 Hi everyone my name is Raif Derrazy and in this video I'm excited to interview our special guest Dr. Marcus Conant to discuss his groundbreaking work in HIV both at the height of the epidemic in the early 80s and continuously on through today with groundbreaking HIV cure research, most notably related to American gene technology's recent announcement of their AGT-103T phase one clinical trial results. If you haven't seen the video where I covered the announcement I'll put up a card here so you can watch that as well. But first I'll start by introducing our esteemed guest Marcus A. Conant MD is a physician who treated thousands of HIV patients in the early 80s while running the inpatient dermatology service at the University of California San Francisco. Before anyone recognized the virus or understood that it was about to become a global epidemic he took the lead in forming the Kaposi Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation in 1982 which later became the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Marcus conducted early clinical trials persevering despite seeing 94 percent of patients die during the epidemic's first years. His clinical experience sensitized him to the suffering caused by the disease. As a physician with a holistic perspective his work expanded beyond the strictly clinical to include education, research, and advocacy. Marcus is currently a clinical professor emeritus at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He has published more than 70 articles on the treatment of AIDS, testified in front of Congress multiple times, and is a powerful advocate for the LGBTQ community. He is currently the chief medical officer at both American Gene Technologies and Atomium. Dr. Conant you have such an incredibly storied legacy and career and in doing my research I was just in awe of all that you've accomplished and the inner conviction you must have had to wade through so many challenges. It's so great to have you on the channel welcome. Thank you. So I'll just start with a really wide general question that I ask a lot of my guests which is what is your view on the current state of the global HIV AIDS epidemic? It's not been good from the beginning and it's not good right now. As you know probably better than I there are more than 38 million people living with HIV infection worldwide right now approaching 40 million. In addition to that there have been 40 million people who have died of HIV so we've got 80 million people infected with this disease. Unfortunately I can remember in the early 80s when the CDC announced the first 1,000 patients that they knew of who had been infected. So I've lived through the period when we knew of a thousand people worldwide infected with this disease to now 40 million people half of them dead. So the prevalence is huge but the bad news is the incidence the number of new cases is not going down or leveling off around in many places in the world it's increasing now it's doing pretty well in the U.S. but around the world it's continuing to increase. So the challenges that we've had since the beginning of the epidemic are one a vaccine or some way to block infection and then a treatment for people who are infected to eliminate the virus from their system. So I guess I'll start at the beginning and ask how because you were a dermatologist at the time how did you originally get involved in HIV work? My research at the university was on another sexually transmitted disease genital herpes and I when I got there as a resident in 1963 I volunteered at the Haydash Barrier Clinic and that was during the summer of love and we started seeing all these cases of genital herpes young people having sex god forbid and they were getting genital herpes so I had spent my career to that point doing clinical research on herpes and a dear friend Al Friedman Keen was a dermatologist in New York and he too was working on genital herpes a dermatologist and Al called me it was on April the first of 1981 and said Mark we now have seen about 20 gay men in New York with Kaposi sarcoma and the amazing thing is they're young now we as dermatologists knew what Kaposi sarcoma was because Kaposi was an Austrian dermatologist who had described the disease in the late 1800s and so we knew what it was but it was exceedingly rare the average dermatologist would probably see one case in a career and suddenly here Al had 23 of them in New York and furthermore they were in young people most of the cases of Kaposi sarcoma were in elderly Eastern Eastern European Jewish men so there was a demographic and this wasn't that demographic so the next day I was doing giving a lecture on herpes but one of the herpes viruses had been implicated as the ideological agent of Kaposi sarcoma and so at the end of the lecture I mentioned this call from Friedman Keen it wasn't this weird that they were seeing all these patients and one of the dermatologists in the audience raised his hands and says I have one of these upstairs so that was the first case that I saw in 1981 and so at that point that's how I became interested in the disease and it moved very quickly to realize that we had an epidemic because the number of cases started growing exponentially and at what point was that connection made between the Kaposi sarcoma and and these young gay men who were who had AIDS we began to suspect it about four months later when cases from Los Angeles were reported with pneumocystis coronia pneumonia and very quickly we learned with the ks patients and the patients with pcp that what what they had in common was there were young gay men they were sexually very sexually active gay men and when we looked at it