Ask Dr. Drew - Dave Asprey – Father of Biohacking – Ask Dr. Drew - Episode 47

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Dave Asprey made $6 million at 26 but lost it by 28. His health issues were a wakeup call that led him to create Bulletproof, which has now sold nearly half a billion cups of coffee. The "father of biohacking" tells his story on Ask Dr. Drew.  Dave Asprey is the founder of Bulletproof and known worldwide as the ‘Father of Biohacking’. He’s the creator of Upgrade Labs, the world’s first Biohacking Health and Fitness facilities which utilize technology to help members reach their highest level of physical, cognitive and cellular performance. He is a four-time New York Times bestselling science author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and is the host of this year’s Biohacking Conference, the largest biohacking event in the world. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We have a very special show here today. My friend and a legend in certainly what's called the biohacking world. We're going to welcome in just a second Dave Asprey. He is, of course, at Bulletproof Exec. He's known worldwide as the father of biohacking. He started with a story that I'm going to make him tell. That when I see Dave today, his transformation, he's a new person. He's a different person.

And you have to understand where he came from, how he caught my attention. I fell in love with Bulletproof Coffee and the MCT oils. And he has gone on to do other things, including upgrade labs, world's first biohacking health and fitness facility, and as well as looking at cognitive cellular performance, four-time New York Times bestseller, Webby Award winner, Bulletproof Radio Podcast won the Webby.

And of course, this year's biohacking conference, he is the host. It's the largest biohacking event in the world. Learn more about the biohacking conference at biohackingconference.com. And again, follow Dave on Twitter, Bulletproof Executive. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. is again, follow Dave on Twitter, Bulletproof Executive. saying. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals, but just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time, educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and

you want to help stop it. I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a shout out to our good friends at Blue Mics. If you've heard my voice on this show any time over the past year, including right now, you've been listening to Blue Microphones. And let me tell you, after more than 30 years in broadcasting, I don't think I've ever sounded better. But you don't need to be a pro or have a fancy studio to benefit from a quality mic. You may not realize it, but if you've been working from home or using Zoom to chat with friends,

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Hydrolyte Plus Immunity comes in convenient, easy-to-pour sticks that rapidly dissolve in water, make a great tasting drink, has 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink, uses all natural flavors, gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and even vegan. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity is also now available in ready-to-drink bottles at the Walmart next to the pharmacy, or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolite.com slash drdrew. Again, that is h-y-d-r-a-l-y-t-e dot com slash d-r-d-r-e-w. Be sure to use the code drdrew25 for a special discount. Here with my daughter Paulina to share an exciting new project. Over the years, we've talked to a ton of young people about what they really want to know about

relationships. It's difficult to know who you are and what you want, especially as a teenager. And not everyone has access to an expert in their house like I did. Of course, it wasn't like I was always that receptive to that advice. Right. No kidding. But now we have written the book on consent. It is called, it doesn't have to be awkward and it explores relationships, romantic relationships and sex.

It's a great guide for teens, parents, and educators to go beyond the talk and have honest and meaningful conversations. It Doesn't Have to be Awkward will be on sale September 21st. You can order your book anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and of course, your independent local bookstore. Links are available on drdrew.com. So pre-ordering the book will help people, well, raise awareness, obviously, and it'll get that conversation going early so more people can notice this and spread the word of positivity about healthy relationships. So if you can, we would love your support by pre-ordering now. Totally. And as we said before, this is a book that both teenagers and their parents should read. Read the book,

have the conversation. It doesn't have to be awkward. On sale September 21st. Dave, welcome to our show. Dr. Drew, it's such an honor to be back with you. It's always, it's a privilege to hear your voice. It warms my heart because I feel like we've talked a lot over the years at times

about things and it's always been sort of enhancing for me. And I just remember the first time I met you, I'm like, what? What happened to you? So if you wouldn't mind, just because it was so vivid for me to hear your story, and you were like, yeah, yeah, this is what happened to me. And it went in deep. So please, if you would share your story with, with the audience. I used to weigh 300 pounds in my mid twenties and I'd been

diagnosed with arthritis when I was 14, pre-diabetes, where I was 30, high risk of stroke and heart attack. I had fibromyalgia and brain fog. I couldn't remember stuff, but my career still progressed. And I made $6 million when I was 26 and I lost it when I was 28. And it gave me this brief window where I could do anything I could imagine just to get my health back, to get my biology back. And I spent $300,000 doing it. And I've since spent at least a million more and realized there's new levels of performance in what we can do. And along the way, I started Bulletproof.

And we're close to somewhere at half a billion cups of Bulletproof coffee. People have lost more than a million pounds. And it's changed a lot of people's lives. And I've now 250 million downloads of my radio show. All I want to do is talk about the stuff that saved my life. And sometimes it comes from the East, and sometimes it comes from going to Tibet.

Well, tell the Tibet story, because that to me is your, because what I want to talk about is there's a lot of noise in your industry. There's a lot of noise. And you tend to pick stuff that has a good deal of evidence basis to it and is effective. You're living proof of the efficacy. And after you tell the Tibet story, my follow-on question is, now how do you choose?

How do you decide what you're – it's very hard. It's hard to know. And it takes me a long time to figure out what I'm putting a hard bet on. But go ahead, start with Tibet, if you don't mind. I decided that I wanted to learn meditation from the masters because I'd exhausted the things that were supposed to work to make me well. And I went to Tibet and I'm at a place called Mount Kailash. This is very remote. It's five days of four-wheel driving to get there. And it's kind of the Mount Olympus of the East. And you go and you walk at 18,000 feet elevation

for 26 miles in a circle. And I'm there and I'm feeling like death because there's no air and it's 10 degrees below zero. A little Tibetan woman brings me a bowl of yak butter tea. And I said, all right, I'm feeling like crap. I'm going to drink this. And within a minute or two, I felt so much better and it made no sense. And I drank a lot more yak butter tea. When I came home to Silicon Valley, I tried butter and tea and it didn't work. And I was mad. So I spent a1,000 on rare tea. And it still didn't work. I didn't know that part of the story. That's funny. I totally did.

But I tested butter next. And it turns out 25 kinds of butter, the two that came from grass-fed cows, noticeably worked. And the ones from corn-fed cows did not work. And I said, I'm onto something. And then I added the MCT oil from the anti-aging research I'd done. And I switched to coffee versus tea. And I made sure the coffee was free of mold because I'd quit coffee for five years because it would give me headaches and make me jittery. Turns out it was the stuff growing in the coffee. And after a lot of iterations, I came up with something. Everyone who drank it stopped caring about food and they felt amazing. And I wrote my first blog post about

Bulletproof Coffee. And if I remember right, you've discovered also the yak butter was very high in MCT oil or MCTs. Well, yak butter is high in saturated fats and something called CLA, and it has some MCT oil. But the MCT oil levels that you get from adding MCT to Bulletproof Coffee go beyond any natural source. And one of the reasons coffee works better than tea is that coffee doubles ketone production. MCTs work via a similar mechanism by increasing ketones. And I think you, last time we spoke, sort of urged me to consider the XCT version, since that's better tolerated in the GI system. There are two that Bulletproof makes. There's the brain octane oil and there's the XCT oil.

And a lot of other companies will use other mixes of these four kinds of oil you can legally label as MCT oil. And it turns out sometimes that can cause what I like to call disaster pants. So the quality of the MCT oil matters greatly. And the cheapest one you can buy is so cheap. They use it for fracking. It just doesn't have special powers, but you're allowed to market it as if it does.

