How to Reverse Cognitive Decline and Future Proof Your Brain with Dr. Tommy Wood

Stop believing the story that your brain has an expiration date after age 40.

I just sat down with Dr. Tommy Wood.

He is a neuroscientist and MD who consults elite performers from Olympians to Formula One athletes.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why brain fog is a critical neurological warning sign that is 100% reversible.

• The exact “minimum effective dose” of exercise—just two sessions a week—to stall brain tissue loss.

• How environmental toxins like microplastics and mold are silently handicap-pitting your daily cognitive performance.

We dive into the details later in the conversation.

If you like the episode, please subscribe.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
7:09 Key Habits for Optimal Brain Health
16:09 Environmental Factors Affecting Brain Health
22:38 Exploring Brain Fog: Causes and Solutions
30:14 Impact of Mold and Microplastics
43:36 Cholesterol: The Good, The Bad, and The Confusing
48:56 Exercise: Maximizing Brain Health in Busy Lives
52:50 Nicotine: A Controversial Neuroprotective Tool
57:47 Mindset and Health Optimization
1:03:28 Cognitive Function: Use It or Lose It
1:14:26 Advances in Brain Stimulation Technologies

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Here’s the full transcript:

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (00:00.078)

If I say that dementia is preventable, then what people hear is, well if I got dementia that means it’s my fault. That’s not what I’m saying. Most of the people who have had dementia historically had no idea that there were things that they could do to decrease their risk of dementia. Today’s guest is Dr. Tommy Wood, a neuroscientist and MD who has spent over a decade consulting the world’s most elite performers from Olympians to Formula One athletes. As the author of The Stimulated Mind, Future Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age, this episode explores how to stop

and reverse cognitive decline before it is too late. We explore why the stories we tell ourselves on a daily basis are often completely false, why brain fog is actually a neurological warning sign, the physiological cost of loneliness, and the truth about how we are over-optimizing our lives into a state of total frailty. But first, I asked Dr. Wood a very specific question. If somebody wants to make their brain perform as optimally as possible, what should they do? What I would do is...

Welcome to That One Time with Adam Metwally, the podcast bridging the gap between health, hustle and happiness. We are at podcasts for a while in Chelsea, New York City, and I’m with Dr. Tommy Wood, neuroscientist and MD and author of the up and coming book, The Stimulated Mind, that looks at improving cognitive function and preventing cognitive decline available.

March 24th, 2026. Hello, how are Hello, I’m good, thanks. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on, man. So what are the key habits that a brain expert believes are killing us? And why should we stop them before 40? I’ll start by saying that in reality, there’s no real hard cutoff point in terms of age for anything. Often we think about the fact that

As we get older, we have to do things differently or the brain is no longer capable of doing certain things. And that’s much more a story that we tell ourselves rather than any kind of reality. And the brain is capable of improving its function, improving itself pretty much at any time. Except for maybe once we’ve really gone very far down the road of cognitive decline and dementia, that’s probably going to be much harder to do. But before then, at any time, the cutoff doesn’t have to be 40.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (02:19.086)

So whatever age you are now, you can get started. The main things that really move the needle on cognitive function, and so the way you phrase your question is almost like, if I wanted to have my brain perform as poorly as possible and deteriorate as fast as possible, what would I do? That’s correct. That’s a way better way to frame that question. And so what I would do is I would lay sort

prostrate on the couch all day, every day and not move at all. I would sleep very little and at just kind of like random times of day, like I have no real structure to it. I would eat a standard American diet, highly processed foods, very calorie dense, very nutrient poor and I would overeat it.

such that I would have metabolic disease, diabetes. And then while I was doing all of that, I would make sure that I wasn’t engaging my brain in anything difficult. I would probably just scroll TikTok all day or watch TV or do nothing at all. Now, of course, for that last bit, those things are not inherently bad, right?

I enjoy a good NetWatch binge session like the next person, but it’s the absence of that like really difficult things. No learning, no skill development, not engaging in anything that’s like cognitive difficult. It’s more not doing that that’s most important rather than what you’re doing instead of it. You tick all of those boxes. and I would also do this alone at home without any friends. And if you do that,

That’s a pretty good recipe for cognitive decline. Assuming I’m doing all these things, what am I actually doing to my body on a physiological basis? A lot of the core mechanisms will revolve around worsening cardiovascular health and worsening metabolic health. So you’ll have high blood sugar, which is bad for pretty much every organ, including the brain.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (04:43.218)

and you’ll have high blood pressure, which is also bad for the heart, for the brain. They are intimately connected. Then you’re probably going to activate a chronic low-level stress and inflammatory response, both because of the absence of physical activity and the diet, but then because of the loneliness that is part of that if you’re just like at home alone, especially if you create a scenario where you feel lonely, right?

that actually creates a physiological response that generates chronic stress and chronic inflammation. And that seems to contribute to why loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk of number of diseases, including dementia. So it’s that. And then at the same time, because of the diet that I prescribed, you don’t have the basic building blocks for neurons, the mitochondria that generate the energy in those neurons.

And because of that, we sort of triage things. the body will take those nutrients where they’re probably more needed. The heart and the liver are still going to have to do their thing, even if you’re not sat doing anything with your brain. So you will use those nutrients elsewhere, and you’ll probably see a loss of brain tissue eventually because of that, because you just don’t have the basic building blocks to run it. So that’s kind of like the picture of what you would expect to see.

Quick side note, what’s the difference between being alone and feeling lonely on a neurological basis? Yeah, that’s great question. basically the difference is, there’s like quantity versus quality. So you can be relatively alone, or you can be alone, truly alone, but not feel lonely. this is sort of integrated over long time scales.

It’s okay to be alone for periods and that might actually be a good thing. Right, it allows maybe you’re going to get more time to have some introspection, actually focus on your own thoughts. That’s certainly a good thing. But over long periods of time, if you are alone and you feel lonely, it’s really the loneliness that’s the primary driver here. So if you have one or two really good social connections, you know, in the grand scheme of things, you are relatively alone.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (07:08.92)

but you may never feel lonely. different people have different requirements here. people will talk about introverts versus extroverts, right? That doesn’t necessarily, those labels don’t fully translate to the number of people you need to be connected to in terms of whether you feel lonely or not. But you may need very few social connections in order to not feel lonely, whereas other people may need a lot. So it’s really making sure that you don’t feel

Like you don’t have anybody and that loneliness is not necessarily driven by who’s in front of you right now. It’s do I have access to these people? Do I have people who can support me when I need it? That’s really a big part of it as well. And it’s that gives you this sort of social information that the brain uses to kind of set certain things that then can impact our health. Now flipping the script a little bit away from

the things that are killing us. What would an ideal day look like, assuming you still have to work eight hours and sleep eight hours for optimum brain health? If I could get rid of one thing from social media, it’s that here’s your ideal day. Here’s the morning routine you have to do all that kind of stuff. Most of the stuff’s complete nonsense. Not necessary in any way. What is necessary? Yeah, I’m getting there.

But it’s going to be important to have some kind of routine probably. And we could start with some sort of good regular period of sleep. So enough sleep. And I start there because if you do work an eight hour day and you have kids who have to get to school or some other responsibilities around that, then you probably have a fixed waking up time. Not many people in the grand scheme of things can just like wake up whenever they want.

It’s a very nice thing to be able to have, not a lot of people have that. So if you have to get up at a specific time, then you know when you’re going to wake up. You know the end of your sleep period. So then you might think, well, if I’m going to try and get seven hours sleep, say, that’s what you need to feel good and rested. And that’s a little bit different for everybody. And it also changes over time. Then you probably need a bit more than that in order to.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (09:37.994)

get actual, that actual seven hours of sleep, right? You don’t get into bed for seven hours and automatically sleep for seven hours. You probably might want to add like 30 minutes to 60 minutes on top of that. So if you’re going to get up at 6 a.m. and you want to sleep at seven hours, give yourself eight hours of sleep opportunity. So you need to be in bed by 10. So, and have that be relatively regular. Like you don’t have be super strict about it, but just like, if that’s similar every day, that seems to be beneficial.

