#300 Louisa Nicola - Peptides, Cancer and the Deadly Habits That Lead to Alzheimer’s

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I think it's a 7 million Americans have Alzheimer's, and by 2060 it'll be almost 14 million. More. More? Yeah, it's going to triple by the year 2050. Holy shit. So currently the statistics are around 60 million people worldwide have that disease. So it's going to triple by the year 2050. Man. Yeah. Well, I want to dive into what's going on in the brain, how it comes about, what we can do, all these, there's some new, I think we sent you this new study they're doing in mice. Yeah. That. 40 Hertz. Yeah, 40 Hertz. That sounds, do you know what a rife machine is? No. It's like holistic type stuff. It shoots frequency through your body. Oh, yes. Yeah. And there's a lot of science. I love that you said it was a mouse study. Right? It was done in mice because it's very hard to replicate these studies in humans. Although it's a, I think it's really phenomenal. I think using these 40 Hertz, whether it signals from light or sound, I think it's actually really great for the brain. It is good for the brain. Yeah. And so do you know what brain waves are? No. So brain waves are, we've got different frequency bands in our brain. So when our neurons fire together, we've got around 87 billion neurons, which we're going to go through everything with the audience. But just as a helicopter overview, when they start to fire, when we're doing particular tasks, they shoot these oscillations of brain waves. And they're good things. And we can map those out using an EEG. And we can map out whether the brain is using alpha waves, beta, gamma, delta brain waves. Generally, the delta brain waves are these big, luscious, big brain waves that occur during deep sleep. Okay. So we know you're in deep sleep because what we see on an EEG are these big brain waves. So we know they're delta brain waves, but these gamma waves are around 30 Hertz to 100 Hertz. And these tend to happen when we're in deep focus or deep concentration or deep thinking. So, and it generally happens around the prefrontal cortex area and in the hippocampus as well. So it is said that these are the first oscillations to deteriorate during neurodegenerative diseases. So when we are- Those brain, those particular brain- The gamma brain waves, yeah, because we lose our processing speed, we lose our thinking capabilities, right? So those neurons don't fire, therefore we don't get those oscillations. Now it's been said that we can mimic certain oscillations from the outside world. It's actually called entrainment, meaning that our brain can mirror the 40 Hertz signals that are occurring outside of us. So if we can get into this place of whether it's through lights, which I love, or whether it's through sound, if we can mimic our brain waves, if our brain waves can get on that 40 Hertz band wave, then it can start to heal the neural pathways that are degenerating. So that's where that comes from. And look, it's, I think it's going to be the next big thing in terms of neurotech over the next five years. Really? Oh yeah, there's companies that are spending millions. I just saw a new company that has raised around $200 million to come up with a device that mimics this. Interesting. I just saw you post something on your LinkedIn. It was like- It was that, yeah. It was a green burn scans. And I thought it was really fascinating. I think, look, this whole binaural beats era took place in the last five years where you could download an app and you could look at the binaural beats and kind of mimic this. But I think now we can start to move into more replication in human studies. And so this is, this, I found this on Twitter right after I saw you on Diarrhea CEO and said, MIT researchers cleared 50% of Alzheimer's plaques using 40 hertz sound waves. So this, so where does the, so if the 40 hertz is, where does the plaque go? Yeah, it's, it's so basically, we're going to have to do a whole, you know, we're going to have to learn all about this. But that tweet wasn't entirely true because the study they're referencing actually used both light and sound. And they cleared it out in a mouse model. So when we accumulate these amyloid beta plaques, when they get cleared out, which we have the ability to do during deep sleep, by the way, they get cleared out through the perivascular space and into the lymphatic system. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So they're able to speed that up. I have a theory along with this. And the theory is that along with sound and light, vibration, I believe, is going to take place as well. Being able to vibrate the, like your, your lymph nodes in your face to clear the plaque out. Why do you think that? I think that because new research has just shown in mouse again, in mice again, that the amyloid beta actually accumulates in the nerves. So we've got two nerves that come into the face, the trigeminal nerve and the facial nerve. And they just sit, just imagine here, right? And they come from their cranial nerves. So they come from the brain and they go into the nerves here and they're found that when they vibrate these mouse models, they can clear out amyloid. And so this is now giving rise to, well, if I wake up every day and I start doing facial massages, can I clear the amyloid? Wow. Wow. What does the amyloid do? Oh, the amyloid is, it's one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. It's one of the things that's getting in the way of your brain functioning. And when it actually accumulates in what we call plaques, these hard plaques, that's what causes neurodegeneration. That's what we see if you look at a brain scan of an Alzheimer's disease patient, you can see their brain is shrinking or there's holes in their brain on neuroimaging because these plaques are getting in the way. They're stopping the brain, the signals from cell to cell, which causes the collapse of your entire network. Oh man. Okay. But we'll go through all of that. Okay. Okay. I got a couple of random questions too before we get really good going, but I just read something this morning and I didn't even get to get the whole article because I was on my way down here, but I just ran across it. It was talking about that, I think it was saying there was a peer reviewed study that said people that use AI are seeing a cognitive decline because they're not, do you know anything about this? Oh yeah. It's this brain rot error. You heard of brain rot? I'm pretty sure I have it. I'll tell you what, I'm actually afraid of kids right now because this brain rot error is basically, what you're doing is you're looking and scrolling at dumb content, right? Content that is not allowing you to think. And your brain, which we'll learn is basically it uses the analogy, use it or lose it. And if you don't provide a stimulus, right? Just like your muscles, you know, you go to the gym, you need to lift weights for a muscle to grow. If you don't do anything, the muscle becomes dormant and it wastes away. Your brain is no different. So when you are not using your brain effectively, you're not providing at the stimulus, what happens? Well, you end up with cognitive decline in the end because you're not training it to think, to critically analyze anymore. And I see it for myself actually, I was a mathematician, right? That's how I got into this entire space. And I told you, Sean, like back in my early 20s, I was doing trigonometry. I was using sine, cosine without a calculator. I could do large mathematical equations. Now I put everything into chat GBT because why not? Even when I'm working out the tip on a bill, that's how sometimes lazy and fatigued I am. And now I'm realizing that my mathematical skills are just diminishing because I'm not using it anymore. So do you think that could lead to Alzheimer's disease? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think that if we don't use AI effectively, we're using it for this brain rot era. And the more times that we're spending on social media, scrolling this dumb content, we are leading ourselves towards mild cognitive impairment, which is the pre-dimension state. And once we're in there, we can't get out of it. And it's just a slippery road down to Alzheimer's disease. Could that alter your genes? I'm just curious. No. It couldn't. No. It wouldn't like evolution or anything like that. It wouldn't be passed down eventually. I do. I've actually been thinking about this often. Like what's our brain going to look like due to evolution in the next 1,000 years? Right? And you can map this out using AI. And it's quite interesting. It actually shows larger brains. But I don't think it can alter the genes. I think it can just change the functionality of our brain. OK. It's going to be a fascinating conversation. Let me give you an introduction here real quick. Louisa Nicolau, an Australian-born neuropsych... I'm a neurophysiologist. Neurophysiologist, human performance coach and clinical brain scientist who has spent over 13 years studying the brain, founder and CEO of Neuroathletics. Host of the Neuro Experience podcast and have published peer-reviewed research in leading academic journals. You were on track for the Olympics as a professional triathlete representing Australia on the world stage until a car hit you and that changed everything. Your mission now is to end the Alzheimer's disease. So I'd like to kind of start with the Olympics and the accident. I would like to know what happened and how that got you into this. I think as an Australian, so my parents were born and raised in Cyprus and then they migrated to Australia. And I think, and I was born in Australia, as an Australian, we all learn how to swim. It's like part of our curriculum to actually move forward in a particular subject, PDHPE in year eight, you have to be able to swim a certain distance with your clothes on. So I was always a natural swimmer, gifted swimmer. And for fun, I decided to enter a triathlon. And I ended up winning in my age group. As you do, I didn't have the best bike and running skills, but I won. And then that led to me, led to my career in being a triathlete. So I had a team. I trained rigorously. Sean, I was training anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week. We would do morning sessions, midday sessions, afternoon sessions. I lived and breathed triathlon. I only spoke to my teammates. I had my coach, obviously, he was an ITU, International Triathlon Union, special trained coach. And he said, we're going to get you on track for the 2009 Beijing World Championship Series. So in order to qualify for something like this, and they take three from every, in terms of like gender age group from every country. So you have to make top three. And in order to do that in Australia, you have to race at least 10 races in that season and get a podium finish. So I did that and I qualified for the Australian World Championship category. So I was off to Beijing and it was probably the greatest time of my life. You know, you're in your, I think I was around 23. I'm corrected, maybe 24. You're at your peak cognitive health. You are, you don't have too many demands. I was living at home. I didn't have any expenses really. So my entire brain was just set on triathlon. And two weeks prior to racing and going to Beijing, we set out to do a 200 kilometer bike ride. And I went out to do this with two teammates. And do you know anything about triathlon? Not much. So when you're on the road and you're traveling at a certain speed, I think we were going at around 30 to 40 kilometers an hour. And we were, we were getting to the 100 kilometer mark and we had to do a U turn. And this was on a road and we do something where we tailgate each other. Right. And so we were doing two kilometers at a time and we'd switch. So it was my turn. I was on the back and the back, the back cyclist is always the one that's directing because you have to look behind to see if there's any cars. Instead of, you know, going onto the road and merging, we stayed in the, in the, in the lane where it's the bike lane. So there's two lane road, bike lane, and then a guard rail. So we were traveling up this bike lane and I looked behind and I saw a car. And I said, hold up, there's a car. So we stayed in the, we stayed in the bike lane. We saw the cargo past us. So we merged into the lane. I saw another one coming really fast. So the speed limit at that time was 80 kilometers and he was coming up really fast. So I signaled to my teammates, let's get back in the bike lane. He's going fast. As we were getting into the bike lane, the driver who was 85 years old, traveling around 120 kilometers in an 80 kilometer zone, he caught out, he caught us and he was looking at us and he wasn't concentrating on where he was going. He actually followed us just by pure like, I don't know. Oh man. Pure signal. And because I was on the back, he slammed me into the guard rail and then my bike obviously clipped the boys. The first one went flying like a couple hundred meters up. The second one, his bike snapped and I was actually squashed between the guard rail and the car. So I had to forfeit my title, unfortunately. And I was devastated. I was in hospital. I had surgeries. My leg was in a cast, broke a few bones and so I was out. He had dementia, didn't he? Well, to be honest, we don't know what he was doing. He was very shocked himself. I don't know what, he had been driving for at least two and a half hours without a break and I don't know if it was clear that he had dementia, but now that I look back, I think to myself like, A, how lucky was I? B, it could have been worse, but what was he thinking? So I was in a cast and that's where I had a major intersection in my life. I felt like I was married to the sport and it was just taken away from me. So there's a bit of heartbreak. I wasn't going to training anymore. I lost my sense of identity and purpose, which I found I had to throw myself into my studies. So threw myself into medicine and science at that time, but funnily enough, I actually was so determined to re-qualify for the 2012 championship series in Auckland. So I did that. Right on. I did that and as soon as I crossed that finish line, I called it quits. I haven't been on a bike since. Right on. Yeah. Most of us are basically flying blind when it comes to our health. 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Not only did superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with code SRS. Head to superpower.com and use code SRS at checkout for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Tell them we sent you. Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. They do it, right? What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch any of this. Little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're f***ing... And now we're bringing them back. It does look pretty f***ing cool. I gotta admit that. We've been making some serious waves in this market now. Yeah, well, let me tell you, you can study human performance. You can study exercise physiology, but I've been there and I've done it. You see a lot of people now on social media talking about brain performance and what it means to perform at elite level. It's good in theory to read a textbook or to read a science study, but unless you've actually been there and done that, you can't really grasp what that means. At that time of training, I did everything to a T. I was doing VO2 max tests. The whole world has caught on now. I was doing those in 2007, 2008. We didn't have data back then to show what our heart rate was. We were using metronomes. I would clip a metronome to my headband to figure out what's my pace. We didn't have watches and heart rates. Every time I ran a lap, my coach would check my pulse. And then we'd determine whether... Through a calculator, what percentage I'm running at. When you know that hardcore raw data and you can translate that into science today, it's so much different than just reading. Do you wear any of those wearables? I do. When I'm training, I wear a Garmin watch and I wear a heart rate monitor, just because it's so natural to me so I can check what my heart rate is. I've recently taken off my Oro ring. Why'd you do that? Which I haven't done. I've got a dent in my finger for that. I did that because I'm so sick of it telling me that I'm sleep deprived because I'm at a stage of my life now where I'm traveling a lot. It was providing me... No, I tell you, it was for somebody who's so deep on biomarkers and numbers, it was providing me more stress. And I just said, that's it. Really? Yeah. I don't have one. I've been thinking about using one, but I just don't know if I want all my data in this... I get paranoid. Well, guess what? They just... A lot of people don't know this. Another reason I took it off, Oro is now selling people's data. Really? Yeah, not warp, but Oro ring. It's another reason why I took it off. So all of your data in terms of women are tracking when they ovulate, women are tracking their menstrual cycles. You've got, evidently, your age, your date of birth, everything is stored in here, your daily habits, and it tracks where you are, because you set it to going for a run that shows you where you've ran. So it's tracking everything, and they're actually selling that data, and this is publicly available news. Who would they sell it to? What would they give out? Large corporations, insurance companies, probably pharmaceutical companies. Is it tied to you directly? Yeah. It would be tied to... Like, your data is now stored and being sold to companies. So I can only imagine what that can pose as a risk for you. Can this stuff help too, if you have, let's say, you have years of data, you know, and everything that that kind of stuff? I mean, if you gave that to a doctor, would that help them in any... That's actually why I wanted you... Determined. Yeah. So I don't wear the whoop band. I mean, I think I might go and do that, actually, but they've got this new thing on there which shows if you have atrial fibrillation, and it can detect whether you have AFib. And AFib is one of the biggest risk factors for a heart-related event or a stroke. So I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. A couple things to knock out here. I have a Patreon account. Okay, cool. And they're the reason I get to sit with you here today. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question, and this is from Corey Powers. From a neuropsychology standpoint, what do we know about the chronic exposure to operational stress and professions like the military and policing? Affects brain aging over decades. And are there specific evidence-based strategies like resistance training or metabolic interventions that can help maintain cognitive longevity for people who have spent their careers in those type of environments? Yes. And thank you for that question. I think it's really prominent. So there's many things at play here. First of all, the ongoing threat and stress to your brain over a substantial amount of time can cause some form of neurodegeneration or accelerated neurodegeneration. But if you talk about the military, then we have to bring up concussions. We have to bring up TBIs. And you've probably heard of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And this here is actually CTE and Alzheimer's disease. Literally, if you look at them on autopsy studies, they look identical. Right? So there is some extreme risk right there with TBIs and concussions. Partly while I'm against the NFL in theory. I don't agree with what's happening there. However, if you are at that stage now where you've gone through all of that, you just have right now to intervene. You can't go back in time. There's no reversal of any cognitive decline. So you can intervene with metabolic interventions. One of the greatest ones that you can intervene with is putting your brain in a state of ketosis. I'm so fascinated right now in the research of ketones and what they're doing to help with brain fuel. So having exogenous ketones is one thing that I'll tell you. You're the person who asked. Another thing, yes, evidently, resistance training, exercise, nutritional interventions, staying away from sugar and sleep. I think in this instance, sleep, when you're trying to recover, will probably outweigh exercise. And I never usually say that. I always say that exercise outweighs everything. But when you're trying to really recover and regenerate a damaged brain, you need somebody to be sleeping. I mean, that's a big challenge for veterans. I'm a veteran. I sleep like shit. I think pretty much anybody that's probably seen any type of combat sleeps like shit. PTSD. PTSD, traumatic brain injury. I mean, you just always switched on business stress. I'm sure you deal with a lot of business stress. I mean, it's just the brain's always running, especially mine. It's just it's going a thousand miles an hour all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about whatever's bothering me. And so if that's, I mean, it almost like when you say, well, sleep better. So I go, shit, that's probably not going to happen. And this is the hard thing, right? Because then you also get new mothers. And so what's a new mother going to? You can't just tell her sleep more, right? You know, they're hearing your mother for the next 10 years of your life. Whether you have one child, two or more, you're going to be sleep deprived, right? So I know the science and then putting it practically is a completely different story, right? But there are certain things you can do for sleep interventions. And it really comes down to instead of just sleep better, it comes down to let's locate what your problem is. And normally when it comes to sleep, people have two problems. I'm having trouble falling asleep. I'm having trouble staying asleep. And they then provide, you know, the interventions that you need to start attacking. So if you can start with just looking at your sleep environment, I always say, you have to train for sleep. And it comes down to like, what are you doing at 8 30 PM every night? What time do you go to sleep? How do you prepare your mind for sleep? For somebody like you who's got this racing mind outside of supplementation, which would actually give you a lot of benefit, you could start, you know, warming up for sleep, like getting rid of your phone, not emailing anybody, not having any crazy conversations, sleeping in a dark room, setting the lights at like 8 39, like dimming them, putting just red lights on to get your body ready for sleep. Putting just red lights on? I like to use red lights or dim the lights or just have floor lights at home because it signals to my brain, Hey, we're getting ready for sleep. Melatonin starts to rev up from the pineal gland starts to release it in small doses. If you've got the lights on at night, your brain thinks that you're awake. You can't go from awake to sleep. You want to have this transitional moment, right? So you have red lights all over your house at nighttime? Yeah, it kind of looks funny. I live in New York City as well. And some people walk past, they see this red light apartment. It signals the wrong thing. Yeah, I see. Yeah. Yeah, that's a challenge that I've been thinking about a lot. And I want to dig into a little bit more, especially when it comes to psychedelic therapy. Yeah. But before we get there, everybody gets a gift. Wow. Are these? Those are Vigilance Elite gummy bears. Oh, I love these. Actually, don't triathletes love gummy bears? Yeah. Well, what depends on what's in them? Well, nothing good. Okay, I can't wait to have these. I've traveled a lot, so this is going to help you. Thank you. You're welcome. Well, let's dive in. I just want to read a couple of numbers when it comes to Alzheimer's. So people understand how serious this is. An estimated 7.1 Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's symptoms, projected to nearly double to 13.9 million by 2060, which you said actually will triple by 2050. Globally, over 50 million people have dementia, expected to hit 150 million by 2050. Someone in the US develops Alzheimer's roughly every 65 seconds. It kills more people annually than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Nearly two thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women. Why is that? Tying to estrogen, menopause, and hormonal shifts. So I think before we go any farther, can we just talk about what is Alzheimer's, dementia, and how does it happen? I love that we're talking about it because I just want everyone to know this is not a disease of old age. We used to think it was. And when I first started in a hospital, working in a hospital, I thought Alzheimer's and dementia was just a disease that you got in your 70s and 80s. Is this even an organic disease? What do you mean by organic? Is this... So I've read several different articles that say cancer is not an organic disease. It's from all the pollution and shit that we put into the earth. Parkinson's is a man-made disease. Alzheimer's disease is a preventable disease. And in my opinion, it is also a man-made disease, Alzheimer's disease. Let's talk about dementia. So dementia is the umbrella term. It's not a diagnosis. Okay. Dementia is not a diagnosis, right? It's a term that we use to describe symptoms. It actually comes from the word demented. So as you get older and you lose your processing speed, that's your ability to think fast, right? Speed of decisions. You get slow thinking and your memory starts to decline. These are all cognitive functions. We use them every day. And when they start to decline or become demented, that's what we call dementia. So that's what dementia is. Underneath dementia, right? Think about it. It's the umbrella term. Underneath it sits various forms of dementia. We've got Parkinson's dementia, right? So if you have Parkinson's disease, you have some cognitive demented states. So you have Parkinson's dementia. Vascular dementia, that's the second greatest form of dementia. We've got Alzheimer's disease, which is called Alzheimer's dementia. What is vascular dementia? That's when you have the vascular system of the brain. That's when that starts to deteriorate. It's when all the blood vessels... So it's not getting blood flow. Correct, yeah. It severely attacks the blood vessels of the brain. So you've got dementia with Lewy bodies. Now, the part that we can't help, right? When it comes to genetics, there's around 30 to 40 different genes involved in all of the dementias. And there's only really three, right? That if you genetically get these from mum or dad, you will get Alzheimer's. You will get a form of dementia, right? Now, you know Bruce Willis? He's got something called frontotemporal dementia, right? So this is generally when we have a mutation in specific genes, right? So the genes I'm talking about are... We've got Priscellan I, Priscellan II and the amyloid precursor proteins. When it comes to our genetic code, we've got mutations and then we've got risk genes. So let's take... If you've got a genetic mutation on chromosome 4, that's how you were born, you will get Huntington's disease. You will get it. We can't change that for you and that is it. But for Alzheimer's disease specifically, not frontotemporal dementia, not dementia with Lewy bodies, for Alzheimer's disease, there's no genetic mutations in the genes. There's only risk genes, right? Okay. So meaning that you don't have to have these risk genes and you can have these risk genes, but it doesn't mean you're going to get it. Okay. The problem is 95% of all Alzheimer's disease cases were driven through lifestyle. Really? Yeah. There's only around 3 to 5% of the total Alzheimer's disease patients or cases that possess the risk factor genes. Can you say that again? Did you say only 3 to 5%? 3 to 5% of all Alzheimer's disease cases were driven through genetics, meaning that 95% of all Alzheimer's disease cases were driven through lifestyle interventions and factors. I feel like that's good news. It's good news, it is, because it means that you have agency over your brain. It means that you have agency over this disease. It means that you don't have to be scared like you mentioned earlier. I am not scared of Alzheimer's disease. I'm scared of cancer because this is something that I don't know anything about A. It's also something that can just sporadically happen no matter how good you are with your diet and exercise. But when it comes to Alzheimer's disease in the brain, and we're going to have a look at the brain I've brought Henry with me today, we're going to discover that you have a choice, whether you get this disease or not. And those choices start in your 30s and they get accelerated in your 40s and 50s. And then in your 60s and 70s, that's what will determine how well you lived in your 30s and 40s. So these risk factor genes, these are called the ApoE gene. So Apo-Lypo protein E, we all have them. And they come in pairs because you have one allele from mom and one from dad. Now we've got ApoE2, they're just different variants of the Apo-Lypo protein E gene, but we've got ApoE2, ApoE3 and ApoE4. So you have these, I have these. And if we have a copy of the ApoE4 gene, just one copy, you could be E3, E4. If you have one copy, it raises your risk of getting the disease by two to three fold. So you have an increased risk, increased risk. If you have two copies, you could be an E4, E4 carrier. Now 25% of the population has at least one copy. 25%. If you have two, it raises your risk by 10 fold. If you are a woman, it raises your risk by 14 fold. 14 fold? If you have two copies of this gene. What is the regular risk? One out of, do you know how many? So around two to 3% of the population has two copies. The Australian actor, Chris Hemsworth, has two copies of this gene. I saw that. They made a documentary series or something about that. They did because he doesn't want to lose his mind. So he has two copies, but it doesn't mean that he's going to get this disease. In fact, there was a landmark study that was done in Africa, which actually showed that they've got a high population of ApoE4 carriers, because it's genetic, so a huge population, but then the lowest population of Alzheimer's disease cases. In Africa. Yeah. Why is that? Probably because they're running around all the time. Eating better, probably have access to- The harder way of life. Yeah. So they have to be more active. Yeah. They've got a better, they've got a, they've figured out something that the, that we haven't in the US. What do you think that is? I think it comes down to lifestyle. I think it comes down to primarily stress, sleep, better sleep habits, better food, access to food, crops, organic foods. They're not spraying their foods with all the pesticides. And then their daily living, you know, activities of daily living. That's what we call it in academic research. Like what are you doing every day to increase your steps? What are you doing every day to exercise? What are you doing every day to keep your brain active? So I think that they're doing more of that. We are so technology driven in this country. And I think that that's what's getting in the way, whether it's AI, whether it's sitting in our, you know, in front of a computer screen working every day. And that's preventing us from sleeping better, eating better food, exercising, etc. Could it be a ethnicity issue? Is it higher in white people than it is in black people? No, I mean, it's said that it's higher in ethnic, you know, in the European countries. And this is all just because of genetics. You pass down your genes. By the way, you can test for this. You can test if you've got, if you're an ApoE4 carrier or not. Some people choose not to because they believe, well, I'm doing everything I can anyway. And while that's true, I believe that everyone should get tested because you want to know if the bus is coming, right? And if the bus is going to hit you, because then you can intervene even better and harder. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So what, what? Let's, let's, let me, let me introduce Henry. Okay. So for everybody watching, so this is Henry. And I'm going to just perform a craniotomy right now. We've just taken a skull and I just want to use the brain just to properly show you. So the brain is around two pounds, right? And it actually feels like hard Jell-O like tofu, right? And it consumes 20% of all the energy that you consume every day. So it's a hungry organ, right? And it's comprised, you've got two hemispheres, if we can do this. So you get two of everything in the hippocampus. We've got two, because you get two on each side. This green part here is called the cerebellum, which is Latin for mini brain. And here is the brain stem. The brain has around 87 billion neurons. Neurons are brain cells. We've got different types of brain cells. We've got glial cells as well, which we'll go into. But here's the fascinating part. See these red vessels here? The brain is the most vascular-rich organ in the entire body. Actually, if you were to pull apart all of the blood vessels in your brain, which comprise of capillaries, veins, and arteries, right? If you were to pull them all apart, it would span 400 miles. Wow. So it's a vascular network tightly densed in this two-pound blob, right? And these brain cells are responsible for everything you do. Right? Everything you do, everything you are, everything you think, everything you feel comes down to how your brain is functioning. That's all. So there is, you know, the reason I got into this in the first place was when I was studying mathematics, there was a neurophysiologist that we had to study. And back then I was like, what's a neurophysiologist? And his name was Warren McCulloch. And he teamed up with a mathematician. His last name was Pitts. And they were able to come up with the algorithm for how neurons fire. It was phenomenal. It's such beautiful work. And in fact, that algorithm and that mathematical equation is what printed the neural network that we know today, which is AI. Wow. Yes. And it's so beautiful. And he's got a phenomenal book, which I've read all through doing my thesis. But when I figured this out, you know, I remember talking to my, my professor and he said to me, he said, McCulloch knew that when that, that neurons either fire or they don't. And that's dependent on a mathematical code. So your neurons either fire together. So neural plasticity is when neurons fire together, they wire together. So we knew that. But neurons are either on or they're off. And when they're off, that's what ends up becoming neurodegeneration and deteriorating your brain. So we've got 87 billion neurons, which are being fed from the vascular system. Right. These little ones that you see here on the outside of the cortex are capillaries. In Australia, we call them capillaries. They're one cell thick. So they're not like arteries. So arteries are thick, right? They're like these tubes and they're supported by a muscular outer layer. Right. So they can handle, they're like pipes, right? So they're big and we have branching off those from the, from the egg order and going up into the brain. But these little ones are the first things to die. Right. They die, primarily when we have an insult and your own insult, like a TBI. If you get a TBI, you're most certainly going to be breaking these little capillaries because they're so tiny. They're so fine. These