinary. He didn't learn to read until age 11, graduated from high school with modest grades, and was taught his schooling by never getting far. But after one life-changing opportunity in an unforgettable Oxford interview, he earned his place at one of the world's most prestigious universities. In this conversation, we explore his remarkable path, the future of biotech and pharma, and our trust in modern medicine fairs. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Dr. Levine, welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Thank you, it's wonderful being with you. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you, thank you for being here from Connecticut at this time. We'll talk about pharma and, you know, you talk in your book about how to restore trust in pharma, so we'll talk about that, but I first wanna start with where you started as a kid. You have a pretty unusual way you grew up, and please share with us your growing up and how you ended up being one of the most influential doctors in the world, for that matter. Well, it's very kind of you to say that, but my background is humble. We are a farming family that came from a little town in the Western Cape of South Africa. We were obliged to leave the country when the country became, went apartheid. My family were successful, cattle farmers, sheep farmers, wheat, and a very beautiful part of it, very beautiful. And so we left, we went to a country that was called Rhodesia. My father was a journalist there, and again, began a situation where at the end of the day, he had to leave that country as well, leaving us behind. When you say he had to leave, what does that actually mean? Well, those of us who live in democracy and understand that it means there's due process. There is a process whereby you can speak freely, and there's a process where if you say something, you're not really at risk of going to jail. My father, we lived in a different time and a different place, and those countries, if you said the wrong thing, the police would come to arrest you, seize your property, and jail you. And we were kids, and we watched this, we understood his bravery, and eventually, he as a journalist chose that speaking out and talking about what was truthful and what was important was more important than the risks that we as a family were taking, and we all understood it. So that's why we were forced to leave. We were forced to leave because the alternative was for him to be jailed, and it was made very clear that he either be quiet or he goes to jail. And then one day, they came to arrest him, and he said, thanks, I'm out of here. Before they arrived, fortunately, he had a very successful career in the military in the Second World War, and many friends in the British Army and South Africans and Rhodesians knew him, and they warned him, and they said, you need to get out. And then you moved to Rhodesia. That's correct. Same thing happened there. We started a newspaper. He exposed some of the things that were going on in the government as it was trying to steal the lands. It was a very, very uncomfortable period of time. Remarkable country again, remarkable country. And his approach to this was you just needed, you needed to expose what was going on always, always. And with that, he faced the same recrimination again and was fortunately warned before they came to arrest him. He took my sister with him overnight, went across the border to Zambia, and then some period of time later, my mother, myself, and my little brother, we joined everybody back in Great Britain. Wow. Was Robert Mugabe, he ended up being president, I guess, but was there a connection between your father and him? There was a connection. The connection was that my father employed him. Wow. As they formed the newspaper, he employed him. And it's remarkable to me to know that at the time, I'd met him once or twice as a young kid, knew him. My father knew him very well. And we have, my mother, before she passed, showed us a letter from Robert Mugabe's first wife saying that this was the first time when she was admitted to hospital for the birth of her child, the first time that a white person had ever come to visit her was when my mother and my father went to visit her. So Mugabe at that stage wasn't what the dictator that he became. He was a very astute and involved person, but he did become a very, very corrupted person eventually. And many millions of people died because of him, unfortunately. Wow. Okay, so now you're in England. Was it the first time you went to England or your first time? Okay, so you're in England, and then apparently your grades were not very good in school, right? My grades were not exactly exemplary. They were, in passing out of high school, which is where I reached into, I got there at that time, in passing high school, you were generally trying to get A's because A's were really important to get to university. And secondly, you went, the kind of school I went to was a school which was called a comprehensive school, which is not considered the top of the ranks at that stage. And I was curious, interested. My English was terrible. My spelling was worse. My written language was atrocious. And I scored a magnificent two C's and two D's in high school which effectively would have condemned me to nothing had it not been for the extraordinary good fortune of an English teacher who said, you know, you need to go and talk to a man called Stuart Hampshire at Oxford. You're different. He's a remarkable philosopher. And I really had no hopes of anything, but I thought it would be a very interesting trip as I'd never been to Oxford. I went to see