Then sort of like if we go into the day, during the day at some point, I would want to do these things. I would want to make sure that I have some kind of nutritious foods that meet my calorie needs, which is sounds kind of vague, but that’s essentially it. That’s the diet rule. That’s it. And if you want to have that as three meals, great.

It’s harder to do if you only have it as one meal, but that’s possible. Why is one meal not as good as, say, three meals? There is some interesting data where they’ve compared number of meals a day. And if you compare three meals to one meal, one meal may be associated with slightly worse metabolic health outcomes. It’s probably a little bit of a gray area. Some people feel amazing eating one meal a day.

Do you less vitamins? do you absorb less of the vitamins? That’s the main issue. Not necessarily that you get less, although certain nutrients do kind of interact and they can interfere with each other. But you get fewer opportunities to get enough of that stuff in. So if you’re trying to eat 3000 calories in one sitting, that’s a lot of food. And so this often happens with athletes is that one of the reasons you may need to be really mindful of when you eat.

is just that you can get in enough food, that’s enough vitamins, but also enough protein, enough total calories. So people who are very active, but it will also restrict their eating window in some way, are often at risk of not eating enough. But if that’s not you, then that’s not necessarily something you have to worry about. So just getting enough in is, that’s it. Then I would have some kind of movement built into the day.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (11:58.126)

And even if that’s just like a 30 minute walk, if it’s every hour or two, you go stand up, walk around, take a few stairs, five minutes. If it’s a structured gym session, dance class, great, ideal. But like minimum would be just like that you move regularly during the day. Or you just like break, or at least break up extended periods of sitting. And then I would, assuming that you’re a knowledge worker, right? So you’re sat at a desk all day.

I would try and structure the day so that you can get the stuff that you really need to get done, done, and really focus on stuff. And then move some of the busy work, the multitasking, the meetings to another part of the day, just so you can feel productive at the end of the day. one of the, well, two of the things that sort of cause this chronic stress that some of us can feel around work, one is a loss of control over our day.

So if we build in a bit of structure, we can get some of that control back, which is certainly seems to be beneficial from several studies. And then the other one is that we feel stress if we’re not actually doing the things that we need to do. We might feel busy all day, but we haven’t actually done this one piece of work that’s really important. So if you prioritize that, and one nice way to do it is think about when do you feel most alert and focused during the day? How do you know that?

So there are a number of ways to do this. One is you just think about it. Everybody will probably appreciate that there’s some part of the day where they feel more alert. And it could be first thing in the morning. It could be mid-morning. Maybe it’s 10 o’clock at night. Mine is like, I just get my best work done at midnight. And I sleep like shit and I’m up early and I just don’t fit. So ideally, you could do both, right? And if you can work late at that time,

And a lot people do get that kind of second wind late at night and still sleep well, then that’s great. But if you can’t, then you might try and shift that period to a different time just so that you can get better sleep. So it kind of like, it depends on your own. And so some of this is driven by chronotype. And you can do a test for chronotype. So I actually have a questionnaire in my book that sort of asks how people think about these things to kind of determine maybe when they might work best during the day.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (14:23.16)

Cronotype is also driven by the environment. So if- chronotype’s legit? Yeah, chronotype is legit. It’s largely driven by genetics. There’s a book. There’s a good book for it, isn’t there? The Power of When? The Power of When, yeah, yeah. So that’s Michael Breas. Yeah. I mean, I’m not necessarily certain that I would have to have people identify as dolphins or lions or bears. But there’s certainly-

some element of like some genetic element of when we feel most alert. However, it’s probably not as fixed as we think it is. And there are some some nice studies that were done out of the University of Colorado where they took and at two different times a year, one in the summer and one in the winter, they took people out into the wilderness and had them go camping with no artificial lights. And what they found was that everybody’s circadian rhythm and chronotype started, you know, within a couple of weeks started to be

more similar to one another. really? So it’s a community thing. Well, it’s partly a community thing, but it’s basically, it’s largely driven by light exposure. So when you’re out in the wilderness, you get exposed to natural light. Sunlight during the day, true darkness at night. so the melatonin pattern started to shift. So what happened is people who were night owls started to look more like morning larks. Interesting. a lot of...

And when they did it in the winter and it’s darker for longer, then that sort of like dark period with high levels of melatonin became longer. Cause again, it was driven by the darkness. So yes, chronotype is a thing. It has a genetic component, but a lot of people who say, you know, I’m a night owl. It’s like, yeah, you’re a night owl because you’re sat at home with these bright lights shining on you at 10 PM. it’s driven by the environment. So some of this is malleable as well.

just kind of depend on your own individual environment. So you can shift it if you choose to. And so like we’ve structured the work day and then yeah, think having like doing some hard thing with your brain during the day is going to be an important part of that. That could be at work. It could be a skill or class or a new thing that you’re learning. But just, you know, 20 or 30 minutes just like you do with your body if you go do an exercise class, just like do something difficult.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (16:48.045)

with your brain, I think that’s been really important. Something I was thinking, I recently went upstate for five, six nights, five nights by myself. And I found that I was still going to bed at one, two in the morning, even though I was barely spending time on my computer. naturally. So that could be, that could be, that could be part of your, your crowning time, but over longer periods of time, especially if you didn’t have artificial lights. Had everything super dim. It was only really dim lights and fire. Yeah. Okay.

So like I said, some of it is kind of baked into, you know, baked into us individually. And then some of it is kind of layered on top of it is the, like the modern light environment. Yeah, it definitely doesn’t help. So on that note, speaking of the modern environment, what are some environmental toxins that are speeding up the decline of the brain right now? Probably the most common one is air pollution. what do do about that though? Yeah. this is why it’s really tricky to talk about it because

Like most people can’t be like, well, I have the finances opportunity to just like move into the mountains and that’s where I can do my job. So there are a few things that you can do.

One is have an air filter. Do you like a specific style? I don’t. Mainly because anything is better than nothing. Especially if you live in a very densely populated or you have a lot of traffic, road pollution nearby. Or you live somewhere near a factory or a plant or something that’s releasing stuff into the air. There was a really interesting study

recently where they just had people put an air purifier into the rooms that they spent most of their time, if they had high blood pressure and they had was significant reductions in blood pressure in that group compared to a control group. Wow. that’s one of the, so how it affects blood pressure and oxidative stress and other things and potentially inflammation. That’s one way that air pollution is negatively impacting our health. Another thing,

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (18:56.488)

not a randomized controlled trial, but quite a nice and interesting study. And because it aligns with other things that I’d recommend anyway, there was a study at the University of Washington that looked at air pollution exposure, so particularly particular air pollution, like the 2.5 micron, you’ll kind of see that when people write about this stuff in the news. People who were exposed to more of that type of particular air pollution had a higher risk of dementia, but only if they had low

intake of B vitamins. So those who had high exposure but took in lots of B12 and folate seem to have less of a risk. So again, it’s not a randomized trial, but I’m going to tell you to take enough B vitamins anyway. So what is enough? Even just like hitting the recommended daily allowance is a good start. But ideally what people would do is measure the levels of something called homocysteine.

in their blood, which actually any doctor can do. It’s not a particularly fancy or expensive test. And that basically tells you something about methylation as well as B vitamin status. And in studies that have looked at people either with who are beginning to have cognitive decline or a high risk of cognitive decline who have high homocysteine, if you supplement with just like a super cheap, the most basic B vitamin, again, not even anything fancy, you decrease homocysteine.

