Q&A on IG Live! David Sinclair and Dave Asprey Talk Coronavirus

Thank you for joining. David Sinclair is coming on board right now. I'm going to get him to join. As soon as he requests to join the live, I've got him on the podcast. We just finished an epic podcast. I mean, it was really good. I'm going to put this out as soon as humanly possible. And this is a guy who's actively working at Harvard as a researcher on how we're going to live way longer than we're supposed to in the author of Lifespan. And you're going to get to ask him questions after I get my first question for him, which is going to be the last question that you hear in the interview when you listen to the whole interview on Bulletproof Radio. There we go. I see your request, David, and. All right, you got to accept my ad here. Do you see it? It's pretty cool. I can see him behind me. You're gonna have to mute or turn your volume down all the way on your phone. I'll do the same. All right, good deal. So my question for you, and if you're just joining in, guys, this is David Sinclair, Harvard researcher, author of Lifespan, and one really brilliant superhuman researchers out there, the guy behind NAD and NMN and nicotinamide riboside and all that kind of stuff. So first off, welcome to the Instagram Live. And then ask you this big question. You're supposed to say, hey, thanks, Dave.

Hey, thanks, Dave. Tell me what to say, Dave.

That worked. All right, guys, we're really. We're rocking this. The dob. We're all going to die. None of that crap. All right, here's my big question for you to cap off our interview on Bulletproof Radio. Your general outlook on the virus, like, what's this going to do to humanity from an immune perspective, From a societal perspective, you spent three weeks going really deep on the virus, looking at what it does, looking at how it's affecting populations. Where are you now?

Well, so as I kept telling my wife, Sandra, the kids are not going back to school anytime soon. Most experts I talk to who actually understand epidemiology think that we're not going to go back to normal as a society, probably for another year. We will go back to work just like China. So don't panic about that. The economy is going to get back on its feet, hopefully soon. But life will not be the same for probably a year, maybe even two. The virus is not going to go away by itself, either. Half of us have to catch it or we need a vaccine which maybe will come from China in the next 12 to 18 months or one of the US companies will succeed in about 18 months or longer. And we're hopeful that one of them is going to succeed. But I think that for humanity, it's not all doom and gloom. What makes me proud of humanity is that if you think about all of the history of life on earth going back, unless you believe in creation, it goes back to at least three and a half, maybe four billion years. That's a long time. Right. And this is the first time ever that a species that's all over the world has united to fight one foe. It's like Independence Day or, you know, one of these, like War of the Worlds. This is what we're living through. It's not just in the movies. We're actually living this.

Now. So you're feeling generally positive over time, and I am too. And one of my biggest concerns we haven't addressed yet. But hugging people increases immunity. So I'm going to continue. Once we're done with this infectious phase here, I'm going to keep hugging my friends and the ones who say, I don't really want to hug, go to therapy because this idea that you're going to die if you have physical human contact, we won't live long as a species. If we all live behind screenshots like our pheromone systems will break our, you know, this is not a long term strategy for success. Do you think we're going to get back to hugging? Or are we always going to be germaphobes for a long time after this? As you touch your nose. I saw that.

Yeah, yeah. You're making me worry about it. We humans, we touch our face at least 12 times every minute. So it's bad. Here's what I think is going to happen. I think you look at China, you look at South Korea, they're not going back to normal. They're getting heat scans on their face and they're not touching each other. Now, I will hug my family all day because I know that they're very unlikely to have it. But if I'm meeting a stranger now, I'm definitely not going to hug them. I'm certainly not going to shake their hand. I think we may enter a world, though, where we show proof that we're immune or we've had the disease. That would be one way to do it. If you meet someone on the street, maybe we could have a government approved card or something on our phone that could say this person's okay.

That sounds so creepy. It's like back when I was in school, they had these forms from the university. They were called consent forms. So before you hooked up with someone at a party, you're supposed to each whip out your consent form and sign them to have legal evidence that you'd both consented before you started kissing. I'm pretty sure that that program failed. I kind of think that, hey, are you clean for this one virus? Even though you might have one of the other, you know, 24 STDs that have been around forever that are problems. And, you know, we've never, we don't have problems with that. So I think we're just going to realize life has risk and life without human contact is not worth living. If that's your whole life going without much human contact for a while, worth it, right?

For sure. Right now is not the time to be hugging people you don't know.

All right, I'm seeing a bunch of comments on here saying that vaccines, vaccines are all evil. It's the end of the world. What's the pragmatic view on vaccines? You're not a doctor, you're a PhD researcher at Harvard Genetics. Immunity, like, you know your, you know, your shit, to be perfectly clear. So what, how should we think about vaccines?

Well, so the vaccine, the vaccines that are being developed are the thing that could save civilization right now. They, we are dependent on them. Got a barking dog behind me so I can help.

