Hope Is A Verb - David Fajgenbaum - The Medicine We Missed

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Meet David Fajgenbaum, a physician scientist who is savinglives by repurposing existing medications to treat different diseases through his organisation Every Cure. This conversation will challenge the way you look medicine and unlock the possibility that some of the solutions we’re looking for, arehiding in plain sight, on the shelves of your local pharmacy. From the near-death experience that changed the course of David’s life to how he’s harnessing the power of AI for good, this episode is a total game changer. Topics discussed: how a repurposed drug saved David’s life, living life in ‘overtime,’ what it’s like to swim upstream against the medical system, the AI advantage in fast-tracking drug matches to our 18,000 knowndiseases, how Viagra is saving sick kids, the economics of repurposing existing drugs and what we can expect from the future of medicine.  Find out more:You can check out David’s recent TED talk or his book ChasingMy Cure. You can also support Every Cure and if you want to let his team know about a repurposed drug that’s worked foryou, click here. Are you interested in how 80,000 Hours can help you use your career to make a difference? Check out their free resources here.This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rosefrom Fix The News and sound design by Anthony Badolato from Hear That!

Welcome back to Hope as a verb. As always, we really appreciate you tuning in. There is a lot of content and a lot of podcasts out there, all vying for your attention. So having you here with us is something that we never take for granted. Today's conversation is definitely worth a listen. We are chatting with a really amazing human being, David Fagan, a physician scientist who was diagnosed with a rare incurable disease while he was a young med student. Teetering on the brink of death, his life was saved by a combination of chemotherapy

drugs which were not made for his disease. And that one moment inside the ICU ward changed the course of David's life and quite possibly the way that we look at medicine forever. Today David is the co-founder of every cure. It's a non-profit unlocking new uses for existing medications, so repurposing drugs, and finding potential treatments for a range of diseases. I mean, everything from rheumatoid arthritis to leprosy. But not only that, David and his team are harnessing the power of AI to speed up the discovery process. So they're training it to spot the matches between existing drugs and the 18,000 non-diseases that we can all suffer from. It's basically like giving science a supercharged search engine for cures that are already

sitting on the shelf. We've all been there in a hospital room, in a corridor, chatting to a physician, worried about ourselves or worrying about our loved ones. And if there's something that you don't ever want to hear, it's a doctor telling you that there's nothing more they can do. This conversation opens the door to the possibility that some of the solutions might already be there. hiding in plain sight. David, welcome to the podcast. We're so looking forward to this conversation. Thanks so much for having me.

I've been really looking forward to this ever since we got a chance to meet back at TED. Is it anything that's giving you hope in the world right now? You know, every day I get to come in my office and look at the output of an AI algorithm. that tells me about drugs that can save patients' lives. Every day I look at these predictions that leukovorin might help autism and lydicane might treat breast cancer. And the algorithm and the predictions are getting better and better.

And I get so much hope from thinking about how it's going to get better and better. We're going to help more and more people. We have all these treatments out there, and we now have a platform to find ways to help people with the drugs we already have. When you take yourself back to 2010, you're 25 years old, third-year medical students, student, your whole life's in front of you, but then your body starts shutting down. What's it like to go from a university student with a really bright future to being read

the last rites in ICU? It was heartbreaking. That's probably the only way to describe it. I had this amazing girlfriend that I wanted to have a family with one day. I wanted to get married. I had all these dreams for the patients I wanted to treat, the drugs I wanted to develop. My mom passed away from cancer a few years before. And I'd made this promise to her that I would dedicate my life to finding drugs and her memory. I was just heartbroken and spent a lot of time in ICU crying and hoping and wishing that maybe something could save my life. Can you tell us, David, what was going on at that point? What was your diagnosis? Well, at that stage, I had just gotten diagnosed with

a disease called idiopathic, multi-centric Castleman disease. I'd been really sick for about 11 weeks in ICU, all of my organs shutting down. It's a horrible disease where your immune system attacks your vital organs relentlessly until they all shut down. And the only way to stop it back then was with chemotherapy. And chemotherapy will obliterate your immune system. Your immune system is trying to obliterate you. And sometimes that'll work, but typically temporarily. And so this horrible disease was just ravaging my whole body.

