8.20 Gardiner Harris: On The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

Hi everyone, if you're new here, this is the perfect episode to start with. But before we dive in, don't forget to follow and rate us on Spotify on Apple Podcasts. So let's talk about Johnson and Johnson. For many of us, the name means baby powder, band aids and that comforting newborn spell. It's tied to our childhood to care to safety, right? But behind this wholesome image is a company that is hidden the truth, light to customers and endangered millions and millions of lives. I didn't know this. And today we're speaking to Pulitzer, prize-nominated NYT journalist, Cardinal Harris. He spent years uncovering the story and written about it in his new book. It's a deep dive into Johnson and Johnson's century long history from its inspiring beginnings to all of these shocking scandals that have rocked the company. And what I really liked about this book is not just this jaw-dropping revelations and this expose, but also how it's written because it's very gripping. It's not only very gripping, but it's empathetic and it's human. So, Garnam, I'm so excited to have you here today. Welcome to books and beyond. I'm so glad to be here. I'm honored. Thank you. So, let's start with just the opening of the book because that is so hard hitting. You are the airport and you meet this sales rep from Johnson and Johnson and she's completely disillusioned because she has worked with a doctor who has prescribed her own nephew the drug that she is selling, which is used to treat young adults who have mental health issues like schizophrenia. And she knows that her nephew didn't need this drug. But her sister and her relatives have insisted that he have this drug and the side effects have been so, so bad. He's put on a lot of weight. He's become a listless young boy and she has seen the negative effects of her work and her marketing efforts now in real time. And I think that scene was just so gut-renching and I can just imagine sort of you in that airport hearing that story and then maybe wanting to uncover more of this because you also as a coincidence grew up in the town where Johnson and Johnson had a lot of its headquarters and factories. So can you tell me about a sort of how the story then led to your decision to research on this book and why did you decide to uncover the story in the first place? Well, again, thanks for having me. Tara, I think one of the interesting things is journalists get known for the stories that they do. But we all have a million stories that we know are incredible, that we get part of the story, but we don't get enough. And that was one of those stories. That was one of those, you know, the fish that got away. It was a great story this woman told me, but she wouldn't give me permission to use her name. I really couldn't do the story without a name attached to it. And there just wasn't enough there. So it was a failure that haunted me for a very long time. Now I will tell you that because of what she told me, I ended up spending years trying to find a way to talk about the use of NSI codex and children and ended up doing a series of stories on the issue in the New York Times, not using her, of course, or her story, but being inspired by her story. And those stories ended up leading to legislative changes in the United States and all the rest, that I didn't really actually talk about in the book because I didn't want to make myself a character in the book. But it was that moment with her was one of the most important moments in my life. It led not only to a series of stories in the New York Times that led to legislative changing in the United States, but it really planted the seed. It was one of the most important precursors to this book. There were others just the year before my son was born. And unfortunately, I don't know if you're a parent, but my first son spent three or four days in the NICU unit, the neonatal intensive care. His life was hanging by a thread as often happens. He was born a little bit early, couldn't nurse. So we had this, my wife and I had this heartbreaking moment in our lives when we weren't sure whether our son would survive. He did. He came home, huge relief. And this was back in the day when there wasn't anything such as paternity leave, which is still true in much of India. And so I went right back to work after my son was born. And just the following days got a huge tranche of documents from a source showing that Johnson and Johnson had spent years selling a heartburn drug as if it was really good for preemie infants. In fact, the company knew that the heartburn drug didn't help preemie infants. There was no benefit to them. And in fact, had this side effects that occasionally killed them, but they were so successful at selling this drug called propulsive that one fifth of all preemies in the United States in the late 1990s were prescribed this drug. And I'm reading these documents where inside Johnson and Johnson, they know exactly what they're doing, which is they are they are harming babies and dead babies start piling up and piling up and piling up. And the company inside has this debate, what all these babies are dying, we're not helping anyone. Why are we doing this? And their bosses are responding, we're doing this because it makes us a lot of money. And I'm reading this, my son has just been in the NICU and I honestly cannot believe that American executives are willingly allowing and in fact acting in a way that will kill these babies for money. And I just couldn't believe it. And I'll tell you one other thing that really sort of stuck with