all of their immune system had collapsed their t-cell number was depressed so it took a while for the community to understand what was going on but I think among people working in the area we realized pretty early that these were two manifestations of the same disease in your work in dermatology did this discovery of the immune suppression in in folks living with AIDS and then having Kaposi sarcoma as a result did that inform your understanding of of dermatology as it relates to immune function and immune health moving forward well we I think we already knew a lot about that because remember in dermatology of course encompasses a huge area they're pediatric dermatologists and they're believe it or not infectious disease dermatologists and so as a dermatologist we those of us working in infectious diseases in my case gentle herpes we knew how the immune system determined the progression of that disease the eruption of the disease the the treatment of the disease so yeah we had begun to understand that now we've learned a huge amount about immune response from the hiv epidemic but early on remember in the first two years of the epidemic we had even no idea what was causing it we didn't know that it was a virus or a bacteria or something in the lifestyle of gay men early on it was suspected that maybe using poppers amyl nitrite was the etiological agent that that was suppressing the immune system and so early on we had no idea what was causing this disease yeah and there's even folks this day who who will still emphasize that it was poppers that caused the epidemic right in reviewing your biography and seeing how many patients were literally dying right in front of you as you were doing this critical work early on how did you as someone running these clinical trials manage not only the professional impact of losing patients losing participants but also the personal impact of witnessing so many deaths i can't answer that question because just as if you ask someone who lived through a major war you know how did you live through something watching everybody you love and care for and the men around you die and they say i don't know you just you you just function you have to and so that's the answer it was a very very tough period of time for everyone because we were losing not only our our patients all of these patients were my patients but we were losing our patients they were our friends many cases they were our lovers thank you for putting it that way i i couldn't even imagine and a lot of folks my age and younger have no idea what that even was and yet we live with i think the weight uh and the fear that that manifested in society and so i just i try to bring folks on who have had that experience and kind of can kind of make that link between our generation because in a lot of times a lot of times that's kind of lost and conversation and it is lost but the thing that's important as gay men who've had that experience either those of us that lived through it or in your generation those of you who have inherited this we have a perspective that we can share with society that can make society better the in my view the important lessons was here here was an epidemic we were not prepared for it hit a stigmatized group sometime we should talk about the stigma i mean while we while we were watching our friends die a large part of society was saying they brought it on themselves if they hadn't lived that lifestyle they wouldn't have gotten it and so that was actually in many cases harder than the day-to-day watching people die was watching society stand by and watch them die but as gay men we have learned a great deal from this epidemic and yet what did we do to get ready for the next epidemic because covid came along 20 years later what did we do to get ready for covid nothing and now what have we done with from covid what have we learned from that to get ready for the next one everyone just pretends these things have happened in a vacuum and never gonna happen again we're not taking lessons from these things and that's that's the legacy that young gay men should take from this is we should advocate for our society to do more to be prepared for the next one of these tragedies and let me enlarge that point a little bit as you mentioned early on AIDS killed 94% of the guys that got it if you had caught AIDS in 1982, 83, 84 and you came to me and I said you have Capsis sarcoma that means you're infected with HIV I was telling you you are going to die and you knew that with the covid epidemic it only killed early on about two and a half percent put somewhere between two and three percent of the people who got it what if covid had killed 30% of the people who got it our society would have collapsed I mean it almost collapsed as it was and yet we're doing absolutely nothing to prepare for the next epidemic that's such a good point and also in talking about things that we haven't learned there was such I think a trust that was broken between community and healthcare between government officials between people who are supposed to be kind of the stewards of making sure that as a society we're functioning and we're taking care of ourselves and I saw that play out during covid too the amount of distrust that has come out of that situation I I don't even do you have any kind of where like how do we remedy that moving forward for the next time I can't answer your question which is an excellent question how do we remedy but your point is well taken and I don't know if you've read Randy Schultz's book and the band played on but in that book Randy makes the point that we had all of these institutions in place to deal with an epidemic we