#2450 - Tommy Wood

Tommy Wood, PhD, is a neuroscientist and athletic performance coach. He is a host of the “Better Brain Fitness” podcast and author of “The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age,” which will be released March 24 and is available for preorder now.https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751292/the-stimulated-mind-by-dr-tommy-wood/www.thestimulatedmind.comwww.betterbrain.fitnesswww.drtommywood.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Make your sports picks with DraftKings Predictions, available in California, Florida, Texas and more. Download the DraftKings Predictions app today. Sign up using promo code ROGAN or at https://dkpred.sng.link/Ereb8/jbhu/dogs GUS III LLC d/b/a DraftKings Predictions is a CFTC-registered Introducing Broker and NFA member. Event contract trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. 1 per new customer. Opt-in req. 100% trade match. Max. $75 issued as non-withdrawable Predictions Dollars that expire in 1 year. Ends 2/15/26 11:59 PM ET. Market availability varies. Eligibility restrictions apply. Terms: https://predictions.draftkings.com/en/promos. Sponsored by DK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  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. First of all, what prompted you to write this?

• 0:34Speaker 03

  So 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. And 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

• 1:19Speaker 03

  their focus and well-being now, and then long-term, that translates to a lower risk of dementia.

• 1:27Joe Rogan?

  So is dementia and is it a genetic thing? Or is it a function of atrophy? Is it a combination of those things?

• 1:40Speaker 03

  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%. And 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.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  They are directly tied to lifestyle and the environment. And right now, it's estimated that somewhere between forty five and maybe even seventy or more percent of dementias are preventable. And most of those fall into those two categories. There is a genetic component. So 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 pre-synellen genes. Those people get Alzheimer's in their thirties to fifties. It's a very predictable and quite rapid decline sometimes. But that's maybe one percent of Alzheimer's.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  The vast majority, like when we think about Alzheimer's, we think about an age-related dementia. And this is much more related to the environment. So there is a genetic component. You might have heard of ApoE four.

• 3:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  So you can have three different flavors of ApoE, ApoLiprotein E, two, three and four. You get two copies.

• 3:28Joe Rogan?

  Which is the one that makes you more, um, more likely to get CTE? Is that two?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  No, so that's, that's, 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. Cause if you're, if you're getting repetitive impacts, repetitive injuries, then it sort of exacerbates or makes that inflammatory response worse. But when you think about that in terms of Alzheimer's, if you have one copy of, of ApoE four, your increase, your risk of Alzheimer's is increased by sort of two to six times. If you have two copies, it's six to twenty times, depending on how you look at it. But all the data suggest that ApoE four is a risk multiplier, right?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  So it's not that if you have a copy of ApoE four, 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. So that also means that if you have, if you then address those risk factors, you have greater benefit, right? Because you're offsetting some of that additional risk. So however you look at dementia from a genetic standpoint, and it can also be family history, right? 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,

• 5:01Speaker 03

  right? You eat and sleep and move like your parents did. And so if they had a lifestyle that might increase their risk of dementia, you get that as well. So even if you do have an increased genetic risk, you can offset a large part of that through lifestyle and other environmental factors.

• 5:18Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so 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?

• 5:31Speaker 03

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

• 5:42Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so is it just like everything else? Like your muscles atrophy, your bones weaken when you don't put load on them? Is that what it is?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's like the core thesis of my book, right? It's called The Stimulated Mind, for that reason. I think that in the, and the title is slightly provocative because in the modern world, we are

• 6:04Joe Rogan?

  Hyper-stimulated.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Over-stimulated.

• 6:06Joe Rogan?

  With nonsense.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Exactly, so we're over-stimulated and under-stimulated at the same time.

• 6:10Joe Rogan?

  Right, 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.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Exactly, so the function of any tissue in the body, right? You mentioned the muscles, the bones, the liver, the immune system. Their function is dependent on the stimulus you apply to them, right? And so the brain is exactly the same. And if you want functions and networks in the brain to perform well, you need to challenge them in order to enhance capacity in them.

• 6:42Joe Rogan?

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

• 6:47Speaker 03

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

• 7:01Joe Rogan?

  Didn't they used to do that with people that had, if they had lung problems, they would give them cigarettes?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:07Joe Rogan?

  Like people with asthma?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And that didn't turn out so great. The theory was okay, but.

• 7:14Joe Rogan?

  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, your lungs aren't a filter to like torture you. Yeah.

• 7:26Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was two different things. One, I focused initially on the brain early in life. And then, you know, elite level cognitive performance in athletes. And you kind of see that these things sort of tie together, like 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 alcoholic, you know, alcohol induced brain atrophy plus vascular dementia.

• 8:05Joe Rogan?

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• 9:40Joe Rogan?

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• 10:23Joe Rogan?

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• 10:52Joe Rogan?

  Um, 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 over saturated 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.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:19Joe Rogan?

  And there's been some studies on that that show that it's a decrease in cognitive function. Like, when they ask them to actually use their brain, the brain works less well than it did before they started. So you're not getting educated by ChatGPT.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:33Joe Rogan?

  Or any of these. What you're doing is you're letting it think for you.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So this one, 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 NLM. And what they showed was that as you increase the amount of, like, outside support you got, you know, 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. So, I mean, this isn't surprising.

• 12:13Joe Rogan?

  Not at all.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  You're not using your brain, therefore, it doesn't engage in the task. But what's interesting is that they they found a version, so like, some of the students who had previously written the, written, 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, like they can expand our capacities, right? You try writing it all first and then you say, hey, what did I miss? What am I not thinking about?

• 12:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  And you can kind of build on it from there.

• 13:02Joe Rogan?

  And that might perhaps actually stimulate your mind.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:05Joe Rogan?

  Why didn't I think of that?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:06Joe Rogan?

  Like, next time I'm writing a paragraph, I'll consider these options.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So you actually have to like fully engage your brain in that process.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  But then they might, you might, the end result might be better.

• 13:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just such uncharted territory for us.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:21Joe Rogan?

  Right? All this, the, especially social media. I mean, completely uncharted territory that people are staring at their hand for eight hours a day. I mean, that's really what you're doing.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:30Joe Rogan?

  You're staring at your hand and you're hoping, uh, usually unsuccessfully, to get something that really excites you.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:37Joe Rogan?

  And something that's really unique and, 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.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:50Joe Rogan?

  I'd 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.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Well, part of the algorithm, and this, you know, I'm not an expert in training algorithms to do this, but part of the, the, the goal of the algorithm is that you don't get everything that is perfect. Although that immediately captured your attention upfront, right?

• 14:12Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Because you want it to be random. And there's a, like, method in the randomness that keeps you scrolling.

• 14:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Because eventually you'll, you'll get those small bumps that then, that then keep, that keep, 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, uh, the acronym is PRIME, prestigious, in-group, moral, and emotional.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  And this is even greater in social contexts, right? 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.

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:21Joe Rogan?

  Not right in front of you.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  And it's designed for like, it's like an anti-human device. Very weird.

• 15:27Speaker 03

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

• 15:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, not just that, they're acquiring enormous wealth and also enormous influence over the, just all sorts of things. Politics, economics.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:45Joe Rogan?

  I mean, some of the richest corporations in the world, they, they gather a thing that we never thought of was valuable, which is data.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:53Joe Rogan?

  I mean, when we, 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.

• 16:01Speaker 03

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

• 16:12Joe Rogan?

  So, the concept is future-proofing your brain.

• 16:17Joe Rogan?

  Like, 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?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  So I think, right, every, every tool has a possible use. So like, for instance, social media, if, if you have crafted a social media that allows you to maintain connections that you wouldn't have otherwise, like, the original version of Facebook, as it existed 25 years ago, was just like posting pictures and you could like chat with some family members, right?

• 16:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  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. So there can be ways that it could be beneficial. And 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. Right. That's fine. But when you think about future-proofing your brain, this idea that there is some unknowable

• 17:35Speaker 03

  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. And so in order to maintain those, we need to challenge and stimulate them. So 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.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  What they do is they improve the function of networks in the brain that are at risk during the processes of aging, particularly because they're important for attention and social connection. And so if we really invest time in doing these things that we suck at but 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.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It's the difference between, like, 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 like, what's your max back squat? The 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 like lift your car off your buddy because it got flipped in a car accident. Like all those things, like 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. So investing in like really challenging tasks and skills builds that capacity so that we have access to it when we need it.

• 19:37Joe Rogan?

  What what is the function and like, what 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.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 19:47Joe Rogan?

  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 and seeing marked improvement that stimulates all sorts of areas of your mind, which I find really interesting.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  So most people don't realize that the process of learning, which in itself is like the core process of neuroplasticity, right? The the 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 kind of new move in jiu jitsu or something, and you have no idea how to do it. You're 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, right?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  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. And this is also then what drives the cementing and function of these networks in the brain associated with that. So the idea that you you start sucking at 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.

• 21:21Joe Rogan?

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• 22:25Joe Rogan?

  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 would do four, I'd have four different occupations. So 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 different things that I'm trying to get good at.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:48Joe Rogan?

  And maybe it would be better if I just concentrated on one.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  So 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.

• 23:02Joe Rogan?

  Like talent stacking.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you think about, like, one of my favorite books is Range by David Epstein, which talks about the broad range of skills that people who then really succeed in academia or sports have, right? They didn't specialize really early. They had like a broad base of talents that they can then draw upon as they specialize later in life. And 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 kind of like give up on it and we try something else. And yeah, there's like a little bit of benefit to that. But when you look at some of the studies that...

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Really examine the effect of learning some of these 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? Right when you're beginning to learn something, that's when you'll learn the fastest. But there is also some benefit to expertise. So 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.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  And so 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.

• 24:44Joe Rogan?

  So it's just about the struggle of trying to get better at something, essentially.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And my wife is learning a new language right now and she's been so excited about it. And it's like, it's really interesting because she starts talking around the house in French and it's one of those things where you're like, I'm watching her do it, she wasn't doing it and then she's been doing it over the last couple of months and I'm seeing this like excitement in this like new project. And 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 like this back and forth with another person.