That's hysterical. Yeah, the Brain Octane I've been using for a long, long time. I don't get any gi stuff from that and i get a noticeable boost from it yeah and so um so now to the the you know how do we sort through the the noise um the two things that um personally i've sort of glommed onto or had good results with. And it took me a long time to get to both of them. MCT and coffee, I was an early adopter, and I've been on that ever since. And I was on and off of keto for a while when I was early in my sort of MCT use.

And then I just started reading a lot of the material on insulin and insulin's effect on apolipoproteins and the endothelial function in certain genetic subgroupings, which I'm sure I'm a part of. And I just cut out carbohydrates entirely. And that made a huge, huge difference for me. The other thing that I got into was trying to enhance NAD, because I saw some of that working extraordinarily well in infusions and things. And so nicotinamide riboside became part of my regular thing. Talk to me about those two areas, if you would, and what your thoughts are there. There's a lot of discussion in the world of keto and the Bulletproof Diet. I'm an early

keto advocate, but it was always cyclical come in and go out. And what I found was from unending keto, I did tend to get leaky gut and your gut bacteria measurably shift for the negative. So in order to do a zero carb keto, it turns out different carbs do different things. I added back in prebiotic fiber, which is still keto fiber. It's a carb, but it cannot affect your insulin. So did I. I was able to quadruple the number of species of good- I did the same thing.

I did the exact same thing. Yeah. I didn't measure anything. It's the only way you can really make it sustainable. Yeah. So you guys do actual, do you recommend measuring what's going on in the gut? I like measuring what's going on in the gut because otherwise you fall into the keto trap,

which is like the fasting trap. It's the same as the vegan trap. If some of it's good, more must be better. And you don't really want to over keto for too long because most guys after about eight weeks of old keto, their sleep quality goes down. They don't have a kickstand in the morning and then their hair starts to get thin. But if you have the prebiotic fiber, you can solve that problem. Or if you once a week go out of ketosis and then give the glial cells in your brain a little bit of glucose to clean things up and then go back in. So it's a question of how much is too much and it's different for each of us. Do you have a prebiotic fiber? Do you produce one? Bulletproof makes one called Inner Fuel and there are lots of them they're usually based on

acacia gum yeah and when you're using it with fasting the way i write about in my newest book on fasting you don't want the rough fiber like psyllium you want the soluble fiber because that's the stuff that won't break a fast by causing the gut to do something called peristalsis interesting uh and so that was the the carb keto side of this. How about the NAD side? I've been doing NAD infusions at Upgrade Labs in Santa Monica for several years, and I've been supplementing with nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide. Before you could really buy them commercially, I bought them from China a kilo at a time. And I've probably had 30 infusions of NAD.

And where I am now is I take those compounds. I use NAD via IV on occasion, but I also take niacin, which is a very old-fashioned, the full-flush niacin way of raising NAD. And I make sure that I add compounds that help with NAD recycling. And I've had a couple episodes on Bulletproof Radio where we talk about, you can add NAD, but imagine that you really like to drink beer.

And as soon as you're done, you throw the can in your backyard. Well, when your backyard is full of beer cans, you can't drink any more beer. If you're not recycling your NAD right, just adding more NAD to the system can make the NAD byproducts build up inside the cells. So there's an argument for making sure you're doing your green tea extract and you're taking enough zinc and things like that. And enough zinc is sort of a confusing area for me. I don't know what that means necessarily. What is enough zinc for somebody? And we've been through this time, right? And we've been through a time

when people are taking lots of zinc and ionophores for it. I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what a lot or enough is. What do you say? Well, it would depend on your body weight. It would depend on your RBC, red blood cell levels of zinc, and very importantly, your level of copper. So for most people, it's 20 to 50 milligrams a day. 15 milligrams is a common thing. But if you're a 100-pound woman, your levels will be fundamentally different than a 225-pound guy, right? So enough is probably something to do on a lab test. But generally, if you take 15 to 25, you're probably in the sweet spot. If you do not take copper and you do it for years,

you will get gray hair. Copper depletion is one of the three big reasons hair can go gray. Yeah. And we haven't really seen whether people are predisposed to worsening copper depletion. I don't know. I worry about it. I always wonder, should we be measuring copper? It's not really cost effective. And it's kind of, I don't know. So how much copper should be supplemented, do you think? Usually about 2x the recommended daily allowance. Seems right. And again, if you are in a position to afford a lab test, getting basic minerals is not an expensive lab test. It can really guide you. Some people are copper toxic. Some people with anemia actually are low in copper.

But what I find is that when I did, I'm going to call it 40 milligrams of zinc without copper for about four years, I noticed a substantial shift in graying. And when I added the copper back in, my hair isn't ungray, but it's a lot less gray than it was a couple of years ago. So you can tweak it. Interesting. And back to the niacin, what about niacinamide? It doesn't work.

Niacinamide is the no-flush niacin. You got to take the stuff that makes you turn red, do it before you get in a sauna, you'll turn all red, you'll feel kind of tingly, and it'll help you with detox anyway. The niacinamide, the reason I take it is there was some literature in the dermatological science, believe it or not, that supplementing with niacinamide reduced the risk essentially of basal cell cancers in sun-exposed folks who live in Southern California. And so I wonder if niacin would have the same effect. Almost certainly. The problem with niacinamide is it doesn't convert to niacin unless you have

a certain enzyme and you run out of the enzyme. Right. And so what's your niacinamide is it doesn't convert to niacin unless you have a certain enzyme and you run out of the enzyme right and so what's your niacin record do you have a dosing on dynacin i i like about 500 milligrams at night and that's enough to turn quite red some people 100 milligrams is enough if you've never taken it you'll turn bright cherry red but once you get used to it it's just right it kind of settled down or you can can take aspirin before. What's that? Aspirin, definitely. But the broader question is how the heck would I know all this stuff works? Well, you read the papers the same way you do, right? And then you look at the mechanisms of action. You look at all the papers around those papers, and then you try it and you see if it works. And I was wondering why after say two and a half years of drinking tons of grass fed butter, why do I want less of it?

And I found the paper that said it takes two years to replace half the fat in your body. So I became one of the guys who had enough saturated fat in my cells for them to work right. And my cravings for butter went down. And all of a sudden I was just a normal butter eater, not like a give me as much as I can get guy. So you find confirmation over time. And then when I read the paper, I see the mechanism, I try it out, I pull some labs, then I'm willing to talk about it. And sometimes things like collagen, collagen was not on the map. I'm probably the biggest voice putting collagen so that it's a major category in grocery. And the reason for that is that collagen actually works. And there's tons of studies, lots of them animal studies.

But when you try it for a little while and you're a guy like me with arthritis who doesn't have arthritis anymore, like I think I can talk about this. And that's the bar. Is there a reason for it to work? Is there evidence that it actually works? And could I feel it? Then I'll talk about it. Interesting.

And so back to the noise, how do you, well, let me ask it this way. What's got your attention right now? Right now, I'm really interested in two sources of energy that we never think about. In a normal person, you take 30 pounds of air and a pound or two of food, you combine them, and you make electrons. Well, you can get up to 10%. It's unusual, but you can get up to 10% of your energy from sunlight in mammals. And there are papers on this. I'm not advocating breatharianism, but I am saying if light is a nutrient, how do we cut apart light to change the type of light nutrients we're getting?