Stuart, who was, of course, a big professor, and I called him sir all the time. And he sat at this large table with his wife, Renee, in this wonderful old building called Wadham College. And after a very extraordinary conversation, he was talking to a young man with long hair. I guess I did have long hair. And his comment to me was, you're very different. I'd like you to come to Oxford. I'll help you do that. You need to pass an exam. And then you need to show everybody that you can do this. I said to him, look, I'll never pass the exam. And he said, yes, you can do it. You can do it. And I did. I was very fortunate. And they admitted me to Oxford to study zoology because my dream at that time was to study do zoology and go back to Africa as a game ranger. That didn't happen. But at Oxford, I was given the freedom to walk around. And I did. I wasn't just focused. I knew nobody. I was a stranger. The other person admitted with me was a man called Oliver Ngobe, who is a black African, also from Zimbabwe. And the two of us represented the diversity that was in that group. The rest, very upper class English, very public school, didn't really want to talk to us. We were strangers. So it meant that I had to work hard. Oh, by the way, there were no women in the colleges. So you had no distractions. Now, how unusual is that? So you just passed one exam. What would normally be the criteria to get into Oxford? Is it just passing that exam or to have other activities or other things that you would be doing? Oxford today is a very different place. Universities throughout the world actually often regard that your exams out of school need to be exemplary. They need to be A's or triple A's. You at least need to have three A's to get into a university of that caliber. But at that time, it was a little different. There, they were looking for people that they thought had a spark, may not have gone through a great education, but still could grow. And Oxford still retains that extraordinary ability to say, let me open doors in different parts of the university and see if you want to walk through them. And I did. I met multiple philosophers, many physicians, many, actually, some people like Michael Howard, one of the greatest historians on military history. Extraordinary people. But the point was you had to finish your homework in zoology. You had to produce three essays a week. And then the rest of the time was yours. You wandered around. You learned people. I met extraordinary scientists. Another one, Dennis Noble, one of the all-time great physiologists. And they'd simply open the door. They'd be curious. They'd say, what do you want to talk about? And you'd talk. It was a kind of education which was remarkable because I had no distractions. I sat down and I worked, worked very hard. I earned my keep by working in the kitchens, cleaning things. I became a milkman, carrying milk, stuff like that just to keep you going. And the good news was you had something of a, education itself was paid by the government. At the end, I graduated and I graduated with the top degree. I won the university prize and was asked if I wanted to do a PhD. And that was the door that opened up. It was opened up by a man called Henry Harris and David Phillips. He's a great scientist, remarkable scientist. And I was very honored and humbled, actually. And I decided that this would be my life. And what happened after that? How did you end up being one of the most influential people in biopharma after Oxford? What made that difference afterwards? See, very quickly, I began to understand that if you were going to make a difference, you had to help humankind, truly. I was studying the complex shape of DNA and one of the diseases that were caused by this, and I wasn't a doctor, there's a thing called xeroderma pigmentosa, terrible disease. You can't walk in the sun, you can't repair what the damage that the sun does to your DNA and it makes cancer on your skin. And one day I met one of these patients and I said, you know, this is amazing, I love my PhD, but I need to translate that into something practical. So I started doing all studying actually off the books, everything to do with medicine, did all my preclinical exams at Oxford and Cambridge gave me a scholarship. When I got to Cambridge, I met remarkable people, Kornberg, really astonishing people of the greatest kind, biochemists, the same story, but this time at a higher level, this time I was talking to them about my interest in medicine. And the point about your question is that that changed my life, the idea that you could really help a patient. And from that moment on, I have had the same philosophy, which is if you build a medicine, always you change, you must think that you're going to change the life of a patient, always. It's not a question, if you give that medicine. So I've never looked at the medicine and the industry as an industry where you make money, you become rich. This is not the interest to me. The purpose of our industry became, was rooted back then, decades ago, in the concept that my role was fundamentally to try and better the lives of others. It's not a not-for-profit issue. There are better scientists than me by far, but I took that as step number one. And in order to do that, you needed to make everybody around you successful, Steve. You needed to have them believe in that. So if I've had any kind of difference on the industry, it is that everything, everything I've done has been focused around making people successful around me and then focusing on the one thing that matters to me, which is making that difference to the patient. And if I can do that a little