I was just fighting for every breath. Did you get to any point of acceptance in that state? Or did you just refuse to believe that it was going that way right to the end? there was a moment where I was really giving up I don't usually like the term giving up because I think that a lot of us at that stage we don't want to be in that position it's not like we're choosing to give up

I just didn't have any more fight left in me and my family had all hugged me goodbye and I started slowing my breathing and I was really letting go I remember hearing my sister Gina she didn't want me to let go she wanted me to keep going and I heard her say just breathe Dave just breathe

and I was so sick and I didn't have too many clear things going through my head, but I was like, you know what? I can do one more breath. And breaths at that stage were really, really hard. I'd gained a lot of fluid because my liver and my kidneys weren't working, so every breath was, like, getting stabbed. It was horribly painful.

And one breath added up to a minute of breaths and then an hour of breaths. And it turned out that the out bit of time is what I needed for my chemotherapy to kick in and for me to then get 15 more years of life, Angus. I mean, it's not like it was a day or two, you know, And because I fought for that little bit more, that gave me enough time to get the treatment, which gave me enough time to get another treatment and another treatment. And here I am 15 years later. So what were the non-treatment options for Castleman's at the time?

It was a few different chemotherapies. One drug called retuxamab was used often. I ended up getting an accommodation of seven really intense chemos that have been around for decades and decades. We didn't know if they would work, but obviously really hoped that they would. And amazingly, they did. I mean, obviously, I'm here 15 years later. but they only worked temporarily.

I kept relapsing on them. But the really important thing was that they opened my eyes up to the possibility that drugs not made for my disease could work for my disease. It was this sort of crazy moment where it was actually my fourth deadly flare of my disease. And I remember my doctor explaining that we were out of options.

And I was sort of like, well, I know you're telling me we're out of options, but those seven chemotherapies that you've now saved my life with three times, they weren't made for my disease. So how do we know that there's not another drug made for another disease that could also help me? We can't say that they don't exist

if we haven't tried them yet. Like there's thousands of other drugs. Like maybe there's another one out there that could help me. And that became my like central obsession. And that is what led to me being able to save my life, but now us being able to save a lot more lives. Okay, tell us that story.

So at that stage, I'm like, oh my gosh, the drugs that have saved my life temporarily, They're made for other diseases, so what else could be out there? So I started collecting my blood samples because my whole idea was, well, maybe I could run experiments on my immune system and figure out what's going wrong and then see if there's a drug that already exists that could turn that thing on or off. So I started collecting my blood samples and I had another big relapse. And the good news is that I was collecting them every couple of weeks leading up to that relapse. So I spent another month in the ICU. I said goodbye to my family again.

And thankfully the chemo worked and it kicked in just in time. But once I got out of the hospital, I just went straight. to the lab and started performing a series of experiments on those blood samples that eventually uncovered a communication line in my immune system called mTOR which is really important for your immune cells basically to talk to one another all over the body it's kind of like a communication system or an alert system it was turned into overdrive and there was no guarantees but i thought maybe if we could turn that alert system off maybe that would stop my immune cells from trying to kill me it had never been used before for my disease it was made for organ transplant rejection decades

before but I went to my doctor and I was like look I'm out of options and he knew I was going to die within a matter of weeks and so I asked if he would consider prescribing it and he did prescribe it and what's amazing Amy is that that was over 11 years ago this drug that wasn't made for my disease that no one had ever tried for my disease was literally just sitting there at the pharmacy all along like I should not be here Amy I should not have survived any of those first few episodes but definitely not for 11 years since that fifth one. This story has got so much in it.

There's the almost dying moment. You're on the other side and you can suddenly see the world clearly and you have this vision that, oh my gosh, hold on, there is another way of doing this that no one really thinks about. And then you go on a whole

position, heal thyself journey, which is ridiculous on its own. I don't know, it's just this story that feels almost mythological. It's just extraordinary. But then what's even more extraordinary is you start saying, okay, well, if one drug that wasn't

meant for my disease can cure me, then maybe we can help somebody else. Yeah, and honestly, Angus, once you see that, you can't unsee it. And once you've experienced it, like every breath I take is because of a drug that wasn't made for my disease. It's just a constant reminder. Once you've seen you can't unsee it. Once you've felt it, you can't unfeel it. It's just become, you know, all-encompassing.