The color and timing of light really matters more than we thought. In fact, it matters more than timing of food for sleep. And then the same thing is true of the gas that we breathe. Well, we've always said, oh, athletes can go train in Colorado. But what if you artificially manipulated the amount of oxygen or other gases you were breathing? And that's one of the things I'm doing at Upgrade Labs with some of our interventions, and they're very powerful metabolically. So now we're living in a world where we can look at,

how did you lift weights? How did you increase cardio with the minimal effort? And then how did you change what you breathe to get more results? And how did you change what you see to get more results? And the world of biohacking is getting really interesting. That is really interesting. And it makes sense to me that it would have significant impact.

I mean, these are all major pathways into the human body. I mean, what you're breathing in, what's happening in your retina, that's your central nervous. This is the only part of the central nervous system that is exposed to the outside world. It's right here. And it is a direct link yeah five percent of the cells in your retina aren't even wired to what you can see and they're called melanopsin sensors they're wired into your timing circuits and just to know that and to be able to actually see them in a microscope was almost life-changing for me to go, wait a minute, that system matters as much as what I can see. And when

we start changing that, saying, wait, we can change our mental state, our sleep state, our inflammation state, just bright blue light at night can reduce your ability to process carbohydrate. You can actually get pre-diabetic just from staring at bright lights before you go to sleep. I'm going to make a prediction. I'm going to make a prediction that's going to sound unpleasant, but it makes me feel good, is that I'm going to predict that you're now going to go down the central nervous system hole, rabbit hole, and you will never emerge. You will be there from now on and it's it's a quite an interesting place and uh it's never it does the amount of material and ideas just

never stops so it'll keep you busy for a long time but this is a great way in the vagal nerve the vagal nerve is one of the most interesting things. Absolutely. I've interviewed Dr. Porges who invented polyvagal theory. And yeah, I've run small currents over inside my ear to change my vagal tone. And as someone who was obese and someone who did have PTSD and used to be a lot more anxious than I am now, not anxious at all these days,

understanding that vagal tone was part of me healing both psychologically and physically. so my system works. You're talking my language. Steve Porges is a good friend, and I fell upon his material and was just probably 12 or 14 years ago, and I thought, oh, here it is. He figured it out. He's got the mechanism. Now we just need to expand on it. And it is,

for those of you maybe don't know what we're talking about, the vagus nerve is a cranial nerve, but it's the main outflow of your parasympathetic nervous system. And I was raised in medical school with the idea that its primary function was to sort of affect maybe some acid production in your stomach, but mostly it just slowed your heart down down and maybe it also was the brakes on other things like your gut and what's you know things like that they always just it slows everything down so it's the brakes it's the brakes the sympathetic this system is the accelerator and the you know the parasympathetic is the brakes that was a frankly crimin, criminally simplified version of what's going on. The reality is that different kinds of sympathetic systems have been layered on through evolution in addition to this parasympathetic system that has had multiple incarnations in the human, whereby the parasympathetic,

which is primarily the vagus, becomes the main means of socio-emotional exchange. It's the arbiter of socio-emotional exchange, and it really is one of the primary pathways from which feelings get to our central nervous system. Feelings are things that happen in our body. We don't think about it that way, but that's the case. And so it's the vagus nerve into the midbrain, and it's the lateral spinal thalamic tract into the insular cortex, and that's how we feel. That's we feel and that system is very complicated we don't understand much about it and it can get really fucked up pretty easily and that ties right into addiction it ties into sex addiction it ties into all the weird stuff that humans do as you well know right well that's why that's why it intrigued me so much. There's something else that's fascinating.

When you look at something called mass cell activation, what makes cells think there's a threat? Well, they're at the very far end of the vagal nerve. And if a cell locally says, oh, there's an allergen or a virus or something, I'm going to overreact because I had a threat setting that wasn't accurate. Well, eventually you might feel it in your nervous system, but in the meantime, you might get hives. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I believe that up to 40% of aging is inappropriate mast cell activation.

Oh, wow. That's an interesting theory. It's an underlying foundational thing. I'll prove it. It's going to take me five years. Well, good for you. Do you think that is, you know, a lot of us clinical folks are very preoccupied with cytokines these days. Do you think that's a cytokine-mediated phenomenon? It's well-documented to be. So, what's causing this inflammation? Well, mitochondrial dysfunction, when the cells can't make energy from food, that's part of it, but something else happens,

and it's the alarm bell goes off, and these are called toll-like receptors. They're set by something. And when you have allergies to foods or to things in the environment or to things from your gut bacteria, that chronic inflammation, which makes those cytokines, well, if we can turn off the little alarm bell, it's like turning off notifications on your phone, you're going to have less inflammation. You're going to have less aging.

They call it inflammation. I agree with you that inflammation, I was very late to the inflammation game, but I started looking at it through the it's going to sound weird through the eyes of endothelial cells the lining of our arteries literally there's inflammation has everything to do with what goes on there and that has everything to do with how oxygen is delivered to our tissue and there we go i mean that's a diathesis that is sort of highly predictive of trouble. Do you have any, you know, you talked about if screwing with the gases that we inhale, are you getting any theories about oxygen and what's going on with that on a cellular level? Well, pseudohypoxia is a major thing that the anti-aging functional medicine crowd would talk about

10 or 20 years ago. And I think most mainstream doctors don't recognize it as commonly as it happens. And this is when you get cells that act like they don't have enough oxygen, even though there's enough oxygen present. We've heard of insulin resistance. Oh, there's insulin, but I'm not getting it. It's almost like oxygen resistance. And why is it happening? There can be metabolic dysfunction, or there can actually be knots in the muscle. And so when a cell goes into that emergency mode, it's not able to use oxygen that's present, and it creates a self-fulfilling cycle that feels a lot like musculoskeletal pain. And as you know, people with chronic musculoskeletal pain, like I had with chronic fatigue syndrome, painkillers are awfully tempting. And so sometimes that massage

that you're getting is helping to restore the oxygen in the local tissues. Right. And I think that's the way massage therapists think about this. Who should be coming to Upgrade Labs? Who do you want to see there? Upgrade Labs is, we just announced our franchise nationally. So we're now in 30 states where people can do that. My goal is that everyone who doesn't want to spend time in the gym should come there. Because in a total of three and a half hours over two months. That's it. Not three and a half hours a day or a week, but little five-minute segments. We can improve your VO2 max, your cardiovascular fitness by 12%. And we can put muscle on three times faster than lifting weights. So we're talking very short interventions. And with the extra time, you can go in and do the recovery technologies, or you can do neurofeedback, or you can actually do things that improve your vascular system. And I just think we want our

time back. When I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week, desperate to lose 100 pounds, and I didn't lose it after more than a year, I want that time back. And I never want anyone to waste time going to the gym again. So it's all about your energy and your time. Wasting time going to the gym,. So it's all about your energy and your time. Wasting time going to the gym? You think it's all wasted time? Well, if you go to the gym and you get fewer results in five times more hours,

yeah, it's a waste of time. Interesting. And are you doing anything else supplement-wise you're excited about right now? Are you guys getting into other stuff at the labs? you doing testosterone replacement or anything else that yeah upgrade labs we're not doing the medical side of that but upgrade labs is doing a new line of very high end supplements separate from bulletproof that i'm pretty excited about i'm working on the formulation steps now and one of the most important things is cognitive enhancement and making your brain work. This is an area of weakness for me historically. And there's so many

things out there that are all doing the same thing with the same ingredients from 30 years ago. There's a whole new realm of this. I'm working on that and I'm working with some peptides as well that are going to be very powerful. Interesting. And Susan, any questions from you? I know you're sitting there quietly listening to us. Anything? How can I not have to go to the gym? She's your prime candidate. I work out a little bit, but I do get my heart rate up. It sounds ridiculous, but using artificial intelligence to guide how quickly you can make your heart rate go up and then back down, it's the speed of the raise and the speed of the decline that determines your cardiovascular fitness, not the total volume of work you

do. So you don't have to change out of your work clothes. You don't sweat. You just have a machine that guides you on a little exercise bike, go really fast for 20 seconds and stop. And there are now three studies at the University of Colorado that show this actually gives you better cardiovascular improvements than doing 45 minutes of spin class. Oh. That means you get 40 minutes and no shower required. You can do whatever you want.

