JOHN WELLS: One of the things that’s been very gratifying about this show is early on we were adopted by the medical community saying, this is what it’s really like. And the stories that are most meaningful for us when we hear about what we’re doing is we’ve had a number of communications and people reach out to say, my family started watching this show, and they came to me afterwards and said, is that what it’s really like?
And they said, “Yeah, that’s what it’s really like, and that’s why I can’t come home and tell you what happened in my day.” So people understand more what they’ve been through, which I think is also a wonderful thing that we were able to do.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Hey everyone, welcome to We Disrupt this Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González, and for today’s episode we’ll be talking to someone who has done the impossible: gotten Americans to enjoy talking about healthcare. Yeah, that’s right. We are sitting down with legendary showrunner, writer, director, and producer John Wells, who has been a crucial part of some of the most iconic television from the past few decades, including shows like The West Wing, ER and everyone’s latest favorite medical drama, The Pitt.
The Pitt has won over audiences for its incredible ensemble cast and an almost documentary- style approach to depicting the life of medical workers inside an ER where each episode covers one hour during a shift. But it also seems to hit home for a lot of viewers, laying bare this country’s broken healthcare system. One we all have to deal with at some point.
Later in the episode, we will talk to media scholar and executive producer of this podcast, Caty Borum, who spent years studying how entertainment media helps bring public health policy to audiences who might not otherwise hear about it. ‘Cause let’s be real, when you’re curled up on the couch after a day at work, are you turning on a CDC press conference or Noah Wyle looking surly in scrubs? I know my answer. Don’t go anywhere, when we come back we’ll be talking to executive producer of The Pitt, John Wells.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re here with TV legend John Wells. John Wells is a producer, writer, and director, maybe best known for his role as showrunner and executive producer on TV series like ER, The West Wing, Shameless, The Pitt, and so many more. His projects have won three Peabody Awards and received seven Emmys, as well as countless other awards and accolades. The whole team here is so excited to welcome John Wells to the podcast. How are you?
JOHN WELLS: I’m well, thank you. Thank you for asking me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. We’re thrilled to have you here. I’ve gotta say the word of mouth on this series has been so strong.
JOHN WELLS: Yeah, it was surprising to us, and it’s great when it happens. It’s happened to me a few times on shows we’ve done, but usually not straight out of the gate like this, so it’s been very gratifying.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, you’re returning to sort of familiar ground here. Obviously shows like China Beach and ER were medical dramas you’ve worked on, and now we’re back in this world with The Pitt. So I’m wondering how did medical dramas become such a part of your television work?
JOHN WELLS: I think the medical drama, the possibility of what can happen to people is very much part of what we worry about in our lives. We have to deal with mortality, we have to deal with the fear of what will happen. And particularly the emergency world is one in which people come in and they were just going about their day, and then they’re suddenly thrusted to a very different situation. So it has a lot of dramatic possibilities. And then in the case of all three shows, we were doing them at a time in which we felt that there was a significant reason to have a conversation about what was happening.
Particularly on The Pitt, more recently, what’s been happening over the last few years in urban emergency medicine, which has become the primary care option for a huge portion of the American population. The changes in the ACA that are being wrought right now and in Medicare, these are all issues that we were hearing about from the physicians that we had been in touch with and talking to for many years. And they started to talk about, post-COVID, just how dire the situation was getting, and it seemed time to revisit it again and kind of talk about what’s going on in the American healthcare system.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I think people feel like The Pitt has kind of breathed new life into the medical drama, and part of it is the kind of temporality, right? The day in the ER. We get to sit with patients and doctors through several episodes dealing with issues. How much did what you were discovering about changes in the medical field inform the format of the series?
JOHN WELLS: You know, I think I’ve done somewhere around 500 hours of medical in my career, but what fascinated me about this idea of doing it in a single day was we would just be following the doctor so we wouldn’t be required to also do their personal lives, follow them home. We would literally just be talking about what are the stressors, the difficulties post-COVID for emergency room physicians and medical personnel, nurses, techs in the system? And it would relieve us from having to play melodramatic storylines, romantic storylines, because that doesn’t fit in the day’s format. So we really just talked about it as a virtually kind of a quasi-documentary where you would be following kind of over the shoulder of the doctors.
