1005: David Fajgenbaum | Leveraging AI to Cure Rare Diseases

22:14Like you all go there to communicate. Then you go ahead and you fight things and you go back to your home base. Lymphoma is where you get a cancer within one of those cells in your lymph nodes. So one of your immune cells becomes cancerous and then you get a big lymph node and those cells go and they kill you because they go to other parts of your body. I see. And so I had a bunch of big lymph nodes and I was really sick. So like, okay, well, I think this might be lymphoma. So cancer of one of those immune cells in your lymph node. And so they cut it out. The doctors were really perplexed because they didn't see lymphoma when they looked at it under microscope.

22:43What they saw was this pattern that had been described for the first time back in the 1950s and occurs in like 5 ,000 patients a year in the US called Castleman disease. And I was like, I was a third year med student. I had never heard of Castleman's before. I'm like, Castleman, what? What is this? And so it basically, it behaves like lymphoma where it's this aggressive, like relentless disease that tries to kill you, but it's actually got more similarities to an autoimmune disease than a cancer. So yeah, like the aggressive nature of a lymphoma, but it's actually the underlying problems are much more like an autoimmune disease.

23:17And at the time there were no approved treatments. And so for me, chemotherapy was the only thing I could get. Wow. It's like the doctor from Family Guy or something where it's like, the worst case is it's lymphoma. It's like, congratulations, you don't have lymphoma. You're like, thank God. Actually, there is a thing that's worse that I just never heard of before. It's called Castleman's. And it's like, that's not what? Right. You dragged me in here to say that. Wait, how many people get Castleman's again? About 5 ,000 a year in the U.S. Okay. That's still, that's not nobody. It's not nobody, but it is quite rare when you think about, you know, we've got 300 million Americans and only 5 ,000 of us get diagnosed each year.

23:55And at the time, you'd said something like you had looked it up in a database. The database was ironically named UpToDate and it was completely out of date. That's right. That must have been kind of a bummer to say the least. It was. So UpToDate is like literally the resource the doctors go to for, as you said, UpToDate information. And so I went to it and it said that there were four patients ever with my subtype of Castleman's, which was just wrong. But so I saw that. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm like the fifth patient ever. This is crazy. And then like three weeks later, I learned there was a clinical trial down the street at UNC that was enrolling patients with my subtype of Castleman's.

24:33I'm like to a trial that they're enrolling 79 patients in and they'd already enrolled 30. And I was like, wait, the math's not adding up. So like there's four people ever, but there's like 30 people down the street. Yeah. What's happening here? And that was sort of like my first introduction to this, like, whole realization that for the vast majority of diseases that are rare, no one has a clue what the hell is going on. Like, 95 % of rare diseases have no approved treatments. And for a lot of cases, we don't even know how many people have any of this stuff. You too are going to die when you see the killer deals on the fine products and services that support this show.

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25:36I don't care if you're retired or at the beginning of your career. This course will teach you great systems that are easy to apply, non-cringy, down-to-earth, nothing awkward in just a few minutes a day is all it takes. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, the course is free over at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Dr. David Fagenbaum. It's often seen as a bad idea to create treatments for diseases that only a few people have, right? Because research is really hard to do and there's limited resources.

26:10So if you get something really rare, like that supposedly five people have, or even 5 ,000 for crying out loud. Yeah. Often you're just kind of screwed, right? Because not only is there no profit in finding a cure. So big pharma is like, hey man, 5 ,000 people a year. You're not going to do it. But the resources, even if everybody was like, you know what, let's just do this in an altruistic way. It's like, look, there's 15 ,000 people a year getting this other thing. There's 35 getting this other thing. We can't research this random thing. We got a lot more ducks to, what is it, fish to fry. We got bigger fish to fry.

26:43Ducks to fry, I don't even know. We got bigger problems. So you're just kind of like, if you get a disease, you want something that everybody has had for years and that there's a lot of treatment, of course. but if you get any kind of disease without a treatment, you want something that at least a lot of people have and you had no such luck. That's right and as a result, there was this like one drug that was undergoing clinical trial. Like I said, it was been enrolling people down the street but there was nothing approved for it and I also learned that 95 % of people with rare diseases don't have a single approved therapy and it's like, oh my gosh, like you said.

27:17What? And the other thing too that's crazy is like each rare disease is rare but like when you add them all up, it's like actually there's a lot of people with rare diseases. One in 10 Americans has a rare disease. Just each one is like super rare, right? Oh man, that's disappointing. So we got to figure out how to solve this, right? Yeah, that's actually kind of scary, right? Well, terrifying, I should say, that one in 10 Americans has a rare disease. And you said how many, what percentage of diseases have no treatment? Well, so 95 % of those rare diseases have no treatment. But rare diseases make up a large portion of our population because again, each one's small, but collectively they're huge.

27:50Oh my gosh. I think the perception of medical technology among the public is really skewed. If you'd asked me probably before I read your book and looked at your talks, I would say medicine is so amazing. There's breakthroughs every single day. You can cure almost everything. I still think medicine is amazing. But this is not true. People like me think it's the case because the 100 ,000 things people tried and did that failed, like some clinical trial for a, that doesn't make the news. The only people who find out that didn't work is like some subunit of whatever hospitals run in the trial. Only the breakthroughs make the news.

28:24So we have this crazy cognitive bias that like, oh, that disease you heard of last year, they found something for that by now. No, they haven't even started on that thing by now. And it creates this sort of like mental framework that there must be people out there solving problems. In the book, I call it the Santa Claus Theory of Civilization, which is like, I had this idea that like, there must be this like group of Santa's elves who are working on like every disease, you know, they're collaborating and they're working with all the other elves and they're going to deliver a treatment for your disease.

28:53And I actually really did believe that there were like collaborative teams working on diseases. But then all of a sudden I got into it and I learned like, it is just such like just a shit show, frankly. I mean, there's just people in all over places that aren't working together. And it's just like, it's totally uncoordinated. And as a result, you end up not having treatments for all these diseases. That's really disturbing, especially because as I get older, I'm 44. As I get older, and you hear about something like ALS, for example, right? Yep. You're just like, oh, man, what if that happens to me?