Susan may come knocking on your door. I know. I can't always do it, you know, because we travel or, you know, we go out of town and I don't have a Peloton in my other house. And tell us about the Biohacking Conference. Yeah. The Biohacking Conference is September 17th

through 19th in Orlando, Florida. I've been doing it for seven years. We're expecting somewhere slightly under 3,000 people. And we have some major names in functional medicine and biohacking coming, including some who've been heavily, heavily censored. A guy whose name I would love to see on the air, probably someone you know, but I don't know, you might get censored for having his name on the show. Oh my god. So we're going to have open questions. Who is it, Dr. Z?

The number one most censored physician in America. And Susan just distanced. Don't even. Don't even. You guys like those Ricola cough drops? Yeah. Ricola cough drops? It rhymes with that. Got it.

I got it. Anyhow, he is going to be there as well as many others. And here's the thing. I identify as being vi-curious. That's vaccine industry curious. So I am totally open to taking a vaccine for diabetes or one for heart disease or Alzheimer's, things that kill lots of people all the time. And I'm open to seeing evidence, but I don't feel like I have to be vaccine promiscuous, which means everything that's available. And I'm also not opposed to

them at all. So I want to be scientific about it. So I'm willing to ask hard questions about things and listen to different opinions. And I feel like that's our fundamental right to do it. And at the biohacking conference, there'll be people saying, pulsed electromagnetic frequencies are good for you, and here's how to grow strong bones. And there'll be others saying, they're bad for you. And it's okay to disagree. Oh my God, yes. To still have respect for someone who believes something different. Critical that we disagree. It's very important to disagree. I am vaccine promiscuous, for sure.

For sure. And I've rendered my family as such, too, maybe fairly or not. And so that's me. I've always been that way. I've always been that way. That's always my thing. And just because, and probably, you know, I get biased. You didn't like the HPVs and all that?

Oh, yeah. Well, I got biased. You know, I came into medicine through the HIV epidemic. So I saw, you know, I was, as a fourth-year medical student, I was telling people every day they had six months to live. And I was never wrong. And you saw horrible infections of all types. And it was just, it was devastation time. So that's where my bias comes from.

But anyway, I welcome any and all opinions. That's always my thing. And this place has become sort of a place to kind of just, you know, I like it to be a place for people to chat and share ideas. Do you mind if we speak to that? Want to take a call? You up for that? Absolutely. Okay. Let me see if this. It's a little lag, if anybody wants to know.

This Dr. Hope Kilman was in the waiting room. I'm going to see if she wants to come back up. You have to unmute your mic if that's you, Dr. Kilman. And I'll give you a chance. If you want, otherwise you don't have to speak. There you are, you're unmuted. Do you want to ask... Dave, ask for your question?

Maybe mute and unmute your mic again. Sometimes that works if you're talking. If you're not talking, I'm going to put you back into the. Yeah, but sometimes they start talking when I'm talking to somebody else. So I'm going to move you back to the audience. If you want to speak, please raise your hand again. I will come to you right. So I'm going to move you back to the audience. If you want to speak, please raise your hand again. I will come to you right now. I'm going to go to Mason.

See what Mason's question is for Dave. Mason. You there. He's got his there. He's standing there with his hand raised. Anyone else? There they are. Oh,

Kristen's in here too. All right. I'm going to Mason doesn't seem to come up. So I'm going to get, see if Kristen wants to come up. What's that, Susan? Maybe they want to. Hello.

Hi, Kristen. What's going on? My kids went back to school today. Hallelujah. Hooray. I'm so happy, but I also have a question. Yeah. It has to do with, uh, children's nutritional health and, um, just looking, I, I make most of,

uh, my kids' food at home, you know, but I'm not a saint. I pick up, you know, pre-bought, pre-baked bread when it's on sale for a buck a loaf and stuff like that. But I'm curious to ask your guests in terms of developing kids, if there's anything that we should be paying attention to that maybe we don't know we should be paying attention to when it comes to supplements and what our kids are eating. Go ahead. My first book was on fertility and pregnancy, and I care a lot about child development. In order to grow effectively, kids need less omega-6 things like canola oil, corn oil, things like that. And they need more grass-fed butter and healthy meat. So what we're seeing

now is kids not only getting too much sugar, but too much of the bad fats. And that really is hard for them to grow hormones and brains the right way. So instead of looking at fancy supplements outside of vitamin D and vitamin K2, maybe, I'd be looking at how do I get the bad fats out of their diet whenever I can. And that is a, Kristen, that's a major, major, major deal. Dave, do you know Kate Shanahan? Absolutely. She's a friend. She's been on my show. Yeah.

So Kate is the leading, she's a biochemist and an emergency room family practitioner. She's one of the leading voices on what Dave just said. And I'm convinced she is right. And so you need to get the mayonnaise and the margarine and the, you know, she had all, you might get her book called Deep Nutrition. She has all kinds of tricks for things to use that are like the yummy stuff your kids want that don't have those bad fats, so to speak, in them. In fact, Susan, you had a screen we used to put up from kate's thing what the the good the medium and the bad fats remember that we don't have that anymore yeah it's kaleb doesn't have it any event the bulletproof diet roadmap has a similar has a similar stack of things and that's dave asprey.com roadmap and it's the same for proteins yeah you know a lot of

folks are saying oh i'm gonna do a plant- protein, but gluten is a plant-based protein. It might not be the best one. So just be aware that different proteins, different fats and different carbs do different things. So just because it says high in protein doesn't mean it's a good food. Thanks, Kristen. Thank you for doing that. Let's see. I had that canola oil. It's everywhere. I know. Getting my favorite mayonnaise. That's gross. I know. I had that canola oil. It's everywhere. I know getting my favorite mayonnaise. I know I was trying to get it up. It's like crack. I know. And you keep exposing me. I want the, uh,

Dr. K, Mr. Kensington's avocado based one. That's a better, it doesn't taste the same. You get used to it very, very quickly. I know I, I should probably be better to you. Um, we're friendly with Gary Brucker. He's a friend and he's very... Is this the chart you're talking about? Maybe. Let's see. Yes, there it is. Thank you for that. So bad fats are over there on the right, if any of you are watching. Good fats are over on our left. And you can see particularly olive oil, avocado oil.

Let's see her favorites. The seed oils are the ones you want to stay from. Well, she had one seed oil I think that was okay if I remember. But anyway, coconut oil, palm kernel oil. Let's see what else she got up there. Flax oil. But as I remember, she was really big on olive oil, avocado. But if it's with heat, you don't want to have anything that's

made out of seeds the heat the heat makes it carcinogenic and it's crazy she's a big believer in tallow i try to eat meat from the bone now because of her because their nutrients near the bone uh there's a lot of really and she right but dave has a link too as well okay and she's a she's a she's a really fine biochemist. And it's so funny. When I first met her, she goes. Yeah, I support her work. She's great.