The ideal level for brain health is to get it least below 11. And then you slow the rates of both concave decline and loss of brain tissue. So again, it’s just like getting the basics done can have a really big impact. What’s your ideal daily routine look like? So for me personally, so what I do. So yeah, guess kind of going through. Is it that? Yeah, so it’s actually very similar to that.

I wake up at six every morning. The dogs get me up at six every morning. So I want nine hours of sleep opportunity so that I can get eight hours of sleep. So I go to bed at nine. That’s kind of my target. I wake up at six, the dogs out, have a cup of coffee. I usually start my work day around seven, mainly because I have a lot of people that I work with on the East coast or in Europe. So if I wanna have meetings with them then, because I live in Seattle, so I need to start work early.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (21:22.854)

I will, so sometimes I’ll have some early meetings. I’ll try and block off at least an hour or two in the morning to do sort of my focused work. Cause that’s when I, I work best on like a sort of a difficult, like difficult tasks. Then I’ll usually have breakfast sometime between eight and nine lunch between 12 and one then around three, usually between three and four.

I’ll try and stop for the day, work out, then cook dinner, and then have dinner with my wife. And try, like most days, try not to do any work in the evening. So try and keep it, like, really, even though could have a 24-7 job, I do have a 24-7 job, they could truly be 24-7. So I try and, like, really, as much as possible, put it into that defined period. Why do you do that? Mainly because if I work late in the, well,

If I work late in the evening, I don’t spend any time with my wife. If I late in the evening, I don’t sleep as well because I’m constantly thinking about the work that I was just doing. For me, it’s very noticeable. When there are times when I’ve got a deadline or something I have to do and I work in the evening, I’m much more likely to ruminate before I go to bed. And it’s not even like, because I’m worried about something, I’m just like thinking about that work that I was doing. Is there a good cutoff? What’s the bare minimum cutoff to get a valuable break before bed? Yeah.

some people can just like switch off really quickly. For me, it’s probably, and so like, as long as I’m not in that kind of state, like I fall asleep very quickly. If I’m in bed, I start reading a book two minutes in, I’m like, I’m down. So I’m, know, not everybody’s that lucky necessarily, but you know, like an hour or two is probably good for me. But this is why I try and have this like very defined sort of, I have a defined cut off in the afternoon. Then I do things that,

forced me to not do work. I don’t think about that. So I create this separation with a workout and then cooking dinner. And I think that really helps. leads then into being able to relax before bed. Makes sense. Do you work out late? So I work out usually between 3 and 5. What’s too late to work out? Too late depends on the type of activity. So if...

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (23:50.318)

And maybe the environment a little bit as well. So if you’re in the gym, super bright lights and it’s right before bed, that’s gonna suppress melatonin a little bit. That might make it a little bit hard to get to sleep. But exercise probably only really affects sleep if it’s within like an hour or two and it’s really intense. Okay. What’s like the definition of in...

really intense in this situation. Yeah. So if you went and you were just doing like a really, really hard sprint workout, a really, really hard, you know, long run, um, you know, maybe even like, like zone four and above or zone three. Yes. So, um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s in that kind of, it’s in that kind of area. Um, probably zone four, zone five for an extended period of time. Um, it’s going to increase heart rate. It’s going to increase body temperature for a long period of time. That’s going to prevent you getting sleep.

If you go for light jog, brisk walk, maybe even like a regular sort of resistance training workout, dance class, bring out the dance class again. Probably all of that is fine even within an hour or two of bed. Yeah, gotcha. I wanna switch gears to the concept of brain fog. Cause I know a lot of people experience this and what are the causes of it?

I it can basically be almost anything. That’s part of the issue. So brain fog has a lot of overlap. So brain fog, there are some like questionnaires and like validated questionnaires for brain fog. But as an idea, it’s relatively new sort of in neuroscience and in neurology. So is there any basis? Is there any actual basis of reality to brain fog? Yeah, absolutely.

the subjective experience of a change in cognitive function or mood can certainly fit into that. So it overlaps a lot with what has been around for a while longer, which is called subjective cognitive decline. They’re not fully the same thing, but they have a lot of very similar. So like when somebody says I have brain fog, you might go to when you’re on a day where you have what we would call subjective cognitive decline, which is basically you have noticed

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (26:07.79)

that your brain doesn’t function like it used to. And it could be difficulties with word finding, changes in memory. It could be a more depressed mood. Some people might be more anxiety. It might be poor sleep. So a lot of these things also overlap with symptoms of burnout, which are equally diverse, depending on the individual. so if we think about

Sometimes people like to put a formal, is it brain forward or is subject to decline? I think a lot of it is essentially like the warning light in your brain saying something’s not quite right. when you look at subjective cognitive decline, it’s kind of built into these diagnostic pathways of how much has your cognitive function changed, and eventually that can become bad enough that we’d call it dementia.

At the stage of subjective cognitive decline, I could do a cognitive test on you and you would look just fine. You haven’t lost, you still are in the normal range. you have the brain scans of a monkey. So it’s really only you that’s noticed it. Sometimes maybe your close loved one would notice something’s just a little bit off. Most.

So if you experience subjective cognitive decline, you have an increased risk of later dementia. But it’s not definite, right? Most people who have subjective cognitive decline don’t go on to get dementia, but the risk is increased. But it’s generally considered that subjective cognitive decline, or we could call this brain fog, because I think a lot of times we’re talking about the same thing, those are probably completely reversible if you kind of put everything in the right place.

So then it’s the case of thinking about what could be having an effect here. And so all the stuff we’ve talked about so far, the absence of that or the presence of that, depending on what it is, could be contributing. So some of it may be some kind of inflammatory or stress response. A lot of people experience brain fog after COVID. Some of that could be driven by the virus itself. Some of it can be driven by

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (28:22.998)

like the fact that we lost a sense of smell and we know that when our senses change, can change how our brain works. Some of it can be a downstream effect of being socially isolated and loss of certain stimuli. So the stimuli basically gives your brain new neural pathways, which then alleviates brain fog? Is a crude way to think about it? I mean, the presence of brain fog is because of the opposite, right? It’s not getting these normal stimuli that help maintain function.

And so because of that function changes. So if you don’t use it, you lose it kind of scenario. That is essentially the whole thesis. That’s the whole thesis of my work. But you know, it could be other things like, or maybe it’s exposures that you’re getting. Like maybe it’s other things in the environment, air pollution, maybe other things that are causing you to have poor sleep. I think a lot of this is going to overlap with symptoms of burnout. know, that’s loss of control in the work environment.

you know, feeling constantly stressed, that’s impacting sleep. So like, only you will know which of the things I just mentioned feels relevant to you. But any of those, I think, could create this confluence of this feeling of brain fog. And sometimes you won’t be able to identify it. So you might need some other blood tests or something like that. one thing that I do think is important is appreciating that this is something worth paying attention to.

So often you’ll hear people kind of poo poo brain fog. Because it’s not a scientific or like a clinical diagnosis. Like it’s a bit vague because it’s different from person to person. But your brain is constantly integrating everything that you’re exposed to, everything that’s happening in your body. And if that output is, like you just feel really fuzzy and you can’t remember things as well, or you feel like you’re not as fluent like when you’re speaking, any of that, right? That’s a meaningful thing that you should.

pay attention to. So if anybody says, brain fog is not a real thing, I would just say, well, that’s probably not true. Something’s going on. It might be difficult to figure out what it is. Maybe some of it is psychological. Maybe some of it is psychiatric. There are lots of different reasons for it. But it’s definitely worth paying attention to. What is making it so much more prevalent in society now? Well, the thing is that I don’t actually know if it is more prevalent. It seems subjectively that.