And then being able to do it for HBO Max was a big part of it because they said we could actually show what it looks like for physicians that we didn’t have to turn away, so the audience would have to have the same experience and ask themselves whether or not they would be capable of doing this job. And also to just understand why a lot of times when you wait for eight hours because you sliced yourself opening a bagel in the morning, there’s a reason that you waited for eight hours, that there are other things that are going on and other things that people are having to take care of. So the whole format really made me interested in the possibility of, you know, reentering this world.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. What goes into finding a balance or harmony with such a big ensemble cast working so quickly in a space like the ER?
JOHN WELLS: Well, it starts first with just conversations about individual characters and making certain that the characters actually are representative of the people who are really working in the emergency rooms, and so it really kind of comes from there.
These are very diverse workplaces. And the people who decide that they’re gonna go into this field are not going into it for a lot of money. They’re gonna make a living, and a good-ish living, but they’re not dermatologists. You know, they’re not doing plastic surgery. They are there because they really care about people. And that was how they were kind of developed.
And then their backstories come out in the same way that you would talk to people that you hadn’t worked with before. And so if something seemed too revelatory or something that somebody wouldn’t say, we scratched it.
CLIP: The Pitt
What are you doing here?
I’m working and you?
Oh, I don’t know. Had a guy come in, hit by a drunk driver in a crosswalk. 39-year-old vet survived three tours without a scratch. I spent the last two hours coding it.
That’s always a rough way to end the night.
Must have had a reason at one time to keep coming back, but. I can’t think of it right now.
Because this is the job that keeps on giving nightmares, ulcers, suicidal tendencies. Besides if you jump on my shift. That’s just rude, man.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering, given that you have spent close to 500 hours working on medical dramas, have any changes in the medical industry surprised you over the decades?
JOHN WELLS: Oh, a lot of things surprised me. You know, first and foremost, that violence in the emergency room against healthcare workers had really picked up, and had become a major issue to the point where there’s actually pending national legislation about it. There’s a boarding crisis where the hospitals really don’t have enough room to take people upstairs, so they board people for days and days in the emergency room. And then you have a whole generation of physicians and nurses and technicians who went through that crisis that we watched from the comfort of our living room. And had to make life in death decisions with limited equipment and what are the impacts of that on them? So that was all really surprising.
Dr. Joe Sachs, who’s a writer and executive producer on the show, and also a working emergency room physician, the way in which Robby looks in the first season in his memories of COVID are actually based on the photographs of Dr. Joe while he was in the ER during COVID.
So, you know, all of that has surprised me. And then the continuing crisis as more and more people are losing their health insurance and are turning to the emergency rooms for their primary care, which usually happens when people are farther along and have greater medical needs. And the system’s not really set up to handle that. There just aren’t enough people to take care of everyone who needs the help.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: In the pilot, we get to the hospital and the first thing we see upon entering the space is a chaotic waiting room. It is overcrowded, and then we slowly start to understand why. Right. Was this image kind of something set in stone or was it something you kind of discovered to help segue audiences into these themes?
JOHN WELLS: You know, we were just trying to be realistic. We visited a lot of emergency rooms. In fact, we shoot our exteriors at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. It’s a very important hospital for the community. And you know, when we were talking to ’em a few weeks ago after the ACA changes, which happened at the first of the year, they’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the number of patients who were coming in, people needing help right away. So it hasn’t taken, you know, a year for these changes to move through. It’s really what it looks like. And the intention was to show the audience immediately what I consider to be heroic young healthcare workers are doing on a day-to-day basis. They’re just trying to not drown.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Your work is pretty well known for that dedication to research, right? Bringing in folks who work in the field, consultants finding accuracy in scripted series. Why does that accuracy matter so much in this instance? What’s that sort of tie to representing the world as it is that you have in your work?
JOHN WELLS: If you want people to have an experience in which they come away from it feeling as if they’ve actually seen something that hasn’t been manipulated, even though obviously everything we do is artifice, you need to make sure that the research itself feels real: the language, the people, the way the people speak, the way they move through the spaces, what actually happens.
So I think it’s just essential. And that was something that I learned on China Beach when we were working with Vietnam veterans, and we worked with lots of Vietnam veterans, who told us their stories and came in and literally gave us the textures and the language and the pace and the way that things actually worked.
And you know, I think that’s been central to the audience connecting with it and feeling as if we’re telling them something that’s valid, that there’s an expertise that exists with these characters. Somebody referred to the show at one point in an article as “competency porn”, and I think that’s, and I think that’s something we saw as a compliment.
