Michael Marquardt on Breakthroughs in Early Cancer Detection EP 497

25:43And it's tough. I mean, it breaks my heart when I see people suffering alone because I definitely can speak for myself that having support from others to help you through a battle like that and the aftermath of a battle like that makes all the difference. We'll talk about my sister later, but having just gone through four years of her battling pancreatic cancer, I can't imagine if she'd had to do that alone. In fact, it was all the friends and her community that I think helped keep her going as long as they did. The meals that they brought, the massages, all those things mattered so much to her.

26:19So I can't imagine doing something like that in isolation. That would be almost the worst thing you could do, is have to suffer in silence. But that still happens a lot. And there are people that blame themselves, you know, for getting cancer. What did I do wrong? There's different religions, of course. I mean, there's different viewpoints on this. But, yeah, I can completely, that resonates with me, what you went through with your sister. So a lot of the listeners and viewers may not be familiar with what, I mean, they've heard of the American Cancer Society, but they may not be familiar with what the organization really does behind the scenes.

26:52I was hoping, because you were the most recent chairman, maybe you could talk through what the organization does and why they're so vital. Absolutely. Well, I will say, first of all, that the American Cancer Society, I love talking about this organization. is over 110 years old. As many of my friends on the board and other volunteers and colleagues know, one of my favorite statistics of the American Cancer Society that America has not heard is that we're known for research, we're known for investing money in research, but what most people don't know is that we do a lot of grants to young researchers, young cancer researchers.

27:28And at this point, over the last, I think it's 65 or 70 years, we have funded, given grants to 50 young researchers who've gone on to win the Nobel Prize. 50? 50. That's incredible. And there is nobody else who can say that. And of course, given grants to thousands of researchers. But I often say that's a pretty good batting average. And oftentimes I've met quite a few of those Nobel laureates. They will say, oh, everybody remembers when somebody gave them their first chance. And people often think, oh, these people, they're well-educated. They're obviously brilliant researchers. people must just be giving them grants and money left and right.

28:04That's not the usual experience for most researchers that are coming out of whatever school. They're setting up their lab. They're for the first time trying to... They have a theory. Maybe this is what's causing cancer. Maybe there's a way that we can disrupt this. And then they get turned down, and they get turned down again, and they get turned down again. And so the American Cancer Society, our vision is to end cancer as we know it for everyone. And the for everyone is very important here because one of the causes that really has also resonated with me beyond trying to end cancer through research and so forth is also the fact that where you live should not determine if you live.

28:43And for a lot of people, for millions of Americans and millions of people around the world, it's not having access to the standard of care versus having access to some sort of new Nobel Laureate medical genius, a new drug, a new treatment that just is in clinical trial. It's the fact that somebody lives in a zip code or lives in a part of the country where the actual standard of care that might be available at Bethesda, Maryland, or in New York or in Dallas will not be available in their community. So the American Cancer Society has three pillars, we call them. One is research. One is patient support.

29:20So it's all the things that you go through as a patient. Having somebody to drive you to treatments. Having a free place to stay near a major medical center, like in downtown Manhattan. Try, if you don't live in New York City, try and get in a hotel room. I mean, who will pay for that for six months going through a clinical trial at Sloan Kettering, let's say? And then the third pillar is advocacy, and that is maybe a fancy way of saying appealing and convincing politicians in our state capitals and in Washington to do the right thing when it comes to public policy and health policy, including things like putting labels on cigarettes to say, hey, don't smoke, it'll kill you, and as well as having Medicare, Medicaid pay for colorectal screening and things like that because it just makes good sense.

30:04It makes good public policy sense. I want to explore a couple of those in more depth. The second pillar, I think, is an important one. And there's a friend of mine who lives in St. Pete named Bill Potts who himself has battled cancer six times now. Wow. And he wrote this book basically to give people who are diagnosed with cancer a guidebook to how to navigate life with cancer. But I think his guidebook is really profound regardless of what ailment you might have. because at the center of it is really this approach that you need to be the CEO of your healthcare journey. And one of the most pivotal things that he talks about is you need to treat your cancer journey as if it's a business because it really becomes it.