And then there's this incredible circuit that has been created. And that is every time we help a patient with a drug that's not made for their disease, It is so powerful, and it's validating, and it's also motivating. And then at the same time, we're learning about people suffering from conditions that could potentially benefit from existing medicines. And so it's sort of this dual, you know, you get the positive reinforcement of the successes, but then you get this negative reinforcement when you hear about the suffering that exists. I think the other thing I'll mention that is maybe a through line that explains a lot of this

is the tremendous clarity you get when you have the ultimate sense of urgency. I had my last rights read to me when I was 25 and sort of got this real clarity because I was going to measure the rest of my life in a matter of days at some points. It was hours. When you start having that mindset where you measure your time here in hours or days,

you get this tremendous clarity on what's important in life. I call it overtime. I played American football in college. We lost a lot of football games, Amy, but occasionally we went to overtime. And in overtime, there's an amazing clarity that happens. And that's because the clock is ticking down

and it's all about the mission in front of you. And so I've gotten this tremendous clarity that comes from that urgency. Your clarity, David, is such a big reframe because we tend to look at medical conditions and their treatment as a pretty fixed problem solution. But what you're doing is throwing everything out of the box and looking at things in a completely different way.

Did you know that you were going against the grain by repurposing these existing drugs, and what resistance have you encountered with that? Yeah, I mean, early on when I was a medical student, I did experience resistance, and I mean, maybe rightfully so, right? Like, what are the chances I'm going to find anything? I get it, but, like, maybe there's a one in a million chance. So let the med student go try to find something.

He's probably not going to, but let him try. But to your point, I think that in our medical system, it's so binary, and it's a billion dollars in 10 years to create a new drug. and it's like this huge step that you have to take and you wait and you spend and you wait some more and then maybe your disease gets lucky and you get something and usually that thing

isn't entirely curative but it helps with your disease and that's amazing and we should keep developing new drugs but the thing that I just realized is what about those drugs over there? We don't have to do the whole billion dollar 10 year thing what if one of those other things could help and when you have the clarity of overtime and when you have the benefit of experiencing it

and you see someone else suffering and you think they could benefit from it, you just become focused on how do I help that person with that thing without having to, you know, wait to go all the way to the top of the mountain. Now, I listened to a talk that you did in Philadelphia and you said that even though different diseases present differently, they often share this underlying problem. Can you talk us through this? Because this, again, is a really different approach at how we look at disease and then how we treat disease. Yeah, absolutely. I think some of these are best described with examples. So two totally

different diseases. Leprosy, which many of us are familiar with, your limbs fall off as a result of this horrible infectious disease, and multiple myeloma, a cancer of your plasma cells that make antibodies. I don't think you can think of two diseases that could be more different. And the treatment that is approved for both of them is thalidomide that caused horrible birth effects back 50 years ago. And the reason for that is that these conditions appear very different, but they share the same underlying problem where mechitis is in the body that has to do with angiogenesis's blood vessel development. And so in the course of figuring out why thalidomide caused all of these birth defects, scientists figured out its role in angiogenesis and inhibiting angiogenesis, and therefore

it was clear that it could be effective for leprosy and then multimiloma. And that to me is one of my favorite examples. But there are also examples, another favorite, is Viagra. Many of us know that it was used for heart disease first. And then the famous story goes that all of the men in the heart disease trials didn't want to return their Viagra at the end of the trial because they liked it so much. And all the women returned their Viagra. And so they were like, why do all these men want to hold it on with their Viagra? Turned out that it's a very effective for erectile dysfunction. But what most people don't realize is that very randomly, a cardiologist said, well, I've got all these kids that are dying because they're not getting enough blood flow to their lungs. Viagra is very good

at distributing blood flow. I wonder if I give these kids Viagra if that will help get blood flow to their lungs. He started doing it and it saved their lives. Wow. The established treatment for kids with pulmonary arterial hypertension, too little blood to your lungs, they were dying by teenage years, is to give them Viagra, and they can live full lives on Viagra. Another example, erectile dysfunction could not be more different than kids dying because their lungs aren't getting enough blood and oxygen, but they share the same underlying problem. And so