me that led to the book. And this is something that where India plays a really important role, you'll remember Tara that in the late 1990s, ARVs, these anti retro viral drugs come out and they end up saving the lives of HIV patients up until that point, up until really 1996 when the cocktail of ARVs came, you know AIDS was a death sentence. And then in '96, really in '97, these cocktails of medicines come out and they're saving HIV patients' lives and making HIV really a chronic illness instead of a death sentence. But these drugs are so expensive, they cost roughly $20,000 a year and you have to take them for the rest of your life that nobody really outside of these well very wealthy countries can afford them. As you will remember, this was the time when HIV infections were sweeping across Africa and Africa was facing essentially a death sentence. There were predictions that half of the African population would die in the next 10 years or so. And so there was this huge controversy where the companies were bludgeoned by advocates. You have to make these drugs available to Indian generic companies to copy and allow them to sell and distribute in Africa. And the pharmaceutical industry essentially buckled and a program was set up at the United Nations called UN AIDS to collect the patents of these drugs, give them to people like my friend Yusuf Hamid at SIPLA to copy and then distribute in Africa and once the price of the generic's got below $1 a day, they knew that they had the money to save essentially the continent. So, all the companies gave up their patents, the Indian companies copied the pills and you know, more than 20 million lives have been saved. The one exception to this story was Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson was one of three or four companies that were major manufacturers of AIDS drugs and Johnson & Johnson simply refused to provide its drugs and its drug patents to this program. And so this happy, good news story about the pharmaceutical industry doing the right thing had this one little asterisk that was kind of unbelievable to me because I grew up, as I told you in this town right near Johnson & Johnson's headquarters, I grew up amongst kids whose parents worked there, everybody really believed in this company as this incredibly ethical company and yet they weren't playing ball in the saving of the African continent, like, how was this possible? So I had the HIV thing, I had my own son, and then I meet this woman, and it was enough for me to sort of be like, "Okay, this company not only is not the ethical paragon "that I thought it was, but is in fact exactly the opposite." You know, I covered the entire pharmaceutical company industry, and it's gotten for good reason a bad reputation for doing some bad things. There were some 300 or so guilty pleas, more than $20 billion in fines, but there are actually some good companies in the industry. There are some bad companies, there are some good companies, and I realized that Johnson and Johnson had this strange thing where, on the one hand, it was, it had their best reputation. It was beloved. It routinely tops all these surveys of being the most admired corporation in the world, but on the other hand, was the worst of the worst in how it actually behaved. - And what those stories are just very chilling, and you know, when I was reading your book, I was just thinking about how capitalism has completely distorted the industry, and I don't think that's something that we really speak about in India, just because I don't think there's enough data on this, I don't think there's enough research happening. So I see a lot of movies, a lot of PV shows, a lot of news about the American pharmaceutical companies. You know, you also, you mentioned this in your book, and I've seen it on television that in the movies, how these sales reps bribe these doctors to wrongfully prescribe medicine, and it's almost standard practice. And I'm just thinking here, we go to doctors to help us, and then those are the same people that are actually giving us something that's so bad for us. Like, how do you even know what's right, and what to consume in a world like this? - I think it's really difficult, and that's, you know, one of the most important reasons that I wrote this book is to give people tools to understand really the healthcare system, that dynamics, the incentives, why you really should be skeptical of your doctor, even this person that you think is so well educated, someone you should trust, you know, in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry gives roughly $3 billion directly to doctors for those doctors to serve as part-time drug sales reps. So, you know, on the one hand, they're supposed to be these learned intermediaries for you, which is they know more information than you, and they're supposed to be completely agnostic about what drugs you take, because they're not supposed to have a financial incentive in their decision making. That's the definition of a learned intermediary, but by taking the money and listening to these pitches, they are neither learned it, because their own understanding gets distorted, nor are they a true intermediary, because they're actually working for the drug with a device company. So, it really distorts the heart of the healthcare system, which is the trust between a patient and their doctor, and until that changes, the kind of disasters that I describe in the book will only continue, and I wanted to take just a moment to, you know, just talk about what those disasters are. You know, the first one that I talk about is Johnson's baby powder, and the