are the first things to go with hypertension. High blood pressure. Right. So one of the best things you can do is buy yourself a $25 automatic blood pressure monitor on Amazon, which can measure your blood pressure and you want to maintain the 120 over 80 gold standard. Anything above that, you know that you are starting to break your brain, the small vessels of the brain. So then the next question is, well, Louisa, if we, you know, let's just say we kill off these little capillaries, what happens? Well, these capillaries are feeding the, the neurons in that area. If you cut off its blood supply, you cut off its oxygen and its nutrients. So the neuron itself can no longer survive. So what does it do? Dies. Correct. And then you think, well, there's 87 billion neurons. You know, am I going to feel it? Well, this is why it takes 20 to 30 years to feel your first symptom of Alzheimer's disease. One neuron, you're not going to feel it, but that one neuron stops communicating with the, the nearby neuron. And then that stops communicating with the nearby neuron. This takes, you know, and when you stop, when they stop accumulating, when they stop accumulating in a small cluster, that's when we start to feel symptoms of dysfunction. You know, if it happens on the left side, maybe you're getting in the way of your language processing. Does it make sense? What would people notice? Well, the first symptoms to go is memory, specifically short-term memory. I forgot my keys. What's that person's name? You walk into a room. Why did I come in here? What was I getting? You walk out of a room. Faces start to become distorting. You start to forget certain things, short-term memory. Long-term memory doesn't really get affected. So it's the first thing to go. And that is because, let's just perform surgery here, that is because we have a deep structure in our brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure. It actually means seahorse in Latin. And it lives, as you can see, it's so deep. It's part of what we call the limbic system. The temporal lobes are here behind your ears and it lives deep in there. And it's the first thing to go during Alzheimer's disease. So that starts to deteriorate. The hippocampus holds all of our memory formation, our memory consolidation. This is where we learn new things as well. So that is, it's very susceptible to oxidation, meaning that if it gets stressed, becomes oxidized. That's when we start to kill the neurons in that area. So if we start to kill the neurons in that area and they become dysfunctional, then I'm sure 10 memories starts to fade. We've all seen it. The Department of War is operating in a world that's changing faster than ever. That's why so many guests on my show talk about the importance of continued innovation and technology in the military. But here's the problem. Working with the Department of War can be complex. For many companies, the process isn't always transparent. It's hard to know who the right stakeholders are, where the decisions are made, or how funding actually moves. Even when you get the right conversation started, you often hear the same responses. We like the technology, but funding is already allocated. Or check back next fiscal year. That leaves a lot of capable teams with strong products, but no clear path forward. 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I don't forget people's names, my family, my team, close friends. When those memories are formed in the hippocampus, they get protruded out to the cortex. And that's where they live. This is why you can get somebody with Alzheimer's disease in their end stage. And they'll remember their daughter. Or they'll become lucid and they'll remember their wedding day. But the short-term memory. It's also important to differentiate between short-term memory loss and just pure stress and lack of concentration in the moment of knowing that person's name. But you're a vet. You've been, I'm sure you've been involved. Have you had a TBI? You've probably had multiple, right? And who knows what happened in that moment? The most important stage right then is 72 hours of that insult. An insult is a hit to the head. What happens within that 72-hour time frame? Which is why the concussion protocols at the NFL really matter. Like, what are you doing to preserve this person's brain after they've taken a hit? You can stop the process immediately if you do certain things in that 72-hour period. But we don't know what happened back then for you. And then did that evolve with you killing off blood supply to a certain area of the brain? Like, what is going on in your brain? I haven't seen any of your images. I don't know if you've done any like MRIs or anything like that. I don't want to. Because I have a lot of friends with us. And I'm not saying a lot of improvement unless it's psychedelic assisted therapy. And that's, you know, and I know that you've taken... I begain. I begain, yeah. I think that's going to be also something big, especially in the state of California, where they're looking at this now on people with major depressive disorder. You know, people with clinical depression there, there, going through this. And I think it's great as well. But I also think it's wonderful to see other interventions that we could use if you knew what was happening in your brain. But I forget words sometimes when I'm talking. Are these signs? They have to be, right? Yes. I mean, they would be definite signs of mild, forms of mild cognitive impairment. So when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, this is what happens, right? You have a, you get something called subjective cognitive impairment. It's when you first start to notice these signs, brain fog, right? Brain fog where you can't remember things. And then after that, if it becomes more persistent and you see it in different areas of life as well, slurring of words could be a language processing issue. This, if you get diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, there is a test that you can take that's called the Mocha test MOCA. You get a score out of 30. It's a free test Montreal cognitive assessment. You can do it. It doesn't take long. If you get 30, that's great, right? If you're getting like, you know, if you're getting around 25, you've got mild cognitive impairment. Right? So, or even 26 mild cognitive impairment. This MCI state lasts around 20 years. And the problem is it accumulates and accumulates. It's like compound interest, right? It's not that you get it now and then you're just going to stop it. Now you're on the road. Okay. Let's imagine, right? Where we live our lives up until 25, the brain fully forms at around 25 years old. That's it. And that's why that age is so beautiful. You know, when I was training like triathlon, my brain is still developing. It's firing 22, 23. Beautiful. But then you are survived in those by, by your age. You can get hit in the head, right? And yes, it's going to do some damage, but you are survived by your growing of your brain due to your age and the healing process that takes place. But at 25 evolutionarily, evolution stated, that's it. Reproduction is over and we no longer need to survive anymore. So we're going to die. That's evolutionary. Why we stopped growing at that age, our brain. But now we're living longer because of penicillin, antibiotics and vaccines. Right? So now we're living to 100. So our brain wasn't built for that. It wasn't built to survive up until 100, learn 120 or 30. Right? So we're at this critical point at 25. And that's when we really need to start to protect our brain. Okay. So it cannot be reversed. No. But you can stop it. No. You can stop the, the snowball effect. No, you can slow it down. You can slow it down. Yeah. To my date, there are, there is a prominent neurologist who believes that he has reversed Alzheimer's disease. He written a book on it. I think that that is unethical. I think it's, it's a good thing to do. I think it's extremely difficult. I've never seen it. It's never been seen in academic peer reviewed literature. I don't believe it's true. I tell people that Alzheimer's disease is a diagnosis that is similar to end stage cancer. Okay. You know, how so? If you've been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, it's called the glioblastoma. Right? I'm in neurosurgery. I work in your research room. We've got a tumor board and we've got, you know, then your research and are constantly being, you know, thrown cases of glioblastoma. We know that there has a one to five year survival rate. You don't really survive that. That's end stage. Right? And we don't know who's got, it's not something that you can prevent. It just happens. Right? So that's the same as Alzheimer's disease. Meaning if you get it, you have a, after this, you've got maybe a one or two year survival rate. You start to lose everything, all of your cognitive functions. You don't even know who you are. I've had a patient looking in the mirror asking me, who's that? She's looking at her and she thinks it's another person. You lose your cognitive faculties. Right? So to say that you've reversed that is a really serious thing. And I don't believe you can do that. Now, when it comes to mild cognitive impairment, as I mentioned, this is a 20 year process. You can slow the progression. Right? So if you get MCI, and we know that, okay, in 20 years, this means you're going to get Alzheimer's disease. Let's make it 30 years. Let's slow that progression. It doesn't mean you're getting off the treadmill. Right? You get on the treadmill. That's MCI. You're going down this track. Doesn't mean you have to get the disease at 80. Right? By the way, you don't die of Alzheimer's disease. If I think it's really important for you as well, you mentioned a close family. Remember, diet. I think it's important to know on the death certificate what it actually says. Sometimes it will say on a death certificate mixed dementia. I think it was actually kidney dialysis. That's what it is. You don't die of Alzheimer's disease. Oftentimes, which is what makes it so devastating is that you can die of asphyxiation, meaning sometimes people just forget to swallow. Holy shit. You forget to swallow, or you may die of sepsis. You get an infection. You don't know it. A lot of these patients are walking around. They don't know if they've been hurt or you fall. You hit your head. And that's, it's really sad. The reason why it's so sad, Sean, is because out of all of the diseases, it's the one that you lose who you are. Why I love it so much is because I love my life. And I love learning. And I've loved learning my entire life. I didn't really grow up watching TV. I grew up with books and encyclopedias, and I read a lot. And reading is one of my pleasures. And I love it so much that my brain gets to do that. And I love forming memories, albeit with myself or with my loved ones. And I would hate to lose those because you spend your whole life building those up for it to be robbed of a disease that was preventable. Right? So let's keep going down this if I've got you, right? So you've got this, this brain that is at the mercy of all these insults. So every day when your neurons are wiring together, right? And every, every time you produce a thought, your neurons are firing together. And at that time, they're producing a whole host of chemicals, dopamine, serotonin. If they're getting produced in the right way, you're releasing serotonin, which makes you feel happy, right? Dopamine, if you're releasing them in the right way, makes you feel vigilant. And it gives you that drive and that motivation to pursue your goals in the pursuit of goal setting, right? Or it could be hormonal. So it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful structure. It's the most beautiful structure in the entire universe. There's so much I don't know about it. This here is called the circle of willis. It's just how the, the blood supply is shaped. And it's really interesting because you've got the aorta, which is this massive, massive blood vessel that comes out of the heart. From the aorta, you've got, here you've got the carotid arteries. We've got one on each side. And then you've got the vertebral arteries, the vertebral arteries. The carotid arteries supply the frontal part of the brain with blood. And the vertebral arteries supply the back part of the brain. I love the system because if one system breaks down, if you've had a stroke, right, in one of the arteries in the brain, the brain has a backup system. So if the stroke is happening in the posterior part of the brain that's supplying the posterior part, maybe the occipital lobe here, which is responsible for our vision and our, everything that we see and how we process vision, then the front supply, the anterior part of the brain, the blood supply will use their backup system and immediately supply the brain with blood, which is why strokes, my father had a stroke in 2019, which is why a stroke is such a heart, like for you to have a stroke, you have to think neurologically, all systems broke down in the brain, right? So that's your brain. That's neuroanatomy 101. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about Alzheimer's disease. So we've got all of the dementias. Now, what separates us? Like, why is that the most prominent form of dementia? And what separates it from the rest of the dementias, right? There's two proteins at play here. We've got amyloid beta. Okay. So if we have, if we've got amyloid beta in the brain, that's one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. That's how we can differentiate it from the rest of the, the, the dementias. And then there's another one called tau protein. Now, amyloid beta lives outside of the neurons. Tau protein lives inside of the neurons. So we've got two attacks, one that's getting in the way. So these, the way the neurons are structured, the 87 billion of them, they've got a cell body, just like the cells in your, in your body. But then there's an axon that comes off it. So think of a tree, you've got the roots, and then you've got the tree trunk, right? So that's the axon. Okay. Okay. And then the branches are the dendrites. And then the leaves are these little dendritic spines. The leaves, okay, the dendritic spines and the dendrites communicate with the other dendrites. So imagine two trees forming together and the leaves are touching. That's how you produce your actions. They're called synapses. Okay. And so, so when we get that pruning around of the synapses, that's what causes the degeneration and our network system starts to fail. Right? So outside of the tree trunks, in the air, which is also the cerebral spinal fluid, that's where amyloid beta lives. And in the tree trunks themselves, that's where tau protein lives. So you can imagine, first and foremost, if we get the buildup of amyloid, what happens? Well, the leaves can't communicate anymore. They get stuck, like glue, right? They get stuck. And then if they can't communicate and they're stuck like this, they just die. So where does that amyloid come from? Where does the buildup come from? I'm going to take you in history now and I'm going to give you something that's really, it's going to make you maybe hate science or medicine or institutions, which I know that I already hate it. You've got something to say about that. In 1901, the first ever, this is how Alzheimer's disease became a thing. A woman was experiencing a form of delirium and her husband thought she was crazy and she needed to be in a psych ward. So he took her to the hospital and the neurologist, at that time, he was around 34 years old. His name was Alois Alzheimer and he took this patient and over a three year period, he tracked all of her symptoms and he's got a book. He tracked everything about her because he thought it was so mysterious, you know, what happens to her. She died three years later, but she came in with complaints of not remembering who people are, not remembering faces and she actually quoted, I don't know who I am. They couldn't understand why. They just thought that she had delirium, right? She ended up dying of sepsis like three years later. What they did was they donated her brain and Alois Alzheimer was able to look into her brain on an autopsy and cut her brain and look under a microscope and he found these plaques, right? And when he scanned it and investigated it, he found that it was amyloid. Okay? It's a protein. It's an antimicrobial peptide, right? So stay with me. It's just a protein peptide. He found it. So since 1905, there was this whole theory that Alzheimer's disease, they called it after him. If you get these forms, this form of delirium, it's not delirium anymore, it's called Alzheimer's disease after Alois Alzheimer. And they were able to stain these using silver staining to show that, okay, they've got these amyloid deposits in their brain. So then Alzheimer's disease became something called the amyloid cascade hypothesis, right? In 2003, this is what we thought was, if you get a head full of amyloid, you've got Alzheimer's disease. This is where it gets so interesting and really frustrating. In 2003, there was a scientist, his name was, he was a French neuroscientist, Sylvain Lesnar at the University of Minnesota, was working in a lab to try and figure out Alzheimer's disease. And he found that a specific type of amyloid in the brain, before it becomes these hard plaques, they're soft oligomers, right? So they become soft and then they accumulate and they become these dense plaques. But before they do that, they're just these little oligomers that are floating around and they're actually not neurotoxic, right? They become a monomer and then an oligomer. And then when they start to accumulate, that's