29:23Are they working on something for this? And then it's like, uh, the progress is really limited on this. There's not like a thing you can get now for this that cures it. Really scary. It is. And ALS is an example where a lot of resources have gone into it. And there are two approved drugs, but the two drugs add months of, you know, additional life. And so like there's so much. And ALS doesn't even fit into the 95 % because it's part of the 5 % that has an approved drug. Oh, man. But those drugs only add months. And it's like, there's another 95 % that don't even have a single drug that can help.

29:55Yeah, months is not really what we were looking for here. I was thinking like, again, ideally, if you get diagnosed with something like this, you want the HIV thing, right? Where you're like, oh, you have this and like, you got to do certain things, but basically you're just going to live a normal life as long as you take your pills or whatever it is. That's what people like me think most diseases are like. Look how fast we hit HIV. Everything else is going to be fine. They probably had that forever. No, not at all. Okay, so you're still in, holy crap, there's no treatment for this, and you make a switch.

30:24You go towards the Mecca for Castleman's disease research. Did that trial work out for you? It did not. So I went to the Mecca, which is Little Rock, Arkansas. I started on this treatment, this experimental drug, and it didn't work for me, man. While I was there, I started relapsing, And so we tried the drug. It didn't work. I started getting really sick. And so they gave me seven chemotherapies all at once, like the seven worst chemotherapies out there. And they just completely destroyed my immune system. But I started feeling better with the medicine. And it actually worked. It's like, finally, we were really controlling this thing.

30:59But we hope that maybe even though the drug didn't work when I was sick, we're like, maybe it can prevent it from coming back. So like, maybe I can just like keep taking it every three weeks and see if it comes back. And so I returned to med school. I was a third year med student. And I was like, you know, back to rotations and seeing patients and really just hope that the disease was in my rear view mirror. And then about a year later, the disease came back and like, you know, just exploded. And so I'm like back in the ICU, you know, all my organs shutting down. My doctor tells my family to come in again to say goodbye.

31:27And it's like, I couldn't believe it. And that's when my doctor actually told me, he was like, I said, okay, Dr. Vandri, like, you know, what are we gonna do next? Well, this is it. The only thing that's in development didn't work for you. I was like, well, aren't there like other promising leads? Like, you know, we know this thing can work in this way, but like, is there something else that could work? And he's like, that's it. Like, we've tried everything. There's nothing more that we can do. And I remember hearing that and just being like devastated because, you know, Jordan, so much of this is like hope, right?

31:56Like, you know, thinking about like my sister talking to me when I was sick. I'm thinking about like my ex-girlfriend who actually then became my girlfriend. We started dating again. We got to the hospital. Like those things like give you hope and like you're looking forward to things. But then when your doctor tells you like, there is no hope, this is it. I was heartbroken. And then I really quickly went from like devastated heartbroken to like, you know, there may not be a drug for Castleman's. It's coming down the pipeline, but you just gave me a bunch of chemotherapy and it didn't work for long-term, but it did something.

32:26And that chemotherapy wasn't made for Castleman's. It was made for lymphoma actually, but it worked. So like, what about the other drugs out there? Like, what if there's something else out there? And it's kind of like, you've seen the movie, the Martian, right? So like Matt Damon gets stuck on Mars and he's like, how do I get back? I was like, well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have within reach. I'm like, shit, I've got this horrible disease. And the only way that like I might be able to save myself is if I can find a drug that's already at the CVS. And so my mission then became, could I figure out what the hell is going wrong in my immune system?

32:57So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. You've got an interesting, this is a little sidebar, I suppose, but you've got an interesting perspective that you discuss in the book on the way people treat you when you're sick. And you, you kind of muse like, are people doing things out of sympathy or how would they react? How would they act towards me if I wasn't dying? Tell me about that a little, because I, it was kind of a humorous thing to think about. Like, you're just being nice to me because I'm going to die. It's like, what does it matter, man, at this point?

33:25Why are you worried about that? Totally. I was, I was so worried about it. And it was like, cause well, in particular with Caitlin, I mentioned Caitlin, I started dating again and it's like yeah like does she really want to be with me i mean i think you described me as a gremlin or a goblin i think that's like a good way to describe what i looked like no it's like that's very accurate or like i don't know there's probably other other words to describe fat you know what i looked like and i yeah oh gollum yeah that's actually who i look like that's actually accurate yeah so gollum so i look like gollum but not only that i'm also like literally like packed with this awful disease of like explosives waiting to go off in the future And it's like, if someone could have like, there's no way anyone could have more baggage than I did.

34:05And all of a sudden Caitlin's like, yeah, I want us to start dating again. I'm like, are you sure? Like you want to date Gollum that's like loaded with like a suicide vest of a horrible disease and like all these baggage. But she's like, no, I do. And she was like offended that I like questioned it. And of course, I loved her and I like wanted to date her. But I also was like so worried that she was just wanting to date or sort of acquiescing because she thought that was like the right thing to do. Right, yeah. And that's just sort of how I felt about like so many things at the time. And I just, yeah, I subsequently learned that I think I was wrong.

34:36Yeah. I'd be so worried about it. Maybe. Yeah. But I also understand thinking about that. But I'm also like, man, at that point, just take what you can get, man. Just like take it, right? Give yourself a break. Don't question it. Yeah. Don't question it. Be like, oh, you want to date me? I don't care why. But like. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Like, look, man, the prospects are otherwise, the pickings are quite slim. Otherwise, you know, take it. There's not too many people interested in Gollum. Yeah. Come on, man. What are you on Tinder with that? All right. But another thing I found quite fascinating that you mentioned in one of your talks is you said rare diseases, they're not necessarily more complex than other diseases.

35:09In fact, they're often more simple. They're just less studied, which of course makes sense on its face, right? Who's to say why it's more complicated? It's just that people haven't taken a look at this thing under a microscope or whatever. And the underlying pathology is often simple and it affects just a single gene, for example, in some of these things. Yep. And of course, it's hard to create a targeted treatment if you don't know what needs to be targeted. So did you find that Castleman's was not that complicated? Is that why you mentioned that? Because it seemed a little bit detached from other things, or maybe I just didn't put it together.

35:40But that's a kind of a relief, right? Not all this stuff is curing a massive, complex disease. It's just that nobody has bothered to try. Yeah, I think I mentioned it at that point in the book, because for me, that was like partly what was giving me hope, is that the more I understood rare diseases, the more I realized, like you said, it wasn't that they were like particularly complicated, just like no one was putting any effort into figuring them out. I was like, wait a minute. So we just like use the same technologies that we're using on Alzheimer's or cancer, but we apply it to this thing that no one's ever even scratched the surface.