• 25:35Joe Rogan?

  You have to understand sentence structure. It's just like, and especially French is so different than English. There's so much weird shit involved in it, but you could see, like I could see in her that like this is very stimulating to her mind.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:49Joe Rogan?

  And it made me go, ah, 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 like, when I was on social media all the time, I would look down at my phone some days and it would say, screen used today, six hours. I'm like, fucking six hours?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  That's where your time is.

• 26:03Joe Rogan?

  Right. If you spent six hours just learning Spanish, how you'd be fluent. I'd be able to go to taqueria and order in Spanish, you know?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:11Joe Rogan?

  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, um, what is the, oh, what is this? Oh, it's this. Uh, is that this? Uh, got it. You know, that, that dance.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:31Joe Rogan?

  That firing of the synapses and, and forcing your brain to figure this, this puzzle out. So many people don't have that. And I see it in people that get stagnant, where they're doing the same thing every day. Their job is fairly mundane and kind of 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 like five, 10 years later and it's almost like they've, they're slipping.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:06Joe Rogan?

  Like you see it. You can see it in people that have mundane existences. Like their stimulation is so low that their ability to be stimulated is low.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  I think that

• 27:19Speaker 03

  that thing you describe i- is so baked into our society that we've started to believe that it's normal.

• 27:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  So when you look at the trajectory of cognitive function over the, over like your entire life, imagine like a graph where on the one side you have cognitive function and it could be something basic like processing speed. How quickly do you, does your brain process information? On the bottom is age, right? It, it tends to peak sometime around our sort of mid twenties to early thirties. Um, it's usually the peak on average tends to be higher and later, the more time we spend in education. So the more time we spend essentially as professional learners, the more we can build that kind of final capacity. After that, it's just sort of like, uh, an average decrease downwards.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  And, uh, a colleague of, of mine, Josh Turknet and I, he's a neurologist, we wrote a paper a couple, a couple of years ago where we Theorize that the reason why we see that decline in 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, and then everything else in our life gets in the way and 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. And so the decline is partly because

• 28:48Speaker 03

  we just stop doing that. So the part, you know, one of the theories of aging is that it's just a continuation of development, like process of development. And most of the processes of development in the brain are refining connections based on the environment and the stimulus the brain receives. So if you start removing stimuli because you're no longer engaging in these like cognitively challenging things, the brain's going to start removing connections. Hey, I don't need that, right? I'm not, I'm not using this part of my brain. And as a result, you start to see decline. And so there are studies that show if you have, 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

• 29:31Speaker 03

  as an adult and a lower risk of dementia. You see in individuals who continue to engage in reading, reading, writing, lectures, dancing, you know, 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, we, we stop engaging with the world and we stop challenging ourselves.

• 29:54Joe Rogan?

  Well, it completely makes sense, right? Like, if you think about physical activity, it goes along the same kind of path.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 30:02Joe Rogan?

  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 like 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 like 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.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:31Joe Rogan?

  And I know that because I force it.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:33Joe Rogan?

  You know, I make myself do it. And I would imagine the same thing is true with With the mind, I mean, it has to be. I think it's all together. It's a use it or lose it.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:45Joe Rogan?

  And if your mind doesn't have a need to be constantly intrigued and stimulated, like you could think for survival, right? One of the things that speculated, maybe I can ask you about this, because this is one of, I think about this a lot, like, what is ADHD? And I, whether or not it's actually a problem, I think it's a superpower. Because I'm pretty sure I have it, you know? But yet, I can folk, 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, I'm very interested in certain things and I can lock into them and concentrate.

• 31:27Joe Rogan?

  But if, 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.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:41Joe Rogan?

  Right? But I think that that is, this ability to focus on certain things, like hyper-focus, was probably a function of a persistent hunter.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:53Joe Rogan?

  Right? 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, you keep looking for tracks, you keep trying to find sign, you're trying to figure out a way, like, I've got, keep pushing, one more hour. We got 20 minutes of daylight left, I've gotta figure this out. Right? You, you, that thing had to be in you in order to be a successful hunter.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  So, I'm sure that that's, that's part of it. The, the current picture of ADHD, I think, is, is quite complicated. So 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?

• 32:34Joe Rogan?

  Right, but that medication is Adderall, right? If I took Adderall, I would say the same fucking thing. I don't need a stimulant.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:44Joe Rogan?

  But if I took a stimulant right now, I'd be like, dude, I'm so much better.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  So, no, but, but you know what happens in, in certain individuals with ADHD, when you give them stimulants?

• 32:52Joe Rogan?

  They calm down.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  They, they calm down, right? So I think there's a combination of multiple things. Some is- Um, yes, like, 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, right? And yeah, of course, some of it is, I think, um, right, the teacher is boring and they're like, they're just not engaged because the majority of people with ADHD can still focus, right, on things that they're interested in focusing in.

• 33:28Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Um, or on.

• 33:29Joe Rogan?

  Even without any kind of medication.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, but there's like 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, I think it's complicated.

• 33:40Joe Rogan?

  Can I ask, before you go any further than that, can I ask you, how much of that is dependent on physical activity? Like, 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. Like, if for something, if something happened and for some reason, like, I got a court order, you're not allowed to exercise for six months or you go to jail, like, oh, God. I'd probably be a fucking complete basket case, right?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:07Joe Rogan?

  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. Like, how much of it is a biological requirement that your body has to release energy?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  So, I think you can, I would expand it out even further than that because physical activity is a core requirement of our biology and physiology.

• 34:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Um, there's a, there's a nice quote by Inigo Sanal Milan, who's a, you know, well-known exercise physiologist, who says that, um, physical activity is baked into our evolutionary development, so much so that now we've had to invent exercise in order to like, like, to prevent what happens when we don't move.

• 34:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  So, it's the lack of movement is a disease-causing, pro-aging, like, situation.

• 35:01Joe Rogan?

  So, to stop you there.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:03Joe Rogan?

  What if, I mean, or do they, when they treat kids with ADHD, do they take that into consideration?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  So.

• 35:13Speaker 03

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

• 35:17Joe Rogan?

  But I would think that before you would give someone a stimulant, maybe track and field. You know what I mean?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:23Joe Rogan?

  And maybe play badminton, do something where you've got to run around.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:28Joe Rogan?

  Where you're like, oh, boy, I can focus now.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  I think, I think that that's, again, I would say that that's needed for all kids regardless of any potential diagnosis. So of course, we need, I think that should be taken into consideration. Whether that's going to be enough for every kid, you know, hard to say. But we know that all humans require significant amounts of physical activity just for their biology to work properly.

• 35:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:02Joe Rogan?

  Well, it just only makes sense, right? And I mean, this has been talked about forever. The Stoics used to talk about this, quieting the mind.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 36:12Joe Rogan?

  I mean, Samurais used to talk about it, like that physical activity, just what, you know, 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, what you're doing is you're dulling a biological requirement. You're, you're dulling the impact of this biological requirement that you're not needing. Why wouldn't we prescribe exercise first and then think about those things? Like, for instance, like hormone replacement.

• 36:49Joe Rogan?

  If you have a good doctor, an ethical doctor, that is working with someone and they, they find out you have low testosterone, one of the first things they do is adjust your diet.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 37:01Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 37:40Joe Rogan?

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• 39:29Speaker 03

  So I think that all kids should absolutely get, you know, several hours ideally of movement and physical activity of different kinds every day.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  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. So making sure that every kid has the time and the resources to be able to exercise and like the right kind of people so that they know what they're doing and they're supervised. And you know, it's the same with, say with testosterone replacement if your testosterone is low. Like most, right, the primary cause or one of the most common cause of low testosterone in men is right, that combination of metabolic disease, being sedentary, poor quality diet, like we know that.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  But creating the systems that allow people to change those things and then supporting them to do that is really hard. Nobody, nobody has solved the behavior change problem, right? If we think about, if we think about the modern environment and we think about what that drives us to do and not do. But we know, we have all this information, right? 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. Like, nobody's solved that problem yet.

• 41:07Joe Rogan?

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

• 41:13Speaker 03

  No, but it's not.

• 41:14Joe Rogan?

  But if you could tell someone, this is your requirement for the day. I want you to run one mile. I want you to do a hundred pushups and a hundred situps and write it down.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  But how are you, so first of all.

• 41:26Joe Rogan?

  But you're saying some, you're saying it like it's impossible.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  I'm not saying.

• 41:29Joe Rogan?

  Very, very difficult.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I'm not saying, 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, and our lives, like, like you and me, of course, it's like, of course, you just do that. Like, you just go for the run, you do the hundred pushups.

• 41:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  But for people who like 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.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Changing that actually requires a ton of work and coaching. And it's actually, it's actually really difficult. And when I, when I say.

• 42:01Joe Rogan?

  It's difficult, but it's totally doable physically. It's not like I'm asking you to breathe underwater. Like, people have done it and you can draw inspiration from them. Like, my friend Jelly Roll. You know Jelly Roll, the musician?

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:12Joe Rogan?

  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 sure, not even slowly, over the course of just a couple of years. He shrunk to like a normal sized human. It's fucking amazing. But he drew inspiration from a lot of other people. You know, one of them, he's, he's good friends with my good friend Cam Haynes, who's a ultra marathon runner and endurance athlete. And so, you know, he's taken him on runs and worked out with them and helped him. And just watching YouTube videos and just, all he started doing was just walking. You know, where he couldn't walk up hills and he would just walk around his block

• 42:57Joe Rogan?

  and walk up the hill when he didn't want to do it. And he did it. It's like, it's not, it, you can do it. You just have to start doing it. And I think the starting doing it is the most difficult. I don't think it's difficult to do it. Once you gather momentum. Cause there's a, 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. As long as you don't like, you don't take a guy who's 500 pounds and say, today we're going to do 100 pushups, 100 situps. 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.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:30Joe Rogan?

