Transcript of #2450 - Tommy Wood

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right. Nice to meet you, sir. Stimulated mind. A future proof for your brain. Is that possible? Future proof. Why can't I say that? I already have dementia. Future proof your brain from dementia and stay sharp at any age. But first of all, what prompted you to write this?

I've spent a long time working in a whole range of different spheres related to the brain. How to treat newborn brain injury, how to treat and maybe even prevent certain traumatic brain injuries and concussions, looking at what affects long term cognitive decline and dementia, as well as working with elite professional athletes, particularly Formula One drivers, trying to help them stay on top of their game for as long as possible. I saw across all those different areas, there are these core things that the brain seems to thrive on that are required either for development or maintenance of cognitive function. And these are things that people can apply to themselves on a day-to-day basis, improve their focus and well-being now. And then long term, that translates to a lower risk of dementia.

So is dementia And is it a genetic thing or is it a function of atrophy? Is it a combination of those things?

It's a combination of those things. Certainly, there's a genetic component. So maybe I will zoom out to start with and just think about what is dementia. Dementia is the clinical diagnosis of losing so much cognitive function that you're not able to take care of yourself on a day-to-day basis. There are several different types of dementia. The most common is Alzheimer's disease. That's something like 60 to 80% of cases of dementia. The next most common is vascular dementia, something like 10 to 20%. Then there are others like frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, dementia you get with Parkinson's disease. But those first two, something like 70 to 90% of dementias, they are directly tied to a lifestyle in the environment. Right now, it's estimated that somewhere between 45 and maybe even 70 or more % of dementias are preventable, and most of those fall into those two categories. There is a genetic component. Alzheimer's disease has two broad types. There's early onset Alzheimer's disease that's caused by a single mutation in a single gene, something like the amyloid precursor protein gene or one of the presenilin genes. Those people get Alzheimer's in their 30s to 50s. It's a very predictable and quite rapid decline sometimes, but that's maybe 1% of Alzheimer's.

The vast majority, when we think about Alzheimer's, we think about an age-related dementia. This is much more related to the environment. There is a genetic component. You might have heard of APOE4. You can have three different flavors of APOE, apolipoprotene E, 2, 3, and 4. You get two copies.

Which is the one that makes you more more likely to get CTE?

Is that two? No. That's four as well. That's four as well. Yeah. So four essentially has an effect of amplifying certain inflammatory effects in the brain. That's probably why it makes CTE worse, makes it more likely for you to get CTE, because if you're getting repetitive impacts, repetitive injuries, then it exacerbates or makes that inflammatory response worse. But when you think about that in terms of Alzheimer's, if you If you have one copy of APOE4, your risk of Alzheimer's is increased by 2-6 times. If you have two copies, it's 6-20 times, depending on how you look at it. But all the data suggests that APOE4 is a risk multiplier. It's not that if you have a copy of VAPO before, you're definitely going to get dementia. It's that in the setting, particularly of the modern environment, risks of dementia or risk factors for dementia are amplified, like excessive alcohol intake, physical inactivity, low-quality diet. That also means that if you then address those risk factors, you have greater benefit because you're offsetting some of that additional risk. However you look at dementia from a genetic standpoint, and it can also be family history. If you have a family history of dementia, you have an increased risk of dementia.

But a lot of what comes with family history is shared environment and shared lifestyle. You eat and sleep and move like your parents did. If they had a lifestyle that might increase their risk of dementia, you get that as well. Even if you do have an increased genetic risk, you can offset a large part of that through lifestyle and other environmental factors.

Okay. For some people, there's an increased genetic risk, but do some people who do not have this increased genetic risk, do they still have a possibility of getting dementia just from atrophy or just from sedentary lifestyle, no stimulation whatsoever?

Yes. So the way we would say it is that not everybody who has APOE4 gets Alzheimer's, and most people who have Alzheimer's do not have APOE4. So absolutely.

Okay. So is it just like everything else, like your muscle's atrophy, your bones weaken when you don't put load on them? Is that what it is?

Yeah. That's the core thesis of my book. It's called the Stimulated Mind for that reason. I think that in The title is slightly provocative because in the modern world, we are-Hyper stimulated. Over stimulated and- With nonsense. Exactly. We're over stimulated and under stimulated at the same time.

We're getting a lot of input, but we're not doing any calculations. We're not formulating new ideas. We're not being creative. We're not problem solving. We're just being inundated with nonsense.

Exactly. The function of any tissue in the body, you mentioned the muscles, the bones, the liver, the immune system. Their function is dependent It's dependent on the stimulus you apply to them. The brain is exactly the same. If you want functions and networks in the brain to perform well, you need to challenge them in order to enhance capacity in them.

Do you think you need to keep your liver working healthy by drinking every now and then?

It's the example of, yes, if you drink a lot of alcohol, your liver gets better at metabolizing alcohol. It proves the point, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the alcohol is there to keep your They were healthy.

Probably not. Didn't they used to do that with people that had... If they had lung problems, they would give them cigarettes? Yeah. People with asthma?

Yeah, and that didn't turn out so great. The theory was okay.

I I think they should have just been breathing heavy. That would have been a better application of that, right? Because it's just like, you don't want to torture... Your lungs aren't a filter to torture you. So when you started studying this, do you have someone close to you that has Alzheimer's, or is it just a field of study that you were interested in?

Yeah, there was two different things. One, I focused initially on the brain early in life and then your elite-level cognitive performance in athletes. And you see that these things tie together. What happens early in life, what happens during life, affects what happens later in life. But I also had my grandfather died of dementia. He was an alcoholic, and he had a combination of alcohol-induced brain atrophy plus vascular dementia.

I really wonder about people today, and this is one of the reasons why I was so interested in this, because what we were just talking about before, that people are being oversaturated with nonsense but not stimulated in any way that challenges your mind. I mean, this is a constant state today. And then on top of that, you've got a lot of people that are using AI throughout their day to solve all their problems where they don't think at all. And there's been some studies on that that show that it's a decrease in cognitive function. When they ask them to actually use their brain, the brain works less well than it did before they start. So you're not getting educated by ChatGPT or any of these. What you're doing is you're letting it think for you.

Absolutely. So maybe one of the studies you're thinking of was a study they did at MIT, and they had students write essays, and they could either just write it using whatever they had in their head already or using Google or using an LLM. And what they showed was that as you increase the amount of outside support you got, Google and then I think it was ChatGPT, then there was less activity in the brain networks associated with actually doing the task, and students remembered less well afterwards. I mean, this isn't surprising. Not at all. You're not using your brain, therefore Or it doesn't engage in the task. But what's interesting is that they found a version. Some of the students who had previously written an essay just for themselves, then they asked them to go back and use ChatGPT on top. And what they found was that the final output was better. So the way that we can use these tools rather than just asking it to do all the stuff for us, which is what most people are doing, and I think will cause skills and maybe even parts of the brain to atrophy because they're not being used, is we use them as orthotics.

They can expand our capacities. You try writing it all first, and then you say, Hey, what did I miss? What am I not thinking about? You can build on it from there.

And that might perhaps actually stimulate your mind to think, Why didn't I think of that? Next time I'm writing a paragraph, I'll consider these options.

Yeah, exactly. So you actually have to fully engage your brain in that process. But then the end result might be better.

Well, it's just such uncharded territory for us, right? Especially social media. I mean, completely uncharded territory that people are staring at their hand for eight hours a day. I mean, that's really what you're doing. You're staring at your hand and you're hoping, usually unsuccessful, to get something that really excites you and something that's really unique and changes your perspective on things. I mean, I think maybe when I was using social media every day, maybe once a day I would get something that was really interested in that I would save. I go, Oh, that's actually interesting. And I would think, Okay, that'd be a good subject to bring up on the podcast. But the rest of the time, it was just horseshit.

Well, part of the algorithm, and I'm not an expert in training algorithms to do this, but the goal of the algorithm is that you don't get everything that is perfect, that immediately captured your attention up front, right? Because you want it to be random. And there's a method in the randomness that keeps you scrolling because eventually you'll get those small bumps that then keep you going. But what's particularly interesting about social media is it leverages the fact that we are social beings. So we prioritize information that is called, the acronym is prime, prestigious in-group moral and emotional. And this is even greater in social context, because we are trying to learn about our social environment so that we can survive our group and be fitter. And so social media makes us think that we will get that information whilst at the same time offering us the exact opposite, which is essentially isolation. But it leverages that desire of the human brain to find this social information and this social connection whilst not giving us any of that.

Also, without it getting any feedback from another human being while you're communicating ideas. So you could say the most horrible shit to people in a comment or a text message, and you don't think about it because it's like there's not a person there, not right in front of you. It's like an anti-human device. Very weird.

But if your goal is to capture attention, they're doing a great job of it.

Well, not just that. They're acquiring enormous wealth and also enormous influence over just all sorts of things, politics, economics. Some of the richest corporations in the world, they gather a thing that we never thought of was valuable, which is data. When people first started using these things, when people first started using the Internet, nobody really thought that data was going to be one of the biggest commodities in the world.

Yeah, but now if they know what captures your attention and what you'll spend money on, that's the perfect way to get as much out of you as possible.

So the concept is future proofing your What are the things that you think people should be doing to try to future proof the... Other than avoiding social media and avoiding a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here.

I think every tool has a possible use. For instance, social media. If you have crafted a social media that allows you to maintain connections that you wouldn't have otherwise, the original version of Facebook, as it existed 25 years ago, was just posting pictures and you could chat with some family members. If you use social media like that, and there are studies that show that if you're using online tools, including social media, and it increases communication and connection beyond what you would have had otherwise, that can be a net benefit. If it's all you use and it's replacing in-person human connection, then it's a net negative. There can be ways that it could be beneficial. If your Instagram feed is just like, cute dogs running around in the snow, which is what most of mine is right now, that can be a nice five-minute break in between cognitively demanding tasks. That's fine. But when you think about future proofing your brain, this idea that there is some unknowable future. We don't know what the future is going to look like. But if we want to exist in that future, we're going to need good processing speed, good decision-making skills, good working memory, good emotional and social skills.

In order to maintain those, we need to challenge and stimulate them. I think the most important thing most people can do is think about new, challenging, and often creative skills, and there's a lot of evidence for creative arts, music. What they do is improve the function of networks in the brain that are at risk during the process of aging, particularly because they're important for attention and social connection. If we really invest time in doing these things that we suck at and get better at them, we maintain these broad cognitive skills that we're going to need in the future, regardless of what happens. And some of that is also personal. So the goal is to build as much cognitive capacity as possible. I have this idea of headroom, which is the difference between what you need on a day-to-day basis versus what you're truly capable of. It's the difference between on a day-to-day basis, your legs need to be strong enough to get you up off the toilet. But your maximum capacity is what's your max back squat? The difference between those is your headroom. And then that gives you capacity to perform when you're injured or sick Or you need to lift your car off your buddy because it got flipped in a car accident, all those things.