didn't know what epidemic was coming but we had institutions in place we had the CDC we had the NIH we had the the public health system we had the press we had the churches as institution of providing care for community all of these institutions were there and every single one of them failed all of them said we don't want to be involved in this and the next thing you knew a large percentage of our population young gay men were dying at one point in the epidemic the most common cause of death for young men in America all men was the HIV epidemic because it was killing gay men you know in huge numbers we lost 800,000 boys in San Francisco we lost in a town of 800,000 people we lost 36,000 men yeah that's like I said I can't I can't even fathom it that's the that's the blessing is you don't have to fathom it because we got a pill and the the pill of course makes the young gay guy today not only able to live with the disease and have a normal lifespan but to use PrEP to protect his sexual partners from getting the disease as well that's great but think about the rest of the world I mean we're privileged in America to have access to treatment and to prevention but for the vast majority of people in the world if you're a young boy in Africa and you're infected with HIV you don't have the resources to treat yourself much less provide pre-exposure prophylaxis for your partner yeah it's interesting for me my experience I was diagnosed in 2012 and initially I was diagnosed with HIV and I I mean I knew I was taught how to avoid getting a diagnosis how to avoid STIs in general common safer sex practices but I was never taught in all those years what happens if you do get a diagnosis and what what options are available to you and what your life might look like so I was under the impression I was going to be dead in two to three years and immediately went through the okay what am I going to do I came back a week later on my 27th birthday and then I was diagnosed with AIDS and I'm like okay well that's it so I've got two three years and then I'm done so what do I do with my life now so I did have kind of have that moment of like wow the impact of it without because I didn't have the education before realizing oh hey wow there is this I think at the time it was two to three pills that I took that completely changed everything within it within six to nine months well to pick up on your point right now in America we have people who are HIV positive who are on treatment that's a large percentage we have people that are HIV positive that don't know it now they're out there tonight having sex and transmitting it but they've not been tested we could test them we could have a program in America where we tested everybody and then offered them treatment and we could stop the epidemic in this country but there's no there's no interest in doing that but do you know that 20 percent of the people out there who are HIV positive and know it are not on treatment the very thing they're saying they don't either know what to do they don't know how to access it they think it costs too much they don't have the information and whose problem is whose whose failing is that is that theirs or is that our government failing to educate our people absolutely you made so you make such a good point about testing everybody gosh like that is so simple to routine ice something like that with routine doctors visits you just get a test it doesn't matter who you are what your background is you just test and that would instantly take away the stigma and then the concern of like if you are worried about having HIV well I don't want to be seen in a clinic I don't want to be seen going here they're getting tested or having to deal with any of that it's just part of part of everybody's yeah that's so profound oh wait take take it a step further don't just test people when they see the doctor everybody who gets a driver's license gets a buckle swab so you could test the entire society in a period of about a year or two very very quickly every time you renew your driver's license there's an automatic offer for we'd like to HIV test you okay and then take it one step further who should pay for that the drug companies the drug companies are making a fortune treating patients or HIV and for every patient they find that's positive they make even more money wow I've never heard that put before and it makes so much sense I can I can instantly hear the pushback of a portion of society that says oh that's big brother that's an invasion that's you know the politicization of all of that that is so prevalent especially now yeah that's too woke for them exactly okay so I'm gonna change direction here a little bit because I noticed that though the California legalized the use of medical marijuana in 1986 federally it wasn't it hadn't been legalized it hasn't been legalized and in 2002 you were the lead plaintiff in the conant versus walters trial which led to the judicial decision to protect the first amendment right of physicians to recommend the use of medical marijuana to people living with HIV and AIDS what how did that how did you get wrapped up in that what prompted the trial was there recourse happening from the federal government oh yeah you again something you don't know that you should it was doing but believe it or not a democratic clinton administration but they decided that they would criminalize doctors talking to patients about marijuana Barry McCaffrey the general that you see on tv from time to time you know a very bright guy had been made the drug czar and he proclaimed during the clinton administration that they would punish doctors if they recommend if they discussed