You know, over the last few years, particularly in healthcare, part of it certainly was heightened during the COVID period as we’re starting to question competence, and education and research. And so we’re just trying to show that these are people who are dedicated, young people who are dedicating their lives, who could be doing something else. And Robby, of course, and Dana as their mentors, who have done the thing. And the audience can feel it. I’m absolutely convinced that they can tell.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Part of that hyperrealism comes through in the structures we talked about, not just the kind of time of the show, right, this one day in the ER. But the way some storylines are not resolved neatly or resolved at all. I think in season one, back to the mom who came in with the Sterno burn on her hand. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see things not resolve fully, right?
JOHN WELLS: Yeah. It’s part of it, that people work a 12 or 14 hour shift and they go home and they don’t know what happened to most of their patients. They have these five and 15 minute or two hours, over eight hours involvement with people’s lives, and then the people are gone.
One of the things that’s been very gratifying about the show is early on we were adopted by the medical community saying, this is what it’s really like, and the stories that are most meaningful for us when we hear about what we’re doing is we’ve had a number of communications and people reach out to say, my family started watching this show and they came to me afterwards and said, is that what it’s really like? And they said, yeah, that’s what it’s really like, and that’s why I can’t come home and tell you what happened in my day. So people understand more what they’ve been through, which I think is also a wonderful thing that we were able to do.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We’re talking a lot about the intersection between medicine and social realities. The series includes social workers quite a bit. They seem very present in the ER, more so than I’ve seen maybe in other medical dramas.
JOHN WELLS: Well, they’ve always been an important part of the ER, but they have become more important as the amount of mental health work that has to happen. The fact that we have relegated to our police and to our emergency rooms, the treatment of people with very serious issues, means that we require more and more social workers and therapists, psychiatrists. In the second season, a psychiatrist becomes one of our major characters in the show because that’s what we’re asking these emergency rooms and these emergency room healthcare workers to handle now for us.
CLIP: The Pitt
This is Dr. Jefferson from Psychiatry.
Why do I need to see a psychiatrist? Jada, why do I need to see a psychiatrist?
Oh, it’s gonna be okay. Jackson. Dr. Jefferson says he can help.
Do you know how you got here?
The medics brought me, I don’t really remember. I, I, I, I was in the library.
What were you doing there?
I, I was, I was studying. I, I, I was trying to study, but then they wouldn’t stop talking.
Who wouldn’t stop talking?
They don’t want me to pass the bar.
Who doesn’t want you to pass the bar?
That’s what they told me.
Hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me. Who doesn’t want you to pass the bar?
Let’s give them some privacy. Dr. Jefferson will let us know when he’s done.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: There’s a central tension between whether healthcare workers can bring their full humanity to make decisions in a system that is increasingly built on efficiency and profit. So one, how is that coming up in your research, and then how do you represent that on the series without making the world feel totally hopeless?
JOHN WELLS: It’s something we hear constantly from the nurses and doctors that we work with and talk to. You know, we’re very fortunate that we have four full-time practicing ER physicians who rotate through the show, so there’s somebody on the set at all times to make sure what we’re doing is real.
And then we have anywhere from eight to ten working emergency room nurses who come in and work with us in between their shifts and are actually, when you see the nurses who know what they’re doing in the scenes, particularly the trauma scenes, they’re all real ER nurses and so makes a huge difference. So they come in and tell us what they’re concerned about. And these are the issues that they’re really concerned about.
I don’t want to try and indict the hospitals in this or the hospital administrations. As we continue to have exploding healthcare costs for treatments, a lot of the basic primary care treatments are under a lot of pressure to be done more efficiently, quickly, and to control costs. And we haven’t really addressed this throughout the system. So what’s left for the physicians is a lot of pressure to try and see more patients so that there can be more billing into the system, which is always gonna be a negotiated billing anyway. And there’s a lot of pressure to increase those efficiencies because more and more patients are coming into the emergency rooms who cannot pay.
They’re uninsured. They can’t pay. The hospitals know that they’re not gonna be able to pay, and so other patients have to be able to be charged in such ways to at least allow the system to continue. It’s not sustainable over many more years. You know, we’re gonna see it now with these most recent changes in the big beautiful bill to the Medicare system, where we’re gonna lose a lot of rural hospitals, we’re gonna lose a lot of practitioners. And on top of that, a lot of those hospitals are staffed by physicians who come in from across the world to do it as part of their education package. They are a big part of the skilled immigrant labor that we allow in, a lot of it is healthcare workers.