Don't worry, the dog is vaccinated.

All right, you're live. So I'm a big believer in the benefit of vaccines. Probably half of us would not be alive today if it wasn't for the invention of vaccines. Now, they're not always risk free, I'll grant that. But right now, when we have a tragedy going on, vaccines are our best hope of actually making a difference. And so I'm gung ho. I want vaccines as soon as possible.

All right, you guys heard something really important right there. This is Dr. David Sinclair, Harvard researcher, author of Lifespan. So people are saying, who is this? So the standpoint on vaccines you heard right there is in alignment with mine, which is that you look at your individual risk, you look at what the risk of the specific vaccine is, given all those things, and then you say, all right, is this vaccine worth it? And if you have a 20 or 30% risk of dying from some sort of illness in an area you're going to, it just might be worth it. And for you guys to say, no vaccines ever. Good God, like, stop being religious. Start being scientific. Here's the Deal. Surgery. Terrible idea, right? Oh, unless you're dying of maybe a heart attack and there's something they can do that's interventional, Your risk of dying in the surgery is pretty big, but you're going to do it. So here's an example. I stepped on a rusty nail. I'm on a farm. I hadn't had my tetanus vaccine. Why? Because every time I get the dpt, I feel like crap for two weeks and I can't raise my arm. The D and the P is diphtheria and participants. So I'm stealing David's time here. But I just got to tell you guys this. So I got actual tetanus. You know, the kind of your jaw locks up and it kills you. I had to go to the hospital, get iggs, and I got my tetanus shot without the D and the P, and you know what? I felt just fine. So are all vaccines evil? No. Are all vaccines good? No. Did my wife get really sick when she took all the doctors out borders vaccines all at the same time and couldn't practice medicine for six months because it cooked her brain? Yes. So are they good or bad? It depends. So get off the high horse whether you think they're all great forever or they're all bad forever. No, they just require thinking and worth fighting book or worth the fight book about mandatory vaccines. That's already a war crime and. Or vaccines are stupid. All right, there. There's my. There's my opinion. David. Sorry, I had to say that. Everyone's going crazy on this, so we won't talk much more about vaccines, except when will we have one?

Well, everyone's saying the same thing, and I agree with it. It's at least 18 months if it works. I am hopeful, though, if China is ahead of us and they seem to be, and they probably will go quicker through their safety testing, that they'll share it with us, that we will be first taking Chinese vaccines. That's my hope and prediction. But for a U.S. vaccine, it's probably 18 months. We have to be careful that we don't cause more harm than good. There was actually a monkey study that showed that the previous SARS vaccine in monkeys made things worse. And these vaccines are targeting the same protein on the surface of the virus. So you cannot just hope that it's going to be okay. You have to make sure 100% that millions of people are not going to get sick from this.

I like that. I like that perspective a lot. We got a good question here. Relationship between mtor signaling pathway and Covid. Is there one? Because you and I both are into mtor.

Well, yeah, there were some really interesting and promising studies done by Novartis, actually, that if you take very low dose rapamycin, please don't take high doses. This is an immunosuppressant. But the low dose seemed to boost the immune system of elderly people, probably by rejuvenating their stem cells in their immune system. Would I try it now? Probably not. I think it's too risky to try something like that. It's not really proven, but it's promising. And I think down the line we might have something like rapamycin for older people to rejuvenate their immune system.

Okay, what about increasing heme iron? There's someone asking about that. Would it help or hinder with fighting the virus or just make no difference?

I think it'll help. I think that if you're iron deficient, if you have. Certainly if you have anemia, you want to try and keep your iron levels up. I wouldn't overdose on iron because that could be just as bad. We know that that promotes senescence, the zombie cells in your body that drives aging. But a low dose of iron would be bad for a start. It's going to make your body less able to carry oxygen. But also there's a theory out of China based on some science that says that COVID 19 targets red blood cells as well and knocks the iron out of the heme group in the hemoglobin. And so I'm making sure that I'm supplementing with a little bit of iron just so that I'm not deficient.

There's a question here from ohj. Lynad. He says what about blood pressure meds and negative effects of COVID 19? We talked about that in detail on this episode, which should be live, hopefully within 48 hours. I'm going to postpone that one, but you want to. You want to look at that? All right, here's one I didn't ask you on the show. Urine therapy. This is a serious question from someone drinking or possibly injecting your own urine.

How is it possible that it's going to help?

It's supposed to be a source of iggs.

Oh, that makes sense. I don't know. I don't know if it's proven to work.

You heard it here. David Sinclair from Harvard says that makes sense to drink it on urine. Okay, just a guess. You did not hear that here. But the logic of igg does make sense. So you did not I'm just putting words in his mouth.