  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 then in three weeks, you know, we're going to incorporate some light body weight squats. And along the way, we're going to adjust your diet and then write these things down. Like, this is, it's not impossible. It's just they need motivation.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  So I, I agree, it's, it's not impossible. Um. But, you know, I've worked with several digital health companies who are working in the behavior change space. And people don't need more information, like they know that they need to to walk more and they know that they could eat better. And they know that they could sleep better.

• 44:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  But the the process of trying to, first of all, understand, like, how should I do that? What should I do that? When, you know, when when should I do that? And then, right, like, some people may absolutely not have the time or the environment. Maybe they live somewhere where, actually, you know what, they don't want to be walking around outside, right?

• 44:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  That's that's relatively common. Or um they don't have a kitchen, right? So then, how do you how do you cook food? Like, how how do you navigate that that food environment? So I I agree, I 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, right? Gain that momentum, understand, understand um how how that feels, um how it changes them. And right now, the majority of people don't have access to that that kind of support. And I absolutely hope that that changes, right? The food environment changes so that it's much easier to change the way that you eat. And the the built environment changes so that it's it's much easier to go out and and have a walk.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Um and and and do a lot of that. Um. So I think that we just have to consider that it's both, right? There's there's an individual component, right? But there's also like a societal component where we have to make this as as easy for people as possible. And sort of like build it into their lives such as they are.

• 45:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 45:52Speaker 03

  So I think you need a few, a few different parts to it. One great part would be, so say through, you know, if you could dramatically improve quality and access of like 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. Right? So 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, these other things. So like, teach, teach people how, how to cook and, and how to do that within the bounds

• 46:34Speaker 03

  of what they have access to their, you know, cultural preferences, dietary preferences, you know, financial, you know, financial abilities, that kind of stuff.

• 46:42Joe Rogan?

  Right, that should be a part of a school curriculum.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Just like you should teach kids about taxes and all these, all these other things.

• 46:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  And so I think if you start early on and you do this with sort of curiosity and skill building, then you release people out into the, you know, that, that, that, I think that's, 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 don't want to go for a walk outside and like you can barely get six hours of sleep every night and you know, you've got three kids that you're trying to look after, saying, oh, hey, you should do a hundred pushups every day, but that's not going to happen. Like other things are going to happen that, that are more important. So, so I think there's that part, maybe the, the, the skill building part. Then it's thinking about like how people have opportunities to do those things.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And then I would think about, you know, access to high quality, you know, healthcare, psychological care, like these things that's like some, 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 is definitely would definitely help as well.

• 47:52Joe Rogan?

  I think one great way would be to devise a website, make like maybe like even a government website where you put in like your body weight, when was your last physical activity, what this, that, the other thing, all the, 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.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:19Joe Rogan?

  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, like 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, here's day one.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:38Joe Rogan?

  And follow along, post your weight, post what you're eating, I mean, that, I mean, and with AI, I mean, that's one of the good things about an LLM, right? With AI, you could ask it to formulate adjustments.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:53Joe Rogan?

  And you could say, okay, what nutrients should I be consuming, what, how much protein do I actually need, how much, how many calories do I need, how many calories are in this and that, and you know, how, what is, how much protein do I get from, you know, 20 ounces of broccoli, or whatever the fuck it is, you know what I mean?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  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, that's a very typical way to do it. When you see, when you want somebody to change their behavior and feel, feel good about it, one of the sort of constructs is self-determination theory, you've probably heard of, right? Humans need three things, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So autonomy is the, 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, right, I have some choice there. Competence, like, how do I help somebody feel like they know what they're doing?

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Like, a lot of the hurdles with exercise or diet is like, I don't know what I'm doing. And like, 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 amounts of zone two. But I like, what does that even mean? 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, like, you support each other. Uh, maybe you do stuff, you do stuff together. So, um, one of the most successful weight loss trials of all time was called the Broad Study. And one of the things they did, so they, they lost a lot of weight and they kept it off. And so most weight loss studies, people regain it afterwards, is they, they met several times a week.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  They did like potlucks, group activities, like, they helped each other.

• 50:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, community.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's community. Um, the one downside of that is that there were, there was, there was, there was an app, I can't remember the name of it, that tried to build that for exercise. So like, 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 kind of have to like build in multiple buffers and different ways to help people, depending on what it is that motivates them or not.

• 51:08Joe Rogan?

  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? Why don't, 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 out, outside of, you know, like, financially, it wouldn't be feasible.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:33Joe Rogan?

  It's not that hard to do.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  So I think that was the, I don't know what the financial model is now, but that was the, the idea of like the YMCA.

• 51:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right, yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  It becomes a, um, a community focus point, like, um, my wife grew up in North Carolina. It's like, she talks about how they were down the YMCA all the time, like, playing basketball.

• 51:49Joe Rogan?

  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 all, 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.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there was something very similar, close to where I, um, grew up in the UK, just like for a couple of pounds, you go do a, uh, some kind of martial arts class or something.

• 52:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they had that too. Does Austin even have a YMCA? Yeah, definitely.

• 52:15Speaker 03

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

• 52:22Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:28Joe Rogan?

  Why, I mean, if we pay for all this other shit that we don't need, why don't, why don't, you know?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  When, when, when a big hurdle is accessibility and.

• 52:37Joe Rogan?

  One year, new progress pack, join today, how much? Uh, a hundred and twenty-five dollar value for a year? Is that what it says? How much does it cost?

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Doesn't say how much it costs.

• 52:50Joe Rogan?

  What does it cost? Join today. How much?

• 52:53Speaker 05

  So the secret of most memberships for gyms, they don't list their prices on.

• 52:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's a YMCA. Click on join that, join today.

• 53:00Speaker 05

  I'm telling you, they want you to come in and say hi so they can talk to you.

• 53:03Joe Rogan?

  Oh, is that what it is?

• 53:05Speaker 05

  Every, that's how everyone works, but it's probably cheaper than most.

• 53:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, why don't you put it into, uh, perplexity or something like that? Say, what is, uh, how much does it cost to join a YMCA? Here we go. Let's guess. How much do you think it costs? Twenty bucks a month?

• 53:21Speaker 03

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

• 53:24Joe Rogan?

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

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the, yeah.

• 53:35Joe Rogan?

  You're generally looking at forty to eighty dollars per month, depending on age and household type. That's not too bad.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but for, for some people, that's, that's, that's a lot of money, right?

• 53:43Joe Rogan?

  Forty bucks a month.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, that's, um, a good chunk of their food bill. So I, there, there should be some sliding scale where this becomes very, very heavily subsidized.

• 53:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but, or free.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't it be free?

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it should be.

• 53:58Joe Rogan?

  And then homeless people go in there and shower.

• 53:59Speaker 05

  There are.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm okay with that too.

• 54:02Joe Rogan?

  Depends on who they are.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  I mean, if they shower.

• 54:04Joe Rogan?

  Okay with some of them, you know, fucking crazy people shitting in the sub, in the, in the shower. Uh, Blue Cross Blue Shield, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, many health insurance plans, offer gym membership. Uh, through reimbursements, discounts or programs like Active Fit or Global Fit. Benefits can include twenty to four hundred dollars annual reimbursements.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  So some people can use their health insurance to get some of that fee covered.

• 54:29Joe Rogan?

  Okay, well, that's nice. But the thing is, again, it's just like Planet Fitness or any of these places. The, the thing is like, they want to recruit you and then you go and you're like, okay, and then you never go again.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  But we genuinely want people to go. Like, that's, that's the whole idea.

• 54:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, the thing is, like, there's one thing, like, 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.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Like, learn a new skill, move, make a friend, like, so much amazing stuff happens in that kind of setting.

• 55:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and, and they should have multiple different classes available.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:07Joe Rogan?

  At the same time, right? There should be a class for people that have done nothing. Like, okay, these are dumbbells. This is, you pick up a light one, I'm gonna show you how to do a shoulder press. And then it should be for, you know, more advanced people, intermediate people, or something.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  And a whole, whole range of different skills, yoga, zumba, Pilates, Tai Chi.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  Slightly different, not dumbbell weights, but in Austin, they have a bunch of, uh, public, free gym equipment in different parks.

• 55:34Joe Rogan?

  Playgrounds and parks, yeah, that stuff's great. Well, New York City has a whole, look at these guys. Look at staring at each other, talking shit.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  I, I think one of the problems is that, um, well, first of all, like, a lot of people might just, like, look at that and be like, what do I do? What do I do with that? And then the second is that, uh, a lot of what we see around fitness and movement is kind of the extremes, right? They're idolized, professional athletes, like, 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.

• 56:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Whereas, all the data suggests that literally any type of movement above what you're doing right now is beneficial. Cardiovascular health, um, cognitive health, dementia risk. So I, I think some of it is just like 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, right, you, you get, 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, that's part of it, too. Like, having people understand that it doesn't take that much. To really start, you know, having, having an impact.

• 56:41Joe Rogan?

  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. It's, you have to trust in a process. And so that has to sort of be, that has to be, people have to be educated to that. It has to be taught to you, like, this is a process. And you're on a process, you should be very excited about being on this process. It, it's gonna be weird, because it's gonna take a long time for you to see any results. But that long time, like, in that, 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 gotta do it.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  One of the, one of the things that I, I like when I talk about movement in particular, or exercise, and say cognitive function, is that you will start to see benefits relatively quickly. So if you go and do a six-second max sprint a couple of times, right? And there were studies that show this, you will acutely, like, immediately see an improvement in cognitive function, better blood flow to the brain, you've created arousal, which is really important for focus and attention. If you, you know, go out, go for a walk outside, right? You will sleep better that night, so you'll feel better the next day.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  And so, yes, you're absolutely right that this is a lifelong thing, right? You can't just do it for a couple of months and then hope that it's gonna 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, and you can feel it very quickly. So I, I think that that's, that's gonna be important, because not everybody is gonna, is gonna feel in the position to invest in their future selves.

• 58:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Right? So if, if you start to see benefits straight away, you're more likely to keep going with it.

