Howard Stern isn’t as shocking as he used to be, and snippets of news that repeat every 15 minutes  are only interesting the first time around.  You’re stuck in the traffic already and there are many ways to tell what the weather is (cold), so you don’t need “traffic and weather together on the 3’s.”  And that classic hits station repeating the same 500 songs?  Newsflash: We aren’t cool any more (I now freely admit I never was) and no amount of bouncing up and down playing “air guitar” and drumming on the steering wheel to “Jumping Jack Flash” is going to change that.

So why not try a podcast on the wellness industry?   This podcast will tell you, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. It covers  not just outcomes issues but also some lurid history, including how I originally  “didn’t just drink the vendor KoolAid. I even mixed it up and sold it.” And how I abandoned a lucrative business brokering population health when I figured out the numbers didn’t add up and I had been accidentally telling my clients they were going to save money.

Two quick fixes that the producer can’t retroactively edit in.  First: I accidentally said “Health Industry Research Organization” when I meant “Health Enhancement Research Organization.” My apologies to the former.  I’m sure they would be upset to have been conflated with the latter.  Second, the information about the University of California system canceling its wellness program for 200,000 people and not getting a single complaint was stated  in HRDive but is disputed by the UCal system.  I learned about this dispute only after I taped the interview.  So in the immortal words of the great philosopher Gilda Radner, never mind.  (A great link by the way)

These are both pretty minor in the overall scheme of things, but our policy is to correct (or at least give both sides of) every inaccurate or disputable statement that is brought to our attention.  It is called “integrity” and the wellness industry ought to try it sometime.