bit when I pass, and I will do, and I can leave behind the sentiment that it means something, it is profoundly human, profoundly important to help others, then I will have accomplished at least something of what you said. Maybe, just maybe, I will have changed people's minds. Maybe. And now, a topic that you're, I think you're passionate about, talking about restoring the trust in pharma. And I think the public trust has been declining in the last few years, maybe more. Can you talk about that? First of all, the decline and why this happens. I think it's that we need to think carefully about the public's view, first of all, what is pharma? And why do they have this view? And it's a long history. It's not just one day. It's not just one year. It's not a decade. It's several decades. But when we talk about this, Steve, we need to divide between the biotech industry, which is essentially innovation, new medicines, different medicines. And then on the other side of this, these incredibly important giant companies who effectively are the global companies who distribute. I've had the pleasure of leading one of the largest one of those. And I've had the pleasure of starting more recently, some of the very young ones on the other side. And then between the two, I've also run the generic giant, the largest one of all, the one that gave each American, each Brit, the one fill out of six that was ever delivered into those nations came from the company I led. So I was at Bristol Myers Squibb on the giant company, Novartis on the giant company. I didn't lead those, but I was up there in the senior executives. And then Tevye actually ran it globally. And then I had several small companies which I've started and grown and I love them. The reason the public have had a very dim view of the large pharmaceutical companies is almost uniquely a Western concept. In Africa, they love them. They want medicines. In Asia, deep respect, enormous respect. Here, what we've managed unfortunately to do is to lose trust. How did we do it? The first thing is that the large companies saw themselves primarily as only businesses, only businesses. They failed earlier. They were very successful. People were buying their drugs in the 60s and the 70s. Their stocks were rocketing. They brought in advertising. And it became the concept that this was a hugely important business. Like a Microsoft or Google or whatever. It's like selling cars. What I call the covenant, the covenant between the patient and the company was divorced. Then people took advantage of it, took immense advantage of it. Let me explain what I mean by that. There is those who make the drugs. Then there's the patient on the other side. And between the two is an invisible set of individuals who take and consume money from the pharmaceutical process. They take about 50% of all of the price of a drug goes to the middlemen. Those middlemen do very little. They're called names like PBM, Pharmacy Benefit Manager. They are the insurers. They are those that also distribute. The distributors have a reason. They're actually driving a motor car or a truck to deliver the drug. But the Pharmacy Benefit Managers don't do anything. They do not do anything of consequence. But they set prices. They take 50%. So the individual at that end, the patient, when they go to Walmart, they go to CVS, they have to put their hand into their pocket, pull out money and pay for something that they actually don't want to be taking but have to take. Nobody wants to be on a drug, but we all will take one at one stage or another. So you're being asked, you are being punished twice. Once you have the disease and twice because now you're being made to pay money to get what we can cure. When the insurance companies could easily, let me repeat this, insurance companies could easily cover the costs of those drugs. Now, I think that that leads to the observation that boy, the pharmaceutical industry, they are really just gouging us. It's made worse because some of that is visible. Senior executives make fortunes in these large companies. And the reason for that is that their compensation structure is built to reward them for building businesses, not medicines. Now, if they were rewarded by saying, well, you don't get rewarded for any price rise. You don't get rewarded unless you develop a new drug. You don't get rewarded unless you push innovation. There's a whole structure there which leads to distrust. And then when you see the adverts, everybody compares them in their heads. The only thing that an individual sees about a pharmaceutical company is three things, but two primary ones. The money they pay out of their pockets when they go to the pharmacy and the adverts on TV. And then the bad press just flows and the politicians see this as a wonderful opportunity to hammer the industry because they rightly are. There's the public saying, we don't like these guys. So the politicians say, gee, we can control them. We will put in place legislation. And what they've all failed to understand, all of them, is that at its core, the whole industry depends on a fundamental flow, an incredible flow of new medicines that all, at least 80%, 70 to 80%, come from this wonderful part of an industry which started near you, Steve, started in San Francisco, the biotech industry. Nobody knows what this is. The public don't. They don't even know what the public, you talk to them about biotech means they can immediately swerve to pharma. But the biotech industry today grew up, grew up as scrappy entrepreneurs in first of all, in San Francisco, then Boston, then San Diego, then Seattle. And today, there are a million