• 58:36Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so that's for people, we were just, I mean, I'm glad we covered it, but we're essentially talking about people that don't know what to do.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 58:42Joe Rogan?

  For people who do know what to do, you said you work with a lot of Formula One athletes.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:46Joe Rogan?

  And what do you do for, like, what is, Formula One is fascinating to me. I've been to the the Coda racetrack. We're actually putting up a studio. We're gonna have a studio at Coda. We're gonna have a second studio at the racetrack. And the idea is to take people around the racetrack. I think it would like stimulate their mind and then come in and do a podcast. It'd be a lot of fun.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:05Joe Rogan?

  Right. It'd be like you'd be like racing. Like your mind, you'd be like, woo.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 59:09Joe Rogan?

  Um, that is an incredible sport where it's fractions of a second, split second decisions. Your ability to react has to be like incredibly fast. Like, have you ever seen the thing where they drop things?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:25Joe Rogan?

  Lewis Hamilton is like better at anybody than anybody at it. He's just fucking intense. Um, what do you do with them? So you already have people that are primed, right? They're the best in the world.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:37Joe Rogan?

  But they are constantly looking for an additional edge. What are you doing for them?

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's um, a few things there. Um, my work with Formula One drivers happens mainly through a company called Hintz Performance. It was founded by Aki Hintz.

• 59:52Joe Rogan?

  What is it? Hint to?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Hintzsa, H I N T S A, um, named after Aki Hintzsa, who was a Finnish orthopedic surgeon. He worked with Harley Gabriel Salassi, with Mika Hakkinen. He was two-time Formula One World Champion. And then now this sort of like a big sports enterprise and I'm their head head scientist for motorsport. So that's all motorsport categories from like karting and kids up to up to Formula One. We work with several Formula One drivers. And we provide coaching and medical services. Each driver or most of the drivers have a coach, right? So like, you know, when you watch Formula One, there's like, somebody holding the umbrella, holding the helmet, right? That's that's usually, well, that's often one of our coaches. They're usually a strength and conditioning specialist, or they might

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  be a physio or a nutritionist. Like, they they have a ton of, you know, really high level skills. And they're there every day, right? They do the sleep. They do the training. Like, they're traveling with them the whole time. They sort of can manage as much of their of their life as possible. And when you're thinking about that level of of skill.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  The stimulus part has taken care of itself, right? 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. So, and that's slowly building these skills, first in karting, then in these different formula categories, Formula Three, Formula Two, up into Formula One. And so the kinds of things that we might work on, and so like I'm helping the coaches, working with the drivers, we have like a huge team, you know, a doctor who's, who works with a bunch of Olympic athletes as well.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  And so it's a combination of are there any individual performance limiters? So we might do some blood tests, look at nutrient status and various other things. You know, make sure they're really on top of that with their diets. But then in that kind of world, and like, I'm sure you experienced this yourself, everybody's got a thing for you to try or a thing for you to do, right? You're constantly being bombarded with the latest, greatest technology and like this guy wants to sell you this thing. So a lot of what we do is like be really careful about the things that get added and maybe even like take stuff away if we need to. Like what are we, what are we trying to work on? What are we trying to build?

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  What does this one driver need? Because they're all, they're all very different. They need a difference, you know, 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, right? 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 rather than a different country every week.

• 1:02:57Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, that's a factor, right? That's a huge factor.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Huge factor. And like on top of like every race weekend, they've got to go meet sponsors, they've got to do media days, right? They're 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, like, how can we, what kind of exercise and how can we do targeted training to like 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. So 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

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  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? And then that might be technology, but it might also be, you know, just like, how can we nail the basics again and again and again, make sure they're getting enough time in bed, right? Especially when you're traveling a bunch, that gets really difficult. So we're often focused on the recovery side and how we track, like, 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 kind of stuff we tend to focus on.

• 1:04:16Joe Rogan?

  So let's talk about the jet lag aspect. What are the strategies for mitigating jet lag? And like, how do you, let's say, if they fly in for a race, like, 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?

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, the time for them, like, 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, right? 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. So 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

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  things shift circadian rhythm so that, so you can kind of get closer to what you're going to do when you land. And so those are, those are the, probably the primary tools is exercise, light, caffeine. You use, 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 like time giver, like helps to drive circadian rhythm. So often, when you're, when you're flying, they'll give you a meal that's happening like in the middle of the night in the time that you're going to land, right?

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

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

• 1:06:09Joe Rogan?

  I've heard that one of the things to help with jet lag is just eliminate meals when you're flying, period. That there's something about eating, even if it doesn't have anything to do with the timeline, like 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. Six hour flight, don't eat at all.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Usually, I think most of that is to do with circadian, circadian timing, because you're usually flying at a time when you wouldn't normally eat. Or like you're often, like they give you dinner at like nine PM or it's even midnight, right? So if you, it's a.

• 1:06:45Joe Rogan?

  But is that all it is? Because, but, Waze explained to me, is that just, there's something about your body processing food when you're flying that actually exacerbates jet lag.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  So I can't think of a, you know, other than the fact, other than the fact that, I mean, you're obviously, you know, sat still for long periods of time, which might not normally happen at that time of day as well. I think the majority of it in terms, certainly in terms of jet lag plans, is thinking about the timing of meals relative to circadian rhythm, because you normally, you know, 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.

• 1:07:21Joe Rogan?

  Okay. Um, what about rigorous exercise? Cause one of my strategies, like say if I have to fly to London or something like that, and I wanna avoid jet lag, I immediately go to the gym.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:33Joe Rogan?

  That's the first thing I do. I put my stuff in the hotel room, I go right down to the gym.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Joe Rogan?

  No negotiation whatsoever, and I get in at least an hour.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Joe Rogan?

  I have to.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a great way, that's a great way to, um, to, to help to offset some of the jet lag. Cause you, you start to tell your body, or hey, like even though it's whatever, midnight in Austin, right, this is the time when I wanna be awake, so it starts to advance the circadian phase. So, exercise, uh, some people like to do, um, cold exposure, right? It does a similar thing, right? Increases adrenaline, increases heart rate, increases arousal. Um, can do it with light, can do it with caffeine, and so like some combination of those things can definitely help.

• 1:08:11Joe Rogan?

  Um, okay, so there's the sleep, adjusting the sleep, there's the light exposure, there's exercise and food. Is there anything else? Like what, what kind of supplementation is effective to mitigate that?

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, um, they might use, they might use melatonin. Um, one of the, one of the issues that we have, it's not an issue, it, it makes perfect sense, is that, um, the, the supplements that we use with the drivers have to be third party tested, right? NSF is sport certified, it forms sport certified. So some of the things that we might like to try.

• 1:08:45Joe Rogan?

  Is that because the drivers get tested?

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Cause the drivers get tested.

• 1:08:47Joe Rogan?

  And what do they ban? What's banned?

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Everything. It's the same as, well, it's like, all the, all the wider drug, you know, drugs.

• 1:08:54Joe Rogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  It's the same, they're under wider regulations, so, um.

• 1:08:58Joe Rogan?

  Are they allowed to use peptides?

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:10Joe Rogan?

  Are they tested for peptides?

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Um, so they're not tested for peptides, but.

• 1:09:15Joe Rogan?

  Take them.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Uh, well, that's, it, you know, it depends on whether there's actually a peptide that has good, high quality evidence in humans.

• 1:09:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's also, you should get them from a real good compounding pharmacy. Um, 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, you know, bullshit corporations that are selling you stuff that's nonsense, and even things that are tainted.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so, so, so the main thing that you're, you're worried about is contamination. Like, what else have they put in there?

• 1:09:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Right? To make it, to, to, to get better.

• 1:09:49Joe Rogan?

  Same thing as supplements.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, same thing as supplements. But in reality, like, 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, right? Those studies just don't exist. And so, until we get to that point, plus the, the sort of like, the, the gray area of the, the sort of legality of it, we, we tend to focus on, you know, the real, I mean, it's the basics, but we know that they work.

• 1:10:23Joe Rogan?

  But there are peptides that have shown to increase sleep and increase REM sleep.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  In humans?

• 1:10:30Joe Rogan?

  Yes, in humans. Boy, I wish I could tell you, because they, they talked about it, but I never tried it. I know Tom Segura's on it. See if we can find what it is, Jamie. It's, uh, boy, it's fucking with my head.

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  DSIP?

• 1:10:45Joe Rogan?

  Is that what it is?

• 1:10:46Speaker 05

  I'm asking.

• 1:10:47Joe Rogan?

  No, um.

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  Delta sleep-inducing peptide?

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Uh, like, I, I wanna see the randomized controlled trial. I have to. I'd like, I can't, I, 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. Like, all those things have to align.

• 1:11:03Joe Rogan?

  The high quality, the problem with high-quality studies is they take time and money.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Joe Rogan?

  And these aren't FDA-approved, so you're not gonna get those things. But that doesn't mean they don't work.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Joe Rogan?

  And this is the problem, is that, like, you could try it, and then if you show benefit, like.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  In that, in that setting, I can't try it.

• 1:11:20Joe Rogan?

  You can't.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:11:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, you can't because of Formula One drivers and all that stuff.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Joe Rogan?

  So, with the, the way drug-free sport works, which is the governing body of the UFC drug testing, um, this, they, they don't allow anything, unfortunately. But there are studies that show that BBC157 includes, in, increases tissue recovery and helps you heal from.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Not in humans.

• 1:11:41Joe Rogan?

  True. But there's, look, the same thing with the COVID vaccine. They weren't tested in humans either before they started trying them.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:54Joe Rogan?

  Right, but all it showed is that it showed an antibody. It didn't show that it-

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Oh no, that against hospitalizations and death. In, in the fir-, in the fir-, in the first waves.

• 1:12:03Joe Rogan?

  That, we could argue about that because it's very sketchy.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:05Joe Rogan?

  It's very sketchy data that has been disproven.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  I think that those, I, I think those first waves were high quality. Um, I don't think, I don't think we've seen it-

• 1:12:14Joe Rogan?