Well, let me turn that back to something sensible. You can isolate antibodies from particularly patients that have survived. And so that's a real therapy and that's being trialed in China for one place. Problem with that is it's hard right now to find a lot of people who are, who've recovered enough that you're not going to risk infecting more people. You know, a few viral particles is enough to infect you, it seems, but that is a possibility. In the, in months to come, we may see that people get transfusions from the serum of people who've survived.

Okay. And Dr. Bob Hariri has expressed that he thinks it's possible immune therapy can deal with COVID This is coming from the LEO who's asking that question. What do you, what do you think about immune therapy? Dr. Harari has been on the show, actually.

Which kind of immune therapy do you think he's referring to, Leah?

What are you talking about? I'm guessing this must be some sort of plasma based thing where you get plasma from people who had it and give it to other people.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about. That, that, that's real science. That should work. It's just that there's not a lot of it right now.

On the show we talked about how one of the young people that, that, you know, I think was 29 and, and got it was on a ventilator and things like that. Why do you think younger people are getting it now? Or is it just bigger numbers? It has the number, let's put it this way, has the number of young people who are getting it increased and if so, why?

Well, so I haven't looked at the numbers since this morning, but I haven't seen any evidence that young people are dying in greater numbers. I think we're hearing stories. There's some anecdotes. Yesterday a friend of a friend at 29 died without any underlying conditions. So it can be lethal to young people. There are even babies with it. But maybe I'm unaware, but I don't think that the numbers are changing.

Have you seen anything about exosomes being used on people with COVID I've seen.

Companies talk about it, but I don't think anybody's trying it right now.

I talked to Dr. Harry Adelson from Docera Clinics this morning who's one of my, my. In fact, it's my main stem cell go to Resource in Park City. So he's done a lot of work on Me and he's, he mentioned that he's seen trials of it with really good, really good effects. And apparently Amy Killen, who's been on the show too also says that. I haven't seen the study though. But they, yeah, they both say that there's a study. Amy B. Killen, she's a professional rapper and an MD doing stem cell therapy. She's not really a rapper, she just sounds like one.

That there are these placental stem cells people are trying to. And that was tried in China.

Did it work?

Well, they say so, but it's only small number of people. I think they had five people that recovered well. But until you do these controlled trials, it's hard to know. And you know I'm a Harvard professor, I have to be based on true clinical blind placebo control blind studies. So it's, there's anecdotes. I know Dave, your opinion is, you know, let's go with what we know and forget about. Well, not forget about it. But we don't have time to wait for these long term studies.

Yeah, I'd like to see the results in 18 months. I also would like to be around in 18 months. So I'm going to do what seems likely because it's better than average. And that's your goal. Better than average?

Yeah. Yeah. Well I'm a rebellious scientist so you know where I come down? I'm one of the unusual ones at Harvard that actually says we don't have to wait for absolute proof before we try something if it's safe.

And part of that's because you're a PhD researcher and no one can pull your medical license. And it's such a horrible situation when doctors get that held over their head saying if you are progressive, if you do something that may save a patient's life, then you're basically putting your 12 years of study and your career and your reputation at risk even if it might save the person's life. And man, it takes a lot of courage to step up. What about medicinal mushrooms? We did not talk about that on the show. I've had several episodes with the guys from Lifecycle with Paul Stameth have been on what have you seen any evidence for Reishi Chaga, Lion's mane, cordyceps for COVID 19? Yeah.

No. Have you?

The only thing I can think of that would seem really good Turkey tail for modulating gut inflammation which would lower overall inflammation. And I could see cordyceps. This is a general tonic that's anti inflammatory on many different levels. If I Woke up tomorrow feeling like crap. I would probably take three or four dropperfuls of the Australian cordyceps, the life cycle stuff, as a part of a huge handful of other things I would take that are all likely to help, but many of which aren't proven for whatever the heck I don't know that I have.

Yeah, Dave, we should tell everybody that they should definitely tune into the show when it's posted because we went through quite a long list of things that we're taking and why.

In fact, we went through a list of everything, maybe almost everything that David's taking, including donuts and then not really. And a lot of stuff I'm taking. So. Bulletproof radio, itunes. It'll be on our YouTube channel. Be on all that stuff in. God. As soon as I can get this thing up, we're going to put in the subtitles and get all that for you. But there's also a show. David Perlmutter, another good friend that's going to come out. Guys, I normally do two shows a week. If it's a Covid related thing and it's actionable and what's, what's happening now, I'm just going to pump that as fast as I can so you can read the transcripts, listen to the show. You know, I'll get back to regular scheduled programming. Meantime, you have extra time so you can listen to an extra one. All right, David, if you had. We've got about six minutes left before you run into your next, your next call. Now, we talked about fasting on the show, both intermittent and regular. So you gotta listen to the show to get that answer. Here's someone asking about magnesium bicarbonate and by extension sodium bicarbonate. Is changing your alkalinity a good idea for this? And full disclosure, I do take magnesium bicarb. I have for many years for mitochondrial function. But any evidence for the virus?

