This Is The Fastest Way To Get Dementia...The 6 Science-Backed Brain Fixes!

One thing I've learned from interviewing a lot of founders and building companies myself is that trust is the real currency of business It's the thing that gets customers to buy Partners to say yes and investors to back you but as you grow trust stops being just a feeling and becomes something You have to prove because the bigger you get the more exposed you are customer data security expectations regulations all of it And the risk of one small mistake becomes incredibly Significant and if you've ever tried to scale while keeping on top of all of that You'll know it can become a full-time job But our sponsor Vanta All to make sure compliance processes and brings compliance risk and customer trust together Through their AI-powered platform and the companies are already using Vanta Say they spend 82% less time on audits because of Vanta's platform So if your organization wants to inject time back into building and growing Make sure you head over to vanta.com slash diary. That's vanta.com slash diary I think everybody needs to listen to this episode if they want to start 2026 properly if there's one thing I've learned that's really stayed with me this year It's from speaking to some of the world's leading minds about our brain Which might just be the most powerful asset that we all have You know if you listen to the diary of a CEO you're probably listening because you're trying to get something whether it's Information inspiration maybe entertainment all of which because you're striving towards some kind of goal And it's dawned on me this year because of interview too many incredible neuroscientists that this all starts with having a healthy brain Because all of our thoughts our feelings our relationships our memories our chance of having a future start in the brain So in this special Christmas episode we're going to focus on the brain how you can have the most Fundamentally healthy brain so you can live the most fundamentally meaningful life I've been through all the episodes where we've talked about the brain and I've looked at the moments that you shared and Replayed the most and the moments that added the most value to your life and I put all of them into this episode today You Remember the first time you saw a human brain I do didn't change how you think about your own brain It changed my life because I was like I want to study that That is the coolest thing that I've ever seen in my whole life it with life changing I say that because we you know the start of this conversation We said that most of us don't appreciate our brain a lot of people don't even realize it's there Yeah, the minute I had a brain scan one day and that brain scan Really changed my life because seeing my own brain for the first time It was the push that I needed to start caring more about how my decisions behaviors are impacting it So let's talk about how I can make that ball of tofu in my head super healthy. Yeah, it's a big fat and fluffy right You talked about exercise early on but we didn't really dig dig into exactly what you mean My exercise because exercise. I think is multifastied in this definition. What kind of exercise should I be doing to make my all of tofu in my head? Great. Yeah optimal Well all the research shows that the best kind of exercise that you can do is anything that gives you a Robic activity that is getting your heart rate up So that that goes for you know power walking will get your heart rate up soccer So many different things name your activity so many people want to say oh well my favorite activity will that work And I always just say is it is your heart rate up when you're doing it if the answer is yes Then yeah that that works great We know that that level of aerobic activity is critical because that's going to release that growth factor Maximally to get into your hippocampus that will grow those new brain cells how much So um, I have an answer to that So um, we did two different experiments in my lab one in Low fit people people that are really not exercising very much at all less than 30 minutes In the last three three weeks you you've moved your body and um, we asked What could we see any behavioral improvement in your memory function from your hippocampus or your ability to shift and focus attention If we ask you to move your body in a aerobic way for two to three times a week And we collaborated with a spin class so clearly very aerobic and what we found was In those people that did successfully do two to three times a week a 45-minute aerobic activity Their mood got significantly better Their memory function got better and their ability to shift and focus attention got significantly better So that gives a little bit of a guideline for low fit people two to three times a week can start to give you some of those some of those cognitive changes But you don't look low fit So let me let me answer the question you're about to ask me would like what about me? I exercise pretty regularly and um How much how much do I need so to answer that question? We went to another spin studio and we said look we're gonna give you free classes You could exercise as much as you want in this in this um at this studio and Go up to seven times a week and the control was just stay the same You know you they were they were working out twice a week at at the studio control was the other group that what you were testing them against? Yes exactly and so what we found was Basically every drop of sweat counted the more you exercise the more change in your brain We noted both your hippocampal function prefrontal function and mood If you you were already getting benefit, you know, you're already going twice a week But the more you did the more brain changes you got So that that doesn't give the formula that I would like but we were heading in that direction Which is part of one of the questions that I want to answer But I love to leave people with the idea that every drop of sweat counts for building your brain into the big That fluffy brain that you really want And then in the real world again making it super um real for people. Yeah. How how does that change how I show up Yeah If you allow it to should have a beautiful effect on your mindset that your mindset around um How often should I take wake up and 30 minutes early and do that walk before I start my day or Accept the the invitation to go walk the dog with with a neighbor It's not an obligation It is something that you're doing for yourself. It is gonna have direct benefits on that ball of tofu as you call it in your head It's gonna make it work better and and I mean I think the most immediate thing that I benefit from every single day is the mood boost that you get From that serotonin dopamine nor adrenaline that gets released every time you move your body I always think that because I do a little podcasting and it's I'm super reliant on my brain being attached to my mouth And sometimes when I just that it's not Sometimes I'm not articulate. I can't get my thoughts together whatever And I always try and figure out the correlation between what I did that day When I have a good day versus a bad day And I've from from you and also I speak on stage sometimes So I've often asked myself because I saw Tony Robbins the speaker one day on a trampoline before he goes up on stage I asked myself okay Should I be doing a workout in my green room before I go up on stage for a big talk presentation? You think I should oh yeah, absolutely. What's the basis of