fact that the company has known for 70 years that its baby powder has been contaminated with asbestos, and yet sold this product to mothers for their babies. And, you know, at the height of the popularity of this product, half of all babies in the United States, and I'm sure some huge share in India had their bottoms dusted with Johnson's baby powder. And then I tell the story about Tylenol, and you know, Tylenol is seen as widely seen as the safest pain pill out there. In fact, it is by far the most dangerous over-the-counter medicine sold. It causes more death and injury than all other over-the-counter medicines combined. So, I show the story of how Tylenol got to this terribly dangerous space. And hopefully provide warnings to people about being careful about using this drug. And then I walk through a series of other prescription drugs and devices. The first is Epo that was the Johnson and Johnson sold as a cancer drug, even though Johnson and Johnson knew that it was actually miracle grow to tumors. So instead of curing your cancer, it actually secretly made it worse. And they knew this kept it secret for something like 15 years and around 500,000 Americans died as a result. And then I tell the story that you and I started this with, Ryspirital and Antisecotic, and how the company illegally targeted the smallest of children with this drug and the oldest of the elderly. And it's routinely talked about that the opioid crisis is the worst public health crisis in American history. It's not. It's the Antisecotic crisis that has killed more than a million Americans easily. And to this day kills three times as many patients as opioids. And I talk about the lies that Johnson and Johnson told. Criminal lies, they eventually pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the marketing of these medicines. And covered up their actions by telling doctors, don't worry, no one is ever gonna catch you. And I know this because I've seen the grand jury sworn testimony of the company's sales representatives who did this. And then I walk through the opioid crisis. I'm sure you've seen some of the TV shows about the saculars and Purdue pharma causing the opioid crisis. And everybody thinks that the saculars and Purdue pharma are the worst to the worst. You know, as a former Johnson and Johnson executive told me, they're the hikers compared to Johnson and Johnson, even just when you look at the opioids, you know, at the height of the opioid prescription epidemic in the United States, about 10% of the bodies that showed up in morgues had a Purdue pharma product in their system, 60% had a J&J product in their system. So why is it that the media, particularly the American media, has sold this story that Purdue pharma and the saculars are sort of the sole responsible parties for this epidemic. How is it that Johnson and Johnson has gotten away with its much more important role and nobody knows it? And that's a really important part of the book is the incredible failure of all of the institutions that should have caught this company, stopped them and brought accountability. You know, the first one obviously is the FDA has played a disastrous role in enabling these terrible moments. And then the American media, you know, I worked for the New York Times, I worked for the Wall Street Journal. We should have done a much better job, but Johnson and Johnson is one of the largest advertisers in the world. They have enormous influence on American reporters. You know, the kind of influence that Purdue pharma, this tiny one product company, couldn't hope to get, which is one of the big reasons that Purdue pharma was the focus of all those stories and not J&J. And then I tell stories about metal on metal hip implants and vaginal mesh, you know, two huge disasters that by the way had enormous echo effects in India. You know, millions of patients in India were affected by those products as well. And in fact, there's a new book out about just the vaginal mesh scandal in India. So, you know, I didn't really tell the India story in most of these things. It's such a complicated story that I decided to focus almost exclusively on the United States, but there is an Indian echo to each one of these disasters. And, you know, one of those echoes, the vaginal mesh one has its own book out right now in India. But, you know, I thought you would ask me that. I don't know offhand, I'll tell you in a minute. - Yeah. - The book has been sent to me and it's wonderful. Anyway, it's the book has this, and then of course I tell the COVID vaccine story and how, you know, everyone's sort of in the United States COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are suddenly controversial, but nobody really revisits the J&J vaccine, which is, was by far the more dangerous of all of them. You know, it caused a clotting disorder. It caused Guillaume Baray syndrome. It wasn't particularly effective. So these dangers, made no sense and it was withdrawn. Whereas, you know, Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines obviously are continued to be sold around the world. No, I think that I really liked the way that the book is structured because as you said, you go through each of these tragedies. Honestly, when I read the baby powder section and realized that it had so much of a stowa, which leads to a variant cancer and you give those case studies, I had no idea and I did a Google search about a baby powder in India and it's being sold in abundance here and then I looked at the labels. I'm the labels are no chemicals, organic, all of these like beautiful words that will compel mothers to keep buying it. I know