what I think is important to remember with all these examples I described is that in each of these cases, there was patent potential to find a new use for these medicines. They were either early in their patent life, they hadn't been approved for anything, or in Viagra's case, it was very early. It had recently been approved. And so there was a commercial path to finding

this new use. But 80% of our medicines that are approved today, Amy, are already generic, which means there is no path at all to finding a profitable way to selling more doses of that medicine. So that's why we have this massive problem where the creativity of finding thalidomide for leprosy and multimiloma, that creativity and incentive disappears once a drug becomes generic. And that's probably the biggest problem we have. Amy, I really just can't get over what a huge reframe this is.

For as long as modern medicine has existed, the focus has been on discovering new treatments, new drugs, new molecules, new trials, new patents. But David and his team, they're flipping that model on its head. Instead of starting from scratch, they're asking, well, what if the cures that we need are already here? That is such a different way to think about medicine, not as a race to invent more, but as a mission to make the most of what we already have. and the beauty of it is that it's faster, cheaper,

and of course potentially life-saving for millions of people who can't afford to wait for the next big breakthrough. Yeah. You know the thing that I can't get out of my head is the way David talks about living in overtime and how he harnesses that urgency that you only have once you really know that the clock is ticking. And he's the second person, Gus, that we've spoken to this season,

who's come back from a near-death experience. The other was Paulie Stewart. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you could not get two people more different than Paulie Stewart and David. One is a scientist, one is a former punk rocker. But both of these men came back from the brink thinking more about service than they did about survival. I don't know about you, but they both had this really similar presence that's hard.

to describe. It just felt like both of those people were really in the room with us. I remember hearing about it. I think this was you in a talk as well, that there's 18,000 roughly known diseases and there's 4,000 roughly known FDA approved drugs. And we don't have time to make another 14,000 drugs to get to those 18,000 diseases. So we've got to do this. But of course the systemic barriers to getting this done are enormous. How are you trying to overcome this? How are you trying to solve this problem? Yeah, in a few ways. So the first thing is that if you want to try to address this at a system's level, you have to be able to match all drugs to all diseases. You've got to be able to understand, okay, if there's 4,000 drugs and

18,000 diseases, we've got to be able to fairly quickly match every drug to every disease and quantify the likelihood that that drug will work for that disease. Amazingly, artificial intelligence. This is one of the perfect use cases for it because there's so much data that exists on these drugs, so much data on these diseases. There's a lot of data on the known treatments. So now we can train algorithms on this drug works for this disease. So now look for patterns that are similar to that across all options. So one, you've got to really understand your landscape of every drug versus every disease. And two, you then need to be able to put some real effort into prioritizing what are the greatest opportunities to help people because

though we have all these drugs and we know they can help more diseases, I'm not naive to think we can cure every disease with the drugs we have. But I do believe that every patient who has a disease that could benefit from an existing drug should benefit from that drug, and we have a responsibility to unlock those treatments. And so first you've got to quantify all the opportunities. Second, you've got to prioritize which ones you're going to go after. And third, you've got to garner the resources, whether it's from philanthropy or federal government, to fund the laboratory testing or the clinical trials or the awareness

raising to get those drugs to patients. And when you think about the economics of it, if you create one brand new drug, it's going to take you between 10 and 15 years and 1 to $2.7 billion on average. We can take a drug that's approved for one thing, let's say kidney transplantation like Cyrillimus was, and we can prove that it works in another disease like Castleman disease for between $1 and $3 million. So we're talking about 1% of the cost of creating a new drug. Now, there's no upside.