when it becomes dangerous. He realized, or he found, in 2003, in mouse models, that these oligomers, which is actually called amyloid beta-56, that that is the sole cause of Alzheimer's disease. So it was so monumental in 2003, right? This paper that he put out to show that we can solve the amyloid cascade hypothesis, if we intervene and stop this oligoma from becoming the actual plaque, right? Foundational. Do you know what happened then? He got cited 2,300 times, which is huge, right? Immediately, he got a $7 million grant for his own funding and then the NIH put $300 million per year towards formulating, or replicating these studies, and formulating pharmaceutical interventions to attack this, right? And this was the biggest thing in academic research. And it wasn't until 2022 that they found that it was fraudulent. Holy shit, are you serious? So all of the papers he put out, he made, he did around 40 of his own papers. What he did was, they've got these Western plots that you have to put in academic research. They were all fake. So all of the images he put into, and by the way, guess where it was first printed in 2003? The journal Nature. Nature is the most prestigious academic journal in the world. It is a high stringent journal and yet a neuroscientist at the university, and he only, he only quit from his tenured position in 2024. He resigned or was fired. This is the biggest scandal in the amyloid cascade hypothesis, and I'll tell you why. A, $300 million went towards funding something that never existed. They were never able to replicate these studies, and like labs all over the world were getting funded to replicate this amyloid beta 56. They were going, okay, great, how can we replicate this? No one was able to replicate it over a 20-year period. Why didn't people intervene earlier? This is a high stringent journal, the most stringent journal in the world, and yet you didn't realize that these images were manipulated? How he manipulated them, I'm not sure. And when it came out, you have to think what this did over 20 years. A, they were putting all of these patients through these phase three trials to see if we could replicate these, you know, replicate drugs. They could come in and clear it out. What was happening during that time? Well, nothing, A, like pharmaceutical companies like spending billions of dollars for absolutely no reason. We lost so much. A, integrity in science. B, integrity in peer-reviewed processing and academic integrity. I mean, I just, it's the biggest, I would say, scandal that no one's really talking about. I'm not sure why. And it's fresh. It wasn't until, you know, and it was a scientist, it was printed in 2022, like, you know, they went in, they investigated it, they found that these images were not real. And it's just like, what did we lose in that process? And now we are now being faced with people losing, you know, trust in Alzheimer's disease research. You know, the NIH has now cut the funding completely, which is so sad for people now. But imagine the patients who are going through, you're giving these patients, millions of people over the world, false hope of going through these phase two, phase three clinical trials. Damn. 20 years of effort, I'll just raise my trash. 20 years of effort, yeah, from this one man, which I don't know what his motive was. Maybe it was money, maybe it was prestige, because let me tell you, for 20 years he was a king. It's now, the retracted article is the most, it's the second most cited retracted article in the entire world when it comes to medical science. I think there's like, I looked on it yesterday, there's like 84,000, like, I don't know, I saw 84,000, I was like, oh my god, that's climbed a lot. So people are now becoming more aware of it. But it doesn't stop there. So we have drugs now, IV drugs. One of them is called Lecanomab. Okay, one of them is called, there was one called AgiCanomab, but that was pulled off the market, right? So now we've got something called Lecanomab, right? And basically what this is, it's an intravenous drug. It's extremely expensive. It's around $26,000. And what it does is when it's administered, it goes through and it clears out the plaques from your brain. But what people don't realize is when the scientists were going through the phase three clinical trial, deaths were occurring. And something called ARIA, which is basically when you administer this drug, it's causing micro hemorrhages in the brain. So brain bleeds. And these brain bleeds are causing deaths. And during the phase three clinical trial, it caused deaths, it caused two deaths. And this was never noted. And the pharmaceutical companies, which formulated Lecanomab, went through and fast tracked it to get it approved. So it's still on the market. I get asked every day, just yesterday, I have a friend of a friend who messaged me and she said, look, I know you know what's going on. My dad just got Alzheimer's disease. And she's quite young. She said, my dad just got diagnosed. They want to put him on this IV drug. Can you tell me anything about it? It's the only thing we have right now in terms of pharmaceutical interventions. But when you actually have a look, and the New York Times actually posted this back in 2025, huge, huge article, when you look at what it's doing, A, is a $26,000 administration. Not many people can afford that. You actually need four lots of it. Right. You're taking with you. Look at that, $100,000. Yeah. You're taking with you the plaques, the amyloid beta plaques, right? But what they're not reporting is that a lot of these patients who went through the trials, who survived and didn't have micro hemorrhages and didn't obviously cause any death, it wasn't preserving their cognitive functions. So they're clearing out the amyloid, but they're still not themselves, they're still not remembering things. So what was the point? But still there's no improvement. There's no improvement, which brings me to my next thing. You can have a person with a head full of amyloid and have Alzheimer's disease. They've got no cognitive functions. Subsequently, you can have another person, same age, same gender, same genetic profile, if you will, with a head full of amyloid, but they've got their cognitive functions. What does this mean? It means that amyloid is not the demon. But we have been led to believe that this protein, which is a naturally occurring protein, a naturally occurring peptide, that it's not the problem. We can't, we need to stop focusing, but pharmaceutical companies don't want to stop because they're formulated drug that can eliminate that. But that's not the problem. That's like putting a band-aid on it. By the way, you get rid of the amyloid. It's going to come back. Wow. Is that what the 40 hertz is getting rid of? Supposedly, yes. So it doesn't do anything? So, I mean, it gets rid of it. So what we're doing now is what we're trying to say is, I don't know, it's like, let's give a financial analogy, right? It's like going and spending so much money on a credit card. You know, not thinking about anything over a 20 year period, and then it creeps up to you. It's like, hey, you have billions of dollars in debt, what now? And you're like, oh, I don't know. But you were warned about this 20 years ago. You've, that compound interest has been accumulating. So the problem is an amyloid. The problem is, why is the amyloid accumulating in the first place? So what is amyloid beta? Well, as I mentioned, it's an antimicrobial peptide. Your brain is so strong. Remember, prior to antibiotics and penicillin, it had to survive. So how does it survive evolutionarily? Well, amyloid actually lives in your neurons and it actually gets ejected out of the neurons in the event of an attack, a microbial attack. So think of a virus, right? Or pathogens that get into your brain. How does the brain protect itself? Because if the pathogen gets in the brain, it starts to attack the neuron. The neuron's smart. It's like, I need to protect myself. So what does it do? It releases amyloid and the amyloid goes, it traps the microbe or the virus, it engulfs it, it engulfs it, and it kills it. This is like what white blood cells do with cancer cells. It detects cancer, goes through, it engulfs it, kills it. So you eject the amyloid, it goes in, it kills the virus, and then there. But it's outside now. So now we have to get you into deep sleep at night, which is why we sleep. In fact, before antibiotics and penicillin, we were sleeping 11 hours a night. So we'd be able to clear it all out, right? That's how you do it. So then you've got tau protein. Now tau protein lives in the axon, as I mentioned, and if that builds up, it actually causes the collapse of that tree trunk. Sure. So then the question is, well, how do we stop it from being ejected? Why would it, like, how do we, like, it makes sense, right? Mathematically, well, let's just stop the brain from ejecting the amyloid in the first place. That'll solve it. But why does it get ejected? Well, because it's an antimicrobial peptide, it actually gets released every time you activate your innate immune system. Every time you get stressed. Remember, the brain doesn't know the difference between you getting hit by a car or you just receiving a text from an ex. It depends on your emotional security at that time. If you get stressed and you release all of this cortisol, it signals to your brain that you are under attack. You're running away from a lion. Massive amount of cortisol, the stress hormone gets released. So your brain is like, I'm under attack. Let's release amyloid to protect our brain cells. We get an influx of inflammatory cytokines. These neurotoxic, these neurotoxic cytokines that go into the brain just like inflammation in your body, but inflammation in your brain, neural inflammation. If your brain senses it's got inflammation, it starts to release amyloid to protect you. And when it's first released, when amyloid is first released, it's not harmful. It's soft. It's a monomer. It turns into this these different fibrils and then it actually comes together. That's when it becomes toxic. So amyloid is not the demon. And yet pharmaceutical companies know this and yet they're still spending money giving you a medication to clear the amyloid when they should be spending their money figuring out how do we get people to stress less, sleep interventions, natural things to help people in their daily lives to prevent this from happening. Why aren't they doing it just because of the business? Well, there's no money in it. You can't make money on an exercise intervention because it's free. You can't make money really on a sleep intervention because it's free. You can make money on a monoclonal antibody, which is the IV drug, lakana map and dinana map. That's what they are. If you ever hear the word map on the end of a pharmaceutical, it's a monoclonal antibody. So these are used to go in and clear the amyloid, but that's not the problem. So there's another phenomenon that I want to bring shed light on, which I think it's really fascinating. We have something in our brain called cognitive reserve. I mentioned to you, 87 billion neurons. By the way, every neuron has around 15,000 connections. Do the math on that. 15,000 times 87 billion, that is your neural network and it's firing. So the leaves again, when they communicate with one another, that's a connection. You have 15,000 per neuron. Those connections are your cognitive reserve. So we want to keep it in reserve. The reason why you can have a head full of amyloid at the end of your life, but preserve your cognitive functions, comes down to your cognitive reserve. Your cognitive reserve is built through everything that you do, right? When you go for a run, you build new connections in your brain. When you see something new for the very first time, you build new connections. This is why a baby's brain is formulating so rapidly because everything is new to them. Sound, color, anything, light, buildings, everything. Imagine seeing something for the very first time, your brain has to build a connection. So this happens throughout our life and you can keep building cognitive reserve. It's really beautiful, but what happens is we stop doing it because we get older and we stop exercising. Actually, a huge risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and all cause dementia is retirement because you stop interacting socially. You stop using your brain. You stop providing a stimulus. Therefore, it's not creating your connections. And also, those connections that were preserved, the ones for mathematical reasoning or social connection, if you stop using those, those connections die off. I mean, that's interesting because you would think it would be less stress after retirement. But that's not what your brain is. Your brain is, it needs stimulus. You would think that as well, like, oh, why would our muscles deteriorate if we just have less stress? Well, you have to use them and you have to provide a stimulus for them to grow and adapt. That's actually evolution, right? Adaptability. So you provide a strong stimulus and it grows and it adapts. So if you want to preserve your cognitive functions, you need to be deliberately doing things in your day to day that's going to be effortful, right? Yes, exercise. But how about reading? I don't know if you agree with me on this. In your amazing studio, you've got so many books and I'm an avid reader. I think we have a literacy problem in the US right now. A lot of people are finding it difficult to articulate words, to articulate their thoughts and to even read because they don't have to because we've got AI now or we've got videos on YouTube, you know, growing up. I didn't have the internet. I know, it kind of makes me feel old, but every time I needed to study something, my father would say, get the encyclopedia. So you'd have to build those connections. We're losing those. So seeing culture, you know, new cultural things. And if you want to age somebody fast, get them talking to the same people every day, get them doing the same things, not challenging their brain, living in a secluded form, talking to the same person every day and not seeing new things. If you want to grow your brain and have an enriched environment, travel. Travel somewhere because you see something new that your brain's never seen before. And every time you see something new, your brain creates a new connection and you add to that cognitive reserve bank. Let me tell you, you want that bank. You want it there because you never know what's coming your way. You don't know if, you know, you have a tragic accident where you'd be concussed in the head. You don't know if you're going to get a virus that will engulf your brain. You want to be able to have so much reserve there to overcome any insult that it takes. What is the, what is a person with Alzheimer's experiencing? I think, I think pretty much everybody knows what it is from the outside, but what is, what is the person actually experiencing? Is it stressful for them? Do they, how does it, how is at the core loss of sense of self? What is yourself? It's your, it is your cognition. So they're losing sense of, look, you've got in some aspects, loss of spatial awareness, right? Where they can come closer towards you. I've noticed this, you know, with my father, you know, he had his stroke and a stroke obviously causes deterioration, a certain part of the brain, and you lose the cognitive faculties around there. I've noticed his loss spatial awareness, and you see him sitting close to you, and it's so interesting. You know, he sits so close to my mother now on the couch. He doesn't realize where he is in space and time. You can forget, obviously you can forget certain things like walking into a room. Yes, but to a larger extent, you can be driving, which happened to my father as well, which he, I don't think he should have been driving. He was cleared from the doctor because his eyesight was fine. Cognitive faculties were fine. He was driving, he forgot to hit the brake, right? He went straight through a traffic light, car tumbled down. He was left upside down, and he had no idea what happened in that moment. And he was, he's miraculously, because of, of God, I believe he was fine. He came out without a scratch, but the car was torn apart. I asked him, like, what, what happened? His brain didn't relay in that moment, in that split second, red light stop, which he knows, but just didn't happen in that moment. So people are feeling, you know, they don't want to be, you know, you can get auditory dysfunction. Actually, the American Academy of Neurology actually put down mild hearing loss. As a symptom of cognitive impairment. So you get mild hearing loss, and it is now a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Why do you think that is? That's because I told you, every brain cell in the brain needs to be utilized. It needs to be, or it starts to think that, hey, she's not using me. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm just going to die because she doesn't need me anymore to preserve my energy. Your ears are here, right? And your ears are connected to the cells in your brain, which is in the, in the temporal lobes of the brain. Remember, that's where deep in the temporal lobes, that's where the hippocampus lives. If you're not using the cells around here, because when you hear sounds, you need to process those sounds in your brain. So you need to use this part of the brain to process sounds. And if that's becoming dysfunctional, because you can't hear anymore than those cells in the temporal lobes start to die, which is why with the military, I spoke at the inaugural military convention on TBIs and sounds, people think the TBIs, it's just the hits to their head. It's no, it's the sounds, the massive explosions that can cause mild hearing loss. And actually, a lot of the vets, they had hearing aids, which I love. Hearing aids are phenomenal because they can help you preserve your cognitive functions. If you start to, you know, lose a sense of sound, then that can deteriorate your brain. The back part of our brain, the occipital cortex, we don't see with our eyes. We see with our brain, you've got your eyeball there, the retina, then you've got the optic nerve that comes out of the, literally from your eyeball goes into the brain. And the signals travel down here to the back of the brain, where you make sense of your, you've got a black hat on the end. The reason I know this is because this part of my brain is functioning. It tells me what the image is, and then it relays it back to the frontal cortex. That's the executive processing part of the brain that gives you the idea that, hey, that is a black hat that you are wearing. That becomes slower over time, right? If you've got Alzheimer's disease or if you've got mild cognitive impairment, that rate and that speed becomes slower. So you'll see something happening, but it takes you a long time to process it. Oh God. This is why some people who have got a lot of cognitive overload when they're driving and they're trying to figure out where they're going, you just need your eyes, but they like turn the music down. I need to see where I'm going. Hmm. Are they aware? I mean, how a lot of them get angry? Of course they're angry. They're frustrated because they don't know what's happening to them. They're experiencing a loss of their faculties that, you know, think, I know for myself, and I'm in my 30s, right? When things become, I'm not as sharp as I was in my 20, when I was 25. Oh my God, you should have seen me. Like I was, I was able to do so much with little sleep, right? Now I need my seven hours, seven and a half hours a night, or I'm not, I'm not myself. Things are becoming slower. For my father, especially, he gets very frustrated and his frustration turns to anger when he has to do something that is a bit mathematically challenging. So he took care of everything in our house and now my mother does when it comes to bills and, you know, their properties and investments. And my mother has to take care of all that because my dad simply just, he looks at it and it's, he just cannot make out what to do. And it frustrates him. And he's spoken to me about it and very much frustrates him to the point that it, that's when you start to lose, you start to question, who am I in this world? Damn. And depending on where, look, Alzheimer's disease, as I mentioned, it starts in the hippocampus and it starts to go out into the temporal lobes and then the, the frontal part of the brain. Remember, your frontal lobe, it's the biggest part of the brain, it has the most amount of neurons. It, that's where our executive functions live in the prefrontal cortex. I kind of think of the prefrontal cortex as the, the, the federal government, right? It's making all the decisions and that starts to deteriorate. And the, the, because it's so got the most populated amount of neurons, those start to, you know, become dysfunctional. And that's when we start to, you know, our, our thinking and our intellectual capabilities start to decline. Let's keep going if you're okay. I said to you that it takes around, it's a, it's, it's a highly metabolic organ. So how is it powered? So how are neurons surviving? It uses glucose as its primary fuel source, right? So glucose is its primary fuel source. Have you heard that, you know, in some aspects that Alzheimer's diseases type three diabetes? That's what they say, right? Why is that? Well, as we get older and it actually occurs more in women, so this is where we're going to be a bit gender specific. Why are 70% of all Alzheimer's disease cases female? Right? Why is that? Well, A, because the first, the, you know, the biggest risk factor of Alzheimer's disease is age, right? As you get older, you've got an increased risk of getting the disease. The second biggest risk factor is being a woman. Really? Yes. The second biggest risk factor is being female. And that is because of two reasons. A, on average, women live around 4.5 to five years longer than men. So it increases their age. So they've just got a greater susceptibility of getting the disease. The second one is because women go through the hormonal transition, which is causing the increased risk factors of getting this disease. We start to lose estrogen and progesterone. And you know what this is called? This is called menopause. Okay? When you get the complete cessation of our primary hormone, which is estrogen, right? So just with the amyloid cascade hypothesis, we used to think that estrogen was just a reproductive hormone. That's all we thought it was. Women, you know, start, you know, stop to, you know, they stop producing estrogen. That means they can't produce children anymore. That was it. But it's only been in the last 10, 15 years that we now know that estrogen is a neuroendocrine hormone, meaning that it is a hormone that we need for our brain cells to survive. Now, you are a male, you have estrogen too. And your brain is more protected because you go through your own type of menopause. It's called andropause. But for women, it's this steep, steep collapse. Okay? So at age 45, right? This is what happens. They decline of our hormones start to go down like this. For men, it goes down really, really slowly. So you can maintain your estrogen and your testosterone. You have estrogen too, believe it or not. And what happens with testosterone in the brain is testosterone aromatizes into estrogen. So you have that protective barrier in your brain of estrogen throughout your life, whereas women downforce, we've lost our estrogen, right? We can help that with hormone replacement therapy. But why is estrogen so important? Well, on our cells, we have receptors, right, for estrogen. Imagine a receptor like a cantaloc. That's the receptor sitting on the cell body. This is estrogen, estrogen is floating along, it gets in, and then it can get into the brain cell. And what estrogen does is it helps with neural inflammation. So it detects, okay, she's got inflammation in her brain, it brings it down. It also helps shuttle glucose into the cell. So if I don't have estrogen in my brain anymore, where's the glucose going? It can't get into the cell. So therefore, I've got two problems. I've got a buildup of glucose in the brain because it's not getting into the cell, it's not getting utilized. Right? Just like the glucose in your bloodstream, in your body, you become insulin resistant. So higher risk for diabetes. Insulin resistance in the brain. So it starts to deteriorate the blood vessels of the brain because it's just floating around in there. It shouldn't be there. And B, that means the cell doesn't have energy. It doesn't have its fuel source because it's not being able to get shuttled in. So what does it do? Well, the brain cell in that state, that's what's causing the brain fog in the menopausal women. We've heard, you know, brain fog is deteriorating the thalamus, which is where our temperature control mechanism is. So this is why 60 to 70% of all women experience hot flashes during the menopausal transition because their hypothalamus doesn't have the estrogen anymore. So it's not supporting the hypothalamus anymore. So the thermoregulatory system in your brain doesn't know what it's doing. So it's making you go really, really hot and then it's making you go really, really cold and that's a hot flash. And that's keeping women up at night, not allowing them to get into deep sleep, not allowing them to clear out the plaques. So we've got so many problems. And that was another flawed study back in the early 2000s, the Women's Health Initiative, by far the most fraudulent study in all of medicine. And it starved and wronged millions upon millions of women out of taking hormone replacement therapy. Millions. And so now we're suffering, right? We've got all these baby burners. My mother is one of them. She's 72 years old and she's got her cognitive faculties intact. She's fine there, but she was scared out. Like her doctor never told her to take, you know, 20 years ago, to take hormone replacement therapy because this study went out there and said that hormone replacement therapy increases your risk of breast cancer. Does it? No. No, that has been retracted. We now know that hormone replacement therapy is safe. They used a different type of estrogen back then when they were testing it on women. There was many things wrong with the study. A, they were putting conjugated estrogen, which is they took the estrogen from the urine of female men, so horses, horse, urine, estrogen. And so it's a synthetic form of estrogen. They were putting it into these women. These women on average were around 63 years old. So they had already surpassed menopause. And so it wasn't working. And it actually increased their risk of dementia. So what we have now is we have a safer option for women. It's bio identical hormones. So you can take a, you know, a hormone patch, an estrogen patch, you put on your, your body, and you replace that, I believe. I'm not on HRT yet, but I will in my 40s. Basically, we have a window of opportunity. So women must get on their hormone replacement therapy between the ages of around 42, 45 and 52, when you still have circulating estrogen in the, in your body for it to go in and mimic that hormone and it becomes bio identical. So you have that, you have now a safeguard. It's called the window of opportunity. So women need to start hormone replacement in their 40s. Correct. So generally you want to get on it when you're in the perimenopause stage, which again, just like mild cognitive impairment, perimenopause happens 10 years prior to the onset of menopause. Menopause is just one day. Right? It's when you have been 12 months without your menstrual cycle. So if you reach that 365 days and you haven't had a period, that is the first day of menopause. It generally happens at around 52. Right? So women can get into perimenopause in, in their, you know, at 42, at 40, it varies. And that's when you need to go to the doctor and discuss your symptoms. And it can help you. It can help you stave off dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And it can help you with your symptoms, which is the biggest thing affecting these women. Is there any data that shows how what percentage it detours dementia, Alzheimer's? So we haven't got the research yet. Okay. The research is underway. And actually, this is a huge controversial debate amongst academics right now, because we can't solely say hormone replacement therapy prevents dementia. We can't say that. But what we can say is we know for sure that it helps with the symptoms involved in the risk factors of dementia. Meaning if a woman's going through perimenopause and she's experiencing hot flashes, that means she's getting up at night. She's frustrated. She's hot. She's sweating. Right? That's keeping her up at night. That's a, so sleep deprivation is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. If I can correct that in a woman, then that's going to help her stave off Alzheimer's disease. Right? What is another risk factor? Well, diabetes, osteoporosis, huge risk factor as we get older. A lot of women who are in menopause have osteoporosis because we have estrogen receptors on our bones. When we lose those, then we stop the formation of our bones growing and they start to deteriorate. What happens if we get osteoporosis? Well, our bone actually communicates with our brain. First and foremost, but a woman, if she experiences a fall in her 60s or 70s, it's a steady decline to death after that. Sure. Yeah. So there are so many things. So I like to think of hormone replacement therapy. It's not your beal and end-all, but it's going to help you go to the gym. It's going to help you lift weights. Estrogen is anabolic to muscle, so it's going to help you build more muscle. It's going to help you with your mood swings. It's going to help you with your hot flashes. So that's what it's there to do. It's to help your symptoms so you can then do the things that you're meant to do, like go to the gym, sleep, eat well, so then you can have a better, healthy brain. Okay. Okay. So, what if we take a quick break? Yes. Perfect. Aging is inevitable. And if you're anything like me, you feel it a little more every year. Soreness, tight joints, recovery takes longer than it used to. We can't stop the clock, but we can take care of ourselves. That's why I take Bub's Naturals Collagen Peptides. I mix it into my tea every morning. It blends right in. No taste, no gritty texture. It's simple. I've been using Bub's Collagen for a long time, and I genuinely notice the difference. My knees feel better. My skin looks better. I recover faster after workouts. I stick with Bub's because I trust the company. Their Collagen is NSF certified for sport and sourced from grass-fed cattle. So it's clean, tested, and exactly what they say it is. And there's a bigger mission here. Bub's was founded in honor of Navy SEAL Glenn Bub Doherty, and 10% of all profits go towards helping veterans transition back to civilian life. So you're not just supporting your joints and recovery. You're supporting people who served this country. If you're ready to upgrade your daily routine with Bub's Naturals Collagen, head to bubsnaturals.com slash srs and use code Sean for 20% off your order. Again, that's bubsnaturals.com slash srs and use code Sean for 20% off your order. Take care of your body. It's the only one you've got. See you later. What's all this building? What do you think Sean? We're high. All right, Louisa, we're back from the break, which is kind of wrapped up women's hormone replacement therapy. I wanted to go back just a little bit about what the, what a person with Alzheimer's actually experiencing. And we kind of talked about the beginning of it. Yeah. But I have, I don't, my wife actually, one of her really good friends, her father has it, and they sectioned off the house into two different, basically apartments. And her dad, she's completely gone. And, you know, my wife has asked her like, you know, how do you, how do you deal with this? And she says, I don't even visit him anymore. He's, he's legitimate. Like she considers him dead. It's just not him. Exactly. So remember, at that stage, you're, that's it. You don't know, you don't even, you don't, you don't have control over anything. It's, you are not in control anymore. When your, it's, your brain has now taken control because your brain has decided that it's time now to like decompose really, because it's, it's thinking, well, I'm no longer, like it's, that the signals are all cut off. So you are not in charge. Your cognitive faculties that are responsible for you going to the toilet, or you don't have control over those anymore. It's another force. And that force is the accumulation of those amyloid plaques. And so what you'll notice, though, is a lot of patients who have got Alzheimer's disease, we're not talking about mild cognitive impairment anymore. They kind of feel like they want to do this from the world. A lot of them you'll see, they start, they stop to, they stop going out and communicating with people and socializing and they become so secluded. It's like, they just want to stare at the wall. I've had the daughter of somebody tell me that their mother, she noticed that she started sleeping, facing the wall only. And she didn't want to see anybody. She just wanted to face the wall. And that's it. That's what makes it so devastating. So they're feeling lost, they're feeling confused, but they're waking up every day, not themselves. So it's not who they are. And it's so devastating. We think two thirds of all Alzheimer's disease cases are female. And then also a third are carers. A third are what? Are carers. So it's usually the females who then end up taking care of a person with Alzheimer's disease, albeit mother, father, husband, whatever it is. So you've got enormous pressure placed. And Emma Willis speaks about this, the wife of Bruce Willis, like caregivers, enormous financial burden and seeing a loved one, forget who you are. So it's actually hard on both parties. It's hard on the person. So you have to think this person who has Alzheimer's disease, they don't know if they've eaten. Sometimes a lot of these people starve as well. They don't know if they've eaten. They sometimes they forget to swallow. They don't know if they've hit their head. They don't know if they're feeling pain or not. They don't know if they've been to the bathroom more often than not. It's just the wedding themselves or something like that. So they don't realize any of this because your brain is not functioning. Your brain does not function, your life doesn't function. Do they go in and out of it? They can become lucid at times. Yeah, and that's very unpredictable. Why does that happen? That just happens. Well, we don't know. You can become a it's just a small moment in time where you can be laying there on your bed and you can recognize your wife or your child. You can recognize them for a very short period of time. There's a movie that was made and it was so beautiful. I forget the actress's name, but it's called Still Alice. And basically it chronicles the woman who gets diagnosed with dementia in her 40s. And that's called early onset Alzheimer's disease. That's the one that's predominantly genetic. As I mentioned earlier, when you do get those genes, if it's pre-sinella one, pre-sinella two, amyloid precursor