that in science and neuroscience? It's the basis is that immediate fact so there's three key effects that we know happen every time you move your body First one is moved you're gonna get your dopamine your serotonin up Second is focus and attention so so a single workout isn't going to Make more synapses in your prefrontal cortex But the prefrontal cortex uses dopamine and so It's clear that even a single workout can make your prefrontal cortex work better in terms of focus attention Also very important anytime you're speaking and the third is reaction time your reaction time You know motor your you're you're working your motor cortex when you move your body and your Response and reaction time is significantly shorter after a even a single workout compared to if you just don't work out and sit sit alone so Great great things to do a great thing to do before you you stand up and speak what about Coffee I'm trying to figure out if coffee is good for my brain. Yeah, bad for my brain. Yeah, I'd a couple of mixed messages around The impact it might be having yeah you know caffeine is a stimulant and People respond to that kind of stimulant in different ways over stimulation with caffeine is is not good for your If you're able your ability to put words together, you know, this is where I turn to A main theme in in my book healthy brain happy life with this which is self experimentation For you how what can you titrate your coffee? To see what level of coffee is best for whatever your podcast or you're giving a talk The other thing that couldn't work Similarly to coffee that that I've started and that I do every morning is Hot cold contrast showers because that cold that you Shower on yourself after the heat stimulates adrenaline in you a natural adrenaline who who it wakes you up and okay, it was painful The first kind of few times I tried it, but then you get addicted to it And I have forgotten to do it and gotten back in the shower just to douse myself with cold water Because I feel better when I do that for for you know first thing in the morning So lots of different things that one can explore with okay on the other side of the coin then what are some of the Central behaviors that people do that destroy that brain Ha ha ha ha ha Well sedentary behavior is one of them Um, not getting enough sleep is critical. We haven't talked about sleep yet Sleep is so important for normal functioning of the brain. I like to scare my students by saying that You know in torture situations if you deprive a person of sleep for too long they literally die They they die you cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row It's that critical yet we don't we we happily you know watch too much Netflix at night and and and and get only five hours of sleep Well, we could have had eight So what's happening exactly why is it so important? Well, there's um there's so many different things I'm gonna I'm gonna say too one is that we know that in regular um Healthy sleep There is activity in the hippocampus that helps you Strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day. It's called consolidation and it's so important If you shorten that if you don't get enough you are not Consolidating your normal everyday memories and second it is the time during sleep when all the metabolites all that garbage that your brain is producing Because all biological cells produce garbage it get kind of cleaned up Through the cerebral spinal fluid that that is flowing through your brain And if you do not get enough sleep you build up garbage metabolites in your brain It's like you have a gunky brain and do you feel like I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don't sleep enough That is exactly what is what is happening? What when you think about things that we consume You know like food and drink and alcohol and all these kinds of things Is there anything that if I'm trying to have an optimal brain? I should be yeah having or not having yeah well so um I think the most evidence is around the benefit of the Mediterranean in diet which is basically all healthy Kind of organic not organic, but non-processed is the word I was trying to think of things to eat that are very very colorful There's so much evidence about how good that is generally for the brain that that is my go-to like What should I eat? Well, is it on the Mediterranean diet if it is then go ahead if it's too processed Only do it just a little bit. Is it true that if we have less friends if we have less strong relationships if we're lonely Yeah, then our brain will shrink and is more prone to Dimension outside is and things like that. Yes. We are social creatures and There are really powerful studies that have shown the correlation between the number of social connections that we have including Just saying hello to the barista at Starbucks. It's not a close Friendship that you develop over 30 years. It's just how many people you interact with and greet and longevity The more people you are regularly interacting with the longer you are living overall longevity But if you go into brain health absolutely, it's also very very healthy for you. It also brings happiness so friend and colleague of mine Robert Wallinger studied What makes people happy the studies started in the 20s the 1920s in Harvard and after all of those many many many decades the answer is What brings happiness is the strength of your social connections? So it makes you happier it makes you live longer and and yes loneliness on the flip side causes stress long-term stress that that damages the brain and yeah in the long-term can can make it smaller and Less healthy here's the fifth most replay moment when I asked you before this conversation started rolling What you're really excited about the moment your response to me was there was a few things but one of them which lit up your face was creating Yes, and it's funny because it lit up your face again Yeah, it's it's funny because creatine has been around for I mean Ever for decades and it's always been in my mind It was like one of those Jim Bro things like I don't need to be swole Yeah, I don't need creatine. This gets swole and you know This is this was the thought for for many many years and then over the last five years or so The effects of creatine on the brain started to really get my interest anything that affects the brain I really become interested in and so that's kind of what Did get me the most excited about about creatine? But also I started doing a lot of resistance training and so I was like okay here. I am now I'm like one of those Jim guys. I'm doing I'm doing the barbells I'm doing the you know the squats and the dead lifts and all that and so So why not give myself some of the creatine? Well, what is creatine? Right? Why is it important? You talked about earlier, you know Why doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial We do make creatine we make about I don't know our liver makes about one to three grams a day of creatine And our brain also makes the creatine and those are the two organs that make it creatine gets consumed by other tissues like the muscles probably the one that's the greediest because creatine is stored as phospho creatine, but it's used to make energy essentially So it can increase muscle mass. It can increase muscle strength in combination with resistance training because you're able to regenerate and make energy faster So for example, I became interested in it after reading studies where people that supplemented with creatine that were engaged in