When you need to draw on greater resources, you want those resources to be there. Because we are going to be stressed, sleep-deprived, sick, and we still want our brains to function. Investing in really challenging tasks and skills builds that capacity so that we have access to it when we need it.

What is the function and what is the effect on the brain when you learn a new skill, like sucking at something, which I always tell people is one of the best things you can do. A lot of people don't enjoy it because their ego, they don't like being frustrated that they're terrible at something. But there's something about not being good at something and dedicating yourself to it and seeing market improvement that stimulates all sorts of areas of your mind, which I find really interesting.

Most people don't realize that the process of learning, which in itself is the core process of neuroplasticity, the your brain making new connections and cementing new connections. That whole process is driven by failure, essentially, and making mistakes, because your brain is a prediction machine. It's constantly predicting what's going to happen next based on the world around you and what you're trying to do. And so imagine that you're trying to do some new move in jiu-jitsu or something, and you have no idea how to do it. You're going to try it, and there's going to be this big gap between your expectation and reality. That's going to be frustrating. That's the feeling of failure. But that's what diverts resources in the brain to say, Hey, we need to close the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened. And that's what drives neuroplasticity. This is also then what drives the cementing and function of these networks in the brain associated with that. So the idea that you start sucking it something and you get better at it over time, that is Exactly the thing that the brain needs in order to improve and maintain its function.

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Co/predictionspromo. How many of those things should you take on at once, though? This is my issue. I have a problem. I wish I could have four lives that I could run simultaneously. I'd have four different occupations. I try to smash as many things into a day as possible. But there's many times where I think, boy, I think I'm doing too many There's many different things that I'm trying to get good at, and maybe it would be better if I just concentrated on one.

There's a few different ways to look at this. I think that a broad base and a broad range of different skills is probably Something that we should all hope to have.

Like talent stacking.

Yeah, exactly. If you think about... One of my favorite books is Range by David Epstein, which talks about the broad range of skills that people who then really succeeded in academia or sports have. They didn't specialize really early. They had a broad base of talents that they can then draw upon as they specialize later in life. I think that's something that we can all aspire to. But equally, what's probably more common is that We try something and we do it for a little while and then we just give up on it and we try something else. Yeah, there's a little bit of benefit to that. But when you look at some of the studies that really examine the effect of learning some creative skills, and they've done it with tango dancers and painters and video gamers. When you compare an expert to an amateur and where you're seeing the benefits of expertise in terms of the function of some of these networks in the brain, It really is the development of some level of expertise is probably required to see the maximum benefit. Obviously, the learning curve is steepest at the beginning. Right when you're beginning to learn something, that's when you'll learn the fastest.

But there is also some benefit to expertise. Some of that, just to say that, pick one or two things that you're actually excited to continue getting better at for a long period of time. Then maybe you do have to try a bunch of different things until you find the thing that really gets you going. But across all those different skills, they have similar core effects on the brain. So you don't have to do one or both. You can just pick the one that you enjoy the most.

So it's just about the struggle of trying to get better at something, essentially. Yeah. And my wife is learning a new language right now, and she's been so excited about it. It's really interesting because she starts talking around the house in French It's one of those things where I'm watching her do it. She wasn't doing it, and then she's been doing it over the last couple of months. I'm seeing this excitement in this new project. We were talking about it, about how that is one of the things that's very difficult to do, but it's more complex than learning because it's learning and interacting. It's not just learning. You're learning, but you have to... It requires this back and forth with another person. You have to understand sentence structure. It's just like... Especially French is so different than English. There's so much weird shit involved in it, but I could see in her that this very stimulating to her mind. It made me go, Maybe I should learn a language. But I'm like, Fuck, where do you have the time to learn a language? But then I thought about, when I was on social media all the time, I would look down on my phone some days and it would say, Screen use today, six hours.

I'm like, Fucking six hours.

That's where your time is. Right.

If you spent six hours just learning Spanish, you'd be fluent. I'd be able to go to a taqueria and order in Spanish. It's like we spend so much time doing nonsense. That anything that you can do that requires your brain to be in that uncomfortable state of, What is the... Oh, what is this? Oh, it's this. Is that this? Got it. That dance, that firing of the synapses and forcing your brain to figure this puzzle out, so many people don't have that. I see it in people that get stagnant where they're doing the same thing every day. Their job is fairly mundane and boring, and maybe they like it, but there's nothing stimulating about it. They're talking to the same boring-ass people. They don't exercise. They go home, they watch TV, and then they shut off, and they do it all again. And then you talk to them 5, 10 years later, and it's almost like they're slipping. You see it. You can see it in people that have mundane existences. Their stimulation is so low that their ability to be stimulated is low.

I think that that thing you describe is so baked into our society that we've started to believe that it's normal. So when you look at the trajectory of cognitive function over your entire life, imagine a graph where on the one side you have cognitive function, and it could be something basic like processing speed. How quickly does your brain process information? On the bottom is age. It tends to I think sometime around our mid-20s to early-30s. It's usually the peak on average tends to be higher and later the more time we spend in education. The more time we spend essentially as professional learners, the more we can build that final capacity. After that, it's just an average decrease downwards. A colleague of mine, Josh Turknet and I, he's a neurologist. We wrote a paper a couple of years ago where we theorized that the reason why we see that decline at the population level in cognitive function from about that age is because we go to work, we do the same thing again and again and again. Then everything else, our life gets in the way. We never spend that same time investing in building our cognitive capacities the way we did when we were kids and when we were in school.

The decline is partly because we just stop doing that. One of the theories of aging is that it's just a continuation of development, like process of development. Most of the processes of development in the brain are refining connections based on the environment and the stimulus the brain receives. If you start removing stimuli because you're no longer engaging in these cognitive-challenging things, the brain is going to start removing connections. Hey, I don't I need that. I'm not using this part of my brain. As a result, you start to see decline. There are studies that show if you have a very stimulating job, it's very complex problem-solving skills, lots of social interactions, you have a slower rate of cognitive decline as an adult and a lower risk of dementia. You see in individuals who continue to engage in reading, writing, lectures, dancing, a whole bunch of hobbies, again, you see a slowed rate of decline. So some of what we just expect to happen with age is because of the way we stop engaging with the world and we stop challenging ourselves.

Well, it completely makes sense. If you think about physical activity, it goes along the same path. Exactly. You see, I have friends. I'm 58, which is crazy to say. It sounds so old, but I have friends that are 58 that are basically... They're skeletons with meat hanging around various parts of it. But my physical ability is very similar to what it was when I was in my 30s. The only way that I could really test it was physical competition, and I'm not really interested in that. I don't want to get hurt. But my capacity for work is very similar. I know that because I force it. I make myself do it. I would imagine the same thing is true with the mind. I mean, it has to be. I think it's all together. It's a use it or lose it. If your mind doesn't have a need to be constantly intrigued and stimulated, you got to think for survival, right? One of the things that's speculated, maybe I can ask you about this because I think about this a lot, what is ADHD? Whether or not it's actually a problem, I think it's a superpower because I'm pretty sure I have it.

But yet I'm very functional. I can focus on things. And as long as I tire myself out from activity, I can relax and I can concentrate on things. And I'm very interested in certain things, and I can lock into them and concentrate. But if I was forced to be in a classroom with a very boring teacher teaching a subject I'm not that interested in, and I was a child, if I had the wrong parents, luckily I didn't, I would be medicated. But I think that that is this ability to focus on certain things, like hyper focus, was probably a function of a persistent hunter. Because if you wanted to catch an animal, you couldn't be a person that gives up quick. You had to be a person that You keep looking for tracks. You keep trying to find sign. You're trying to figure out a way, like I've got to keep pushing one more hour. We got 20 minutes of daylight left. I've got to figure this out. That thing It had to be in you in order to be a successful hunter.

I'm sure that that's part of it. The current picture of ADHD, I think, is quite complicated. I have family members with ADHD. When they then started on medication, they were like, oh, actually, all of a sudden, my brain works.

Right. But that medication is Adderall. If I took Adderall, I would say the same fucking thing. I don't need a stimulant. But if I took a stimulant right now, I'd be like, dude, I'm so much better.

But you know what happens in certain individuals with ADHD, when you give them stimulants, they calm down. They calm down. I think there's a combination of multiple things. Some is, yes, these can be very beneficial traits in the right settings. But you also have to consider that we're layering on a modern environment that's like bright light at night, a whole bunch of caffeine and stimulants. Yeah, of course, some of it is, I think, the teacher is boring and they're just not engaged because the majority of people with ADHD can still focus on things that they're interested in focusing in or on.

Yes, even without any medication.

Yeah, but there's a sliding scale, and I think there's a whole bunch of different reasons why for one individual, they might experience symptoms of ADHD or not. So I think it's complicated.

Can I ask you, before you go any further in that, can I ask you, how much of that is dependent on physical activity? Do we study ADHD based on whether someone is physically active or not? Because look, if I'm not physically active, I'm a mess. If something happened and for some reason, I got a court order, you're not allowed to exercise for six months or you go to jail. Oh, God. I would probably be a fucking complete basket case, right? And maybe I would have full on ADHD. Maybe I wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything. My brain would be bouncing all over the place. How much of it is a biological requirement that your body has to release energy?

So I think I would expand that even further than that because physical activity is a core requirement of our biology and physiology. There's a It's a quote by Inigo Sama Milan, who's a well-known exercise physiologist, who says that physical activity is baked into our evolutionary development, so much so that Now we've had to invent exercise in order to prevent what happens when we don't move. The lack of movement is a disease-causing, pro-aging situation.

To stop you there, what if, or do they, when they treat kids with ADHD, do they take that into consideration?

I'm not an ADHD researcher, so I genuinely don't know.

But I would think that before you would give someone a stimulant, maybe track and field. You know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe play badminton. Do something where you've got to run around, where you're like, Boy, I can focus now.

I I think that, again, I would say that that's needed for all kids regardless of any potential diagnosis. So of course, I think that should be taken into consideration. Whether that's going to be enough for every kid, hard to say. But we know that all humans require significant amounts of physical activity just for their biology to work properly. So certainly, if that's not being taken into account or it's not available or it's not encouraged, there are a whole host of conditions where that's going to become a problem.

Well, it just only makes sense, right? And this has been talked about forever. The stoics used to talk about it, this is quieting the mind. Samurais used to talk about it, like that physical activity, which is one of the main benefits the Chinese used for kung fu thousands of years ago, quieting the mind. And the propensity that we have in the society, this direction of almost immediately prescribing a medication for something, When it seems like what you're doing is you're dulling a biological requirement. You're dulling the impact of this biological requirement that you're not needing. Why wouldn't we prescribe exercise first and then So think about those things? For instance, hormone replacement. If you have a good doctor, an ethical doctor, that is working with someone and they find out you have low testosterone, one of the first things they do is adjust your diet. They say, well, you have so much food in your diet that causes inflammation. You have a very high rate of complex carbohydrates. You have a lot of sugar in your diet. You drink too much alcohol. You smoke cigarettes. Let's remove those things first, and then let's see what happens.