That's something important to keep in mind. You will not make any money off finding that new use for that old drug, but you will help a lot of people. And so that's the problem we have in our system. You can do the work for 1% the cost with no upside, or you can do the work for 100 times the cost and have a massive upside. You can make a lot of money when you create a new drug. And I don't think anyone in our system is trying to block repurposing. It's not that anyone's evil and trying to prevent cures from getting out there. There's just no financial incentives for people to do it. Where's the money coming from? How are you doing this? Yeah, so we created a nonprofit to do all three

of those things. And so our non-profits called Every Cure, and we were launched almost three years ago. We have funding from the federal government to build out that AI platform to quantify the likelihood of every drug to treat every disease. We then go through a really rigorous process to prioritize

which treatments for which diseases look most promising to help people. We want to spend the least amount of dollars to have the greatest impact possible because we're nonprofits. We have to leverage these dollars to the greatest use for humanity possible. We've got this real audacious goal of repurposing 15 to 25 treatments by 2030,

which puts us in the same camp as like a big pharma company that's going to spend a thousand times as much money as us. But because we're using old drugs for neglected diseases, we can just do it for a lot less money. Wow. I want to know a little bit just about the technological side of things. I know Amy's dying to ask you about actual human beings. Sorry, Amy. But I'm really fascinated by The Matrix.

It seems to me to be such an incredible use of artificial intelligence. but one that kind of is largely out of the limelight there's so much buzz at the moment there's so much hype but you don't really hear about too many of these AI for good stories so can you just tell us a little bit about the Matrix and your thoughts on AI more generally perhaps

sure and I should also mention all of the great work that was done before every cure that put us in a position to leverage this work for the Matrix so we utilize what are called biomedical knowledge graphs which are two-dimensional maps if you imagine mapping every drug every disease gene protein

every biomedical concept, which are literally millions of concepts, put them all onto a wall, and then draw edges to connect them to describe their relationship between every one of them. So interleukin-6 is increased in Castleman. Siltuxinab inhibits interleukin-6. Imagine connections between all of them,

but do it for every single biomedical concept that the world knows about. And so when you do that, you now have mapped out what the world knows about all of human biology. This is the perfect ingredient to then train machine learning algorithms on known relationships. So we train the algorithm on this drug treats this disease, this drug treats that disease, and the algorithm can

learn the patterns of connections between every treats relationship. So now they know, okay, among the world's knowledge, what would be likely to work? Wow, Ozempic agonizes GLP1, therefore it could be useful in this disease, in this disease, and this disease. And so you train the algorithm on known treats relationships, and then you unleash the algorithm on the rest of the graph, every drug versus every disease. And as you said, it's really an area that hasn't been investigated much, and it's really because there's no intellectual property in finding a new use for an old medicine. If you create a new compound, there's tons of IP, there's a lot of upside, and AI has been used a lot right now to come up with new chemical entities. But there's

really no IP in this, I really should call out the center at NIH called NCATs that spent tens of millions of dollars building out five different biomedical knowledge graphs. We wouldn't be able to train machine learning algorithms if not for the tens of millions of dollars the U.S. government put into building these ingredients in the first place. It seems really weird to me that this is all kind of happening at the same time as everyone's suddenly going hot on GLP1 drugs have this range of other effects. So this concept that a drug can tackle something at, not the root cause, but at like a bottleneck somewhere in the body and just has this cascade of different effects. That seems to be an idea that is now gaining

broader acceptance in the medical community because GLP1 drugs have come along at this particular point. Do you find that uncanny? That's amazing. It is amazing. I love when drugs are used in multiple ways. You know, one thing I don't like is when someone says, that's a diabetes drug. And I'm like, no, it's not a diabetes drug. It's a drug that was first used in diabetes. And There are a lot of other things that it could be useful. And this is such a great example of it. GOP1's diabetes drugs. Well, no, that's the first thing they're using.

It's probably going to turn out that we'll call it a Parkinson's drug and we'll call it an Alzheimer's drug and we'll probably call it a breast cancer prevention drug at some point. All right, Gus. Are you done? I'm done. It's just, this is really amazing and it's mind expanding. It is such a different way of thinking about medicine.