Metwally — That One Time Podcast (30:51.458)

more and more people complain about things like this. Yeah. it could, so some of that could be the total burden of things that we’re exposed to, right? So the environmental burdens or so I’m, I’m, mainly thinking cognitive and psychological burdens. They’re certainly different than what we might normally be adapted to. So historically humans, mean, life has always been hard and stressful.

But we now have these sort of like chronic, ill-defined things that we have to deal with. The work environment can be very stressful. Certainly, I don’t think social isolation helped during COVID, if that was a trigger for some people. And like we already talked about, being constantly overstimulated, like distracted, dealing with multiple things at the same time, your brain never really gets a chance to recover.

you don’t get a chance to do like really difficult things that can be beneficial for the brain, but you don’t get a chance to like recover in any way. Cause you’re just like constantly on in some way. And so I think that that might, that might be part of it. But another part of it, and this is, this is actually the case with a lot of neurological diagnoses, not that brain fog is one, but you know, when we’re thinking about our brains is that you may be historically people would just like brush it off and be like, there’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t worry about it. Or like,

you’re sort of people are encouraged not to complain historically, whereas now people are much more open to talk about like when they’re struggling. So some of it could just be that somebody is now willing to tell you that they have brain fog, which they wouldn’t have been 10 years ago. So that could be part of it as well. How much of that is actually useful talking about it in this scenario versus just the placebo effect of saying it’s not there and then it kind of goes away? Yes. So like both of those are important. I think

If it allows you to pay attention to it, maybe measure some things, think about some things, change some things, then I think it can be helpful. But if you constantly tell yourself, I can’t do this, I brain fog, my brain doesn’t work properly, you will manifest that outcome because you will stop doing the things that are really important for your brain. So I think you can definitely get to a point where being so focused on this idea that, my brain doesn’t work well.

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you will then, because of that, do things that could help your brain work well. And then as a result, your brain won’t work as well. So useful to pay attention to, but sometimes it’s also useful to know that you can still perform even when you don’t feel at your best. And it’s really important to still engage in all of those things, because those are the things that will maybe get you to the other side of it. Makes sense. So what are some steps that can be taken to reverse it if you feel like you do have brain fog?

Yeah, in reality, it’s just a little bit of a, you start with just a bit of a mental checklist of all the things that we’ve talked about. I think for a lot of people, it’s going to be related to chronic stressors, work stressors, the work environment, maybe effects on their sleep. It could be related to your nutrient status. It could be related to your being relatively sedentary, which can certainly like, even in

just within a few hours that can affect cognitive function that can compound over time. So then it’s just thinking about of all the things that we’ve mentioned, which of these kind of feels like something that, what changed in the past year or two? And maybe there’s a bit of a lag, right? What changed in the last year or two that seems to have proceeded some of these things? Doing a bit of an inventory, and then thinking about

where can I start to make changes? And some of it is worth just thinking about for yourself. We know what actually maybe some of the getting to the other side of this is to actually engage in some of these other things again, or new things, physical activity, changing your diet, focusing on sleep again, trying to build some control into your work environment. It will just kind of depend on what you’ve experienced and trying to tie those things together. Just quickly though.

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and they’ll also provide the podcast a small kickback. These are two very easy ways for you to support us as we continue to grow the podcast that we absolutely love doing. Thank you for your support and I’m back to the episode. I wanted to talk about an experience I’ve been having actually around brain fog. So I recently found out I was exposed to mold and have

gone down the rabbit hole of beginning to detox said mold. And I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had this, but I’m about two and a bit months into this detox, working with a clinic in the city, Extension Health. don’t know if you know those guys, but they do a lot of longevity medicine. And I’ve noticed in month three that my energy levels have increased dramatically. And it feels like

a limiter has been released off my brain that I didn’t know existed. Because I just thought this is what my life was. But now I’m finding in the last few weeks that I’m getting home from a full day of things and having energy to continue to do more things. my fitness is improving, everything’s improving, my recall is improving. I was like, shit.

I’ve been playing life on a handicap that I didn’t even know existed for a really long time. what feedback do you have around this, the mold story? Mold is a really interesting one because it’s another one of those things where I think it’s simultaneously gotten a lot of attention and not enough attention.

There are lots of people, sort of very extreme mold toxicity as described in the scientific literature, black aspergillus releases various toxins that can certainly have a neurological effect. But it’s still relatively poorly understood. So you could certainly imagine.

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why your exposure to something like mold or there are actually lots of different toxins that could be in the environment that could be affecting cognitive function and cognitive decline. But we just haven’t really adequately categorized them all. And that’s something that we need to do a lot more of. And part of the problem has been that we’re always trying to find like the one thing that causes cognitive decline or the one thing that causes dementia. But in reality, it’s probably all of these different things in a different mixture in different people, which is why everybody experiences cognitive decline differently.

I even have close friends, colleagues who have experienced essentially exactly what you said. So how you then, so first of all, know, old buildings where there’s a lot of, a lot of damp, there’s been water damage. This is very common. So that’s something that’s worth definitely worth looking at. If you, you just like know that you’re like moved into a new place and that this is a story with a

a doctor that I know, she and her family moved into a new place and just like, everybody was suddenly sick all the time and they couldn’t figure out why. And then eventually they found that like one wardrobe that was kind of a built-in, like behind it was basically just like all black mold and then they moved and everything completely changed. They felt like better immediately. some of this is just, but yeah, so some of this is just like figuring some of this out. So that could be a factor for some people, but I don’t know how common it is. So.

The other side of it is that, you people who are out there talking about mold, they’re like, we should never be exposed to mold and everything. In anything at all, right? Mold is always bad, it’s always going to be toxic. But humans have been around mold and these, you know, for long periods of time, know, historically forever. So I don’t think that we need to be always worried that mold is going to be bad, right? Mold on food, mold in our coffee.

But like black mold in buildings can certainly have a big effect, but I don’t know how prevalent it is. And then how you detox it. a whole shit show. And there are people out there doing it in really crazy, probably quite unethical ways. What do you mean? Well, just all of the different things that are recommended.

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all of the different supplements, we don’t necessarily know what the best protocols are. And part of it is just people are flying blind, right? It does feel like it. Everyone’s guessing and I just am taking 20 different things a day. I couldn’t tell you, like I feel great, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. I mean, I think, you know, some of the people who’ve done a lot of work in this area, they’ve had a lot of success. Some of this is published, so people have access to some of it.

But again, I think we’re maybe even still just at the beginning of figuring out how to like really get to the bottom of it. Yeah. Well, I think I read a book a while ago. I can’t remember what it was called, but it was basically the argument was that all of the big killers in the modern world are basically from the same cause, which is systemic inflammation. So it seems to be not a far reach to say that something like black mold gets into

all different cellular pathways of your body creates systemic inflammation, which then causes all these other problems. So, and I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but that makes sense. The words sound right. Yeah, it makes sense. That’s half the battle. So, but that being said, microplastics are a very interesting topic at the moment, especially given the concept that they are lodged in components of your body.

everywhere you could find them, and then this idea of systemic inflammation. what’s your understanding around the microplastics impact on the body, on cognitive decline, and what to be done? It’s interesting because microplastics, they’ve become a thing in the past year or two. I mean, just in terms of the public knowledge, but also the scientific knowledge, there have been some

scientific papers that have made a big splash like microplastics in your balls. I was thinking about the one of microplastics in your brain, but microplastics in your balls. both have a good headline. So I think there are a few things going on. One, it’s very unlikely that having a bunch of plastic in your body is a good thing. Right? Like I don’t think, like, don’t think anybody’s going to argue that.

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With plastics come plasticizers and phthalates. We know that they can have effects on cardiovascular disease risk, brain development, brain function. So what the plastic is made of is certainly going to have an effect. But then when you look at some of the estimates of how much plastic, how the microplastics that we’re exposed to, there’s one study that was like, you eat credit cards worth of plastic every week or something like that.