And then you increase your protein and you start drinking water and you go, oh, look, your hormone levels are going up naturally. Well, because you're fucking poisoning yourself, right? So wouldn't you I mean, why don't they prescribe exercise for kids? Other than the fact that you can't make money off of it, wouldn't it be a good idea?

I think that all kids should absolutely get several hours, ideally, of movement and physical activity of different kinds every day. Part of the problem, it's not that scientists or doctors don't think that's important. Right now, the systems that we have make it very difficult for those things to be put in place. Making sure that every kid has the time and the resources to be able to exercise and the right people so that they know what they're doing and they're supervised. It's the same with, say, with testosterone replacement if your testosterone is low. The primary cause, or one of the most common cause of low testosterone in men is that combination of metabolic disease, being sedentary, poor quality diet. We know that. But creating the systems that allow people to change those things and then supporting them to do that is really hard. Nobody has solved the behavior change problem. If we think about the modern environment and we think about what that drives us to do and not do, but we have all this information. We know how to prevent these diseases. We know how to reverse many of them. And a lot of it is driven by lifestyle and the environment.

But supporting people to change those behaviors and make sure they have the resources and time to do it, that's really hard. Nobody solves that problem yet.

Boy, that seems like a problem that's easy to solve. It's just based on personal responsibility.

No, but it's not.

But if you can tell someone, this is your requirement for the day. I want you to run one mile. I want you to do 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups and Write it down.

But how are you...

So first of all- But you're saying it like it's impossible.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I think that those of us for whom this has become a part of our personality and our lives, like you and me. Of course, you just do that. You just go for the run. You do the 100 pushups. But for people who have never had anything like this, and it's never been a part of their environment, it's never been a part of who they are, changing that actually requires a ton of work and coaching. It's actually really difficult. When I say- It's difficult, but it's totally doable physically.

It's not like I'm asking to breathe underwater. People have done it, and you can draw inspiration from it. My friend Jelly Roll. You know Jelly Roll, the musician? Yeah. Jelly Roll was 500 pounds, and he's lost 300 pounds. And he did it with no Ozempic, no GLP-1s. He just started walking and started cutting sugar out of his diet and slowly, but not even slowly, over the course of just a couple of years, he shrunk to a normal size human. It's fucking amazing. But he drew inspiration from a lot of other people. One of them, he's good friends with my good friend, Kam Haynes, who's an ultra marathon runner and endurance athlete. And so he's taking them on runs and worked out with them and helped them and just watching YouTube videos. And all he started doing was just walking, where he couldn't walk up hills, and he would just walk around his block and walk up the hill when he didn't want to do it. And he did it. It's like, it's not. You can do it. You just have to start doing it. And I think the starting doing is the most difficult. I don't think it's difficult to do it once you gather momentum, because there's a thing that happens with people when they start doing something, they get excited, and then they look forward to doing it again.

You don't take a guy who's 500 pounds and say, Today, we're going to do 100 push-ups, 100 sit ups. We're going to do kettlebells, and then we're going to do laps around the block. You can't do it. It's not possible. But you could just go for a walk. And then tomorrow we're going to go for a walk a little bit further. And then in two weeks, we're going to double that walk. And in three weeks, we're going to incorporate some light bodyweight squats. And along the way, we're going to adjust your diet and then write these things down. It's not impossible. It's just they need motivation.

So I agree. It's not impossible. But I've worked with several digital health companies who are working in the behavior change space, and people don't need more information. They know that they need to walk more, and they know that they could eat better, and they know that they could sleep make better. But the process of trying to, first of all, understand, how should I do that? What should I do that? When should I do that? And then, some people may absolutely not have the time or the environment. Maybe they live somewhere where actually they don't want to be walking around outside. That's relatively common. Or they don't have a kitchen. So then how do you cook food? How do you navigate that food environment? I completely agree with you. All of this is doable. It's just that different people are going to need different levels of support to do that, initially. Gain that momentum, understand how that feels, how it changes them. Right now, the majority of people don't have access to that support. I absolutely hope that that changes. The food environment changes so that it's much easier to change the way that you eat and the built environment changes so it's much easier to go out and have a walk and do a lot of that.

I think we just have to consider that it's both. There's an individual component, but there's also a societal component where we have to make this as easy for people as possible and build it into their lives such as they are.

Okay, so let's consider the societal aspect of it. How would you implement something? Let's imagine that you get appointed to some committee that's in charge of trying to facilitate this growth and improvement in people. What would you do?

I think you need a few different parts to it. One great part would be, so say, if you could dramatically improve quality Be an access of education at all levels and make physical activity just be a regular part of that. That has been slowly removed from many educational curriculums around the world over time. Bring some of that back, and it just becomes part of day-to-day life. And then you would also teach people the skills involved in some of these other things. So teach people how to cook and how to do that within the bounds of what they have access to their cultural preferences, dietary preferences, financial abilities, that stuff.

That should be a part of a school curriculum.

Yeah, absolutely. Just like you should teach kids about taxes and all these other things. And so I think if you start early on and you do this with curiosity and skill building, then you release people out. I think that's the place to start, because when you get out into the real world and you're working three jobs and you live somewhere where you You don't want to go for a walk outside, and you can barely get six hours of sleep every night. You've got three kids that you're trying to look after saying, Oh, hey, you should do 100 pushups every day. That's not going to happen. Other things are going to happen that are more important. I think there's that part, maybe the skill building part. Then it's thinking about how people have opportunities to do those things. Then I would think about access to high quality health care, psychological care, these things that sometimes people need help that they can't get access to or it's expensive or whatever. So I think giving more of that so that they get support when they need it would definitely help as well.

I think one great way would be to devise a website, maybe even a government website, where you put in your body weight. When was your last physical activity? What this, that, the other thing, what's your diet? And then they implement a program, and you could follow online with a bunch of other people that are doing the same thing and post your results. So you have a community aspect to it. You have a dedicated program that you can follow. So you don't have to think about, oh, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do this. It'll just tell you, just do this. Just do this. Oh, you weigh 400 pounds. You're 39 years old. You haven't worked out in 10 years. Okay, here's day one. And follow along, post your weight, post what you're eating. And with AI, that's one of the good things about an LLM, right? With AI, you could ask it to formulate adjustments, and you could say, okay, what nutrients should I be consuming? How much protein do I actually need? How many calories do I need? How many calories are in this and that? How much protein do I get from 20 ounces of broccoli or whatever the fuck it is?

You know what I mean?

Yeah. So when you look at some of the most successful trials of behavior change, and most of them are based around weight loss studies, right? That's a very typical way to do it. When you want somebody to change their behavior and feel good about it. One of the construct is self-determination theory, you've probably heard of. Right? Humans need three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So autonomy is like, I am in charge of my life and I'm in charge of my decisions. So what are the things that I want to work on today? I have some choice there. Competence. How do I help somebody feel like they know what they're doing? A lot of the hurdles with exercise or diet is like, I don't know what I'm doing. And this guy says that I need to do sprints, and this guy says I need to lift weights, and this guy says I need to do X amount of zone 2. But what does that even mean? It's like, do I even know what I'm supposed to do? So how do you build competence in people? And then relatedness. That's the point that you were making, right?

You have a group, you support each other. Maybe you do stuff together. So one of the most successful weight loss trials of all time was called It was a broad study. One of the things they did, so they lost a lot of weight and they kept it off. Most weight loss studies, people regain it afterwards, is they met several times a week. They did potlucks, group activities. They helped each other. Community. Community. The one downside of that is that there was an app, I can't remember the name of it, that tried to build that for exercise. You'd have these buddies and they'd be your accountability buddies. But what happened was that when people started to slip, they left the platform much faster because they were like, I don't want my buddies to know that I'm not doing what they are supposed to be helping me do. So you have to build in multiple buffers and different ways to help people depending on what it is that motivates them or not.

I mean, we have public education, right? We have universities, we have public high schools and middle schools. Why don't we have public gyms? I mean, how much money would it cost to have community gyms set up where you don't have to have money to join, where it's paid for by your taxes? You're not talking about something that's outside of... Financially, it wouldn't be feasible. It's not that hard to do.

So I think that was the... I don't know what the financial model is now, but that was the idea of the YMCA. It becomes a community focus point. My wife grew up in North Carolina. She talks about how they were down the YMCA all the time, playing basketball.

I used to have a YMCA when I lived in Boston that I used to go to. It was really cheap. They had weights, they had a track, they had a swimming pool, they had all sorts of stuff. It was way cheaper than a regular gym. And they had classes you could take.

Yeah. And there was something very similar close to where I grew up in the UK. Just for a couple of pounds, you go do some martial arts class or something. Yeah, they had that, too.

Does Austin even have a YMCA? Yeah, definitely.

Oh, yeah. There's a big one downtown. I've driven past it once. It's like big glass front. I don't know what it costs.

How much does it cost to get into the YMCA in Austin? Let's find that out. I mean, that should be paid for by taxes. I mean, if we pay for all this other shit that we don't need, why don't...

When a big hurdle is accessibility and One year, new progress pack.

Join today. How much? $125 value for a year? Is that what it says?

How much does it cost? It doesn't say how much it cost.

What does it cost? Join today. How much Click on- That's also the secret of most memberships for gyms. They don't list their prices on- Yeah, but it's a YMCA. Click on Join today. They want you to come in and say hi so they can talk to you. Oh, is that what it is? That's how everyone works. But it's probably cheaper than most. Well, why don't you put it into perplexity or something like that? Say, how much does it cost to join a YMCA? Here we go. Let's guess. How much do you think it costs? $20 a month?

$50? Yeah, I think it can't be much more than Planet Fitness, right?

Planet Fitness is pretty cheap. But the thing about Planet Fitness is a lot of these big gyms, not just singling out Planet Fitness, they hope that you don't show up.

Oh, yeah. That's the thing.

You're generally looking at $40 to $80 per month Depending on age and household type, that's not too bad.

Yeah, but for some people, that's a lot of money, right? Forty bucks a month. Yeah, that's a good chunk of their food bill. There should be some slightly scale where this becomes very, very heavily subsidized.

Yeah, or free.

Ideally.

Why wouldn't it be free?

Yeah, I think it should be.

Then homeless people go in there and shower. There are.

Well, I'm okay with that, too.

It depends on who they are.

If they shower- I'm not okay with some of them.