It really is. And I want to come back to your story for a moment, David. So you were the first patient that you treated with a repurpose drug. When was the moment that your personal mission became a much bigger one? When did you decide that you were going to use this to help other people? I think one that really stood out for me was in 2016. So this is now two years after we repurposed this drug for me. We now had repurposed other drugs for Castleman's patients, but we hadn't gone beyond Castleman's at that stage. And my My uncle was diagnosed with metastatic angiosarcoma,

which is a horrible, uniformly fatal cancer. His doctors told him he was out of options, and I did something really simple, Amy. I went to a website called PubMed, which is sort of like Google for healthcare. And I typed in angiosarcoma treatment, literally that simple. And I came across a paper that was published in 2013,

and it suggested that a particular immune pathway was turned on in this one tumor. It's called PDL1. And at that stage, there was early data to suggest that if someone had PDL1 turn on their tumor, they might get better with a PD1 inhibitor. It's not guaranteed, but they might. I ended up encouraging my uncle's doctor

to test for PDO1, and the doctor said, I'm not going to do it because no one with this form of cancer has ever been given a PD1 inhibitor. And I'm like, come on, you just told him he's going to die in the next couple of months. Just do the test. He wouldn't do it, but we got another doctor to do the test, and it came back really positive.

And so at that moment, the question was, should we try this drug on him or not? It had never been used before, but he was fully out of options so he tried it and Michael this past April crossed nine years that he's been in remission

on this drug and because it worked so well for him other doctors started learning about this and started treating their patients and now it's recommended for this form of cancer it required no brilliance Amy whatsoever I literally did the equivalent

of a Google search to find this data and the data didn't guarantee it was going to work but this was an example of a breadcrum that was out there that no one was looking for. And so as I've continued to think about every cure and the vision for it with my co-founder Grant Mitchell, who is a role leader in machine learning, it was

how do we create a system so that all these breadcrumbs get captured and that we can chase them back to where the solution is and find these as quickly as possible. So today, you and your team at EveryCure have repurposed around 14 drugs for multiple diseases. What has been the impact of that?

And are there any pay? patients stories or discoveries that really stand out for you? Sure. Yes. Every patient stands out. And sometimes it's actually really powerful when we don't hear their story until, say, years later and you hear that this person took a drug because we gave this drug to this other patient and all of a sudden it came in guidelines. I think that one that stands out for me that's sort of timely is the very first time we ever ran our algorithm. This was a little bit over two years ago. We didn't know what the results would be like. And by the way, we didn't know how long it would take to run.

It took 100 days to get the results back. And now it takes 17 hours to do an all-versal scan. But anyway, it took 100 days. Get the results back after 100 days. Don't know if it's going to be garbage or what. This is this big dream that me and Graham, my co-founder and Tracy had. And we looked at the things at the top. They looked really promising.

At the same time, there was a patient in Vancouver with Castleman's, the disease that I have, who wasn't responded to any drugs, including the drug that saved my life, Cyrillin, because it wasn't working for him. Well, the top-scoring drug that came out of, out of our algorithm is a drug called adalamamab. It's a TNF inhibitor. It had never been used before for Castleman's,

but it sort of made conceptual sense. And so I talked to this patient's doctor and told him, like, you know, it's early days. We got this insight from this AI platform. You want to try it? I mean, he was like, well, I don't have any other choices. I'll give it a shot. And it worked incredibly well.

It's been over two years now that this patient's been doing great on adalamamab. And for me, that was an amazing moment. Just generating the 60 million plus scores It felt like a monumental moment. And then for the first drug that we gave to the first patient as a result of that score, that's when I just caught on fire.

I mean, I've been on fire about this stuff for like 10 years, but that was fuel to the fire and just such a big moment. Yeah. You've been on this mission for over a decade and you are a man on a mission, but it's not easy, right? You're swimming upstream against an entire medical establishment, against medical culture, against commercial interests, and this stuff is a long, hard slug.

Have there been moments when you were just like, oh my gosh, we're not going to be able to do this? Yeah, the first year and a half, really, of every cure, there was a lot of enthusiasm for what we were doing we would share our vision. But everyone we talked to that was in a position to potentially support us, whether it was the federal government

or whether it was philanthropy, they all had a specific disease in mind they wanted us to focus on. And they would be like, we'll give you millions of dollars if you focus on this disease. What we kept coming back to is that's the problem is that no one has ever looked across everything

versus everything and just said we want to follow the data to the best ways to help people. No one's ever said, we just want to help people. They've always said we want to help people with this disease or help people with that disease. And so it was really frustrating in the first year and a half. We couldn't raise any money. But I'm really glad we stuck to our core value