30:50I mean, you're booking flights. You're having to do all this investigative work. If you need surgery, where do you need to go? Where are the best centers to do it? If you have to go into clinical trials, where are they? How do you find out about them? How do you become qualified for them? Because there are all these processes that people don't understand, and sometimes the timeline that you need, the system doesn't work as quickly as you need it. So how was ACS trying to do more awareness around that topic? You framed it really well because, I mean, most people are not prepared for that cancer journey.

31:30And thank God most people will never need to be prepared. But the way we call that in the American Cancer Society is the concept of navigation, of navigating that cancer journey. And so we have cancer navigators around the country, as well as through our 100 number and of course the website. The cancer.org is the most highly visited website in the health space period around the world because there's independent information that's available. So I was just diagnosed with, let's say, ex-cancer, what's the checklist of the 20 things that I've got to keep in mind, and what are some best practices that I've got to keep in mind?

32:04And so that's something that ACS is fantastic at, because, and nobody needs to worry, is this information coming from a drug company that's really trying to get me into one of their trials, or is this, and not that they're evil, the drug companies, but I mean, people wonder. And I mean, it's the old saying about if you ask a barber if you need a haircut, you know the answer you're going to get. I've talked with my dad often about the fact that you have a cancer diagnosis and you ask a surgeon what should you do. Surgeon's going to say, oh, cut it out. You ask a medical oncologist, oh, no, don't cut it out.

32:32We'll do chemotherapy. You ask a radiation oncologist, oh, no, don't do either one of those two. We'll do radiation on it. And obviously not all can be true, right? And so oftentimes you need independent information. You need somebody that has been through that journey professionally, just like with anything else. I mean, if you're trying to book a complicated trip, you may want to to a country you've never been, might be good to have a travel agent that's done that 20 times over in the last year. And in the same way, I think if you're battling a, especially a, there's very few people that have standard cancer diagnosis.

33:02It's much more common that there's something else. Oh, they're also diabetic. They also have this autoimmune thing that's in their family. They're not sure if that's going to be a factor. It turns out that they're in between jobs. They're worrying what COBRA pays for this and their wife has another insurance, but they also are a veteran. Who do I I need to call. And it's complicated. And so I think that, I mean, we had a former member of the board. He's no longer on the board, but great guy. He's based in Washington. He said, America needs the American Cancer Society. And we have millions of people that we help every year.

33:36We're the largest nonprofit in the space. And so, I mean, it's been one of the honors of my life to be a volunteer, to serve on the board. I've served on the board since 2018 and to be chair of the board. Yeah, so a lot is going on in the cancer space. So on a positive note, some of the largest, most common cancers, the survival rate is going up significantly, especially with breast cancer, which we talked about, and colon cancer. There are other cancers where it's not happening as quickly, and this gets into early detection, which we're going to be talking a lot more about here in a second. The other issue that's going on is more and more people are getting cancer.

34:23And not just the common cancers, but cancers that used to be rarer becoming more common. When you were on the board, did you get access to information on why they think this is happening? Absolutely. I mean, and we actually have done something that this may get a little inside baseball, but we've done several studies for decades that are what are called really epidemiological studies. So we follow hundreds of thousands of healthy people, like people like you and me, and we follow them for decades. And some fill out questionnaires, a lot of this is now based on apps and stuff. But you basically say, okay, how often do you exercise?

34:59What do you eat? What are your other habits? How much do you sleep? All those kinds of things. And then you try and discern patterns to say, wow, and people in this part of the country, maybe is there a radiation source nearby? why they're getting these kinds of cancers. This type of work actually is what led to, in the late 60s and 70s, the American Cancer Society being the first really reputable organization that made the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. There had been no direct link established prior to that, but it was based on these large cohort studies that sort of said, well, we got 200 ,000 people that smoke, and their lung cancer rate is this much higher than this, and you try and figure these things out.

35:35But what's interesting is that I had one of our researchers say to me, gosh this was probably two or three years ago said sitting is the new smoking and how things stick with you so that seems like an outrageous thing to say I mean smoking is obviously bad and here we are sitting and but the point was really that activity or lack thereof is a very major risk factor that has been not properly understood and I think a lot of that has to do with your blood circulating there's a cleansing effect that comes from your blood circulating and if you're just not lazy, but if you're just inactive, that can have as big an impact on your health, negative impact on your health, as smoking cigarettes.

