Transcript of Truth & Toxins: Dr. Soon-Shiong’s Vision for the LA Times and America’s Health | 12.21.24

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Patrick Soon-Shion, owner of the LA Times, made headlines this fall for making big and potentially risky changes at his paper in an effort to root out bias. In this episode of MorningWire, we speak to Dr. Soon-shion about his intentions for the paper and why he's willing to go to bat for Trump's incoming cabinet pics, RFK Jr. And Dr. Marty McCarry. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief, John Bickley. It's Saturday, December 21st. And this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us now is Dr. Patrick Soon-Chiam, medical entrepreneur and owner of the LA Times. Dr. Soon-chiam, thank you so much for coming on.

You're welcome, and thank you for having me.

So first off, when did you acquire the LA Times?

I think it's about six years now, around the 2018 time frame.

Now, you've presided over some very divided political times, but recently you've made some headlines for shaking up the editorial board and also for declining to endorse a political candidate. That suggested to some people that you might be changing the direction of the paper or at least doing a bit of a rebrand. Is that accurate?

Well, the accurate thing is that when I bought the paper, I wanted it to be a really voice of all people. And more importantly, I wanted readers to understand the difference between news and opinion. When I first started this, obviously, Norm Polstein was the executive editor with me and really seasoned, and we had that same Unfortunately, COVID happened, and I had to take my eye off the paper to focus on what I was doing on cancer and COVID. I hired a new editor as Norm retired. The new editor, unfortunately, I think, pushed the paper into something I didn't believe was the right direction. Once I had time, which I did last year and beginning of this year, I began to realize we really need change.

Now, how are your readers responding to that? I mean, obviously, it's a delicate dance because you have this subscriber base. They've become accustomed to a certain tone at the paper. Are you seeing a loss of subscribers? And if so, is that something you're willing to weather to build this new and improved tone?

Yeah. And I think, look, I recognize it'd be risks, right? As I said in my tweets, if you have to lead, you have to lead. Leaders have to lead. My concern was, were we writing opinions based on only one-sided view and recognizing that California is a very blue state. But as you begin to see, I didn't want to be just the voice of California. I wanted to be voice of the nation. More importantly, I wanted to be the voice of truth. Taking that position that we could be the voice of truth, we need to make that happen. I would like to refer you to the mission statement, which I'm going to read to you now.

Sure.

The Editorial Board actually has not even followed. It says here, our editorials are written by a group of writers who meet three times a week to discuss and debate issues. I think that's okay, but maybe they're not really okay because if the group of writers Again, I'm getting into trouble for this, but so be it, are an echo chamber of themselves, we just get a one-sided view. But what is most important in the mission statement, it goes on to say, and I'm quoting, We strive to take into account different perspectives, particularly if they don't align with our own to inform our views. Our hope is to lay out arguments and analysis that can help our readers navigate complex questions or at the very it is, give them a well-considered way to think about the issues of the day. That is an amazing laudable mission statement, meaning that we allow our readers to take into account different perspectives. I didn't believe we were living up to our mission statement. I needed to take a position that the former executive editor, who I terminated and who's gone out to say that he resigned under protest, which is, again, a level of information, we needed to make that change.

Change is difficult. Get that. Change is risky. Get that. Change is necessary in order to heal the nation. La Times, as I believe, a moral obligation to be the voice of all people.

Now, just from the small amount of data that you have so far since making some of these changes, or at least announcing them, have you gotten a sense that your readership does have an appetite for opinions from people like Scott Jennings, for example?

The answer is yes and no. Obviously, I've gotten a huge amount of negative feedback on X, but also positive feedback on X. As you could see, I approached Scott Jennings first because I watched him when he was a contributor to LA Times. But his voice was quasi-drowned, just like his voice on CNN was drowned. If you watch on CNN, he's one out of five. And even the moderator would throw a bone to Scott Jennings prior to the election And it's amazing how it changed after the election. I watched his courage, I watched his demeanor, I watched his respectfulness, and I watched his opinion based on what I listened to as many facts rather than speculation. So I reached out to him and asked him, Would he join this new campaign of mine to change the editorial board? And he accepted. I just tweeted again. He was nominated like one of the rising stars in media. So Obviously, we made the right call.