  They didn't even say that it increased, uh, hospitalization and death. It was stopping transmission and infection, which was just a lie. So that's what they claimed.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  That-

• 1:12:25Joe Rogan?

  So it's all sketchy because it was based on profit. The, the, the whole thing is weird. It's a weird one. It's a weird one.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  I can't, uh, I can't, yeah, I can't talk about my-

• 1:12:35Joe Rogan?

  Maybe it's not a good example.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:36Joe Rogan?

  But with, 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.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:59Joe Rogan?

  I understand. You're an actual doctor. You're just, Dr. Tommy Wood, he's legit. I'm just a dork. I'm allowed to just say, try it, fuck it. Um, but, so with drug-free support, um, like with the UFC, they're, they use thorn supplements, it's with the UFC recommends, which are very good.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:17Joe Rogan?

  Third-party tested. But, 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, like for, I would, let's stick with Formula One drivers. Reaction time is critical. Um, your, your ability to function at a very high cognitive state, right? You're, you're thinking constantly, you're always calculating and movements. What supplements are these guys taking that benefit them?

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  So the-

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:20Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the, the curve is bell shaped, right? It's the Yerkes-Dodson curve, named after a couple of guys who actually did studies in mice. Um, but then translated actually surprisingly well over to humans. Um, and so what it says is that if you're sort of under aroused, you're kind of disengaged, a bit lethargic, right? You're you're not really going to perform well. If you're over aroused, you're sweaty, anxious, right? Again, you're not going to be able to sort of pay attention to the task. So 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 like it's it's hard work. Um, and so what you're trying to do is get the guys to the top of that curve. Um, and this for many involves some element of routine, right?

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Knowing that I've done the thing that I know that's going to make me feel good. And so it's a combination often of the things that we've already mentioned. They might use um some warm up sprints, they might use music, they might use bright light, they might use breath work. Um, they might use cold, um, certainly if it if it's going to be a a hot race, they might um do some pre pre cooling uh to bring down core temperature. That improves endurance during the race.

• 1:17:04Joe Rogan?

  Do they bring like cold plunges to Formula One bays?

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so so some of them have a some of them have a like a cold plunge or, you know, you you can you can fill a a wheelie bin with uh water and ice and jump in that. Um, it doesn't need to be that cold, actually. So for um increasing endurance performance, like twenty minutes at around twenty degrees Celsius or like sixty ish um Fahrenheit. That significantly improves um like endurance.

• 1:17:30Joe Rogan?

  Is there a benefit to twenty minutes at sixty degrees Fahrenheit versus three minutes at thirty four degrees?

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  So the the problem is that when you get too cold, you can actually um decrease cognitive performance. So there's a there's a fine line when it's really cold that what you want to do is you want to decrease core temperature without negatively affecting cognitive function. And so that's easier to manage at at slightly less cold temperatures.

• 1:17:59Joe Rogan?

  I see, I see.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  Because just like if you did really, really exhaustive exercise, right? You go out, um, and so I was a rower uh in college, so like a two K test on a rowing machine. Like after that, my brain doesn't work for like hours afterwards, right? And so like very um, you know, very cold ice baths for several minutes for some people. That can decrease cognitive function. So you you can find a sweet spot.

• 1:18:21Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense because my mind is very bad after brutal workouts.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:29Joe Rogan?

  Like if I if I have a really hard workout and I come in and do a podcast, there's there's a moment where I'm.

• 1:18:36Joe Rogan?

  It's just not firing.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And that and that's perfect. And that's that's that's normal. We know that.

• 1:18:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Do very fatiguing exercise for a period of time, you experience a decline in cognitive.

• 1:18:44Joe Rogan?

  But a light exercise stimulates.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. So like, one of the best studied exercise modalities to improve cognitive function is literally just like a twenty minute jog.

• 1:18:55Joe Rogan?

  Right. Hmm, just a light jog.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. But you're kind of warming everything up, you know, increasing sympathetic activation, increasing release of all those hormones you mentioned. And that increases arousal. That that improves cognitive performance. So they might be doing some of those things in the car, right? That there'll be differing types of caffeine use depending on sensitivity and and timing.

• 1:19:16Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's been studies on creatine and cognitive performance that are really interesting.

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Particularly in the setting of sleep deprivation.

• 1:19:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  And so when they're jet lagged, like I think that that that one makes sense. There are some newer caffeine related compounds that if we can get them when they're third party tested. You know, some may try those. So uh, theocrine or t-creon and paraxanthine, which is a metabolite of caffeine. Some they they may have some fewer of the like 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 sort of third party tested and stuff, but and that some of the evidence is newer. But that that's looking sort of promising as as another thing that that people might try.

• 1:20:30Joe Rogan?

  You mentioned theanine, which is a nootropic. There's quite a few different ones that people enjoy. You know, um, uh, beta choline, there's a bunch of different ones. Like, do do Formula One drivers, do they supplement with that kind of thing?

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  So, um, so you're thinking like Alpha GPC, like, yeah, yeah. So like, uh, uh, it's a choline, type of choline. Yeah. Like, uh, it's preferentially, uh, turned into astal choline. Um, and astal choline is really important for like focus and attention.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Some of that stuff isn't isn't regularly used, like, ma- mainly because, um, it's hard to get a third-party tested, uh, source.

• 1:21:11Joe Rogan?

  Is it really?

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Plu- plu- like, most of the things that you take, there there probably isn't, uh, or that anybody would take, that there might not be a, an NSF for sport, a certified version. There's very few companies that do that routinely for all their supplements.

• 1:21:23Joe Rogan?

  God, you'd think that that would be really accessible.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Joe Rogan?

  Because nootropics are so common now.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  So, but, uh, so there's that. Plus, there's the, um, when we're working with different drivers, they each have very unique needs. So it's trying to, 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 espressos before it got in the car and then he overcooked the first corner.

• 1:21:54Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Um, so it it's a really tricky balance of trying to make sure that they can, um, systematically get in the zone to perform well in the car without sort of pushing them too far over the, uh, over the other side. And so that's where supplements become trickier because it's very easy to down-regulate. Um, if you've overcooked it, um, through some of those physiological means, right? I can do some breath work or something to kind of calm myself down. But if I've like stuffed myself full of caffeine, it's really, it's, it's, it's going to be hard to like come back from that. And then you sort of step in the car and it could cause some issues. So we tend to focus on some of the physiological stuff and then may maybe a little bit of supplementation. Um, because that seems to be the, the sort of like best balance across those different needs.

• 1:22:37Joe Rogan?

  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 and you would think that they would have that dialed in. Like 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 race.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  So, yes, um, we do a lot of that, but it's different for each guy and nobody wants to share what they've got.

• 1:23:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's that kind of deal.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  So like even, even like your, you know, your biggest rival is your teammate in many respects, right? Because you're, that's the only guy you can go up against truly head to head because you're in the same car.

• 1:23:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  So, yeah, you know, a lot of what we do, we have, we, um, we have to silo within a driver. Like this is the stuff that works for this guy and I can't use that to help this guy, right? That's one reason, that's one reason why.

• 1:23:34Joe Rogan?

  They don't share information.

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's one reason why Hints has been very successful as a company is because they've been, we're very good at walling this stuff off. Like we know what's good for this guy. We know what's good for this guy. And we, we sort of leave those separate because, right? Different frameworks, different approaches might be needed.

• 1:23:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's such an extreme example because any little deviation that you wouldn't normally feel in everyday life could be disastrous.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Joe Rogan?

  In a Formula One race.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:02Joe Rogan?

  What about different things to stimulate cognitive function? Like playing chess or doing, is, is there anything that those guys engage in specifically to improve the way they think?

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  Again, it depends a little from driver to driver. A lot of them like play some kind of video games, which actually have, have some interesting evidence to support them in terms of, in terms of, um, improving cognitive function. I think for them though, uh, a lot of that is, it's almost like relaxation. Like when you drive a Formula One car for a living, like playing a video game is, it isn't necessarily as challenging, right? And so a lot of it tends to be very car, car focused, right? They get tons of time in the simulator, like during the season, they get a lot of time in the car.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  So there's nothing that like consistently would work or that that everybody does. I think a lot of where the cognitive training side comes from is during driver development. Right. How can we get more sports specific or sports supporting cognitive challenges in younger drivers as they're developing. So we might use some cognitive training tools and some other things to try and support some of those development processes because by the time they're at the the top, especially if you want to maintain it, the the main thing that you need to do is obviously maintain those driving skills, which you'll get through like the day to day aspects of the job. Plus then it's really continually paying attention

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  to sustained physical health, physical performance, especially because of the like arduous schedules and all that kind of stuff. So so often, again, that they're focusing on the other areas because they know that will help them stay at a high level for longer.

• 1:25:59Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So sleep, some of them use different meditation or breathwork or other devices just to kind of help. Maybe you like 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 to sort of like vibration and that that that kind of stuff.

• 1:26:29Joe Rogan?

  You mean like pressure plates, like those standing on things?

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like.

• 1:26:33Joe Rogan?

  Shaky plates?

• 1:26:33Speaker 03

  No, there there's.

• 1:26:35Joe Rogan?

  Turbosonic?

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  There's a there's a chair that that's that some guys use. And I mean, this is used in a ton of different sports and like in other military groups as well. Called the shift wave. Have you heard of this?

• 1:26:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I have one.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So some of the guys, some of the guys have a shift wave. It just kind of depends on what works well for them in terms of like allowing them to down regulate, allowing them to kind of sleep, sleep better. And again, we sort of often focus on the more sort of physiological environmental side rather than, you know, trying to throw a bunch of supplements on it.