protein, if you've got it, you will get the early onset Alzheimer's disease in your 40s. But most of diseases occur due to late onset Alzheimer's disease, which is the lifestyle ones. So if you see her in this movie, you can see the fast deterioration of who she is to death really. And you should watch it because she starts to lose everything. Like first of all, she's driving and then out of nowhere, she's looking at her and she's like, where am I? Where am I driving to? What am I doing? And that's the mild cognitive impairment stage. But I was asked on the heart of a CEO, which is quite a funny question to me when he's after I explained it over a three hour period what Alzheimer's disease was, he said, Stephen said, well, what would you do if you got Alzheimer's disease? And it's like, sort of a question, I couldn't do anything. In that moment, I could not do anything. Nothing, no therapy would help me. No amount of exercise would help me, no amount of sleep would help me, my sleep would be completely disrupted. I wouldn't know who I was. I wouldn't know if I'm walking on the road. I wouldn't know if I'm eating out of a garbage trash can. I wouldn't know what I'm doing. The reason I was just, I'm wondering, you know, is it harder on the family or the caretaker or is it harder on the person? Does the person even realize what's happening? Exactly. And that's what's so devastating. Or is they just staring off into space all the time? They don't know. They don't know. Just like this beautiful patient that I say came to me literally. And I have seen, and this is how I really started in this, going on this journey of wanting to end this disease and focusing on women as well, because I did have this one woman, I was tasked with the mis... I'm a neurophysiologist. So usually somebody who you'll see when you've had, when maybe you've suspected of having MS, or you've had a seizure and we assess the functionality of your brain. And I was tasked with heading up an entire mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease unit. And I had to do that by scanning brains and I scanned thousands of brains. And every time I would go to a meeting, these bi-weekly meetings, I'd say, you know, I'm giving a diagnosis of MCI to 90% of these patients, but like a third of them are women. Why? And every time I asked why they would, you know, the attending would always say to me, it's just what happens. We can't do anything about it. It's just, they've got it. You know, genetics, they could never give me an answer. It was frustrating because one woman came in, I tracked her over a five year period, husband, two kids came in addressing me by my name. And over that period, like at the end of those five years, she'd come to me and she'd say, you're my daughter. And I, at that time, I was troubled because I had built a relationship with her and her family. You give the diagnosis of there's nothing we can do. And this was, you know, somewhat 10 years ago, we didn't know as much. But then you're, the spouse, you've lost somebody. It is like a death. They are no longer there. When it comes to habits or anything that increases risk, is there increased risk with alcohol, marijuana, drugs, certain medications? What are some common things that people are doing that increase risk? So there is the famous Lancet study. Lancet is another academic journal that came out with 14 modifiable risk factors, meaning that these are risk factors of getting the disease. But if you modify them, you lower your risk and it turns out that there's 14. So they include things such as, first of all, smoking. We all know this. If you smoke, you increase your risk of all cause mortality. We all know that. High pretension. So your blood pressure, if that's high, I told you, we want to maintain blood pressure. We want to maintain 120 over 80 as the gold standard. I don't know. Do you measure your blood pressure? Every once in a while. Every once in a while. There's now actually continuous blood pressure cuffs. So I'm going to buy one for my father because this is what caused his stroke. So this is a really great and easy way, non-invasive and inexpensive. Obesity. One of the biggest risk factors of getting the Alzheimer's disease is obesity, which I think now we've got a grip on because of GLP1s, which is what makes GLP1s, you know, we're going to be like Osempiac and Trezebotide, which makes them so phenomenal. So these are good drugs? Oh yeah. Oh my God. They are remarkable. GLP1s are absolutely remarkable. And I think, you know, when we first founded, as humans, penicillin, it was like this breakthrough moment. Then there was insulin, which is also a peptide, breakthrough moment. Now we have, you know, we can help people with type one and type two diabetes. Now GLP1s, and I think it's definitely on par, and I think it's going to be something that is going to eradicate diseases. Wow. GLP1s will eradicate diseases that in a hundred years, I don't think, you and I won't see them. But I do believe in a hundred years, people will be saying, people were obese. You'll look, we will be, our nation will be in, our society will be in, in medical textbooks. And people won't recognize it. I don't think people will know what Alzheimer's disease is either. You think it will solve that eventually? I think it's going to solve a big portion of it because we're now, there was a huge evoke trial which tested, do GLP1s prevent dementia? And it failed. But it failed because of many reasons. A, we can't directly say that, just take the GLP1 and you're going to lower your risk. Just like hormone replacement therapy, it's doing other things. A, it's helping with insulin resistance. And B, it's helping with obesity. C, we're seeing a lot of patients who are, they don't feel like they want to drink anymore. So it's stopping alcoholism. In fact, I think was it this year in 2024, alcohol sales have completely gone down. Have you seen that? Now there's- I've heard that. Yeah, which is phenomenal, right? Because alcohol increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease. So, trisapatide, these, we're now getting retitrutide, which is, has got three hormones in it now. Trisapatize has two. I think this is going to be even more remarkable. So yes, so obesity is a risk factor. Type two diabetes is another modifiable risk factor. So you mentioned like, what am I doing to increase my risk? Well, drinking alcohol, no amount of alcohol, no amount, I don't care what anybody says, is good for the brain. Alcohol is actually diminishing the white matter of the brain. So you know that, that, you know how I told you about the axon, the tree trunk? So that's part, that's coated in this myelin sheath, right? And if you have a look on imaging, it's called the white matter of the brain. The white matter of the brain is the myelinated neurons. That's the tree trunks of the brain. So when you drink alcohol, and this was actually done in a UK biobank study, when you drink alcohol, even as moderate drinkers, which is around seven drinks a week, on neuroimaging, when they took photos of their brain with an MRI, they showed what we call white matter hyperintensitives. So in the white matter of the brain, they've got these, these deteriorated portions. You're also affecting the gray matter of the brain, which is the cerebral cortex, where the neurons cell bodies live. So alcohol is detrimental for the brain. Okay. So don't do that. Evidently, like I said to you, smoking, social isolation is now becoming a huge, huge one as well. We're becoming, why is that? Why is that? Well, we're becoming more isolated because we're obviously on our computers more, but why is that? Well, there was an 80 year long study done at Harvard, which showed they wanted to track over an 80 year period. At the end of this 80 years, who has the best health and who has the best brain, like who's aged their brain well? It turned out that it comes down to the quality of your close relationships, out of everything, out of they accounted for every variable they accounted for sleep, nutrition, exercise, and it turns out that those who maintained good quality relationships showed better signs of brain aging than those who don't. Why? Well, basically, if you have somebody that you can lean on throughout your years, this doesn't mean romantic partner. It doesn't mean you have to go and get married to preserve your brain, right? It means that if you can feel safety in another person that you trust, that knows who you are, it regulates you more, regulates your nervous system better. Secondly, if you have somebody that you can talk to who knows your life and that you can have deep conversations with, also challenging conversations, that's another human that you're interacting with. Remember, every cell in your brain is getting utilized. The way I'm looking at you right now, your facial features, me being able to pick up on everything, you're different to, obviously, you look different to somebody else. So my neurons have to accommodate for that. So having somebody by your side that you can talk to, and this is why close friendships that take long years to accumulate really matter. Is there any information on how many relationships you should be maintaining? No, but I mean, it's very hard to maintain close relationships. I've got a close group of friends and you're not just like acquaintances. I've built my close friendships and I spend a lot, you invest a lot of time in them because you have to. And I've maintained my close, and some of them have falled off and yeah. Build new ones. Any other risk factors? Not exercising. Probably the biggest one is lack of physical activity. In fact, inactivity is now a disease state. Inactivity and sedentary lifestyles is an actual disease. Are you serious? Yeah. What is that disease called? Inactivity. Well, it's called sedentary lifestyle. It's now classified as a disease. When did that happen? Back in 2024. How many people are suffering from that disease? That's a choice. It feels like a choice, not a disease. Well, you could say the same about type 2 diabetes. It is a choice. You could say the same on some part. I know this is controversial because of, you know, GLP-1s, but obesity to some extent, apart from, you know, different genetic risk factors could be somewhat a choice. You do get a choice in everything you do, which is the choice to get up and move. So that actually is a really good segue to what I focus most of my academic research on, and that's exercise. So if you want, we can delve into that. Yeah, let's dive in. How many days do you have? We've got as long as we need. I do want to point out because I just, I mentioned women. Men have something else that's not often spoken about. It's called emloy, where 17% of men actually lose their Y chromosome. Yeah, and they lose it in the immune cells. So you're obviously, you know, we have different genes X and Y, X, X, X, 17% of men lose their Y chromosome in their immune cells, which actually is increasing their risk of getting dementia and different neurodegenerative diseases as a whole family. And it hasn't been specified yet, but my hypothesis, you know, I think about, well, why are men at an increased risk of A, Parkinson's disease, and B, amytrophic lateral sclerosis. I don't know if you saw McSteamy from Grey's Anatomy. I forget his name in my life. He, one of the leads in Grey's Anatomy just passed away of ALS, I think it was two weeks ago, which is very, it's probably the most, it is so scary, Sean, to see in real life because it's so fast acting and deteriorating. So I, you can test for this, you can test whether you're losing your X chromosome through a genetic test, generally over the age of 50. So that's one thing that we didn't pick up, it's called emloy. Okay, so now let's segue to exercise. I think it's so prominent to talk about because A, exercise is free, B, the only reason we call it exercise. It wasn't called exercise 200 years ago because people were running and doing things. We have to now, because of technology and the way we're living, we've now formulated the word exercise, right? Which doesn't mean, which I tell my mother every day, it doesn't mean you walking around the house and getting the clothes off the line. That's not exercise, right? Exercise is structured programs where you are increasing your heart rate or moving your muscles or contracting your muscles. So first of all, we'll separate into three. You've got the aerobic exercise and the fast paced VO2 max exercise. You've got resistance training or strength training, and then you've got what I call neuroathletics or neurocognitive training. The relationship between aerobic exercise and brain health was the first one to ever be discovered. Marion Diamond, back in 1960, well 1961, basically she got two sets of rats, right? Two sets of mice and one were put on a protocol of wheel running. So she got these mice running on wheels and she got them in what she called an enriched environment. She was the first female neuroscientist, by the way, enriched environment. So really nice cage, lots for them to do and with other people as well, other mice. Over six months of wheel running every single day, what she found was that their brains grew. She's like, why were their brains growing? And not just, so they were growing new new brain cells in their brain. And she figured out that the mechanism was every time they were running and their blood was flowing through their body, they were releasing a hormone called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor. And it turns out that this is a growth factor for the brain. So when it goes into the brain of these mice, it grows the brain, right? What she found was with the other mice who didn't do anything, obviously they weren't in an enriched environment, they were in a depressive environment. Actually their brains shrunk, especially the hippocampus. So that was the start. That's where we first knew that exercise is good for the brain. When replicated on humans, it works the same. So when we exercise, we get this massive bolus, okay, massive release of BDNF. It goes into the brain and it helps our brain function better. But it doesn't help us growing new brain cells. In fact, we can't as humans grow new brain cells. That's called adult neurogenesis. It doesn't exist, which is sad because if you've taken a huge hit to the head of TBI and you kill off brain cells, you can't revive those. Like my dad, when he had a stroke, killed off certain neurons in the brain, they can't grow back. But what we can do is we can grow new neurons in the hippocampus. Isn't that beautiful? Because remember, the hippocampus is the first structure to go during Alzheimer's disease. So if we exercise, now this beautiful study, which is one of my most favorite studies in 2011, Eric Sanatile, basically what they found was if you exercise for 30 minutes a day, a aerobic exercise, you can grow the hippocampus by 2%. The volume of the hippocampus, you can grow it just by 30 minutes of exercise a day. Not just that, 30 minutes of exercise a day. You know what else it does? It down regulates 13 types of cancer. No kidding. Yeah. It's so prominent that there is now a new field in research or in medicine called exercise oncology. I've done a whole episode on it. It's one of my best performing episodes, which showed that through exercise interventions, you can mitigate your risk of tumor cell growth. No shit. Yeah. Most prominently breast cancer, colorectal cancer. Wow. Yeah. That's huge. And prostate cancer. Those are the three. And prostate cancer. Yeah. Just from 30 minutes of exercise. So exercising for these long periods of time using the aerobic system gets the massive release of BDNF and that's what's helping the brain. Now, we didn't stop there. That was the first ever studies. Then they moved on to what does the high intensity exercise do? You know that one that, I don't know what your exercise regime looks like, but the VO2 max exercise where you're going so hard, you feel like you're going to vomit. And when I was a triathlete, we would call them spew sessions. I don't know if you've ever do these. Not anymore. You should. Okay. Spew sessions. Right. So it's when you're going hard out. You're in that zone five, cardiac zone, right? Where your heart rate is reaching around 90% of your maximum heart rate. What is this doing? Well, A, to go to that effort, you're using the anaerobic system. Right. So when we're in the aerobic system, doing the long exercise bouts where you can last for 30 to 60 minutes of running, you're producing energy in something called the mitochondria. Okay. The mitochondria is the energy powerhouse of the cell. So we're, we're in there, it produces energy for us. And that's how we get our energy to run. But when we're going so hard out at 90% of our maximum heart rate, it's, it's the mitochondria can't produce that energy in that fast time. So when it does, when we produce the energy, it happens outside of the mitochondria. A byproduct of that. Okay. During the, the byproduct of producing glycolysis is lactate. And lactate produced in that moment is a fuel source for your brain. So the lactate, it's a, it's a myokine. So basically it comes out of the cell and it goes into the brain. And that's what can produce better brain energy. It can help neurons that are dying, survive better. It can help with brain energy metabolism. So it helps your brain produce more energy and utilize energy better. It's just such a phenomenal, phenomenal fuel source for your brain. Right. And this is where most of the studies are done on cancer. In fact, what we find in the cancer research and exercise research is exercising at that intensity. Right. What happens is you get this shunting of blood, right? Imagine