36:14Like maybe we can blow this whole thing up. Right. And so for me, that gave me a lot of optimism and hope, even though I didn't really know, like maybe Castleman's wasn't going to try to be really complicated, but I ended up figuring out that it actually, it is more simple, less complicated than we thought initially. And that, you know, I'm sure we'll get to this, but we were able to discover a drug that was able to save my life. And actually additional drugs that have been able to save many other patients' lives because the work just hadn't been done yet. We're getting there, man, slowly but surely.

36:42So how did you start to take the bull by the horns? I know you read something like 2 ,000 papers on Castleman's. I guess at that point you're just devouring anything you can get your hands on. Yeah. So I had this like very clear mission in front of me and it was okay you're dying from this horrible disease chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window but it's probably going to come back so you know what's your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you and so I sort of thought about it in a couple ways one is that I wanted to get together all of the physicians researchers and patients from around the world to start working together for Castleman's you know coming up with a with what we call our international research agenda like what do we need to do to figure this thing out.

37:18So that was one thing I was organizing this community. And then at the same time, my very clear task was figure out what's happening in my body and then figure out, is there an already FDA approved drug that can reverse that thing? So like if we figure out there's too much of something called IL-6, is there a drug that inhibits IL-6? It was sort of that simple, but in order to figure out, you know, what was going on, I needed to understand, like you said, the 2000 papers that had ever been written about calcium disease. So I had to read all of those. I had to connect with all the experts. And then I had to start performing experiments on my own blood samples and my own lymph node tissue.

37:55And so I started storing my blood samples every couple of weeks because I thought I was going to relapse at some point. And the only way to really figure out a disease is to actually get samples when it's active. And so I needed to store it for like when I was going to relapse. And sure enough, I did relapse. I got a bunch of chemo and it saved my life now for the fifth time. But when I got out of the hospital, I kept relapsing. Each time you relapse, it's basically your likelihood of surviving is very low. And now I've basically survived five times. It's like, you know, you're going to run out of luck at some point.

38:27And so it was like, oh my gosh, I got to find something to keep this thing in remission. When I got out, I did a bunch of experiments on my own blood and my lymph node. And I figured out that this one part of the immune system, it's basically like a communication line your immune cells use to communicate. I mentioned the lymph nodes where they go to talk to one another. And this one part of it, one way they communicate was turned into overdrive. Like it got this really strong signal. Like think about it almost as like the fire alarm or like the alarm system is just into like, yeah, it's turned on to say like something's going on here.

38:59So all the immune cells are just going crazy. Like the alarms on, we don't know why it's on, but the idea was like, well, maybe we could just turn the alarm off because there's a drug that inhibits that thing. It's called an mTOR inhibitor called serolimus. And it had been around for decades, Jordan. It was approved first for organ transplant rejection and had been used for a rare lung disease. It had never even been considered for my disease. I was like, wait a minute, if I've got too much mTOR turned on and this thing turns mTOR off, like I don't care if it was made for calcums, maybe it's going to work.

39:29And so I started testing it on myself. And this past January marked 10 years that I've been in remission, no relapses. I mean, three and a half years of like nearly dying five times. And now it's 10 years of nothing. I'm going to knock on some wood and I hope you're not going to get some wood within reach for me. Right here. We're good on that. It's crazy, right? That is crazy. And I can imagine the motivation, if you can even call it that. It seems like an understatement at that point, because your goal is not like, oh, I'm going to get a prize or I'm going to get a fellowship or a tenure for this.

39:59It's like, I might not die right now. Yes. Or in the next year, if this works. It's like, and you're dating Caitlin. It's like, I'm probably not going to make it to my own wedding if I don't figure this out. Like that's next level motivation, I suppose. Totally. And yeah, we had a wedding day. It was May 24, 2014. And in January of 2014 is when I'm experimenting and running these tests on my blood. And I started taking the drug around then. And it was like, I'm not going to make it to May 24, 2014 unless I find something. And so I tested it. I started taking it myself. And then like I made it to May 24th.

40:33And we had like the most amazing wedding day. And it was so special. And then like May 25th, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm still here. Yeah. And like, I'm not exaggerating, but like every day I wake up and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And then like, you know, you measure it like one day at a time. Then you start measuring it like one week at a time, one month at a time. So like I was measuring my remission every month until like around like month 34. And then by the time I got to like month 34, I was like, I start measuring it in years. And then, and now I was on a podcast recently and someone was like, you can measure it in decades now.

41:03Like those are the first times I've said that. It's like decades, like, whoa, this is crazy. You're coming up on that. I mean, that's It's like, yeah, your wedding, well, first of all, don't forget the wedding anniversary. I know. I was just thinking about that. Thank you. I'm glad. May 24th. I got to see the plan the next few weeks. You forgetting your remission date, forgivable. You forgetting that wedding anniversary. She's going to be like, I dated a goblin and you forgot her anniversary. Married a goblin. So, man, having this sense of urgency must have helped you break the mold a little bit, right?

41:31Both in terms of research and I don't know what you would call it in medicine, almost like the chain of command, right? I would imagine. Yes. you were less afraid to approach people or try new things because your clock is running out, right? You're not going to get like a letter of reprimand for going around somebody at some medical department. It's like, I'm either going to die or not. This is a binary issue. Exactly. I mean, it created this incredible sense of urgency. And the analogy I like to use is overtime. And of course, thinking about overtime in sports, right? It's time you didn't think that you'd have.

42:02But in overtime, there's this incredible sense of urgency, right? It's like, if something goes wrong, like the clock is ticking down, you got to make sure everything goes right. But it actually creates this real clear sense of just clarity. Like, what do I need to do? Because like the clock's ticking. And so that sense of overtime is something that I've really like taken with me. And it's like, what I've also learned is actually we're all in overtime. I mean, I think like I can feel the clock more than anyone else, but we actually are all in overtime. But the fact that I got into overtime when I was 25 years old and I'm in my fifth over time now has just made it so real for me that it's given me like such a sense of urgency for everything I do.

42:38And it's given me such a clarity of purpose for what I want to do. I definitely want to talk more about that in a bit. I'm just thinking the level of stress you must have been under during the time where you were experimenting, that must have been absolutely ridiculous. I mean, there's an anecdote in the book where you say you thought you had like a fatal brain bleed. Yeah. And it just turned out you had like a stuffy nose, basically. And it's like, I just can't imagine thinking that every time I got a headache, that's just like, oh, I probably have a brain bleed. I'm going to die now. That's just.

43:07Yes, it was so, so difficult. And I'm laughing about this because that was during my fifth relapse. But during my very first presentation, one of my closest friends came in to say goodbye to me and I had like no platelets. So your platelets are really important so that you don't have a brain bleed and like bleed out. you need platelets. And I had like no platelets. Everyone's like, be careful. Like David can't really sit up in bed. He can't really move. Cause like, he might just have a spontaneous bleed and like, this is it. And so my, my friend Francisco comes in to hug me and like gives me a hug.

43:36And right as he leans in to hug me, his stethoscope that's around his neck, like hits me like right in the forehead or like right between the eyes. And there's like this moment where we're like looking at one another and I'm like, Oh my gosh, did you just like poke me to death? Like Francisco, like what the heck? And so we're just like, sort of like, I'm like stuck and like frozen. I'm like, Francisco, what did you do? And then like, everything's okay. And we're like, Oh, I guess it's okay. But like, I think that the reason I want to bring that up is that like, there's also this like, incredible, at least for me and my family, my friends, like need for like humor in the midst of these horrible times.

44:07Like when you think you just got like poked to death by your friend, you like have to laugh about that. Because if not, you're just going to be like crying all the time. Of course. Yeah. Your friend comes to say goodbye, a doctor, and he gives you a heartfelt hug to see you for the last time and his stethoscope is what does you in. It's like, okay, that was kind of funny. I know. Yeah. I know, right? You have to laugh about that stuff or else you're just like going to cry all the time. So you find this drug, and by the way, there's all these, some of your asides in the book are so funny. There's these disease codes that are totally random, like burning while water skiing on fire or whatever.

44:40I mean, tell me about this. First of all, why does that even exist? It doesn't make sense to me. I don't think I'll ever be able to tell you why, but I can tell you a couple of these codes that just blew my mind. So one code, and these codes are the codes that basically, if you go to see your doctor and they diagnose you with something, they have to put a code next to your name. And that helps them to bill to like basically get paid more or less, depending on like how complicated your disease is. So everyone gets these codes. The couple that blew my mind, one is the water, it was the one you mentioned was like struck by lightning while water skiing, repeat event.

45:13And I'm like, wait, repeat event? Like Like what? But then even more crazy is going through a engine of airplane repeat event. And so it's like, it's like, wait, first off, you like can't really make it through an engine, like, you know, an airplane the first time. And it happened twice. Like you went through an engine like for a second time. So yes, there's like all these kind of like crazy codes. And the reason I brought up in the book is that there wasn't a code for Castleman's. It was like, right. I was at a repeat event for an engine and there's like 5 ,000 of us diagnosed every year. We don't have our own code.

45:47And so that was just like, it just like, I couldn't believe that sort of stuff. I'm like, this system is just so fragmented and there's like so many holes in it. And I happened to be a third, this stage, I guess I was a doctor cause I'd finished medical school and like, I was able to navigate some of this stuff, but had I not been where I was in my training, I'm just like stuck with, okay, well, I guess since I don't have a code, maybe you should put me as like, you know, struck by lightning and on fire while water skiing. Jeez. You know what's better than a terminal incurable disease? The great deals on the fine products and services that support this show.

46:17We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals and discount codes and ways to support this show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, feel free to email me anytime, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Thank you for listening. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr.

46:46David Fagenbaum. I think I copied it from your book. It says being sucked into a jet engine second time. That's what it was. So like you got sucked in once and then it's like, you know, I crawled out of there, but then I got sucked in again and here I am in the hospital. You know, it's tough. Can't tell if you're the luckiest guy around or the unluckiest guy around at that point. you mentioned before that you had to find an FDA approved drug. And I want to clarify why that is because you can't just, well, making a new drug is really hard, but you had to find something that you could get that was already available.

47:19Can you explain that? Cause it kind of gets into off-label use and what that means. Sure. So what's really incredible is once the FDA approves a drug for one thing and it's like on the market, any doctor can prescribe it for any reason they want. So like an example would be you develop a drug for toenail fungus as a toenail fungus treatment. And then your doctor decides I'm going to use it to treat your hearing loss. And like they don't have to justify it. They don't have to like apply for anything. Like you just doctors can drive anything they want for anything they want. The only question is whether the insurance company is going to pay for it.

47:56I see. And so what this means is in our country, between 20 and 30 % of all prescriptions the doctors write are for things that are off-label. So doctors are constantly prescribing steroids for a cold, even though no drug company ever did a trial to prove that steroids are helpful for colds, for example. And so what it did for me is it, like, opened my mind up to this idea of, like, if I can figure out an FDA-approved drug that could work, my doctor can just write the prescription. and yes, we have to figure out how to get it paid for, but if there's a strong rationale and if it's an inexpensive drug, then I bet we can persuade the insurance company to pay for it.

48:33Right, so especially if there's like a generic version of the drug, right? It's been out for 20 years, like you said. Yep. It's like, oh, this is 30 bucks a month for this whatever drug from brand X. Yep. I can take this and it puts my entire, it saves my life or whatever. So this, of course, leads to what your new company is doing. Tell us what your new organization is doing. Tell us about what you're doing, because of course it's amazing, and it gives a lot of hope to a lot of people who both have rare diseases or are just convinced that they're going to end up with one. No names mentioned. Instead of calling it medical student syndrome, it's podcaster syndrome.

49:08Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not referring to myself. Yeah, it's podcaster syndrome. You read enough books, you're like, this could happen to me. No, Jordan, it really can't. No, no, no. It can. Oh, it can. So yeah, this new organization, Every Cure, I mean, I started it 100 % because I'm not supposed to be here. Like my drug wasn't made for me. It saved my life. It was always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CBS, your nearby Walgreens that could help more diseases and more people, but the incentives aren't aligned for us to do that.

49:46And that like our system isn't looking for these more new uses. I mean, you mentioned generic drugs earlier. 80 % of all FDA approved drugs are generic. When a drug becomes generic, that means it's no longer profitable because many companies can make that same drug. So that means that 80 % of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow, no one's doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them. To me, that's like the craziest thing ever because these are like the oldest, in some cases the safest, certainly the most well understood. and by far the least expensive drug. So the drugs that could help people like all over the world are the ones that no one is doing any research into.

50:22So we created Every Cure a couple of years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease it possibly can, regardless of whether it's profitable or not. So we're a nonprofit organization. We also started a couple of years ago. We've been thinking about this for about 10 years, but really the catalyst for it was that the incredible advances with artificial intelligence allow us to do what I've done. And I didn't mention this. I joined the faculty at Penn and my center has now done this a total of 17 times where we've taken a drug and found a new use for it. Many of those in Castleman's, but also in other diseases like angiosarcoma and a rare disease called data too, poem syndrome.

51:00And so we've been doing it, but we've been doing it one disease at a time, Jordan. And so like what artificial intelligence allows us to do and started becoming clear in the last few years is that we can actually repeat the exact process that me and my lab have been doing one disease at a time, but we can do it across all drugs and all diseases simultaneously. Wow. So we can actually have AI predict there's 3 ,000 approved drugs and there's 22 ,000 diseases. So if you tried every drug for every disease, you do it 66 million times. Oh my gosh. We have a handful of algorithms that can come up with a score from zero to one for how likely each one of those 66 million attempts are.

51:37And then we can say, okay, among all the possibilities, what are the most promising? And then we can focus in on them. So one part is the technology was really advancing. And the other part was I got this crazy phone call three years ago. Jordan, you'll like this. So it's March 31st of 2021, so the day before April Fool's Day. And I get this phone call from an unknown number. And the person on the other end says, hi, this is David Fagenbaum. I have a former president in the line. He wants to talk to you. And I'm like, is this like the president of like the middle school association? Or like what sort of president?

52:09Yeah, president of Penn. and I'm sort of like confused. And I'm like, well, maybe it's the president of the United States, but it's like, you know, probably not. And anyway, so on the other end, I hear, David, it's Bill Clinton. And I'm like, oh my gosh. So it is a president. It's not the president of the middle school association. He had read my book. He had read Chasing My Cure. We connected on a bunch of levels. We both went to Georgetown and we went to Oxford and we love Little Rock, Arkansas because, you know, that's where my life was saved five times. But the reason he reached out is he was like, David, I'm blown away that all these drugs have been developed and approved and that no one's figuring out more uses for them.

52:46I'm blown away that even as medical technology advances, no one is looking back at the drugs that were made 50 years ago or 100 years ago to say, are there other things they can be useful for? He said, what's your plan here? And I said, well, for the last seven years at that stage, I've been wanting to start a nonprofit focused on this to try to match drugs and diseases, but the technology just really hasn't been there. It's starting to come online. And I think I want to start this with my, actually my medical school roommate, Grant Mitchell. And President Clinton was, you know, really encouraged me to do it.

53:14He said, well, I think you need to do it. And if you do it, you'll have my support. And so that call was a bit of a catalyst. Grant and I had been talking about, we wanted to do it. And then President Clinton kept calling every month or so and, you know, kept being like this unknown number and, you know, connect you in. Wow. But we ended up deciding to do it. And I'm just so happy we did. it. It's really incredible, especially using AI to unlock new uses for existing drugs. Can you kind of explain like I'm five, you did explain it a little bit, but it's sure. I think some people are like, I don't get how, what is the AI actually doing?

53:47I think maybe I'll start with an artificial intelligence algorithm that everyone listening to this uses. And that's if you've ever gone on Netflix and you see where it says like, these are shows, Jordan, that you'll like. Yeah. Netflix uses something called a random forest model, where basically Netflix comes up with a profile for who you are, Jordan, and then comes up with a profile for all of the shows you've watched all the way to the end, all the shows that you watch for like one minute and switched off. Those are the not good shows. The ones you watch at the end are the ones that are good.

54:15And then it asks how similar are the ones that you've watched all the way to the end to these other ones you've never watched before. And then it gives a prediction saying like, you're probably going to like this. And it's in order from like the highest to the lowest. So we do something very, very similar with at least one of our five algorithms. It's my favorite algorithm. And basically we map out every drug against every disease. So all 66 million possibilities, every gene, every protein, imagine a two-dimensional graph of everything the human biology is known. And we train the algorithm. We say this drug, insulin, is a really good treatment for diabetes.

54:49This drug, siltuximab, is a great treatment for calcium. We do that for 9 ,000 that we know work, which is basically the shows you watch all the way to the end. And then we also say these drugs definitely don't work for these diseases because we know that trials have been done and they don't work. Those are the shows you watch for one minute. And then we say, okay, algorithm, now look across every other drug and every other disease and give me a score from zero, which means that there's no connection, to one, which means that, wow, I bet this drug is going to work for this disease or for Netflix.

55:15I bet you're going to like this show. And give me that score from zero to one. So now you get a rank order list of every drug against every disease based on the fundamental mechanisms that connect drugs and diseases. And then I assume you do some kind, and these are FDA approved drugs, they already have trials completed, and then you have to do additional trials, obviously, to make sure that the algorithm was correct and that it does work on some element of the disease. That's exactly right. So after we get these scores, then what I consider the next most important part is just getting humans to go through those scores and saying like, maybe number one is the greatest idea ever, but maybe it's number 18 or maybe it's number 150.

55:51We start at the top, obviously, because the algorithm's telling us things at the top are good. But we're not just going to go to a clinical trial of like the first 10 scores. We have humans that go through and say like, this looks really good. This is important for this reason. And we have three criteria. So the first is, does it look like it really is going to work? Like, you know, for example, and I'll use insulin. So insulin obviously is a treatment for diabetes. But there are other conditions where hypoinsulinemia, where you have too little insulin. And so like this knowledge graph could be like, wow, insulin, you give it, it increases insulin.

56:20This disease has too low of insulin. Let's try insulin for this disease. And so one, you just want to check that the mechanism makes sense. Like the thing that it does like makes sense. So that's one. Two, you have to say, if it works, what's the impact here? Like, is this a disease that is deadly and there are no other treatments? Or is this a condition that maybe, and I don't mean to minimize conditions, but there are some conditions that are just not as bad as other conditions. Like eczema or something like that. Yeah. Yes, exactly. You know, you want, like, we want to treat everyone. And I don't mean to minimize things, but we really want to go after the bad ones.

56:53The things that are killing people, that's where we want to go. So that's impact. And the third one is feasibility. We want to make sure that we can actually study that drug and that disease in a feasible way. So if it's an IV infusion and it's a really expensive drug or it's a disease that would require a 50-year clinical trial, we don't want to do those. We want to do things we can do, quick clinical trials with inexpensive drugs that are ideally pills so that way we can move quickly. And so humans assess those three things, you know, biology, impact, feasibility, and then you're exactly right.

57:23Then we say, okay, these are the five things we're going to do clinical trials of, and we're just going to prove that they work and then move them forward to patients. You said fast clinical trials. I know that clinical trials for a new, brand new drug, that takes years. But since this is already like, this won't kill you because it's already been approved for this other thing, how much time does that shave off here? So much time. I mean, if you start with a new drug from scratch, it's going to take at least 10 years of studies before you can get your first approval. That's the minimum. That's like rapid.

57:51Wow. But once that drug is approved for one thing, to prove that it works in another thing and to get patients on that drug, we can do that in months. Wow. So we actually have done that in months. There's a horrible cancer called angiosarcoma that has historically been uniformly fatal. And in 2016, we had a patient come to our center here at Penn. And we found that a study was published three years earlier that in that study, it suggested that a drug could be used for angiosarcoma. But this paper sort of is one of billions of papers that get published. So no one did anything with it. And based on the paper, we're like, let's treat this patient with this drug because, you know, there's a reason to believe it might work.

58:28And it saved his life. It saved Michael's life. And what was so important about this is that this is a uniformly fatal cancer. And this April, so last month marked eight years that Michael's been in remission. What's important about it is that because this is such a horrible, everyone dies within a year of metastatic angiosarcoma. Michael's doctor was so impressed and couldn't believe it. He started treating all of his angiosarcoma patients with it. Sure. And one-third of them had this incredible response. Two-thirds did not respond at all. But one-third have like years and years of remission.

58:58And so you can imagine he started telling all of his friends. Sure. He started treating all of their patients. And now here we are, eight years later, Michael's doing great. and maybe even more importantly, or just as importantly, pembrolizumab, this treatment, is recommended for angiosarcoma without ever doing a clinical trial. Just because it's so clear that it was killing everyone before, and now when you treat it, people survive, that you didn't even have to do a clinical trial, and it's still the recommended treatment for it. Right, and we know that, again, we know that it's not going to just randomly cause brain cancer or whatever because it's already been FDA approved.

59:29It was already approved. Wow. This is wild, what you're doing. It's like one big game of drug-related Where's Waldo, basically. It's like the cures are hiding in plain sight, but you've got to find the Waldo that doesn't have a hat on or whatever. You're finding a needle in a needle stack, which is the biggest problem here. No wonder AI is helping. I can't even imagine doing this manually. You couldn't. The labor involved in ruling things out would take years. That's just nuts. So, okay, it's essentially off-label use of one drug to treat something else, like how we use Ozempic to treat obesity, even though it's a diabetes drug.

1:00:05Or I think Viagra was like a blood pressure medication. And they were like, ah, I keep getting boners. Well, wait a minute, maybe we can monetize this. Right. That is amazing. So you got a bunch of federal funding, which I think is great. Is that kind of all the money? I think it was 50 million last I checked or 48.5, but who's counting? Well, besides you. 48.3. Yes. 48.3. Yeah. You better know. So is that all the money that you're going to need for this? Or is it like, hey, man, we need 100 more. How's it looking? So this is all the money we need to build out the best AI platform that humankind has ever used for this purpose.

1:00:40This is literally the federal government is supercharging our efforts so that we can make a better algorithm than Netflix has. Don't you think we should use AI to match drugs to cure people better than we might need to match shows to people? I don't know. It's a toss-off. I can pick based on the little art thing and then that stupid trailer that plays even though you don't want it to. I just – and then I turn it off after a minute even if I like it because I got two little kids. I don't have time to watch anything. Yes, I think the drug matching might be slightly more important given your track record of success.

1:01:12Yes. And so, yeah, this funding from the federal government basically allows us to make a better algorithm than even Netflix for this sort of stuff. So that's what this funding does. what we still are raising funding for and what we still are very aware of is that, to your point, you've still got to do clinical trials to prove these things work. And you still have to, in the angiosarcoma example I shared earlier, we didn't have to do a clinical trial. So there will be some where we won't have to do a full-blown trial. But for the vast majority, we will need to do a full-blown clinical trial, which would cost anywhere from$1 to$10 million per disease.

1:01:43And there are literally hundreds of opportunities out there. So it's a very scalable fundraising process where it's like, hey, you know, we can do this for five diseases or we can do it for 500 diseases. And we're just going to do as many as we can with the resources we can get our hands on to help as many people as possible. How many drugs? You need to index all drugs, right? Pretty much every drug. All 3 ,000 of them. Yep. There's only three. That seems like such a low number somehow. Right. So there's a couple of numbers that like blew me away. So one, there's only 3 ,000 FDA approved drugs.

1:02:14Yeah. And of course, everyone who makes drugs would be like, you're saying only Like every one of those took us, you know, a billion dollars and all this time. But there's 3 ,000 approved drugs and there's 22 ,000 diseases. And it's like, I don't know. I think I would have maybe predicted more approved drugs, maybe less diseases. I don't know. Yeah, same. Yeah, but it's incredible. So you have to index all of those. Man, thank God for AI because otherwise I don't – Thank God. I just don't know how you would – yeah, it would take you your whole life and you'd make like a do 1 % of this or something.

1:02:42Exactly. And is this going to be open source because, you know, a lot of public money goes into a lot of private companies and then they turn around profit and people get pretty salty about that. Yeah, so we're a nonprofit organization and we decided to be a nonprofit because we evaluated whether there was a company here. And what we decided is that it should be a nonprofit because we need to have the flexibility and the freedom to go after the diseases that are not gonna be profitable. The diseases that are profitable and the drugs that are profitable for those diseases, our capitalistic market does a pretty good job of getting drugs to those diseases, right?

1:03:14Like that's like why capitalism works is that like the incentives are there and we do it. Right. But what's missing are the diseases that are too small and the drugs that are too inexpensive to be profitable. And so that's why we're a nonprofit is that we want to go where people aren't going. And so we're nonprofit, which means obviously we can't profit all off the funding that was given us from the government. And it also means that as part of getting government money, you have to commit to the government. You'll make your data open source. So we will actually be sharing all 66 million scores within 18 to 24 months from now.

1:03:44So you basically will be able to go to our website at everycure.org. You'll be able to type in the disease of interest. You know, hopefully you have no diseases that you're interested in, but, you know, maybe there's someone that you love that has a disease. You type that one in, you'll get a rank order score for all 3 ,000 drugs against that disease. You'll be able to say, okay, like, what's the top five or the top whatever? And maybe they can help my loved one. Well, that's great because then there could be an offshoot of EveryCure, your organization in the EU, in China, in Japan, wherever. and they can go, hey, we just upload it to the database and then the database reconciles itself every 30 days or every 24 hours or whatever.

1:04:21And everybody's just working on this. They take your scores and they run a trial over there on a disease that disproportionately maybe affects the Japanese population or whatever. Who knows? They can prioritize in their own way and everybody benefits from this. This is awesome. I love this kind of stuff. This is incredible. Thank you. I know some people are gonna say, why don't drug companies do this? You did touch on the fact that it's not profitable because the addressable market is essentially too small if not enough people have a disease. And or if there's generic drugs, there's no money in testing a generic drug, right, to sell because then somebody else can just go and make it.

1:04:56Exactly. So you don't want to spend the money to do that. Exactly. And on top of that, for generic drugs, you can have sometimes as many as 10 different manufacturers of that drug. And so when you have 10 people making the same drug, the price plummets to like pennies a pill. So, you know, when you're making pennies a pill, the math just doesn't add up to do like a$10 million clinical trial. And now you're going to sell like a thousand more pennies worth of profit, right? That's just, it doesn't add up. And so I never demonize pharma for not doing this. Cause I really, I recognize like they're working within the system that we have and the system we have does a really good job of incentivizing pharma to create new drugs.

1:05:33And I want them to continue to create new drugs, but the system we have also makes it so that these drug companies are not incentivized at all to find new uses for medicines and it's horrible. And as a patient who like should have died many times from my disease and should have never found out serolimus could save my life, I guess I should be like really bitter. Like why wasn't this drug company figuring out that serolimus could treat my disease? But I think I just realized like that's the system we're in and we just need to fix the system. And so first we need to fill the gap and then we need to fix the system.

1:06:02But filling in the gap is just saying like, hey, let's go after all those cheap old drugs and let's just like do the trials and prove they work. Do pharmaceutical companies also have data that they could share with you? Like, hey, we didn't run the trial on this, but like one of the things that happened in our other trial was it, you know, gave people erections or whatever, like the Viagra thing. I mean, surely they have some indication of their drugs doing other things that are off-label that they just haven't commercialized. For listeners, I promise you, I did not pay Jordan to say that. But like that literally, Jordan, what you asked is like, to me, the million-dollar question.

1:06:34Oh, really? Okay. It's so important. And it's, I guess, less even a question and more the answer is yes. Drug companies do have additional information. They've never had a place to share that information before. And so it literally sits within the company. A drug becomes generic and the file just like sits on some shared drive and no one ever looks at it again. My dream and the reason why I made the comment about like, I should have paid you to say it is like my dream is that drug companies and every cure, we can come together and we can create like this simple process to where if you're Merck or Pfizer, J &J, whatever company you're with, you can just share that info with us.

1:07:10These are your old drugs. You're no longer making money off of them. You're not going to lose any money because you're not making money. Just share this old stuff with us. Your company's worked so hard to develop the drug, to get it approved for one thing or two things. Help us figure out more things for it. You're right. The data exists. We haven't figured out the exact process, but if you're listening and you work at one of those companies and you want to try to work with us to figure out the process, I would love to work with you. I think the first thing they're going to do is be like, okay, we need some sort of liability shield so that if this shows up in our trial data, they're not suing us.

1:07:40Like, you knew! Yes. So you might need legislation where it's like once you share this stuff, you're essentially granted. Or you're protected. Yeah, you're protected. Because I can see companies, as a lawyer, former lawyer, I can appreciate a company being like, do we want to open up these books? Like what's in it for us is a smile from Dr. Fagenbaum and what's possibly also in it for us is like a massive class action lawsuit when they say like, oh, you had this side effect and it was like understated on the packaging and yada, something like that. So I can see that being a bottleneck. But also, yeah, it would be amazing if that could happen because what you're doing is so promising.

1:08:16I've read this, so maybe this information's not 100 % up to date, but you've got the algorithm in an initial pilot. It says you identified 106 drugs that might treat 147 of the 9 ,000 rare diseases. I mean, that's pretty damn good. You came up with 106 drugs that might treat 147 diseases in an initial pilot. I mean, that thing, I don't know how long a pilot is, but it sounds short by definition. That's a lot of progress. That was our absolute V1, the very first version we ran of this. And we actually run a subsequent version last March. We are so excited. I can't remember, Jordan, if I mentioned earlier, but when we ran the algorithm last March, the number one drug that came up for Castleman disease was actually a drug that had never been used before for Castleman's.

1:09:04And we had a patient around the same time who wasn't responding to any of the drugs, including the one that works for me. So I told his doctor to try this drug in sort of last ditch effort. And it saved this patient named Alan. It saved his life. For me, that was like this insane moment where it was like, wait a minute, like this algorithm, like we've been doing research for like 70 years into Castleman. We couldn't figure this drug out. And you're telling me on our second run last March that the number one thing it predicted, a drug that had never been used before for Castleman's, is going to save Alan's life.

1:09:36It's this incredible moment in time. The potential here is so great. There are going to be false starts and hiccups. There's going to be times where the number one drug for this disease doesn't work for sure. That's going to happen. And that's why we need a really great team to go through all these hits. But the promise is just huge. And, you know, talk to Alan, his wife, his daughter. They got this life, you know, from this algorithm, right? You kind of touched on this earlier. Do you feel pressure to use your life well now that you've been granted a stay on the death sentence that we all have?

1:10:09I mean, we all have the death sentence, right? But you, sir, have gotten like numerous. You have a great lawyer up there. I have a really good lawyer. Yeah. Yes, I do. I think that even more than the fact that I've survived all these things is that the way I survived it was this like, I don't know if I'm going to call it like a loophole, but like this like sort of cheat code in the system that like just because there's not a drug for your disease doesn't mean there's not a drug that can treat your disease. Right. And like somehow that like hit me in the face and I was able to use that knowledge to save my life.