36:14And so I think to your point of like, why are more people getting, it seems like more people are getting cancers and cancers that are more rare. We're still working to figure that out. But the hypotheses that I've heard have been related primarily due to like more Western lifestyles and this is happening around the world. Sometimes I hate to say it, but it breaks my heart when I go to some place halfway around the world and even a developing country and I see a fast food restaurant from totally with a US brand I'm saying God we're exporting the worst things and these people used to eat fresh local foods and now you're you have obesity and other things but the other thing it may be important to say John is that talk about cancer singular C-A-N-C-E-R cancer there are 200 plus diseases that we call cancer and out of those 200 plus you already alluded to this there are dozens that have already moved into the category of essentially being manageable diseases.

37:10You get that diagnosis, and it's not the doctor telling you, okay, call you a state attorney and put your affairs in order. It's more, okay, we caught this at an okay time. There is a treatment for this. You're probably going to be on this treatment perhaps for the rest of your life, but not to downplay it, but it might be not that different from diabetes. Okay, you're going to manage this and you're going to be okay. You're going to be able to travel. You're going to be there for your kids' graduations and weddings and so forth. But there are quite a few of those 200 plus cancers that are not yet in that category.

37:43And you're right. A lot of, for obvious reasons, the researchers and the dollars that are going into cancer research are focused on the ones that have affecting the most people. So the patients and the families that I often feel the worst for are the ones who are getting some rare cancer that doesn't have a lot of effort behind it, so nobody's working on this. And so they're stuck with a treatment protocol that was designed in the 70s, and it doesn't work for everyone. Well, I think what you were saying beforehand, not just the sedentary lifestyle that we have, but you and I both know from traveling in other countries, I remember when I lived in Spain, the thing that struck me right off from the beginning of my time there was the Spaniards didn't shop like we do in the United States.

38:33They didn't go to a supermarket and buy their goods for a week. I mean, they would go there for one meal, maybe two meals. And I have had so many people on this podcast who have been studying ancestral diet compared to the way that we're eating now and all the preservatives and everything else that are in our foods, and I can't help but not think that chemical inflection and not eating things that we're hunter and gathering for is having a profound difference as well. I think there's no question. I'm laughing because this is an ongoing joke in our marriage now because I have a hard time shopping for like a whole week because I didn't grow up that way.

39:16In Germany, you go to the store every afternoon, and my wife thinks that's nuts. You know, just let's go on the weekend and buy stuff for the week. And she's right, I mean, it's much more efficient. But on the other hand, I don't know what I'm gonna want to eat tomorrow evening. Exactly. Well, just for the audience, if you're wanting to get more information on this, I've had Mark Hyman on this podcast twice, Kara Fitzgerald, Morley Robbins, Chris Kenobi, Terry Walls, Michael Greger, so a lot of, Will Cole, lots of episodes that you can go back and learn more about the impact of diet and the way you're living on your chances of not only getting cancer, but autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes, etc.

40:00And maybe let me just cut in for one second. Those are all great individuals. I think what your listeners need to know, in my opinion, is that we're still discovering. And as much as we're all products of how we grew up and everything else, there's science happening every day. And pH in your blood, I know Mark talks about that, and acidic versus basic things. I mean, we're living at a time in history where research is advancing the ball every day. And don't think that nothing's ever going to change. Like, we're learning things. And I encourage everyone to be on the lookout for the latest research that's being discovered and then take note.

40:39Absolutely. A great thought, because it is changing all the time. So I want to go back to my sister here for a second. So Carolyn had pancreatic cancer, which the life expectancy with those having it is going up. I remember a few years ago, it was a five-year survival rate in the single digits. It's now 11 or 12 percent. But in her type of cancer, I hate to say this, but if it is not detected early enough, the most effective way to treat it is to get something called a whipple surgery, which means they take out a portion of your stomach, your liver, your pancreas. But patients who have had that have survived for decades afterwards, some of them.