Now, both you and Jeff Bezos declined to endorse a candidate at your respective papers. Are you hoping to establish a trend in the larger media space, or are you primarily just laser-focused on the LA Times?

Well, as you said, leaders have to lead. We led, and interestingly enough, a day later or two days later, Jeff Bezos followed. Whether he followed us or whether he followed on his own accord, I have no idea. I have not communicated with Jeff on any of these issues. So whatever Jeff Bezos' motivation was, you have to ask Jeff, but my motivation was very clear. I did not believe in an echo chamber, prepackage endorsement which I have yet to see but didn't believe in, of a candidate that I had some knowledge of, and both candidates I have some knowledge of. I just wanted some fair factual statements to be put out there. The editorial board elected to, rather than do that, keep quiet about it, which I supported. I said I would not accept an endorsement that, first of all, I wasn't part of that analysis. Secondly, I wasn't sure that the analysis was based on facts rather than speculation.

Now, I know you declined to endorse either candidate, but would you like to share your thoughts on some of the incoming cabinet pics? Do you have any strong feelings about any of them?

I have very strong feelings about some them when the President elected Robert Kennedy, there was this furor around Robert Kennedy. Having said that, what he says is fundamentally correct. We have huge amounts of toxic materials. We have a rising incidence of cancer. He was the first to announce about PFAS we can talk about. I've been studying for the last five years the coloring and toxic materials in the food that causes cancer. My concern in life or my entire career was to find a cure for cancer. I was beginning to see, in a slam, beginning to see the higher incidence of cancer in young people. I think the underlying basis of that is all the chemicals that we are eating, drinking, and we can talk a little bit about that. My other concern was with regard to the care of a patient, you really cannot have the touch and feel from some academic bureaucrat versus somebody who was actually touched and felt patients. When he nominated Dr. Martin McCarry, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, as the FDA head, that was such a breath of fresh air. When he nominated Dr. Mehmet Arz, who was a cardiothoracic surgeon, that was such a breath of fresh air.

What it speaks to is the level of competence. I think unless you have competence, the combination of competence and real-world experience about real-world patients' lives and how it affects Americans' lives, you really would end up with a bureaucratic mess. And When I tweeted that about that was an inspired choice, I think, again, I got positive and negative. But I think I need to go out now on programs like this and have no short sound bites. I need to give complex insights into complex issues that affect our healthcare. I think if anybody can bring change at the level of the HHS and downstream, it's Robert Kennedy. I think without getting political, if you look at the current HHS, there's no different, maybe even less competence in the current HHS secretary I say that at high risk because our approvals is dependent on the HHS Secretary understanding the importance of the decisions that's being made in the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, I think it was an inspired choice. I think he ran truly on the basis of looking out for the welfare and health of all Americans, and most importantly, of children and this next generation of children and grandchildren who are being affected by the toxins that we have in our food and in our water and in our farmlands, and how we can not only address that, but reduce what I'm really concerned about of the higher incidence of cancer occurring in younger people and healthier people.

Now, that's obviously something you've spent your career researching, and it's become a pretty big topic recently with some of these nominations physicians. What are a handful of takeaways from your research that you wish lay people knew about reducing their cancer risk?

Okay, let's go through one at a time. It is remarkable that since 2012, there are very, very strong, good scientific papers that show these yellow and blue and red dyes are carcinogenic. Very strong papers. So it is a settled science that these chemicals are carcinogenic It is also a settled science that the chemicals that you and I use a Scotchgard or on our clothing or on a non-stick pants called PFAS is carcinogenic. Yet we are the only country in the world, to my knowledge, compared to Europe, that have not banned these chemicals or regulated these chemicals in our food and allow them to happen. We're the only country in the world that has never measured this thing, PFAS, that's in the ground and uses fertilizers and in the milk. The consequences of that is 3, 5, 10 years of consuming this food in everything we do is we are now seeing, and I don't want to scare the world, but I'm speaking to all my colleagues at University of California, San Francisco, at Mount Sinai, at Oxford. We are now seeing 8-year-old, 10-year of all, 11-year-old children with colon cancer. I've just treated a young 13-year-old child with metastatic pankreatic cancer who sadly just passed away.