And then another paper came out and said, they put the zeros in the wrong place. And it might be like 100 times less than that. Or maybe it’s somewhere in between. So we’re really just like, So we’re really trying to figure some of this stuff out. If we think about the study that looked at microplastics in the brain, because we’re talking about the brain, again, I think they found several grams in some brains. Well, that’s what they said they found.

and that it was higher in individuals with cognitive decline dementia. But is that correlation or causation? Well, exactly. So there’s a few reasons why it could be correlation, which is that

When you have, so almost everybody who has dementia has some element of blood vessel disease or vascular disease in the brain. And so if you have diseased blood vessels in the brain, then the blood flow isn’t as good. It’s more turbulent. It’s slower. So if you have microplastics in circulation, it’s more likely to get lodged in the walls in the brain, which is like this really, really dense caputin.

capillary network. So some of it could just be that the blood vessels in the brains of people with dementia are the types of blood vessels that more likely to accumulate microplastics if they’re in circulation, rather than the microplastics are there and then they’re causing the problem. One other thing that hasn’t necessarily gotten enough attention is we don’t actually know

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whether that measurement of microplastics in the brain or in most of these studies in parts of the body is correct. Because the way that you measure microplastics in a tissue is you take a piece of tissue and then you expose it something called pyrolysis, which is basically using high heat. You kind of break it down. And then you run it through like chromatography, either liquid chromatography or gas chromatography. I think they use liquid chromatography in these studies.

But basically, when you take most plastics, and most plastics are polymer chains of carbons and hydrogens, when you break them down, a simple chain of carbons and hydrogens looks a lot like a saturated fat, because that’s what saturated fat is. So a lot of what could be being picked up and called microplastics is actually just fat that’s in those cells that’s supposed to be there. And there’s a ton of fat in the brain.

including saturated fat, supposed to be there. And the technique that they use to measure microplastics in tissues can’t differentiate between saturated fats and some of the breakdown products of microplastics. So some people have said that when we’re being told there’s X amount of microplastics in these tissues, they could be over counting because they’re accidentally counting fat as microplastics. So how do you figure this out then?

The answer right now is we don’t know. There’ll probably have to be different techniques to really figure out what’s plastics versus fat. I’m sure some of it is plastics. I’m sure of it. We’re exposed to enough of it. It’s in the air. We breathe it in. It’s in foods. We eat it. Some of it’s going to get across the gut. Some of it’s going to get into the circulation. I’m sure some of it is real. So right now, I think the best bet is to do what you can, but not go crazy about it.

So try and minimize the foods that you eat that are stored in plastic, especially plastic that gets heat stressed or gets hot. don’t eat credit cards. Don’t eat hot credit cards. If you attempted to grill a credit card, don’t do that. I leave this in AMX Platinum because that’s made of metal. So like simple stuff like.

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Don’t microwave your food in plastic. The more food you can just get as whole food that’s not stored in plastic, probably the better. When you’re maybe minimize the amount of nonstick stuff, because especially damaged nonstick pots and pans, they seem to release a lot of microplastics. And then also PFAs, which seem to not be particularly good for us either.

If you’re using cooking utensils, use wood or metal rather than plastic. think those kinds of, you know, some of this stuff and like related compounds can end up in the water, get a basic water filter, just like a basic air filter if you need one, like something that’s probably better than nothing. Even though water in general is very safe, but actually, you know, all of these things kind of are in there. There’s still a lot of lead in certain pipes in certain water systems in the US and UK and other places. So.

I think if you cover some of those basics, you’re gonna minimize most of your exposure and that’s probably gonna have the best kind of effect. Check your water filters as well, cause there’s many britter filters with mold all through them, which is disgusting. Cause what happens is if you have like a water filter in the fridge and then you like, change the filter and then use the same filter for like a year and you never think about changing it. So does BPA free that?

it’s irrelevant, still microplastics are getting into your body and they’re harmful, potentially harmful, we don’t really know yet. Could be fat. So bisphenols do, again, they’re one of the contents of plastics that seem to be associated with worse like cardiovascular outcomes. However, so the one that’s had the most attention is bisphenol A or BPA. The problem is that when something says BPA free,

they usually just use a different bisphenol instead. So yeah, it doesn’t have BPA in it, but it has a different compound that essentially does the same thing. So technically they are not lying when they tell you that it’s BPA free, but they don’t say bisphenol free. So unfortunately all of these, and again, like I wouldn’t go crazy about it, just like control your controllables, like which of these things are you able to minimize? That’s a great place to start.

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Speaking about saturated fat in the brain, I’d love to talk to you about the battle of high cholesterol and brain health and whether it’s fear mongering or it’s relevant. It’s definitely relevant. So high cholesterol is important in the body? Well, so high cholesterol and now we’re thinking LDL cholesterol.

which is actually a proxy for ApoB containing lipoproteins, is a risk factor for dementia and cognitive decline. So that’s the bad cholesterol? the bad cholesterol. I didn’t want to say it because I hate that terminology. Sure. Plus, it’s not the cholesterol that’s the issue. It’s the particle that carries the cholesterol. It’s just that we measure the cholesterol as a proxy for the number of particles, if that makes sense.

So we know that’s risk factor. There’s lots of large population studies show that if you have elevated APOB, and again, that in most people that correlates with a high LDL-C or LDL cholesterol, that’s associated with a higher risk of dementia. though studies that have tried to do cholesterol lowering specifically for dementia prevention haven’t really shown an effect, when you look at big population studies,

it suggests that those with high cholesterol, that’s treated and brought down, their dementia risk is decreased. So again, that’s kind of observational data, but we see both sides. So if you have high APOB, that’s associated with a higher risk. If you have high APOB and that’s treated, that’s associated with a lower risk. And it makes sense because, like I said,

Most people with dementia have diseased blood vessels in their brains. And the accumulation of atherosclerosis, part of that is the accumulation of ApoB in the walls of those blood vessels. So they are part of that process. It’s not the only thing. But certainly, if you have high cardiovascular disease risk, that is also associated with high dementia risk. And above a certain threshold, depending on your risk,

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you know, treating that or making lifestyle changes to decrease upper B levels. We think that’s going to be protective or like will reduce your dementia risk. Okay, that makes sense. I’m quickly, mean, Gemini is not really the best place to get all of your health information, but I’m looking at something called the cholesterol paradox, which suggests that high cholesterol is dangerous for younger people. But

higher cholesterol levels in elderly people is often associated with longer lifespan. And I didn’t read a study, but I saw a headline of a study, which I’m sure, you know, this is the battle you deal with as a doctor dealing with people like me, but that there was a positive correlation with higher cholesterol levels and lifespan. Yeah. So, do you what, that’s actually fairly consistent. That has been seen in multiple population studies. However, there were a few, there were a few potential issues with that.

So if we focus on an individual disease, and so heart disease is the one that’s best understood, we know that there’s a very strong correlation between your upper B levels, or your outer cholesterol levels, and your risk of heart disease at the population level. So on average, people who have higher levels have a higher risk of heart disease. Within an individual, there’s much more variability. And it probably depends a lot on context, other genetics, other aspects of health, other lifestyle factors.

And so this is where some of that message gets lost as we’re taking this big population risk factor. And then somebody is like, well, my cholesterol is really high and I don’t have heart disease. I’m like, well, yeah, because we’re not talking about the same thing here. Other stuff matters too. But when you look at studies that show that high cholesterol is associated with greater longevity, some of it is reverse causation. What does that mean? Yeah.