and to build something that was going to find the opportunities that were being left behind and being helped the people that were not benefiting from the drugs that existed as opposed to a single disease approach. But there are a lot of diseases out there where there isn't a drug to be repurposed, right? Like there are diseases that literally we could try all 4,000 drugs. None of them are going to work. And so I didn't want us to go down that route of chasing one disease at a time. I knew there was power here, or at least I believe there was power

here to help a lot of people at scale, but we just couldn't get anyone behind us until actually our very first funder Chan Zuckerberg initiative came in where they're trying to look for sort of systems changing approaches. But the fundraising part was frustrating because we couldn't build out the tech platform until we had funding to do it. David, the thing that's coming up for me is that we're at this point

where the scale of our problems feels really overwhelming. And so this idea that some of the solutions that we're searching for may be right under our noses. They might already exist. I mean, this is a really helpful mindset shift. Are there any takeaways or insights that you can share with our listeners that have really helped you on this journey? Yeah, I love that you framed it that way.

I think that there's two things that converge in my mind. One is that my life completely changed when I started reflecting on what I was hoping for and then asking what action can I take to create that thing I'm hoping for. However, as you know, it's not easy to be hopeful if you don't believe there's any way that you can achieve the thing you're hoping for, right? But what your point is, actually I've never thought about this way, is that I've been able to turn my hope into action because I also in parallel have this underlying belief that the solutions are hiding in plain sight. So you can be really hopeful, which means you can take action if you believe that the solutions are within reach, right? Time and time again, people lose their hope when they're like, I can't do anything.

I have no power. I have no agency. But yeah, I've never really thought about how this fundamental belief that I think we should all reflect on what we're hoping for and be like, what am I hoping for? for, what am I wishing for, what am I praying for? And then what can I do today, tomorrow, and the next day to get closer to the thing I'm hoping for? So you've been in remission for

11 years now. How has this changed your lens on life? And do you consider yourself cured? It has absolutely changed my lens on life. I was just going to say, I was looking at the date. July 5th will mark 11 and a half years

that I've been in remission. It was January 5th was the last I was in a hospital of 2014, but always, it's funny, I never like to round up. I never like to say July 5th will mark 11 and a half years because what I've learned is that life is so fragile and that there's so much uncertainty in life that one should never round up. I don't like to round down either because you have to be so appreciative for every fraction of anything that you got. So I think that it's changed everything and it's almost changed everything in such a way that it's hard for me even describe what it was like before going through this experience. But in terms of whether I like to use the word cure, it's funny.

I never like to use the word cure. I'm in extended remission, and I'm really thankful for that. But then my friends who know I never like to use the word cure give me a hard time because I wrote a book called Chasing My Cure, which has Cure in the title. But I emphasize it's chasing. It's not caught. It's chasing. And then I have this nonprofit called Every Cure.

And it's like, wait a minute. Not only did you have cure in it, but you're saying every cure? We're like, you know, that's this pretty ambitious, but we're talking about every single one of them, all of them, you know, thousands of them, which is certainly in our mission and our vision, we want to save as many lives as possible. When we think about every, we believe every single person that could benefit should benefit. It's 2035, so it's a decade from now, and you burn through all your funding, but you manage to get some more and things go really well, and the AI gets more powerful, and medical culture slowly changes. Can you tell us what does medicine look like in 10 years' time and what's every cure doing? I think that medicine is going to undergo a massive transformation in the next 10 years. There's some really interesting research around, I think the term is ambient listening.

And it's basically where artisan intelligence can look at the way that you move, the tone of your voice, how you're speaking, even your posture, and certainly what you say as well, all of those things together and make rapid and very accurate diagnoses. So imagine having audio and video in your own house. so you're going to make these diagnoses, even without going to the doctor, just ambient listening of how you're acting and how you're behaving and what you're doing and being able to say you're diagnosed with this. You certainly won't need to go anywhere to get treatments. It'll be fairly automated. You have this condition.

