Good morning, John.

So strangely enough, and I don't know if you've heard about this, I got a cancer. It was, and this isn't a super close race, the worst thing that's ever happened to my body. If I hadn't gotten treatment for it I wouldn't be dead yet, but I'd be on my way to dying, Luckily though, for me, there was never any question about what we were gonna do about the cancer. Hodgkin lymphoma was one of the first cancers that was shown to be really responsive to both chemotherapy and radiation. So even though chemotherapy sucks, I knew we were gonna do that.

Chemotherapy targets cancer cells really specifically, but not so specifically that it doesn't also get a bunch of the good guys. But I was 100% on board with chemo and it's definitely extended my life. It's probably saved my life and I'll die of some other thing. And three out of the four chemo drugs that I was on are natural. They're from nature. Vinblastine comes from the Madagascar Periwinkle. It's just in a cute little flower. It was known to the indigenous people in Madagascar. Scientists checked it out and found that it had a bunch of anti-cancer properties. Another one: Adriamycin, also called doxorubicin, was found in microbes in the soil at the the base of an Italian castle. The third, bleomycin, was also found in a soil microbe called streptomyces verticillus.

Soil microbes have been known for centuries to have antibacterial properties. Ppeople would pack wounds with specific soils because they knew that those soils would prevent infection. They didn't know why, but they knew that they would, and the reason why is that a lot of bacteria produce antibiotic compounds to compete with other bacteria. And it turns out, a lot of antibiotics are also good chemotherapies because they work by messing with cell's ability to replicate themselves. Streptomyces verticillus was never used in traditional medicine as far as we know, but all three of these molecules are both natural compounds and very effective chemotherapies for Hodgkin lymphoma, and some of them for other things. And they've been tested, not just to see if they're effective, but what doses are most effective, which cancers they are most effective against, how dangerous they are, what side effects are most common, how they affect women versus men, how they affect people based on their age, their efficacy at different stages of cancer, how long you can safely take them, which side effects are most serious, and how to minimize those complications both in the short term and the long-term. Because when we're talking about chemotherapy side effects, we're not just talking about puking this week, which is a big deal, but we're also talking about long-term potential damage like lung scarring or cardiac effects or secondary cancers.

Cancers are not chill. Treatments usually have to be high-impact because these are high impact and sneaky diseases. And so it's kind of amazing that we are in this point in history where a lot of these medicines have been tested in a lot of different ways to see what their best dosing schedule is, to see how little you can take without increasing the chances that the cancer will come back, to know how to be prepared for potential side effects. This is the slow, careful, tedious work of medical research. And it made the cancer treatment that I've been through way less awful than it would have been just 10 years ago.

During the time when I was publicly living with cancer and talking about cancer treatment, I received almost universally good vibes. Like, I just want to be clear about that people were amazing. But I did get some folks who would come to me and say that I would have a better outcome and be healthier if I took a more natural route, by which they meant that I should not be doing chemotherapy. There was also a second set of things that happened, which is that people would take my words and then they would move them over into their social media feeds in some way, so they wouldn't be talking directly to me. They would be talking about me. And those people were a lot less polite. those people were creating content around me about how my decisions were bad and about how you should do something different if you ever have cancer or if you currently have cancer. I know that the right thing to do is to not let the anger that I felt about that show and how I talk about those people, so I'm trying to do that, but the question becomes "If most of my cancer treatments came from nature, what do they mean when they say that I should be doing more natural treatments?"

I gotta be clear here too. When it comes to like Epsom salt baths and acupuncture during chemotherapy, yes, I'm in favor of all of that. If you wanna do it and your doctor is telling you it's not going to do any harm and you feel like it's going to do good, do it. I took Epsom salt baths. I don't know if it was any good, but it was like a chance to take a big long bath and feel like I was doing something for myself. And there are also supplements that we know don't hurt and we think might help. Like, I took fish oil, I took vitamin D, I took magnesium, especially the magnesium I think helps. I was getting muscle cramps that cleared up after I took magnesium supplements. As long as you're talking to your doctor about it and it doesn't look there's negative consequences, I say do it.

There are some things that look like they might have some positive effect, but nothing has a positive effect like actual cancer treatments. So skipping those actual cancer treatments in favor of natural treatment makes me wonder what do you mean by natural. And here it is, and I'm not sure sugarcoating this, I don't know a nicer way to say it when we say natural cancer treatment, what we mean is something that either we don't know it works or we know that it doesn't work or that we know that it does more harm than good. Those--that's the only things that we mean when we say natural cancer treatment because otherwise, a natural cancer treatment would include the three compounds from nature that I put in my body to cure my cancer.

The majority of cancer cases on Earth, and an even greater majority of cancer deaths on Earth, happen outside of high-income countries. Those people don't die of cancers because they don't have access to coffee enemas or cannabis oil or apricot pits. They die because they don't have access to chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and screening. It's just obviously true, it's just not something that I think people who talk about natural cancer treatment and avoiding chemotherapy think about ever.

While I was feeling like garbage while on chemo, I designed a bunch of socks and then my friends picked the top eight that they liked the most. It was one of the only things I felt like I was capable of doing creatively with my brain in the state that it was in. They're comfy and cozy and stylish and fun patterns and they all use the exact same color scheme, so if you want, you can mix and match to have a little fun, and 100% of the profit goes to increase access to cancer treatment.

Cancer treatment does often suck, absolutely, and also, I feel so lucky to be alive in this time, in this place, so that I can have access to it. 10 years ago my treatment would have sucked more. 30 years before that, it would have been horrible and probably caused me lifetime disability. 30 years before that, it would not have existed. And yet, there are people on the Earth right now for whom that same reality of 80 years ago in the U.S. is their reality now. We don't have to live in a world like that and also, we don't have to live in a world with boring socks where the profit goes to some stranger somewhere. These socks are gonna be available for a long time, but this is the last day for standard shipping with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve, so if you wanna buy them for somebody else, now is the time. That's also the case for everything else at good.store and dftba.com, for people in the U.S. International, all bets are off. If your style or the size that want has sold out, you can sign up to get a notification. I suggest you do that. I actually went to the warehouse this week and made a bunch of boxes and packed a bunch of orders. It was a good time.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.