How do you create a healthier city? As the climate shifts, screens dominate our lives and cities continue to grow - urban areas are grappling with how to put themselves on a better track to health. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan joins The Other 80 to talk about his ambitious plan to increase health in the Big Apple, with the goal of increasing life expectancy from 78 to 83 years.

We discuss:

• What Paul Farmer taught him about rejecting a scarcity mindset and reaching for bold goals
• The three cross-cutting challenges addressed in the Healthy NYC agenda: access to primary care, mental health and climate change
• Why NY issued a public health advisory on teen social media use and is suing Meta, Tik Tok YouTube and SnapChat

Ashwin shares why youth social media use is such a major public health priority:

“ Our kids are hurting … Fifty percent of teens are saying that they are either moderately or severely depressed …It's hard to ignore the role that digital media and social media is playing … And what we found was pretty troubling …The more time you're spending on social media, the worse your self -reported mental health is. Whether it's symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear for the future.”

Relevant Links

Article: “Using Law to Advance Population Health Management”

The City of New York’s Advisory on Social Media

More information on Healthy NYC

Viral Video of “Dancing Guy”

About Our Guest

Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the 44th Health Commissioner of New York City. He is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy outcomes for marginalized populations in New York City, nationally and globally. Throughout his career, he has brought in a unique, unparalleled focus to combating the mental health crisis, releasing a comprehensive citywide mental health plan addressing the second pandemic – a crisis of mental health plaguing youth, vulnerable New Yorkers with severe mental illness, and those impacted by the overdose epidemic. Having begun his career in global health working at Partners in Health and the HIV Department of the World Health Organization, he most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a US-based mental health nonprofit. He currently serves as faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

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In July, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark advisory declaring firearm violence a national public health crisis. The advisory builds on decades of work from Dr. Megan Ranney and other researchers who advocate taking a public health approach to reducing firearm violence. She joined us at Aspen Ideas: Health to discuss what this means: namely moving from a focus on law and order to centering harm reduction and prevention. Now, as the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, Megan is applying the same systems thinking approach to focus on the big changes we need to drive health in the US.

We discuss:

• What it means to be a great public health communicator
• How public health approaches were used to dramatically reduce automobile deaths over the last 50 years, and how the same strategies should be used now to tackle firearm deaths
• Her take on bridging the gap between medical care and public health

Megan says this is the moment for public health reinvention:

“This is a moment where we get to reinvent how we study, teach, and most of all, practice public health, not just locally, but also globally, as we come out of the COVID pandemic, and I think there's a real moral clarity, but also a moral imperative for us, as public health professionals, to seize this moment, to take this kind of pivot point that we're at as a field, and to move it forward in a direction that we will be proud of.”

Relevant Links

Megan Ranney testimony on gun violence as a public health issue

Gun violence panel at Aspen Ideas: Health

Surgeon General advisory on firearm violence

Yale Q&A with Dean Megan Ranney

Common health coalition

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

UC Berkeley School of Public Health course on urban gun violence prevention

More on Rahimi case

About Our Guest

Dr. Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician, researcher, and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health. In July 2023, she joined Yale University as Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, where she is also the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems, and on COVID-related risk reduction. She has held multiple national leadership roles, including as co-founder of...

Deena Shakir is an investor who is obsessed with expanding access to the basic health services people need and often can’t access: pediatric care, community health and women’s services. Her journey to investing passed through policymaking, journalism and big tech and her early techno optimism has given way to a much more nuanced and pragmatic view. She is able to see the big opportunities for impact hiding in plain sight.

We discuss:

• The two obvious megatrends hitting healthcare: GLP1s and AI
• And the not so obvious opportunity: doing basic things better
• How Dobbs was an accelerant, not a deterrent, for investments in women’s health
• Why Public Health is great training for healthcare founders

Deena is excited about “asset light” investments that combine new care models – like community health workers – and technology:

“There are some things that won't change. And there are things that hopefully tech can help to navigate. And so these asset light models, these models that are leveraging under leveraged care workers – like community health workers that are providing culturally competent care – and at the end of the day, that are improving metrics and outcomes, are the ones that get me excited.”

Relevant Links

Lux Capital

Jonathan Haidt article in The Atlantic titled “Why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid”

President Obama’s Cairo speech

ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health

Health companies Deena mentions that she invests in:

Waymark

Summer health

Maven Clinic

About Our Guest

Deena's investments span stages and sectors, and include women's health, digital health infrastructure, health equity, foodtech, and fintech. Above all, she seeks out extraordinary, often underdog, founders on a mission. Prior to Lux, Deena was a Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), led product partnerships at Google for health, search, and AI/ML, and directed social impact investments at Google.org. Deena also served as a Presidential Management Fellow at The U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton, where she helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship...