Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard David Fajgenbaum (on repurposing medicine) About this episode David Fajgenbaum (Chasing My Cure, Every Cure) is an immunology researcher, professor, and author. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss being recruited to play football at an assortment of Ivy League schools before ending up at Georgetown, the promise he made to his mother to pursue medicine before she passed away, and starting a foundation in his mom’s honor to help college students with grief. David and Dax talk about the sudden onset of symptoms that meant his liver and kidneys were shutting down, gaining 100 pounds of fluid almost overnight, and nearly dying multiple times amid a diagnosis of Castleman disease. David explains the decision to approach his illness with off-label drugs, putting himself into full remission with a drug used to prevent transplant rejections, and the current mission with non-profit Every Cure to treat other inflammatory diseases with existing medicine.
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Transcript 22,216 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Experts on Experts. I'm Dax Shepard, joined by Lily Padman.
0:06 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:07 Dax Shepard? Today, we have David Faganbaum, who is a physician, scientist, and bestselling author. His books are Chasing My Cure and We Get It. This is an incredible story of a guy who cured his own disease that he was dying of, actively dying of.
0:24 Speaker 01 And working hard on curing others. It's, this is wild and so cool.
0:29 Dax Shepard? Very cool. And he was a football stud. Nah, we're talking about mixed messages.
0:34 Speaker 01 And he was, went to college with a perfect 10 Charlie, as you'll hear.
0:38 Dax Shepard? Yes. Also, if you're moved by this episode, which I think you will be, and you want to donate to EveryCure, please go to www.everycure.org. Please enjoy David Faganbaum. Armchair Expert is proud to have Alexa Plus as our presenting sponsor. The all-new Alexa Plus is your smart, proactive AI assistant. Just chat naturally about anything and watch your to-do list disappear. It learns your style and anticipates what's next across Echo, Fire TV, and more. Learn more at amazon.com/newalexa. We get support from Quince.
1:16 Speaker 01 I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.
1:25 Dax Shepard? I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.
1:48 Speaker 01 $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is, because they go straight to the factories, they skip the middlemen, and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy, it's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.
2:06 Dax Shepard? The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve This man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.
2:15 Speaker 01 It's a uniform.
2:16 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
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2:34 Dax Shepard? Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show.
3:11 Dax Shepard? How are you?
3:13 Speaker 02 Good to meet you.
3:15 Dax Shepard? I was just sharing with Monica that Charlie.
3:17 Speaker 01 Yes, it's so exciting.
3:19 Dax Shepard? I know, I just learned this mere minutes ago myself.
3:21 Speaker 01 We just FaceTimed him.
3:22 Dax Shepard? Oh, you did?
3:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, we FaceTimed him, said hi. Well, we were over in the corner.
3:28 Dax Shepard? That's not gonna work.
3:30 Speaker 01 So, not really. But yeah, since we weren't recording, David is good friends with Perfect Ten. We call him Perfect Ten Charlie on this show.
3:37 Dax Shepard? You can't be surprised. I'm not surprised at all. Georgetown.
3:41 Speaker 01 Georgetown, very good school.
3:42 Dax Shepard? Very prestigious.
3:43 Speaker 01 I mean, David's gone to all the good schools, so.
3:45 Dax Shepard? He really has.
3:46 Speaker 02 He's gone to too many good schools.
3:48 Dax Shepard? It's almost like a sickness at some point.
3:50 Speaker 01 Ding ding ding.
3:51 Dax Shepard? Tell me.
3:51 Speaker 01 Because David had a sickness.
3:53 Dax Shepard? Oh.
3:55 Speaker 01 Hello.
3:55 Dax Shepard? I didn't realize we're at the making light of a party. Yeah, but that's great. We should start there. Welcome, how are you?
4:01 Speaker 02 Doing well, thank you. How are you doing?
4:02 Dax Shepard? Wonderful. So yeah, as Monty was just saying, I was working out appropriately to receive a text from Charlie and I was like, ah, Formula One race, yes, expected, expected.
4:11 Speaker 01 Oh, sure.
4:11 Dax Shepard? I think you're interviewing my friend Dave. And I was thinking, how could he possibly know this doctor?
4:16 Speaker 01 Right.
4:17 Dax Shepard? And then, of course, you were his quarterback.
4:19 Speaker 02 That's right, we play football. Georgetown and you guys are a couple of the people who actually know Georgetown as a football team. A lot of people don't know about our team.
4:25 Dax Shepard? I don't know if without Charlie I would have known and then also even if I knew I wouldn't have guessed it was division one.
4:30 Speaker 01 I didn't know. I went to Georgia, so.
4:34 Speaker 02 Yeah. And you know, we have like a bulldog mascot, but we had to change from being the Georgetown Bulldogs because there's the Georgia Bulldogs.
4:40 Speaker 01 Too close.
4:41 Speaker 02 So were the Georgetown Hoyas. I don't know if you've heard this.
4:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. Go Hoyas.
4:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, go Hoyas.
4:45 Speaker 01 What's a Hoya?
4:45 Speaker 02 It means what in Greek and so apparently it came about.
4:50 Speaker 01 Exactly.
4:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, there were some priests that were screaming Hoya Sax, which means what rocks. Then people would say Georgetown and
4:55 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
4:56 Speaker 02 All of a sudden we're the Hoyas, which means we're the whats.
4:58 Dax Shepard? And so were you guys pals pals or?
5:00 Speaker 02 We were, yeah.
5:01 Dax Shepard? You were?
5:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're good friends.
5:03 Dax Shepard? They're best friends.
5:04 Speaker 01 So sim.
5:05 Dax Shepard? But Charlie will be the first to admit he ran with a real meathead clique within the football program. Were you immersed in that?
5:13 Speaker 02 If you open up the book, I showed Monica a picture. Open it up and go to this middle picture.
5:17 Dax Shepard? I've already looked at your body. If that's where we're going with this.
5:20 Speaker 02 I know your body very well. I don't look anything like I look like now. I mean, I've fully embraced dad bod these days.
5:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, we in the middle?
5:26 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, the very middle. Um, there's a picture there.
5:28 Dax Shepard? I mean, I know this picture by heart. I love a great body.
5:31 Speaker 02 But the point being, that's what I looked like. So yes, you could have called me a meathead back then, but I was pre-med and I had intentions to be a doctor.
5:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and.
5:39 Speaker 01 What a catch. Can you believe? I mean, if I'm in college and there's a pre-med.
5:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, forget it.
5:46 Speaker 01 Man who looks like this.
5:48 Speaker 02 My poor wife, she started dating me when I looked like that and then she stuck with us. It's rough.
5:52 Dax Shepard? He was a lineman. Yeah, he was a defensive.
5:53 Speaker 02 He was a tight end. He was a tight end, yeah. I used to throw footballs to Charlie.
5:57 Dax Shepard? Oh, and you could count on him?
5:59 Speaker 02 I always, always.
6:01 Dax Shepard? I would imagine that is a special relationship between the quarterback and the tight end.
6:04 Speaker 02 Tight end, especially because they're the one position in the field that you both were throwing passes to and they're also blocking for you, right? Like you have a special relationship with your offensive line because your life is sort of in their hands.
6:12 Dax Shepard? Gronk was a tight end?
6:13 Speaker 02 Gronk was a tight end. That's right.
6:15 Dax Shepard? So of course TB 12 and Gronk are besties. That makes sense. How are Travis Kelsey and?
6:20 Speaker 02 Oh, and Mahomes?
6:21 Dax Shepard? Mahomes, are they?
6:22 Speaker 01 They're good friends. They're very good friends.
6:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay. Well, let's start in Raleigh, North Carolina, because your dad was also a physician.
6:29 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right.
6:30 Dax Shepard? What kind of physician was he?
6:32 Speaker 02 Orthopedic surgeon.
6:33 Dax Shepard? Ironic.
6:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:35 Dax Shepard? Because I was gonna ask you, how did your physician father feel about you playing football in the first place? But I would imagine even compounded by this being an orthopedic surgeon.
6:44 Speaker 01 Like that he wouldn't want it?
6:45 Dax Shepard? Well, he's probably observed a lot of injuries.
6:46 Speaker 02 Well, that's true, but also he was an orthopedic surgeon for the NC State football team. So he was like taking care of people that were playing football. And that sort of led to why I fell in love with football so much.
6:56 Dax Shepard? Right, because you were hanging.
6:58 Speaker 02 Exactly.
6:58 Dax Shepard? Exactly. Okay, and were you a standout in high school? What were the challenges? Did you have a hard time putting on weight?
7:05 Speaker 02 I'm like an okay athlete, but I work really, really hard.
7:10 Dax Shepard? But David, I have to tell you something, every athlete says that. I finally want one to say like, I'm a fucking physical phenom, I hit the genetic lottery.
7:16 Speaker 02 Charlie Curtis.
7:17 Dax Shepard? Oh no, he'll tell you he worked so hard.
7:20 Speaker 01 No, he says he's the best.
7:22 Speaker 02 Too hard work.
7:24 Speaker 01 He says he's the best athlete. One time, we were all at a vacation and the men were playing horseshoes. And my friend Jess, who is very athletic, but has not done athletics in a long time. And Jess was kind of dominating at horseshoes and everyone was getting very upset.
7:44 Dax Shepard? It was confronting their stereotypes, to say the least.
7:47 Speaker 01 And I said, Jess is the best athlete here. And Charlie did not like that.
7:53 Speaker 02 Charlie's competitive, for sure. So to give a sense for how crazy I was about working, I had posters all over my wall as a 10-year-old. They were like tracking how fast I could run, how far I could throw. I was totally, totally obsessed and just worked like crazy.
8:08 Dax Shepard? Your dad must have loved this. If I had a little guy and he was taking something this serious and working so hard, it would have just made my heart explode.
8:14 Speaker 02 I think both my parents, they did love it, but I think they also were like a little concerned. He's really, really focused on this thing, like, is this too much?
8:21 Dax Shepard? Well, my concern would be, boy, he's given in his whole life. If it doesn't work out in some capacity, he's gonna be heartbroken.
8:26 Speaker 02 Exactly.
8:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but it worked out. You did get recruited to play at Georgetown.
8:30 Speaker 02 That's exactly right.
8:31 Dax Shepard? Did you have other offers, other schools?
8:33 Speaker 02 I did, I was recruited by Ivy League schools, so Yale and Cornell and Georgetown. And then a couple other smaller schools in the North Carolina, South Carolina region too.
8:40 Dax Shepard? Did you pick Georgetown for some kind of family tradition?
8:42 Speaker 02 There were a few things. Georgetown had this pre-health program, which wasn't just a typical pre-med where you're taking basic science, but it actually had, where you actually could learn about the human body and learn about health and disease. And that was interesting to me at the time. And then I loved the quarterback coach at Georgetown. Joe Moorhead is amazing. He went on to be the head coach at Mississippi State and coordinator at Penn State. And it was his first job as a Georgetown. I was like, oh, my God, this guy's amazing. He's going to be incredible, and he is incredible.
9:05 Dax Shepard? And when you went there, you were already going to do medicine, yeah?
9:09 Speaker 02 When I went there, I was really interested in sports medicine. I was really interested in like exercise and diet and nutrition, all that sort of stuff.
9:15 Dax Shepard? So does mom's glioplastoma change courses here?
9:19 Speaker 02 Changed everything. It was just a couple of weeks after I got to Georgetown was when my dad called and told me that my mom had brain cancer. And I immediately went home to be with her. And just a couple of days later, she had brain surgery. It was heartbreaking.
9:32 Dax Shepard? So it was operable? Rarely can you operate on them, yeah?
9:35 Speaker 02 So this was operable. It was in the front left part of her brain. And so it was in a particular location where they open up your skull and they actually wake you up once they've opened it up. And the reason they do that is because they want to start cutting out tumor, but they don't want to cut out too much because then you're like, you won't be able to speak. And so they did this surgery. It took four and a half hours. And my sisters, my dad and I were just terrified. And I remember they said she made it through surgery and we're so happy. We're going to go back to see her. And I remember we're like crying because we're so happy. Just there's so many emotions. And I told my sisters and I was like, we've got to stop crying. Like, let's be strong for mom. And we go back to see her. And I'll never forget this. She had a wrap around her head and she had this bulb coming out of it. It was basically like draining the fluid. She was sort of sitting up. We just didn't know what to say.
10:18 Speaker 02 And we walked in and my mom pointed to her head and she looked at us and she said, Chiquita Banana Lady. And we just like burst into laughter. She was making this joke for us that like the wrap and the bulb, like that she looked like the Chiquita Banana Lady. And I loved it so much because she just had a four and a half hour brain surgery. She's brain cancer. But what's the first thing she's thinking about? What can she say to make us laugh? We're crying and we're snot crying. And we're like, our mom's still here. First off, she was speaking. We didn't know if she'd be able to.
10:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:48 Speaker 02 And then she was trying to make that joke. It was just everything.
10:49 Dax Shepard? Do I have Bader Minehoff? It feels like I've heard an inordinate amount of women in the last 10 years get this glioplastoma. Is it asymmetric to women?
11:00 Speaker 02 I haven't heard about it being more common in women, but it does feel like it's just getting more common.
11:04 Dax Shepard? We know like three different people in our circle.
11:07 Speaker 01 Related to one person.
11:10 Dax Shepard? Well, one person knows three people and we know that person.
11:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. And one of the people is a man who was affected by her. But yeah.
11:18 Dax Shepard? So there's no weird gender thing happening with that?
11:21 Speaker 02 But it's heartbreaking. It's just one of the worst out there.
11:24 Dax Shepard? So the surgery, what did that buy her?
11:26 Speaker 02 It bought her about a year of clean scans.
11:29 Dax Shepard? Was it followed by radiation?
11:30 Speaker 02 Radiation and chemotherapy. And this is back in 2003, 2004. She either came up to Georgetown every weekend, or I went home every weekend to North Carolina to see them. So got a really special time with them. And I remember about nine months in, when they did the first big scan after it's been a while and it was clean. That was one of the first times where I just had the most intense tears of joy of my life. It was just sort of like, oh, my gosh, a clean scan. This is amazing. But then it was just a few months later is when it started to grow back. And she passed away 15 months after she got sick.
11:58 Speaker 01 Oh, man. So sad.
12:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's fucking rough. So you were in your sophomore year?
12:03 Speaker 02 I'm over a sophomore year.
12:04 Speaker 01 You're in college.
12:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Do you see a dip in performance in all categories for a minute? Or do you get psycho type A and work even harder to ignore it all?
12:13 Speaker 02 More than a lot. So part of it was the moment my mom got sick with brain cancer. All those posters I had about football and all the thoughts, that was out of my mind. And it was like, I want to dedicate my life to finding treatments for people like her. I'm not interested in sports medicine. I'm not even really interested in football right now. I just want to be a doctor because I want to dedicate my life to helping patients like her. If I'm going to be at school while my mom's going through this, like I'm going to lock in and I'm going to become a doctor and help people like her. And a couple of weeks before she passed away, I promised her that. That was the last thing I ever told her.
12:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
12:43 Speaker 02 I said, Mom, I'm going to be okay and I'm going to dedicate my life to trying to find treatments for patients like you.
12:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah. What did she say? So I have kids, you have kids. If one of my little girls says to me, I go, oh, honey, do not hurt in yourself with me at all. You go have whatever life you want. You don't know.
12:59 Speaker 02 Because of the brain tumor and the part that was in, she didn't have too many words left. But it still hits me today. One of the things that she could say and the thing that she said was unconditional love. Again, she didn't have too many words. And so like that was something she could say. She started crying. I cried.
13:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
13:13 Speaker 01 Wow, how special.
13:14 Dax Shepard? Well, dude, you gave her the ultimate gift, which is I only hope for one thing in my life. And if I get me looking at my little girls when I die. I'm gonna be like stoked.
13:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:21 Dax Shepard? That's as good as it gets.
13:22 Speaker 02 It is.
13:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you get hardcore about medicine. You graduate from Georgetown.
13:28 Speaker 02 That's right.
13:29 Dax Shepard? You go to Oxford. What's this detour? You get your masters in Oxford?
13:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, during my time at Georgetown, I became obsessed with medicine and cancer and cancer treatment, cancer prevention, and I learned that there was a program at Oxford focused on health promotion and disease prevention, and they were particularly focused on heart disease prevention. But there was data coming out around that time that diet, physical inactivity, and smoking can actually all contribute to cancer risk. And so this idea that like, well, maybe I could go study with these people who are focused on heart disease prevention, we could apply it to cancer prevention.
14:01 Dax Shepard? And did you like it?
14:02 Speaker 02 I did. I loved the academic part of it. I have to admit, I didn't mesh as well with Oxford students as maybe I did with my buddies from Georgetown or from Penn.
14:11 Dax Shepard? Whatever cultural gap.
14:12 Speaker 02 It's funny, I played football at Oxford. They have an American football team.
14:15 Dax Shepard? Were you ridiculously good compared to everyone?
14:17 Speaker 02 It was really fun. It was really fun.
14:18 Dax Shepard? You were a sandbag.
14:19 Speaker 02 But what was cool is that it was a joint program between Oxford University and Oxford Brooks. Oxford Brooks is the local state school that's right next to Oxford, and I just got along so much better with the guys from the Brooks side of things.
14:29 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting. Can you be objective enough to answer if you were exceptional at Georgetown? Or if everyone at Georgetown is like you?
14:38 Speaker 02 In terms of?
14:39 Speaker 01 Achievement?
14:40 Speaker 02 The biggest thing that I would say is that Georgetown has this really special focus on helping other people. Like, the motto is men and women for others. And I think that that was the perfect place for me to be at that moment in my life, to be in an environment where literally the walls say like, men and women for others. Take what's gone on to you and help other people. That was the perfect environment because I shared one part of the promise to my mom with you all, and that was that I would become a doctor. The other promise is I told her I was gonna create an organization in her memory. Her name was Anne Marie Faganbaum. Her initials were AMF. And I was like, I'm gonna call it AMF. I don't know what it's gonna stand for.
15:10 Speaker 01 Wow.
15:11 Speaker 02 But it's gonna be for grieving college students. Because I was really struggling with this anticipatory grief. And so we started at AMF and then ended up spreading that to other college campuses. I think if I was at any other college campus, I don't know if that immediate, I'm going through a lot of pain, I'm gonna now create something to help other people. I don't know if I would have done that anywhere else. So I think Georgetown was the right environment for that.
15:29 Dax Shepard? Now David, I'm a teeny bit suspicious though that I don't know if you were, were you dealing with it? Do you think you were dealing with it?
15:34 Speaker 02 Dealing with my grief?
15:35 Dax Shepard? With your grief?
15:36 Speaker 02 No, I think that the way that I decided to start dealing with my grief was it's called instrumental grieving, where like you create something and you pour it into that thing. And this is actually something that a lot of men do when they deal with grief. They channel it to something. I created AMF and now I'm like sitting in support group meetings, other people dealing with grief, and they're talking about AMF and that for me was how I tried to deal with it.
15:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds a bit like you tried to treat it with action.
16:00 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly.
16:01 Dax Shepard? As opposed to maybe perhaps sitting in discomfort.
16:05 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I was like, if you start feeling some discomfort, I'm like, I'm gonna go work on this non-pro.
16:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yes. Okay, good. That was kind of my hunch. And then of course, that just waits there. At some point, it does start just kind of seeping out. How delayed was it for you? I lost my dad when he was 62 and I just had all these waves. First was just getting him through the whole thing. There's a lot of action there. Then there's action in the aftermath. And this is honestly years and continues to be waves of like, oh, right. Wow, I have a sadness now that I didn't allow myself to have then. And that's 13 years ago.
16:36 Speaker 02 Sorry that you lost your dad. I've had those waves and I think that you're right. If I sat with it more when I was 19, then I probably would have had maybe fewer waves.
16:44 Dax Shepard? Also, who knows?
16:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's no way to know.
16:46 Dax Shepard? I got in a drinking problem and you're fucking gone nowhere.
16:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I will say that the one thing is that because my thing that I was channeling my time into was like, schoolwork and this grief support group, in that grief support group, I'm talking, I think I got maybe some of that out. But when I went on to get sick, that brought back a lot because all of a sudden I'm now laying in the hospital bed and my dad, my sister's around me and I was with them before. I was on that side.
17:10 Dax Shepard? Yes, and you can't get into action because you are strapped to this thing. So let's get to there. So we leave Oxford, we go to Penn.
17:17 Speaker 02 That's right, for med school.
17:18 Dax Shepard? And you're in your third year of med school? And what's the first symptom? You're like, everything's great, you're humming along, you're in your third college over many years.
17:27 Speaker 02 That's right. I was very healthy still. I actually won a bench pressing contest a couple of months before that.
17:33 Dax Shepard? How much did you put up?
17:34 Speaker 02 I think it was like 325.
17:34 Dax Shepard? Jesus Christ, wonderful.
17:36 Speaker 02 So very healthy. I am honored. OB GYN rotation, I'm now in the OB part of it. So I delivered my first couple of babies into the world, which in med school, that's this major highlight. As incredibly as I actually, I'll share a quick story about the second patient I delivered. The parents were both older than me, as you can imagine, because I'm 25. And they're sort of really concerned like, why is this like 25 year old in here?
17:56 Dax Shepard? Not what I want. Not what I want.
17:59 Speaker 02 The husband comes to me, he's like, uh, this isn't your first time, right? I was like, whoa, no, because it was my second time. And I was like, uh, no, it's not my first time. I'm a med student, I'm just learning. And I remember like delivering the baby and baby's healthy and everything was all good. But then I remember turning around like, it was my second time. But like, your baby's really healthy and everything's all good.
18:19 Dax Shepard? We got lucky. We all got lucky today.
18:21 Speaker 02 We're two for two.
18:22 Dax Shepard? Oh my god.
18:23 Speaker 02 So yes, maybe I got sick as payback for that. But within the next couple of weeks, I started feeling more tired than I ever felt before. I'd been in school forever and I just never felt fatigue like that. And I started noticing lumps and bumps in my neck, which turned out to be in large lymph nodes and had abdominal pain. And then what was so weird, but I noticed like fluid pooling around my ankles. And I was like, but I'm like this like healthy 25 year old, what's going on?
18:44 Dax Shepard? Also, can we add, and I love the irony of this. You're also a dude, you're in medical school and you probably ignored three or four red flags, right?
18:51 Speaker 02 Oh, for sure.
18:51 Dax Shepard? Yes, isn't this insane? Like, you would think you'd be inoculated from this because you know about it, you're not.
18:56 Speaker 02 No, exactly. I'm literally feeling lumps in my neck. I'm like, oh, and I'm like, oh, these feel like lymph nodes, like that patient I felt on lymphoma two months ago. I'm like, that's weird, head on to something else. Like, I'm just, I'm just reading. Why am I not paying attention to any of this? Probably a lot of reasons for it. But so the fatigue got so bad, I would see a patient and then I would go find an empty room and I would take an eight minute nap. I'd set my alarm for nine minutes. I'd wake up eight minutes later, I'd go see another patient. I'd just keep doing that over and over again. Taking caffeine pills, I was doing anything I could to stay awake. So I took a medical school exam and then I'm sure I got like the worst grade ever. I never got my score back. And I went down the hall to the emergency department and they did blood work.
19:34 Dax Shepard? Really quick, from feeling the inflamed lymph nodes.
19:36 Speaker 02 Two weeks.
19:37 Dax Shepard? Two weeks.
19:37 Speaker 02 Okay.
19:38 Dax Shepard? Two weeks. So walking down the hall.
19:39 Speaker 02 I even remember when I was taking this med school exam, I was like, is the answer A or B? And then I remember in my brain, I thought to myself, I'm like, it doesn't matter because I'm about to die. And I'm like sitting there, I'm like, why did I?
19:48 Dax Shepard? Think that I'm about to die. What?
19:50 Speaker 02 And so like I finished the exam, I walked down the hall to the ER.
19:52 Dax Shepard? Can we take one second right there? That is a gift to have those moments a few times in your life to experience a right sizing of what's important. Just a few times in your life and hopefully it doesn't kill you. But I've had a couple of those, right? Where it's like, oh, right. I don't give a flying fuck about all this stuff I thought I cared about. It's a unique feeling, like for you to say you don't give a shit how you did on the test is really profound.
20:12 Speaker 02 And I think it's an important feeling for us to share with other people because the important thing is to start putting your mind in that place before you have to experience it yourself. Like, don't wait until you're 80 years old and then you're like, oh crap, I wish I had thought this.
20:23 Speaker 01 But I don't know that you can get.
20:24 Speaker 02 But yeah, I used to have to be there.
20:25 Speaker 01 I don't know if you could borrow it. I think you just have to experience it, unfortunately.
20:29 Dax Shepard? Maybe do a medically supervised overdose.
20:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, hopefully not. Hopefully don't have to experience it.
20:35 Dax Shepard? I'm not going to a clinic that's like medically supervised.
20:38 Speaker 01 It is normally death related, though. It's moments where either someone around you is sick or has died, or you yourself are dealing with some health issue. So yeah, it does suck that you have to experience it like that.
20:50 Dax Shepard? The main thing has to be in.
20:51 Speaker 01 So bad. Yeah.
20:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Okay. So sorry. We go down the hallway.
20:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I go down the hall. They do some blood work. I'm a med student, so I'm used to like being on the other side. It usually takes a while to come back and see the patient unless there's something really serious and then they come back really quickly.
21:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
21:05 Speaker 02 The doctor comes back like 10 minutes later or maybe it was 15 minutes, but it was quick. He said, David, your liver, your kidneys and your bone marrow are shutting down. We have to hospitalized you right away. And I'm like, wait, what? I was just like, I delivered baby a couple of weeks ago. What do you mean? My organs are shutting down. They hospitalized me and then over the next couple of weeks, I go from my organs shutting down to being unconscious, gaining 100 pounds of fluid all over my body.
21:31 Speaker 01 Did you see the picture?
21:32 Speaker 02 100 pounds of fluid all over my body because my liver and my kidneys weren't working.
21:36 Dax Shepard? So everything's just backing up.
21:37 Speaker 02 You're not urinating at all, so the fluid's just going everywhere. I had a retinal hemorrhage, which made me temporarily blind in my left eye, so I couldn't see anything out of my left eye.
21:44 Dax Shepard? Couldn't have thrown any passes. Depth perception's gone.
21:48 Speaker 02 That's all I can think about, actually. I was like, darn it. This is gonna really hurt my
21:52 Dax Shepard? You wouldn't go throw it 10 feet or 25 feet away?
21:54 Speaker 02 Exactly. And so I was getting so sick because of all the organs shutting down. I was on dialysis because kidneys weren't working. I was getting daily transfusions of red blood cells and platelets. They were just trying to keep me alive and no one knew what the diagnosis was.
22:07 Dax Shepard? In that state, is your white blood cell count just like off the charts?
22:11 Speaker 02 So white blood cell count was pretty normal at that time. I don't have a good explanation for why. White blood cells were normal, but the platelets and the red blood cells were just collapsed. And you need platelets in order to prevent basically from you bleeding out at all times. Like, because you have these little microbleeds that happen all over your body, including your brain. And your platelets just sort of sop it up always. It's like fix a lot all over your body, all day, every day. And so when you get as low as mine, where you're in this critical state where you can have a little bleed in your brain and then you die from it.
22:35 Dax Shepard? Let's take a second for your poor fucking father who loves his wife. And now he's visiting his
22:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. He spent every night in the hospital room by my side. So like, you know how they just like pull out couch things? This is horrifying. He spent every night with me. My sisters were amazing.
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23:51 Dax Shepard? We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that, too.
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24:34 Speaker 01 That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.
24:38 Dax Shepard? It's an easy, everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know, mm, I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.
24:48 Speaker 01 Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already did something good for myself.
24:56 Dax Shepard? Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega three fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that armchair experts sent you. We get support from Scottsdale, Arizona. Monica, with summer ending or heading into fall, I've been researching a nice, quick getaway location and I keep coming back to Scottsdale, Arizona.
25:30 Speaker 01 Ooh, Scottsdale's good. What's drawing you to it?
25:33 Dax Shepard? Well, first of all, I have this wonderful memory of going there as a kid when I would go see my stepdad when he was working out there. The weather is perfect in fall. Warm, sunny, no humidity. And you can really do whatever you want with your time there. I want to do a sunrise hike through the Sonoran Desert, be surrounded by Saguaro, and then at the same afternoon, just completely melt into a spa treatment at one of their luxury resorts.
25:58 Speaker 01 Oh, that sounds amazing. I want to. Do that. Also, I was there visiting my brother once and I loved Old Town Scottsdale. It's so walkable. They have galleries and cute little restaurants and shops. The food scene alone is worth the trip.
26:12 Dax Shepard? What I keep reading is that it's luxurious, but not stuffy. There's no pressure to do it a certain way. You can explore public art, check out the architecture, go off roading in the desert, or just sit and watch a sunset.
26:24 Speaker 01 It really is the perfect fall reset.
26:26 Dax Shepard? Learn more about all Scottsdale has to offer at unwindinscottsdale.com. We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax.
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27:45 Speaker 01 Also, you told your mom you were gonna be okay. And then that was another promise. And then like,
27:50 Speaker 02 No, I thought about a lot, the promise I made to her because I was like, I promised her I was gonna help people. I was like, and I've just been like working, working, working to help people.
27:56 Dax Shepard? Sucking up the system.
27:58 Speaker 02 I was thinking about that. Now you say it, I'm like, darn it. No, I was thinking, I'm not gonna help. I did all this training and now I'm not gonna help anyone. I told her I would. So with Francisco, he came in to see me. He like leaned in to give me a hug and he's a med student also. So he has a stethoscope around his neck. And I remember it was like slow motion because he comes and gives me a hug. And I see this stethoscope coming because any sort of trauma to my body could create one of these bleeds. And I see this stethoscope coming and it just like hits me like right between the eyes and we're just like looking at one another and for a split second we're like, oh my gosh, did he just kill me? They're like, my husband ran just like, he just like hit me in the head with this stethoscope. And then we like were sort of still for a second and then I didn't blackout because of an internal hemorrhage. And then we were okay and then we laughed about it, but it's crazy. That was what things were like back then when I was in the hospital.
28:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
28:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
28:40 Dax Shepard? Okay, so they end up giving you a crazy cocktail of chemotherapy.
28:44 Speaker 02 That's right.
28:44 Dax Shepard? It was a last ditch effort.
28:47 Speaker 01 At this point, how long were you in the hospital?
28:49 Speaker 02 So I was in the hospital for seven weeks before they gave me this. First, they actually gave me high dose steroids because we didn't have a diagnosis. So first they give you a high dose steroids, things start to improve. And then four weeks later, it's roaring again. And this time is when I had my last rights read to me. This was now 11 weeks into my illness, right when we finally had the diagnosis. So diagnosed with Castleman disease, this rare disease where your immune system attacks your vital organs. Right around the time of the diagnosis, they give me first one chemotherapy. And thankfully that's enough to sort of hold things at bay. But then four weeks later, I'm back in ICU again. And that's when they give me seven chemotherapies.
29:24 Dax Shepard? So yeah, your own immune system is killing you. And so they need to carpet bomb your immune system. So that's non-functional and that works.
29:33 Speaker 02 It does. The time they gave to me now, it's the third time that I'm on death's doorstep. And they tell me before, you know, we're out of options. So we're going to carpet bomb you with every chemotherapy we can think of at the highest dose possible. You know, I remember closing my eyes and being like, well, this is it. It's not going to happen. Hugged my family goodbye.
29:46 Dax Shepard? Was there any peace at any point during this?
29:48 Speaker 02 You know, I have to admit during that six month period, there was never a moment. Oh, actually, no, there was one moment of peace, but for the most part it was this fight. Like, I can't believe this, like such sadness.
29:57 Dax Shepard? With the diagnosis of Castleman, that doesn't get you shit, right? Because there's no real treatment for Castleman. Do they even know? I got quite curious whether we think this is a genetic condition or environmental. Do we have any sense of how Castleman comes about?
30:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, so my step type is called idiopathic, multicenter Castleman. Idiopathic means we don't know the cause. You don't ever want to have a disease that's called idiopathic. But we do know that even within idiopathic, that about 5% of patients will have a family member with Castleman's as well. And so. Those people, we feel pretty confident there's some sort of genetic heritability. But in the rest of us, we don't know what triggers this. I run a lab and our lab does spend time trying to figure this out. And we have found some what are called somatic mutations. So they're basically not mutations you're born with, but mutations you acquire over the course of your life. It's in the same way that cancer occurs because you acquire mutations in your life in those cells. We're observing somatic mutations in Castleman's patients.
30:50 Dax Shepard? And where is that centered?
30:51 Speaker 02 Generally in the lymph node. And part of the reason that that makes sense is that the lymph node is sort of the home base for your immune system. So like if you're fighting an infection, you'll notice your lymph nodes get enlarged. And that's because your immune cells are fighting something and they go back to the lymph node and they talk to one or they communicate and they go back and they fight. They come back and they go out and fight. And so the lymph node is like the home base for your immune system. And so we think these are occurring in the lymph node. Therefore, all these immune cells are going out and wreaking havoc.
31:15 Dax Shepard? So they're leaving mutated and so they're not good at reading its own DNA.
31:21 Speaker 02 The big thing is that in both of your immune systems, you want your immune system to be in surveillance mode, which means it's turned off, looking for bad things. And when it sees a bad thing, you want it to kill that bad thing. Then you want to turn itself back off and go back into surveillance mode. What we find in Castleman's is that our immune system turns on and then it doesn't turn off. And when your immune system's on and it's releasing all these bad things, it starts attacking healthy, good things like your heart, your lungs, your kidneys.
31:44 Speaker 01 That's autoimmune disorders in general, right?
31:46 Speaker 02 And autoimmune disorders typically are focused on one particular organ or one tissue type. So it might be the joints or it might be the heart.
31:53 Dax Shepard? I have psoriatic arthritis.
31:55 Speaker 02 Yes, and so that's your skin and it's also your joints.
31:57 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes.
31:59 Speaker 02 Castleman's is like that, but it seems to be more nonspecific. It's not directed at the skin or the joints like in psoriatic arthritis, but it's more general.
32:06 Dax Shepard? Okay, so this intense carpet bombing works, but it works for how long?
32:12 Speaker 02 For about a year. So now I'm out of the hospital for a year. I'm back in med school. And by the way, my girlfriend Caitlin and I were dating and somehow she like wants to stay with me during all this.
32:20 Dax Shepard? You look rough. You did a 180.
32:22 Speaker 02 I did, I did.
32:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
32:24 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, you had 100 pounds of fluid.
32:26 Dax Shepard? And that kind of distended stomach you get when you have, I forget what condition that's called. But yeah, there's a lot happening.
32:31 Speaker 02 A lot's happening, yes.
32:33 Dax Shepard? When do we put the MBA in the mix?
32:35 Speaker 02 So the MBA comes two years after I get sick with Castleman's because I spend the next two years, certainly battling my disease, but also when I have this relapse after I get the carpet bomb chemo, I decide I'm going to dedicate my life to trying to find a cure for Castleman's. But it took getting the carpet bombing and then I was actually put on an experimental drug that I would hope would keep me in remission. And it was. After it didn't work, that then I was like, I gotta dedicate my life to this. And then it was in the course of trying to figure out a cure for Castleman's that I realized that the barriers in the way of a cure for Castleman's were not science and technology. They were like, can you get people to work together? And can you collect enough blood samples for research? And can you come up with the right strategy? And can you raise money? And like, these are organizational business problems. And I was like, oh, the science is clear. The administrator stuff is going to prevent me from solving this disease.
33:20 Speaker 02 And actually, I mentioned that experimental drug is called soluximab. And it's hard for me to put into words what it meant when I got started on this drug, because Castleman's a rare disease. So there's 18,000 human diseases, and more than half of them are very rare. And it's like, you've probably never heard of literally 10,000 plus diseases ever. Castleman's is one of those, super rare. And it's very rare for them to have a clinical trial of a drug that might work. Like 95% don't have any treatments. Mine actually had a trial. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I know there's no solutions, but maybe this drug's gonna work. I was so hopeful. And I got put on it after the carpet bombing chemo. And I really believed and hoped that it would keep me in remission. And then a little bit over a year later is when I had that relapse. And it all came back. I'm back in ICU with all my organs shutting down.
34:00 Speaker 02 And that was so difficult emotionally to go from like, I think we got it. Like, this is the thing. Like, and I think it's gonna keep me in remission. And I actually met other patients who were in remission. I like saw them. They told me how they were in ICU for months. One person had part of his bowel resected. He had all these strokes. And he was walking around on this drug. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can be like him. And then when it came back, it just wrecked me.
34:23 Dax Shepard? True vulnerability hits when you relapse like that. And you had three relapses in five years?
34:28 Speaker 02 The total of four relapses of five episodes of this disease. And each one was so difficult for the emotional parts. I mean, obviously, there was the physical part. I'm in ICU. Because for each of them, I had gotten really hopeful. And I was like, we did it. And then it just all came back.
34:40 Dax Shepard? Okay, so when do you get the kind of breakthrough thought that maybe I should approach this in an off-label way? And let's just talk about off-labeling in medicine and how that works.
34:51 Speaker 02 It was during that big relapse. And now this is flare number four, so the third relapse. And my doctors explained to me, okay, you've now failed to respond to the only drug in development. Like, soluximab is it. There's nothing else. It didn't work for you. He said, all of your organs are shutting down. I'm gonna try the same seven Chemotherapies again, there's just a few problems. One is that who knows if they're going to work again. You know, you've gotten them multiple times. They tend to lose their effectiveness as time goes on. Two, you're approaching the lifetime maximum of a drug called Adriamycin. There's only so much of these chemos that you can actually get before they cause cancer and organ dysfunction on their own. So you're approaching your lifetime max. So I don't know how many more times we can do this. And the third thing he said was, we've tried everything. There's nothing more we can do. And my sisters and my dad and my girlfriend Caitlin were sitting in the hospital room. And I remember we were just heartbroken because he's telling us.
35:35 Dax Shepard? End of the road.
35:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:36 Speaker 02 This is it, like this is it. And we're crying and it's horrible. And around maybe a minute or two of just like us all crying and bawling. I just remember thinking to myself, I'm like, wait a minute. You just gave me seven chemotherapies and none of them were made for Castleman's. They were all made for lymphoma and my Loma, and they worked. I know I keep relapsing, but how do we know there's not like an eighth drug out there? Did we try all the other drugs? There's 4,000 drugs.
35:58 Dax Shepard? 4,000 FDA approved prescriptions one could be given.
36:01 Speaker 02 Exactly. And so I've gotten 10 of them now between the different drugs. They've been like, there's nothing. Still like a lot left. And not to say every drug is possible, but how can you tell me that we've tried everything?
36:10 Dax Shepard? We're at the end of the road.
36:11 Speaker 02 If I hadn't benefited from those seven, I wouldn't have thought that. They'd be like, oh, well, nothing else is going to work. I'm like, okay, they're probably right. Nothing else worked, but they gave me drugs that were working. So that became really clear. So I told my family, I was like, I'm gonna dedicate my life to trying to find a drug for this disease. They sort of were like, all right, Dave. Weren't particularly optimistic at that moment.
36:27 Dax Shepard? As someone who loves someone going through that stuff, you're always really having a hard time debating whether or not you're gonna snuff out their hope or help them get to the part where we have closure. That's what you're trying to navigate. Like, no, my love, it's time for us to take stock of all the good stuff and have as much gratitude as we can have on the way out. It's hard.
36:45 Speaker 02 It's really hard because I also think back with my mom, probably two of the most important months of my life were the two months after the cancer was coming back, where we just were like present with one another. We were like looking at old home videos together.
36:57 Dax Shepard? Not fighting.
36:58 Speaker 02 Exactly. And then I like, look at how I've handled this. I'm like, wait a minute, I didn't do that at all. We watched no home videos. I was like in the lab trying to figure out, is there a drug that could save me? And I'm like fighting, fighting, fighting, right? It really was, it was like, let's go. So yeah, it's hard to put those two things together.
37:12 Dax Shepard? So once you have this idea, where do you start? 4,000 drugs, you start doing classes of drugs? How do you start weeding out?
37:19 Speaker 02 Great question. So the first thing I did was to try to start to understand what does the world know about this disease? And so there were 2,000 papers. I read those 2,000 papers to try to understand what do we know about Castleman disease? Second, I connected with all those doctors for all the papers that were written to try to start connecting them through an organization called the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network. So I created this nonprofit to basically let's centralize all the doctors, the patients, the loved ones. Let's get an understanding for what do we know? Cause I even heard there was a doctor in Japan that was trying this one drug. I'm like, well, I want to try that drug.
37:46 Speaker 01 How are you doing all this? Weren't you so tired? I mean, your organs are in flux. How are you doing this?
37:52 Speaker 02 I did none of this for the month that I was in ICU. So like I made the promise to my family and then I'm out for the next four weeks fighting for my life. But it's then, once I started to make it through that, that then it's like, all right, let's get to work. And so started reading papers, started reaching out to doctors. So coming up with sort of this network. And then the second thing was, let me look at all the related diseases. These that are kind of like Castleman's that are weird immune disorders, like psoriatic arthritis. What's out there? What are all these drugs that exist for other conditions?
38:16 Dax Shepard? Cause we would agree, these labels are arbitrary.
38:18 Speaker 02 They are very arbitrary.
38:20 Dax Shepard? There's a doctor dealing with six patients over here that calls it this thing. It could be the same thing, right?
38:23 Speaker 02 Exactly. And the drug companies, when they pick a disease to pursue, they've got a lot to pick from. Like they picked the IL-17 drug for psoriatic arthritis, but they could have picked a lung disease with the same drug. And they picked for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with biology and nothing to do with whether it's going to work. It's like they have to figure out the most profitable opportunity.
38:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah, kind of market.
38:40 Speaker 02 Just because it's not approved for it doesn't mean it's not going to work. So my mindset was, okay, let's figure out what we know about Castleman's. Let's start looking at related diseases that are like Castleman's. And then the last bucket, which was probably the scariest, or at least the most challenging was, I'm going to start collecting blood samples on myself and start trying to do research on my own samples. And the reason that was scary is because I didn't really know all that much about laboratory research. I found this amazing colleague at Penn who gave me some space in her lab, but I could do the first two. Like I could build a network and I built that organization, AMF. I could understand what other diseases there were, but like starting to do experiments, that was certainly the most challenging. And so, yeah, over the next year, built out the network and started identifying, you know, potential related drugs. Was storing my blood samples every couple of weeks in the lab.
39:21 Dax Shepard? And so as opposed to you taking one of the medicines and Monitoring your symptoms, you were actually able to apply the medicine to your blood in some kind of a petri dish and observe it?
39:31 Speaker 02 So what I was doing was actually trying to understand in my blood samples, which of my immune cells were turned on, what were the proteins that were elevated in my blood versus healthy people and see if that could give me a fingerprint for what was wrong in my disease. My idea was that if I could figure out what was wrong, I could then see is there a drug that can reverse the thing that's wrong. Like if something's too high here, find a drug that can maybe make it go down.
39:53 Dax Shepard? Yes.
39:53 Speaker 02 That was that third bucket in my mind that I wanted to do.
39:56 Dax Shepard? How hard was just the figuring out which of these T cells or immune cells were the ones that were problematic? That feels hard enough right there.
40:04 Speaker 02 It is hard. Didn't even get to the third bucket before I then had my fifth relapse. I was just storing these samples. So by that stage, I started business school because I'd finished med school and I had this relapse and I had this long spreadsheet and I remember now I had a couple of drugs at the top that I thought maybe we should try because they were used in related diseases. I hadn't yet done the experiments in my own blood to figure out what could be maybe useful for me. And I remember I talked to my doctors about trying this one drug called psycosporin. We tried it. We were so hopeful and then it didn't work at all. My disease was just roaring through it. Organs were shutting down. All of the markers were bad. I was getting like worse and worse every day. And then I asked my doctors to try the number two drug on my list, this drug called IVIG. It requires an infusion. I remember I'm going to get that infusion and my doctor who I asked to do this, she asked me, she was like, do you want some fries for that order, David?
40:48 Speaker 02 Because I'm like asking for this IVIG.
40:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, well, that's, that was gonna be one of my questions, like, were you able to prescribe yourself this stuff? Cause you had your medical degree or were you reliant? And how hard is it to get other doctors to sign on to this approach?
41:01 Speaker 02 I was reliant on the other doctors and it's appropriately hard to get these medicines, right? Like it should be hard, you know, it shouldn't just be the drugs get thrown all over the place. But while it was appropriately hard and I needed to show them evidence and reasoning, I was dying. They'd already told me they tried everything. They already told me they didn't have anything else for me. So I'm telling them things that maybe we could try.
41:19 Speaker 01 You're like, I'm here to be a lab rat now.
41:21 Speaker 02 Exactly. And I was willing to take on all the risks. It's like, I know that the drug could kill me, but I'm not going to live much longer. And so the IVIG, they gave me the infusion, everything stopped. All the things that were getting worse halted.
41:33 Dax Shepard? In like what timeframe?
41:34 Speaker 02 Within a couple of days. So like it's halting and I'm with Caitlin and we're engaged and we're like.
41:38 Dax Shepard? Are you scared to trust it as well, though?
41:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:41 Speaker 02 I sort of wish I was.
41:44 Speaker 01 You're just so humble, so nice.
41:47 Speaker 02 I was like, IVIG. I remember literally saying the words, we did it, Caitlin. We did it. And so a couple more days go by and then all of a sudden, things start getting worse.
41:55 Speaker 01 No.
41:58 Speaker 02 I'm like, this can't be. We go for blood work. It's getting horrible. Within a couple of weeks, now I'm back in ICU with everything shutting down. And I just tried the two things that were like the top of our list. I gave it my best. I wasn't ready to like fully accept it, but at least we tried it. And I had the feeling like we tried and we failed. And then my doctors gave me the same seven chemotherapies. This time they gave me the highest dose they'd ever given a human of this one drug called atobasid. And I remember saying goodbye to my family again and saying goodbye to Caitlin. I was just heartbroken about it. And Caitlin and I were supposed to get married five months later and I felt like I failed her.
42:31 Dax Shepard? She wasted all this time.
42:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, she'd been with me for all this time and she is just amazing. I remember sort of starting to close my eyes and let go. I remember falling asleep and realizing that this was it. And a couple of days passed and that crazy intense chemo worked just enough. Like I squeaked by. I remember starting to wake up and just being shocked. It was a lot of feelings. Like one was shock, another was, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. Like I'm.
42:59 Speaker 01 The amount of times you've said it worked.
43:02 Speaker 02 But this time I didn't say it worked. It was like, because of what happened just a couple of weeks before. But then it was immediately the sense of urgency was like, okay, I've got a window. I don't know how long it's gonna be. I turned, my sister Gina was on my left side and Caitlin was on my right side. And I remember turning to Gina and I was like, hey, G. And they're both like, oh my God, damn. Hey, G, can you go downstairs and see if you can get that lymph node they just cut out and send it to Philadelphia? And I was like, and Caitlin, will you call UNC and send those blood samples to Philly? Can you get the records to go down too? And they're both like, what? And I was like, because I'm getting out of here. I was like, and we gotta find a drug for this thing. And so it was about three weeks of me recovering, just like, I gotta get to Philly, I gotta get to Philly, I gotta get to Philly. So I got to Philly and I thought of the blood samples and started doing experiments. This is when I was now in that third bucket, which is what are those immune cells doing? What proteins are too high?
43:47 Speaker 02 I spent about three weeks doing experiments. And by the end of it, I was pretty convinced that this one part of my immune system called mTOR. So your immune cells, they're all over your body, literally billions of cells. They have to communicate with one another and be able to let cells in different parts know what's going on. One of the key communication lines in your immune system is called mTOR. The research I had done on my own samples suggested it was turned into overdrive. There's like too much mTOR on. You can imagine like if your fire alarm is mTOR and it's saying like, there's a fire here and it's stuck in overdrive. Your immune system is going to go berserk. In my opinion, and the data suggested it's a false alarm. Like the alarm is going off, it's going berserk, but there's nothing to fight. So when I saw this result, I got so excited because there are drugs that are called mTOR inhibitors. They've been around for decades. They actually were made for organ transplant rejection.
44:29 Speaker 02 Because if you get a kidney, your immune system will attack that organ and it'll turn mTOR on. But if you turn mTOR off, the alarm goes off and you don't attack that kidney. So I was like, oh my gosh, we can try an mTOR inhibitor. And so I took the data to my doctors and they prescribed me this mTOR inhibitor called serilimus.
44:45 Dax Shepard? It was like a 10 year old drug at the time?
44:47 Speaker 02 Been on the market 15 years, sort of known for a few decades. And yeah, now it's been over 11 and a half years that I've been doing great on this medicine.
44:53 Speaker 01 Wow.
44:55 Speaker 02 No relapses, full health. Yes, let's start knocking it all away.
44:59 Dax Shepard? The question I don't want to ask, but I got to ask is how many of these drugs your body kind of adapts?
45:04 Speaker 02 How long is it going to work for? Yeah, it's the right question. I mean, I think that what's so crazy is how long it's been.
45:09 Dax Shepard? Well, to me, you know, Evan's like, you've definitely passed that window where stuff stops.
45:13 Speaker 02 But you can imagine that every day that went by afterwards, I used to measure, someone would be like, how long have you been in remission for? And I'd be like 37.29 months. And they're like, what?
45:23 Dax Shepard? You're like someone in sobriety.
45:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm like, I can't round up. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow when you're going through these sorts of things. But I know it's been like 28.29. And so the months added up, I made it to Caitlin's wedding day, May 24, 2014. My hair grew back just in time for the wedding.
45:36 Dax Shepard? Nice.
45:37 Speaker 02 It looked like a buzz cut.
45:38 Dax Shepard? That was a great do, but.
45:39 Speaker 02 Back in time. And yeah, the months have just sort of stacked and stacked.
45:42 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you come out of this and I don't know in order, but you get a job as a professor at Penn in the medical school.
45:49 Speaker 02 That's right.
45:49 Dax Shepard? And you have a lab.
45:50 Speaker 02 Yep.
45:51 Dax Shepard? And you decide to really dedicate yourself to exploring. These other 18,000 diseases with these 4,000 medicines that exist to see what off-label stuff could exist. Are you immediately employing AI? When does AI enter the picture? Because it's gotta be almost impossible without AI.
46:09 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right. So the moment that Syrilime started helping me, I just remember having these flashbacks to walking past the CVS and being like, wait a minute, it was in there. All those three years that I was dying from this thing and all those five times I said goodbye to my family, like, it was in that CVS. And I just never knew it. Like, no one knew it.
46:29 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
46:36 Dax Shepard? We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left. What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already right there. Inside your email, your docs, your browser. You don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important?
47:18 Dax Shepard? It flags what doesn't add up before it leaves your hands. It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed. At your service, not after your job. So, do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So, we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?
47:56 Speaker 01 Which is a fair ques-
47:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10pm to 7am.
48:23 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
48:25 Dax Shepard? Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age appropriate experiences for teens.
48:40 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram is helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
48:44 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. We get support by Peloton. You know that feeling when you're spiraling over a problem and you just can't figure it out? When that happens to me, I need a change of pace and I've found that running is the best way. It takes my brain out of the driver's seat and I come back with a fresh perspective. Running can be freeing and cathartic and Peloton helps you feel all of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's movable and foldable, designed to fit your life. So next time you feel stuck, you can go for a run literally anywhere, whether that's in your
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50:48 Speaker 01 Are you kind of like, why didn't all these doctors figure? I'd be mad.
50:52 Dax Shepard? You would.
50:52 Speaker 01 Well, I'm just in here doing my own blood and testing. Why aren't these other doctors doing that?
50:58 Dax Shepard? I think you have to acknowledge how myopic the field of medicine is. You are an oncologist. His father's a surgeon. You're not in the synthesizing generalist business. You're in the specializing business. And generalizing and synthesizing is so hard. This is why people were freaked out, you know, that Homeland Security was tapping everyone's phones. And so it's like, this is a fucking joke. Nothing can synthesize all this information. You can gather information all you want, but to actually find patterns within information is so time-consuming and nearly impossible for a human to do.
51:30 Speaker 02 I completely agree. And then also, the incentives are the other problem for why this doesn't happen.
51:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're not going to launch a new drug. Hopefully, you're going to pick up another few patients, but it's going to be a few. So the pharma company is not incentivized to figure this out.
51:42 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. So once I started, oh, my gosh, how many drugs are out there? It's like, okay, this worked for me. Are there other drugs out there for other people? And I'm just thinking about like the patients that I took care of in med school, where we said, this is it, we're out of options. Like, well, maybe we weren't. Maybe there was something else. I think about my mom. Maybe there was something that could have helped her.
51:57 Dax Shepard? I'm going to add too, it's not a sexy idea.
51:59 Speaker 02 No, not at all. It's like recycling old drugs.
52:01 Dax Shepard? We like inventions and breakthroughs. And we don't like hearing the fucking answer was sitting next to us the whole time.
52:06 Speaker 01 Well, unless you have the ailment, then it's really sexy. Like, it's already here.
52:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, of course. It's just our nature is to want the breakthrough and the next thing and the next clinical trial and not, hey, we already had it.
52:18 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. The people who are doing the work are not. Not incentivized is the patients like we are incentivized to do. We can benefit from it, but the people actually doing the work are not going to benefit from it. The same way that they would a new drug. So decide that, okay, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to find new uses for the medicines we have. I want to save people with treatments that already exist, just in the same way that I was able to be saved. And so joined the faculty at Penn. And of course, we started focusing on Castleman's and other related rare inflammatory diseases. Rare cancers, rare autoimmune conditions.
52:45 Dax Shepard? Cause there's some weird overlap.
52:47 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. So Castleman's is very similar to multiple myeloma, it's similar to Poem Syndrome. There are these weird inflammatory conditions and cancers that overlap. And so start studying them and we start finding more repurposed drugs. I'm like, wait a minute, there's more for Castleman's and there's more for Poem Syndrome.
53:02 Dax Shepard? Sadly, you had recommended to another guy suffering from Castleman's to take what just worked for you. And you were so excited to share it with them. And then it worked for a minute, but it didn't work.
53:10 Speaker 02 It worked in some Castleman's patients, not in others. I remember the first Castleman's patient that I got to see, because we treated patients in various parts of the world, but that I actually got to see in person, a young boy named Joey, who responded incredibly well to it. So of course, Monica, you're going to laugh with me that here I am again, like we figured it out. Like Castleman's is taken care of. Look at Joey, like it's working for everyone. We're done with Castleman's.
53:29 Dax Shepard? I was directing the sitcom version of this, like he would always pop champagne. And just like by the 20th time we saw him pop champagne, we were laughing so hard.
53:35 Speaker 02 I know.
53:36 Dax Shepard? But you need that spirit, actually.
53:38 Speaker 01 It takes that.
53:39 Dax Shepard? It's essential.
53:40 Speaker 01 Type of mentality.
53:40 Dax Shepard? That's right.
53:41 Speaker 01 Thank God.
53:41 Speaker 02 So we start helping these other people and then it's other diseases. And so angiosarcoma, this horrible cancer, we find that there was research that was done three years earlier about a potential drug that could be useful for it, but it was done in the lab and it was never given to a patient. And we treat a patient with it and it works for him. And like he has this uniformly fatal cancer. And actually this person is actually my uncle. And so that's even why I was thinking about it. My uncle, Michael, he got this horrible diagnosis. Everyone dies within a year.
54:07 Dax Shepard? I hate to be, this is too much stuff in your family. You guys all on a well. Like some point I get suspicious of your environment. This is like a definitely disproportionate amount.
54:18 Speaker 02 We've had a lot of suffering.
54:19 Dax Shepard? Yes.
54:20 Speaker 02 So figure out the basically this work had been done three years earlier, but no one ever tried it in a patient. So we get Michael on this drug. It works incredibly well. Last month, he walked his daughter down the aisle on her wedding nine years later. This is crazy, incredible. So start giving it to other patients. It turns out it works in about 18% of patients. So it's not everyone, but 18% of it works in, it's everything. You're living years instead of weeks. And so that for me was this major eye opener. The other drugs we discovered, the repurposed drugs, we did a lot of hard lab work to figure it out, doing experiments in my blood and other people's samples. But we didn't have to do anything for Michael. We said to find a paper that someone else had published and everyone had just disregarded because like you can't read millions of papers a year and stay on top of everything. And so here I was like, wait a minute, maybe there's actually breadcrumbs that are already out there.
55:03 Speaker 02 So we don't even have to do all the crazy hard lab work. And so that was a really important moment for me. And fast forward over these 11 years, we've now advanced 14 repurposed drugs for a number of rare diseases. We save thousands of lives, including angiosarcoma patients. But about three years ago was when artificial intelligence was really coming on the scene. And to your point, we could do 14 drugs for rare diseases, saving a few thousand lives. But AI actually would allow us to say like, instead of looking at these few diseases, we actually can look at all 4,000 drugs and all 18,000 diseases and let AI actually score globally. Every drug, every disease in a way that one lab never could, one person never could. And so that was the big unlock.
55:43 Dax Shepard? The whole school, if you dedicated the school, no, couldn't do that.
55:46 Speaker 02 Years, it would be impossible for humans to do. So three years ago, my best friend from medical school, Grant and I and Tracy Secor, we co-founded Every Cure, this nonprofit, with the idea being that we want a nonprofit that's on a mission to save lives with the drugs we already have. It's here to unlock the potential of the treatments we have to treat the diseases that ail us. And we use AI to actually quantify every drug to treat every disease. So there's 4,000 drugs, 18,000 diseases, that's 75 million possibilities. If you tried every drug and every disease, you do it 75 million times, we get a score from zero to one for every one of them, for how likely it is to work.
56:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So what's the max out of that zero to one range? I read that and I was just curious, what do you see normally or what's outrageous? Like a point seven is like, whoa, we got something.
56:26 Speaker 02 It's a good question. It's a fairly linear scoring system. So there's actually a lot of point nine, nine, nine, nine. The idea being that we want to look at the point nine nines. The whole point of the score is to always say like, what are the things at the top? Cause if you start with Castleman's only, it's like, well, you might find the best drug for Castleman's. But is that the best drug for humanity to use? Is that the best match between a drug and a disease? Probably not. But if you do this all versus all, to your point, like you can look at the things that are the point nine nines. And you come across things where like, really? But then you dig into it deeper and you figure out.
56:53 Dax Shepard? Vitamin that you've discovered had an impact on nonverbal autistic kids. This seems impossible.
57:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, so a portion of kids that are nonverbal and or have other neurodevelopmental challenges, often speech delays. They actually can have a antibody against the folate receptor. So folate is important for brain development. And in order to get folate into your brain, you need this receptor to be functioning. But if you have an antibody against it, basically the vitamin doesn't cross into the brain. These kids can have what's called a cerebral folate deficiency. And so interestingly, there's a derivative of folate called folinic acid. It was made for people that are on methotrexate chemotherapy and it's been around for decades. But that derivative of folate can actually bypass this blockage at the receptor and can get into the brain.
57:35 Dax Shepard? Can leapfrog this whole.
57:36 Speaker 02 There's something called the RFC, which is a channel right next to the folate receptor. And so if the folate receptor is blocked, but if you give the derivative of folate, it can go through this channel. So basically leapfrog, get in the brain. And that was a really important discovery that humans made.
57:48 Dax Shepard? Let me ask you really quick, so that makes total sense. There's this thing inhibiting this vitamin required for this part of the brain to function. But in the absence of that, wouldn't that portion have already been so atrophied? It couldn't be brought back or it's just there and it needs that as fuel?
58:03 Speaker 02 It's a good question. We don't know the answer to it. All we know is that work's been done to show that some of these kids have too little folate. We know that the reason they have too little folate is because they have the body receptor. And then the really interesting thing is there have been multiple clinical trials now, all relatively small, that have shown that giving this derivative folinic acid can improve verbal communication in these kids.
58:20 Speaker 01 Is it just a pill?
58:21 Speaker 02 It's just a pill.
58:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, give the example. One kid was nonverbal for five years.
58:25 Speaker 02 That's Ryan. Ryan was basically nonverbal for five years. He could do something called echolocia, where if someone said something to him, he could repeat it back to them. But he could never actually share his own. He'd never made the executive communication where he made the decision. He had receptive communication. So he had a lot of things in his mind that he wanted to say, but he couldn't say them. Within two weeks, starting lukavoran, he told his dad for the first time ever a statement. And he said, Daddy, I love you.
58:47 Speaker 01 Oh, you can't even write.
58:49 Dax Shepard? That would have killed dad on the spot.
58:51 Speaker 02 Like I cried for the next 15 minutes.
58:52 Speaker 01 Oh.
58:53 Speaker 02 I couldn't do anything.
58:54 Speaker 01 Can you imagine?
58:54 Speaker 02 He couldn't even leave the house.
58:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, my kids' first sentence would be like, I want to go to Target, I think.
58:58 Speaker 01 Oh, because he's been stuck wanting to say this.
59:02 Dax Shepard? And also, like, should Ryan have had behavioral issues over the years? Of course, if you had all your thoughts and you couldn't fucking get them out to you, I would rage.
59:10 Speaker 02 Could you imagine?
59:11 Dax Shepard? But there's been multiple success stories.
59:14 Speaker 02 There have. Multiple success stories. Next, there's another patient, Mason, who within three days of starting it, he said his first word, and just thinking about what my kids would say, his first word was more. And I feel like that's all my kids do is ask me for more. And I was like, that's exactly what my kids are, more, more, more, more, more.
59:28 Speaker 01 That's very human.
59:29 Speaker 02 Me too.
59:31 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh, that's so incredible.
59:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and so like, this is why we wanted to start every cure, because there's things that are out there. And I love that every cure in AI can help us discover new treatments. And I can share about some that we've discovered, literally, it's like, oh, wow, this is never been used, that's amazing. But sometimes it just uncovers what us humans know about, but we just don't put into practice.
59:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I want to hear those two things. I want some more examples. And I also want to know, I keep reading, you guys trained this model to do this.
59:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:55 Dax Shepard? But how the fuck do you take this tool we have and actually get it to go through every single medical journal ever written? How do you construct that? That's its own breakthrough.
1:00:05 Speaker 02 It is. So we utilize something called biomedical knowledge graph. So a knowledge graph is a way to basically construct and bring together lots and lots of information from disparate places. So imagine a knowledge graph would be if we had on the wall, every drug, every disease, every gene, everything we know about medicine, all as one node each. And then you've got lines connecting all of them based on the relationship between them. So we use every paper that's ever been written, all data we can find online, anything that we can find, we'll fill out this graph. So every concept plus all the relationships between them. So it's like, so tuxomab treats Castleman disease, IL-6 elevated in Castleman's. But imagine that for everything on this graph.
1:00:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:00:39 Speaker 02 So now this search is the perfect ingredients to then train machine learning algorithms. Because we can say, you know, this whole graph here, this drug works for this disease. This drug works for that disease. And we train it on the known treatments. And what it'll learn is that there was a paper that was published three years earlier, like an angiosarcoma, showing that this drug might work in that disease, and it did. And so understand these patterns. And then we ask the exact same algorithm now that we've shown that this drug works for this disease. Now give us a score from zero to one for how likely every other drug is to treat every other disease based on these pattern of connections.
1:01:07 Dax Shepard? And do we owe the Scandinavians the biggest debt of gratitude? I don't think the ones that have kept the best medical data and made it. It's not public, but it's public. It's obscured, but it's all there.
1:01:17 Speaker 02 Yes, Northern Europeans have done a great job with electronic medical record data.
1:01:21 Dax Shepard? These like epidemiological studies in five seconds.
1:01:23 Speaker 02 Absolutely, yes. Everyone's in the same database, which a lot of other countries, we don't have that.
1:01:27 Dax Shepard? I know we all have privacy concerns, but there's got to be a way. Everything I've gone through with this whole psoriatic arthritis thing, like I could save someone years if you could access my thing and just not know my name.
1:01:37 Speaker 02 I feel like we need to move towards that. Yeah, why is this not happening on its own? Like, what's broken about our system? And I think there's a couple of things that have just completely shocked me. So first of all, those 4,000 drugs we have, 80% of them are generic, which means that once a drug becomes generic, anyone can make a copy of that drug, the exact same drug, it's the same name. And when you have 10 people making the exact same drug, the price plummets, which is good for our healthcare system. It's not a cheap drug, but now it's like a penny a pill of profit per sale. And there's 10 different companies all selling what one company used to sell. So you might find that that drug could work for a million people with another disease, and no one will make any money off of that. The depressing thing is that that shouldn't matter, but it does matter. It's not that people are hiding, it's just that if you can't make any money off this
1:02:19 Speaker 02 thing, you can't spend millions of dollars doing clinical trials and then actually raising awareness about it. Somehow 80% of the drugs we have, there's no incentive to find a new use for them at all, even though they're there and they're safe and we know how they work and we know everything about them. And they're the things that are perfect for a knowledge graph because we've got a lot of knowledge about them. Of course, everyone's using AI to find new uses for medicines, but no one's using AI to find new uses for old medicines. Right. And so that financial problem is huge.
1:02:44 Dax Shepard? So real before you move on to the next one, what's the solution for that one?
1:02:48 Speaker 02 We feel that the solution is to create a nonprofit that doesn't have to be driven by profit. So we've got this financial problem, which is that it's not profitable to find a new use for an old medicine. And then on top of that, we have an issue that somehow no entity is taking responsibility to be like, I know that there's this market problem over here, but we're the NIH or the FDA or we're some entity, we're just going to do this. Like, we're just going to find new uses for medicines. And so there's just been this huge gap. And then to your point earlier, there's also never really been the technological capability to really do this at scale. So maybe we can't blame the system too much because it's only recent that the system could even address this.
1:03:22 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:03:22 Speaker 02 But when you bring those three things together, we have this horrible situation where there's all these drugs that could help people, all these people that are suffering, and no one doing the work to bring them together.
1:03:30 Dax Shepard? But you're here now.
1:03:31 Speaker 01 Thank God.
1:03:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's all every year.
1:03:32 Dax Shepard? Okay, so give us a couple more. I read an article maybe in The New Yorker about Joseph Coats.
1:03:37 Speaker 02 Joseph was diagnosed with a rare cancer called Poem Syndrome. He actually was initially thought to have Castleman's disease. And so that's how we initially got connected. He came to a conference and I got a chance to meet him. His diagnosis was changed correctly to Poems. And a few months went by and I hadn't heard anything about how Joseph is doing or what was going on. And then his girlfriend Tara reached out. She said, David, since I saw you guys last, Joseph got really, really bad. He's in ICU right now and he's on life support. This was a Friday and by Monday, the doctors are going to take him off of life support and put him in end of life hospice care. And I remember just being so shocked, like, oh, my gosh, I saw him just a few months ago. He has so much life and energy and love and just heartbroken for it. And Poem Syndrome is a condition that I mentioned is in the sort of same
1:04:21 Speaker 02 family as Castleman's and myeloma. So I knew enough about it to where I felt comfortable really digging into see like, are there drugs we could recommend for Joseph? I know that his doctors are ready to give up, but can we just try something? And so I was able to get in touch with his doctor on that Saturday. And his doctor graciously called me back on a Saturday. I recommended three drugs that are typically used for multiple myeloma, which again is a similar cancer to Poem Syndrome. That doctor hadn't considered. In hindsight, it's like, let's be creative here. Yes, there's nothing for poems, but like, let's look to the side of poems.
1:04:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:49 Speaker 02 Thankfully, he listened to me and he's like, well, I'll talk to the family and I'll talk to my colleagues. Maybe we'll try them. But he was actually very worried about the fact that the chemotherapy that we were recommending was going to kill Joseph. And I talked to him and said, but you're going to take him off life support on Monday. He's going to die from his disease. Let's give him a shot. Let's try this.
1:05:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:05:07 Speaker 02 He made the decision to try these three drugs. And we just sort of waited for the next few days, like, what are we going to find out? And then within a few days, heard that things started to improve. And I can't tell you.
1:05:17 Dax Shepard? You got that bottle of champagne out.
1:05:19 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
1:05:20 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:05:22 Dax Shepard? Cuts a cigar tip.
1:05:24 Speaker 02 He responded, he got out of the hospital. And then what's so amazing is that Poem Syndrome is a condition where if you can get into remission, like we got him into, we did a stem cell transplant for him. And so he's potentially even cured right now. So like, I saw him just a few weeks ago and he's got the most incredible energy and he's so positive. And he's got his life back. So I should also mention, this is an example. And at every cure, the way that we work is so we scan every drug against every disease or AI platform. Our med team finds the best matches and then we move them forward. We do lab studies, we do clinical trials. With this whole systematic approach to fix this system problem. And then also in parallel, we get contacted by patients like Joseph and Tara. I struggle so much because I want to help them. I want to throw the Hail Mary in the same way that we did a Hail Mary for me.
1:06:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 And at the same time, we have this systematic process where we've got a 50 member team where we're using AI. We have to focus on that. Like we've got this responsibility from a systems level because there's people at the other end of these drugs that we're working on that are waiting for solutions. But then there's also people who are reaching out to us like Tara and Joseph. And that's probably the biggest struggle that I have is how do I balance the two? Because we've got an amazing team, but our team can't actually pursue every disease that we're contacting.
1:06:31 Dax Shepard? I hate to be crude, but you could be penny wise and pound foolish.
1:06:34 Speaker 02 I think that's the right analogy here. And so what we have to do is we have to say, okay, if you match every drug to every disease, what are the best opportunities? We have nine programs already. We launched this nonprofit three years ago. We built our platform over the first couple of years. We've only been using the pipeline for 12 months. We already have nine drug disease matches that we're advancing forward from breast cancer.
1:06:53 Dax Shepard? And there's this lidocaine thing, which is bizarre. Tell Monica about this.
1:06:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. So amazingly, there's really interesting both laboratory and clinical data on the potential role that lidocaine injection could play in individuals with breast cancer. So lidocaine is the numbing medicine you get when you go to the dentist, right? So injecting it around a breast cancer tumor before surgery, there was a large trial that was done in India of 1,600 patients. And those patients who had it injected around their tumor before surgery had a 29% reduction in mortality at five years versus people who didn't. But lidocaine, like this simple substance, and it was published in a major journal called the Journal of Clinical Oncology, one of the best cancer journals in the world. We're looking at it in our platform. It comes through our pipeline and we're like, people must be using this, right? It's like super cheap and it's widely available. But then we learned that no one is using this. The paper's out there, the study's done, and the general consensus from a lot of folks is like, well, you guys should do another study,
1:07:42 Speaker 02 another seven year study and see how people are doing. The question is, do we need to do another seven year study? This one's already proven. A randomized controlled trial. It's already going to be used in. Surgery and so we are doing more lab work now because the other thing that doctors like is to understand why something might work because like oh we injected lidocaine and people died less like well why so we are doing lab work to try to figure out the mechanism we've got some hypotheses one is there's a lot of evidence to suggest that during the actual act of surgery to cut out a tumor whether it's breast cancer or you name the tumor that that's apparently a moment when a number of cancer cells become very migratory they basically try to escape from the region it's partly because there's decreased blood flow because there's trauma that's occurring in the area so the thought is that there's actually metastases that occur while you're operating it's actually migration and of course this is a hypothesis but it's something we're
1:08:25 Speaker 02 studying so the idea for how lidocaine may work is that lidocaine is very good at making cells non-migratory it stops it from moving the thought is that maybe we prevent what would have been a future metastasis to your liver or you name it from being able to get out of the space before the surgery happens
1:08:42 Dax Shepard? You're like kind of paralyzing
1:08:43 Speaker 02 Paralyze it and you actually do the injection eight to 10 minutes before surgery so you're like paralyzing it then you cut it out and at least in these patients in India it was a game changer
1:08:51 Dax Shepard? We trust India
1:08:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, we like that
1:08:53 Speaker 02 So these are the kinds of things that we would have never thought to look for
1:08:56 Dax Shepard? One that blew my mind is botox in the frowning because that is a cycle as we know the people that were famously documenting all the face shapes were giving themselves emotions and this is a two-way street and just numbing the ability to frown can have an impact on depression maybe crazy
1:09:13 Speaker 02 Yes, so this idea with botox is there's actually have been clinical studies that for about three or four months after a botox injection right here between your eyebrows there's improvement in moods
1:09:22 Speaker 01 So it's crazy
1:09:25 Speaker 02 Right and so we got to figure this stuff out and I mean we actually just talked through two of our nine programs but one of my favorite ones is this rare condition called Bachmann buff so kids are born on feeding tubes they're unable to move it's a horrible condition it's because they have too high levels of an enzyme called OCE1 and so what's so interesting is that African sleeping sickness is a condition that involves elevated levels of OCE1 so there's a drug called DFMO that blocks OCE1 for African sleeping sickness well it turns out that OCE1 is also too high in these poor kids that are bed bound on feeding tubes if you give that drug DFMO to these kids and there's now been about 10 kids treated the early The more likely they might have their feeding tube taken out. They might sit up. They can even walk. I keep saying this is why we started EveryCure. Every one of these is why we started EveryCure. But this is it, right?
1:10:10 Speaker 02 It's like this super rare disease. This super cheap drug's been around for decades. No one's ever gonna do the work to get it to every patient possible. But we at EveryCure, we can do that. We can get involved in trying to diagnose more kids, to make sure that more kids get DFMO. This is for us why we did this.
1:10:23 Dax Shepard? Well, okay, so if people want to support EveryCure, what should they do?
1:10:26 Speaker 02 Go to everycure.org/donate to donate to us. Also, a big part of this is awareness raising. So thinking about some of the drugs we've talked about and even others that we're working on. Part of it is doing really good science, great lab work, great clinical trials. But another part is actually just getting the word out. If you know someone who might be able to have this blood test, it might be helpful for someone in their family. So go into our website, learn about our organization, help to spread the word. I did a TED Talk that came out about a month ago. Spread the word about that. These are the kinds of things that actually, patients will benefit because we tweeted something. The work's already been done. The drugs are there, so just get in the word.
1:10:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Mary, how often does your wife come? It's like, we gotta eat kale now. And you're like, how'd you find that out? My whole diet is based on whatever someone's told my wife. That is good for us now.
1:11:06 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:11:07 Dax Shepard? And then, of course, people should read your book, Chasing My Cure. It's wonderful. It's rare that I can say this to somebody, but I'm so happy you didn't make it in the NFL.
1:11:16 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:11:16 Dax Shepard? Congratulations on not going to the NFL. We needed you way more.
1:11:20 Speaker 01 And not getting CTE.
1:11:22 Dax Shepard? I knew we wouldn't make it through.
1:11:26 Speaker 01 We're just lucky that you didn't get it because you wouldn't be able to do all this.
1:11:29 Speaker 02 Very true. Maybe there's a drug to repurpose.
1:11:32 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:11:34 Dax Shepard? David, this has been a delight, and I hope everyone does check out your book and checks out the website. And totally grateful this is the work you're doing. And every time we're getting really negative and pessimistic about AI, it's also doing this. It's like doing this shit humans could never do. Can't come through all that stuff. Thank you so much. Good luck with everything.
1:11:50 Speaker 02 Well, thanks for having me. This has been so special. Thanks, guys.
1:12:03 Dax Shepard? Okay, so I have, I have huge Aaron updates.
1:12:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:12:06 Dax Shepard? Okay, so Aaron was there for, I think, five days.
1:12:11 Speaker 01 He already went?
1:12:12 Dax Shepard? He flew home this morning.
1:12:14 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. So he didn't fall down?
1:12:17 Dax Shepard? Well, listen, um, in order, you know, each evening, I would FaceTime him.
1:12:25 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:12:25 Dax Shepard? Uh, even before he started. And, um, I said, look, what, what's the game plan for this? Like the second story, um, Eve on the roof, you know? Uh, I said, you need to rent like a bucket? Do you, if you want to rent a bucket, you know, let me know, I'll figure that out. And he said, uh, no, I think I'm going, uh, I'm going harness and ropes.
1:12:45 Speaker 01 Okay, I like that. But what's that mean? You, you put yourself in kind of a diaper?
1:12:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you put yourself in a leather diaper or a nylon diaper.
1:12:54 Speaker 01 You use a carabiner?
1:12:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and then you hook off onto the roof.
1:12:59 Speaker 01 What, what, to what?
1:13:01 Dax Shepard? Exactly. So the issue with the house in Nashville is it has a metal roof. So you can't do what he would have done when he was a roofer, which is like anchor it to the top, just screw into the wood.
1:13:10 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:13:11 Dax Shepard? So he had to lasso the chimneys.
1:13:13 Speaker 01 What?
1:13:14 Dax Shepard? Yes, but this, this plan wasn't, he, I think wisely, like I would have done. He just kept putting off the height.
1:13:23 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:13:24 Dax Shepard? The really tall work.
1:13:25 Speaker 01 The hard part.
1:13:26 Dax Shepard? He just kept like working in the yard and work, doing trees and doing like fences and stuff. And just, I think, eyeing all week. And, and so each night, but he's up and down a ladder. You know, he's doing a lot of ladder stuff.
1:13:37 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:13:38 Dax Shepard? And then I would look at the cameras at the house just to see if he was lying anywhere on the ground, you know?
1:13:43 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:13:44 Dax Shepard? And then I would FaceTime him every night, which was so fun. A, just to have an excuse to have to FaceTime every single night.
1:13:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:51 Dax Shepard? It's a good, I want to make up a reason why I have to do that.
1:13:53 Speaker 01 I think you can just, friendship can be the reason.
1:13:55 Dax Shepard? I know, but there's something more organic about it. It was like, okay, good, you're alive. And then I'd hear about everything he did that day. And, um, all right, so did you look at the pictures?
1:14:05 Speaker 01 Okay. I see him on top. Wow.
1:14:11 Speaker 01 This is so dangerous.
1:14:14 Dax Shepard? Yes, Aaron looks, he looks like an ant on top of the roof.
1:14:18 Speaker 01 Who's taking these pics?
1:14:19 Dax Shepard? Chris, the contractor happened to stop by for something else and he sees Aaron way on the top. Look at the one of Aaron crawling up.
1:14:26 Speaker 01 I know, that's so scary, Dax.
1:14:28 Dax Shepard? I want him to almost be a decoration, like, wouldn't it be funny if there was a person, we had a person, like a dummy up there putting it on?
1:14:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:36 Dax Shepard? Um, okay, now if you go to the last picture in that group, do you see Aaron lying on the?
1:14:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, on the roof.
1:14:44 Dax Shepard? Okay, so he did fall.
1:14:47 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no, no. Aaron, and by the way, he's not wearing the helmet, so he does not get $500 from me.
1:14:58 Dax Shepard? Okay, but look how happy he is, zoom in on his face. This is textbook Aaron. So Aaron, he had this long rope, but the problem was is this, the chimney is not centered to where he needs to be on the high point. So he's using this rope kind of diagonally. And he's, in his mind, he's like, oh yeah, I mapped this out perfectly, like, if I fall, it's gonna catch me on the second story. Well, no, the rope was longer than he anticipated and he fell down to the first story. Um, but he did land right before he would have gone off the edge.
1:15:27 Speaker 01 On the ground, yeah.
1:15:28 Dax Shepard? He is taught. I said, are you hurt? I was talking to him on my ride to my meeting last night. I said, you get hurt? And he goes, oh my God, no, I feel great. No problem. Then he sent me this picture about an hour later from the shower. I'm gonna send it to you. And this is, uh, this is from his harness.
1:15:46 Speaker 01 No, it's not, that's from his fall.
1:15:48 Dax Shepard? Well, yeah, the harness, um, tightening when he fell.
1:15:52 Speaker 01 That looks horrible, he's hurt.
1:15:54 Dax Shepard? I know, but he just doesn't care. But I also know what it's like to be him, which is like this, uh, this stuff just doesn't even register. It's like, I wanted to get those lights up there, I got them up there, I didn't really care about the thing. Okay, now watch the video coming into the house.
1:16:08 Dax Shepard? And I'm gonna watch it with you. That's in fast forward. He's not really driving 100 in my neighborhood. He just wanted you to see what the neighbors have going before you saw what we have going.
1:16:17 Speaker 01 They do. Wait, that's yours?
1:16:20 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:16:21 Speaker 01 The yellow and the blue?
1:16:23 Dax Shepard? Look at this place. It's like the Scanso Gardens.
1:16:27 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:16:30 Dax Shepard? It's truly Clark Griswold.
1:16:33 Speaker 01 Wow, Aaron.
1:16:35 Dax Shepard? Can you believe?
1:16:37 Speaker 01 He did such an amazing job.
1:16:39 Dax Shepard? It's like an amusement park. Chris is like, you should charge $20 for people to walk through your yard this Christmas. Can you believe? I'm like, Aaron, no one has ever over-delivered this much. My expectations versus what he did.
1:16:51 Speaker 01 That looks so good. It looks stylized. Like, he like, he didn't just throw a bunch of shit everywhere.
1:16:59 Dax Shepard? Right, and he put some real thought into it.
1:17:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, wow, good job, Aaron.
1:17:04 Dax Shepard? Um, so for people who don't remember our custom for Thanksgiving with our friendship group.
1:17:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:09 Dax Shepard? We do something called Secret Turkey.
1:17:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:17:12 Dax Shepard? I presume you've been assigned somebody?
1:17:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:17:14 Dax Shepard? And have you been working on it yet?
1:17:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:17:16 Dax Shepard? You have?
1:17:17 Speaker 01 I have. I finalized my idea yesterday and I, I put it a little bit into action. But there's a lot more steps and I'm nervous about running out of time.
1:17:26 Dax Shepard? Cause is it, it's next week?
1:17:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a week from Thursday.
1:17:31 Dax Shepard? Okay, I gotta get cooking on mine too. I have, I have the base of mine.
1:17:35 Speaker 01 You do?
1:17:36 Dax Shepard? And then I need to get artistic on top of it.
1:17:38 Speaker 01 I, you know, the rule is you have to make it.
1:17:41 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:17:42 Speaker 01 Right? Like, that's our rule?
1:17:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:44 Speaker 01 And I feel like-
1:17:45 Dax Shepard? Or customize something you love.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 So I feel like I'm blurring the line a little bit this year on that.
1:17:52 Dax Shepard? Me too.
1:17:52 Speaker 01 A little. Okay, you too, too. Okay.
1:17:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:17:55 Speaker 01 I wanna know who you have, but I don't wanna know.
1:17:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't wanna know either. You like spoilers or not? Lincoln loves spoilers.
1:18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, she loves that.
1:18:05 Dax Shepard? I don't like it.
1:18:06 Speaker 01 I don't either.
1:18:07 Dax Shepard? And she'll ask me, like, we're watching a movie I've already seen. And she's like, oh, what happens about it? And I'm like, I don't want to tell you.
1:18:12 Speaker 01 I know.
1:18:12 Dax Shepard? You really want to know?
1:18:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:13 Dax Shepard? And she really wants to know.
1:18:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, must be anxiety in a movie or something, maybe?
1:18:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, or just impatience. I think more impatience.
1:18:22 Speaker 01 That's interesting.
1:18:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I mean, that's a quality of mine, impatience, that I definitely think I passed on.
1:18:28 Speaker 01 But you do, you don't want to know.
1:18:31 Dax Shepard? I don't, and that might be a product of getting older, which is there's so few surprises anymore.
1:18:35 Speaker 01 It's true.
1:18:36 Dax Shepard? In life, you got to really kind of protect them. So like, I never want to know. I mean, I virtually don't even want to ever open presents on Christmas.
1:18:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:45 Dax Shepard? What I love is the anticipation of presents.
1:18:48 Speaker 01 I know, it is exciting.
1:18:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, post presents is...
1:18:51 Speaker 01 Sad.
1:18:52 Dax Shepard? It's sad, yeah.
1:18:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:18:54 Dax Shepard? It's time to make up an excuse for why...
1:18:57 Speaker 01 You're going to Staples? Why you got to go to Staples? Um, yeah, because yesterday I walked in the house and Lincoln was there and she was working on something. And she was like, oh, I want to show you. And she showed me and it was her secret turkey.
1:19:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:11 Speaker 01 And she was like, I have. And she said, and she said, who do you have? Like, with no, like, I know we're not supposed to say.
1:19:17 Dax Shepard? No.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 Like, she just feels like we're gonna say it.
1:19:19 Dax Shepard? That's right.
1:19:20 Speaker 01 I did tell her.
1:19:21 Dax Shepard? You did?
1:19:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, because I felt kind of weird being like, no, I'm not, I'm not telling you.
1:19:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, she cornered you.
1:19:28 Speaker 01 Oh, I told her, and I told her my whole idea.
1:19:30 Dax Shepard? Oh, you did?
1:19:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:31 Dax Shepard? Okay. Well, I'll make sure to not ask her. I'll make sure to not find out from her.
1:19:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, don't let her tell you about mine.
1:19:39 Dax Shepard? Was it, no, it couldn't have been done, because when I got home last night from my meeting, she was just kind of finishing, and it was mind blowing.
1:19:44 Speaker 01 Ah.
1:19:45 Dax Shepard? Like, I don't know what career exists in making dioramas, but boy, that is her, her crazy superpower.
1:19:52 Speaker 01 Skill.
1:19:52 Dax Shepard? She makes so many dioramas.
1:19:54 Speaker 01 She's very artsy.
1:19:55 Dax Shepard? And it has, the tree has lighting in it and stuff?
1:19:57 Speaker 01 I know, it's beautiful.
1:19:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:00 Dax Shepard? I mean, her and Aaron, they could get together and really start a business.
1:20:03 Speaker 01 They could.
1:20:03 Dax Shepard? She could make a model of your house.
1:20:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:05 Dax Shepard? What it'll look like when it's done. And then Aaron could execute it and then you get the model afterwards.
1:20:10 Speaker 01 I was just thinking that, then you have a small version of it inside.
1:20:12 Dax Shepard? And it's like fifty-five thousand instead of.
1:20:15 Speaker 01 Instead of five?
1:20:16 Dax Shepard? Because of the model.
1:20:17 Speaker 01 Oh, the, do you guys take down everything the day after Christmas?
1:20:22 Dax Shepard? Oh, god, no.
1:20:23 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, some people are like, it's over and we're done.
1:20:27 Dax Shepard? Those, good for those people. No, you gotta go after New Year's, man.
1:20:30 Speaker 01 That's how I feel.
1:20:31 Dax Shepard? You're gonna be entertaining and having people over. Okay, so, I have a correction to make.
1:20:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:20:36 Dax Shepard? And this is, um, I'll take responsibility, even though I think we are on the same page with what the lyrics were.
1:20:44 Dax Shepard? Dax, I was screaming in my car. The Nair lyrics are.
1:20:47 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:20:49 Dax Shepard? Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts. If you dare wear short shorts, Nair for short shorts.
1:20:59 Speaker 01 Nair for.
1:21:01 Dax Shepard? And they're using Nair as a verb there, even though it is a, it is a noun, because it's a proper noun name of a product. They are using it as a verb. Nair for short shorts, Nair yourself.
1:21:11 Speaker 01 Or.
1:21:12 Dax Shepard? Or sure, I guess it works both ways.
1:21:14 Speaker 01 Could still be the product.
1:21:15 Dax Shepard? So it's not Nair wears short shorts.
1:21:17 Speaker 01 Okay, well, I'm, I guess I'm happy, because that didn't make any sense to us.
1:21:21 Dax Shepard? I'm sad, I liked it more when it was Nair wears short shorts, as if Nair wears shorts.
1:21:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I do think it's cute if there's little shorts on the bottle.
1:21:29 Dax Shepard? Big time.
1:21:30 Speaker 01 That's adorable.
1:21:32 Dax Shepard? But I do, I do appreciate, um, Taryn Graydell, um, correcting us.
1:21:37 Speaker 01 I like that. Do we think Nair is still on the market?
1:21:43 Dax Shepard? Rob?
1:21:44 Speaker 05 Checking.
1:21:47 Speaker 05 Still have a website. Uh, yeah, it looks like it.
1:21:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:21:50 Dax Shepard? Oh, great.
1:21:51 Speaker 01 I kinda feel like, allegedly, it had some, some, you know, some stuff in it that was like not so great.
1:22:01 Dax Shepard? Well, if it's interesting, it burns your hair off your body, but it doesn't hurt your skin. What a product. You gotta give your, you gotta tip your hat to the folks at Nair that they figured out how to burn hair off your body without hurting your skin.
1:22:11 Speaker 01 I guess the question is.
1:22:13 Dax Shepard? Does it?
1:22:13 Speaker 01 But does it hurt your skin?
1:22:14 Dax Shepard? I remember using it once and it hurt my skin. Do you know what's so interesting about my uni brow?
1:22:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, what?
1:22:21 Dax Shepard? Um, as I think it started coming in when I was like in
1:22:24 Speaker 01 Is that how you say it?
1:22:25 Dax Shepard? High school uni brow? What do you say?
1:22:27 Speaker 01 I mean, it is.
1:22:28 Dax Shepard? You know eyebrow?
1:22:28 Speaker 01 No, you're right, but it's just, it sounds cute the way you're saying it.
1:22:31 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:22:32 Speaker 01 I think I'm like, oh, she is, have you seen her? She has a uni brow. Uni brow, I say uni brow.
1:22:37 Dax Shepard? But that doesn't make sense, right? Cause there's no A in uni.
1:22:40 Speaker 05 That's how I say it, too.
1:22:41 Dax Shepard? You say you know brow?
1:22:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, uni brow.
1:22:43 Dax Shepard? Okay. And I want you guys to continue to say it that way, but I do think in this rare case, I'm saying it correctly and you guys are saying it incorrectly. Okay, the point is-
1:22:51 Speaker 01 But I think it's funny. Okay, go.
1:22:52 Dax Shepard? Okay, my uni or e brow started coming in probably ninth grade or something. I started getting insecure about it.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:59 Dax Shepard? And I started shaving it.
1:23:00 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:23:01 Dax Shepard? Which is dicey. And a lot of boys shaved it in my school. And you can see them be stubble and it looks, it's terrible. So I was like, this doesn't work.
1:23:09 Speaker 01 Right.
1:23:10 Dax Shepard? Cause you see it grow in.
1:23:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:23:12 Dax Shepard? And then I used Nair, I think.
1:23:13 Speaker 01 You did?
1:23:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think I did. And I remember my, in between my brows being very red and irritated. And me thinking, oh Jesus, do I have a, I have a burn now between? That's not better.
1:23:23 Speaker 01 You got a chemical burn.
1:23:24 Dax Shepard? Chemical burn, yeah.
1:23:25 Speaker 01 Because this skin is so sensitive.
1:23:27 Dax Shepard? Very thin.
1:23:28 Speaker 01 Face skin is extremely sensitive. It's like silk, they say.
1:23:31 Dax Shepard? Is that what they say?
1:23:32 Speaker 01 They say, and you don't want to be pouring chemicals on silk.
1:23:35 Dax Shepard? Never, never.
1:23:36 Speaker 01 Almost never.
1:23:37 Dax Shepard? I never put Nair on my silk, even if I have a tough stubborn stain on my silk.
1:23:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't want to. Now, you never, I guess like the boys in ninth grade weren't even thinking about plucking.
1:23:49 Dax Shepard? No, so then I switched to plucking.
1:23:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:23:51 Dax Shepard? In my, probably by the time I'm a senior or
1:23:55 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:23:56 Dax Shepard? twenties or whatever.
1:23:57 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:23:58 Dax Shepard? All this to say, Monica, I don't do anything to it now.
1:24:02 Speaker 01 And it's gone.
1:24:02 Dax Shepard? It's fucking gone.
1:24:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:04 Dax Shepard? And it's been gone for a while.
1:24:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:06 Dax Shepard? And I'm so confused because hair is just proliferating all over my body in the most offensive way.
1:24:12 Speaker 01 Right.
1:24:12 Dax Shepard? I told you, it's like when I work out, half my workout is seeing different hairs because the light's coming from behind me and I'm in front of a mirror.
1:24:19 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:24:20 Dax Shepard? I'm like, my God, I'm turning into a werewolf.
1:24:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:23 Dax Shepard? Um, but for whatever reason, the uniture, the middle part of the uni brow.
1:24:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:29 Dax Shepard? Went away in, in, in an era of great, great hair growth.
1:24:33 Speaker 01 So I agree though, even for me, like.
1:24:38 Dax Shepard? Have you had that experience?
1:24:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it, I mean, every now and then I'll like have to like pluck a little bit, especially on the sides, but the middle is.
1:24:45 Dax Shepard? Is free.
1:24:46 Speaker 01 Done. Yeah.
1:24:47 Dax Shepard? And it used to have some action?
1:24:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:49 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:24:49 Speaker 01 I think there is, is something to when you pluck a lot.
1:24:54 Dax Shepard? They give up.
1:24:55 Speaker 01 An area, yeah.
1:24:56 Dax Shepard? They give up.
1:24:57 Speaker 01 They give up. That's why people were so worried, you know, girls of my gen would over pluck our eyebrows like crazy. And it was just this like teeny tiny thin line. That was what was in.
1:25:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:09 Speaker 01 And then there was a lot of fear once bushier eyebrows were back in, they would never come back.
1:25:15 Dax Shepard? Right. But they did.
1:25:17 Speaker 01 They kind of did.
1:25:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:19 Speaker 01 For me, anyway. But yeah, the, the uni is.
1:25:22 Dax Shepard? Retired. It'll retire.
1:25:24 Speaker 01 It retired.
1:25:24 Dax Shepard? I wonder why it thinks you needed in your youth and not in your old age. Must have been a very attractive thing at some point.
1:25:31 Speaker 01 Maybe.
1:25:32 Dax Shepard? It showed your virility or something.
1:25:34 Speaker 01 Well, testosterone.
1:25:36 Dax Shepard? Sure. Tea.
1:25:38 Speaker 01 Very virile.
1:25:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:39 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:25:40 Dax Shepard? But mine's gone.
1:25:41 Speaker 01 Do you think, yeah, at one point, like the female unibrow was considered hot?
1:25:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:47 Speaker 01 I guess Frida.
1:25:48 Dax Shepard? Frida.
1:25:49 Speaker 01 She was hot.
1:25:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah. May almost had it and she looked great. Like she would, she would on parenthood, she had bushy eyebrows and she would comb them towards each other.
1:25:58 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:25:59 Dax Shepard? And it looked so cute.
1:26:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:26:02 Dax Shepard? You just, I mean, you really, the power to decide you're cute and it's infectious is really one of the miracles on earth.
1:26:09 Speaker 01 What if they start doing like, um, implants? Yeah, merkin.
1:26:28 Speaker 01 Okay, we gotta talk about it.
1:26:29 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:26:30 Speaker 01 Skims has a merkin.
1:26:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, tell me more. Tell me all about it.
1:26:36 Speaker 01 Skims has a thong. The front is covered in hair.
1:26:42 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:26:42 Speaker 01 And then there's different colors and there's different textures. There it is.
1:26:46 Dax Shepard? Interesting, so blue is an option.
1:26:48 Speaker 01 Well, I think that's black, isn't it?
1:26:51 Dax Shepard? Okay. Photographed a little blue, but that's okay.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 It did.
1:26:54 Dax Shepard? And the other one looks like camel hair.
1:26:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, one's red. I don't really understand that.
1:26:58 Dax Shepard? Well, that's red on the head, fire in the hole.
1:27:00 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a redhead.
1:27:02 Dax Shepard? The curtains.
1:27:03 Speaker 01 Absolutely. See how they're different textures? Like, one's curly, one's straight, one's like fuzzies.
1:27:09 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:27:10 Speaker 01 By the way, you can't, you can't get any of these.
1:27:13 Dax Shepard? Oh, you can't?
1:27:14 Speaker 01 No, they're all sold out, which I find, I have to be, I love Skims. And I want them to send this to me.
1:27:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, send it to Monica. I was gonna say, I wanna see someone in, obviously not you. That would be in the realm of, what was the, what were you gonna?
1:27:30 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:27:31 Dax Shepard? Put your thumb in my butt to save my life? As a coworker?
1:27:38 Speaker 01 The things we talk about.
1:27:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I wanna see someone in this, maybe Rob.
1:27:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:27:45 Dax Shepard? See Rob in this.
1:27:47 Speaker 01 I think you should see Kristen in it.
1:27:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:49 Speaker 01 Cause that's the best case to know if, like, it actually.
1:27:52 Dax Shepard? Is erotic.
1:27:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 It says it's an actual pair of underwear. I mean.
1:27:57 Dax Shepard? Anything's erotic.
1:27:58 Speaker 01 It's called faux hair micro string thong. It's totally sold out.
1:28:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:03 Speaker 01 I would like Skims to send me one. Now, I do have a question. Like, I've never seen.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 A redheaded pubes.
1:28:15 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:28:16 Speaker 01 Would it possibly be that red?
1:28:19 Dax Shepard? No.
1:28:19 Speaker 01 It wouldn't, right?
1:28:20 Dax Shepard? Well, I've had some redheaded lovers.
1:28:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:23 Dax Shepard? And I've had the great pleasure and joy of seeing red pubes.
1:28:27 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:28:28 Dax Shepard? They're lovely.
1:28:29 Speaker 01 But aren't they more orange?
1:28:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:31 Speaker 01 Okay, that would be my guess. Even red hair isn't that color.
1:28:35 Dax Shepard? No, unless it's been augmented.
1:28:37 Speaker 01 Okay, the one I would be, I think I should try.
1:28:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:41 Speaker 01 Is, um.
1:28:42 Dax Shepard? Well, blonde though, that's kind of mixed messages.
1:28:45 Speaker 01 It's like fun mixed messages.
1:28:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:28:47 Speaker 01 They have like a white blonde one. They also have, let me look. Let me see what I want.
1:28:52 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:28:52 Speaker 01 I want two. I want, I want three.
1:28:57 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
1:28:57 Speaker 01 I want the cocoa blonde straight.
1:29:00 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:29:01 Speaker 01 That's this.
1:29:03 Dax Shepard? Oh yeah, great, exciting.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 Okay, then I want cocoa ginger curly.
1:29:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure.
1:29:13 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:29:13 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:29:14 Speaker 01 Then I'm interested in cocoa brown straight.
1:29:19 Dax Shepard? That's the bottom one there.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:21 Dax Shepard? That one looks a little coarse, doesn't it though? Like horse hind?
1:29:24 Speaker 01 It does, but to me that looks the most real.
1:29:28 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:29:28 Speaker 01 But it's not my coloring, so I think that'd be interesting.
1:29:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that could be fun for people. Keep them guessing.
1:29:34 Speaker 01 And I, this one is closest to me, that, that middle one, cocoa black curly.
1:29:41 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, so that's what you want? Oh wow, Rob. We have a real extra close up of the.
1:29:49 Speaker 01 The brown hair.
1:29:50 Dax Shepard? It looks beautiful.
1:29:51 Speaker 01 It looks itchy, yeah.
1:29:53 Dax Shepard? It looks like hay, stabby.
1:29:55 Speaker 01 It really looks like pointy.
1:29:57 Dax Shepard? Well, you'll, send those to Monica and then we'll get a full update on.
1:30:00 Speaker 01 Yes, please send me these. Cocoa black curly I would like because I want to see how realistic it is.
1:30:06 Dax Shepard? Well, there's got little hints of gray hair in there.
1:30:08 Speaker 01 I know, that's.
1:30:09 Dax Shepard? That's fun.
1:30:10 Speaker 01 No.
1:30:11 Dax Shepard? Elderly.
1:30:12 Speaker 01 That will depress me. Um.
1:30:15 Dax Shepard? People's pubic hair does turn gray.
1:30:17 Speaker 01 I know, I've heard that.
1:30:19 Dax Shepard? Mine hasn't, yeah, luckily. Still look youthful.
1:30:22 Speaker 01 Wow, will you let us know when yours starts to turn?
1:30:25 Dax Shepard? Turn gray?
1:30:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:26 Dax Shepard? Be a sad day, I'll report it. There's that old allegory, there's a very famous story right about a king with one gray hair. Soon as you get a gray hair, you can no longer be king. Do you know this? It's a very famous story.
1:30:36 Speaker 01 I don't know it. I don't know it. What happens?
1:30:39 Dax Shepard? He's either, well, he can't be king anymore, and he might even have to die, I don't know.
1:30:43 Speaker 01 Oh!
1:30:43 Dax Shepard? Or he turns it over to his son immediately when there's a gray hair. So he's living in this great fear of one gray hair.
1:30:49 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:30:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and it teaches you some kind of lesson, but I don't know what it is.
1:30:53 Speaker 01 It feels like you should be afraid if you're gonna get killed or dethroned.
1:30:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's a legitimate fear, yeah. But it's supposed to teach you an important lesson.
1:31:01 Speaker 05 Uh, messenger of death sent by the god of death. And the king immediately understands the implication is youth, middle age, and old age are coming to an end, and death is imminent.
1:31:12 Dax Shepard? Ooh.
1:31:13 Speaker 01 I still don't understand the lesson.
1:31:15 Speaker 05 Uh, the core moral of the story is that even a long life is too short to waste on mere worldly pleasures and power. One must recognize the signs of aging and mortality and dedicate oneself to a life of wisdom and righteousness.
1:31:27 Dax Shepard? Ah.
1:31:29 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:31:29 Dax Shepard? Okay, wow, this is a ding ding ding. This is really ringing a bell.
1:31:33 Speaker 01 Ooh, okay.
1:31:34 Dax Shepard? Okay, so my weekend, now I'm gonna violate it, but I'm not really violating it. You might think I'm violating it, but I swear I'm not.
1:31:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:42 Dax Shepard? Because I'm not telling any of the people involved, and that's the key.
1:31:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:45 Dax Shepard? And no one involved in this will listen to this, nor will it get to them. So my weekend was 100% of service.
1:31:54 Speaker 01 Great.
1:31:54 Dax Shepard? We had a thing on Friday night, I had to drive to sit through, I had a volleyball game, then I had a birthday party, I had to drive someone out there, then I'd sit in my car for an hour and a half while someone was at a birthday party. Then there was a show, a thing, I mean, it was the whole weekend. And I, I found myself wanting to call attention to what a sacrifice I had been making. That was my instinct, and that I, I wanted it to be known that I hadn't done anything I wanted to do this weekend.
1:32:20 Speaker 01 Right.
1:32:21 Dax Shepard? And I remembered my great therapist Mark telling me, um, listen, as a man, you can think this, but you shan't say this. You shan't ever say, what about me?
1:32:34 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:32:35 Dax Shepard? And that's solid advice for a man.
1:32:37 Speaker 01 I like that.
1:32:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's, it's the path we need to walk, us men, and it should be walked. And I just kept hearing the voice in my head all weekend like, you're not gonna mention at all that you haven't done anything but drive people around on your limited two days off.
1:32:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:55 Dax Shepard? And I achieved that goal. And then on the flip side of the coin was I had done something abnormally generous for me, for virtually a stranger.
1:33:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:33:05 Dax Shepard? And then I was like, and you can't tell anyone. And I was like, I'm gonna call my mom and tell her. That's what I wanted to do.
1:33:13 Speaker 01 Great.
1:33:14 Dax Shepard? Like, I'm not gonna tell any of my friends I did this.
1:33:16 Speaker 01 Great.
1:33:16 Dax Shepard? I don't want my children to know. Kristen had to know because we share finances.
1:33:22 Dax Shepard? And I had to talk myself out of.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 Telling your mom?
1:33:25 Dax Shepard? Telling my mom. And I decided, it's, you're old man, it's time to stop doing anything.
1:33:32 Speaker 01 Looking for.
1:33:33 Dax Shepard? And so that you'll be observed doing it. Applause, validation.
1:33:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:40 Dax Shepard? We love you, you're so good. When is it just gonna be for you? Why don't you just do things that you know give you esteem and leave it at that? That's a hard challenge for me. I'm embarrassed to admit.
1:33:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:53 Dax Shepard? Like, to do things secretly that only fill me up and only I know were good.
1:33:58 Speaker 01 Right.
1:33:59 Dax Shepard? Is, is the, I think, the last chapter you should, I should hope to achieve.
1:34:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's great.
1:34:05 Dax Shepard? On my evolution on this planet. But that, that reading just made me think of that entirely. Like, it's time for wisdom, it's time for other things.
1:34:13 Speaker 01 Oh, that came.
1:34:14 Dax Shepard? And for me and my life, it's time to just do things.
1:34:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:19 Dax Shepard? Quietly for me.
1:34:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:21 Dax Shepard? And it's almost, it feels pointless, which is crazy. That's how deep the exhibitionism of my soul is.
1:34:30 Speaker 01 It feels pointless to help.
1:34:32 Dax Shepard? If I only know.
1:34:34 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:34:35 Dax Shepard? I mean, it doesn't feel pointless to the person that I help, of course.
1:34:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. That should be enough.
1:34:41 Dax Shepard? But opening my imagination to a world where no one ever knows if I did something good.
1:34:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:48 Dax Shepard? Is shockingly absent of the normal reward I'm.
1:34:54 Dax Shepard? Used to giving or the, just the operation.
1:34:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:59 Dax Shepard? Um, I don't know, it's really tripping me out.
1:35:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great goal.
1:35:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and it's harder than I want it to be.
1:35:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, but this kind of circles back to something we talked about a few weeks ago, the give for fun and for free.
1:35:12 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:35:12 Speaker 01 That's what it is about.
1:35:14 Dax Shepard? I know, I know. I guess, like, I don't feel very judgmental of myself because like, look, again, we're, we're like this super social animal and our reputation is everything in, in a group.
1:35:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:28 Dax Shepard? Are you benevolent or are you selfish? Like, these are key things we need to know about each other if we're gonna trust each other. So naturally, we want people to see when we're benevolent.
1:35:38 Speaker 01 I know.
1:35:38 Dax Shepard? And we pray they don't see when we're selfish and shitty.
1:35:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:35:42 Dax Shepard? Because we have to keep our standing in our group.
1:35:45 Speaker 01 I know, but I guess the, the-
1:35:47 Dax Shepard? It's like life or death.
1:35:48 Speaker 01 The catch 22 of it though, and this isn't fair, but this is true, is displaying you're benevolent or generous, like stating it-
1:35:59 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:36:00 Speaker 01 Has the opposite effect.
1:36:01 Dax Shepard? Uh huh, yeah.
1:36:02 Speaker 01 It makes people think like, no, you're not, because you had to do that. Like, like, it takes away from the act itself. I think people, I think-
1:36:10 Dax Shepard? Well, there's some artistry to it. There is a way for people, for you to let people find out stuff you've done that's good, that isn't overtly braggy. Like, if someone's overtly braggy, yeah, it's immediately distasteful. But if you find out that Eric put a kid through college.
1:36:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:29 Dax Shepard? You're like, super proud of Eric.
1:36:30 Speaker 01 That's amazing, yeah.
1:36:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you would want to say to him, like, that was rad, dude, I'm glad you did that.
1:36:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:35 Dax Shepard? And so there's a way for Eric to get that out that's not gross.
1:36:38 Speaker 01 But I don't think so. Like, I, I think if he has a hand in saying it, it does take away. I think though, I, I think people would do find out, whether you say it or not.
1:36:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:36:51 Speaker 01 People will find out people, other people's level of generosity, whether they are affected or not, or told or not.
1:37:01 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:37:02 Speaker 01 It's- I don't know. I think it's clear.
1:37:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:05 Speaker 01 And it way more clear when the person is keeping it to themselves.
1:37:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's just, it's a really powerful force.
1:37:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:14 Dax Shepard? To do things secretly.
1:37:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's a good goal.
1:37:18 Dax Shepard? It is.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 I like it.
1:37:20 Dax Shepard? And it's ju- but again, so me saying that there seems to be no reward on the other side of it is also me saying like, oh, this is interesting because I know there is a reward, but I can't even imagine it.
1:37:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:33 Dax Shepard? Which is interesting and fun because I'm so locked into this architecture of like, people approve of you.
1:37:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, the reward.
1:37:43 Dax Shepard? Doing the right thing. It's like, people approve of you.
1:37:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, the reward is that you know you're good.
1:37:50 Dax Shepard? Right. And that's where they think the growth is, is that why, why don't I value it all if I think I'm good?
1:37:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Why do you need other people to know, to think it if you know it's true?
1:38:01 Dax Shepard? Yes. Why doesn't my opinion about myself matter at all? Unless it's negative, then I think it's very important.
1:38:07 Speaker 01 Right, right, right.
1:38:09 Dax Shepard? Self-flagellating, I think I'm the, I'm the most astute observer of me in the world.
1:38:12 Speaker 01 Right.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? And so, yeah, I think I am going into it with a blind faith that one day I'll wake up and go, oh, this is the reward and I love it. But it is a bit of a blind faith pivot.
1:38:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I like that.
1:38:26 Dax Shepard? I think I've been slowly moving in that direction before whatever this re- this weekend just was like compounded. Two things I would have normally done is like call my mom.
1:38:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:38 Dax Shepard? Mommy, I was a good boy.
1:38:41 Speaker 01 I think.
1:38:41 Dax Shepard? I turned out to be good like you hoped I would be.
1:38:46 Speaker 01 I think of all the people to tell your mom.
1:38:49 Dax Shepard? Is safest.
1:38:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:51 Dax Shepard? Which is why it was hard to talk myself out of.
1:38:53 Speaker 01 Right.
1:38:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you would, you could have done that.
1:38:56 Dax Shepard? No, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna.
1:39:00 Speaker 01 Well, that's great. Um, all right, let's do some facts. Okay. David Fajgenbaum, um, I only have one fact. He was extremely factual.
1:39:13 Dax Shepard? He sure was.
1:39:14 Speaker 01 The only thing I did look up was, does glioblastoma affect women more than men?
1:39:20 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:39:21 Speaker 01 It's more common in men than women.
1:39:23 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. Well, this is, this is why anecdotal info is misleading. It just so happens in my life, I've known a lot of women.
1:39:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:30 Dax Shepard? And none men.
1:39:32 Speaker 01 Men are about 60% more likely to develop the tumor. While the exact reasons are still being researched, this disparity is not believed to be solely due to sex hormones. Anyway, it's very, it's not fully understood.
1:39:47 Dax Shepard? It's horrific. I know that part.
1:39:48 Speaker 01 I know, I know. It's because, so unfortunately, one of our very good friends has had multiple people affected by this, died of it. She once taught me that like, it's like the shape of the tumor. It has like, kind of spikies.
1:40:11 Dax Shepard? What are those?
1:40:11 Speaker 01 Which make it hard to remove.
1:40:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, what are those kind of, they look like caulflowers, but they're pointy at the end? Yeah, they're beautiful.
1:40:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, um, they're green normally.
1:40:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, uh-huh, they're beautiful.
1:40:23 Speaker 05 Romanesco cauliflower.
1:40:26 Dax Shepard? Romanesco what?
1:40:27 Speaker 05 Cauliflower.
1:40:27 Dax Shepard? Cauliflower. God, is that impossibly gorgeous. Nature, let's all give it up. Round of applause for nature. Isn't that impossibly beautiful?
1:40:35 Speaker 01 It looks like tiny Christmas trees.
1:40:37 Dax Shepard? Tiny Christmas trees, also coral, sea coral.
1:40:40 Speaker 01 It is wild that nature made that.
1:40:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:43 Speaker 01 And like, nature makes pineapples, like, that's crazy.
1:40:46 Dax Shepard? And the symmetry you see, and crystals, and all these things, like the shapes it can make.
1:40:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's pretty cool.
1:40:54 Dax Shepard? I'm really grateful for you, nature. I hope you're a listener.
1:41:00 Speaker 01 Oh, one other thing I did look up because he talked about folic acid for nonverbal autism. So when I got diagnosed with epilepsy.
1:41:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:12 Speaker 01 He told me, so I got put on the Kepra. My doctor, my neurologist, great man. Dr. Steven Sykes, love him.
1:41:20 Dax Shepard? Beautiful man.
1:41:21 Speaker 01 Beautiful man. He said if I'm thinking about getting pregnant ever, that I should take folic acid. Being on this medication and having epilepsy.
1:41:31 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:41:32 Speaker 01 I didn't really know why. He probably told me, but my brain was a little fucked up. So then I just looked. Should you take folic acid if you have epilepsy? Yes, people with epilepsy, especially women of childbearing age, should take folic acid. Uh, but the appropriate dose must be determined with a doctor. Prevents neural tube defects and other birth defects in children. And can also be deficient in those taking certain anti-epileptic drugs.
1:41:59 Dax Shepard? I take it and I don't have epilepsy.
1:42:01 Speaker 01 Oh, you do?
1:42:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's part of my regime.
1:42:03 Speaker 01 You like the taste?
1:42:04 Dax Shepard? No, I don't like any of it. I constantly am complaining at night. It takes me like 30 minutes extra to go to bed because of all the stuff I'm doing to try to stay alive longer. And I lament it. I'm like, God, it's a lot of work to stay.
1:42:18 Speaker 01 And you're actually taking time out of your life. What if we added up the amount of time you're taking?
1:42:23 Dax Shepard? I would rather have the TV time.
1:42:24 Speaker 01 Ah.
1:42:25 Dax Shepard? All right, love you.
1:42:25 Speaker 01 All right, love you.
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