• 1:27:04Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And the one of the interesting things is that the sort of the the real performance stuff is kind of siloed within the team. So then. Um, right, because that's related to performance in the car and that's sensitive information. So a lot of the time, we're kind of thinking about, and, and this actually, across most sports, the, the best predictor of performance is, is subjective wellbeing. How does the athlete feel? How, and, and so like, there are tons of studies even like coming out now, like you compare that to blood tests and HRV and all this other kind of stuff. How they feel? Am I tired? Am I achy? Um, do I feel alert? Uh, you know,

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  all that kind of stuff. That seems to predict performance really well. So how can we, or, or, and, and better some of those, better than some of those other things? The best is a combination as much as possible. But, so, so we do a lot of, uh, work aggregating data. But then really, the rest of the time is, how can I make sure this guy feels good every day? Right? And feels confident when he gets in the car. And so then we have psychologists, they're a big part of that. Plus like keeping an eye on their body and all that, you know, all those sort of things to sort of put them in the best spot possible when they get in the car.

• 1:28:27Joe Rogan?

  Do you coach them to avoid toxic relationships?

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:28:34Joe Rogan?

  For fighters, it is like the, one of the number one predictors of poor success in, in a competition. I've, I've seen it over and over again. Guys with horrible relationships.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Joe Rogan?

  You know, whoever's fault it is, both fault, both parties, whatever it is. But those are the ones, like when they have like really bad relationships. Like there was this one guy that I know that, um, was a really high performer, very good fighter, but he had this crazy girlfriend and, um, she required so much, 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. Like their relationship was so toxic, she would always start fights and all the coaches knew it. She would start fights after he weighed in because he was so locked in on the fight the next day that he wasn't paying attention to her.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Joe Rogan?

  So 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.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  I at least I personally haven't seen the evidence of that in that in that world. I will say that.

• 1:29:38Joe Rogan?

  Fighters are kind of crazy, though. It's a it's a it's an interesting group to study. Because it's a very bizarre activity to begin with. You know, it's the way I describe it is high level problem solving with dire physical consequences.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Joe Rogan?

  And.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:29:57Joe Rogan?

  Very similar.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  The there are there are certainly, you know, a lot of drivers come into into the sport with that. It's often driven by family relationships. So so I think that that may may be an influence sometimes, right?

• 1:30:10Joe Rogan?

  Overbearing parents are another one. Coaches, other overbearing.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so they come in with this long history of right of of like what got them there.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:22Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  The.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  The one I think the ones that I found most challenging are. It's usually because they're pulled in so many different directions that it's it becomes difficult for them to like really engage in in the things that we know are gonna is is gonna help them perform long term. And so as and like I have friends who work in the NBA, for instance, where I think this is amplified even more. Right, you have teenage millionaires who can literally do whatever they want. But you have to like keep them on on task. And we see that in a lot of professional sports. And so it's that it's that kind of stuff is what's distracting them.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  What are the other things that they're doing that's stopping them from being able to engage in these processes? And so you you can have like really good conversations and put together really good plans. And like in the moment, they're really engaged and they're interested in right, they want to do well. Right, this is their job and they love it. But.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  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 like other things in their life, right? Could be like the toxic relationships, but it tends to be other other distractors. They're kind of pull them away from that that sort of like core goal.

• 1:32:01Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some, some, some people like maintain like really dead, they maintain dedication to the craft, like 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 like the little details. Like, 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, you want to sustain that for a very long period of time. It requires an increasing amount of dedication to the, to the other areas of your life to make sure that you can still do that. And 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.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  So that's the, that's the most frustrating thing is when you sort of, you, you hear one thing, but you see another thing because of like the other areas of life that are, that are taking over.

• 1:33:10Joe Rogan?

  So what do you do if you have an athlete, like 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 like spending money all the time and partying and hanging out with girls. And how do you get them back on track?

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:33:47Joe Rogan?

  So what athletes do you deal with? Like what sports?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

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

• 1:34:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. And when you compare notes, what are the differences between like dealing with Formula One athletes versus dealing with like NFL or NBA or baseball?

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  A lot of the stuff comes down to uh differences in travel schedule and training. And the ability to to capture data, for instance. So data capture in Formula One is is really hard. Because of the the types of travel and right, you don't get to aggregate across a team. Whereas you're you're part of a big team, there's several people you can kind of work, but you you work with and aggregate data across to kind of understand what what's happening with with with individuals as well as like overall. But um I I think that it it Formula One is unique because it's so it's so individual. Um in terms of each driver has their one specific team.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  And it's often very difficult to 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, right?

• 1:35:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Really difficult. Um whereas other places where they have a home base and this kind of stuff as usual, you you you might be be able to get at that better. So I think that's maybe one of the biggest differences is the travel's travel schedule and how easy or not it is to like capture and aggregate data.

• 1:35:22Joe Rogan?

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• 1:36:07Joe Rogan?

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  Because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first. There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. When you're working with these Formula One athletes, like how much are you changing the methods that you use like year to year?

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  It will depend on whether, so I mean, 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.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  The the main thing is getting the boring basics done consistently. And like again and again and again, like, we know that's foundational to sustain performance. And yeah, like the the some of the the tools and technology for recovery and some of the supplements, especially if you're trying to address nutrient insufficiencies based on, you know, an inadequate diet, which is also very common. Right, those things do make a bit do make a difference. But the the main struggle, at least from the the guys that that I regularly see, is having an environment and framework that allows them to keep doing that stuff,

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  like stay on top of a specific training program or stay consistent with a certain sleep routine that allows them to to sleep well. Those are the things that make the biggest difference. And so it's like, that's where we tend to focus. And then, you know, maybe every year or so, we like, we're constantly improving our data capture and our data analysis. We're constantly, you know, trying to improve sort of the support processes because we know that with the better better support, we can make sure they're more likely to do the stuff that's going to make a big difference. And then maybe every sort of like year or two, there's a 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, right?

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  That's that's another thing is when I first, when I first walked into the paddock in in, it was here in Austin, it was the first time I went to Formula One to like, start working with these guys. I like, I showed up and I'm like, I've got like a, I've got like a hundred things that these guys are gonna love. It's gonna be really important. It's gonna revolutionize everything. And then you speak to like 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 gonna make a difference, right? Or else you wasted our time.

• 1:39:58Joe Rogan?

  So how do you decide?

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  So a little bit of it is, of course, there's gonna be some trial and error and it does depend on.

• 1:40:09Joe Rogan?

  But the error is like. Consequences are huge.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, and you just have to acknowledge that upfront. And the error is biggest when you're telling some guy to do something before he gets in the car. Right, because that's that's that's going to immediately have an effect. So there are ways to offset some of that, right? They have practice periods. And so it's like right now is a new generation of cars for this season. Nobody's driven them before. They're getting more extended track time to practice, practice with them. So like, that might be a time when you could try a new supplement or something before you get in the car. Because it's a low, it's a much lower risk setting. You're not racing, there's not 19 other guys or now 21 other guys trying to, trying to get past you.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  And then, right, so that, so some of it is that, right? Trial and error, you acknowledge that you, you, you just have to be really confident that you know what problem you're trying to solve. And that it's an important problem, right? So I've, I've worked with coaches and their driver where like reaction time was a very specific thing. Like off the line, we, we think we need X amount improvement. So 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. So you, you need to make sure it's an important problem. Then you need to think about like, what's the hierarchy of things that have the highest likelihood of benefit? And the lowest risk? And then sort of work your way through it.

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  And I realize that this is all kind of in the abstract because it just like really depends on the problem that's in, that's in front of you.

• 1:41:41Joe Rogan?

  What about the psychology aspect of it? I mean, this is a very controversial aspect of mixed martial arts in particular. Because there's, there's kind of two schools of thought. There's, there's, like, 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, you just can't count on them. He goes, they're just too fragile. They need a mental coach. He goes, I want a motherfucker who just knows that this is what he's supposed to be doing and just go out and do it.

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12Joe Rogan?

  I'm like, boy, but that kind of limits your athletes, right? Like, do you, do you think that there's benefit in mental coaching? Or do you think like 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 he knows the athletes he works with.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:41Joe Rogan?

  But, you know, he recently had a bad result with one of his athletes. He's like, I'm done. No, no more guys who need mental coaches. I want killers.

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  So I think that you're going to need some element of a mindset to get to that level to begin with. Right? But

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  we have psychologists on our team who work, work with the drivers regularly. Other drivers who aren't, you know, working with us, bring in sports psychologists very regularly.

• 1:43:12Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So we have.

• 1:43:16Joe Rogan?

  What are common issues?

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  The

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  I mean, again, it's just, it's so dependent on the, on the individual. But it but it's also, but it's also very common across all athletes, right? So it's like overcoming failure or fear of failure or

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  you, you maybe it's dealing with difficult relationships, which, which, you know, for various reasons that they can experience.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  And then it's how, you know, their inherent thought process is when that happens. So, so we know that the most resilient athletes are those that tend to be self compassionate. Right? So like.

• 1:44:00Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so there's this idea, right, that, right, you want killers, you want.

• 1:44:08Joe Rogan?

  People hard on themselves.

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  The guys who are hard on themselves.

• 1:44:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  For sustained, and, and so this is looking across like as broad as possible across sport. Those who are most, most successful, most often, of course, there's going to be, there's going to be the, 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.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  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 that we all make mistakes and stuff always happens, but I can overcome this. You know what, this has happened to me before, like 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, high level athletes. So I give an example, this is not, so I don't know him, but like Roger Federer has a very famous quote, right? He gave it some like graduation address or something where he

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  says that across his career, he only won 54% of his points on court, right? So that means that 46 of, 46% of points he lost, right? So that means that every time he makes a mistake, every unforced error, he has to come back and be like, hey dude, like you've got this and I know I can do this. And like, and that's the point that he's making in this address. And it's those kinds of mental skills that seem to be most important. So when you've had a history of beating yourself up and being hard on yourself and that's kind of gotten you to that point, there will often be a stage where there's so much accumulated

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  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 like, 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.

• 1:46:22Joe Rogan?

  I'm really into professional pool. I play pool and I follow a lot of professional pool players. And 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.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:46:39Joe Rogan?

  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, they 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.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Joe Rogan?