Fucking crazy people shit in the shower. Blue Cross Blue Shield, many health insurance plans offer gym membership through reimbursements, discounts or programs like active fit or global fit. Benefits can include $20 to $400 annual reimbursements. Some people can use their health insurance to get some of that fee covered. Okay. Well, that's nice. But the thing is, again, it's just like Planet Fitness or any of these places. The thing is, they want to recruit you, and then you go, and you're like, okay, and then you never go again.

But we genuinely want people to go. That's the whole idea.

Well, the thing is, there's one thing for someone, and I've taken friends to gyms before that don't work out, and they're like, what do I do? They have no idea what to do. Classes. Classes is what should be.

Absolutely. It should be classes. Learn your skill, move, make a friend. So much amazing stuff happens in that setting.

Yeah, and they should have multiple different classes available at the same time. There should be a class for people that have done nothing. Like, okay, these are dumbbells. You pick up a light one. I'm going to show you how to do a shoulder press. And then it should be for more advanced people, intermediate people, or something.

And a whole range of different skills. Yoga, Zumba, Pilates, Tai chi. Slightly different.

Not dumbbell weights, but in Austin, they have a bunch of public free gym equipment in different playgrounds. Playgrounds and parks. Yeah, that stuff's great. Well, New York City has a whole, look at these guys. They're staring at each other, talking shit.

I think one of the problems is that... Well, first of all, a lot of people might just look at that and be like, What do I do with that? And then the second is that A lot of what we see around fitness and movement is the extremes. They're idolized professional athletes. This is what the best of the best do. And we often we internalize this idea that that's what we need to do. And if we're not doing that, then we're not doing anything. Whereas all the data suggests that literally any type of movement above what you're doing right now is beneficial. Cardiovascular health, cognitive health, dementia risk. I think some of it is just letting people know and having people understand that it doesn't take that much to move the needle. And then when they start to do a little bit, you get a bit of a bug, maybe you enjoy it, you find a thing that you enjoy, you do more of it. And so that's part of it, too. Having people understand that it doesn't take much to really start having an impact.

Yeah. And it's also for a lot of people, this is a society that really emphasizes quick fixes on things. And it's not a quick thing. You have to trust in a process. And so that has to be... People have to be educated to that. It has to be taught to you. This is a process, and you're on a process, you should feel very excited about being on this process. It's going to be weird because it's going to take a long time before you see any results. But that long time, in that time period, you will eventually see results, and then you'll be excited, you'll feel better, you'll have more energy. It'll help every aspect of your life. You just got to do it.

One of the things that I like when I talk about movement in particular or exercise and say, cognitive function, is that you will start to see benefits It's relatively quickly. If you go and do a six-second max sprint a couple of times, and there are studies that show this, you will immediately see an improvement in cognitive function. You've got a blood flow to the brain. You've created a Housal, which is really important for focus and attention. If you go for a walk outside, you will sleep better that night, so you'll feel better the next day. And so, yes, you're absolutely right that This is a lifelong thing. You can't just do it for a couple of months and then hope that it's going to translate to benefits for decades to come. But you can see immediate benefits if you start to do some of this stuff, and you can feel it very quickly. So I think that that's going to be important because not everybody is going to feel in the position to invest in their future selves. So if you start to see benefits straight away, you're more likely to keep going with it.

Okay. So that's for people. I'm glad we covered it, but we're essentially talking about people that don't know what to do. For people who do know what to do, you said you work with a lot of Formula One athletes. What do you do? Formula One is fascinating to me. I've been to the Coda racetrack. We're actually putting up a studio. We're going to have a studio at Coda. We're going to have a second studio at the racetrack. The idea is to take people around the racetrack. I think it would stimulate their mind and then come in and do a podcast. It'd be a lot of fun. You'd be like racing. In mind, you'd be like, whew. That is an incredible sport where it's fractions of a second, split second decisions. Your ability to react has to be incredibly fast. Have you ever seen the thing where they drop things? Lewis Hamilton is better than anybody else.

It's intense.

What do you do with them? You already have people that are primed. They're the best in the world, but they are constantly looking for an additional edge.

What are you doing for them? There's a few things there. My work with Formula One drivers happens mainly through a company called Hint2 Performance. It was founded by Hintza. What is it, Hint2 Hintza, H-I-N-T-S-A, named after Aki Hintza, who was a Finnish orthopedic surgeon. He worked with Haleigh Gabriel Slassi, with Mika Hakehnen. He was a two-time Formula One world champion. Then now, this is like a big sports enterprise, and I'm their head scientist for motorsport. That's all motorport categories from like karting in kids up to Formula One. We work with several Formula One drivers. We provide coaching and medical services. Each driver, or most of the drivers, have a coach. When you watch Formula One, there's somebody holding the umbrella, holding the helmet. That's often one of our coaches. They're usually a strength and conditioning specialist, or they might be a physio or a nutritionist. They have a ton of really high-level skills, and they're there every day. They do the sleep, they do the training. They're traveling with them the whole time. They can manage as much of their life as possible. When you're thinking about that level of skill, the stimulus part has taken care of itself.

One of the reasons why these guys are so good is because it's all they've done every day for two plus decades, four decades, if you're Lewis Hamilton or close to that. That's slowly building these skills, first in karting, then in these different Formula Categories, Formula 3, Formula 2, up into Formula 1. The kinds of things that we might work on. I'm helping the coaches, working with the drivers. We have a huge team, We've a doctor who works with a bunch of Olympic athletes as well. It's a combination of, are there any individual performance limiters? We might do some blood tests, look at nutrient status and various other things, make sure they're really on top of that with their diets. But then in that world, and I'm sure you experience this yourself, everybody's got a thing for you to try or a thing for you to do. You're constantly being bombarded with the latest This is the greatest, greatest technology. And this guy wants to sell you this thing. So a lot of what we do is be really careful about the things that get added and maybe even take stuff away if we need to.

What are we trying to work on? What are we trying to build? What does this one driver need? Because they're all very different. They have different diets, they have different training programs, they have different warm-up strategies for when they get in the car. And so a lot of what we end up doing is focusing on the other side. So if you stimulate your brain, it adapts when you rest and recover afterwards. So because they're essentially jet lagged nine months of the year, right? They're in a different country every week.

That's a factor. That's a huge factor.

Huge factor. And on top of every race weekend, they've got to go meet sponsors, they've got to do media days. They're It's constantly moving. So it's what can we do to maintain their level of performance throughout the season? And this is something that the coaches do a ton of work in. What exercise and how can we do targeted training to maintain performance throughout the year? And then the other part is how can we get as much recovery as possible? Because if we want them to adapt to all the work they're doing and come back each weekend at the top of their game or as close as possible, we need to get them to rest and recover and come back and do it again. Often we're not focusing on the stimulus part. We might be in driver training. We might be thinking about how can we develop cognitive skills and these kinds of things and these driver physical skills. In Formula One, often it's how can we get these guys to recover better? How can we get these guys to sleep better. Then that might be technology, but it might also be just like, how can we nail the basics again and again, make sure they're getting enough time in bed, especially when you're traveling a bunch, that gets really difficult.

We're often focused on the recovery side and how we track, how do we collect those data? How do we know when something's starting to slip and get on top of it early? That's the stuff we tend to focus on.

Let's talk about the jet lag aspect. What are the strategies for mitigating jet lag And how do you... Let's say if they fly in for a race, if they're going from Europe to the United States and they have to race, how many days in advance do they arrive and how do they shift their circadian rhythm and eliminate jet lag? What are the strategies?

The time for them, the number of days they come before the race will depend on how long it was since the last race, plus what other things they've got going on? But it's often like two or three days. They'll try and get it come in the beginning of the week, at least like Monday, Tuesday, if the race is then going to be on Sunday. And then as much as possible, you might start to try and shift things earlier. Shift your light exposure so that it aligns more closely with your destination a couple of days before you travel. Shift your sleep if you can. Shift exercise and caffeine timing. Again, because those things shift circadian rhythm so you can get closer to what you're going to do when you land. Those are probably the primary tools is exercise, light, caffeine. Some of them use melatonin. You can also change when you eat. So like food timing is a zeitgeber. It's a fancy word for time giver, helps to drive circadian rhythm. Often When you're flying, they'll give you a meal that's happening in the middle of the night in the time that you're going to land.

So often you might try and avoid eating while flying and then have your next meal in time with a normal meal timing when you land.

I've heard that one of the things to help with jet lag is just to eliminate meals when you're flying, period. There's something about eating, even if it doesn't have anything to do with the timeline. Say if you're flying from Los Angeles to New York one way to eliminate jet lag, they say, is just to not eat on the flight. So six-hour flight, don't eat at all.

I think most of that is to do with circadian timing because you're usually flying at a time when you wouldn't normally eat. Or often, they give you dinner at 9: 00 PM or it's even midnight.

But is that all it is? But the way it's explained to me is that there's something about your body processing food when you're flying that actually exacerbates jet lag?

So I can't think of a- Does that make sense? Other than the fact that you're obviously sat still for long periods of time, which might not normally happen at the time of day as well. I think the The majority of it, certainly in terms of jet lag plans, is thinking about the timing of meals relative to circadian rhythm because you normally break your fast at a certain time of day, have dinner at a certain time of day. So I think most of it is related to circadian timing. Okay.

What about rigorous exercise? Because one of my strategies, say if I have to fly to London or something like that and I want to avoid jet lag, I immediately go to the gym. That's the first thing I do. I put my stuff in the hotel room, I go right down to the gym, no No negotiation whatsoever, and I get in at least an hour.

I have to. That's a great way to help to offset some of the jet lag because you start to tell your body, Hey, even though it's whatever, mid Night in Austin, this is the time when I want to be awake. So it starts to advance the circadian phase. So exercise, some people like to do cold exposure. It does a similar thing. It increases adrenaline, increases heart rate, increases arousal. Can do it with light, can do it caffeine. And so some combination of those things can definitely help.

Okay. So there's the sleep, adjusting the sleep. There's the light exposure. There's exercise and food. Is there anything else? What supplementation is effective to mitigate that?

Yeah. So they might use melatonin. One of the issues that we have, it's not an issue, it makes perfect sense, is that the supplements The things that we use with the drivers have to be third-party tested, right? Nsf is sport certified, informed, sport certified. So some of the things that we might like to try.

Is that because the drivers get tested?

Because the drivers get tested.

And what are they banned? What's banned?

Everything. It's the same as all the Wada drugs. It's the same. They're under Wada regulations.

Are they allowed to use peptides?

It's a gray area in general. I don't believe anybody does, and we certainly don't recommend for that reason because we just don't know what's in there.

Are they tested for peptides?

So they're not tested for peptides. Then take them. It depends on whether it's actually a peptide that has good high-quality evidence in humans.

Well, also, you should get them from a real good compounding pharmacy. Make sure you're getting it from a quality source, which is the real problem with peptides today is that since they're not regulated, there's a lot of gray market. There's a lot of real bullshit corporations that are They're selling you stuff that's nonsense and even things that are tainted.