resistance training Were able to gain more lean body mass. They were able to gain more strength It was increasing their training volume. So you can do one to two more reps, right? Whatever exercise you're doing and it seems to decrease the recovery time between those those sets as well So you're able to increase your training volume. Well anything that's going to increase your training volume Is going to then have the downstream effect of you know, increasing the adaptations like increased muscle mass or increased muscle strength I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago And I started supplementing with it for that reason for the my training and I was doing about five grams a day because that was really What was shown to to be beneficial for muscle health in combination with resistance training And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by itself without any type of resistance training isn't going to grow your muscle It's not going to make you stronger you have to put in the effort Because what creatine is doing it's helping you make the energy quicker, right? And that and then Being able to make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise better Harder more of it, right? So it's sort of supercharging your exercise routine I had already been aware of the effects on the brain I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that So what are the effects on the brain? Well your brain also consumes a lot of energy, you know needs a lot of energy So it does make its own creatine But it turns out if you can if you can give your brain more of that creatine particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress so let's say lack of sleep or Let's say emotional psychological stress or in my case high cognitive load where you're just every day learning concepts complex things you're trying to remember them You're putting ideas together and coming up with new hypotheses and you know, you're just you're just you're studying a lot and it's very cognitively demanding and it's it's a type of stress on your brain. That's like my life, right? Under this condition of stress depression is another one. That's a stress on your brain or neurodegenerative disease. That's a stress on your brain. So any kind of stressful condition That's where creatine shines in the brain I would argue that I'm all of us who has the perfect amount of sleep never has stress Nobody, right? There's always some sort of stress in the background So that's when I was like, okay, so if you're the perfect person you have no stress you get the perfect amount of sleep every night Your brain makes enough creatine to kind of do what it needs to do I know that I'm constantly under stress So I'm like, okay, well, I think I need a boost and this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different labs some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine and how it increases creatine levels in the brain And this is why I now supplement with 10 grams a day. So the study out of Germany Found that five grams a day of creatine if you're supplementing with five grams a day Your muscles are greedily consuming it particularly if you're working out. They want it. They want it After about five grams a day, especially over a few months like you're you're saturating your muscle and that's enough, right? Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain And so they've what this German study found was that 10 grams of creatine increased creatine levels in several different regions of the brain and that was probably the most exciting You know, I would say evidence that supplementing higher than five grams a day was actually doing something in terms of getting creatine to bring There I've now been a variety of studies that have looked at different outcomes, right? So if you supplement with 10 grams of creatine or even go higher than that like 20 grams of creatine How does that affect cognitive function, right? And so some of these studies have been done by a doctor Darren Kandau He's at the University of Regina in Canada and it's looked they've looked at things like sleep deprivation And it's been found that if you take someone and you sleep deprived them for 21 hours and give them about 25 to 30 grams of creatine It completely negates the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation Actually, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation It makes people function better than if they were well-rested That's where I was like Wait a minute There's many times when I'm traveling I'm jet lagged Lots of times when I'm sleep deprived and I have to be doing a podcast or a presentation whatever And in those situations I go up from my 10 grams to more like 20 grams like today for example I wasn't really Sleep deprived but you know there's a lot of high-cognitive demand This is a long podcast there's all that stuff and so I went up to 20 grams today on my creatine And I will say even at the 10 grams for me We were talking about this with respect to being in ketosis I don't feel that mid-afternoon crash when I have the creatine Not being on a ketogenic diet, not being in ketosis It's very clear for me and I've done this where sometimes I only do five grams And then if I do that, I'll notice I'm like why am I tired right now? So there's something interesting and maybe it's placebo I'm gonna throw that out there very possible But I don't know maybe the creatine is again, it's able to regenerate that energy quicker And so that's also beneficial for the brain And now I would say all these creatine researchers a lot of them are shifting to the brain It used to be all muscle-focused And now people are super interested in what creatine is doing to the brain Especially if you're supplementing with more of it And you know this is important for people that are under a stressful situation But also for vegans because creatine is found in food mostly in animal products Like meat and poultry and fish, dairy A lot of vegans don't eat that and I've had so many of my vegan friends I've got them on the creatine and it's changed their lives I mean they're like this is like incredible You know can you imagine someone who's not getting any creatine from their diet? They know me And all of a sudden they start supplementing with five 10 grams of creatine And it's like they have energy Some people say they require less sleep Which is kind of interesting That's kind of a comment I've heard many many times from people Is that it's like their brain doesn't need as much sleep They have more energy So I've been a big fan of the creatine Not only for the muscle especially because you know working out Is something that's very important But for the brain as well I always thought of creatine as something that you You took and you kind of had to load up on And then over a couple of weeks or months the effects would kick in But you're telling me that if I had creatine in the morning That same day I would experience potentially Improve cognition if I have big enough dose Yes, so um great question A lot of studies that have been done that you're referring to Have been done in the context of exercise and muscular performance And the reason why people have to load up on like they do a loading phase Let's say 20 grams And then they go down to this sort of maintenance phase of five grams Is because it takes I don't know but I think it's about a month or so before you can saturate Your muscular stores of creatine And then you're- Which does that mean? It means that um the creatine