Yeah. She goes, first matter, she goes, the body of a human body is too complicated. The only thing I can say something about are these two things, you know, the fats. And I forget what her other thing was she told me. I know these things for sure. The biochemistry is what it is. And I have to know for certain to be able to to get behind something and she's built a very interesting theory around that um so gary brock is a friend in methylation he's very big on methylation and

folate metabolism uh where are you with all that it's fundamental about 28 to 35% of people have genetic variations, including me, called MTHFR. And if you're one of those people, the government demand that we supplement folic acid in our grain actually is bad for you. And you should be taking a methylfolate supplement. And this has been something that I've put in my blog and books for 10 plus years. So if you're not tested, you're not going to know. Good news is if you have any genetic tests like 23andMe, you can run it through a filter and tell you, hey, do you need special B vitamins or can you take the normal ones? And just doing that can totally transform your health. So if you're one of those people like me who stuff never quite worked right, it's just

totally worth looking at this. And a shortcut, if you were to go to a cardiologist and get a homocysteine test, which is very common, if that's high, you have a methylation problem. It's always. That's right. It's abundantly common. It's common. And I meant to ask somebody about this. I've noticed in obese patients, it tends to go up too. Is there something acquired that can happen as well? Or is that just part of the inflammatory thing? Obese patients oftentimes, but if you are MTHFR,

your chances of being obese go up a lot. Oh, maybe that's it. You'll find if someone fixes their metabolism to stop being obese, they probably had a mild methylation issue that went away. I worry more with C-reactive protein. And people say, Dave, you're telling people to eat butter and tallow and saturated fat and to cut out these things, but saturated fat. Well, then you measure only three things to know if you're safe. One is C-reactive protein, which is how

inflamed am I? And if that's up, it might be your diet. It's probably an infection. There's homocysteine, which is probably your B vitamin methylation status. And the other one that you'll love is LPLA2, which is an enzyme that's released when inside your blood vessels, if there's damage, this will go up. If the cholesterol is bad for you, then this should go up. But if those numbers are all low and you're eating a stick of butter a day and losing weight and feeling great, my advice would be keep doing it as long as your body wants you to do it and things are working.

But if those numbers go up, then you pay attention to it. I know Peter Attia has a good presentation on a lot of the different genetic variations around lipid metabolism. And certain of us, again, insulin is the big problem and our apolipoprotein system is off. And personally, I could never get my HDL up. I could never get my triglycerides down, even on a statin, even on no fats, even on everything, until I eliminated the carbohydrates. That's when it just immediately plummeted. You're very carbohydrate sensitive. Very.

I mean, my triglycerides went from 225, which is technically normal, to 75 and just sits there. And my HDL went from 40-ish to 70, you know, and just, and I could never get it up. No, what I did exercise just never changed. And then cutting out carbs. Wow. That's something. I would like, I'd like to see your gut bacteria and analysis. What's your acromantia doing?

And some of the newly discovered species. I think there's a lot more correlation there. And there's a company called Viome that's doing some groundbreaking work on that. So hang on. So hold on. The CEO of Viome is speaking at the Biohacking Conference. So hold on. Caleb, I sent my stool into Viome.

They never sent me anything back. Caleb? What? They sent out an email they were they've been delayed for a bit of time they actually just sent an email yesterday they have a new lab and so our results should come in within the next couple of weeks so there you go so i i'm one step ahead of dave asprey which is amazing to me so we'll see what they say concourse love it. We'll see what they say. The CEO of Viome is speaking at the biohacking conference in September about these things. And he'll be the first one to tell you that for most of the data they see, a keto diet causes GI dysfunction. I actually would agree with that, which is why what you're doing with the prebiotic fiber is I want everyone on keto to understand if you don't feed the good guys, they will go away.

Right. And it's okay to not have insulin go up and still get some fuel for them. And I don't think I'm really on keto. I really don't. Because I can tell when I'm ketotic. I can kind of tell. I go in and out of it when I'm super good and getting enough fats and that kind of stuff. I can't sustain it.

I'm just not eating grains and sugar. I'm just, yeah, I'm just trying to avoid carbs. I probably get 40 grams of carbs. But I want to know about your gut. All right, all right, all right. It's coming. It's, it's, Vioma's on the way. Well, you know, maybe we'll.

You know what? I love what you're saying. 40 grams of carbs. Even if you're doing 80 grams of carbs, if they're vegetables and they're not super starchy and they're not super sugary, you're going to be fine. I can probably tolerate more starch than you where I am now, right? Because of all the stuff that I've done to my biology and my genetics, right? So maybe for me, it's 60, but it's not 200, which is where a lot of

people are and it's not sugar. So that's, that's the anti-aging secret right there is don't eat a lot of sugar. Don't eat a lot of bad fats and tune it for you. Yeah. And, and I'm, I'm real interested in, I think that that's a, people should listen to exactly what Dave just said there. That is packed into that statement. There's a lot of really solid advice. And I also just become interested lately in not just aging. I don't want to live too long in a 90-year-old body. I want to live well into my 80s. You know what I mean? I'm more interested in how we get into our... Because eventually, aging itself does become a disease. There's only, you know, maybe we'll push that back. Who knows? But, but I'm interested in living as well as we can. And that, and I came, I backed into it interesting through NR. I mean,

the NAD story really is how I got gotten into this. And ever since I've been on NR, people will say things like, Oh, I don't, you don't seem to be aging. I'm like, Hmm, I'm wondering, I wonder if, cause I don't have good genes. I don't have a good genetic hand. And I'm looking at you now, and you look like a different person from when I first met you. And so something's going on. I think people should kind of listen to that.

I have written the whole superhuman book about anti-aging i do stem cells i do nicotinamide riboside i manage my nad levels i have a low toxin diet i live on an organic farm where we raise our own animals to have the right fats in them so i am turning the knob up as much as i can partly to show people it's possible but like you when, when I'm old, I would like to feel and look exactly like I am now. And then I want to live a long time. But if living a long time involves tubes and monitors and hospitals for the majority of my time, that's not what I want to do. No thanks. And this is another- It's optional. We don't have to do that.

Right. This is a separate, this is a really not a conversation about biohacking, but the conversation I like to remind people about, and I hope COVID pushed us to think about this, which is talk to your family about your wishes. If your brain stops working, what do you want to do? Do you ever want to be in a nursing home? I don't ever want to be in a nursing home. If I'm so far gone that I need institutional support, that's different than somebody who needs to go to a nursing home to recover from something. If I need to go to a nursing home because that's what I need now to survive, no thank you. No thank you. And you should be discussing those things with your family. So just dump you out on the street somewhere? Yeah. You could just put me, you know, this new patio you built? The wheelchair. That patio you built? Just stick me out there

and do what you will. That's fine. Susan's also already planning this. No, Susan's also already planning. I guess I need to get a nurse, a room for the nurse and the, and the bed. And the, no, no, you listen, you guys, no, no, no, no. Listen, I know that you dread all that stuff. Palliative palliative care. Palliative care is a highly developed field of medicine. Look into palliative care consults and systems and hospice and that kind of stuff if that's what you want or a family member wants. But don't, I mean, if you want to go forever, fine, that's unto you. But talk to your family about what your wishes are and talk to them

about what their wishes are. Don't worry, I'm going first. I don't think so. I know you hope for that, but you have too good of a genetic hand i'm eating best foods mayonnaise yeah right you're eating the mayonnaise all right okay so we'll hasten you we'll we'll get this we'll get this sped up as much as possible uh so susan and this by the way thank you for saying that i i have a living will you know i have medical power of attorney for my family, and they know what I want. And it's important. And if everyone listening did that, we'd create a lot more peace in the world because everyone does pass eventually, even if you live a long time.