marijuana it wasn't that you could we were recommending it theoretically if you just said it's a bad thing you shouldn't do it it was if you talked about marijuana now and the way they were going to punish doctors because remember you're licensed by a state not by the federal government so the feds can't take away your license but what they can do is take away your right to see medicare patients and if they take away your right to see medicare patients they're taking away your right to earn a living okay so they had a way of punishing doctors now again this was under a democratic administration not a republican administration there were concerns this was a period of time when monica lawinsky had had an affair with president clinton and they were trying to persuade her miss trip i believe her name was was trying to persuade monica to wear a bar to entrap the president in admitting that he had had sex with her now think about it you're a doctor the patient comes in into your waiting room and closed the door and the patient says doctor i have hiv and i'm throwing up every night i'm not hungry and i'm losing weight and i've heard that smoking a joint will increase my appetite is that true and i say yeah that's true i've had 20 patients that tell me that's furthermore i did the research on marinal which is a marijuana derivative and it increased their appetite so i've got clinical evidence that it'll increase your appetite and that patient's wearing a war and i could lose my license that's exactly what we were facing well they approached me to to be because i was well known you know as an advocate and a patient's advocate to be involved and i said no i'm too busy taking your age patients i haven't got and they were having trouble finding someone because think about it as a gay man i was single most most physicians have a wife a practice and three kids are planning to send to college they're not going to take on something like that where they could lose their license in my case you know fine what are they going to put me in prison unfortunately i could move to europe you know i mean i'm not stuck here and so finally i did take it off to agree to become the lead plaintiff because it became obvious that somebody had to step up if everybody just sat down and said absolutely nothing that was going to become the law of the land and so fortunately it was the the lawsuit no no one can support a lawsuit like that it was supported by the sorus foundation they funded all of the lawyers for that and it went to trial in san francisco not only to to punish me for and the other people that signed on for saying that we thought it was wrong but they had asked me in deposition had i ever recommended that a patient smoke marijuana and i said yeah i have and they were going to charge me with aiding in a belly in a felony which could send me to prison the court in san francisco which is very liberal court said doctors have a right to talk to patients this is a first amendment right and therefore the the felony charge is moot because he did something that was acceptable the government appealed it it went to the appellate court they upheld it it went to the supreme court and they said we're not going to hear it which meant that's the history there it's fascinating and that's what got the right for physicians to talk to patients hopefully about anything the patient wants to talk about incredible and i know you said you know somebody had to step up but i don't think that's a given and i think it takes a certain kind of character to actually be willing to step up and do that so hats off to you and i appreciate also you emphasizing that it was multiple times that it was under a democratic administration that this happened because it's not political and it's not just limited to one side and there's this misunderstanding that happens all around and it's important to be aware of that and to not just assume that because democrats are in power or someone has progressive beliefs that that are understanding of hiv aids and and taking care of our community and and prevention is necessarily going to happen that it's a given also that's right so fast forwarding to the present you are currently the chief medical officer at american gene technologies and now also of the new spin off company at immune can you talk a little bit about what your role is as chief medical officer sure that's the easiest question of the morning the researchers do do the heavy lifting that they do the work to to get the product ready the job of a chief medical officer is twofold to work with the researchers to try to implement what they do in a clinical trial in the clinic to get the answers that they need and also probably most important to be sure that that's done in a way that doesn't injure the patients so so my job is to work with jeff boil the chief scientific officer to design the protocol for the next trial the last trial is just finishing up as you know from your last interview and for the next trial and we're working on that right now and then as i say to monitor it as the trial goes forward to be certain that we're in our view we're not in enjoy injuring our our friends and our patients okay so would it be fair to say that the chief science officer is more focused on the logistics aspect and you're you're concerned with the human aspect in a broad suite this truth in that yes what so you work alongside jeff boil and i assume you work closely with jeff calvin as well sure what's that relationship like it's it's a great relationship because jeff calvin as you as you know from your interviews an exceedingly bright guy he's one of the brightest guys i've ever had the