which is actually stored in your muscle as Fosso creatine is there and ready to be used to make energy So it takes Again it takes about a month or so to do that Unless you are really giving your muscles a high dose Right so the five grams a day It only it can only do it for so many days and then finally you get saturated When you do this loading phase you kind of just accelerate that whole process And so that's why when people are doing these experiments where they want to test the effects of creatine They want they want the participants to have really high levels of creatine in their muscles quick Because they don't want to do a month-long experiment right they want the experiment to be like a couple of weeks or a week So that was kind of the whole concept behind this loading phase If you're not someone who's Going to some kind of competition You know like you're a crossfit games or something You don't really need to do that loading phase if you've already been supplementing with five grams a day for like a month When it comes to the brain What's happening if you get above that five grams that's pretty much all consumed by the muscle You're having some leftover in circulation and the brain takes it up and it takes it up right When it what it really shines is under that stressful condition Which again for me I feel like every taz is is like cognitively demanding for me because I'm constantly You know learning new material or learning new information or working on things right and so there's a lot of cognitive stress on my brain And so I feel like I'm constantly under that stress and that's where Getting the creatine in your brain helps you make that energy quicker And so that's why like I've done I've had you know Ben jet lagged and have have to give a talk it You know like five a.m. In the morning my my biological time after not getting sleep I've done like 25 grams of creatine and it it's insane how much it helps me again It could be placebo because I'm anticipating that effect which is fine And placebo is a real thing. It's great. I'm all about it But there's some evidence also that this works right that the creatine is helping with under that sleep deprivation and that stressful condition I was reading about study in 2025 where they Gave creatine to people that had depressive symptoms alongside CBT training And the people that had creatine and the cognitive behavioral therapy training Experience to greater improvement in their depression symptoms than those who just received the cognitive behavioral therapy Which is which is Incredible it's fascinating. I mean depression is a type of brain stress, right? I mean we know inflammation plays a role in in depression. We know oxidative stress is plays a role in depression And there have now been some animal studies that have shown creatine is somehow having an anti-inflammatory effect That hasn't all been worked out So I don't know if it's all just the energy Component of it It could also be this other sort of newly identified role that creatines playing in sort of Having an anti inflammatory effect and I don't know I'm not enough about that I don't know that there's enough even known about that But I do know that it exists and it's fascinating because again I think we're creatine really shines in the brain and it's been shown study after study is under some kind of stressful condition Depression or sleep deprivation or there's a new study that came out it was published I don't know a month ago or so Showing that it was a very small pilot study and I want to caveat this there was no placebo control But it did show that giving people with Alzheimer's disease creatine I believe it was 20 grams a day Did improve their cognition and so again, this is a whole new field We're now we're looking at creatine in the brain Not just the gym bro is and not just the muscular effects But in the brain and how it's affecting the brain and being beneficial for cognition for brain aging For depression Here's the fourth most replayed moment One of the most Inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity because If you're if the brain can physiologically change based on what I'm doing then it means that who I am now my identity That 60 that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the money thing with the ferret Isn't who I always have to be I can literally change Um, we've spoken a little bit around like what causes the motivation to actually change But knowing that there's a my brain will actually change Those two things are really Inspiring for me because it means that whatever rut times stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one Now you said that the motivation to change comes from fear Well in my case it took a fear circumstance fear of becoming a permanent failure. Yeah to motivate immense change and um That was that circumstance ice I do believe however that the best work our most creative and best work comes from a love of craft But sometimes in order to find what you truly love You have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it So neuroplasticity is absolutely real But if the question is can a person change can you learn new thing? Can you unlearn certain patterns? Can you overcome traumas at any age the answer is absolutely categorically yes How well it's very clear that as a child Until about age 25 more or less Just passive experience will shape the brain for better or worse after about age 25 and again, these are not strict cutoffs We can change our brain, but what's required is a market shift in the neurochemical environment under which Something happens So one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered although by the way you can remove some of the emotional load of that Trauma does not have to be traumatic forever Is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature There is the release of certain what we call Neuromodulators things like epinephrine adrenaline and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our broad body and brain and The neurocystum recognizes this as unusual and as a consequence in the subsequent days There's reordering of the connections So that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again This is why we have what's called one trial learning you go to a certain location something terrible happens there You will forever associate that location with something terrible But there are tools therapy and other tools That can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm No fear whatsoever The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn Provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment This is why when we are very interested and focused on something two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity We have to be alert and we have to be focused we can't learn passively as adults we can't just play You know a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room and then it just the knowledge doesn't just sink in biosmosis But if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention There's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention What we call the catacole amines it's three molecules dopamine epinephrine and nor epinephrine all which cause an increase in alertness All which cause an increase in focus a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field so like cones of attention is one way to think about it And then it sets emotion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night Maybe the next night as well There's reordering