  And for a high level pool player. So there's performance scores and 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 performance score is about, I think it's like 850 out of 1,000. So that means if he makes 1,000 shots, he's gonna make 850 of those shots, which is very elite.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Joe Rogan?

  So you gotta think like even the best, because they're playing on four inch pockets, but this guy never gets upset.

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Joe Rogan?

  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. So 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.

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Joe Rogan?

  And maybe they'll smile, but they never get upset. Whereas a lot of the American players, they get fucking pissed off and like, you see it. Some of the European players do the same thing. And those guys, they fall off a cliff.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:05Joe Rogan?

  Their performance is elite. They'll make a couple of bad shots and then the match goes downhill and they wind up getting steamrolled.

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

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

• 1:48:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  And.

• 1:48:29Joe Rogan?

  And dwelling on failure.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

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

• 1:48:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's one of the most important things about a shot, because even if your mechanics are good, if you think you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Joe Rogan?

  It's weird.

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Joe Rogan?

  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 gonna miss.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Joe Rogan?

  Like 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.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Joe Rogan?

  It's a mental thing. It's ability to perform under pressure.

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Joe Rogan?

  Because it's fine motor skills and it's, you know.

• 1:49:11Speaker 03

  There's, I mean, across every different aspect of cognitive performance, well-being, there's. You again and again, you see that psychology drives physiology and drives performance. Like you can, you can measure these things as you think them, as they then change physiology, which then alters how you perform. So, so I mean, that, this is a very, very long answer to your, to your question of like, is, is like psychology and mental skills important? Absolutely, because I think that's going to be foundational to whether you can even achieve those high levels of performance. And everybody needs help occasionally and right, that's, that's perfectly, that's perfectly

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  normal. And then right, different people are going to need different tools and different skill sets. So like different psychologists are going to provide, you know, different things for them to do. So like, 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.

• 1:50:10Joe Rogan?

  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, right? 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 sort of mental state and I have to find a method. And so like, when you talk with psychologists, what do they, what tools and what, what, what sort of strategies do they give these athletes to abandon negative thinking?

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  There are a few different ways to approach it. And again, like, don't want to pretend I'm a psychologist, right? These are, these are the, 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 of maybe, maybe initially the causes of mistakes and then. The and the causes of stress and why that may or may not be beneficial in the way that you can you can leverage it. So there's a lot of research on understanding that

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  stress responses are there to divert resources to something that matters and something that either requires your attention or adaptation to it, right? So, understanding that actually stress in the moment, in that kind of moment, is a good thing, and you want to you want to leverage it rather than be scared of it. So, and we know that people who are trained in this mindset, so this is work by Adi Akram at Stanford, the stress is enhancing mindset, also like predicts how well Navy SEALs do during training, like how much they sort of like appreciate that stress response is important, this is me, you know, rising to the occasion, not only that you still get stressed, where you still can measure stress

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  hormones, that's that still happens, but you release other things that help to also like counteract that and drive adaptation, and it results in better decision making when stressed. So like reframing some of these responses can can be important, as well as then thinking about like after a mistake happened, you know, thinking about other examples of times when you did that and you overcame it, or, you know, having having like these different parts of understanding what it is to be a human, even when you're performing at an elite level. Maybe some of it is building in routines so that you feel confident in a given situation, right? Like, these are the things that I do, and

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  when I do these things, I know I'm going to perform well. That can be a double edged sword for some people, because, and I think this, we see this, a lot of this in the in the world of sort of like health optimization, we assume that we need to do all these things in order to perform well, and so then if those things don't happen, we think we won't perform well, right? So that's another way for us to get in our way, our own way. So you kind of have to balance that depending on the individual. And then some of it can be, right, in in the moment, right? So 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, right?

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  Your brain is too busy being dunked in adrenaline to like make good decisions. So that that's where you might have tools like leveraging your physiology, breath work, closing your eyes, visualization. Those things sort of work from the bottom up to kind of help your mind get a grip and like get back in the game. So 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 up for success through a series of? And it could be like, what's my warm up? What's my, what am I thinking through? What am I visualizing before I perform? Or is it tools to kind of deal with the processes of failure afterwards?

• 1:54:31Joe Rogan?

  And 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.

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:55:03Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. That's what's important, right? It's like, I, I, 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.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Joe Rogan?

  Cause I think there was a young kid who recently broke the world record of the mile. Did you see that?

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I watched that. It was sixteen, it was three forty something, three forty eight maybe.

• 1:55:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, three forty eight, which is nuts, which is nuts. We didn't think that people can get below four minutes before. This sixteen year old kid hits three forty eight. And I immediately thought, wow, through the inspiration of this kid being able to do this, who's going to break three forty now, you know?

• 1:55:49Speaker 03

  That I was, I heard from somebody that in the run ups to the race, he was like, he hadn't raced a bunch recently, he, um.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  This was just gonna be like a, just like gonna be a run out. He was just like gonna, you know, loosen his legs up, get back in the, in the, into the race. And so like in that situation, he's put no pressure on himself, right? All the, all the brakes are off, like whatever, he's got nothing to lose. And so like in that situation, that you could, like incredible performances are possible.

• 1:56:17Joe Rogan?

  And 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.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, under 18 record, yes.

• 1:56:25Joe Rogan?

  It's so crazy. That's so fast to run a mile. Whoo.

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:56:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for like 20 feet.

• 1:56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:38Joe Rogan?

  I can't run that fast. It's kind of amazing, but I mean, 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, that inspires people to become better. And so the athletes that we're seeing today, I, I say all the time that martial arts has evolved more in the last 30 years than it has in the last 30,000 years. And it's, it's true. And it's,

• 1:57:21Joe Rogan?

  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. They're 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, it, it's amazing because they've, they're walking on the foundation that was set by the athletes before them. So it's the mind recognizing what's possible.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Absolutely, or not thinking that something is impossible, right? It's the opposite too, and maybe that's more of it, right? It's the same with Roger Bannister and the four minute mile, right? As soon as he did it, everybody, not everybody, but lots of people started to do it.

• 1:58:08Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

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

• 1:58:14Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  But this is, this is also the thing is, right? If we think about these traits that we'd, we'd maybe like to carry over that, that help us perform or maintain performance for long periods of time later in life, like some of that curiosity, not worrying about like these burdens, continuing to engage in these things that challenge ourselves that kids just like readily do, right? The, the brain is exploring and trying to learn. I think we need more of that as adults. But when you think about the, the standard being set or thinking that things aren't impossible, there's, there's two parts to that. One, yes, that, that, that's a huge aspect of achieving higher and higher levels of athletic performance.

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  But for, for many of us, like us regular people, when you spend a lot of time seeing other people performing so much better than you, it has the, it can have the opposite effect, right? I think this is something that we see on, on social media. There's some really interesting, there's some really interesting studies on social rank, right? So we are always trying to see where we rank in the world compared to others, right? It's the part of us like being social beings. And so if you spend all day looking at people who are richer, more beautiful, more jacked than you are, internally you demote yourself, right? You, you, you give yourself a lower social rank and that creates a social stress

• 1:59:44Speaker 03

  that triggers genuine stress responses, right? Increased sympathetic activation, activation of some like inflammatory processes in the body, very similar to if you're socially, socially isolated. So for some people who have the, you know, are on a trajectory to improve their performance, you know, because they're really athletes and they're seeing these other guys do it and they're like, oh yeah, I can do that, right? That's really beneficial, but in like 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.

• 2:00:15Joe Rogan?

  But not with everybody.

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  No, no, it's it's it's very.

• 2:00:20Joe Rogan?

  That's the thing between the difference between an athlete and someone who is intimidated by other people's performances. Instead of being inspired.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so but but that's that's what I mean is that when when you're one type of when you're an athlete and you're seeing other guys. Like you do this thing, right? 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 out for the rest of us. Based on like seeing how we compare to others.

• 2:00:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, particularly in things you can't control, like your looks or your wealth.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, but but.

• 2:00:55Joe Rogan?

  Wealth in some ways can be achieved, but.

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  Your mind doesn't interpret it that right way, right? You you don't you don't immediately rationally think, well, I can never be that, right? I'm never gonna look like Brad Pitt, right?

• 2:01:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  You can't you can't apply that sort of like rational thinking to it.

• 2:01:10Joe Rogan?

  Well, 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 like this is the solution to everything and I just need to get a nose job and a chin job and a this and a that.

• 2:01:23Speaker 03

  Which of course never.

• 2:01:24Joe Rogan?

  No, and also it's like the psychological aspect of being controlled by paying attention to other people's lives is very weird. And it's, you know, Jonathan Haidt 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.

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Uh, calling them, so he he did write Coddling of the American Mind. That was more about changes in like academia. Academia and helicopter parenting and safetyism. The anxious generation was the one about social media.

• 2:01:53Joe Rogan?

  Yes, right. And that aspect of it, of comparing yourself to other girls is particularly devastating. It's like there's, you see when the impact of social media, when social media gets introduced into the world. Immediately you see more self harm, suicidal ideation, all these different things increase.

• 2:02:13Joe Rogan?

  Whereas like, so those same stressors, if you were in a position like an athlete, and you're a competitive athlete, and you see someone who's elite, you would be inspired. But you feel helpless to achieve these goals that, you know, you, like, you can't get any taller, you can't get any better looking, you can't, like, it's just, this is what you got.

• 2:02:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:36Joe Rogan?

  And then you see these, and then you see people that are using filters, so it's not even what they really look like.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so 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 wellbeing.

• 2:03:00Joe Rogan?

  Right, and, but you'd imagine that for competitive athletes, you're, 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, seeing, 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 wanna 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 gonna do that." This episode is brought to you by Quince. Putting together a good wardrobe isn't actually that hard. You just need the right pieces, and that's where Quince comes in.

• 2:03:43Joe Rogan?

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• 2:04:22Joe Rogan?

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• 2:05:05Joe Rogan?

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• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  So, but that's the key difference, right? Is that, um, something else? We didn't talk about this in terms of like the, the approaches of, of the most successful athletes is that.

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  They don't just say, I want to be like LeBron or Kobe. They say, what did he do?