pleasure of working with and he's a real visionary you know he sees this in the in the big scope of things he's raised the money to get it done without his his impetus we wouldn't be doing this and he's put in place the people that can get it done so it's a delight to work with him and we see each other you know on a daily basis when i'm here and folks i had another great interview with jeff calvin also on this channel recently so be sure to check that out as well i'll put a card up here if you haven't seen it so he recently talked about the agt 103t phase one clinical trial he seems very hopeful about how far um how it's gone so far do you share his optimism yes and what it's an 87 year old man i wouldn't be here if i didn't i wasn't optimistic about this thing and so yeah yes i'm very optimistic about it the science is good i mean you know your audience knows about the burlin patient and there have now been five other patients who've been cured by a simple technique of of blocking the entry of hiv into cells by by rendering the patient ccr5 deficient homozygous solution deficient and so all we've done is to take that information and then build on by taking a group of cells gags specific t cells and rendering them essentially impervious to infection with hiv by blocking ccr5 and we've the first study is as jeff calvin told you what we did was with seven patients we took their cells we grew them up and grew up the gags specific t cells into huge numbers and over a billion we injected a linty virus in there that blocks ccr5 we put those cells back in patients now that was a safety study it was not an efficacy study and the safety study was an unequivocal success their success in that that kind of safety study is measured by essentially one parameter were there serious adverse events from the from what you did did patients get sick to patients die and the answer was there was zero there was not one single serious adverse event the minor events like i got a headache doctor occurs with any transfusion so the things that we saw were anticipated but those were minor events there were no serious adverse events now from our point of view from a scientific point of view even more important was was our vector still there at the end of the trial i mean did what we put in those cells persist or did your body kill it off and the answer is no it's still persistent so we put the cells in it didn't hurt the patient they still persisted and then i was brought on to now take the patients off of their medications off their hiv medication to see if it worked and we don't have we don't have a cure that's for sure but what we have are indications that yes ourselves are active they're doing what we think they should do what we want them to do so the next trial we'll build on that we've got it designed essentially there will be three centers in california two in san francisco one in la where we will test 24 patients with this same construct moving toward a cure for hiv but but let me again remind your audience this will be a cure for people who can afford it who are privileged like you and me we still have to have a a vaccine or some way to stop this epidemic because there are millions of people worldwide who will not be able to avail themselves of this hopefully with this we will be able financially to then begin to work on the vaccine that we need yeah again great comment i would say a large proportion of the amount of comments that i get especially on those videos that i talked about agt 103t and other functional cure hopefuls is that will it be available where i live and how much will it cost and there is a general sense of cynicism among a lot of viewers saying well we all know it's going to cost a hundred thousand dollars or something crazy so only the privileged few are going to be able to access it well let me let me pick up on that let's let's say that it cost a hundred thousand dollars but let's say that it works for 10 years now i'm hoping it'll work for the life of the patient but just just pick 10 years right now it costs 30 000 a year for drug okay and if it's 30 000 a year in 10 years that's 300 000 if you can do it for 100 000 you've saved 200 000 that's right and presumably a lot of people are living along a lot longer than 10 years that's right and and we should be able to persuade insurance companies hey guys would you rather pay 300 000 or 100 000 exactly and since you're since you made a good comment on that i'm curious to hear your opinion on this as well other folks say there just isn't money to be made in a cure and therefore you know the idea that it's going to it's not going to be at the very least it's not going to be pursued as aggressively as it should be well i can point to what jeff galvin has done jeff galvin galvin has raised almost 75 million dollars so far in the 15 years he's been doing so there are venture capitalists out there who are willing to put money into looking for a cure because they can see the markets that we just described it it doesn't it certainly it's not something that's going to be available worldwide at least not for a long time but it's certainly something that would make money for investors if we can make it work yeah folks for those of you watching really keep that in mind in order for an investor to be able to to be able to throw in tens of millions of dollars at something i mean they're not just expecting to get that money back after two decades they want to get a profit and return on that investment so that alone the fact that investors are interested should give you some sense of evidence that there is there is profit to be made in a cure and that people will and people are going