the tubes like the highway system, your blood is pumping, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And in that moment, when it's pumping, it's taking with it and clearing out something called circulating tumor cells. Right. So when you have stage one cancer, it's local. Okay. It's a, it's a, it's a growth. It's a tumor that's formed somewhere in your body. Right. Let's just say prostate stage one, meaning it hasn't metastasized. But the way tumors work is the tumor cells off that one tumor break off. And they, they go through the bloodstream and they think, where can I lodge myself again? And if it does, if enough tumor cells break off and then they form another little family, that's metastasized. Now you're moving into stage two and stage three exercise at that zone five is clearing out those circulating tumor cells. And that's how it's down regulating tumor cell growth. Yes. And a study was done on this in the journal Cell, which showed the effects of this, of inhibiting prostate cancer in men. So that was pretty interesting to me. It's good to know. So it's, it's doing a whole host of things. Where my area of research is, is really taking place. I first authored a paper that was printed in the journal of aging was I wanted to look at what are the effects of resistance training on the brain. And it turns out that there is far more effects of resistance training on the brain than these two categories. First of all, when we, when we, you know, lift a, lift a dumbbell, right? And where we're shortening our muscles, we're contracting our muscles. What happens is we produce and shoot out something called myokines. These myokines live in the skeletal, skeletal muscles, right? They, they live in the cells of your skeletal muscles. They just live there. And when you squeeze them hard enough, like literally under tension, they get released. And when they get released, they go into the bloodstream and they travel and we've got receptors just like the hormone receptors of estrogen. We've got receptors all over our organs, our heart, our liver, our pancreas and our brain. And when these myokines get released, they do so many different things. They go in like instructions. I call them care packages. They go into different cells and they help the cell perform better. So cells are, they're really phenomenal, right? Whether at the DNA level or whether just in the cell itself, the cytoplasm, they've got instructions on how to do things, how to keep you from dying pretty much or how to, you know, survive, like how to, how your cell survives. When those instructions, like when the mitochondria becomes dysfunctional, that's really at the root cause of all diseases. But we can fix this mitochondria, right? By sending an instructions to fix itself, right? It's called autophagy. We can grow new mitochondria or we can just correct the bad ones, right? And we can do that from these myokines. So when the myokines go into the brain, they're helping the brain do better things. They're helping the synapses of the brain, the ones, the synapses that are like, you know, where do they form the synapses again? It's called synaptogenesis. They grow new neurons in the hippocampus. They help your great, your different areas of your brain grow and proliferate. They work together as a camp. There's like a hundred different myokines. They work together as a camp to help each other express themselves. They help with immunity. They help with the clearing out of amyloid beta. They're doing so many different things for your brain and your organs that I've got to tell you, pharmaceutical companies are trying to replicate these myokines. They're trying to replicate them in pharmaceutical forms to make them injectable drugs and they can't do it. Really? How long have they been working on that? Years. Ever since we first found out about myokines, like back in, like, you know, the early 2000s. You think they'll figure it out? I hope not. That means we're just going to sit there for the rest of our lives and inject ourselves, right? I mean, look, this whole, I don't even want to get into peptides, but look, I think in five years, everyone's going to be using peptides. Really? Why? Because people are becoming, you know, the gray market, the black market is infiltrated. Like, people are buying these black market, which it's so dangerous, by the way, peptides, right? A peptide is an amino acid. Amyloid beta is a peptide, right? And I think, in theory, they can do well. We've seen them, you know, in my studies, but not one human randomized control trial has ever been done on peptides, which is why it makes it so dangerous. We don't know what the safety and efficacy is of peptides yet, but I do say that they will start funding it because of who's currently in charge. And, yeah, I think that people, you know, will start to see human studies in five to 10 years, and that's what's going to happen. So you're not, you are not a fan of peptides? I am not a fan. I went out really public with this, because one of the things that BPC 157 does, that's the most prominent peptide right now, body protection compound 157. What it does is it's meant to help with cartilage health and recovery. That's a lot of people are taking it. What we don't know yet is it's doing this by inducing vascularization, meaning that it's helping you around the cells of injury. It's helping you form new blood vessels. When you form new blood vessels, what happens? You get oxygen and nutrients. It's great, right? Better healing. But it can't detect whether it's causing vascularization on a cancer cell. And what a cancer, how does cancer survive and grow on proliferate? It forms blood vessels to feed itself. Cancer cells are so hungry when they form a tumor site. They say, okay, great, now we need blood vessels to survive. So they form its own little blood vessel supply, and that's what grows and that's what metastasizes, because they're like, yes, they become so greedy and so hungry, these tumor cells, they go out and metastasize all over your body. You have no control over that, right? Whether it goes to your brain, your spinal cord, you don't know. So why would I accelerate that? Because we can't test yet whether you've got stage one cancer. We could all be walking around right now with it. It's just too small to detect on neuroimaging. These imaging things, they don't even detect it. They can't detect it yet, no. I mean, look, on some cancers, yes, prostate cancer, yes, we can detect it. This is colorectal cancer. Yes, this is why everyone should be getting screened and doing colonoscopies, because around 95, 99% of all colorectal cancers exist from the polyps that are built up, but you can get rid of those. This is why everyone should be getting screened and doing their colonoscopies and endoscopies. But breast cancer, I believe so, but I'm talking like pancreatic cancer. You don't know whether you've got it until stage four and then you're done. That's what took my grandmother. That's what took my aunt. Ovarian cancer, you don't know. Glioblastoma, forget about it. So why would you I mean, a lot of people are taking peptides and not knowing the harmful risks. I took them. BPC-157. I believe that's what it was. Everyone's on something called the Wolverine stack, which is TB-500 and BPC-157. There's melanotan and then there's these secretogogs, which Somoril and Ipomorol. Everyone's taking them, but my question is, first one, I don't know if you know this, but it failed. It failed its trial. You do phase one, phase two, phase three. It failed when they found out how dangerous it was. So the FDA cut it completely. They said this is too dangerous to move forward in human studies. That's why there's not one randomized control trial done. This is why you can't go to and get a prescription for BPC-157. So I don't know where you got it from. I'm scared because when you get it on a gray market or scarily on a black market, let's just say you get on the gray market. The gray market means that it's not FDA approved, but it comes with a form that basically says, you know, this is what's in it. You don't know what's in it. It could think you don't know what you're injecting. You're injecting it systemically. GLP-1s are peptides, but they've passed phase three clinical trials. They're FDA approved. You get a script. They're not compounded, meaning that, you know, if you go and get it from WGOV or ZEP bounds, like they are, you know, they're safe, the safety and efficacy they have passed with flying colors. How do you know that when you're using BPC-157 that you are not inducing vascularization of a tumor cell? I guess you don't. You don't and you won't know. Shit. And so that's my problem. Now I got a lot, you know, I put this out on social media and I got, you know, even Andrew Heberman message name. I'm sorry. Like I, if I would, you know, there's another one that's great for the skin, copper GCU. I'm not even sure what it is. I'm into anything that's going to slow me the aging process, right? You know, I spend thousands on my skincare products for God's sake. If I thought that these were safe for me and my mother and my future children, I'd, everyone get, I'd be telling my mom every day, get, you know, do it. Of course I would, right? But I can't take that risk. Now, if you could go to the doctor and get cleared and the doctor can say, Hey, listen, we've scanned you. We now have technology to pick up. You have not one cancer cell inside you that is going to grow and proliferate. Then yeah, and they've, these have passed clinical trials and they're safe. Then yeah, take your VPC157. If not, to put an ice pack on, like why are you taking it? Why are you asking me? I'm asking you. Yeah. Shoulders. And what happened? They may have gotten a little bit better. But yeah. And look, it could be placebo or it could well and truly have down regulated inflammation and helped the healing process. This is why you injected at the site. You probably injected it into your, then that's not what I was on. Or I took it wrong. Yeah. Okay. I'm not sure what you were on. I'm usually what happens if you've, if you've got an injury usually injected at the site, you don't have to, but a lot of people do they. Like, okay, I've got a shoulder injury. I'll inject it here because it goes in systemically and it does a number of different things, but one of them is the formation of the vasculature. So it helps with the healing process around that site. What did Hugh Berman text you about? He believed that I got something wrong, which was in one study and I've put this out on social media. It's funny when you do, you know, a one hour long episode and the thing that gets clipped, it needs more nuance, right? And what got clipped was I mentioned that in a phase two clinical trial, I don't correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe it was melanotan. It was one of the, one of the peptides, it caused death in one person and I stated that. But I think when it got clipped, it said that, you know, I was referring to every, you know, BPC 157, which I wasn't. You look at the full clip on YouTube, but, you know, he wanted to correct me and I re-corrected him and said, well, I didn't say that. And because I think he's a proponent of peptides, I'm not sure if he... Well, that's where I got my doctor from. What's the recommendation from Andrew? Yeah. Which I love that doctor. I love that doctor. No, look, he's phenomenal. We've known each other for so long. And I think he sits in the same bandwagon as me. I think he believes that it's going to be a big thing in the next five to 10 years. I know he knows that there are no human randomized control trials that have been done outside of GLP ones and insulin, which is another caveat people were telling me. GLP ones are peptides. I know that. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the ones that you buy on the gray market. And secondly, I wouldn't even... You know, I don't even buy my supplements on the gray market. I make sure that my supplements, which are nowhere near... It doesn't pose the risk that a systemic injection does. I don't even buy my supplements on the gray market. That's how adamant I am on safety and efficacy. Where do you buy your supplements? Well, I make sure that I'm buying it from a reputable company that has got their manufacturing standards on their website, that have been third party tested, that don't contain contaminants. I go through, I look at their safety scores to make sure that they're not full of lead and full of gunk and filled with things that I don't want to be putting in my body. In saying that, I'm sounding so much unfarmicocentric, meaning like I'm not against pharmaceuticals, meaning I don't live my life in an organic way like that. No, I think that there are certain things in life that you need to realize, like what's safe and what's not. You're not anti-vaccine. That's what you're saying? I'm not anti-vaccine. And I can tell you why. Sure. Are you? No. Why? Why am I not anti-vaccine? Because they, I mean, I don't know, my dad's a pharmacist. Oh, good. Because they save lives and they have eradicated diseases. I want to put that out there so loud because we are here because polio doesn't exist anymore. Smallpox doesn't exist anymore because of vaccines. A reason why I'm, I'm really upset with the decision of the current administration when they decided to eradicate certain vaccines from the vaccine schedule, right? Flu vaccine, basically for children they took which is really scary, by the way. Some of the vaccines that they've taken off the schedule could be very scary and detrimental. I mean, vaccines scare me. They do. Especially, I have two young ones and the amount of vaccines that they want to give them when they have an appointment is like, I don't think we need to do six in the next five minutes here, but I don't think people understand. I get that. I get that completely. And I'm not also pro-vaccines if you don't need them. I supported the initial rollout of the COVID vaccine schedule, the initial rollout because we saw that it lowered hospitalizations and death. What I didn't support is the second and the third and the fourth vaccines. I didn't support that. So that's me not being pro-vax or anti. I just didn't support that because we didn't see that it made any meaningful difference, especially, you know, keeping 10 year old kids inside. I didn't see this, you know, I didn't see that to be effective. My problem is in education. Now I'll tell you something. The largest studies ever done. I'm talking in Wales, I've got a huge study. I'm talking millions of people. A huge study out of Wales, Australia and the US for the shingles vaccine has showed that if you receive the shingles vaccine after the age of 50, you lower your risk of all cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease by 50%. No kidding. The shingles vaccine can reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease by 50% and that is even more pronounced in women. So why are we telling you to stop getting vaccines? Do you want, do you know what shingles is? No. Just getting disease, right? You get chickenpox as a young kid, right? You end up in rush, you get chickenpox. That never leaves your body. It goes and it lies dormant in the spinal cord, in the dorsal root ganglia we call it, which is in the spinal cord. Under times of high stress and low immunity, usually in your 50s and above, when you get stressed, it reactivates. So basically, the chickenpox virus that lives in the spinal cord gets woken up. It was dormant, now it's woken up. What happens is it travels and depending on where it's asleep in terms of a nerve root, it travels up your spinal cord and we've got things called dermatones, right? So if it traveled up this nerve root here, you would see that the rash, the skin rash comes in the form of the dermatone. So it won't just be a skin rash all over your arm. It causes these painful sores in that spinal cord nerve root. So now you've got this virus in the spinal cord and what happens then? It goes up into the brain and what happens to viruses in the brain? What did I teach you about amyloid beta? Brain cells are like, oh my God, run to attack. It releases all this amyloid beta to try and engulf it. But in the process, you're increasing the amyloid beta plaques in your brain, you know, and you're causing a massive influx of neural inflammation, increasing your risk of Alzheimer's disease. So getting the shingles vaccine can prevent this from occurring, not just Alzheimer's disease, but can prevent you from like this is a really painful rash. Why are we, why do not more people know about this? Right? Why are we saying no to the shingles vaccine? People are so scared of vaccines. So that's my thing. I think that education needs to come to the forefront right now. mRNA cancer vaccines. I think that there's so much research that can be done in there. These mRNA like vaccines, I think people understand that it's just, you're actually injecting the virus, a very small amount of it into the cell, doesn't go into the DNA or anything, the mRNA vaccines. And it helps your body fight off the virus if it's if it's going to come and attack you. That's all it's doing. It's not, people are under the impression that you get a vaccine and it's causing lead buildup or something. Well, you don't know what's in the vaccine. I don't trust them. The same people that are scared of vaccines are the ones buying peptides on the gray market. It's like, make it make sense. So as I mentioned earlier, we have a huge literacy problem here because all you have to do is go and research and you will realize what the mechanism of action is of the vaccines. And by the way, the US and Australia have very strict vaccine