employees. It generates an enormous amount of the economy for the United States and employment and secondary employment. And this is a strategic asset for the United States. So your question on trust is very important because everybody sees the pricing, TV ads, et cetera, of the pharmaceutical companies. What they don't see is that every day, scientists go into the labs of biotech and fail. And yet, the next day, they come back. They come back. Would you go every day if you were a car salesman and your car didn't get sold, and your car didn't get sold? No, you'd change your life, not these scientists. What I see as a challenge, and I don't know how this can be resolved, that is when it comes, again, I wanna give the example of Microsoft. They build operating systems in the past and the more people need them, the more they build. If it's Facebook, the more people watch Facebook, the more customers they have, the more the company grows, they make money. With medicine or with biotech or with pharma, the more people are sick, the more money they make. So it's hard to see an incentive for the executives or for whoever to tone that down or to stop producing because they're not gonna make money. Now, of course, they're not gonna make people sick on purpose, but again, there's that incentive when money comes into play that makes things difficult to understand. So can you talk about it? How can that be resolved in some way? Well, I think we need to be cautious because it's, yes, you should be rewarded for finding something wonderful, a new medicine. Why? Because the person who has cancer and is cured, the terror is removed, the family is rewarded, they can go back to being productive in their community. And we all die, we know that, but it's the when and can they live well in this? So it's appropriate that those who cure diseases get rewarded. Yes. And this is not, there's no endeavor in humankind that one does when you're not rewarded. It doesn't matter what it is, whether you're surfing, whether you're driving a racing car, whether you're riding a horse, whether you are building a house, whether you're doing something else. Most people who do that enjoy doing it and they get rewarded in some fashion or form. In order to build these drugs, this is not trivial. You have to convince people that it's worth investing in the health of patients. Because if you invest in a new drug and that cures the health, then you will change society. That is the covenant that you have to have with your shareholders and those that fund it. And you are right. It's very difficult for the person in the street to turn around and say, gee, you guys are spending $500 million in this and then it fails. We don't understand that. How can you do that? That means you must be just taking the money yourself. No, the cost of developing these drugs is immense and they fail very frequently. But the investment is worth it if one out of, as it is, one out of 10 makes it because you then change the lives of millions. And let me give you an example. There was a moment where if you had melanoma, it was a death sentence. No question. You were dying. Yes. Today, it can be completely controlled and often is, not always, but often. Why? Because a company, Bristol Myers Square, took the science, looked at it. It was in 2007, eight, nine, and said, and I was there at the time, said, you know what? We can see this new idea. We can take the idea of a white cell that will, somehow the cancer hides, cancer kills bacteria that invades you. Good, but not cancer, sorry. White cells kill invading bad bugs. That's what they do. But why don't they kill cancer? That was the question. And some great scientists in, actually one in San Francisco, Niels Lonsberg, and down in Texas, just some great scientists, and one in New York, said, you know what? Let's try and figure this out. Took a long time. And then when Bristol understood what they did, was brave enough to take an enormous chance and buy the company that was building this. And what that happened, and here's the fact. This is the fact. The results were extraordinary. They could take these patients, they gave them the injection. Injection basically galvanized the white cells. This is the T cell, PDF1, immuno-oncology are the words you may hear, taught them to attack cancer cells. That bravery was extraordinary. There were no, there was one company doing this in 2007 and eight called Medarex. Bristol bought it, poured resources into it. And by the time 10 years later had come, there were incredible medicines showing great results already, not just from Bristol. The whole industry pivoted. And 50%, a fully 50% of the entire industry's research was now being poured into curing cancers using this approach, a remarkable change. So it does happen, but it costs money. And I think it's very difficult for the public to understand the immense risks that scientists, that companies, that investors take to take them. All they see is, as I said, when they go to CVS, Walmart, whatever, to get their prescription and it costs a fortune. And that's the middleman. We need to stop that. Now, I'll ask you more about how you address the trust, how you bring the trust back. But before then, I wanna ask your thoughts about the natural remedies, the herbs or whatever. I don't know what it's called, alternative medicine. Do you see those options being able to work in sync with the traditional, with the Western medicine? Do you see that happening? Alternative medicine has been profoundly practiced across Eastern nations for years. This is something that you should never school. Some of these have immense potential. Some are just