The average life expectancy, average. Now, people are going to go, my grandma's been in a nursing home for 10 years. Yes, that happens. But the average life expectancy, particularly for men after admission, is six months. Six months. So that's the average duration. Now, I would argue that those are the ones that God is being kind to. The ones that stick around for five years and suspended animation. I, I don't know. I don't know what we're doing there, but,

but okay. Susan, give me a little coaching up here on schedule. Do, do I let Dave go at this point where we take a break or. I don't know. Ask Dave. He has a life.

I know he's got to get going. No, he's yeah. I don't know if he has another round of. All right. I'm flexible for you, Dr. Drew. All right. Well, I think we can wrap it up because you took me through the landscape I was hoping to sort of hear from.

And I just want a little more on. I have a question. Oh, here we go. Somebody said that you got COVID. Did you get COVID and recover pretty quick? I had COVID in February of 2020, and it really knocked me out for about five days. Almost hospitalized. And then it took me about another 10 days to feel like myself again, and I was totally fine.

And I am intrigued at the new evidence that says you have 13 times more protection from having an infection than from getting a vaccine. And I want to see the data that says, what if you get vaccinated after you've been infected? And I would love to know good advice, or I haven't found any convincing evidence. So the data's mixed. Follow Monica Gandhi. She's a very reasonable source on this. And here's, I went ahead and took the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for a couple of reasons. One was I wanted to travel and move about without hassle. I just, it was a pragmatic question. It was, in my opinion, an unnecessary medical procedure. Unnecessary medical procedure.

And that bothers me that we're doing unnecessary medical procedures because of a panic or whatever we're into here. But okay, I did it. Number one. Number two, I had a terrible reaction to it. Number three, data has come out. Yeah, it's all right. Data has come out that shows that the Johnson and Johnson is actually probably your best bet against the variants if you've had COVID, but you don't necessarily need it. Today. Wow. Yeah.

This could change tomorrow. Well, it could change. It could change. And there's multiple other... I just found out yesterday an Indian vaccine is coming called... What's it called? Cernivax or something. And we're waiting on Novavax,

which might be a really good alternative for people that have had the COVID before. I would like to take Novavax. Yeah. You're not alone. Novavax makes take Novavax. Yeah. You're not alone. And Novavax makes me happiest of all the options. You're not alone. That's what most- And also- Go ahead.

Sorry, didn't mean to cut you off there. The J&J, when people ask me, which one do I think, given all my biohacking knowledge, the J&J seems like a really solid choice. It's solid. It's solid. That was the one you chose as well. Yeah. It's solid. I didn't. You chose. Yeah, it's solid. I didn't want to take two vaccines because I knew it had both. I knew I'd have reactions. I have reacted to everything.

I react to vaccine. I have something's up with my viral immunity. I've always gotten, I got H1N1. I had mono and they were all just, just, just ruined me. By the way,

H1N1 was worse than COVID. Although COVID was more persistent. It was kind of weird. It's like went on. But so yeah, that's why I took the Johnson & Johnson. And I had my eye on it for a long time. It's sort of a traditional platform and stuff.

The Indian vaccine is going to be very similar to that, but you're very much like most people that are waiting for Novavax. There's so many things they need to rush out that they're not rushing out. I don't understand what the delays are, but I'm not there making those decisions. Dave,

I'm going to let you go. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you being a good friend and being around when I need you to talk about stuff and congratulations on all you're doing. It's, it's, uh, oh, by the way, where is the biohacking conference in Orlando? Cause I was just there two days ago. Oh, it's at the, geez, I'm going to say the wrong hotel it is at a major awesome hotel and it's you guys have the you guys have the

placard with the information let's put it up again because I was in this I was at this hotel this weekend I searched all of Florida to find a hotel that would serve grass fed meat high quality food is part of biohacking, and normal hotel food is not acceptable. So I pulled out all the stops to do that.

It's at the Hyatt Regency. Thank you. That's the right one. It's the Hyatt Regency. There is a lot of crazy resorts. A lot of crazy resorts down there. It's super, super wild. I had no idea.

I thought there was Disney World, and then that's that, and a bunch of hotels. No, there are giant resorts scattered all over Orlando. It's wild. Okay, Dave, we've got a delay thing here going on, so I'm just going to say goodbye to you, and thank you so much, and I hope to talk to you soon. Thanks, Dave. Drew, much respect, much love. Thanks for all the work you're doing. You're awesome.

You bet, man. And we will take a little break and I'll be back. I believe Adam Hounsley is coming. Is that correct, Susan? Yes. And Joe Garner, I think. Is it Garner? He's from the. Yes, that's tomorrow. That is tomorrow. So Adam is tomorrow. This broadcast podcast. So for, I will go ahead and for this podcast,

I will go ahead and after the break. We're going to talk about PTSD, journalists, how they cope with it. That is tomorrow, correct? And also, you know, honor 9-11 and talk a little more in depth about what's going on in world affairs with Adam Hounsley. That is tomorrow, correct? Okay. What I would do is take a little break and I'll come back and see if any of you want to ask any questions, take any calls, and chat a little bit.

Be right back after this. I want to give a shout-out to our good friends at Blue Mics. If you've heard my voice on this show any time over the past year, including right now, you've been listening to Blue Microphones. And let me tell you, after more than 30 years in broadcasting, I don't think I've ever sounded better. But you don't need to be a pro or have a fancy studio to benefit from a quality mic. You may not realize it, but if you've been working from home or using Zoom to chat with friends, you probably spend a lot of time in front of a microphone.

So why not sound your best? Whether you're doing video conferencing, podcasting, recording music, or hosting a talk show, Blue has you covered. From the USB series that plugs right into your computer to XLR professional mics like the mouse or the blueberry we use in the studio right now. Bottom line, there's a Blue microphone to fit your budget and need. I can't say enough about Blue mics. And once you try one, you will never go back. Trust me. To take your audio to the next level, go to drdrew.com slash blue. That is drdrew.com slash B-L-U-E. All right, I'm back. Thank you in the clubhouse for being patient

with all that. Clubhouse, if you'd like to raise your hand to ask a question, now is the time. I'll bring you up to the podium. But note well, you will also be streaming on Twitch, Rumble, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. So we'll stream out on all that as well if you don't mind that. So just raise your hand and I'll invite you up to speak. I am also watching you guys on the Rumble chat and on the Restream chat. And thank you, Marlies, who says, I used to spend hours listening to data from Dave. It's been a minute. What a treat.

Doesn't he look great? He really, he's into something. And I'm glad, just glad to see people trying and thinking. Video is a little fuzzy. Yeah. Because he's in a hotel room somewhere. Yeah. There were multiple people that felt like they were on acid, they said.

I mean, the infused light kind of makes you look younger so uh no he looked he was no he does look good he looks very um healthy and he has good color and great hair and you know he was a he was a mess when he first got to act together he's 300 pounds anna is that you i or i'm not quite sure how to characterize how to characterize your name. There she is. Yeah. It's Piana. Go ahead. Okay. I have a question about, um, relocating and kind of like getting comfortable in the dating scheme. I'm currently 23. I know that your book talks about like, you know, relationships and like, you know, interpersonal, interpersonal, you know, communication. Like I just want to know, like, how can I build i build my confidence um as someone who's relocating from you know the south

la and i know that la is a different space and like i just want to you know prepare myself for like how dating can be over there in what you know it los angeles like many many different cities what part of town are you in um beverly hill slash hollywood okay so that's going to be challenging but yeah um it it's susan do you have any um you know we we just yeah we just see people feeling disposable and it's hard to find people that want relationships and the well they get off the dating apps very quickly because they get sort of disgusted with that. I think the important thing is, look, it's never changed, which is building a network of peers that are like-minded and who actually care about you and build out from there, meet other people. I'm for sure you can always use the apps to kind of see if it's an efficiency to meet people.