So was basically, it’s a fancy way of saying that there’s things that kill you that cause you to have low cholesterol. And that’s what’s being picked up. So the cholesterol kind of has nothing to do with it, but the factors around death lower your cholesterol, which kill you. Yeah. So things like cancer and other, and certain chronic inflammatory diseases can decrease cholesterol levels. And then that, right. So then people who have

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who have cancer and that’s been associated with lower cholesterol because the cancer is actually using that cholesterol to like build a tumor. That’s one of the reasons why that can happen. Then people with lower cholesterol, they have something else going on that that’s what kills them, but it looks like low cholesterol is associated with more mortality. The other thing that can happen is that, like I said, there are some people who have high cholesterol and live a long time, right? They don’t get heart disease. But actually,

you’re selecting for the people who live a long time. Survivorship bias. Yeah, so the survivorship bias. So all of this stuff comes into play. cholesterol does have important roles in the body. So it’s not like this useless thing that we have to make as low as possible. Some people do suggest we do that. I’m not sure how much evidence we have for that.

But basically the studies, a lot of the studies that suggest that higher cholesterol is associated with greater longevity are confounded by all these things. They’re just really difficult to unpick. So I’m more confused than when I started on that question. My job here is done. Fair enough. Just quickly on the exercise piece. A lot of the people that listen to this podcast are super busy. I’ve got a lot of founders and entrepreneurs and busy professionals and

If they can only exercise for three to four hours a week, what would be the best use of their time? If they can just not be sitting still for several hours at a time all day, every day. And like we said, like it can be just like super brief breaks. You get up, you walk around for a little bit of something like that, like exercise snacks. You might call it. If you can build those into the day, right? That doesn’t count. It’s your three to five hours. I think that’s really beneficial. I would then have maybe

two to three sessions a week where you do something like 30 to 45 minutes of some kind of aerobic activity. I think if you’re trying to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of brain health, I would have that be some kind of coordinates of exercise. some type of sport or exercise that has... The perfect example is dancing. But it could be a team sport, a ball sport,

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board sport, anything that sort of gets you in an unstable or slightly unpredictable environment, you’re having to constantly react, requires more complex motor skills. If it’s in a social environment, that has a benefit. So badminton, table tennis, pickleball, surfing, skateboarding, martial arts, as long as you’re not getting repeatedly punched in the head, anything like that. That’s going to give you a cardiovascular component and it’s going to give you...

going to give you that sort of like additional brain benefits. Then I would layer on once or twice a week, I lift some weight, some kind of resistance training. Once or twice a week, is that enough? Yes. Yeah. So when you look at studies, both in terms of what it takes to gain muscle mass and strength, what’s associated with greater longevity and lower disease risk,

What’s associated with improvements in brain structure and brain function? The best sort of estimate of a minimum effective dose is probably two times a week. And it can be like just like 30 to 45 minutes. We’re talking, do six machines in the gym that cover all muscle groups, three sets of eight to 12, like the most basic resistance training program. That’s gonna be, that’s the minimum effective dose. That’s gonna be enough. Of course, if you wanna get.

bigger and stronger, you have to do more, but that’s probably going to be enough for most people. And then, you know, once you’re doing all of that, the final piece, I might think about occasionally doing some, you maybe once a week, if you’re depending on what your coordinates of exercise looks like, if it’s, if you’re playing what we would call football or depends if you’re like, not Aussie rules, I’m thinking soccer. Yeah. If that includes like some sprinting and that kind of stuff, maybe you’re getting some of this already, but like some kind of extended

really hard cardio type exercise, some kind of sprints where you just like work really, really hard for a short period of time. Could be anywhere from like 10 seconds to two or three minutes and then take some rest and you do that a couple of times. Lactate does some really interesting things for the brain. So that would be like the final piece I’d layer on. Okay. So lactate is not a negative because you hear a lot of minimizing lactate when you’re exercising. yes. So in terms of being able to perform at a really high level,

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in endurance exercise, yes, your ability to clear lactate can become important and you can train that. lactate is not just this waste product that we’re trying to get rid of. You produce lactate to try and help decrease or buffer some of the acid that gets produced in the muscles like that kind of stuff that causes the burn. Lactate accumulates at the same time, but it’s not lactate that’s causing the burn. your body is actually trying to buffer some of that. That’s why it produces lactate. But lactate...

actually goes into the brain and it activates production of things like brain derived neurodiprophic factor or BDNF, which is like this really important molecule for like helping to support the growth and function of nerves and their connections in the brain. And so one way that exercise supports brain function is by producing lactate, which then goes and stimulates BDNF production in the brain. Wrapping up, I have one more thing in this space that I wanted to talk to you about.

which is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, which is using nicotine as a neuroprotective tool. Love to get your thoughts around this. So some of this idea comes from, well, there’s actually, so a lot of it comes from how nicotine and nicotinergic or codeinergic signaling. And so the reason why nicotine has these effects is because it binds to

A certain type of acetylcholine receptor called a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, named so because nicotine binds to it and activates it. And acetylcholine is really important for things like focus and attention, as well as for memory and coding. like actually information comes in and you start the process of storing it. There’s some epidemiological evidence that suggests that people who smoke have a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease. And that’s thought to be because

that activating those coronary allergic pathways can help to keep some of those dopamine neurons, dopamine neurons that you lose in Parkinson’s can keep them functioning. So in people who are at high risk, that may be beneficial. In individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, one of the ways that that’s treated

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in terms of the symptoms is not nicotine, but it acts along a similar pathway. it’s used colonesterase inhibitors. it’s drugs that stop astrolum from being broken down in the synapse. So it like binds the receptor for longer and keeps that activated. That doesn’t stop the disease process, but it helps with some of the memory and other sort of focus and attention symptoms, at least in the early stages of the disease. So we know that astrolum and those signaling pathways are really important.

for certain parts of cognitive function. we also know that, well, talking about nicotine is tricky because as soon as you talk about nicotine, people assume you’re talking about vaping or smoking or something like that, which have their own negative health effects. But if you just talk about nicotine as a molecule itself, when you give people nicotine in randomized controlled trials, you improve certain aspects of cognitive function, some aspects of focus, working memory.

And this is sort of in the like one to four milligram ish kind of range. Now, though that combination of things has kind of led people to say, well, we could sort of take nicotine chronically to help support long term brain health. But I would say that we don’t necessarily have good evidence for that. So people could use it in a targeted manner if it boosts a specific cognitive function that’s useful, useful for them.

you know, occasionally and sort of, you know, use it in that way. I have no issue with that. However, when we think about these kinds of drugs that affect the brain, you know, often we’ll use this term, nootropic, right? People have heard of that. But nicotine is not a nootropic in the purest version of that word, which has kind of gotten muddied. what’s a nootropic in your mind? So a nootropic is something that boosts cognitive functions.

has minimal side effects and does not create tolerance or dependence. So you don’t start to lose the effect of a certain dose and therefore need more to get the same effect. coffee is not even a nootropic in that case. Coffee is, caffeine is not a nootropic either. The baseline stack of nootropics is like coffee and L-thionine. So it’s not even. Yeah, no. So in terms of the truest definition of nootropic, caffeine is not a nootropic.

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the combination of caffeine and theanine gets closer because L-theanine counteracts some of the negative effects of caffeine. But nicotine creates both tolerance and dependence. So you need a higher dose to get the same effect and you become dependent on it you get withdrawal symptoms. A true nootropic shouldn’t create withdrawal symptoms. And caffeine does as well. So I think if people find that it helps them for short periods of time for a specific task,

I think that’s okay. I feel the same way about coffee, but it’s not something that I’m gonna rely on regularly because there are these other downstream parts of it that don’t necessarily achieve what I want them to. Yeah, I heard something about this and then I bought some nicotine gum and then I had one and then I nearly vomited.

How many milligrams was it? I feel like it had a four. Okay, so four milligrams, that’s a lot. Maybe not. I mean, you can definitely get nicotine with it. So when I’ve had people using this, like you might get a one milligram piece of gum and you start with like a quarter of it. It’s like a quarter of a milligram. That’s like a good starting dose. Let me see. I’ve made me...