It’s not just people working in high tech for Google or someone, they’re actually the physician you’re gonna see if you go into a small hospital in North Dakota. And we’re making the United States a less welcoming place for them to practice their professional craft. So all these things are things we hear about constantly from the doctors and nurses we talk to.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: In all your conversations with doctors and healthcare professionals, was there anything approaching potential solutions that you heard from folks?
JOHN WELLS: Well, I don’t wanna be accused of being a proponent of socialized medicine exactly, but when you have a tiered system in which a large portion of the population is properly insured and has access to higher quality medical care, and the other half, or I’m just making up the percentages, but huge percentage of people either can’t afford that care or to pay for that care themselves, no longer have union benefits, were a huge part of what the healthcare system was for a long time, or simply can’t afford any care, the balance is off.
We’re gonna have to have a system in which everyone participates in it more meaningfully. And I try to point out to people that while you, the majority of your life, if you’re properly insured, you’re going to have excellent medical care. It’s gonna be a little bit of a pain in the butt sometimes, you know, a lot of deductibles and figuring out the billings and et cetera with your physicians. But when you’re in a major accident. You’re gonna go to a major trauma center. And those major trauma centers are under a tremendous amount of pressure because they’re also providing all of this primary care for a huge portion of the population.
So simply as a part of self preservation for when you really need it, when your child is in an automobile accident, when you have a heart attack, you’re gonna go to a place that is wildly stressed by all of these problems in the healthcare system. So just as a country, we kind of have to step back and really try and figure out how we’re gonna get more money into the system for the trauma care systems and for the people who aren’t covered.
And we’re going in the opposite direction, which is making it more expensive off of what I consider to be a very naive idea that people are not participating in the system somehow by not working or having whatever problems. Just as a society, who do we wanna be? You only need to spend a couple of weeks in an urban emergency room to think that the system needs significant changes. And in your own self-interest, I would suggest that people really get involved in trying to increase the amount of insurance coverage that’s available for people. It’s about where are we putting our resources? How are we gonna care for people’s primary care, which will save a lot of money for the system as a whole?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, when we don’t all take care of each other it not only becomes riskier for other folks, but based on most of the data we’ve seen, more expensive. So by not paying this cost upfront to care for each other, we end up traumatizing more people and costing ourselves more literally and metaphorically.
JOHN WELLS: Yeah, and that’s the vaccine argument as well.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Sure.
JOHN WELLS: You know, I have no idea. I’m not a vaccine researcher. I have no idea if there are a certain number of people who have an adverse reaction to vaccines. I think there are percentages about that. How do you balance that percentage with people’s personal freedoms to refuse and the cost of the community as a whole to take care of things like measles?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We’re about to learn.
JOHN WELLS: We’re about to learn. We’re learning right now in Texas.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, we are. Yeah. I’m imagining there were very few laughs while you were talking about the healthcare system with some of your early interviewees and consultants, but were there any stories that left you laughing or feeling a little more positive when you talked to folks during the early stages of The Pitt?
JOHN WELLS: I love these people. What you discover is they have a tremendous sense of humor. Some of the things they think are funny are pretty appalling when they tell you the story, but it’s their day-to-day work environment. You know? That’s how we cope. That’s how we cope with complicated situations. And so we hear they’re laughing a lot.
Now, one of the things I asked one of the doctors was, what did you learn right away when you started working in the emergency room? And she thought, for a moment she said, “People are kind of stupid.” A lot of people who end up in the emergency room have done something really stupid. Now, they may not literally be stupid, but they are there and they’re embarrassed.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Sure.
JOHN WELLS: By something that they did that they kind of, when they were doing it, knew it wasn’t a good idea. So yeah. So there’s a lot of that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Any instance I’ve been in an ER was me as a child doing something stupid and making my parents pay for it. So you know that’s, that sounds about right.
John Wells, it’s been such a treat talking to you about The Pitt and your incredible body of work today. Before I let you go, I am wondering, is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you wanted to leave us with or mention before we go?
JOHN WELLS: Be kind when you go to the emergency room. It’s a very frustrating place ’cause you’re gonna wait and there’s gonna be a lot of paperwork. Understand that the people who are there, who are in the waiting rooms and trying to help you there and the people that are gonna try and help you when you get back in the emergency room are doing their best, and just say something nice to them. Just understand that their jobs are under tremendous pressure now. And kindness from us and understanding goes a long way.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you so much for joining us and for leaving us with that message. I hope it resonates with our listeners.
