Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2170 - Max Lugavere
Uploaded: 2024-06-27T17:00:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2170 - Max Lugavere' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2170 - Max Lugavere' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2170 - Max Lugavere

I know what's cracking oh man just uh first of all honored to be here thank you
love you and your
work and yeah I mean just a national treasure say that's very nice of you go
out on a limb and say
it but um no I'm super super excited because I've been working on this
documentary for the last 10
years of my life and um it's finally out today which uh I'm super pumped for
and it's called
Little Empty Boxes and we talked about it the last time I was here and um it's
a project that
means the world to me I think it's the most important thing I've ever done and
it's the
first ever dementia prevention documentary about the science of dementia
prevention but it focuses
it's a very emotional and personal film for me because it follows my mom who
for many years
suffered from a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia which is akin
to having both
Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time that's what Robin
Williams had that's
what Robin Williams had yeah and it's a it's a rare condition it affects about
1 million people in the
United States but it's a um it's a dementia and dementia is now a soaring
public health problem
and there's a lot of controversy in within the field um the last time I was
here we talked about
you know fraud in the um in the research space with regard to the prevailing
hypothesis as to what
causes Alzheimer's disease which is the most common form of dementia and
actually finally over the past
month that paper was finally retracted it took two years but um could you
explain to everybody what
the fraud was yeah so basically among the dementias Alzheimer's disease is the
most common form of it
and that affects about 6 million people in the United States and since it was
first named in 1906
by physician Aloise Alzheimer the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes
Alzheimer's disease
dubbed the amyloid hypothesis has been that this plaque formed by a precursor
protein called amyloid beta
accumulates in the brain and by finding a drug that can potentially remove
extract that that those plaques
from the brain from the extracellular space around neurons that we could
essentially cure the disease that
that the that the causal factor in the condition was this was ultimately this
amyloid
beta protein which forms the plaque and trial after trial has been a dismal had
been a dismal failure and it wasn't looking good
until in um 2006 a paper was published in nature which for any scientist
publishing in nature it's like winning an academy award and that paper
essentially what that did was it it allegedly identified this variant of amyloid
beta that connected the plaque to the cognitive dysfunction so the most
important clinical feature of Alzheimer's disease because for a long time
it was known that cognitively healthy people accumulate plaque in their brains
and that plaque doesn't seem to correlate with cognitive impairment or anything
like that
and so that was very deflating for researchers in the field until this 2006
paper came out
and what it did was it renewed faith in this in this hypothesis which
was always a hypothesis and continued to send billions and billions of dollars
worth of funding down this path
and what turned out to be the case just two years ago was that that paper was
essentially fraudulent
and it represented about 16 years worth of wasted time wasted money which was
hugely deflating for
not just the research community but also for any patient who's ever suffered
from alzheimer's disease
and you know the way that the field is now slowly starting to turn but this is
a drum that i've
been beating for the past 10 years is that we really need to start talking
about these conditions in terms of
prevention and that's what inspired me to set down this path of creating this
documentary little empty boxes
what was the fraud like what what how did they do it so basically the in the
paper there were
they identified these proteins that they isolated in rat models of the
condition mouse models of the
condition called a bay a beta star 56 again amyloid is amyloid is there at the
scene of the crime so to
speak so when you have alzheimer's disease somebody who's died of alzheimer's
disease what they what they
find inevitably in the brains of cadavers who've died from alzheimer's disease
are two features they see
this aggregation of these plaques amyloid beta plaques and tangled proteins
called tau and so
it was a very seductive narrative that this plaque causes the condition right
for years the problem is
they've succeeded at reducing the plaque in the brains of people with alzheimer's
disease but that
hasn't led to any improvement in the clinically meaningful features of the
disease that we that we
aspire to improve for sufferers of alzheimer's disease right the cognitive the
cognitive function
and in tandem with that we see that amyloid is produced naturally in all brains
and people who are cognitively healthy have amyloid in their brains there's a
degree of amyloid burden
that seems to be inevitable as a as um as a just general phenomena due to aging
and so it it was very it was becoming very clear that amyloid is not the causative
feature here that
there is some other factor or factors at play which lead to cognitive degeneration
until 2006 and then in 2006 what happened this paper basically found this subtype
that when injected into
a mouse caused profound cognitive dysfunction and what they did was they
illustrated these proteins on
what are called in what's called a western blot analysis which is basically
basically a graphical
depiction of proteins and um the peer review process for papers i mean they
people go in and they crunch
the numbers and stuff but they don't look at like imagery and they don't they
don't look with a they
don't go through the imagery with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it hasn't