Yeah, was four milligrams. I just jumped into a four. That’s a good dose to start with. I felt so ill. And then an hour later, was like, crazy. Wild ride. So I like to wrap up each conversation with some general questions on the philosophy of life. OK. So what has been one of the biggest things you’ve changed your mind on over the last few years? One thing that’s been really impactful for me, and

Some of this came from writing the book and some of it sort of started a bit before that. I think as a general, or maybe I’ll start with a specific example that was more book related and then like the general concept that I think have been kicking around for a little bit longer. I historically, and you can ask my wife, don’t do that well if I don’t sleep well, right? Sleep is really important for like my general function. It’s not the same for everybody, but it is for me.

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But I certainly, I got stuck in this pattern of if I didn’t sleep well, I would assume I wasn’t gonna function well. And I’d like, I’d almost think myself grumpy. I’m like, oh, I didn’t sleep well. So now I’m just gonna be really like cantankerous and I’m gonna struggle today and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It used to be like that too with food if I was hangry. That concept of hangry is bullshit. Yeah. So I also experienced a lot of hangriness back when I was a...

a rower in university and don’t have that issue anymore. But like with a sleep thing, when you look at the literature on the effects of a night of poor sleep, it actually does very little to cognitive function. You’re actually just going to be fine. The brain kind of adapts in certain ways to maintain its function. Now, of course, like sleep is super critical to brain health, right? So I’m not saying that you don’t need to sleep.

Long term. So long term. it’s like an area under the curve thing, which is a fancy way of saying like, it’s the total amount of sleep deprivation over time that’s maybe having an effect. So one night of poor sleep, which often happens, right? Before a big event, before travel, we get anxious. a kid. Yeah, exactly. So one night of sleep deprivation or even two or three nights, you’re probably going to be just fine. Two things are more likely to change. One is mood is more likely to change than...

performance. So you actually perform just as well. just feel grumpier about it. speed decreases before like actual complex performance. So like you might be a bit slower, but the quality of the work that you do is actually just as good. And so when I realized that now I do much better when I don’t sleep because I’m like, well, do you know what? Actually, I’m going to be just fine. But all of that was psychological. And this is, this is one reason why wearables can, can have a

can cause issues with people because they tell you you slept poorly and therefore you perform poorly because you think you slept poorly, but it’s all in your head, essentially. And there are studies that have shown that. But the bigger concept is this idea that by thinking that we have to optimize all these things, we create frailty. Because what happens when those things don’t happen is we’re like, well, I’m not going to perform well. I’m not going to do well. I can’t do well. I didn’t get my

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I didn’t get my supplements in, I didn’t sleep properly, I didn’t get my exercise, right? Therefore I’m not going to perform well. And so actually you’re creating a mindset of frailty when actually you want the opposite. I do all these things most of the time, therefore when things don’t go right, I can perform just fine, right? So it’s flipping that idea that has been really, like really meaningful to me. And then I think that that’s something that people can try and maybe build in themselves as well. Especially if they like spend so much time optimizing.

Just be careful that when you’re optimizing, you’re not building this idea that if you don’t have things being optimal, that you won’t perform. And you won’t perform because you think you won’t perform well, rather than because of anything that happened in the environment. Yeah. I’m probably leaning too far on the optimizing category as well, but I’m starting to optimize a lot less. And it’s been partially in part of living with my roommate, who I’ve seen grow, start a business last year, work full time, start this business on the side, work crazy hours.

in 12 months raise on a $20 million valuation, being the Forbes 30 under 30. And this dude just like locks in for hours and hours on end, exercises sometimes, eats like shit, drinks a ton of coffee. And I’m sitting there, I’m like meditating and full dialed in, you know, exercise routine and diet and all this stuff.

And he’s just leaps and bounds, just getting it done. And he said to me, like, you’re overthinking this. Get up and do the work. Over long periods of time, he might start to feel the effects of some of that. But I think that the ideal scenario is somewhere in between. You put in a good foundation with good habits. Eat well, sleep well, in general, exercise, all that kind of stuff. And then sometimes you just need to, you do put in the work, you skip some sleep, you have to work hard, and that’s fine. You’re going to perform well.

you’re not going to experience negative effects of it. And so I think we often over-optimize and that can, yeah, like I said, you overthink it and it could potentially hold you back. So Goggins really had some good points here. Yeah. sometimes it is just about getting it done. The thing that I’m less of a fan of is this kind of building up, like the self-talk, which is basically like self-flagellation, like, you know,

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You’re such a terrible person. You’re so lazy. God, that kind of stuff, I think that’s less helpful. But the other message is sometimes you just need to dig in and get it done. I think that’s true. What’s a view that you have that would make most people either scratch their heads or potentially get angry? I think probably the idea that, or maybe there’s two, and they’re definitely related. And the first one is people kind of know that this is true, but they haven’t really thought about like,

what that then leads to. So it’s that how we use our brains essentially determines our long-term brain function in terms, including cognitive decline and potentially dementia as well. And like you said, use it or lose it. And everybody’s heard that, but nobody really knows, like, what does that mean? And it’s sort of like engaging in these cognitively difficult things that we’ve talked about. But then because of that, if we think about that the primary, if the primary driver of cognitive function is how we use our brains,

and we can put in some pieces for the things that kind of support how we respond and adapt to that stimulus, then we have massive impact to prevent dementia long term. And that’s starting to be accepted in the scientific literature that some dementias are preventable. But where this makes people angry is because the automatic assumption is if I say that dementia is preventable, then what people hear is,

Well, if I know somebody who got dementia or if I got dementia, that means it’s my fault. And I’m going to be mad at you because you think that I’ve done something wrong to my brain. But that’s not what I’m saying. But is that not true? To a certain extent. the framing is really critical. So one is that most of the people who have had dementia historically had no idea that there were things that they could do to decrease their risk of dementia. So if you don’t know, you can’t act.

The second part is that when we’re talking about dementia prevention, we’re talking about it the population level. If everybody exercised, didn’t have metabolic disease, didn’t get brain trauma. does metabolic disease mean specifically? So metabolic disease is a cluster of things and it’s best described by, you might have heard of metabolic syndrome, which is basically

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you have multiple of large waist circumference, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides on a blood test and low HCl cholesterol. So- The good cholesterol. The good cholesterol. Why do you make me do that? So basically metabolic disease is the presence of those things. And I would say in its simplest form, metabolic health is the absence of those things. So the less of those you have-

The better. The more metabolically healthy you are. Yes, exactly. Great. And there are a bunch of fancier tests that you can do that are maybe better. we have really good evidence for those things. So if nobody got metabolic disease, nobody got brain trauma, everybody got a good education and didn’t have chronic stressors and all that kind of stuff, we could prevent a big bulk of dementias. But not all dementias. So we know we can dramatically decrease risk.

But that’s not the same as me saying that for this one person, I can definitely prevent them getting dementia. So it’s happening at a population level rather than individual level. So that’s why the framing is important. One is, if you don’t know how to act, you don’t have the information, then you wouldn’t be expected to. And the other one is, I think I can dramatically decrease one individual’s risk of dementia. But I could never promise that this individual person will not get dementia.

There are still other things that are part of that process that we can’t prevent or that we don’t understand well enough yet. What’s an important truth that you know that most people disagree with you on? I’m not sure that I have an answer to that question. Because my answer is I don’t think that I can be certain that I really know anything. it’s because, especially in the worlds that I exist in,

They say it is very true. Nothing can be proven in biology. Proof is for physics and maths. And you’re just like one good experiment, one experience away from having to completely rethink everything. like, come back to me in a year and I might just be like, everything that I said on the podcast last time was just completely wrong. That is within the realms of possibility.