scams and businesses. And today I was hearing somebody say, you know what, we have incredible results that says, hydroxychloroquine will cure cancer. This is nonsense. And I'm saying nonsense. But that's not a natural medicine. That's a drug. But the same thing happens with some natural medicines. We saw it with Laetrile, which comes from apricots. Yes, apricots. That extract never showed any benefit, never. And yet people were so scared of their cancers that they took anything. And you have to distinguish between the Western medicines that have to run through a clinical trial and say, we can guarantee you that it works this much. Natural products, which have an immensely important role, and we'll come back to that, not those that are sold basically to make money. That's a different group. Then there are others. There are vitamins, there are minerals. There are many other things that contribute. Those are important. And I think that culturally they help, they stabilize thinking, they help people understand and calm people in many ways. And that they actually do have a role in sync. But the danger, the real danger is that without a clinical trial where you compare, say for example, you or me with the same disease, take one of us taking a natural product and the other one not taking a natural product. That's the test. You have to do that. Because if you don't do that, you truly can't say which of these are beneficial or not. So I don't have any biases against it. I do have a bias against bad science where you don't take that rigid approach. Right. But I wonder, do you see a time where, let's say you go to Kaiser and then at Kaiser there's this huge pharmacy and maybe next to it, it would be like a natural whatever herbs pharmacy and then maybe the doctor would prescribe, okay, you take this, but maybe you also take this or maybe a full-time acupuncturist working in Kaiser. Do you foresee that to happen at some point in time? Oh, I don't know that will happen, but I do know something and see, this is very, I actually witnessed something remarkable when I went to China in 19, I was there in 1974, a long time ago. I witnessed surgery under acupuncture where the patient walked into the surgery, walked in, three different patients. This was a very clear and remarkable, I've never forgotten it, but I've never seen anybody and they didn't, they had the surgery, they were talking to us throughout the surgery with acupuncture and they clearly knew what pain was, but they weren't under any drugs. That being said, it's terribly important to understand that without proof, natural products, even some drugs and acupuncture, they become different. They aren't the kind of things that you should or can put your life at risk with. That doesn't mean you can't have them. Please understand me. What I don't want, what you don't want to do is to remove confidence, help, thought process, but that shouldn't replace medicines which are targeted. That's all. So is there a time when it could come together? I don't know, but I do know one thing that if that is going to happen, then there needs to be really rock hard proof that they are not harmful and that they work well because otherwise that's not treating patients. That's not the covenant that you have with the patients. One last point. There are many, many, many herbs that are highly effective and we know this because we find all the time, one of the greatest sources of medicines is the rainforest. Yes. Enormously important. Trees, roots, shrubs, and of course aspirin comes from the willow tree. Right. And I don't think many people know that. Aspirin is actually from the bark of the willow tree. I have to admit, I didn't know that. Yeah, people used to chew it. Very bitter. Well, so in conclusion, maybe you can tell us what would be your vision on either restoring trust or I guess making biotech have its own, carry its own weight and be recognized and being where it should be in people's eyes and not diminished or praised or just have its own place in society. You know, Steve, that's such an important question. We have evolved from a few tens of scrappy entrepreneurial companies to over 1,000. 70% of the pharmaceutical products come from us. And yet right now, and science has never been more exciting. Never. Cells that can help your cancer, DNA, RNA, words that many people don't know in the public, but the reality is they are changing genes, using all sorts of different things. This is the most exciting time that I can ever think in medicine because of that. And yet, and yet, underlying that, this entire middle piece, remember what I said? Said that this is the patient, here's the pharmacy. Pharmacy will come. The middle is invisible. And the middle is deteriorating. Sorry, why is that? Why does it even have to be a middle, the middle man? Is it just a historical way of doing things? It is entirely, in this country, we have allowed it to grow up because it has generated immense profits on the stock market. Some of the largest companies in the world are actually these middlemen. And there are five of them, and they really do take, they skim off everything. Is that fair to say, it's like a bureaucracy? Yes, it's a malign bureaucracy who helps no patient. So I think to restore trust in the biotech industry, we need to do several things. And number one, we need to convince legislators that this is a true strategic industry. One, just like housing, just like defense, just like education. Legislators must see this as something they invest in, not that they crush, very important. Number two, we need to be able to follow what we have, which is we have patents, we pay for