been photoshopped
essentially but one sleuth who is a scientist himself um this researcher uh
from vanderbilt named matthew schrag
actually identified that a lot of these images had artifacts that made it very
clear that they were faked
yeah so full-on fraud full-on fraud and by the way it was it's been two years
it took two years for
that paper finally to be retracted are there any consequences towards people
that publish that paper
i mean it's obviously they have a lot of egg on their face so to speak i mean
it's very it's it's
hugely humiliating um but no i don't think that there's they're still employed
they're yeah the lead
researcher still employed i mean they're they're investigating sylvain lesney
who's the university of uh
he is a i want to say michigan not michigan um it'll come to me but the the the
the primary
researcher is being investigated um as far as i know so the primary researcher
they're connecting to the
photoshop they're saying this person might have been the one that released it
it was very clear it was
very clear and that you know that's it's so dirty it's so dirty it's so evil
for all the people that
are looking for some sort of relief yeah and that you know you have this
scientific paper you publish and
you knowingly release these photoshopped images in order to validate your paper
there's a ton of
fraud and god yeah it's so evil when you think about how many people suffer
from this so many people and
you're giving them this false hope just to boost up your academic career yeah
it's awful the lost time
and by the way that paper has been subsequently referenced thousands of times
in the medical
medical literature basically you know negating a ton of research i mean like
count countless papers that
have been since published that have referenced that paper in 2006 that nature
paper that was finally
retracted i mean think about the lost time think about the needless suffering
yeah and it's my view that
dementia essentially by the time you are diagnosed with dementia we'll say alzheimer's
disease you are in
late stage alzheimer's disease whether it's mild whether you were just
diagnosed yesterday it's it's
this is a disease of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life and so that's
why the field is now
slowly hopefully i hope pivoting more towards prevention and where the money i
think needs
to go is i in into identifying that golden biomarker that's associated with the
onset of the condition
so that clinicians can intervene earlier because right now when you catch it it's
sort of like
pancreatic cancer which incidentally my mom passed from in 2018 but it's you
know pancreatic cancer most
of the time it's diagnosed and it's too late the can't the tumor is already metastasized
and so this is
kind of similar with alzheimer's disease by the time it's diagnosed it's
already you're already very late in
the game there's widespread neuronal uh dysfunction glucose metabolism in the
brain is diminished by 50
so it's again you're you're catching it in its latest stages ultimately and
that's why i think
alzheimer's drug trials have a 99 99.6 fail rate because by the time you catch
it i think reversing it is
you know impossible i think it can be slowed with exercise with diet with a
with a multimodal
dietary and lifestyle intervention but um but yeah it's really it's really sad
and so that's why 10
years ago when i saw this developing in my mom and i stumbled upon all this
research and i began really
diving in it became very clear to me that this is something that that anybody
with a brain needs to
be aware of and talking about and what what's the factors when it comes to
someone eventually getting
alzheimer's is it purely genetic is it lifestyle is it diet are there
environmental factors and toxins
like what is it yeah so there are what are called risk factors so the the heritability
of alzheimer's
disease is very low it's like two to three percent and the variant that is hereditary
is early onset
familial but that affects that that makes up a very tiny proportion of overall
alzheimer's incidence
and similarly with parkinson's disease the heritability of parkinson's disease
is very low
i mean this is and i definitely want to talk about parkinson's disease because
there's a lot
of really interesting new research in that in that field but by and large with
regard to alzheimer's
disease you have what are called your non-modifiable risk factors which are
your age you can't change your
age your gender you can't change your gender and your genes you can't change
your genes
although you can affect how your genes express themselves which is known as epigenetics
but then you have your modifiable risk factors which i think is so exciting
because these are the
the risk factors that you have agency over you can you can control obesity
hypertension type 2 diabetes
i mean these are all nutritionally mediated obviously which i love talking
about nutrition and nutrition
insofar as it can prevent or reverse obesity i think that's incredibly
empowering type 2 diabetes if
you have type 2 diabetes your risk for developing alzheimer's disease increases
between two and four
fold they're actually now um we interviewed in my documentary the researcher
who coined the term type 3
diabetes have you heard that are you familiar with that no concept no i haven't
so it's looking a lot
like alzheimer's disease might in fact be a form of diabetes of the brain wow
which is a mind-blowing way to
think about this condition um and in fact we see that peripheral insulin
resistance so the the hallmark
of type 2 type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance and we see that the more
insulin resistant a person is
the more difficulty their brains seem to have with regard to creating atp which
is the primary energy
currency of ourselves and the researcher who coined type 3 diabetes her name is
suzanne delamonte she's a
brown university researcher and she is in no way in the public sphere she's a
you know purely a bench
researcher she's actually in my documentary it was like incredible to get to
interview her and speak to her
but it seems that insulin resistance cause