Joe Rogan Experience #1870 - Max Lugavere

(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) What's up, Max? How are you? What up? Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Same. I've enjoyed your content online, so it's exciting to meet you in person. Thank you. I'm glad to hear that. So, you were telling me, before we got rolling, I said save it, let's just talk about it. What, uh, this Alzheimer's- Yes. ... thing that you're doing? What are you doing? Yeah, so I've been deeply immersed in the, in the Alzheimer's dementia prevention world for the past almost, almost decade at this point. Um, I'm not a ... just to lay it out up front, I'm not a medical doctor. I didn't take the academic route. Um, I started college sort of on a, on a pre-med track, but what ended up happening was, uh, I ended up going into journalism straight out of college, and I ended up working for a TV network in the US, um, that was backed by Al Gore back in the day. And so I, I got to hone my storytelling chops there, but I'd always been really passionate about health, nutrition, medicine, things like that. But in 2011, my, my mother started to display the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which is like a rare- Mm-hmm. ... form of dementia. One in f- Robin Williams had that. Yeah. Yeah. Terrible condition. It's, uh, it's described as, as feeling like having, like you have both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time, and certainly that's what I, what I observed in, in my mom. And so, when she started to display those symptoms, um, it had taken me and my family completely off guard. I, I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition. Um, my mom certainly wasn't old at the time. She was 58. She was still, you know, a spirited, youthful woman in, in middle age. Um, she had all the pigment in her hair. And, um, for me, I was in between jobs and I, I really had the opportunity ... I was grateful to have had the opportunity to, to, to go with her to different doctor's appointments. And I grew up in New York City, so we had access to, you know, cathedrals, to medical, um, advice and, and, uh, and, and examination. And in every instance, we were met with what I've come to call diagnose and adios. Basically, a physician would run a battery of esoteric tests on my mom, scribble down a few notes on a prescription pad, and, and send us on our way. But we had to ultimately take a trip to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which is known for taking on really complex medical cases. They build a team around the patient. And it was there that for the first time my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. She was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It wasn't, um, until a few years later that she actually received the Lewy body dementia diagnosis. But at that point, um, I started to dive into the research, because I had been trained as a journalist, which, you know, you're not trained as rigorously as a, as a PhD scientist, but you're kind of taught similar- similarly to investigate things, to maintain skepticism, to, you know, ask questions. And I started to look into the literature and, and just generally get a sense of what it was that my mom had been diagnosed with, what, what this, what this, you know, what this entailed. And I realized that in most cases, dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. 10, 20, 30 years even, um, by some estimates. And so for me, this became something really important, uh, to explore as a potentially preventable condition, because I realized for the first time that I had a risk factor, that my mom, you know, was my risk factor essentially. I didn't ... I hadn't even yet looked into my genes at that point. But, um, but so I, uh, I started looking into it and I came across all of these like fascinating insights which, which we can talk about, but I decided at that point, um, that I ... to, to sort of do what I could to help push the, you know, move the needle with this condition, um, that I would use my skills which at the time were, uh, filmmaking, 'cause I had just come off, you know, I was like producing content for TV and I was on camera. I was a communicator as well. And so I decided to do a documentary, um, on the topic of dementia prevention. The first ever, uh, documentary on dementia as a potentially preventable condition. We've all seen dementia documentaries on, you know, HBO and networks like that, and they're always, they always push this, this very like doom and gloom, um, mentality about the condition, which I, which I understand. It is a very difficult condition. It's America's most feared condition after all. Um, and this is a condition that, you know, 90% of what we know about Alzheimer's disease in particular, which is just one form of dementia, has been discovered only in the past 15 years. So it's a very rapidly evolving field of science. But I felt like if we know that this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms, then to me what that is, that's a very empowering insight. That means that we have agency to change our cognitive destiny. So I started shooting with my mom, which was very hard to do, um, because, you know, I mean, my, the person who I love most in the world I was watching, um, decline right in front of the camera. But also, um, I decided to exploit my media credentials at the time to then talk to researchers and scientists around the world. Um, and I was doing my own research in the primary literature as well. But I decided to, um, to yeah, to go to these labs and clinics where they're really ushering in dementia as a potentially preventable condition, and I actually signed myself up to become a, a, a, a s- a study subject in one actually, at Weill Cornell in New York. Right. And, um, and I actually became, ultimately I became, um, a collaborator with the, uh, principal investigator there, who's become my mentor over the years, Richard Isaacson, um, and I got to, uh, co-author a paper in a clinician's textbook, uh, on the clinical practice of, of dementia prevention, 'cause, you know, uh, uh, after all this time, I've learned so much about, um, about the condition, the etiology and, and so forth. Uh, but this documentary, I'm super excited for it. It's, um, it's called Little Empty Boxes, and we have a trailer up at littleemptyboxes.com. Why Little Empty Boxes? Well, it's a, it's a nod to something that my mom says in the film, which is actually something that d- ... You know, w-... my mom's condition, it seemed like her cognition had just severely downshifted, almost, almost overnight. Um, and so my mom never, my mom never, like, forgot who I was or anything like that. The, the presentation of Lewy body dementia is different from Alzheimer's disease. And once you've seen one case of dementia, just generally speaking, you've seen one case of dementia. Every, every dementia is, is different. But in my mom's case, it led to her often losing her train of thought soon after, uh, beginning to express an idea. Um, and she would often say things that just, you know, didn't, didn't make logical sense. So it's sort of a nod to what, um, to something that she, you know, that she says in the film. But, uh, I'm super excited because we, we inked a partnership with a, uh, a wonderful foundation called the Alz- Alzheimer's Foundation of America. And, um, and, um, yeah, I'm just super excited to, uh ...