So the main thing that you're worried about is contamination. What else have they put in there to make it to get better-Same thing as supplements. Yeah, same thing as supplements. But in reality, there aren't many peptides where I'm like, where I would say, or actually, I couldn't think of any, where I'm like, this will have a definite benefit based on high-quality studies in humans. Those studies just don't exist. And And so until we get to that point, plus the gray area of the legality of it, we tend to focus on the real... I mean, it's the basics, but we know that they work.

But there are peptides that have shown to increase sleep and increase rem sleep. In humans? Yes.

In humans.

I wish I could tell you because they talked about it, but I never tried it. I know Tom Segura is on it. See if we can find what it is, Jimmy. It's a boy. It's fucking with my head. Dsip? Is that what it is? I'm asking. No. Delta sleep inducing peptide?

I want to see the randomized control trial. I have to. I couldn't recommend it unless I know that it's third-party tested, it's legal, and there's a high-quality trial in humans. All those things have to align.

The problem with high-quality studies is they take time and money, and these FDA approved, so you're not going to get those things. But that doesn't mean they don't work. This is the problem, is that you could try it, and then if you show benefit-In that setting, I can't try it. You can't? No. Well, you can't because of Formula One drivers and all that stuff. The way drug-free sport works, which is the governing body of the UFC drug testing, they don't allow anything, unfortunately. But there are studies that show that BBC 157 increases tissue recovery and helps you heal from-Not in humans. True. But look, the same thing with the COVID vaccine. They weren't tested in humans either before they started trying them.

For the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, there were some pretty good quality trials in humans.

Right, but all it showed is that it showed an antibody.

It didn't show that it-Oh, no. Against hospitalizations and death in the first wave.

We could argue about that because it's very sketchy. It's very sketchy data that has been It's proven.

I think that those first waves were high quality. But they didn't even say that it decreased hospitalization and death.

It was stopping transmission and infection, which was just a lie. That's what they claimed. It's all sketchy because it was based on profit. The whole thing is weird. It's a weird one. It's a weird one to cover.

I can't talk about that. I can't talk about motivation.

Maybe it's not a good example. But There's plenty of anecdotal evidence, especially with professional athletes, with BBC 157 and TB 500, particularly, for tissue injuries, for recovering quicker from tissue injuries.

So I know there's anecdote. I know that people say it benefits them. In the environments that I operate in, that's not enough.

I understand. You're an actual doctor. Dr. Tommy Wood, he's legit. I'm just a dork. I'm allowed to just say, Try it. Fuck But so with drug-free sport, like with the UFC, they use thorn supplements. It's what the UFC recommends, which is very good, third-party tested. So you have to find, whether it's pure encapsulations or some legitimate Well-proven established company that provides you with third-party tested supplements. What supplements have been shown? Let's stick with Formula One drivers. Reaction time is critical. Your ability to function at a very high cognitive state. You're thinking constantly. You're always calculating in movements. What supplements are these guys taking that benefit them?

When you think about complex skill performance, and there's a whole chapter on this in the book, the most important driver is arousal. How aroused is your physiology? And are you set up with the right level of sympathetic activation, noradrenaline, adrenaline, cortisol to get the best level of performance?

And don't let any one of those overwhelm the other ones.

Yeah, exactly. So the curve is bell-shaped. It's the Yerkes-Dodson Curve, named after a couple of guys who actually did studies in mice, that then translated actually surprisingly well over to humans. And so what it says is that if you're over aroused, you're disengaged, a bit lethargic, you're not really going to perform well. If you're over aroused, you're sweaty, anxious, again, you're not going to be able to pay attention to the task. There's this sweet spot. At the top of the curve, you're capable of flow states, clutch states, which is where you can perform at your best, but it's still hard work. What you're trying to do is get the guys to the top of that curve. This, for many, involves some element of routine, knowing I've done the thing that I know that's going to make me feel good. It's a combination often of the things that we've already mentioned. They might use some warm-up sprints, they might use music, they might use bright light, they might use breathwork, they might use cold, certainly if it's going to be a hot race, they might do some pre-cooling to bring down cool temperature. That improves endurance.

Do they bring cold plunges to Formula One days?

Yeah. That's smart. Some of them have a cold plunge or you We can fill a wheelie bin with water and ice and jump in that. It doesn't need to be that cold, actually. For increasing endurance performance, like 20 minutes at around 20 degrees celsius or 60-ish Fahrenheit, that significantly improves endurance.

Is there a benefit to 20 minutes at 60 degrees Fahrenheit versus three minutes at 34 degrees?

The problem is that when you get too cold, you can actually decrease cognitive performance. There's a fine line when it's really cold. What you want to do is you want to decrease core temperature without negatively affecting cognitive function. That's easier to manage at slightly less cold temperatures. Because just like if you did really, really exhaustive exercise, you go out. I was a rower in college, so a 2K test on a rowing machine. After that, my brain doesn't work for hours after it's right. And so very cold ice baths for several minutes. For some people, that can decrease cognitive function. So you can find a sweet spot.

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense because my mind is very bad after brutal workouts. If I have a really hard workout and I come in to do a podcast, there's a moment where I'm like, It's just not firing.

Yeah, and that's perfect. And that's normal. We know that if you do very fatiguing exercise for a period of time, you experience a decline in cognitive function.

But a light exercise stimulates you.

Exactly. One of the best studied exercise modalities to improve cognitive function is literally just like a 20-minute jog. It's light. Just a light jog. Exactly. But you're warming everything up, increasing sympathetic activation, increasing release of all those hormones you mentioned, and that increases arousal. That improves cognitive performance. They might be doing some of those things. In the car, there'll be differing types of caffeine use. And depending on sensitivity and timing.

Are they taking it in pill form so that they could regulate it quickly or accurately, rather?

Yeah. So some do, sometimes pills, sometimes gels. Some guys just like cappuccino. Some might use like green tea because the theanine in there might balance some of the jitters that you can get with caffeine. Some people find creatine stimulating or mildly stimulating, so they might take creatine before they get in the car.

Well, there's been studies on creatine in cognitive There's a lot of performance that are really interesting.

Particularly in the setting of sleep deprivation. Yeah. And so when they're jet lagged, I think that one makes sense. There are some newer caffeine-related compounds that if we can get them when they're third-party tested, Some may try those. So theocrine or t-creen and parazanthine, which is a metabolite of caffeine. They may have some fewer of the anxiety-promoting high blood pressure, high heart rate effects, but maintain some of the cognitive effects, especially in combination with caffeine. So you have a little bit less caffeine plus a bit of those. They're harder to get third-party tested and stuff, and some of the evidence is newer, but that's looking promising as another thing that people might try.

You mentioned theanine, which is a neutropic. There's quite a few different ones that people enjoy beta-choline. There's a bunch of different ones. Do Formula One drivers Do they supplement with that thing?

So you're thinking alpha-GPC? Yeah. It's a type of choline. It's preferentially turned into Astalcholine. And acetylcholine is really important for focus and attention. Some of that stuff isn't regularly used, mainly because it's hard to get a third-party tested source. Is it really? Yeah. Most of the There's things that you take that there probably isn't... Or that anybody would take, there might not be an NSF for sport certified version. There's very few companies that do that routinely for all their supplements.

God, you'd think that that would be really accessible because new tropics are so common No.

So there's that. Plus, there's the... When we're working with different drivers, they each have very unique needs. So it's a combination of what do I think is really going to move the needle and not overcorrect. I think most coaches I've spoken to in Formula One have a story where their driver had three Espressors before it got in the car and then he overcooked the first corner. So it's a really tricky balance of trying to make sure that they can systematically get in the zone to perform well in the car without pushing them too far over the other side. That's where supplements become trickier because it's very easy to downregulate if I've over cooked it through some of those physiological means where I can do some breath work or something to calm myself down. But if I've stuffed myself full of caffeine, it's going to be hard to come back from that. And then you step in the car and it could cause some issues. So we tend to focus on some of the physiological stuff and then maybe a little bit of supplementation because that seems to be the best balance across those different needs.

Well, it seems like Formula One would be a great place to develop a framework for this because there's so much money involved. It's such a massive sport. You would think that they would have that dialed in. You're 168 pounds. This is when you woke up. This is what you need right now. You need this much protein, this much this. Stop eating X amount of hours before the raise.

Yes, we do a lot of that, but it's different for each guy, and nobody wants to share what they've got. Oh, it's that idea. Even your The biggest rival is your teammate in many respects, because that's the only guy you can go up against truly head-to-head because you're in the same car. A lot of what we do, we have to silo within a driver. This is the stuff that works for this guy, and I can't use that to help this guy. That's one reason why Hinser-They don't share information. Yeah. And that's one reason why Hinser has been very successful as a company is because we're very good at walling this stuff off. We know what's good this guy. We know what's good for this guy. And we leave those separate because different frameworks, different approaches might be needed.

Well, it's such an extreme example because any little deviation that you wouldn't normally feel in everyday life could be disastrous in a Formula One race. What about different things to stimulate cognitive function, like playing chess? Is there anything that those guys engage in specifically to improve the way they think?

Again, it depends a little from driver to driver. A lot of them play some video games, which actually have some interesting evidence to support them in terms of improving cognitive function. I think for them, though, a lot of that is it's almost like relaxation. When you drive a Formula One car for a living, playing a video game isn't necessarily as challenging. A lot of it tends to be very car-focused. They get tons of time in the simulator. During the season, they get a lot of time in the car. There's nothing that consistently would work or that everybody does. I think a lot of where the cognitive training side comes from is during driver development. How can we get more for sports-specific or sport-supporting cognitive challenges in younger drivers as they're developing? We might use some cognitive training tools and some other things to try and support some of those And so it's a bit of a common process because by the time they're at the top, especially if you want to maintain it, the main thing that you need to do is obviously maintain those driving skills, which you'll get through the day-to-day aspects of the job.

Plus then it's really They're continually paying attention to sustained physical health, physical performance, especially because of the arduous schedules and all that stuff. So often, again, they're focusing on the other areas because they know that will help them stay at a high level for longer.

So they're focused on recovery from all the unavoidable aspects that are going to mitigate your performance.

Yeah, exactly. So sleep, some of them use different meditation or breathwork or other devices just to help. Maybe you gamify it slightly or make it a slightly more enjoyable experience. It's easier to do, easier to switch off if you're doing things related, like vibration and that stuff.

You mean pressure plates? Those standing on things?

Shaky plates? No. Turbosonic? There's a chair that some guys use, and this is used in a ton of different sports in other military groups as well. It's called the shift wave. Have you heard of this?

Yeah, I have one.

Yeah. Some of the guys have a shift wave. It just depends on what works well for them in terms of allowing them to downregulate, allowing them to sleep better. Again, we often focus on the more physiological environmental side rather than trying to throw a bunch of supplements on it.