of neural connection so that that knowledge that new experience Is consolidated in your brain you are forever changed as a consequence of that experience So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing everything that we encounter changes our brain that's not true Why would the brain change unless it needed to right as a child the brain is basically a template for change It's it's trying to understand the environment and make predictions and so that's true neuroplasticity is is Cardinal feature of childhood and adolescence and the teen years And just think about the music you listen to when you were a teen No other music will ever have as much significance And that's because as a teen your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators that the amount of meaning that comes from Now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense that song meant so much and it's because of the neurochemical me It creates in you but as an adult it takes a stronger stimulus as we say the nervous system is very efficient in that way it doesn't change unless it has to and it Always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to just interest in terms of what will shift our brain but it's nice to know that Love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimuli for changing the brain from everything we know about neuroscience It's clear that doesn't matter if you're 90 years old 70 years old 50 years old if you want to learn you can learn and that learning occurs through neuroplasticity Which is the reordering of neural connection strengthening of certain connections weakening of others and in some rare cases The addition of new neurons, but you absolutely can change your brain, but you have to Pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain You have to be alert while you do that and then you absolutely have to go get some rest Because it's during sleep and during meditative states and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs You know every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as A game changer and I would say For about 35 to 40% of my team They would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called keytone IQ which you can get at keytone Dot com As a game changer, but the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are responsive this podcast Is because one day when I came to work those box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was Lily in my team says that this company have been in touch So I went upstairs tried it and quite frankly the rest is history in terms of my focus my energy levels How I feel how I work how productive I am game changer So if you want to give it a try visit keytone.com slash Stephen for 30% off You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment And now you can find keyton IQ at target stores across the United States where your first shot is completely free of charge All I had to do was brain dump imagine if you had Someone with you all times that could take the ideas you have in your head Synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct and write them down for you This is exactly what whisper flow is in my life It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say And it now means that on the go when I'm alone in my office when I'm out in a bow I can respond to emails and slack messages and WhatsApp's and everything across all of my devices just by speaking I love this tool and I started talking about this one behind the scenes channel a couple of months back And then the founder reached out to me and said We're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you So we'd love to be a sponsor We'd love you to be an investor in the company And so I signed up for both of those offers And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called whisper flow You have to check it out Whisper flow is four times faster than typing So if you want to give it a try head over to whisperflow.ai slash DOAC to get started for free And you can find that link to whisper flow in the description below There are a few sports that I make time for no matter where I am in the world And one of them is of course football The other is MMA but watching that abroad usually requires a VPN I spend so much time traveling I've just spent the last two and a half months traveling through Asia and Europe and now back here in the United States And as I'm traveling there are so many different shows that I want to watch on TV Or on some streaming websites So when I was traveling through Asia and I was in Kuala Lumpur one day Then the next day I was in Hong Kong and the next day I was in Indonesia All of those countries had a different streaming provider, a different broadcaster And so in most of those countries they had to rely on express VPN Who responds to this podcast Their tool is private and secure And it's very very simple how it works When you're in that country and you want to watch a show that you love in the UK All you do is you go and then you click the button UK And it means that you can gain access to content in the UK If you're after a similar solution in your life and you've experienced that problem too Visit expressvpn.com slash DOAC To find out how you can access express VPN for an extra four months at no cost Here is the third most replayed moment For those people who have just clicked to listen to this conversation Can you tell them the mission you're on and why it's so important Yeah well thanks so much for having this conversation with me I think that illustrates the problem Right, someone isn't formed as you don't know anything You've never heard of Nitrocogside It's important for us to just make a distinction between Like Nitrocogs that people inhale And that used to you if you played like some of these racing car games You press a button and the car goes really fast if you do Well this Nitroc Nitroc these are two separate things Yeah very good point so this is the not Nitrocogside Nitrocogside is I mean a medicine is a dental anesthetic Right it's a gas it's called laughing gas that's in 2o It's the chemical formula What we're talking about is nitric oxide Or in a one nitrogen one oxygen This molecule is is foundational for human health and longevity So Nitrocogside is a gas it's a naturally produced molecule It's a signaling molecule in the human body And so it's it regulates things like blood flow and oxygen delivery And it mobilizes our own stem cells to help us recover and repair and replace dysfunctional Cells that improves energy production inside the cell And it regulates blood flow So Nitrocogside is a gas it's produced in the endothelium So the endothelium is the single layer of cells that line every blood vessel throughout the body So the function of these endothelial cells is to regulate vascular tone And to regulate you know saw you'd exchange and extravization or transport of molecules across that endothelial layer And so when your endothelial cells can no longer make nitrocogside gas They no longer dilate So that blood vessels become constricted You start to get inflammation You get stiff arteries plaque deposition And that's what starts cardiovascular disease for atlas grocers So let me get this straight I'll repeat back to what I think I understand about nitrocogside And you tell me if it's accurate So this nitrocogside is a chemical that is in all the blood cells of my body And it allows my blood cells to basically expand open up so blood can flow through there So if I dilates the smooth muscle It's