that in every Indian household there is Johnson baby powder. I know that I have grown up with it and I have two younger siblings that I know I've seen my mother use it copiously on them and just to think that these everyday household products can cause so much harm is insane to me and I think that the Epo drug chapter where, you know, you know that this drug actually causes tumors to grow but you are setting it as an anti-cancer drug is just so crazy to me and my biggest question when I was reading this book and then you also talk about yeah, the drug that causes male breasts and young boys and beeps and disfigures all of these things, this history of negligence that you have covered. So my biggest question that when I was reading this book is, you know, how come nobody is talking about this? How come even in India, Johnson and Johnson products are the pinkel of consumer goods, you know, for babies, for band days, all of this. Nobody is talking about any of this. Before your book, I had no idea any of this was happening. They don't touch upon it in the book a lot, you know, the complicit FDA, how Johnson, Johnson threatens to pull advertising out of TV networks and media companies if they threaten to expose anything about this. But I wanted to ask, you know, why isn't this spoken about more? What can we do to sort of get this out there a little bit more? First of all, you know, it's not out there because this company, arguably its core competency is cover-ups and keeping itself out of the news for all of these disasters. You know, Tara, you're a book person, you know this, particularly in business books, 90% of business books are these positive books that tell you stories that you already know, like how Amazon was created and conquered the world and why it's such a great company. How, you know, Facebook was founded, you know, they're these sort of loudatory books, telling you stories, you already know, but giving you nice little details about them and then maybe 9.9% of business books are how this company that collapsed really collapsed. But in all of these 99.9% of the business books, you go into the book knowing how it's going to end. You know the story to begin with because it's been covered endlessly in newspapers. So, you know, the book about Enron collapsing and fraud, you've been reading about this, you know it's fraud and you and and it's not particularly surprising. I think one of the problems with my book is and I apologize if this sounds arrogant, but it's originality. You know, I'm telling you a story that you really haven't heard. You know, I didn't write all these stories in the New York Times. I really kind of wasn't allowed to. And so I am talking to you about a company that you think is the greatest, but you think is the most admired and I'm actually telling you it's just the opposite. It's one of the great histories greatest serial killers. And I think there's a kind of a disconnect that happens. Like I didn't get a review in the New York Times, you know, despite all my years working there. I didn't get a review in the Wall Street Journal, despite all my years working there. Part of that might be because I'm critical of both papers, but I think a lot of it is just like, what am I supposed to do with this? You know, I accused Johnson and Johnson of contributing to the deaths of more than two million Americans. You know, it's a holy original charge. And it's because I got epidemiologists to add up dead babies and dead adults for me. But again, it's nothing that's been out there before. And I think a lot of journalists are just like, I don't even know what to do with this. So it didn't get the kind of the attention in the book reviews. It didn't really make news because I think I just think it is so unusual. And you know, it took me a long time to persuade my publisher that, you know, that we needed to go through this. We went through huge legal reviews because this story is so original. We were worried we'd get sued by, you know, Johnson and Johnson and many of the people we mentioned. I was going to ask about that. So, yeah, was anybody clash? You know, we haven't been. And I think it, you know, I think the company is just hoping that it kind of goes away. And I'm sure they're sort of worried that if they sued, it would just give it more attention. But, you know, that's one of my ex-boyfriend. You know, it is, it has been disappointing to me that my former colleagues, you know, I make news here, for instance. As you may know in my bio, I subsequently, you know, I was a reporter in India for a while and I came back and was a White House course monitor for the New York Times. So I got to sort of the top of the mountain on journalism. And, you know, when you're in those positions, it's not unusual for you to get secret documents, you know, national security documents. What is unusual is to get documents from grand juries in the United States. They are the last truly secret institutions here. The New York Times has not had the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News. I don't believe there's been a large media organization in the United States that has had a single grand jury file from a single grand jury for more than 50 years. I have hundreds of grand jury files from three separate grand juries involving Johnson and Johnson that is one of the reasons why I can make these extraordinary charges because I have, you know, the secret grand jury swore in testimony of company executives. And, um, and again, I think my colleagues are just like, they don't know what to do about that because it's, it's nothing they've ever seen. I think these things