But otherwise, it is really about people who know and care about you. Do you have a network you're going to be coming into here? Yes, a small one. It's people that I'm working with and also some professionals I look up to. I want to ask also, how can I translate my professional relationships into bridging out personally? Because I know that I'm starting off professionally with these people and I think they're great. But also I know that business and pleasure always doesn't mix. So I want to be careful.

Don't ever mix that. Don't let it happen. A really nice rule of thumb is to think about trying not to have dual relationships with anybody. Got it. In other words, you can have peers and friends at work, but you can't have bosses that are friends, bosses that you date. If the relationship, particularly when the relationship has a, I don't want to say a power imbalance so much,

but one person is responsible for you, and now they start romantically or even friendship. That never works out. The boundaries get very crazy. And somebody, it's not good. It's just never good. So try to have people who are. The friends that don't work with you.

Yeah, either just your friends or just your coworkers or just your bosses. Try to keep the relationships in one category so the boundaries remain clean. Okay? Awesome. Thank you so much. All right, you got it. Good luck. Hope you do well out here.

LA kind of sucks. Single woman. Yeah, just prepare yourself for that. Try to treat it like any other town with people with the same strengths and weaknesses as any other place and just build your friend network, okay? Got it. Thank you so much, doctor. Good luck.

Have a good one. All right. I see a couple of hands up here. And Dr. Kelman, whose hand was up before, I was trying to get her up here. Hi there. What can I do for you? Little leg. Uh-oh.

Your mic is on mute so that if you're talking that we're not going to be able to hear you if people put their hand up and then they go do something and then they yeah maybe they don't realize well let me try missing you know i was just thinking paulina is very good at using the apps to find relationships. She's had good luck with it in New York. Yeah. I don't know whether we ought to ask her what she's doing. It doesn't seem like she spends a lot of time on them, though. I don't know.

I mean, she always finds somebody. She's very good at picking the right guy that is nice, not the creepy ones. Right. Like, she just can't believe some of this stuff. I don't know if you guys wrote any of this in the book but um we do a little bit about the apps yes but we do a lot about boundaries a lot about boundaries because that's where people get screwed up

missy welcome back i think we've spoken to you before right hi thank you we have spoken before thank you for having me so my friends and i were talking the other day about the COVID vaccine and were wondering if it would be, and this might be a silly question, but would it be more effective to get a booster shot of a different type of vaccine that you originally had? So like if you had Pfizer, would you get Moderna? Yep. There is a lot of discussion about this in scientific communities and there is no consensus yet. Right now, it's only going to be approved for the same vaccine you've had. So in no way can I make any other kinds

of recommendations at this time. But people are starting to kind of wonder. The other thing they're wondering about is the distance between the first and the second vaccine. If they really could spread that out more to eight weeks, perhaps, maybe people wouldn't even need a booster. So there's a lot of movement going on.

Your thought, your thinking on this is appropriate to bring it up. Whether or not we get a clear answer on this, I think it's going to take a while. Got it. Thank you so much. It hasn't been tested yet. Well, it hasn't been formally tested yet. And the FDA approved Pfizer for kids 12 to 16. Right. And why do you bring that up?

I don't know. I guess they're starting to approve that one. You don't ever mention Pfizer. Pfizer's great. I actually thought that was the most desirable vaccine until very recently, when we are now seeing that the Moderna is giving a more powerful response. So Moderna looks like the superior vaccine at the moment. As I mentioned to Dave, there's also this some data that Dr. Nock presented this data to us that if you've had the J&J vaccine, you're in the and had COVID, you're in the best shape for the current variants. But this is a very challenging area.

Let's bring our buddy Joe up here. Hi, Joe. What's going on? Hi, Dr. Drew. Hope you're having a great evening. We are, as a matter of fact. Late afternoon, I should say. What's up?

All right. Did you hear about Joe Rogan contracting COVID? I did not. What's up? All right. Did you hear about Joe Rogan contracting COVID? I didn't. Is he okay? It might be a good time to get off YouTube. Oh, to have this conversation? Yes. Oh.

Because part of it actually involved what you were just talking about with Osprey. With Asprey. about with Osprey. With Osprey. Oh. The doctor that he... I can cut the YouTube feed. Why don't we get up? No, I don't want to do that. Don't want to do that. Okay. But he's

taking a lot of crap for being against having it, but then a lot of people are saying you shouldn look all i really all i listen a lot of people are saying you shouldn't let's let's stop is he okay that's all i really care about not only is he okay but after three days he feels great okay so good uh and i and do we know what his yes because he has a video which which I will post on Locals. Okay.

And did he get any treatments like monoclonal antibodies or any of the fancy treatments? All right. This is his direct quote. And I'm saying this is a direct quote from Rogan. Okay. So it turns out this was Saturday night. He ended up feeling crappy. He ended up getting tested Sunday.

Turns out he got COVID. He ended up getting tested Sunday. Turns out he got COVID. So here's what he did. He immediately threw the kitchen sink at it. All kinds of meds. Monoclonal antibodies. The I word that I can't use. Z-Pak.

Prednisone. Everything. That's right. I also got an NAD drip. also got an ad drip what kind of drip what kind of drip nad oh that's interesting that's interesting well that's what dave was talking about in a row and on wednesday which is today to the best of my knowledge i feel great okay i really only had one bad day. Sunday sucked. Monday was better. Tuesday felt better than Monday. And today I feel good.

I feel pretty effing good. He's a healthy guy. And I would say the corticosteroids. He's also 54 years old. Yeah. He's young. So again, he's not likely to have a really severe, I mean, you can argue about what young is, but he's young from the standpoint of COVID. And he had the monoclonal, the things that are most likely to have worked was the steroids, the monoclonal antibodies. And I,

listen, I did the same thing when I was sick. And so my only concern was that it took about five days for me to get the monoclonal antibodies. And if I were to need them again, I would get them in about by day two, I'd want them right away. And I've shared, and I'm going to share again that, you know that my neighbors, my next-door neighbors who were in their late 70s, early 80s received the monoclonal antibodies the next day after a positive diagnosis. And that's what it should be.

Yes, it should be very clear. Well, even Monica Gandhi said that they use it prophylactically. They want to do that. Well, yeah, you guys got it. It's a different thing though, right? It's a different thing. And this was a major article, article a lead article in the big journal of medicine that showed a few days of subcutaneous subq we call it subcutaneous monoclonal antibody very different quantities than the ib infusion but if you take those for a few days after exposure there's zero transmission they were able to keep all households covid-free in somebody in households with active COVID. So that's-

And I did read that story. I read that article from the New England Journal of Medicine. I believe that was sometime last week. About three weeks ago. It's about three weeks ago. So can I interject something? Yes, please. You know how you said he's 55, he young or whatever and healthy uh perfectly healthy 55 year old last week three days in he was in a induced coma and died after three days three days of illness or three days in the hospital it's different three days in the hospital got sick they didn't i mean he went in the hospital and that was it i mean just that was it oh there was one other thing I wanted to bring up. It's like the youth part of it doesn't really.