41:23But if they're not able to perform that, your five-year survival rate goes down to 1%. And even as I talked to PanCan, who's putting tons of resources into advocacy, like you were talking about, the third pillar and everything else, early detection is the hardest thing for pancreatic cancer because it's a hard cancer discover. So this leads me to, you have recently become the CEO of a company called EpiOne, which is really trying to pioneer and revolutionize cancer detection. What sets EpiOne apart? Because this is something that, I mean, is really the holy grail. If you can do early detection, it opens, not just for pancreatic cancer, but for all cancers, so many more modalities to elongate life.

42:21I tell you, John, I mean, what I say over and over again, having been through it myself, you've been through it yourself, as seeing loved ones going through this, the only thing really that you want to hear after you hear either that you yourself have been diagnosed with cancer or that your wife or your mother or good friend has been diagnosed with cancer is that, but we caught it really early. And that's really the next sentence, the very next sentence that you want to hear is, but we caught it early, whenever somebody talks about a cancer diagnosis. And then after that, it's like, well, and it's the good kind of leukemia, or it's the, that's what you're hoping to hear after that, maybe.

42:57And so what's happened is that, first of First of all, back to the research, and I firmly believe we're at an inflection point in terms of the amount of resources that have gone into cancer research over the last sort of hundred years. And when I meet young researchers, old researchers, I can see it in their eyes that they're saying, we're starting to figure this out. So with that backdrop, I'll just say that I was introduced about a year and a half ago to a woman in New York City that had made a discovery that the best way I can explain to your listeners is that there's a section of the DNA molecule, a section of the genome, that has been forgotten by science.

43:36It's a big molecule. You say, yeah, that part we don't really worry about. And she discovered it's an epigenetic section of the DNA molecules, maybe the way to say it, that when cells turn cancerous, at the very beginning when it's really stage zero, when cells turn cancerous, that there is a signal, almost like a... it's not a radio signal, but almost like a signal that starts broadcasting on that part of the DNA molecule that is so strong that if you know what you're looking for, if you don't know what you're looking for, you'll never hear it or you'll never see it, but if you know what you're looking for, you can actually detect it with very standard laboratory equipment.

44:12And so when you first hear this, you're like, wow, there's no way. And frankly, that was my reaction. And we talked about the American Cancer Society. I've been involved in, I mean, not just there, but in other areas with groundbreaking clinical research. Feels like my whole life, but at least for a couple of decades. And I was a doubting Thomas, I would say, as a good Germanist. And this can't be real. And as I looked into it further, I was like, my God, there's something here. And so I decided that, I mean, after long deliberation, about to be 54, and like this might be what I was put on this earth to do is to build this company and nothing has ever resonated with me as strongly as this has and so over the past year I became the CEO of the company we are working out of a lab in Brooklyn there is groundbreaking science happening there every week and we've received our first patent we've been raising money of course we actually I think you one of the themes you've heard me talk about is both of us I think it's early adopters and we always look for what's the newest thing or what's the latest thing and one of the trends that I've seen in venture capital and in sort of funding startups is actually equity crowdfunding so in addition to our traditional source of capital which we've also brought in we've also opened this up to the people so we actually have at this point over 150 shareholders who have invested as little as$500 and as much as$100 ,000 and and that's on we launched a crowdfunding campaign on a LA based engine called start engine I I think this is the future of sort of the way entrepreneurship grows, because it's very democratic.

45:46We're completely transparent. We've put all of our financials on the Internet. Anybody can look at it. This is the kind of thing that typically, it's almost like a mini IPO. But I tell you, John, I've been energized to just see what can be done in this area. At this point, we have a patent on prostate cancer. We've done clinical validation work for six other cancers, including pancreatic cancer. We already have detected pancreatic cancer at stage one, not in like thousands of samples, but in enough to make us confident that we feel like we can do this. And so we're throwing everything into this.