Well, it seems like that's a great place to study Formula One drivers, because you're dealing with these fine lines, this tiny differential between success and failure.

Yeah. One of the interesting things is that the real performance stuff is siloed within the team. Because that's related to performance in the car, and that's sensitive information. A lot of the time we're thinking about... And this actually across most sports, the best predictor of performance is subjective well-being. How does the athlete feel? There are tons of studies, even coming out now, you compare that to blood tests and HRV and all this other stuff. How they feel? Am I tired? Am I achy? Do I feel alert? All that stuff. That seems to predict performance really well. How can we... And better than some of those other things. The best is a combination as much as possible. We do a lot of work aggregating data. But then really, the rest of the time is How can I make sure this guy feels good every day and feels confident when he gets in the car? We have psychologists. They're a big part of that. Plus keeping an eye on their body and all those things, put them in the best spot possible when they get in the car.

Do you coach them to avoid toxic relationships?

I'm not sure if anybody's ever gotten into that.

For fighters, it is one of the number one predictors of poor success in a competition. I've seen it over and over again. Guys with horrible relationships, whoever's fault it is, both fault, both parties, whatever it is. But those are the ones when they have really bad relationships. There was this one guy that I know that was a really high performer, very good fighter, but he had this crazy girlfriend, and she required so much attention that it would drive her nuts when he was getting ready for a fight because he was spending all his time concentrating on the fight, and it would peak literally the night before the fight. Their relationship It was so toxic. She would always start fights, and all the coaches knew it. She would start fights after he wade in because he was so locked in on the fight the next day that he wasn't paying attention to her. She would storm out of the hotel room and go down to the bar by herself, and he would freak out, and he would always wind up performing poorly.

At least I personally haven't seen the evidence of that in that world. I will say that-Fighters are crazy, though.

It's an interesting group to study because it's a very bizarre activity to begin with. The way I describe it is high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.

Although you could say that Formula One is similar in that respect, right?

Very similar.

There are certainly a lot of drivers come into the sport with that is often driven by family relationships. So I think that may be an influence sometimes.

Overbearing parents are another one. Coaches, overbearing Because they come in with this long history of what got them there.

So maybe that affects some of them. I'm not sure.

What are the most challenging athletes? I assume you've dealt with a bunch of different athletes from various sports. What are the most challenging ones to deal with?

I think the ones that I found most challenging, it's usually because they're pulled in so many different directions that it becomes difficult for them to really engage in the things that we know is going to help them perform long term. I have friends who work in the NBA, for instance, where I think this is amplified even more. You have teenage millionaires who can literally do whatever they want, but you have to keep them on task. We see that in a lot of professional sports. It's that stuff is what's distracting them? What are the other things that they're doing that's stopping them from being able to engage in these processes? You can have really good conversations and put together really good plans. In the moment, they're really engaged and they're interested. They want to do well, this is their job, and they love it. But when other things start to come into play outside of that conversation, they don't engage with things, they don't do it, they don't see the results that they want, they get demotivated. But it's usually because other things in their life, right? It could be the toxic relationships, but it tends to be other distractors.

They pull them away from that core goal.

Unfortunately, success is a big one, right? Because the motivation to succeed in the first place is you want financial gain, you want recognition, you want all these things that you're chasing after. And then once you get them, now what? Yeah.

And some people maintain really dedication to the craft. This is the thing that I love and I want to do it every day. And the longer you do it, the more you have to take care of the little details. Early on in your career, you can train however you want, eat however you want. If you have a certain set of skills and training up to that point, you'll do pretty well. But you want to sustain for a very long period of time. It requires an increasing amount of dedication to the other areas of your life to make sure that you can still do that. I think sometimes people just aren't honest with themselves in terms of what they really want to do or what they're going to spend their time doing. So that's the most frustrating thing is when you hear one thing, but you see another thing because of the other areas of life that are taking over.

So what do you do if you have an athlete, say an NBA athlete, and you see all this talent, all this potential, but then you notice that they're getting pulled in all these different directions? Maybe they're just spending money all the time and partying and hanging out with girls. And how do you get them back on track?

I don't do a ton of work in NBA. When I intersect with that, I'm generally advising on the data portion rather than interacting with the human. I don't have good tips, but Luckily, because I've never had to deal with that because I imagine it's quite frustrating.

What athletes do you deal with?

What sports? Formula One is the one where I primarily am face-to-face with athletes. In other professional sports, I'm an advisor to the team that works with them on a data health, nutrition.

Got it. When you compare notes, what are the differences between dealing with Formula One athletes versus dealing with NFL or NBA or baseball?

A lot of the stuff comes down to Differences in travel schedule and training and the ability to capture data, for instance. So data capture in Formula One is really hard because of the types of travel, And you don't get to aggregate across a team, whereas you're part of a big team, there's several people you can work, but you work with and aggregate data across to understand what's happening with individuals as well as overall But I think that Formula One is unique because it's so individual in terms of each driver has their one specific team, and it's often very difficult to capture some of the data that we might want to capture, like getting blood tests on guys who are in a plane every other day. Really difficult. Whereas other places where they have a home base and this stuff, as usual, you might be able to get at that better. So I think that's maybe one of the biggest differences is the travel schedule and how easy or not it is to capture and aggregate data.

When you're working with these Formula One athletes, how much are you changing the methods that you use year to year?

It will depend on whether... My job is to stay on top of the latest research, right? So what's come out recently that we think will meaningfully move the needle. In reality, I think this is the case in the majority of professional sports that I've interacted with. The main thing is getting the boring basics done consistently. Again and again, we know that's foundational to sustained performance. Some of the tools and technology for recovery and some of the supplements, especially if you're trying to address nutrient insufficiencies based on an inadequate diet, which is also very common, those things do make a difference. But the main struggle, at least from the guys that I regularly see, is having an environment and framework that allows them to keep doing that stuff, stay on top of a specific training program or stay consistent with a certain sleep routine that allows them to sleep well. Those are the things that make the biggest difference. That's where we tend to focus. Then maybe every year or so, we're constantly improving our data capture and our data analysis. We're constantly trying to improve the support processes because we know that with the better support, we can make sure they're more likely to do the stuff that's going to make a big difference.

Then maybe every year or two, there's a new thing that comes in and we're like, Oh, yeah, we're fairly confident this is low risk, high potential benefit. It's not going to take a ton of their time. That's another thing is when I first walked into the paddock, it was here in Austin, that was the first time I went to a Formula One to start working with these guys. I showed up and I'm like, I've got a hundred things that these guys are going to love. It's going to be really important. It's going to revolutionize everything. And then you speak to a coach for the first time. They're like, We've got time for maybe one thing, and you better be really confident that this thing is going to make a difference, right? Or else you wasted our time.

So how do you decide?

A little bit of it is, of course, it's going to be some trial and error, and it does depend on-But the error is like, consequences are huge.

Yeah.

You just have to acknowledge that upfront. The error is biggest When you're telling some guy to do something before he gets in the car, because that's going to immediately have an effect. There are ways to offset some of that. They have practice periods. It's like right now, it's a new generation of cars for this season. Nobody's driven them before. They're getting more extended track time to practice with them. That might be a time when you could try a new supplement or something before you get in the car because it's a much lower risk setting. You're not racing. There's not 19 other guys or now 21 other guys trying to get past you. Then, so some of it is that. Trial and error, you acknowledge that you just have to be really confident that you know what problem you're trying to solve and that it's an important problem. I've worked with coaches and their driver where reaction time was a very specific thing. Off the line, we think we need X amount improvement. Then Then it's a combination of practice, maybe tinkering with some supplements, maybe tinkering with some of that arousal stuff that we talked about earlier.

You need to make sure it's an important problem. Then you need to think about what's the hierarchy of things that have the highest likelihood of it and the lowest risk, and then work your way through it. I realized that this is all in the abstract because it just really depends on the problem that's in front of you.

What about the psychology aspect of it? I mean, this is a very controversial aspect of mixed martial arts in particular because there's two schools of thought. I have a good friend who's a coach that recently told me he's not working with any fighters anymore that need a mental coach. And I said, Why? And he's like, he just can't count on them. He goes, They're just too fragile. They need a mental coach. He goes, I wanted a motherfucker who just knows that this is what he's supposed to be doing and just go out and do it. I'm like, Boy, but that limits your athletes, right?

Do you think that there's benefit in mental coaching, or do you think to reach a championship level, there's an inherent mindset that you must have going into that, and you can improve upon that, But if you do not have that mindset, you're not going to be successful.

This is my friend's idea. I don't want to call him out because I don't know the athletes he worked with. But he recently had a bad result with one of his athletes. He's like, I'm done. No more guys who need mental coaches. I want killers.

So I think that you're going to need some element of a mindset to get to that level to begin with, right? But we have psychologists on our team who work with the drivers regularly. Other drivers who aren't working with us bring in sports psychologists very regularly.

Do you collaborate with these psychologists? Do you talk to them and get their notes?

Yeah.

So we have What are common issues?

Again, it's so dependent on the individual. But it's also very common across all athletes, right? So it's like overcoming failure or fear of failure, or maybe it's dealing with difficult relationships, which for various reasons they can experience. And then it's how their inherent thought process is when that happens. So we know that the most resilient athletes are those that tend to be self-compassionate, right?

Interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. I would have thought the opposite.

Yeah. And so there's this idea that you want killers, you want-People hard on themselves. The guys who are hard on themselves. But for sustained... And so this is looking across as broad as possible across sport. Those who are most successful, most often, of course, there's going to be the killer who's just like, hard on themselves and gets the job done. Of course, right? But these elements of self-compassion that include Things like mindfulness, like thinking about the world and understanding it and about their place in it, and common humanity, which is like, treating themselves as they would treat other people and acknowledging the right... We all make mistakes and This stuff always happens, but I can overcome this. You know what? This has happened to me before. I've sucked, I've crashed, I've done something wrong, and hey, I overcame it, and now I'm succeeding again. Those mental skills are Most common amongst the high-level athlete. I'll give an example. I don't know him, but Roger Federer has a very famous quote. He gave it some graduation address or something. Where he says that across his career, he only won 54% of his points on court. That means that 46% of points he lost.

That means that every time he makes a mistake, every unforeced error, he has to come back and be like, Hey, dude, you've got this. I know I can do this. And that's the point that he's making in this address. It's those kinds of mental skills that seem to be most important. When you You've had a history of beating yourself up and being harder on yourself, and that's gotten you to that point. There will often be a stage where there's so much accumulated pressure or stress or failure that just Working harder and being harder on yourself isn't going to get you past it. But athletes who are successful for a long period of time tend to have those other abilities to think about the bigger picture, understand what they've overcome previously, treat themselves more like they would treat others, and they seem to be the ones who overcome failure and then continue to succeed.