I haven't come across anything like that. But I do think mitochondrial function is important in general anyway, but particularly for your immune system when you're fighting disease. So I take other things. My mitochondrial function. We talked about Coq 10. There's another one that I take which is alpha lipoic acid. You take that too, but no, I don't know about that particular one, whether that's helpful or not.

Okay. And there's a pretty comprehensive list on the show. You guys are going to love the show. And if you don't have time, there's going to be show notes like always. There's always a transcript on daveasprey.com youm go there, you can download it and just read through it and do my best to link it. We're doing this one fast. All right, here's another interesting question. Drugs that target P38 should be helpful since they also inhibit ACE2. And guys, ACE2 is where is how we think that the spike on the virus enters cells. So, so P38 target drugs. Good plan, bad plan.

Yeah, it makes sense at least based on the biology. And there's a lot of drugs actually, as you probably all know, that are currently being tested. Some of them ACE2 modulators as well. You know, there are P38 drugs that are on the market. Some of them are used for cancer treatments, I believe. So I think anything is worth trying if it's not going to be dangerous. So that's actually a decent suggestion. The other drugs that we could talk about, so chloroquine, please don't take fish tank cleaner. That's not going to make you healthier. But there is Plucknil, which here's what I find that's interesting, Dave, is that every other day people say, oh, plaque mill is going to work. And then the next day, no, it's not. Then it is. Then it's not it really. The scientific community and the CDC seem to be going back and forth. Where I stand on this, by the way, is it's, it's being used off label anyway. Hospitals are using it. I think that that makes some sense. It may not work. You know, a year from now we'll find out if it works or not. But if people's lives are on the line and they're going to die potentially, I think that's certainly worth. And you know, the doctors make their decision. I'm, as you said, I'm not an md. I just do a lot of reading and research. But other drugs, you know that we got a whole bunch. We've got at least 30 molecules in clinical trials around the world and just as many vaccine trials. So that we're going to learn over the next few months more about what should work and at least reduce the number of fatalities.

Okay, final question. Unless you have no comment here. I've for years taking a single or a couple days dose of melatonin is one of those. I'm starting to get an infection. Use melatonin as an anti inflammatory. Dietrich Klinghardt is recommending that any, any knowledge of or evidence of melatonin. If you start getting inflammation, that might be Covid. Good idea, bad idea, no comment.

Well, I'M taking melatonin. I take it every day anyway. I find it's very useful. Just a low dose, 2 milligrams.

2 milligrams. I don't know. Low dose is half a milligram. So you're taking because your body makes three. So you're doing two thirds of your daily manufacturer. Okay. So you're kind of in the middle there. By the way, smart or sleep mode. The stuff I make has a half a milligram and I take four of those because I'm a big guy. So I get one gram a day. But when I'm dealing with. When I'm dealing with something that might be an infection, I have no problem taking 10. In fact, having an extra bottle or two of melatonin seems like it might be a good idea, but who knows?

Yeah, you'd hate Australia, by the way. Where I. Where I come from originally, they don't sell melatonin. It's banned from public sale.

And that's so. That's so irritating. And one of the most important comments here is from Rezi, who says I need lip gloss. Instagram is so random. All right, there's a bunch of questions about fasting. If listened to the show, we went in deep for probably 10 or 15 minutes talking about should you. If, should you fast? We're totally in on that.

Exercise. What type of exercise?

Yeah, yeah, it was pretty. We talked about zinc. We didn't talk about turmeric. You want to talk about turmeric real quick? Curcumin.

Yeah, I take curcumin. I take the liposomal form because it's so insoluble. And that seems to be really good for a whole bunch of things, including boosting immunity. So, yeah, I'm a fan.

Okay. Yeah, me too. So good. We all, we all agree on that stuff. All right, my friends, thank you for tuning in on Instagram. Dr. David Sinclair. His new book is Lifespan. And by the way, if you haven't read Lifespan, he's already been on the show. He's done so much to change the face of aging and just figured out all kinds of crazy stuff that you wouldn't believe. And he's a Harvard, just super impeccable, unimpeachable credentials. And he's kind of said, look, we're going to live longer than we think we are. Here's how we could turn back the cloud. So if you want something to do when you're sitting at home, don't watch Netflix, read or download Lifespan. It is absolutely worth your time. I think we might have even overlapped on the list with Superhuman. We both fervently are working towards making our species live longer. And in lifespan, David says, hey, one of the things that might really mess up our whole generation's lifespan is like, a pandemic or something. And he actually talks about this so he knows what he's talking about because he called this. On that note, see you guys later. See if I can end the show here. There's some way. There we go.

See you.