innovation, but when the patents are finished, we must cut the price immediately, not try and keep them longer and be very transparent about this. Tell the public, look, don't worry, these are gonna be really cheap eventually. But in the meantime, we need to get back some of my money and we need to be talking to people about it and explaining it to them. So number one is get the legislators to think hard about what the strategy is. Number two, we need to go to the public and convince them that we are completely transparent about how we price, what these drugs do. And I think personally, although many others in the industry would disagree with me, I think we need to change the way we communicate with them. TV ads about how wonderful a drug is and then two seconds later, every bad thing it can do for you is a terrible way of communicating. We should be asking our fellow citizens, isn't this, look at this amazing technology, isn't it extraordinary? And at the end of the day, I've articulated in the book I wrote, which we're not really talking about the book, but this is underlying, this is the philosophy, are 10 commitments that we as an industry can make and that the legislators can make. And if we do that, those 10 commitments, which start with being transparent, start with focusing on fact, start with communicating directly with the individuals and committing to do that. All of that leads to building trust, but it's going to be a long job because we've had four or five decades where this distrust has built up. There are whole organizations built to attack the industry. And last point, I think we as a biotech sector need to understand the importance and explain the difference between our sector where nobody makes any, you don't make, you're not doing sales, you're inventing, you're inventing. Every day you're going into the lab, you're failing and you're inventing something else. And on the other side, these giant, incredibly valuable companies who distribute the drugs, we're all part of the same ecosystem, but we're different. It's like saying a Mercedes-Benz salesperson is the same as a person who builds the electric battery that drives that Mercedes. It's a completely different business, but they're essential, they work together. And we need to explain that. To follow up on that one, I guess human greed is something that is there and it's very hard to erase. And how do you control that? Like you said, you gave the example, there's a drug that's being released and the cost is gonna be very high. And then later it can become very low. But the company itself, their first motivation is to make money. The bottom line, it's a corporation, it's not a nonprofit. What's gonna take it for them to lower the cost? Of course, if there's different pressures, they will do it. But ultimately, there's no one thing that is gonna motivate them to lower the cost because they need the higher profit. So how do you balance that? How do you resolve that conflict? Well, I do think there are a number of different things that can speak to. Remember, we're talking here in this element. We're talking about the large pharmaceutical companies that are delivering the drugs, not the innovative entities. So number one, I would like to very clearly segregate them. These companies live day by day. Their drugs fail, they're done. Now, by the way, when Microsoft puts something onto the market and it fails, they fix it. There's no second chance in biotech. You fail, you are brutally punished. So let's go now, but so number one, we need to be able to distinguish between the two. On the large companies, I don't have a prescription, but I'll give an offer, I'll make a suggestion to you that this needs to start at the boards of these companies. The boards of the companies need to make a decision. They have, their purpose must be the patient. Exactly. And if that purpose is the patient, then they must fight against the PBMs who are taking and demanding them. They must do this publicly. They must stand up and speak about how this incredibly complex environment is damaging them, is damaging what is a national asset for this country. So they need to be, stand up, they need to take the purpose, they need to stand up and they need to be very clear that they can make a difference, not just in the pricing, but how they incent their people. Let me give you an example. I started a little bit on this. If you are the senior management of a big company, you should be rewarded. You should, but you should be rewarded for helping patients stay on drugs. 50% of patients go off their drug after a year. That's crazy. Then they get sick again. They need to keep on their drug. You need to help them understand how important it is. Sometimes it's for economic reasons. You need to solve for that. Secondly, you need to have these company CEOs rewarded for new drugs that they launch all the time. And not for the old drugs that they try and keep patents around and they try and save them and they try and squeeze them out. Only new drugs that are actually very, very fundamental. And if you do that, then things start to change big time because you invest in research, you invest in the patient and you're not always simply making money to buy back stock. By the way, you should never be rewarded for a price rise or for a stock buyback. That is not acceptable. Dr. Levine, we thank you so much for your time, for your dedication, for your work and for helping people in society as you've done for so many years. We thank you. It's a total pleasure. I find it a privilege to be able to do this. Complete privilege. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.