JOHN WELLS: Thanks so much. This was a pleasure.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Okay. Nobody tell Utah about competency porn. They’re gonna try to ban that next. But seriously, I love a producer willing to trust that their audience can pay attention. You get drawn in by a hot doctor on a motorcycle, and then, oops, an hour later, you have also learned about the ACA and boarding issues in emergency rooms. And look, not every television show has to do the heavy lifting The Pitt does, but shows like this and producers like John Wells do feel like a rarity these days when studios and networks are eager to pivot to stuff people can watch while multitasking or texting, to draw an audience in, and then ask them to think critically about the world around them, doesn’t have to be as impossible as it sounds, and it doesn’t have to be boring. But it takes great storytelling that resonates, combined with diligent research and of course some very, very charismatic doctors.
Next up we’ve got Caty Borum, who will talk to us about how a telenovela in Peru has an interesting connection to the medical dramas we know and love today. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Now it’s time to chat with our next guest, a familiar name if you’re an avid listener, Caty Borum. Caty is our executive producer as well as the executive director of the Center for Media and Social Impact. She’s also a professor at the American University School of Communication. Welcome, Caty. Thanks for joining us today.
CATY BORUM: Thanks, Gabe. Always a pleasure to be here on our podcast.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I know that in your own work as a media scholar and a producer, you actually have a history studying health and social issues in entertainment TV. Can you tell us a little bit more about that work, what that entailed, what you learned?
CATY BORUM: So at the intersection of media scholarship and kind of media activism is this idea that entertainment, culture and entertainment television can be and often is a really powerful source by which we shape our daily behaviors. You know, health and healthcare is wrapped up very much in the circumstances of your birth, issues of social class, financial implications, are all the ways that we think about health. But health is also related to our attitudes about it. You know, whether or not we get a flu shot or a pregnancy test.
If you think about these kinds of decisions, they’re all the kind of decisions that require us to have attitudes and beliefs and even cultural values that go into that thinking. And part of how that happens that we know for sure is in entertainment and media portrayals. All of these kinds of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, cultural values, they’re all portrayed in the kind of humans that we see in entertainment media, what they’re doing, how they’re interacting with one another.
And so the question really is, in the context of what we’re talking about with John Wells, is what kinds of portrayals actually encourage us to either make healthy decisions, maybe change the way that we think about certain health topics, and ways that we really learn to develop either positive or negative attitudes that can actually really impact how we behave in our real lives.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Can you tell us what that tradition might look like of engaging with these health topics through entertainment? Are we being propagandized or are we slowly being educated in different mediums?
CATY BORUM: Yeah. I love that, Gabe. Okay. Well, I have to answer that question by starting with a story.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Mm-hmm.
CATY BORUM: In 1969, there was a telenovela in Peru called Simplemente Maria.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Oh my god. Love that title.
CATY BORUM: You’re already in. Yes. Look it up. You can still find it on YouTube. So Simplemente Maria was a very popular telenovela and part of the storyline that took place in this time period was Maria was a lower socioeconomic status domestic worker. Right? So she was a housekeeper in people’s houses. And also at that time, literacy rates among women were lower than men and lower than today. And so that’s, we’re starting with this portrait: Maria, lower socioeconomic status, domestic worker. And so what happened in the telenovela was that Maria became a very skilled seamstress. And she started running a business where she would sew and also she enrolled in adult literacy classes. Gabe, what do you think happened when this kind of storyline took off?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m guessing that literacy rates in the country of Peru might have gone up for women after this telenovela was on TV?
CATY BORUM: Excellent. What happened was two things that are pretty cool. So sales of Singer sewing machines went up by something like 500% according to the literature that I’ve read.Yeah, so it’s like this immediate spike. People wanted to learn how to sew. They could feel some empowerment in that. And the other thing that happened was that the number of women signing up for literacy classes did increase.
So here’s what happened after that. There was a very ambitious and enterprising producer based in Mexico named Miguel Sabido, who saw this happening and said, oh my God how could we actually learn from this and perhaps be more intentional in this really positive social change, particularly recognizing the gender aspect in this. Right?