46:16I'm rapidly going to essentially from purely having been involved in cancer as a volunteer for the American Cancer Society to also pouring all of my professional energy and experience and my biochemistry background into making this company a big success and changing the way that cancer is diagnosed around the world. Well, the dream is if this could do what you're hoping it could do, it could radically simplify cancer detection for millions of people. Because let's just even take pancreatic cancer. I had Maria Menounos on the show, and she was able to detect her pancreatic cancer, but it was only because she was given the chance to do a whole body scan, which most people don't have full access to.

47:01I remember when I was an executive at Lowe's, if you were a VP or above, every year you had this opportunity to go get these body scans, and it would catch potential cardiac events. I remember they wheeled an ambulance right up to the facility one day because one of the other executives was about ready to have a heart attack, but it caught cancer, it caught other diseases, but the insurance companies aren't paying for it, and it's unaffordable for 95 % of them. That's one of the key things. I mean, I'll come back for one second to the American Cancer Society. I talked about ending cancer as we know it, meaning it's not the scare that it used to be, but for everyone.

47:40Sadly, and we're not just talking in the United States, but around the world, let's keep in mind there are 8 billion people living on this planet, only 320 or 330 million living in this country. The whole rest of the world is out there. There are countries with more than a billion people that don't have CAT scans and MRIs and so forth available, I mean, even for people that are relatively well-to-do. And so one of the things that attracted me to epi-1 as well is that it is not just potentially a completely new way of detecting cancer accurately and early, but also to do it affordably. Our technology is so elegant and actually so simple that it can be accessible to everyone.

48:26And we plan to actually, we're not ready to announce this yet, but we're actually planning partnerships around the world in a way that most sort of American little startups wouldn't be, but that's because of my background and the relationships that I have, but our goal is very much not to just have this be something that is available to the rich and famous. They can do a whole body MRI or CAT scan any chance they have, but make it available to people that can't even, frankly, afford regular screenings of what is currently available. And just so the audience has a little bit more technical basis for this, how do your tests work, and what makes them more accurate than what's currently available?

49:05So, first of all, they work based on blood or other bodily fluids or tissue. So it's very much like a blood test or a tissue test. We're actually working on urine tests, urine-based tests as well as the bodily fluid. And essentially what happens is that signal that I talked about that is on the genome, I mean, that is in DNA, it's circulating in your blood and tissue, that signal is so strong that we can actually detect it using PCR, polymerase chain reaction. We all remember from COVID, you know, you get a PCR test. Everybody got educated on PCR. It's something that you learn in high school biology class.

49:36How do you get those gels and you see how it travels? That's what some people are familiar with. It's a very inexpensive technology. And so really what it comes down to is that there are what are called cancer biomarkers that are present in your blood. There are companies that are out there that are leveraging this, great companies, that are leveraging this based on genomic sequencing. We are actually not doing it based on genomic sequencing because we found a signal that's so strong that we don't need to. Genomic sequencing, that's how we can keep the cost down very low but it's basically if you think about it the way I explained it to some of my friends that are not scientists or geeks is that when cancer is present and before a lot of people are very in tune with their bodies and they feel like something's wrong but I don't know what it is but at that stage like zero to 0.5 if you will before it's a stage one cancer or something like that at the cellular level cancer leaves behind fingerprints in the blood if you will That's one way to put it.

50:33And, of course, if you don't know what to look for, you're never going to find those fingerprints. But if you know what to look for, they're there. And so I know it sounds too good to be true, but it's really that simple. We're using very standard laboratory. There's no black box medical device or something. I mean, we're using, people can watch us in the lab. We're being very secretive about exactly how we're doing, what is in each of the reagents, how are we doing it. But we're using standard lab equipment to do it. But it's really, it all comes back to cancer biomarkers that are present in all of our bodily fluids.

51:04Well, that's amazing, and I guess if you even found an early determinant, it could lead to more extensive biomarking testing if someone wanted to go down that path. Absolutely, and also, I mean, it comes down to other things, and I remember this very much when my first wife was battling cancer. I remember the physicians say, well, we're going to try this drug. I'm like, okay, tell me about this drug. They're like, well, it works in 39 % of the patients. And I'm like, which 39 %? And they'd be like, we don't really know. I'm like, well, is it northern European ancestry? People are starting to talk about genetic basics of disease.