I've never in my career seeing now so many young, healthy people with colon cancer. I'm about to treat a 22-year-old young lady with metastatic colon cancer. We have to ask ourselves the question, why are we seeing this in our nation? And I just tweeted the longevity life cycle of Americans compared to the the rest of the world, places like Italy, UK, Europe, and you see the curve of us. We have one of the lowest lifespan per capita spend than the rest of the world. This is so unacceptable, and I think it is a consequence of the inactivity or unawareness, if that's an English word, and the lack of action that's happened at the highest level at HHS.

Now, one of the Old Guard advisories you hear floating around about preventing colorectal cancer is that red meat is a major contributor. Do you believe that advice holds up?

Let me give you this idea of red meat. I would refer you to, and again, I tweaked it about that, the news nation did this story on PFAS. Even to me, studying all these chemicals for the last 10 For the first few years of my career, I was unaware that the EPA never measured PFAS, allowed the PFAS coming out of the chemical factories making PFAS, put it together as sludge, and They set as fertilizer across the land of the United States, which means all our cattle, all our dairy cows, have PFAS at such a massive levels, either in the meat or in the milk. If it's true what the That program said, and we need to go validate that, but that's what was claimed in that program, that 97% of Americans have a PFAS level higher than what is normal or safe, then It's the meat that we eat. It's like the salmon. Everybody think fish was fantastic, except until they found it had mercury. The milk that we drink, if it's filled with PFAS, why are we not addressing addressing it by actually just studying it. And I think this is the conflation that when I listen to the criticism of Robert Kennedy, where he is saying, let's just study it and understand the facts and understand the Polio.

We talk about the polio vaccine. He wants to just study it, but it's not the polio stalk vaccine. He's talking about a different vaccine. He's talking about a vaccine that is generated out of a cancer cell, a monkey cancer cell that has never been studied. I think the complexity of this issue needs to be raised not in a sound bite, but we need to break it down. You could say red meat, yeah, but what's in that red meat? Is it If ask, Well, the problem is we've never measured it. You've never measured it and you've never studied it, and somebody is asking to it to be studied, then you throw out a conjecture, and then you call that a quack. That's actually wrong because the idea The idea is, I'm such a scientist. I just want to understand the data. If only we can then have opinion based on facts rather than opinion based on speculation, we'd have a better society.

Now, this might be getting granular, but I wonder, and I am sure some of our listeners wonder as well, is PFAS something you can have tested to find out what your levels are, or is it just a big unknown?

Not only is it going to be tested, what one farmer did, according to the story, and I want to go this investigation myself is because I think either the families or the son was getting cancer, they tested themselves in their milk and in their blood. It was exceedingly high to the extent that what he's doing to all his battle in his milk now, he's throwing it down the drain. Then he had to actually, unfortunately, euthanize his dairy cows. This is the tragedy that we're facing as a nation. The good news about all of it, it's fixable. That's what's so exciting. It's fixable. You know when President Trump went out, he said, They broke it, we fix it? I don't mean that as a political statement. There are so many things that we can do now because we can measure it, understand it, and fix it, which really means we need to measure it so that we have a quantifiable data fact and no speculation, no right, no left. It's not a political statement to say you have cancer, whether you're Republican or Democrat or centrist or liberal. You're an American and we have to fix it.

Now, you mentioned the broken health care system. Obviously, that's been in the news just this past week because of Luigi Mangioni. If you were to prescribe two or three suggestions on how we could begin to improve our healthcare system. What are some of the prime levers that you would suggest we tackle first?