And so what Sabido and others then did was further develop this model. And they coined this model called the Entertainment Education Model or the Sabido Method. And not everybody uses that terminology anymore, but it’s a pretty well known model that exists now and is practiced in 70 countries and around the world, basically understanding health behaviors that want to be promoted and basically working with show producers and showrunners not to do propaganda, although I do appreciate that question, Gabe. But to ensure that the health behaviors are accurate, to ensure that if you’re portraying someone getting a particular vaccine, there are different ways that vaccines are administered, and if you show it the wrong way, you’re actually promoting misinformation. It’s that kind of thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: How do you see those connections between Simplemente Maria and The Pitt today?
CATY BORUM: In the late nineties, ER was doing some programming around HIV and reproductive health. These were issues at the time that you could not disconnect the health behaviors from issues of social stigma, of actually people’s lack of knowledge. There was a lot of misinformation. And so some health dramas were trying to really think about this very thoughtfully, and to work with consultants like you know, doctors who are treating HIV and AIDS patients to really understand the real health data and also some of the barriers to why people would or would not get tested.
John Wells’ work has such a strong history. Of working so thoughtfully with health experts that really can make sure that the health behaviors and the health incidents and the kind of the, what we would call the social indicators, who is likely to have the X, Y, Z issue to make sure that is all accurate.
And then most importantly, where it comes to the entertainment, and then to treat the humans in that social world with so much dignity and respect. And I think this connects really directly to the work on The Pitt because you know, John Wells, of course, is one of the most prolific television producers, writers, and showrunners in, you know, contemporary American television. So, you know, I don’t wanna reduce his experience to just health traumas of course, but the currency that he maintains with the shows that are right there on the moment. And I kind of went to the trouble to talk to you about the late nineties and what was going on in ER, because this is now a very different portrait in 2026. But the idea of being very thoughtful about getting the reality as accurate as it can be.
And in the United States, health status, health decisions, health attitudes cannot at all be separated from who we are demographically, who we are socioeconomically, where we live, whether there are environmental pollution issues where we live, and I think the show just masterfully connects real, contemporary health, systemic and individual issues with issues of race, social class, gender, social indicators, and compassion. John Wells just has a particular history in really being attuned to getting that right and to knowing that health does not happen in a social vacuum.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And as John Wells said, these sort of urban medical centers are where people of different backgrounds and communities are smooshed together, confronting the thing that they don’t want to think about. Right? It’s like, it’s almost like that Everybody Poops book. It’s like everybody will end up in the ER, right? No matter who you are. At some point you will probably end up there. So it is in a way, one of the great equalizers of life and it forces all these things into a little microcosm. So it gives us almost a snapshot of who we are.
CATY BORUM: Yes, I agree. And I think, you know, maybe a summative point here that I’ve always appreciated about John Wells’ work, particularly in the health realm, is the biggest story that I think that you get from watching The Pitt or his older shows, I think the big takeaway is that everyone deserves care. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and you know, a right to decency. Basic compassion is a pretty good value to promote.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Alright, well Caty, thank you so much. I feel like we could have talked about this for hours. Thanks for joining us today.
CATY BORUM: Thanks Gabe. Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thanks again to John Wells and Caty Borum for joining us this episode. I mentioned this in my conversation with Caty, but I really could not stop thinking about this idea that the ER is a place we all hate thinking about, but have to grapple with at some point. Even if your healthcare is stellar and you’ve got a great primary care doctor, at some point an emergency hits, and you’re in a bed next to whoever else needs help. But despite that proximity, or maybe because of it, emergency rooms amplify the inequities that exist in and beyond our healthcare system.To paraphrase John Wells, the ER is where we have to confront the societal problems we prefer to ignore. But just like that nagging toothache or the pain that won’t go away, you cannot ignore it forever.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m your host, Gabe González. Thanks again for joining us today, and before I let you go, we’ve got one more thing to take care of our shows final segment because the Peabody are decided unanimously, every episode will bring you the quote that we chose unanimously as our most disruptive moment.
JOHN WELLS: Just as a society, who do we want to be?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Next time on, We Disrupt this Broadcast if you want to know the riveting story behind some of America’s most iconic soul music, you really can’t miss our next episode. We are talking to Jamila Wignot, director of the documentary series, Stax: Soulsville USA.
JAMILLA WIGNOT: Essentially, like, run the company and have this grand vision, which for Al was so much bigger than making great music. He believed that Memphis could be an economic foundation for the black community. That if you found a way to really succeed in this part of the American business apparatus, you could build something for a people.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. Managing producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González.
Consulting producers Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Bethany Hall. Researcher, Riley McLaughlin. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Drayer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.