I'm really into professional pool. I play pool and I follow a lot of professional pool players. There's a trait amongst the elite pool players that's pretty consistent for the ones that are successful and win tournaments is the ability to let a bad shot go. Exactly. Because the guys who beat themselves up over bad shots, you see it. They slump in their chair, they start running their fingers through their hair, they fucking throw their head back, they take a beat deep breath, and then they're carrying that with them when they go out to make a shot again. And for a high-level pool player, there's performance scores. A really high TPA performance score is like, I think the best in the world right now is Joshua Filler, who's this guy from Germany. He's arguably, if not the best, one of the top two or three guys in the world. His His performance score is about, I think it's 850 out of a thousand. That means if he makes a thousand shots, he's going to make 850 of those shots, which is very elite. You got to think, even the best because they're playing on 4-inch pockets, but this guy never gets upset.

When he misses, he just sits down and he's got a dead look on his face. The Chinese Taipei players are the best at it. I don't know how they coach them over there. They're some of the best in the world, the Chinese Taipei players. So these guys from Taiwan, they have no expression. When they miss a shot, they just go and sit down and maybe they'll smile, but they never get upset. Whereas a lot of the American players, they get fucking pissed off. You see it, some of the European players do the same thing, and those guys, they fall off a cliff. Their performance is elite. They'll make a couple of bad shots, and then the match goes downhill and they wind up getting steam rolled.

There's other stuff going on. You can think about it in terms of that, like a arousal curve we talked about earlier. As you get stressed and worked up about a missed shot, you're pushing yourself further and further away from the level of arousal that's required for performance.

And dwelling on failure.

And then you're thinking about what happened previously rather than the shot that comes next.

Well, that's one of the most important things about a shot, because even if your mechanics are good, if you think you're going to miss, you're going to miss. It's weird. It's a weird thing because you know what to do, you know how to do it. But if you think, fuck, I can't miss this shot, you're going to miss. Nine times out of 10, it's very weird. So it's a very mentally... The game, a giant percentage of it once the skills are acquired, because most of them, when they get to an elite level, have all the skills. It's a mental thing. It's ability to perform under pressure because it's fine motor skills.

Across every different aspect of cognitive performance, Wellbeing. Again and again, you see that psychology drives physiology and drives performance. You can measure these things as you think them, as they then change physiology, which then altars how you perform. This is a very long answer to your question of, is psychology and mental skills important? Absolutely, because I think that's going to foundational to whether you can even achieve those high levels of performance. Everybody needs help occasionally. That's perfectly normal. Different people are going to need different tools and different skill sets. Different psychologists are going to provide different things for them to do. So yes, that's always something that we have on hand as needed as part of the team because that's going to be really important.

Yeah, the mind controls so much of what you do in life, even if you have skills. And that's something that elite performers either figure out or don't. They either never achieve their true potential because they keep tripping over themselves, or they go, Okay, this is not helping me. It's only hurting me. I keep allowing myself to spiral into this same mental state, and I have to find a method. And so when you talk with psychologists, what tools and what What strategies do they give these athletes to abandon negative thinking?

There are a few different ways to approach it. And again, don't want to pretend I'm a psychologist. We have other people with these skills for a reason. But I think a lot of what becomes important, again, is thinking about the causes Maybe initially the causes of mistakes and then the causes of stress and why that may or may not be beneficial in the way that you can leverage it. There's a lot of research on understanding that stress responses are there to divert resources to something that matters and something that either requires your attention or adaptation to it. So understanding understanding that actually stress in the moment, in that moment, is a good thing, and you want to leverage it rather than be scared of it. We know that people who are trained in this mindset, so this is work by Alia Cram at Stanford, The Stress is enhancing mindset. Also predicts how well Navy Seals do during training, how much they appreciate that stress response is important. This is me rising to the occasion. You still get stress, where you still can measure stress hormones. That still happens. But you release other things that help to also counteract that and drive adaptation, and it results in better decision making when stressed.

Reframing some of these responses can be important, as well as then thinking about after a mistake happened, thinking about other examples of times when you did that and you overcame it, or having I think these different parts of understanding what it is to be a human, even when you are performing at an elite level. Maybe some of it is building in routines so that you feel confident in a given situation. These are the things that I do. When I do these things, I know I'm going to perform well. That can be a double-edged sword for some people because... I think we see a lot of this in the world of health optimization. We We assume that we need to do all these things in order to perform well. Then if those things don't happen, we think we won't perform well. That's another way for us to get in our own way. You have to balance that depending on the individual. Then some of it can be in the moment, you're one of those pool players, and you're getting increasingly frustrated because you're not making your shots. It's almost impossible to think your way out of that.

Your brain too busy being dunked in adrenaline to make good decisions. That's where you might have tools like leveraging your physiology, breathwork, closing your eyes, visualization. Those things work from the bottom up to help your mind get a grip and get back in the game. It's a whole bunch of different things depending on what you might need. Is it, I need to regulate myself in the moment? Is it, how do I set myself for success through a series of... It could be like, what's my warm up? What am I thinking through? What am I visualizing before I perform? Or is it tools to deal with the processes of failure afterwards?

I would also think that even just the knowledge that these high stress situations where you do encounter failure can produce a result inside the mind that can be beneficial if harnessed.

Yes, exactly. One And one of the ways that this is taught to other people, not just athletes, is think about all the people who've performed under significant stress. This is what the human mind and human body is capable of. If only we allow it to do that.

That's what's important. I think inspiration is one of the most powerful fuels that we can use. And inspiration from other people's examples is one of the best versions of that. Because Because I think there was a young kid who recently broke the world record of the mile.

Did you see that, Jamie? Yeah, I watched that. It was 16, it was 3: 40 something. 3: 48, maybe.

Yeah, 3: 48, which is nuts. Which is nuts. We didn't think that people can get below four minutes before. This 16-year-old kid hits 3: 48. And I immediately thought, wow, through the inspiration of this kid being able to do this, who's He's going to break 340 now?

I heard from somebody that in the run-up to the race, he was like, he hadn't raced a bunch. Recently, he... He got stud. This was just going to be a run-out. He was just going to loosen his legs up, get back into the race. In that situation, he's put no pressure on himself. All the breaks are off. Like, whatever. He's got nothing to lose. In that situation, incredible performances It's crazy because that's only the 11th fastest indoor mile.

That's what it says here. I thought it was the fastest ever, but it's the fastest ever for under-18.

Under-18 record, yes.

So crazy. That's so fast to run a mile.

I'm not sure I could go that fast full stop ever for any period of time.

Yeah, 20 feet.

Yeah, exactly.

I can't run that fast. It's amazing. But this is one of the things we talk about all the time with mixed martial arts athletes in particular, is that Today is such an amazing time for them because there's so much access to video. So you can watch all these performances by all these elite athletes, and then it raises your personal standards because you're mirroring what these people are capable of doing. And in your head, you have a very high standard because you've seen it. And that inspires people to become better. And so the athletes that we're seeing today, I say all the time that martial arts has evolved more and in the last 30 years than it has in the last 30,000 years. And it's true. And it's true just based on my own personal experience of seeing athletes from 1997 when I first started working with the UFC to 2026. It's a completely different standard. There's so much better. They're so much more elite. They have so much more balance. They have so much more balance in terms of their game is balanced, striking, grappling, wrestling, all of it together. It's amazing because they're walking on the foundation that was set by the athletes before them.

So it's the mind recognizing what's possible.

Absolutely. Or not thinking that something is impossible. It's the opposite, too. And maybe that's more of it. It's the same with Roger Banister in the 4 Minute Mile. As soon as he did it, everybody, not everybody, but lots of people started to do it.

Well, and also the ignorance of youth, which is why young athletes are so damn good sometimes.

Yeah, because they don't worry about their own limitations.

And they also don't have mortgages. They don't have wives, they don't have kids.

They don't have bills. But this is also the thing is, if we think about these traits that we'd maybe like to carry over that help us perform or maintain performance for long periods of time later in life, some of That curiosity, not worrying about these burdens, continuing to engage in these things that challenge ourselves that kids just readily do. The brain is exploring and trying to learn. I think we need more of that as adults. But when you think about the standard being set or thinking that things are impossible, there's two parts of that. One, yes, that's a huge aspect of achieving higher and higher levels of athletic performance. But for For many of us regular people, when you spend a lot of time seeing other people performing so much better than you, it can have the opposite effect. I think this is something that we see on social media. There's some really interesting There's some really interesting studies on social rank. We are always trying to see where we rank in the world compared to others. It's the part of us being social beings. If you spend all day looking at people who are richer, more beautiful, more jacked than you are, internally, you demote yourself.

You give yourself a lower social rank, and that creates a social stress that triggers genuine stress responses. Increased sympathetic activation, activation of some inflammatory process in the body, very similar to if you are socially isolated. For some people who are on a trajectory to improve their performance because they're really athletes and they're seeing these other guys doing, they're like, Oh, yeah, I can do that. That's really beneficial. But in the general world, the rest of us, when we spend so much time seeing other people do other things better than us, it can almost have the opposite effect.

But not with everybody.

No, it's very- That's the thing between the difference between an athlete and someone who is intimidated by other people's performances instead of being inspired. Yeah, but that's what I mean is that when you're an athlete and you're seeing other guys like you do this thing, that's like, oh, yeah, that creates a bar you want to try and hit. But that same thing is very different out for the of us based on seeing how we compare to others.

Well, particularly in things you can't control, like your looks or your wealth. Wealth in some ways can be achieved, but-Your mind doesn't interpret it that way.

You don't immediately Personally, you think, Well, I can never be that. I'm never going to look like Brad Pitt. You can't apply that rational thinking to it.

Or then even worse for young girls, because a lot of them are getting surgery because they know that some girls have radically improved their looks through surgery. And so they think, this is the solution to everything. And I just need to get a nose job and a chin job and this and that.

Which, of course, never results in.

No. And also it's like the psychological aspect of being controlled by paying attention to other people's lives is very weird. Jonathan Haight wrote a great book about it called The Coddling of the American Mind, about the impact of social media, and particularly on young girls. It's really bad.

So he did write Coddling of the American Mind. That was more about changes in academia and helicopter parenting and safetyism, the anxious generation was the one about social media.

Oh, that's right. And that aspect of it, of comparing yourself to other girls is particularly devastating. It's like you see When the impact of social media, when social media gets introduced into the world, immediately you see more self-harms, suicidal ideation, all these different things increase. Those same stressors, if you are in a position like an athlete and you're a competitive athlete and you see someone who is elite, you would be inspired, but you feel helpless to achieve these goals. You can't get You can't get any taller. You can't get any better looking. You can't look. It's just this is what you got. And then you see people that are using filters, so it's not even what they really look like.