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This is actually, this is a, but I will tell you a nice story. So this is a lesson that my dad taught me. My dad is a professor at Oxford. He’s very incredibly well respected in his field. He’s a geologist. He’s a type of geologist. He’s a experimental patrologist, but nobody knows what that means. So he’s a geologist. And he publishes in all the fancy science, like he’s published in Nature like countless times, some of the top scientific journals.

When I finished my A levels, which is like the exams that you do at the end of high school, and I realized that I’d gotten good enough grades, I’d go to Cambridge for undergrad. So you get like an offer, they’re like, if you do well enough in these exams, then you get your place at Cambridge. So I’d learned that I’d done well enough that I was gonna go to Cambridge for undergrad. And it was either the first or the second thing he said to me. I can’t remember if he liked to say congratulations first or second, but the other thing that he said to me was, remember, this doesn’t mean you actually know anything.

And he was absolutely right. So at the time, like you’re 18 and you’re like, I’m invincible. I know everything. I’m so smart. But I’ve kind of taken that lesson to heart more and more over the years because there have been so many times when I’ve been wrong. Like 10 years ago, I knew that low carb diets were going to solve all chronic health conditions, right? And I’m just wrong. I was wrong about that.

They’re a useful tool, certainly, but they’re not like the be all and end all. So there have been so many times when I have known something and I’ve been wrong about it. So I don’t have a good answer to your question because I can’t be certain that I actually know anything. How have you developed the ability to maintain humility in what you don’t know yet, confidence in communicating to other people that then rely on you for that information?

You actually know, we know this from a lot of studies that actually the confidence is really important, right? Because if you’re trying to help somebody, if you feel confident in the information, then when they do the thing that you tell them to do, that experience better effect. It’s crazy. It’s warping the world into your reality. So they’ve done studies where they give people placebos, but if the doctor believes this is a real drug, the patient benefits more from it because...

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they’ve really sold it because they believe that it will have an effect even though it’s the same placebo. if like they don’t believe in it, right, it has less of an effect. So that doesn’t mean that I’m like out to con the people that I’m working with. But like you do have to have some confidence in what you’re doing. I think that’s an important part. the way that I’ve, so I’ve had to, and I will continue to have to redevelop my framework and how I think about things as I gain new information.

But part of it has been, how do I, like, finding ways to kind of bolt together all these different ideas such that if, like, the framework is wrong, if, like, one specific thing is wrong, like, the overall, the framework still kind of makes sense, it can be applied. So, like, that’s, I think that’s an important part of it. And then you’ll have noticed that all the things that I focused on today are things that people already know. And so, like, I just finished telling you that I can’t be confident that I...

know anything, but I think that there are these core things that humans need in order to be healthy and function well that kind of fits into that framework that I was talking about. And I think I can be confident in that. So I’ve kind of moved more and more towards these areas where it’s just so fundamental to our physiology that anything that kind of fits into that framework in terms of then applying it to an individual.

which could be doing blood tests, doing some kind of training, doing something else. It kind of fits into that framework such that I’m as confident as I can be that it’s going to be right. Yeah, that makes sense. So what about the complex systems like biology force us to throw out everything we know on a dime? Yeah, so it’s basically because we’re not at a point yet where we can completely model how all this stuff works.

And we also can’t measure all the things that we’re exposed to and all the things that are happening at the same time. And so we just don’t have enough knowledge or ability to.

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simulate our reality? So yes, but there’s a possibility that we will never have enough knowledge. I think the most likely outcome when it comes to neuroscience is that we will never be able to fully understand the human brain. Really? Yeah. Regardless of how much data we collect. There was a recent study that mapped a tiny part of the mouse brain. And this is the mouse brain.

The human brain is thousands of times larger and more complex. Depends on the brain. Even the simplest human brain, much more complex than a mouse brain. And it took up like hundreds of thousands of terabytes of data.

hundreds of people and a hundred million dollars to map this tiny part of the mouse brain. And that’s just what neurons and cells are there. It’s not what are those cells doing. It’s just, it’s right. It’s just like looking at a map of New York on Google maps versus all the people in cars and stuff moving around and all the different lives people are living. Like the amount of information that we actually have about the brain relative to what we would need to do that is so mind bogglingly different that I’m not sure we’ll ever get there.

And so because of that, what we do is we try and boil this down to very simple questions that we can answer in a lab. This is process of, the scientific process of reductionism. You try and isolate everything else so you can change one thing. But the problem is we do that in like mice and the vast majority of stuff that works or doesn’t work or explains something in mice in the lab is not relevant to humans.

either because their physiology is different or because the environment that we exist in and all the other things that are happening, there are other things that much more important. So that effect is just completely washed out. So we are still just so far away from truly understanding the system. So it’s not that we have to throw things out. It’s just that the information we’ve gathered so far hasn’t been enough to get us all the way.

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to what you might call the truth. And in reality, this stuff is incremental. It’s unlikely that the things we talk about today have to be completely thrown out. But it’s very unlikely that we’ll have to update them enough such that when you talk about it, you would be saying something different. And it’s just because of all those different things plus the, I mentioned this idea of isolating variables.

Definitely lots of parts of biology where you cannot isolate variables. So to give like a really concrete example, if you asked me which bit of dancing is the bit that’s important for your brain, my answer is all of them and all of them together. And I think by trying to isolate the movement versus the music versus the social,

you create something that’s no longer similar enough to the final product that you can actually fully understand it. So I think this idea of really isolating the components is also holding us back to an extent. But then we also have to be comfortable with the fact that we don’t fully know how everything works. So if you were to distill that, basically means it’s generally the concept that the

some is greater than the constitution of its parts. Yeah, makes sense. So is there anything you’re excited about at the moment that you’d like to let listeners in on? In the world of science? Whatever, for your world, the world, dancing. So yeah, I could probably do one of each. So I’m very excited about the technologies that are coming in.

in terms of that we can use to stimulate our brains to improve function and prevent decline and maybe even treat some neurological disorders. So that is a big bucket of things, but it can be stimulation with light, stimulation with electricity, stimulation with magnets or magnetic fields, vibrations, then complex cognitive training with things like virtual reality systems.

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which are going to get much better. They can be used as a much better diagnostic tool for diagnosing changes in cognitive function. Some of them do like eye tracking, which can be really important for diagnosing some of the effects of like a concussion. So we’re to get much better understanding how the brain is working in a given individual, especially if they’re experiencing some symptoms. And we’re going to get better at stimulating the brain in order to support recovery or support function. So I’m really excited about

that whole big bucket of technologies that are coming. Yeah, super cool. And then in the short term, obviously a sidebar on my book coming out, which is very related to that because it’s called The Stimulated Mind. the premise being how you use your brain is how it determines how it functions. I think that ideally people would focus on the ways of stimulating their brains by engaging with the real world and learning new skills and doing creative pursuits and that kind of stuff, which we know.

is very beneficial for brain function. But for some people, some of these technologies are going to be a really nice layer on top of that. And where can people find you if they’re interested in learning more about you? The easiest place is, well, one is Instagram. So at Dr. Tommy Wood on Instagram. My website, drtommywood.com. The URL, thestimulatedmind.com, will redirect to a page where you can read all about my book.

Once the book is out, pre-order the book from that page or you can pre-order the book from anywhere that you buy books. And then once the book is out, thestimulatermine.com will host all the references from my book because there were so many that the publisher refused to put them in the book because it would have added 150 pages of papers. So the references will all be on the website once the book comes out.

And my last question for you is, why do think we’re here on Earth? Random chance. You think so? Yeah. Just chaos. Yeah. Damn. It’s kind of sad. I think we’re here by chance. And in the grand scheme of things, each of us is completely meaningless. OK. But we will, and this is why we dance. Exactly. Dr. Tommy Wood, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for having me.

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