51:39And we're like, no, we don't really know. The trials don't work that way. The trials are just like, it's based on people with 50 kilograms of body weight. I'm like, well, there's a lot more to my wife than that. But the thing is that now with biomarkers, we actually can predict drug response. So imagine if based on biomarkers we could say that well your sister has a 99 % chance of responding to this drug And a 0 % chance of responding to that drug Well, that's a lot better than experimenting on her, right? And oh my god, she feels horrible, we're going to stop And so I guess a message, I would want listeners to hear a message of hope That there's so much that we're flooded with in the media with Oh, so-and-so found a cure for this or that And I think people just tune it out there are good people that are doing research every day.

52:27And if you could see into the laboratories around the world of young researchers that are bright, that have studied their butts off, and that are smiling and saying, I just discovered something. And it no longer is something that takes 20 years to get into the world, because we're living in a much smaller sort of scientific community than many people realize. It should be very exciting to everyone. No, I mean, you're right, because with the pace of change, one thing that all that technology and all this research that you've been talking about, it is making these things come to market much quicker.

53:00And I'm sure if something like what you're proposing could be done and they find that it's working on scale, it's gonna save so many millions of people that there's a huge need to bring it to the market quicker. Yep. So I'm gonna switch gears on you again. And there's another cancer connection here. So you have known President Joe Biden for over two decades, if I understand it correctly. And as we see President Biden today, a lot of us don't see the backstory he has had in his own family with people who've had cancer, the most recent one being his son, Beau, who died most likely due to implications from his time in service that drove him to have brain cancer.

53:49the president view the research and what's happening on cancer, because I know it's deeply personal for him. It is deeply personal for him. And I would say that, yeah, Bo, while he was serving in Iraq, and he served also in the Balkans, he spent a lot of time near burn pits. And I think you know what those can be like. Yeah, I've been around them myself. Yeah, and it's toxic smokes and fumes. And there's no way to prove it. Is that why he got glioblastoma, which is a vicious brain cancer? but certainly that's reasonable to assume or at least to hypothesize that's the case. The thing that I probably go to first, John, is that Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.

54:27I mean, you're the second most powerful person, let's say, in the American government. His son has this diagnosis. They obviously said, okay, where do we go? You try and find the best hospital. And they were talking to everybody from the folks in DC and Philadelphia. And what rings in my ears a lot is hearing at the time how difficult it was, here you're talking about the son of the Vice President of the United States, how difficult it was to have his electronic medical records be looked at by physicians around from different hospitals. And they were literally like saying, well, can you fax this record from, oh, well, we have a different electronic medical record system, so can you, like, I mean, they were taking screenshots with their iPad and texting them down to DC and stuff like that.

55:11And that, I would say, I don't want to put words in now President Biden's mouth, but that drove him nuts, drove him up the wall, that we are in the most advanced country in the world and our medical system is so compartmentalized that it made it very difficult to even just share records to get opinions from different doctors. And it goes further. One of the things that the president's talked about a lot in this regard, and really it's from personal experience, is that there's a lot of funding, federal funding, funding from the American Cancer Society and others, many other wonderful charities and foundations that fund this type of work, that goes to researchers that then their main goal is to do their work and then to get it published.

55:51There's a saying we all know from academia, it's publish or perish. And the thing is, what happens when you're working on an article? Well, you don't really want to share. You don't want other people to know what's going on. Exactly. And so it's an understandable impulse, but it's one that actually slows down medical research. And so I think the president has been on a tear, to put it this way, for the better part of a decade. Bo passed away at the end of May of 2015. We're now here in 2024. he's been on a tear to try and make cancer care and the whole medical communities more efficient take down barriers take down silos have people collaborate more it's not to say that they shouldn't be incentivized to publish and fulfill their grants and so forth but just really think of it that we're all in this fight together and a lot of people i'm sure many of you listeners have heard about the moonshot the idea really was set a goal and do something that seems outrageous It's not just like go 5 % further than you did last year, but let's really have a feeling of ownership and make this happen because we can.