take a long time to sort of come into the limelight and then when it does happen, it's like a juggernaut. And I definitely think, vote them out and readers like me who, you know, I'm going to post about this and more people are going to read about it and then sort of sooner or later, everyone knows about it. These things can't remain secret for that long and you have put it out there for the whole world to see. And I think it's so explosive and it's so shocking and it's so ubiquitous, their products, that everyone is going to want to know about this because it's scary. I wouldn't want any of my friends to use Johnson and be proud of their children at all. I would morn them against that. My husband's, I was talking to my husband and, um, I was talking to him about Tylenol and he said because his mother works a lot in the US and he said that she's actually bi Tylenol and get it back to India because she thought I was so safe and and have it, you know. So there's everyone, these products have touched everybody's lives and it's just so scary. But coming to, you know, the research part of the book, you mentioned that you had these sources that have given you these pages of pages from these grand juries, which is never the case. You also, and the book is, is, is long, it's 568 pages with 200 pages just for notes, references and sources. So it's really, really good research. You're not making these claims, not backing it up with proper evidence. You look at case files, articles, personal accounts, private company documents. You know, one example is what I was a letter by Dr. Alfred Vina, a consultant to J&J which revealed the company and even FDA ignored warnings about dark. So what was your research process? Like let's come to the writing of this book. How did you begin the research process and how do you begin piecing this all together? Well Tara, you know, one of my great flaws as a journalist is that I have always spent too much time on reporting. You know, I always sort of want to find the next cool thing before just sort of sitting down and writing. And this happened in spades on this project. I, you know, it took me five years of work and a big reason is that I just couldn't stop digging. You know, I just wanted the next documents that talked to the next executive. I just kept digging and digging and digging and you know, I, you know, 95% of the book is, you know, I probably could have done this book in a year, you know, and saved myself, you know, just so much agony, but I did want to find that stuff. And I do have a website, gardenerheros.com, that was actually set up by several friends of mine in India. And the website has a document section where I put nearly all of these documents. Now there are some secret documents like the Grand Jury ones that I cannot reveal for fear that it might reveal the pattern of documents, might reveal my sourcing. But nearly all of the other, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that you can go look yourself. You can do your own research on this. And that includes trial transcripts. That includes internal thousands of internal company documents that I got from sources and interviews with people. I ended up interviewing hundreds of executives and former executives in part because the Grand Jury files actually had employee rosters with their names and cell phone numbers. So I could call these people. I will tell you that I looked throughout these rosters for that sales rep who I met at the airport. And I never did find her again, unfortunately. I'm not sure why. So one of my great hopes is that she reads the book and sees herself mentioned and reaches out at some point. But that's not happened. But the process was essentially one of reading documents, going to see people, talking to sources. I did years of that research before I really wrote the first word. And then started gradually writing sections of the book. I will tell you that the original manuscript was roughly twice as long as the book you have before you. I had even more products. Again, Tara, this is what I do. I go overboard. And thank God I had some really good editors who said, Gardiner, OK, I know. You've got to stop. And as it is, you've got way too much. And we're going to have to cut this in half, which was a terribly painful process to me. There was a lot of stories lost that I thought were really important. And the thing is, Tara, the reason why this book is so important is I wrote about a couple of these disasters in the New York Times. And each time people would say, oh, well, the company might have made a mistake in this one instance. But it's a great company. So I'm not changing my mind about it. And so to deal with that objection, I was like, OK, I need to tell you-- originally, I thought. I need to tell you 15 different stories. It's not criminality in lies. Aren't the exception for this company. It's the rule. And so that's my hope is that by telling you in a very dispassionate way, exactly what happened with each one of these disasters that cost millions of lives, that you will see that this is a company that is really essentially a mafia family. Yeah. And I also like that in the beginning of the book, you speak a little bit about how it was set up and the history of that family and how the brothers took it over. And by the third generation, then the third generation couldn't really run it. And then it started becoming professionally managed. And like that piece of business history as well. I wanted to ask you about all the things that you couldn't put inside the book, because I'm sure there's a lot. Two things, actually. One is that could you