1:10:39And it's like, so not only did I get all these extra shots, like the reason I got these extra shots is for this like, yeah, this cheat code that I like feel like I need to share with other people. And like, while I'm here, I need to make sure that I can do as many of these, you know, think about video games, as many like ABC plus up down things as I can to help as many people as I can. Combos, man. Yeah, it's man. I just I can't help but think we're going to look back on this interview in 20 years when you're winning some sort of Nobel Prize or whatever. And everyone's going to say, I can't believe Jordan wore a T-shirt for that conversation.

1:11:14And I hope that's what happens. I hope we do see that day. Man, I can't tell you how relieved I am that somebody is finding a cure for this stuff. Heart disease, like things that are a matter. Heart disease, like that's a matter of lifestyle choices some of the time. But when you see people dying of, I brought up ALS, which is just so terrifying. And there's no cure and it's not their fault. You can't help but feel terrified by that sort of thing. So not only is this bringing peace to those who are suffering right now, but hopefully to anxious weirdos like me who just have one less thing to worry about, right?

1:11:44And I appreciate your work on this. I think it's really admirable that you're not commercializing it in some way or withholding things. I mean, again, I wouldn't expect that from you, but it's just an amazing thing that you're doing. And AI is only going onward and upward, right? So this is so promising. It's really, just really exciting. Well, I so appreciate that, Jordan. I so appreciate you you know, shining light on this, you can probably tell from this interview, I'm really, really excited about this stuff. I mean, I'm like, I'm so fired up about the impact we can have. And like I said, you know, when, or when I was in med school, I thought that there was this like, you know, Santa Claus theory of civilization, where there was this, you know, workshop of elves working together and like, we're building that workshop, right?

1:12:25Like, yeah, we're the elves and we're working together. Yeah. Yes. I've moved up from, from Gollum to Santa Claus, but it's like, close. Yeah. It's like we're creating this system that I think should have been there all along. And I'm so excited about it. And I'm so excited to have the opportunity to be on this podcast with you and to reach so many people that maybe haven't been thinking about rare diseases. And hopefully we didn't, you know, give you podcast listener syndrome that you're not worried about all these horrible diseases. That's right. But I think there's going to be incredible progress that's going to be made.

1:12:56And, you know, I mentioned that we're going to share all this information with the world in about 18 to 24 months. But in the meantime, you could actually go to our website at everycure.org slash insights, and you could tell us about maybe you received Ozempic for Parkinson's disease, or you name it, and it helps you. We want to hear from you. So if you've received a drug for a disease that it wasn't intended for, and it helped you, let us know. We can integrate that into our system. Help us to raise awareness. We're building out like the total A team right now. We've got almost 20 people on our staff, and we're still looking for, and right now, particularly people who've worked at pharmaceutical companies to utilize their drug development experience.

1:13:32So if you can help us spread the word that we're doing, that would be amazing. And as you shared earlier, we're really, really excited to build out this platform, but we're also still raising the funds to do the clinical trials. And so if you're interested in supporting us in that way, we love that too. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man. Looking forward to seeing how this tracks over the next few years. And thank you once again for what you're doing. I just think it's truly amazing. This is so fun, Jordan. Yeah, I had such a good time. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend. Let's stay in touch on this stuff.

1:13:59This was awesome. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show about how hormonal birth control can affect a woman's personality and even influence who they pick as a partner. They found that women who are on the birth control pill, rather than experiencing a big surge in the stress hormone cortisol in response to stressful things, they don't have any increase in cortisol at all. It seems like something in the birth control pill is actually causing women's stress response to go into overdrive. And in fact, this sort of a pattern is something that we usually only see in the context of chronic stress.

1:14:38So people who have, for example, PTSD, or people who grew up in the context of trauma, this isn't normal. This isn't something that we see in otherwise healthy, high-functioning people. Sex hormones have their fingers in so many pots in the body that they're going to be influencing our brain because there's probably no place in the body that has more receptors for sex hormones than the brain. Our sex hormones are part of what gives us, you know, our sort of joie de vivre. It's like part of what makes life exciting and it turns the volume up and makes our whites whiter and our whites brighter in terms of our sort of experience of the world.

1:15:20We've been really, really cavalier about this idea that we should change a person's personality and who they are and their experiences in the world. So that way they don't have menstrual cramps. We don't yet know whether or not the birth control pill is influencing the way that women's brains are being organized. And there's almost no research on this. It's like nobody's really stopped to ask the questions. To hear more from Dr. Sarah Hill about the problems with taking birth control, check out episode 280 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. This guy, man, he is the living embodiment of the saying that hope is not a strategy.

1:16:00Man, he just had to realize no one's coming to save me. Terrifying, but also kind of empowering, I guess. Loved having this conversation. Fun conversation. Was not expecting it to be a fun conversation, but it was. Every drug on the market has multiple effects on the body. not just the one or two that won it approval. And I think that's really the key here. It's so, I of course never would have thought of that myself, but I'm not in the industry. I'm glad somebody is doing this. My gosh, no one is responsible for ensuring that drugs are fully utilized for all diseases that they can help. And that is the responsibility that Dr.

1:16:30David Fagenbaum and his initiative, EveryCure, that is the responsibility they're taking on. It's just absolutely incredible. They basically just have to connect the dots between the research and the drugs available. And they're gonna do that with AI and speed that process up. And they're partnering with pharmaceutical companies because they often know which drugs might be promising for certain diseases, but are not commercially viable. So there's all this untapped knowledge and there are untapped cures out there, which look, maybe I'm just sort of like anxious Jordan. It kind of runs at a tribe, if you know what I'm saying.

1:17:00However, I just find so much comfort knowing that someone is actually out there trying to find cures and treatment for this stuff, even if it's rare and wouldn't normally have a commercially viable solution or drug in development. So bless you, Dr. David Feigenbaum. Great conversation. All things Dr. David will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, we deliver something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday.

1:17:37If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you'll find it. Six Minute Networking over at SixMinuteNetworking.com. I am at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. We also got a TikTok going. I'm not crazy about it, but there's some clips there. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn as well. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:18:10The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in medicine, interested in curing diseases, interested in AI, medical research, whatever, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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