• 2:06:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  What can I do? So they focus on the process, right?

• 2:06:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  You have to love and focus on the process because you you can't guarantee a certain outcome, right? So like in, and I talk about this, I talk about this in the book and I give the example of the 2012 Olympics, right? The, the guys who came second, third and fourth ran personal best times. Like several other national records were set during the, during like the whole hundred meter sprint competition, all the different rounds. But like Usain Bolt ran, right? And so like, you could, like, no, you, you can be the best you've ever been and be amazing. Like you can run fast enough to have won a gold medal any other year, but like sometimes you're out of luck because Usain Bolt shows up.

• 2:07:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  So like, you've got to focus on the process because you can't guarantee the outcome. But by focusing on the process, right? You're gonna get, you're gonna get much closer.

• 2:07:13Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  It's gonna be tough.

• 2:07:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, yeah, but I mean, that's always been the case. That's the thing in championship level fighting, you find that when 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. They, they want, it wind up, winds up being a very competitive contender class.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:50Joe Rogan?

  Underneath it and much more competitive than divisions that are not being dominated by elite fighters.

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. You, it's a very large book, right? 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?

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

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

• 2:08:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you just tricked me. Look at this, folks. I was saying this is a really large book. It's a fucking empty book.

• 2:08:18Speaker 03

  So the-

• 2:08:19Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:08:19Speaker 03

  The different-

• 2:08:20Joe Rogan?

  I read this, I'm like, maybe it's a trick.

• 2:08:22Speaker 03

  The, oh, yeah, you're just not paying attention enough. The, um, the book is as thick as the real one will be.

• 2:08:28Joe Rogan?

  I believe you.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  So, um, and that that's on purpose.

• 2:08:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:08:39Speaker 03

  Well, um, once, once the, uh, once the full thing is printed, we'll send you a real one.

• 2:08:44Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:44Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:08:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:08:47Speaker 03

  So the, like, the first, the first part of the book is about, um, 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. It's like, why we think about, um, Alzheimer's disease as just being like the accumulation of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which people might have heard of, right? That's what it's been boiled down to, when there's actually a much bigger picture of many other things that, that are important.

• 2:09:13Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't the, was it Alzheimer's where the amyloid plaque, where that idea was sort of proven to be a little bit bullshit?

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  So there have been a, so, uh, not really, but kind of. So there were several seminal papers in-

• 2:09:32Joe Rogan?

  They were hoaxed, right?

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  They, they were manipulated in some way, right? They, and this is, this unfortunately is quite common where you, you change the figures, you manipulate these blots to make them show different things, and you kind of move them around and copy and paste. And it kind of shows what you want to show. And so like for some of the like seminal papers in Alzheimer's, that, that turned out to be the case. But it, it, it doesn't like discount the fact that it's still, still a part of it. Um, but people have increasingly looked away from just the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain for, for two reasons. One is that-

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  We had, as a field, they had to create new ideas like resilience. And there's this thing called cognitive resilience, which is how much cognitive function do you maintain in the face of these proteins building up in the brain? And that's because the amount of amyloid you have in your brain doesn't really predict cognitive function and cognitive decline that well. So some of that is related to other things. So we know that like exercise is an important part of that. And then we know that there are these other things that are important as well. So inflammation, other cells in the brain that become critical. So like the white matter is a really critical structure in the brain.

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  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 kind of dependent on white matter structure. And that seems to be really related to like vascular function, vascular health, resistance training is really important to support that. So like all these other things become important as well. So like, that's kind of the, it's just showing, like the first part of the book is saying, hey, we kind of focused a lot here, but actually, that's, it's not that's not important, but like this 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, then, you know, I talk about all the different types of exercise, how different types of exercise affects different parts of the brain in different ways.

• 2:11:31Speaker 03

  Nutrition, talk a lot about cognitive stimulus, social connection, sleep, like I said, stress management and stress mitigation and how you can kind of manage your performance in the moment. And then all of that comes together in terms of, into like a model that I call the three S model of how these different like things kind of interact and affect you on a day-to-day basis. So the, the first S being stimulus, right? We've talked about all the reasons why that's, 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 neurons and the astrocytes there, they ask for more

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  blood flow. So 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. And so you need really good cardiovascular health. That's critical. So that's, that's a big part of what we talk about. You also need good metabolic health. So, 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 your energy. And then there's a bunch of nutrients that are important in that bucket as well. So omega threes, vitamin D, iron, magnesium, because they have very, are 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

• 2:13:00Speaker 03

  and dementia. And then you've stimulated a part of the brain, you've kind of given it all the substrate it needs to do its job. Like we've talked about, adaptation occurs and function and gets enhanced when we sleep or when we recover. So like that's, support is the third bucket. So sleep is a part of that. Other support you might get like hormonal status is important. Trophic factors, right? 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 kind of inhibit that process. So chronic stress can do that. It creates like an overtraining kind of picture in the brain. Smoking, excess

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  of alcohol, air pollution, those kinds of things can, can have a negative effect. So that's how, that's how they all interact. And the fact that they interact means that depending on what feels most impactful to you, like what's the thing that you think you can move the needle on? By focusing on one area, the whole network starts to shift. And we see that in, in multiple different studies. So. If you focus on sleep and you sleep a bit better, then the next, then we see that like inflammation decreases and blood pressure improves and blood sugar improves. And the next day you feel more sociable, so you're more likely to interact with other people in a friendly way. And you're more likely to engage in cognitively stimulating tasks because when we're tired, we kind of shy away from those things.

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  And it's the same if you, so there were 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 afterwards. The same if you exercise more, you sleep better. So the, it's not like this long list of things that everybody has to do. And because when you give somebody a list of thirty seven things, they'll do zero things. Right, we know that.

• 2:14:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Speaker 03

  So if you, if you just know that they all kind of communicate and interact, anywhere you come in, you can start to kind of shift things in your favor.

• 2:14:59Joe Rogan?

  Now, when you're compiling a book like this, I would imagine there's a lot of editing. And so how do you decide like what to leave? And 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 three hundred page book.

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  The final, the final book is about four hundred and fifty pages. Hundred and sixty five thousand words.

• 2:15:16Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:15:17Speaker 03

  And the, the reference list, I like, so unlike most health books, every time I make like a, a statement or I mention a study, there's a little number and that, that gives you the paper or papers that I'm talking about that supports that. Right. It's two thousand papers long. And so like that all has to go online because they couldn't.

• 2:15:39Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:15:39Speaker 03

  They couldn't afford to print it in the book.

• 2:15:42Joe Rogan?

  But that's probably better anyway.

• 2:15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, like, cause like, there's like seven people who will, who will do that.

• 2:15:47Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:15:47Speaker 03

  They'll read the book.

• 2:15:48Joe Rogan?

  That's exactly what I was gonna say, yeah.

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  And then, and then they'll go and look.

• 2:15:50Joe Rogan?

  Psychos.

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so, so it's important to me, like, anyway.

• 2:15:54Joe Rogan?

  As a scientist.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, people who want to do that can do that. But in, I'm not quite sure how it ended up being this way, but I, I actually had to cut very little. But there were things where I kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole and my editor was like, nah, I'm not sure we really need this. But I basically wrote until I got to the word limit and then and then I stopped. And I focused on the things that I knew that were important and were going to stay important even in the age of AI. And as technology improves and changes. So there wasn't a ton that that ended up getting cut out.

• 2:16:33Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:16:43Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:16:47Speaker 03

  When.

• 2:16:50Speaker 03

  When I started. When I started writing, I actually saw I'm gonna disagree with my former self. Like the first I I I wrote the I wrote the first part of the book like three times. And like the first time I wrote it, it was like forty thousand words, all focused on psychology and like super like esoteric and academic. And I was like, nobody's gonna read this. So like had to be scratched a couple of times. So then.

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  The 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. And then then there's just like a then there's an introduction to like, like, why should you care about this? Like.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  For like in individuals over forty, dementia is the the most important health concern, right? More than ten percent say they've experienced changes in cognitive function.

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  We know that the rates of dementia are gonna double or triple in the next two or three decades. Like, so why do people care about this? And like some some history there. And then the middle part is, which I always knew I was gonna write, these are the most important things. And they're always going to remain the most important things. And then the last chapter is sort of like just kind of bringing it together. Does that answer your question?

• 2:18:10Joe Rogan?

  It does, 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.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:23Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:18:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:18:38Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:18:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:51Joe Rogan?

  So many people experience cognitive decline because of atrophy.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so it's, um, that's kind of like the, the, the worst possible end state we want to avoid.

• 2:19:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:02Speaker 03

  But you want to maintain your current level of cognitive function for as long as possible.

• 2:19:08Joe Rogan?

  And possibly improve it.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  And possibly improve it. And there is evidence you can improve it even later in life. And so a big part of this is that when you, right, you know, earlier we talked about, you know, this graph of cognitive function, right? It increases to sort of 20 or 30 and then it declines. When we're doing studies that show that kind of 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 like, you plot them all on a graph. And yeah, as, as you get, as you sort of increase in age, there are some people who are going to lose function and you kind of like draw the average down. But we've known essentially since, 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.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  So like, um, the Seattle Longitudinal Study was run by a guy called Warner Shai in Seattle. And it was one of the first studies where they measured cognitive function in the same people every seven years for several decades. And like every seven years, they measured the same people and brought in new people. And so they ended up with people who were like in their twenties up to over a hundred years old. And 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. And 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.

• 2:20:35Speaker 03

  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. So you're like, oh, I'm too old to lift that. I'm too old to learn a new skill. You know, I don't have time to do that. And as a result, right, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. 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.

• 2:21:06Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm recording it at the moment.

• 2:21:12Joe Rogan?

  All right. When will that be available?

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  Be out on the same day, March 24th.

• 2:21:15Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 2:21:27Joe Rogan?

  Thank you very much. I think it's really important information, too. And I think it's something that everyone should apply.

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:21:32Joe Rogan?

  All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 2:21:49Joe Rogan?

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