tell me maybe about another product that you probably research on, but you did include in the book? And do you know-- or could you share any light on the India story? I know that's not sort of in the book, but I'm just curious as a consumer of this product in India and so many people, you're consuming it. If you could share a little bit of light on the India shadow. Sure. So I think one of the things that I do want to say before I launch into some of these other products is that there's a character arc in the book, as you know Tara, about the company. The company actually does start out. The 20th century is one of the most ethical companies around. And when it is run by the second generation, this guy, Robert Wood Johnson, the second, he really did do an admirable job building this extraordinarily ethical company. And as you said, once the family is sort of pushed aside and professional managers come in, it really starts to change. But the change is really slow. And Baby Powder is a great way of looking at it because they sold Baby Powder for 60 years, not knowing that it was dangerous. I mean, not knowing that asbestos was a problem and all that. And then in the 1950s and '60s, they start to get hints that there's a spestus there and that a spestus is really a problem. But you can kind of see they're like, well, but it's a small amount of a spestus, what's the big deal. And then as they realize that small amounts of a spestus are a very big deal, you know, microscopic quantities of a spestus can kill you. They start covering it up. And the company starts going down a dark path. And they basically decide, you know, in the late '70s, they're going to sell this contaminated product, you know, to women and children. And once you kind of decide to do that, you can kind of start doing anything. And that's when, you know, the Tylenol stuff gets worse. That's when they launch, you know, shortly thereafter they launch Epo. They quickly realize Epo is very dangerous, but they do it anyway. And so you see this company, and by the end, with Vaginal Mash, you know, well before they launch this product, they know it's going to ruin the lives of women. Like by then, there's so far down this dark road. They're sort of creating products for evil. Like it's just, it's just, you know, from the get-go, they're doing terrible things. And so some of the products, you know, there's a whole cluster of products that, this is a company that calls itself the baby company. And there's a whole cluster of products that actually have attacked the health of babies and killed babies. And then, you know, it's also a company that sort of brags about that they're friendly to women. They support nursing programs, you know, one of the reasons that women are so fond of it is that when you leave the hospital with your baby, usually they have given the hospital this sort of package of Johnson baby products. And you go home with your baby in one arm and this package of Johnson baby products in the other. And the affection toward Johnson and Johnson that that engenders really never leaves women. Because they come to kind of together this, you know, this wonderful moment when you go home with your child and you go home with Johnson and Johnson. And so I had a bunch more products that attacked women and their reproductive organs. And I had a few more products that attacked babies. For instance, on the women one, there was this, what's known as a power morselator. If a woman gets a hysterectomy, it's often a very serious procedure where they cut open your abdomen to get to your uterus. And there's long been a hope that the surgery could be far more laparoscopic, like a much smaller incision with a much less recovery period. And so Johnson and Johnson developed this power morselator, which was basically this tiny little blender that surgeons would insert into a woman's abdomen. And it would essentially blend up the uterus in the woman and stuck out the blended up cells into this tube. But the problem is that uterus is often contain cancerous endometriol cells. You know, not just women who have endometriosis, but you can sometimes have cancer in your uterus. It's very well contained, so you don't know it. And this is what's known as an occult cancer. And so by taking these little blenders and blending up your uterus, these little blenders took these cancerous cells and splattered them all across the woman's abdomen inside of her, essentially making it impossible to treat. So it turned out one out of 300 women who had this procedure ended up getting terrible cancer and most of them died and the company knew this and kept it secret. And you know, it's just sort of one of those where you're like, are you kidding me? And so I had a chapter on that and that went. So that's one of I think four or five products that I wrote about in the original version of the manuscript and that got taken out. A lot of the other outtakes were patient stories. You know, I'm a former reporter you and I both notar that the power of these stories is often you know, the lens of regular people and I and I wanted the book to have a lot more of those regular people voices. I spent a lot of time trying to finding people to whom these things had happened and the editors just said, look, it's just too long, Gardner. We have to take a lot of these voices out. Again, heartbreaking to me. But but but you know, I think they know what they're doing. The India story, you know, as you know, India is endlessly complicated, right? I I have spent a lot of time in India and I often tell friends that you know, it's the most interesting place on the planet. You