Yeah. I think that's why there's this. It's interesting that very similar exposures, depending on who you are and what you're trying to achieve and what you have the ability to achieve, can have dramatically different effects on mental and other well-being.

Right. But you would imagine that for competitive athletes, you've already developed a certain amount of resilience already. You already have a competitive spirit, and you are working towards a thing that's a high level of achievement and something you're already doing. So seeing a Michael Jordan, seeing a LeBron James, if you're a basketball player, you would be inspired. And instead of being like, I'll never be as good as that guy, you'd be like, Fuck, I want to be as good as that guy. What do I have to do? Well, Kobe Bryant worked out every day and he did this and he did that. So I'm going to do that.

But that's the key difference, right? Is that something else, we didn't talk about this in terms of the approaches of the most successful athletes, is that they don't just say, I want to be like LeBron or Kobe. They say, What did he do? What can I do? So they focus on the process. You have to love and focus on the process because you can't guarantee a certain outcome. And I talk about this in the book, and I give the example of the 2012 Olympics. The guys who came second, third, and fourth ran personal best times. Several other national records were set during the whole 100-metre sprint competition, all the different rounds. But you're saying Bolt ran. You can be the best you've ever been and be amazing. You can run fast enough to have won a gold medal any other year. But sometimes you're out of luck because Usain Bolt shows up. You've got to focus on the process because you can't guarantee the outcome. But by focusing on the process, you're going to get much closer.

Yeah, that's interesting because if you are a person trying to be the best in the world and you happen to be in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, it's going to be tough. Yeah, but I mean, that's always been the case. That's the thing in championship level fighting, you find that once someone is a real outlier, that what happens is all the other people in that weight class tend to achieve a very high level, even if they never wind up being as good as Anderson Silva or whoever it is, it winds up being a very competitive contender class underneath it and much more competitive than divisions that are not being dominated by elite fighters. Yeah. Europe is a very large book, so I know it can't just be the stuff that we've already covered. What other things do you think are in here that are important when you're talking about future proofing your mind?

I will say you're looking at a dummy copy, so all the pages are blank.

Yeah, you just tricked me. Look at this, folks. I was saying this is a really large book. It's a fucking empty book. That's crazy. I read this, I'm like, Maybe it's a trick.

Yeah, you're just not paying attention enough. The book is as thick as the real one will be. I believe you. That's on purpose.

I've never been given a dummy copy of a book before. So does it even have no writing? Good. I'm going to use this as my new joke book. New notes.

It's all right. Once the full thing is printed, We'll send you a real one. Okay.

You did trick me, though. Thank God I didn't try to read from it.

The first part of the book is about some of the history of neuroscience and why we think about the brain the way we do and some of the limitations that's created. Why we think about Alzheimer's disease as just being the accumulation of amyloid and Tau proteins in the brain, which people might have heard of. That's what it's been boiled down to when there's actually a much bigger picture of many other things that are important.

Was it Alzheimer's where the amyloid plaque, where that idea was proven to be a little bit bullshit?

So there have been a... So not really But there are several seminal papers in-They were hoaxed, right? That were manipulated in some way, right? And this, unfortunately, is quite common where you change the figures, you manipulate these blots to make them show different things, and you move them around and Copy and paste, it shows what you want to show. For some of the seminal papers in Alzheimer's, that turned out to be the case. But it doesn't discount the fact that it's still a part of it. But people have increasingly looked away from just the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain for two reasons. One is that as a field, they had to create new ideas like resilience. There's this thing cognitive resilience, which is how much cognitive function do you maintain in the face of these proteins building up in the brain? That's because the amount of amyloid you have in your brain doesn't really predict cognitive function and cognitive decline that well. Some of that is related to other things. We know that exercise is an important part of that. Then we know that there are these other things that are important as well.

So inflammation, other cells in the brain that become critical. The white matter is a really critical structure in the brain. It's what allows us to have really fast processing speed, decision making, executive function, the function of the prefrontal cortex. All of that is dependent on white matter structure. And that seems to be really related to vascular function, vascular health. Resistance training is really important to support that. So all these other things become important as well. So that's the... It's just showing the first part of the book is saying, Hey, we We're focused a lot here, but actually, it's not that that's not important, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's important, too. And a lot of it is related to things that we have control over. So then I talk about all the different types of exercise, how different types of exercise affects different parts of the brain in different ways. Nutrition, talk a lot about cognitive stimulus, social connection, sleep, like I said, stress management and stress mitigation and how you can manage your performance in the moment. Then all of that comes together into a model that I call the 3S model of how these different things interact and affect you on a day-to-day basis.

The first S being stimulus. We've talked about all the reasons why that's important. The second S being supply, which is if you stimulate a part of the brain or a network in the brain with a new skill. That area of the brain, the The neurons and the astrocytes there, they ask for more blood flow. The blood vessels have to widen, they dilate to bring in more oxygen, bring in more glucose or whatever metabolic substrate you're using, ketones, lactate, et cetera. You need really good cardiovascular health. That's critical. That's a big part of what we talk about. You also need good metabolic health. High blood pressure and high blood sugar are two of the biggest risk factors for later dementia because they affect this supply component, either the blood flow getting there or being able to regulate energy. Then there's a bunch of nutrients that are important in that bucket as well. So omega-3s, vitamin D, iron, magnesium. Because they have B vitamins, they have very specific functions in the brain that we know that if you're deficient, you have an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. Then you've stimulated a part of the brain, you've given it all the substrate it needs to do its job.

Like we've talked about, adaptation occurs and function gets enhanced when we sleep or when we recover. That's support is the third bucket. So sleep is a part of that. Other support you might get, hormonal status is important. Trophic factors, hormones that get released or proteins that get released that support neuroplasticity in the brain, things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And then you want to avoid things that inhibit that process. So chronic stress can do that. It creates an overtraining picture in the brain. Smoking, excess of alcohol, air pollution, those kinds of things can have a negative effect. That's how they all interact. The fact that they interact means that depending on what feels most impactful to you, what's the thing that you think you can move the needle on? By focusing on one area, the whole network starts to shift. We see that in multiple different studies. If you focus on sleep and you sleep a bit better, then we see that inflammation decreases and blood pressure improves and blood sugar improves. The next day, you feel more sociable. You're more likely to interact with other people in a friendly way. You're more likely to engage in cognitive stimulating tasks because when we're tired, we shy away from those things.

It's the same. There are studies in older adults where you give them a brain training program and they sleep better because when you stimulate a tissue, you then drive greater need for recovery after. It's the same. If you exercise more, you sleep better. It's It's not like this long list of things that everybody has to do, because when you give somebody a list of 37 things, they'll do zero things. We know that. If you just know that they all communicate and interact, anywhere you come in, you can start to shift things in your favor.

Now, when you're compiling a book like this, I would imagine there's a lot of editing. And so how do you decide what to leave? I mean, this looks like it's... I mean, obviously, these are all blank pages, so they're not numbered, but it looks like this is at least a 300-page book.

The final book is about 450 pages, 165,000 words. And the reference list... So unlike most health books, every time I make a statement or I mention a study, there's a little number, and that gives you the paper or papers that I'm talking about that supports that. It's 2,000 papers long. And so that all has to go online because they couldn't afford to print it in the book.

But that's probably better anyway.

Yeah, because there's seven people who will do that. Exactly.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

They'll read the book and then they'll go and look. Psychos. Yeah. It's important to me. Anyway, people who want to do that can do that. But I'm not quite sure how it ended up being this way, but I actually had to cut very little. There were things where I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole about it. It was like, I'm not sure we really need this. But I basically wrote until I got to the word limit, and then I stopped. I focused on the things that I knew that were important, and we're going to stay important even in the age of AI and as technology improves and changes. So there wasn't a ton that ended up getting cut out.

But when you're putting it together, how do you decide what's prominent, what's the most important thing to focus on, where to put things?

So when I started writing, I'm going to disagree with my former self. I wrote the first part of the book three times. The first time I wrote it, it was 40,000 words all focused on psychology and super esoteric and academic. I was like, Nobody's going to read this. So it had to be scratched a couple of times. Then the core middle part of the book is all those different areas that we know are important, like the big rocks, and practical frameworks for how to address those. Then there's an introduction to why should you care about this? In individuals over 40, dementia is the most important health concern. More than 10% say they've experienced changes in cognitive function. We know that the rates of dementia are going to double or triple in the next two or three decades. Why do people care about this? And some history there. And then the middle part is, which I always knew I was going to write, these are the most important things, and they're always going to remain the most important things. And then the last chapter is just bringing it together. Does that answer your question?

It does. Well, I'm glad you wrote it because I think it's a very important thing. And I think there's a lot of people out there that don't understand the risks of being sedentary and that these are things that you can change and that you can improve the quality of your life by making those changes. And it might make you uncomfortable to begin something like that, but there's some real value in that uncomfortable feeling of trying something new. Absolutely. And then it really does change the way your brain functions, and it'll improve the quality of your life. And In this case, if possible, hold off dementia and just hold off cognitive decline without calling it dementia. So many people experience cognitive decline because of atrophy. Yeah.

That's the worst possible end state we want to avoid. But you want to maintain your current level of cognitive function for as long as possible and-Possibly improve it. And possibly improve it. And there is evidence you can improve it even later in life. A big part of this is that when you... Earlier, we talked about this graph of cognitive function. It increases to 20 or 30, then it declines. When we're doing studies that show that thing, what we're doing is we're looking at a whole bunch of people, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and we're saying you plot them all on a graph. And yeah, as you increase in age, there are some people who are going to lose function. You draw the average down. But we've known essentially for the last 50 years that when you look at the same person over several decades, it's actually very normal for us to maintain function. So the Seattle longitudinal study was run by a guy called Warner Shay in Seattle. It was one of the first studies where they measured cognitive function in the same people every seven years for several decades. Every seven years, they measured the same people and brought in new people.

They ended up with people who were in their 20s up to over 100 years old. They found that the average effect by that, I mean that more than 50% of people maintain the same level of cognitive function into their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Those data were used to actually raise the retirement age in the US in the 1980s because they showed that it actually wasn't normal for people to decline. But the problem is now we've embodied this idea that as you get older, you will decline. And as a result, you stop engaging in all the things that we've talked about. Because you're like, I'm too old to lift that. I'm too old to learn a new skill. I don't have time to do that. And as a result, it's a self-fulfilling property. You stop engaging in those processes and decline happens as a result. But if we know that it's possible to maintain function and we continue to engage in those processes, the norm should be that function is maintained.

Last question. Did you do an audio version of this?

Yeah, I'm recording it at the moment. All right. When will that be available? Be out on the same day, March 24th.

March 24th, Stimulated Mind, Dr. Tommy Wood. Go get it, folks. I promise it won't be like this. Thank you, Tommy. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I think it's really important information, too. I think it's something that everyone should apply. Thank you.

All right.

Thank you. Bye, everybody.