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Does the FDA really have any oversight? Like, or are they too big to fail kind of thing?

they're enormous but they failed so both at least in many regards no it has its hand of regulating 20 of products it's very politically malleable right some of the things we've just seen with the overturning of martin mccary bringing in new administrators of its relationship to the cdc to the broader umbrella agency of the hhs right under rfk jr it's enormous and it's powerful but That doesn't mean it's good.

It doesn't mean it does a particularly great job of regulating goods, of finding the appropriate costs and benefits.

It doesn't mean that it finds these in a timely manner.

The overwhelming, and I'd have to say 90, 95% of my research finds that when it's correct, it's behind the ball.

I mean, sometimes to the tune of a half a decade.

And then more often than not, it's not correct.

And when it's not correct, it can take another half a decade for people to really realize that.

So, I mean, is it a broken agency or at least a broken process?

It's an insolvable problem from a government agency.

So I don't want to, I'm hesitant to say the FDA is broken, right? The FDA is powerful.

It gets a lot of funding.

It has its hands in a lot of honeypots for lack of a better word.

So it's hard to say that it's broken.

I just recently, before coming on the show, I read an article saying that public trust for the FDA is about 50%.

in terms of surveys, that's completely understandable, but-

I'm surprised it's so high.

I am too, but again, I'm the biased academic here.

I spent 10 years watching it blow itself up.

So my confidence is lower, but public view of that tends to be a little bit higher.

But to say that half the people don't trust the Food and Drug Administration to bring safe and effective goods to market, That's one thing, but it's still incredibly powerful.

It hasn't really lost power.

But the main reason I think that the FDA makes all of these mistakes continuously, and some of the ones we'll talk about, I'm sure, as we continue, is that there's no way to aggregate any of these things.

Costs and benefits are individual calculations.

Consumers have to make them.