have 850 different languages. You know, people ask me about Indian food and I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Are you, you know, because the regional cuisines in India are so spectaculately different and wonderful. And so, you know, even describing the India side of this story like is impossible because, you know, there were parts of these stories in, you know, in northern India. There were parts of them in the Northeast. There were parts of them in southern India. Each time slightly different things that so I heard echoes of these things happening in this part of India or than that part of India. But as you know, it's so hard to tell, you know, I was a correspondent from there and my editors would often ask me, well, what's the India side of things? And I would always be like, I don't even know what you're asking me, you know, I can tell you what the side of things is from Udu Pradesh. I can tell you what the side of things is from Chennai. But I can't tell you what the India story is because it's 1.4 billion people who I'm sure you know this Tara, but the genetic differences between southern Indians and northern Indians is wider than the differences between Europeans and Chinese. You know, your country is so spectacularly diverse, you know, the only place that is more diverse than India is Africa. So like it's impossible to tell what the India story is and do it justice. Yeah, I think maybe this is an open call for any writers out there listening to go and research more about this and expose what's happening with this company in India. I would certainly like, you know, a lot more about this when I did a little bit of research. I didn't find anything except, you know, amazing marketing campaigns from this company. So definitely you would want to learn more about that. I do want to say one thing about the India situation. I mean, as you know, India for decades has relied almost exclusively on its public health system and hospital and hospitals. In over the last 20 years, there's really been this development of private hospital networks and private care and for certainly India's middle class and its upper class, they rely entirely on this private system. And there are great benefits to that. I don't want to say that there aren't. But, you know, India is really kind of at a crossroads between, you know, deciding whether to invest more in its public system or whether sort of to abandon that and just sort of allow the private system to flourish. And I think, you know, the American experience with private health care is is a cautionary tale. And I and I and I think India needs to sort of really have, you know, a serious conversation with itself about whether it wants to go down the road that it's been going down for the last 15 to 20 years. I do agree. I think that it is a cautionary tale and it just shows you sort of, you know, how you can't, there's a limit to sort of capitalism versus health care, right? And if you sort of mix the two, then the incentives are not aligned. You want to make money, but you also want to save you and you but you have to do it while doing good and you have to do it while actually saving people's lives. I don't understand how those two, you know, get so mixed up and can't go hand in hand. But anyway, that's a larger conversation. But I think you're absolutely right that, you know, personally, also as a consumer, I see that. I see so many companies now selling supplements saying that I will help you sleep better, protein supplements, you know, all these fads, lot of VC money coming in. And honestly, I'm very into fitness. So at least for me, I'm very careful about what these companies are telling me because I've also spoke, like I speak to people like you, I read books, but I mean, simply just, you know, in my own family, my father's diabetic. And I see him consuming. Yeah, no, it's okay. And I see him consuming things that have a lot of sugar in them, but the label says that, oh, it's completely healthy, it's organic. I look and read the label and I see, okay, it's just sugar and other forms, you know, but people just don't know, they just want to wear, they don't know that put it inside their bodies and it's becoming very insidious. So I totally agree. I think that this is a cautionary day and we really need to pay more attention. And would you be publishing, you know, this story is that you left out in the personal stories because to me as well as a reader, obviously, you know, those human stories that you put into the book, they were the most powerful and they really brought home what you were trying to say. So would you be publishing them anywhere? Do you think? Maybe someday. I have no immediate plans to do so. I'm starting to work on my next book and I want to sort of head toward that. You know, I think, Tara, you and I both have spent our lives with editors and they are, the process is incredibly painful and I have often screamed at my editors, no, it can't be right, no. But almost invariably they are right. And so I sort of, do I have the original manuscript? It's still with me. And I, I sometimes bring it to my heart to just, you know, remember with fondness. So like I would say I took at least a year of my life to write and research maybe a year and a half. These many things that have never seen the light of day. And that's a year that I will never get back. So well, I do something with those maybe someday. But I have no immediate plans. Thank you for being interested in them. Yeah, I think it was a very interesting conversation and I think one thing that also made me think was that a lot of these are to do with