Okay. Again, I don't want to get political, but I presented this to President Obama. Think about that. And I visited the White House with Dr. Jim Weinstein, who was the President of Dodmouth, Dr. Jim Kim, who was the President then of the World Bank and myself, because we had a solution. The solution was to identify a system where the people who care for the patient, meaning the doctors, have real-time information about the chronically ill. The chronically ill represents about 10% of the population, but It cost 80% of the healthcare costs. At the time, I was presenting President Obama. I think our healthcare costs were maybe in the 3 trillion. It's now 4.8 trillion. We are spending more money than the rest of the world and have about a 49th best outcome. The solution we put in there was to have a real-time data in every geography so that you can incentivize the physician to induce health into the patient rather than illness and provide a financial incentive from the fee for service to really a mechanism. We have the best doctor in the best region, the best location, looking after the patient and introducing health.

For example, you have a patient that is a prediabetic. The patient is not diabetic yet. Your job then as a doctor is to keep the patient in that status as a prediabetic and make sure it doesn't become diabetic with a kidney failure. Well, guess why the system now works? If you have a patient that's a prediabetic, contract as a government with the insurance company, and the insurance company gets paid And more, if the patient goes from prediabetic to diabetic. Think about that. They're incentivized for sick care versus for health care. So sadly, when the Accountable Care Act came out, I wrote an article, which you can go find, where I said the Accountable Care Act is neither accountable nor affordable. It wasn't a political statement. It was a statement in which I was trying to induce a solution. During President Trump's first term, he made two massive important changes. One, the right to try law, which changed the lives of people that otherwise felt they had no choice but to go to hospice and die. Secondly, he put forth a system of managed care that was based on the geography, but most importantly, contracted directly with the doctors as opposed to a middleman of these insurance companies.

Sadly, you watched the output and the uproar in the country about the denials that the insurance companies work towards and the poor outcome and increased cost. That program was blocked immediately by the Biden administration. They put in the current system called REACH, which then put the contracting instead of direct to the doctors, now back to the insurance companies, and you see the outcome. These are, again, fixable ways of addressing changing the incentive so that the doctor and patient could have direct interaction with each other. We convert this perverse incentive of trying to drive what we call up coding of higher costs as you get sicker to an incentive you get paid more if you're healthier. If you take in consideration what I've just said about the cancer, you take in consideration what I said about the toxic materials, you take in consideration about awareness of having safer food, and you take into consideration of the ability of the doctor to have real-time data to manage a cancer patient, a diabetic patient, a cardiac patient, ICU patient, and be incentivized to improve that patient's health rather than drive the patient to the ICU or the ER as it currently is, we change healthcare.

I think the opportunity, I will be presenting as a podcast soon. What I see is five problems in the nation and in healthcare and real solutions. Problem one, I think we are losing the war on cancer with our empiric trial in area of toxic chemotherapy. And I think we're on the brink of curing cancer with immunotherapy, targeting the tumor and activating your body's immune system. If this change is made during this administration, we could see the results of that. Problem number two is transforming sick care to health care and to address what I call the uncoordinated, integrated high-cost care to address chronic disease Problem number three, we have this food industrial complex of toxic preservatives in supply chain. And the problem number five, we need to create our own raw material sources so that we not a national security issue of dependence on raw materials or pharmaceuticals from the rest of the world. All of these massive big problems, I think, are completely soluble within the next four years.

All right. Well, that is a very hopeful message. Dr. Sun Qiang, thank you so much for coming on.

All right. Well, as I said, the conversation we need to have is really long form in which we get into the details So to explain to the American public what's at stake. And I really hope that people understand that the choices that was made by the present elect in picking Robert Kennedy, Dr. Marty McCurrie and Dr. Oz, I believe, are inspired choices that can actually change the course of health care in our nation.

Well, we look forward to having you again soon. Thank you.

Okay. Good talking to you.

That was Dr. Patrick Soon-Shuyang, Medical Entrepreneur and of the LA Times. And this has been a Saturday edition of MorningWire.