56:53And I think the president often has talked about that America is, if you had to sum it up in one word, it would be opportunities and possibilities. And again, maybe there I come back to my early experience of being in Berlin and we thought, oh, this wall will always be there. Well, next day it was gone. I mean, sometimes things happen that quickly. And I think if we had all known, if you asked people afterwards, if you had known that was going to happen, would you have behaved differently? Well, maybe so, right? And I think when it comes to medical research now, I think if the American public knew how close we are to curing some of these cancers or finding them so early that they're easily cured, they'd be like, hell, let's double down on this, right?

57:35There would be an outcry. It's like, all they need is another$10 billion on this or another billion. I know that's a lot of money and it has to come from somewhere. But I think that President Biden feels very, like many of us, and he often say this, I mean, there's so many families that go through this. His isn't any different than anyone else. But there is a personal sense of mission that comes from the experience that he's gone through. And it's not just his son, Bo. I mean, there's others that he's been close to that have gone through this. And I mean, it's definitely something that's been very personal to him.

58:04And I mean, when you look at a lot of the job of a president, obviously, is to bring in other people into your administration. He brought in very early, he brought in Dr. Monica Bertagnoli. She was on our board, on the American Cancer Society board, and he made her the director of the National Cancer Institute. And then a year later made her the head of all of NIH, National Institutes of Health, which is the largest funder of all research in the world. And she's an amazing person. And so when you think about, and you think about this in the military context, in the scientific context, in other contexts, I think being a leader in government or in business is all about selecting people, right?

58:40You can't do it all yourself. And as you all know, President Biden is now 81 years old. He has selected some incredible people throughout his administration that have made a difference every day. And on cancer in particular, I wish more of us actually could see and appreciate all the work that's going on around the country that is coming. and rightly, in my opinion, I'm biased, but rightly, in my opinion, funded by America's resources and America's taxpayers. Well, thank you for sharing that. And, Michael, as we come to a close, where is the best place for people to learn more about you and what EPI-1 is doing?

59:19Sure. Thank you, John. So EPI-1, we're on the Internet, epi1.com with a hyphen in the middle, so epi-1.com. dot com. And I have a website for myself as well. That's just marquardglobal.com. You can feel free to connect with me online. I love connecting people and I love being connected. So your last name, global.com. Yes. And are you on the social platforms as well? I'm on all the social platforms. Same at marquardglobal is, and then epi1's on all the social platforms as well. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. It was such an honor to have you on PassionStruck. Thank you. What an incredible honor that was to interview my friend, Michael McCourt.

59:55And I wanted to thank Thank Michael and EpiOne for the privilege and honor of having him appear on today's show. Links to all things Michael will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we featured or on the show. Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our Clips channel at PassionStruck Clips. Please go, subscribe, and join over a quarter million other subscribers who tune in weekly to watch these videos. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.

1:00:22Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you're looking for daily doses of inspiration and how to live intentionally, then follow me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles. If you're looking to express your courage muscles in a more profound way, then sign up for our weekly newsletter titled Live Intentionally, where each week we post courage challenge that corresponds and takes input from our episodes from the previous week. Are you curious to find out where you stand on the path to becoming passion struck? Then dive into our engaging passion struck quiz. Crafted to reflect the core principles I shared in my latest book, Passion Struck, this quiz offers you a dynamic way to gauge your journey to becoming passion struck.

1:00:59Take the quiz today. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck podcast interview that I did with Dr. David Yeager, a leading psychologist and co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. Renowned for his research with Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth, Dr. Yeager has reshaped our understanding of adolescent behavior. We'll be diving into his new book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People, exploring how we can better connect with and inspire the next generation. Don't miss this deep dive into the science of motivation with one of the most influential psychologists of our time.

1:01:31So the payoff of a college degree is higher now than ever. Now, a lot of people like to bash college these days and say, well, I don't need a college degree to go be an influencer on TikTok or whatever. And we need more welding programs, et cetera. But people have looked at a lot of those data and you can think of higher education as a hedge against the floor and less of a guarantee of a very high position in terms of your earning and your wages and your income. Remember that we rise by lifting others. So share the show with those that you love and care about. And if you found today's episode useful, then definitely share it with somebody who could use the advice that we gave here today.

1:02:08In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion-struck.