women and babies and women's health. And one of the most shocking things in the book is, you know, how women's health is repeatedly sideline, right? Like when the food drug and cosmetic act was passed, it was 345 pages long but only two pages dealt with products like tap, tap, powder, shabu, blush, cosmetics, part of it. And this oversight also, you know, you mentioned how it cost women because of the things to be spoken about and the things that you write about in the book. So yeah, I think that a lot of it is also just with how women's health is overlooked, right? And this company is tapping into that aspect, whereas women and babies, even when, you know, the suffering is right in front of people. Yeah, I mean, baby powder really, the, you know, the lower messages in baby powder are really kind of about racism and about misogyny, right? Because the, for many people, they use talcum powder, baby powder to whiten their skin. You know, as you know, in India, the biggest selling cosmetics are skin whiteners and a, one of the more basic ways of getting skin whitening is to put talcum powder on your skin. And so they sell it as a, they sell it with words like purity and the rest, but what they're really signaling is you can be whiter with this. And, and one of the reasons that it's associated with ovarian cancer so strongly, of course, is that there's a very strong scent in the baby, in baby powder. In fact, it's Johnson & Johnson surveys showed that is the most widely recognized scent in the world. And women use it in their crotch area to cover up vaginal smells, which they're embarrassed about. And they're embarrassed about it because they're, you know, these misogynistic messages that there's something wrong with vaginal smells. So, you know, all of these products play into some of the darkest strains of you know, humanity. So for anyone who wants to write an expose or dig into uncomfortable truth, obviously it's not easy because you are, it's sort of like David versus Goliath, you know, your one person against this huge system. What advice would you give to people who want to write more about these kind of things, but ask out of the consequences? Try doing something else. Get counseling. You know, don't do it. It's, you know, it's hard. It's you fight, fighting the system almost never works and puts you in sort of tough. You know, I lived for five years with these horrible stories haunting me and longer than that because of course, you know, it was really 20 years ago that I started learning about these stories and and and having them live inside of me. And you know, there's something wrong with me that I can't really live without trying to get these stories known and trying to get accountability for the people who have done such terrible things. I think I, you know, I grew up with daddy issues or something like that. You know, I'm hoping that your listeners are healthier than I and can sort of move on with other things because it's, I think it's a really, I think, I think, I think, I think it's a really tough thing to do and it's, it's these sort of stories are very hard to live with. I can't imagine sort of like hearing them firsthand from all of these people and just seeing how pervasive, you know, this company is and how pervasive its tentacles are and how it reaches through everything, the policymakers, marketing, media, doctors and it's still selling products that are bad for you. It's really heartbreaking. What I, I mentioned in the next book, so I'm just curious what, what is your next book about? I'm not going to talk about it. You know, it's another troubled thing and I'll just, you know, I don't want to warn, you know, the folks I'm looking at yet, until I have to. So, but listen Tara, I am so grateful for your interest and, and so grateful that you read the book so closely and that you seem to like it so much. It's, you know, it's conversations like this that really make me happy that I did this effort and that, you know, the message is getting out there and I'm, you know, so grateful that there are people literally on the other side of the world for me who, who, who, so appreciate the work. Well, thank you so much for this conversation and for, you know, driving this book because I think definitely, you know, even if it reaches sort of a few people here in India, maybe sort of we can be a little more careful about kind of the products that we consume and be a little more cognizant, I think in general about, you know, looking at labels and doing our own research because there is this whole market right now, whether it's, you know, people selling health food under wrong label, medicines, etc. I think we as consumers now need to get a lot more discerning and I think work like this will help us really understand that, yeah, we also need to take it into our hands and see what we are putting into our bodies. So thank you so much for this conversation. It's been eye opening and honestly a little bit scary, but to my listeners, keep questioning, holding people accountable and never take safe at face value. And if you're listening right now, do us a favor, hit follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, you never miss an episode and tell us in the comments if you found a brand that you've trusted your whole life as much as actually hiding the truth. What would you do? Thank you so much for coming here and giving me your time. I really, really appreciate the conversation. Thank you, Tara. Take care. Hope you enjoy this episode of Books and Beyond With Bound. Punan, every Wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from India and South Asia.