to be want want to be the first movers on that i mean the the first person to come out with the cure has a huge advantage as well that's right that's absolutely right so what are your hopes and aspirations in the years to come with regard to egt and more specifically with adimmune well think about it we have huge barriers we first have got to prove that our basic product what we're working on right now really works and we'll get us a new set point now let's expand that a little bit i mean what are we really trying to do we know that when you get infected with hib your viral load goes sky high and then your own body over time brings it down and you plateau at what's called a set point mellers back in the late 90s showed that in most patients that viral set point is about four logs and it stays there until the bone marrow burns out and then slowly the immune system collapses now patients on drugs don't have to worry about that because you're you don't have a set point you don't have a measurable viral load what we're trying to do with this is to establish a new set point and we're hoping that that set point will be undetectable the same thing that you get with drugs that you can set the the viral load will be so low that you can't measure but even if it were just even it was a 5000 or 250 or something like that then the challenge will be well how can we make what we're doing work better what can we do to stimulate more of these cells or make make the theory that the construct that we have more efficacious so those are all of the challenges but then think of all of the other things associated with hiv that need to be addressed the thing that kills patients now is not hiv it's immune stimulation it's immune activation so how can we how can we reduce the immune activation in patients that are hiv positive and then with capsaicin sarcoma the the the disease that brought me to this to begin with capsaicin sarcoma is a virus it's a herpes virus that's transmitted from person to person okay you're probably infected with it i'm probably infected with it we have hiv negative men right now coming down with capsaicin sarcoma they have been infected one of the things that immune can do is work on trying to find a cure for that hiv associated disease so there's a whole spectrum of things that we can work on and when you say immune activation is the thing that kills patients now what is that can you elaborate that a little bit it's felt that immune stimulation immune activation is the chronic immune activation is the thing that's causing heart disease that's causing the long-term problems with the people that are hiv positive are experiencing so something that i've typically referred to as chronic inflammation exactly okay yeah that's such an interest yeah that's such a good point and it's such an interesting topic for a lot of folks i would say that it's not really talked about nearly enough by our healthcare providers i didn't really even know that that was a thing and i've i mean i had a diagnosis 2012 so 11 years ago and i only learned about that maybe in the last year or two that that was even a potential concern and for those of us who are plan on living and thriving with hiv that's something that we need to know more about all right i think that's true of all of us so the problem we have there is there really no good markers you know how do you measure it i mean we know it's happening but we don't have really good markers to follow i was actually speaking with the the london patient adam castillo last year and he's the one who actually mentioned that he was informed that i don't know if it's something like your three times more likely to develop cancer as someone living with hiv in regards to to dermatology do you have any insight there no and unfortunately i and this is this is embarrassing but you know as i said get more and more involved in hiv i move further and further away from from classic dermatology i still follow a little of the literature but you know i'm i'm the wrong dermatologist to ask at this point is there anything that we haven't discussed or touched on today that you'd like to share with our viewers no you know i think though that some of the things you hit on early on as we were talking you know what it was like for gay men at that period of time you know what it was like to be in san francisco or new york or some of the gay mechas you know the whole gay society has changed tremendously in the 80 years that i've lived and watched the gay society um you know in the 1960s gay out gay men were living in i mean no more than a half a dozen cities in america san francisco los angeles miami new york chicago nowadays you know gay men are more comfortable living throughout the whole country but the people in those cities it was really amazing because in san francisco many of my patients tried to go home to their homes in texas or wherever they had fled from when they realized they were gay and they couldn't live in where they had been born and many of them had to come back to san francisco because there was no support system for them in their hometown and and and that was a tragedy and i i don't think anyone really i don't think it's discussed today that people don't realize what these people went through or how their families i can remember one patient who was a dear friend and he just loved the fact that his sister had a child and he just wanted to beat the uncle of that to that little boy and the minute she found out he was positive she never would let him see the kid again those kind of horror stories need to be remembered that that was the society that we had created and that we were living through yeah