not affecting the cells per se, but it's dilating the smooth muscle that surrounds the blood vessels Which is clearly a relaxation in dilation Fine so my blood cells would then expand Your blood vessels will go through there But if I'm deficient that mechanism doesn't work and my blood cells wouldn't Expand ultimately expand through the relaxation of the muscles That's right And therefore I would have higher blood pressure which can lead to a series of Downstream diseases and consequences And so when we look at the graph that I showed a second ago Where we're seeing, for anyone that can't see this graph because you're listening on audio We're seeing it Nitrocogside levels in young people up to the age of roughly around 20 Are optimal and then from about 30 to 70 There's this tremendous sort of 80-90% drop In terms of chronic disease that is downstream from me losing nitrocogside level Can you give me a bit of a menu of chronic disease that Is associated with this nitrocogside deficiency Yep And we've touched on them so erectile dysfunction So when erections in both men and women are dependent upon dilation of the blood vessels to get engorgement to get increase in blood flow And that's what an erection is And we call that the canary in the coal mine Because for years people thought it was a lifestyle disorder Right? Well erectile dysfunction Yeah But now it's recognized that it's a symptom of loss of nitrocogside And really an accelerated form of cardiovascular disease High blood pressure metabolic disease and diabetes And then the other one is obviously Alzheimer's Because Alzheimer's is a vascular disease And nitrocogside corrects every single thing we know about Alzheimer's It improves blood flow to the brain It improves glucose sub-tay So it overcomes the metabolic aspect of Alzheimer's It reduces inflammation In fact the number of my patents on the method of reducing inflammation It inhibits the oxidative stress we see in Alzheimer's and neurological disease And it prevents the immune dysfunction And when you do that when you restore blood flow and you get nutrients and oxygen in And you take out the metabolic waste products There's no misfolding a protein So you don't get the amyloid plaque, you don't get the taut angles So this simple molecule nitrocogside gas I'm absolutely convinced we'll eradicate and cure Alzheimer's Really Because it addresses every physiological root cause of Alzheimer's If you can get it administered therapeutically to patients Arealyenough No, I think that's a very key because The successor failure of any clinical trial Any drug and any clinical trial is dependent upon the design of the clinical trial And what patients at what stage of disease that you enroll these patients So what are the inclusion criteria and what are the exclusion criteria And there's a stage in every disease Whether it's hard disease, kidding disease, Alzheimer's Where you've reached a point of no return There's really no medical therapy that's going to reverse that disease Because it's progressed to a state that's irreversible So I think what we try to do is take Take patients early in the process What we call vascular dementia, mod cognitive impairment, early Alzheimer's Because what I want to be able to demonstrate is two things Number one, can we stop the progression of disease Once it started, can we stop the progression And then number two is we want to enroll patients far enough along to where We can show regression So can you move can you move the needle back And so that's a very kind of a specific and finite patient population When you design a clinical study, number one At the at the absolute worst, we want to stop progression At the absolute best, we want to show that we can regress disease And that's the goal of therapy is that you understand the mechanism of disease To the extent that you can treat it, you can prevent it, you can reverse it, and you can cure it Well when I think about the role that food plays in my nitric oxide production What should I be eating to increase my nitric oxide levels Or to keep them at a healthy level I think the same answer is for that too It's not so much what we should be eating, it's what we should not be eating Okay So we'll cover those step by step Number one, you have to avoid sugar And high glycemic index foods Because sugar is a toxin, it's a poison And let's think about what sugar is So when we eat sugar or drink sugar beverages Right, whether it's sucrose, whether it's fructose, whether it's high fructose cornstripe The end result inside the human is we see an increase in glucose So elevation in blood sugar or blood glucose is diabetes Right And now there's continuous glucose monitors that you can get anywhere And everybody does this So if you eat something and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, blood glucose Then you should avoid that Because glucose as the name applies is glue Right, it's sticky And if we if you have a soda and you spill it on your countertop You come back the next day, it's sticky Well, that's what happens inside the body That sugar sticks to everything It sticks to proteins, it sticks to enzymes And it lowers my chocoxide production Absolutely, that's why diabetics Have a 10 time higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, all cause mortality mortality That's why they develop neurological or peripheral neuropathy That's why they have non-healing wounds There's no nitric oxide That's why they're developing diabetic retinopathy macrata generation tank retitis I mean, all of that can be Trace back to a lack of nitric oxide production Because the sugars stuck to the enzyme The sugar destroys the oral microbiome And completely changes the ecology of the bacteria And completely shuts down nitric oxide production Right But I think to answer your question What should we be eating I think you've got to eat a balanced diet in moderation You know, Americans are overfed All you've got to do is walk around and see the epidemic of obesity Good high quality protein Good quality fats And little or no carbs And it's really that simple Here's the second to most replayed moment When you think about behaviors and habits That are popular and trendy at the moment Are there any that stand out to you Is being particularly good for the brain Or particularly bad for the brain Because I had a couple come to mind That I wanted to throw at you I mean one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment Is Paddle Which is kind of I think you call it pickleball here Good for my brain bad for my brain It's so good for your brain Because It's working your cerebellum And I told you that because yours was sleepy And as you activate this And you do that with coordination exercises If that activates your frontal lobes Does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue Yes Oh really And the more you do it The better coordination you develop And that's why coordination exercises for kids So we talked about kids Is You want to do that with them Early Play sports But not sports where they're going to get a head injury Right I mean we have to be smarter than we are But When I was young my mother Who's now 93 Was the Ping Pong champion In the neighborhood And she was really good And she never let us beat her until we could And But she was always encouraging I've got um I was looking at as you're speaking about Different trends at the moment that are either go bad for the brain And one big trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training Lots of people are