Susan, Susan, you actually brought up something that I did want to talk to Drew about on here. There's an article. And this one I also post on Locals from Nature magazine from yesterday. And it's an article. It was really really really interesting and it talked about some type of genetic something genetic related involving and and please give me 30 give me 15 seconds and i will get it because it's a really important article genes and yes it involved here let me let me bring bring it up the name of the article no this should sorry sorry no no but this is very important because the article is rogue antibodies

oh yeah in almost one-fifth of covid deaths yeah the self-targeting antibodies attack type one interferons that play a key role in fighting infection. I have heard of this kind of thing is being looked at. And it might be the mechanism of the cytokine storm. It's possible. Yeah. And that's interesting. So what do you think on something like that?

Do you think that early and aggressive treatment would be so key? Are these the type of people that should be totally isolated from the world? No, no. Well, that would most likely die if they contract COVID. See, that's not the way my medical mind works. My medical mind goes, we should be able to find a way to standardize and measure those antibodies, maybe intervene some way with them, with that interleukin or with the actual replacement of what the hormones, what the antibodies are knocking out, and get ready to aggressively treat cytokine storm

by multiple pathways. And by the way, this is also my, since you seem to bring me up on a weekly basis, this is my weekly reminder for Susan to get her Attitude score. So thank you, Drew. Be well. Have a great Labor Day holiday weekend. Thanks. We're going to be away for a couple weeks, so we'll see when we get back.

All right, thanks. Maybe we'll do some Clubhouse. Sounds like my grandma. We'll do some locals from our destination. You're telling your husband to get you that Attitude score. I know. It's just funny. He just wants to know. Chuck. Let's get Chuck Chuck

up here. Chuck Chuck. It's a weird thing. When I invite them, not everyone comes up. I don't know. It's a little lag. People are like, oh, it's my turn. I don't know what it looks like at the other. Oh, there we go. Chuck. Hey, Dr. Drew. How are you? I'm good. What's happening? Long time listener.

Even back in the 80s with Adam Carolla. Love you guys. Thank you. My specific question is about the idea. Can you help me understand why everybody has to go? They're looking to get this new vaccine. Is it because of the re-up? Is it the variant or is it the ones that everybody's taking? Why do we need boosters? Is that the question?

Yeah, right. Why do we need the booster? Well, if you listen to Dr. Monica Gandhi in my discussion yesterday, she was not sure that everybody did need it. She was saying that we really need to look at the people that are having bad illness. This is her construct, and I agreed with it, which is we need to look more carefully at who is having bad breakthrough outcomes. In other words, who is getting a breakthrough and having hospitalization and severe illness?

And if that's exclusively in people over 70, then everybody over 70 should get that booster. And if it's nobody under 50 or under 40, then maybe they don't need the booster. She wants to stratify the risk for the booster. And I think that's kind of what you're alluding to in your question. Right. Yeah. I do. The flip side of that is we know that the vaccine efficacy wanes with time after six, eight months. And it's looking like a good idea, particularly if you've tolerated the vaccine well, though the reason they're sort of not coming out with strong sort of recommendations is they don't have the data really prove that it's safe yet.

And it's hard for an organization like the FDA to make a strong statement until they have proof. Right. So we're sort of in this weird limbo. I am recommending it for people in my practice over 70 across the board. That's my recommendation at this moment. And I would like my wife to get it too. I think she needs a booster. I think she had no reaction to it.

And I think it would probably benefit her to be better protected. Okay. So you're saying for better protection, what about just in general healthcare providers? Should healthcare providers be getting the extra booster? I would, if you're around it. Yeah, I mean, if you're...

You're being exposed to it. Let's put it this way. Again, I'm not in a position to... There's different ways of thinking about this, right? I'm not in a position to make blanket recommendations to health care providers.

If I had a patient that was a health care provider, I would sit down and really talk to that person about what their risks were, what their feelings were about it, what kind of exposure they're likely to have in their work as a healthcare worker.

And I would generally be pushing them towards, urging them towards getting it. If it was somebody older, I would be enthusiastically pushing them, urging them to get it. I would really be very interested in them getting vaccinated. If they had an adverse reaction the first or second time. Well, that's a different situation.

So it's the fact that we have these blanket sort of categories are what's tough. It's really tough to talk about it that way. Right. Thank you so much. Now, the last piece, if we already had Pfizer, which my wife and I did, should we stick with that? Yes. Yes. Yes. At this point, the only recommendation is to stay with your original vaccine.

Okay? Thank you so much. No double-dipping. Thank you. All right. I've got to wrap up a little early today. I have another appointment I've got to get to. We are going – I want to thank – It all goes back to COVID. It's so funny. Well, that's what's on people's minds. I know. right uh i've got to wrap up a little early today i have another appointment i got to get to we are

going well i want to thank back to covet it's so funny well that's what's on people's mind i know it's on and by the way there's a lot of i've noticed there's a lot of weirdness out there right now because of this surge we're into uh it seems to be peaking i believe we're going to be doing pretty good with this um but it's a it's a big surge and and it's making people feel hopeless and worry about a more you a more serious variant showing up. Monica Gandhi made me feel better yesterday. Dr. Gandhi was saying that she thinks the amount of broad immunity that we're going to be establishing in the world is going to mitigate the risk of a more serious variant showing up or one that really gets around immunity or vaccination. So that was a good opinion based on her years as an infectious

disease doctor. And so I felt kind of good about that. But people are still feeling a lot of hopelessness, a lot of helplessness, and that is a bad emotion for people. Thankfully, they've not locked us down for the most part, so we can still at least interact with each other and have social support that we need so very desperately. There was an interesting, as I told Dave, I gave a talk in Florida a couple of days ago, and I was speaking to a healthcare professional, and we were talking about resiliency. And she said, yeah, some of us are resilient,

but everybody gets depleted. And I thought, yeah, she is right. Everybody gets depleted. And your only hope is social refueling, refueling from contact with other people. And if they, God forbid, if they take that away from us again, we really need to engage in the world, engage with other people. It's a critical piece. It's always been a critical piece of leading a good life, having meaning and

emotional health. But I'm telling you right now, it is really important. And the fact that I'm seeing the helplessness start to come back again, I want to fight against that a bit. So I would urge you to sort of do what you can to spend time with people. Be safe. Mitigate your risk where you can. You know, vaccines are very important about it, that we will have an antiviral soon. Well, hopefully, I would love to be able to go through the world with an antiviral in my pocket and subcutaneous monoclonal antibody in my pocket. Thus, if Susan gets COVID, I could take the subcutaneous. And by the way, the antivirals are being tested as prophylactic agents as well. Just the way we have Tamiflu for the flu, we hopefully will have antivirals for COVID that we carry with us if we get exposed, if we get sick, and it can make a huge, huge, huge difference. So I'm looking forward to that in addition to vaccines and mitigation and other ways

of helping reduce the risk of this thing. It's coming. It's coming soon, hopefully. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Caleb, for producing this. Thank you, Dave Asprey, for spending a little time with me. Susan, thank you for running this. And tomorrow, it again is Adam Hounsley and Greg.

Joe Garner. Joe Garner. We're going Hounsley and Greg. Joe Garner. Joe Garner. We're going to talk about journalists and PTSD. And then Adam's going to give us a little update on Afghanistan. Adam always has really interesting stuff to say. The media and how they're treating us these days. Yeah. What is going on?

And then we're leaving for a couple weeks. So we're going to leave this with you. That'll be our last one? Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So we'll see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock. Is that correct you. That'll be our last one. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So we'll see you tomorrow at three o'clock. Is that correct?

Yes, sir. See you then. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of

medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations

and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.