Now you need to get this medicine. I think the leading edge of health will be very different than it is today. I think, unfortunately, the lagging edge could be even worse than it is today for reasons you can imagine. But I do think that diagnosis is going to be different. I think that treatment will be rapidly. identified and tailored to conditions. I think that every cure is going to have to make a major shift

over the next 10 years in our system. So that way, we can really use the power of AI to get these medicines to people. Because right now, there's no financial incentive for what we're doing to be done. So even though our AI technology is very, very good right now, no one is deploying it for what we're doing. So there's going to have to be some group,

I think it'll be every cure, but certainly some group is going to have to continue. to advocate for and use AI in non-profitable ways that are just good for humanity, because I don't think anyone will leverage them if there's no money to be made from doing this. Now, we have a really amazing community of listeners who follow the newsletter and who listen to this podcast. So how do people support your work, either in a monetary or non-monetary way? Yeah, there's three ways that anyone can support the mission that we're collectively all on. The first is you actually can tell us if you've received a drug for disease,

that it wasn't intended for, and it helped you. You know, we love our AI platform, but it's really nice when our AI platform has a match for something that people have already told us help them. So let us know. You can go to everycare.org slash ideas, about 20% of prescriptions written by doctors or for things they're not intended for.

So these experiments are happening. So letting us know if that experiment happened in you and it helped, let us know. The second way is financial. Every dollar counts for the kind of mission that we're on to help us to do laboratory work, our clinical trials, or get the word out or build our team. And the third is to help.

help to amplify and raise awareness about the treatments that we're advancing. And one of the treatments we're advancing is actually for a vitamin called folinic acid or lukevorin, is the pharmaceutical name, for a subtype of children with autism that have antibodies to prevent folate from getting in their brain. Given this medicine, you can actually help to improve their verbal communication skills. And so we are advocating that there's a blood test you can do to see if your child with ASD might have these antibodies. And if they do, they might benefit from this medicine.

And so those are the three things. share ideas with us, you can share funding, and you can also help us to amplify our messaging. David, we have one final question, and you have touched on it earlier. What does the word hope mean to you? Hope is what inspires action. And you can create this sort of circuit where it's like you need a little bit of hope to take a little bit of action, need a little bit of action, a little bit of progress to be more hopeful. So I think it's a fundamental ingredient to change the world, but hope without action isn't

enough. When you can combine hope and action and progress, you can combine hope and action and progress, you can do things and experience things that, at least, that I never dreamed for possible. I think that the next time I walk into a pharmacy, I'm going to feel different. It's going to be a completely new experience, looking at the shelves and feeling like there is a cornucopia of potential cures that we don't even know about out there. For us at Fix the News, Amy, I think reframes like this are just so important. I love the idea of a hidden cure because we speak so much.

much of course about hidden progress. Yeah. This idea of the hidden half of the ledger, stuff that we cannot see for various systemic reasons. And when you think about it like that, David and his team, what they're doing fits right in. If you want to hear more from David, please make sure that you check out his recent TED talk. I think at a time when the world's resources feel more stretched than ever, this idea of repurposing solutions not only opens the door to more possibilities, but it offers a very practical and very realistic way forward. The potential is extraordinary. Gus, the other big reframe from this conversation is this idea of AI for good. David's work really shows us the potential and the possibility that AI can unlock. But we also know that

it's part of a much bigger conversation. There's a lot of curiosity out there. And on the flip side, there's also a lot of concern and justifiably so around the risks of advanced AI. Now, our sponsor for this episode is 80,000 hours. They're an amazing non-profit that helps people find careers that make a positive difference in the world. And they will even help you use the career that you already have to make that difference.

For over a decade, these guys have been researching and writing about AI and thinking about how we can mitigate the risks. and already they have supported over 1,000 people from a range of different backgrounds to use their skills to advance research and things like AI safety, policy, governance and even cyber security.

They've got a ton of resources that can help you build a high-impact career, including the career guide, a podcast featuring in-depth interviews with experts, they've got a job board and an email news letter. Everything 80,000 hours provides is completely free. You just need to visit 80,000 hours.org

forward slash hope. We've popped a link to that in our podcast notes along with some more information about David and Everykia. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com. There are a lot of podcasts out there.

It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gardagal and the Wurundry and Wei Wurong people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.