doing gains and Using other things to like there's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps Does any of that stuff work Some of them Some of it works And if you're So for example if you're doing memorization games Do them while you're on the bike Now not in the street, but if you're on a stationary bike And You're Doing those games It's been found that exercise Increases blood flow to the hippocampus Meaning you're more likely to remember it and your strengthening your brain in the process So exercise with new learning Stunner So if I want to learn something I should do it while walking or moving in motion Right so if you're listening to a language app You know example Do it while you're walking Mindfulness and meditation good or bad for the brain great I published three studies on a kundalini yoga form of meditation called kyrton kria It's a 12 minute meditation. I always say it's a perfect ADD meditation because it's only 12 minutes And for 12 minutes you do this It's two minutes out loud two minutes whispering four minutes silently to yourself Two minutes whispering two minutes out loud you're done Sa ta na ma birth life death reborn birth life But the one we studied is sa ta na ma And so if they look it up kyrton kria Activates your cerebellum Activates your frontal lobes comes down in your emotional brain People who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks Their resting frontal lobe function was stronger So simple What the hell is going on there I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination meditation sa ta na Loving your job Good to back the brain Absolutely great for your brain if You're learning new things People who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease So if you're stagnant in your work you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's And like if I just read brain scans all day Well, I know how to do it. I'm not learning anything new So I do that But I also I'm writing about something I don't know about Um or I'm learning something new What if you're working with osles I'm sorry I love the job but I'm working with osles Bad for your brain chronic stress Increases cortisol and I think everybody should sort of know their baseline cortisol level And cortisol shrinks the hippocampus And puts fat on your belly. So that's two very bad things for your brain Breathwork that's a big track excellent Excellent you want to break a panic attack The 15 second breath Four seconds in hold it for a second and a half eight seconds out Hold it for a second and a half You just do that four or five times Your whole nervous system will calm down and the research shows Take twice as long to breathe out As you breathe in that's why four seconds in eight seconds out it shifts your nervous system doesn't it? Yes, it increases something called vagal tone Okay, some bad things then Social media usage, chronic social media usage, good for the brain, bad for the brain Because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real What about workaholism and hustle culture So I love my work Am I addicted to it? I don't know But I love it When they say people are workaholics and it's bad for the brain. It's there working with assholes Or doing something they don't like or doing it for the money, but without Other purpose Microplastics that's a big truffle For the brain one of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer I'm other environments. Thank you for not giving me a plastic wearable Imagine if we did that we spend a lot of time these days talking about the Microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people have become more aware of now, which is good noise pollution bad for the brain And if it hurts your hearing hearing loss Is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's Why is that? I did it because you're not getting input right and if you're not getting appropriate input Your brain starts to atrophy and If you don't hear what other people are saying and you have a lot of ants you have a high negativity bias Is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity I just bought some new apple air pods and when I connected them to my phone It said you want to do a hearing test So I did the hearing test and then I asked my girlfriend I said you should do this hearing test as well because I needed something to compare it to and I was a little bit shocked It said I hadn't lost any hearing yet, but my hearing was significantly Not as good as hers and I remember thinking gosh You know, this is but I didn't have any idea that was linked to Alzheimer's at all So now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think you're hearing declines regardless really of what you do with age anyway But as you said earlier like starting from a better baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves Is really the game I think with aging my last point is My last question is a bit of Seems to be uncorrelated, but the world is heading towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence It's like all the all the rage at the moment if you log on in the internet People talking about they're going to lose their jobs all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways When you think about the world of AI that we're heading into there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier As someone who's doing scans of brains and so on But do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad for our brains? I think in the short run it's going to be bad because Your brain is going to do less and that's bad for the brain I think it's fascinating to watch what's going to happen And ultimately in the words of my friend Byron Katie argue with reality Welcome to hell We need to figure out how to use it to enhance our lives rather than to steal brain development Here's the first most replayed moment. It was a study done in 2007 that showed Kind of insane human That shows curcumin up regulates anti Oxidant defenses and down regulates oxidative stress. Yeah, there's a study done in 2016 Which is a metronalysis of random control trials found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief Yeah, there's a lot of work on Curcumin and turmeric as I say a lot of people get confused because they think the air it only works if you absorb it into the blood And I'm saying that actually you don't What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers And there's promising but early studies showing the impact the curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health Yes, well that's Focuses switching on to the blood supply To the brain what we call the vascular effects on the brain And there's something we used to call the blood brain barrier which probably we heard of which is seen to be the place where The barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it We now know this blood brain barrier is a very dynamic interesting interface between the brains tissue and the rest of us is now called the neuro vascular unit NVU And it is so exciting And the more we look at it So far the more we find that the things that help the Neuro vascular unit the blood brain barrier are plants And we have green tea and you know we can If you really want to help Our brain health regular drinking a green tea you know It's been shown to be really useful not that rather than a supplement by the way is the drink that you have I'll put it in here Right so we can make it So as you make that can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea Because it contains a number of gain polyphenols and polyphenols are these colors These colors yeah in this case it's green obviously and memory green tea is just the smoked unprocessed part of the tea leaf So it's a planical chamelea synces So this is a nice Japanese tea pot that's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in And these are the mugs but we fill these up already with Ginger and cinnamon so That's let's leave it for a moment But what we can while it's sitting there for a while there are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in Modulating that barrier we talked about the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us and There's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble What sort of trouble the dementia type problems? Cultivative decline is he get older? Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea they have less dementia? Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect so you need a few other things to Establish that What we're finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area And I mentioned the rosemary now all you need to do to Appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff Oh, smells so good Really nice. That's not just nice because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volusal oils The things to give the smell and when you're inhaling They're literally going into your brain because Part of the brain actually reaches the outside world It's called the olfactory lobe and when you inhale something it literally moves into the brain and From there into the limbic system remember there's a line in the machines we play called hamlet a philia The young lady says Rose me that's for remembrance Because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions and when I was in Working on our campus in Maryland. We actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with Struggling with their crosswords, you know as they get older and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study There were pointers to it improving cognitive or Vawance in those people and there's been other studies since that reason that reinforced that I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health There's another remedy called ginkgo That's a lot of people know about which there's used as a prescription medicine in Europe For cardiovascular problems and that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as we've seen here And with the green tea Check it here. Yeah, that looks all right You see it's more yellow than green And this is flavored with a little bit of mint to make it a little more Agreeable sometimes people find green tea is not their favorite taste The green tea is rich in polyphenols Which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention So It's got a nice minty flavor. Yeah With that kind of yeah, yeah, I got a friend out again. She's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right Well, you know that's what learned that lesson long-term. I know right like I say it all the time in this podcast But she's always like two three years ahead of what then someone really really smart comes and tells me And I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like what the fuck is she like You know They get me start on quick how if you start talking to me back a car No, no, no, no, no, no, she's been telling me I'm gonna nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this Coco. Yeah chocolate. Start chocolate is a medicine End of One of the best medicines around Is 50 grams 100 grams of 75 percent or more dark chocolate Do you know what I've just realized my girlfriend she's gonna live till she's 150 because she all she's 90 percent or something 70 percent Dark chocolate She drinks green tea all day. She has The ginger and cinnamon drinks all day She eats the full rain. She should be stepping in for you. I know I know exactly No cocoa seriously Brain health as well cardiovascular health I mean they just they do studies where they've put cocoa into Volunteers that mean students usually You know, so young kids and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within Minutes So do you mean in an hour of eating cocoa? An official changes in your blood flow. They call it the heart medicine. Yeah, yeah heart circulation brain So she's my girlfriend's very spiritual she runs a business called barley breathwork Um hashtag had if I have to say that But in her business one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats Is she makes cocoa for them and You notice instantly how people change when they've had a hot cup of cocoa It's all and she says it like almost brings out their heart And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons it's good to say but it also of course We know it contains a few other Beneficial stimulate stimulating things and sort of similar The effects of a coffee which in sinless I already said it's a medicine as well But cocoa and chocolate does have a Uplifting effect, which is why we love it so and we have to be clear. We're not talking about hot chocolate That comes from a packet or something necessarily. We would like it to be as dark as possible Okay, so the less sugar the less fat Um, so we talk about 75% cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate And it tastes a bit more medicinal doesn't it's not a sweet um But I'm saying to many of my patients take 50 grams a day. It's a medicine Hmm damn She's right my fridge is full of dark chocolate. I tend to avoid it But the drawer of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in and it's she she likes it 90% she can get a 90% she'll take it Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's hard to tell yeah, yeah having a look at the green tea It was a study done in 2008 which supports How it improved cognitive function memory tension accuracy and um long-term consumption associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease According to the journal of nutritional biochemistry in 2011 So I still have somebody else to say would you say yeah, but it's it's exactly I didn't realize that I didn't I had no idea I had no idea All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me. Hmm Go and say sorry. I have literally literally have gotten Wow health brain function fat burning and metabolism Cancer prevention early evidence blood sugar and insulin sensitivity got an oral health Oh If there's anything we need it is connection especially in the world we're living in today And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards because on this show when I sit here with my guest and have those deep intimate conversations This remarkable thing happens time and time again We feel deeply connected to each other at the end of every episode the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest And we've turned them into these Conversation cards and we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards This is the brand new addition and for the first time ever I've added to the pack this gold card Which is an exclusive question from me, but I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone head to the link in the description below You If you work in university maintenance Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off and Granger is your trusted partner offering the products you need all in one place from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock So your team always gets the win call 1-800-Grainser visit Granger.com or just up by Granger for the ones who get it done