i had i had a personal experience i think back in 93 or 94 i was eight or nine years old at the time and i remember my stepdad had a friend come to the house his name was randy um and he was middle aged but he looked sickly and thin and i remember i saw him the one time he showed up said hi to my parents and my my stepdad said not to touch him and not to hug him and then i never saw him again and i didn't understand it at the time but growing up you know having that realization was like wow that's i mean i felt that my heart breaks thinking about like just that interaction mm-hmm that's right and that was that was not just unique though that was the way society behaved which which was a tragedy but think about it when when i was in my 20s and early 30s that you know as a gay man no one ever would say you know come come to a party and bring your partner because you couldn't acknowledge that someone was gay so he didn't have a partner you were a bachelor we don't have bachelors anymore we have straight men who are not married but they're not called bachelor uncle joe who was a bachelor was probably a gay man back in the 1950s and 60s and so that whole thing has changed they don't exist anymore bachelors were invited to come to party with some girl that had not gotten married in from the neighborhood probably a lesbian and the two of them you know sat there and tried to be very nice during the dinner party and then after the dinner was over they clean with their separate ways yeah that's fascinating and i would never i that's the first time i heard that so thank you for sharing um yeah and frankly you're the one who really brought up the social aspect of it and the stigma i wasn't planning on really touching on that i didn't i didn't expect that talking to you as someone who's really heavily into the medical field would have that kind of sort of connection so i appreciate you really like digging in and making sure that we cover that and i'm so glad we did i do want to it's my intention to share more stories like that with my audience my thinking is always how do i bring something of value to my audience and and what can they gain from it so i personally have a deep desire to dig into that more um and this may be unfair to ask of you you might not have an answer which is fine but i'm curious if you have an insight how how i can make that connection especially with those who are so focused on on cure cure cure how do i you know get out of the situation i'm in today to make that value connection for the audience that's so focused on just getting to a cure well one of the ways that i can help you is i still have friends who've lived through this epidemic who were there at the time and you might we can talk off camera about you interviewing some of those to begin to get perspective from people who actually lived through that period of time yeah that would be amazing i would love to do that and for those of you watching please in the comments below um or in dms however you end up watching this let me know if that's something that would be of interest to you and of the value and insight that you would get from that as well i would love to do that mark is there so much more that i could chat with you and would love to chat with you about um but you've been so gracious with your time and respectfully respectfully it is time to wrap up our conversation today i'd love to bring you back on at some point if the opportunity presents itself we could talk about agt we could talk about so many different things hopefully the data we get will make it imperative that i come back to tell you that we're we're closer to a cure any anytime that that you want to talk about the stigma or what it was like to you know we could talk for a whole half an hour about what it was like to be told you were hiv positive some beautiful 30 year old gay guy who had come to san francisco gotten a lover had gotten a wonderful job and then watch his life just collapse in front of him you know as he is he loses weight and gets you know that and people just people think that you got aids and you died no no you got aids and you live for months slowly wasting away people people forget they don't forget it your generation doesn't even know it oh um before you go um is there anything that you'd like to share with the audience as far as projects that you're working on or self-promotion or if people want to follow you or your work yeah well if if you want self-promotion the university of california and san francisco has been kind enough to name an endowment for me for gay and lesbian dermatology and i would love you to promote that to your audience because quite honestly they need donations if they're going to finance that endowment anyway i've really enjoyed this thank you so much for doing it everyone at home please comment below your thoughts questions i'm more than happy to follow up after the fact this has been such an inspiring interview marcus a huge thank you to you and everything that you're continuing to do everyone at home thank you so much for watching if you do care to donate or support this channel i have included a new paypal link in the description box below and you can always send super thanks or super comments in the comments below as well please like this video if you liked it subscribe if you haven't already and hit that bell so you get a notification every time a new video comes out and share this video with people who in your life who you might think might find this valuable and be sure if you haven't watched it already to check out the agt 103 t announcement video i did as well as the interview with ceo jeff galvin cheers everyone take care