protocols in terms of what they put into the vaccine. There's no lead in them. I don't know what this thing is with lead. I don't know who started that. So that's my take on it. I made my month, my mom and dad when I got the shingles vaccine a few months ago. What age should people be taking the shingles vaccine? In their fifties. In fact, they in the studies, this one out of Wales, they actually accounted for age and birth date. So yeah, you don't need to be getting it before then. So probably at 50. Yeah, 50, 55, go and see your doctor and ask for the shingles vaccine. I asked my mother, I said, did I ever have chicken pox? Because I don't remember it as a kid. She doesn't remember it either. So if you didn't have chicken pox, do you need to take chicken pox? I could still get it though. So I know I've got a friend, a girlfriend who's got a two year old and she got chicken pox because he got chicken pox. So that's my take on vaccines. And I just urge everybody to read a little bit more and become a bit more educated. And I think people just get, you know, the COVID, COVID just really fucked everything up, you know, and people don't know where to look. I don't know where to look. No one knows where to look. I've interviewed a bunch of you guys, I always ask about vaccines. But you open your every time I say the word vaccine. Did you know that Australia was the first country to eradicate HPVs because of the vaccine, cervical cancer? I didn't know that. Yes. As of last year, 2025, we are now the first nation to have eliminated cervical cancer. Why? Because of the vaccine. I mean, that's phenomenal. When you go against the HPV vaccine, you go against women. Like why are we, what are we, what are we scared of? I would love to know. I'd love to hold a press conference. What are we scared of? Is it because the very person that is, you know, HHS secretary, the very person who we are supposed to trust and look to is actually, he's confused himself. I don't know if you know this, but he went on back in the early 2000s to say that I believe in vaccines, all my kids are vaccinated. Are we talking about RFK? Yeah. Well, I mean, RFK also just came out and supported a immunity, what do they call it? Immunity for pesticide companies. Why? How the fuck is that making America healthy again? And do you know the number one cause of Parkinson's disease? I'm going to guess it's pesticides. Paraguat found in dry, it's paraguat is found on our crops and on our fruit. Great. Yeah. And another tri-methyl something, it's another chemical ingredient that is found in dry cleaning products. These, this is why they call dry cleaning products. Yeah. So all dry cleaners should be shut down if they use, if they use this, try, it's tri-methyl, if you just typed that into Google, I forgot what it's called. But this is what is causing Parkinson's disease. But we're getting off track here, but yeah. So this is good stuff. Because I use a lot of dry cleaning. So yeah, shut it down. All right. Secretary Kennedy said in the early 2000s that he got his kids vaccinated, he believes in vaccines. Then fast forward like 10 years, he went on to say vaccines, I don't trust them, they're full of lead and you shouldn't be taking them. And he seems so confused. In fact, in a press conference, he actually went on air to say to the American people, do not trust your doctor, take your health into your own hands. I work in a hospital. If we let patients take their health into their own hands, I'm talking to very patients that don't even know where their neck is or where their knees are, would be in a lot more trouble than what we are now. It's like saying, it's like getting on a flight and asking the passengers, saying to the passengers, don't trust your pilot. You must take this flight into your own hands. No wonder everybody's scared of vaccines. No wonder we are confused when the very person we should be turning to for our health advice is confused himself. I mean, even the, back to that immunity thing, I mean, we just did a big episode on glyphosate, which is the main chemical that they are giving immunity to. And Iowa has the highest concentration of glyphosate in the country. And Iowa also has the highest rate of cancer in the country. So I don't know why they would give immunity to all these pesticide companies. I mean, that right there is pretty good fucking indication that the shit's not good for us. But then they called it a, what do they say? It was a national security concern. But then I looked at it, 600 and something thousand, 600, I think it was 618,000 people die of cancer. It might have been 2024 or 2025. And we're calling the fentanyl crisis a national security concern. And the cancer rate is six times, over six times that of the fentanyl crisis. So how is cancer not a national security concern? You know what, it reminds me of the saga, the Thailand ulcer with pregnant women, or even the vaccines and autism. There is not one one reported case of the vaccine causing autism, not one. Where did it come from? Fabricated numbers, but they can't because there's no numbers to prove it. So feel like the administration are just waking up and they're like, what should we pick on today? Let's just put our blindfolds on and any mini, mini, mini, mini autism. Okay, what we're going to just pick on autism today because that's how we feel. And let's just say that vaccines call it autism and people don't want autism. That's how I really feel like we are running science here. And it's just, it's scary even when it comes down to Thailand, how many poor pregnant women were scared out of taking Tylenol during their pregnancy? The first line of action in the event of a fever. What was that? I remember my wife was, she didn't want to take any Tylenol. Of course, because they said that if you take Tylenol, you increase your kid's risk of getting autism. And that's not true. No. The first line of defense for, there is like, and that, I think they retracted that as well, even at the secretary level, even RFK came on and said, sorry, I'm, I made a mistake. After like scaring the nation for, I think like a two months scare, like, like, don't take Tylenol, like all these, imagine, imagine, right? I can't imagine how it must feel not knowing anything about health because you're not in that field. There's many areas of life I know, absolutely nothing about it. I feel so blinded. I can tell you how it feels. I'm so susceptible to marketing. It's scary and confusing. Yeah. When it comes to like makeup, I don't really know too, I'm so susceptible to that. I'll just buy anything because I don't know too much about it. But I can't imagine how it must feel to know nothing about health, to be a, to be first time mothering a child or even being pregnant for the first time to say, don't take Tylenol, it's going to increase the risk of autism. Imagine how you must feel so scared, so lost. So he retracted that. So that's fine. Now take the Tylenol, it's just for God's sake. In the, in the event of a fever, in pregnancy, the first line of action is Tylenol, it's safe. We got offline. Now the only other thing I would argue there is there seems to be this very big confusion around statins, right? Statins decrease your risk. We've got two huge randomized control trials that show that statins, which is a cholesterol lowering medication, reduce your risk of getting dementia and Alzheimer's disease by upwards of 32%. Really? Yes. Let's go back to Henry's brain here. Just like cardiac, do you know what atherosclerosis is? No. You know, when you build up, so you get cardiovascular disease, which is the number one cause of death in the United States alone. Alzheimer's disease and dementia is the number one cause of death in Australia and the number one cause of death among women in the UK. In the US, it's cardiovascular disease and then cancer. So cardiovascular disease is just when the arteries are getting clogged up with plaque, right? And that's built up because your cholesterol, this is a very layman's term, but your cholesterol builds up in your bloodstream and it goes into the arteries and over time it gets lodged there and that's what can cause a heart attack. The same thing's happening to your brain. You get a buildup of cholesterol in the brain and it causes a stroke or a hemorrhage, right? So why would we want a high cholesterol, mainly LDL and ApoB? We don't. So we can lower that risk by taking a cholesterol lowering medication like a statin, for example. The people who have got ApoE4, the risk factor gene, they are at an increased risk because what ApoE4 does is it helps transport cholesterol through the brain. So if that becomes faulty, which it does in ApoE4, carries that means the cholesterol can't get transported to the brain cells where we need them. So they're going through the brain, they're going into the arteries of the brain and that's where they're causing havoc. So if you have ApoE4, you've got an even better chance of lowering the risk if you take a statin and yet every time that's such an, along with vaccines, that's what I've seen as the most controversial pharmaceutical. Soon as I put it up, like, I'll put up like a massive study that has just been published, like amazing, right? And people are just traumatizing me for it, saying that I'm getting paid by pharma. What is the, what is the scare about statins? I had this conversation with Peter Atia probably a year or two ago. Yeah, he's very pro statin. He's on, I think a PCSK9 inhibitor. I think this, I don't even know people saying you're increasing your risk of getting dementia, which is crazy. Oh, another scare is that it's causing muscle weakness. I'm like, great. It doesn't. I mean, in a very small percentage of people, it might. I don't know what the scare is, but I know it's very controversial amongst that family of people. Do you know the medication that helps with acid reflux, heartburn, it's like ampromisol? Yeah. So that has supposedly has an increased risk for dementia. I have to take that shit. Doctors said also take a B12 shot. Are you doing B12 shots as well? Well, she said that the reason that the, for the increased risk in dementia with whatever that medication is called is that it creates a B12 deficiency. Yeah. You should actually check as well on your blood panel if you've got, if one of the biomarkers, home-assisting is raised as well. But if you're taking a B shot, it should be able to bring that down. Yeah, look, it's funny like that. And you go in for an, you say you've got acid reflux. The first immediate course of action is just take this medication. Right? Have you heard that listerine? You know, the one that you drink is causing the same thing. It's actually increasing blood pressure. Yeah. It's the same mechanism basically. And actually I would caution people against taking listerine that I do believe. Okay. Yeah. So mouthwash especially. Don't take that. But for acid reflux, I do believe it in some part. Yeah. Cause I've also read about, I'm not, obviously, because I'm not able to go deep into, I don't know too much about it, but I did interview somebody who said the same thing. That what did they say? That it's increasing blood pressure, decreasing nitric oxide. All right. We're all, we spoke about exercise and then we went down this field about pharmaceuticals and went into why, I don't know, you know more about politics than me. I don't know why. Why? We're doing certain things in the way that we're doing it. I don't think anybody knows anymore. No. So a lot of confusion out there in a lot of different sectors of politics. I want to talk to you about psychedelics. Ibogaine, psilocybin. I mean, it seems like there are a lot of, I mean, if you read the studies at Stanford for the veterans that have gone down with TBI in the black spots and the scans are full color. I did it. Yes. You, you, I, I, I read about your experience too. You credit Ibogaine to you feeling better and mentally. No booze. No Adderall. No sleeping pills. No, none of that. How did you administer it? How long did it take you? What was your protocol? For Ibogaine or I went down to Mexico and took a couple of pills, woke up and didn't want any of that shit ever again. And I still haven't. The confusion comes in and this is why I think it's, you know, because then you would ask us then, why is this not getting approved everywhere? Why are we still, you know, SSRIs are going through the roof like prescription SSRIs, antidepressants are going through the roof. A lot of midlife women who are experiencing these symptoms I mentioned of perimenopause will go to their doctor who doesn't know anything about menopause and diagnose them with a mental health disorder and give them an SSRI. So then you think to yourself, okay, why, why can't we replace SSRIs with psychedelics? Is that where you're sitting now? If it's done so well with you? Is that the question you have really? I think I have a lot of questions. I mean, I've read that it could help with Alzheimer's dementia. I've read that it actually, I just, I just connected somebody to the guy that I go to because his mother or father just got diagnosed with Parkinson's and they were asking if that can help with that. So I said, I have no idea. Let me just connect you and they sent me a whole article on how it could potentially help with that. I mean, it's helping with, with, with, with overcome addictions, opioid addictions, alcohol, stimulants. Do you believe in micro dosing? I've done micro dosing. But to a smaller extent, obviously, you can't micro dose that one, but people are micro dosing psilocybin. Yeah. How do you feel? Sometimes if I do it, I'll feel jittery at the very beginning of the day and then, and then it'll kind of level out, but I feel sharper. Yeah. And I felt sharper after I took Ibogaine. So at the beginning of this, I told you, sometimes I'll forget my words or I'll get, I won't be able to describe what I'm, what I'm trying to do. I'll read better. And I noticed all these things that like right after, right after I did it, I was like, I'm not forgetting, I'm not forgetting my keys. I'm not forgetting words. I'm not forgetting, I'm not really forgetting anything. I'm reading faster and better than I normally do. My concern with this, and by the way, I'm so happy that you were able to get out of the state that you were in because that's so scary to be in. And the fact that you, through this therapy, which all you did was take some pills, you said. You didn't go through an actual like experience. Oh no, I didn't. Yeah, it was the whole thing. That exists because what I believe is happening at a mechanistic level, one thing is, you know, it's actually helping produce more BDNF. What is that? So, you know, BDNF, the one that I said in the my studies from exercise, okay, massive bowls, every time you're exercising, you're running, you're producing all this BDNF, right? Brain derived neurotrophic factor. So it's a neurotropin. So it basically helps the brain in many ways. BDNF is like fertilizer, they call it in neuroscience, fertilizer for the brain. My problem is, and I'm not deep into psychedelic research, but what I've heard and read, and I was talking to a surgeon about this a few days ago, who did the experience, he said, it enhances whatever state you're in when you're doing it. So my, my, what I'm scared about when people do this is, could they induce psychosis in that moment? Could they induce schizophrenia? Could they induce paranoia? I'm not sure. I don't know if you've heard about anything like that. If they could induce a mental state that they don't want to be in. And could that mental state last a long time? You mean well after the experience? Yeah. I've not heard that from anybody. So the thing is, what you're doing is you're enhancing the neural patterns, right? And this is why the experience matters. You're not going to just go into, into Central Park and pop these pills, right? I don't know what your experience is that you went through, right? But I do know that you do need to go through an actual guided psychedelic experience rather than just doing it by yourself, which is actually what poses the risk with the psilocybin usage. Like I think people are doing that unguided. I don't think it's as unsafe, but I think like, you know, do it in a, don't do it recreationally, do it in a, in a proper manner. How do you explain the black spots on the brain? Well, what sort of spots were they? TBI's. Were they white matter hyperintensities? I don't know. I don't speak that language. If they had an MRI scan, then it would have been the increased production of BDNF creating the, and recovering the neural patterns that were lost during whatever trauma that you went through. Remember that the mathematical equation from Warren McCulloch says, uh, neuron fires or it doesn't. In order for a neuron to fire, it needs a lot of energy and it leads, needs a lot of help from nearby neurons. So when it fires and it creates another neural pattern with another one, you can do that synchronously with the help of BDNF. So if you're going to, if we produce, let's just say 200% BDNF when we, 100% on top of your resting state, when we're running, I would dare say that the psychedelic experience is doing it by 10 fold. So are you, are you excited about something? Oh, I'm very excited. You are. Yeah. I'm excited about it for the treatment. I know that Dr. Dave Rabin, um, he's a psychiatrist. Uh, he's doing it out of California, doing a lot of the studies on psychedelics, um, to help with major depression. I think anybody in that stage, if we can do anything outside of pharmaceuticals, we're seeing that pharmaceutical interventions are, yes, SSRIs are necessary. If somebody is suicidal, of course, but if we can get a better non-pharmacological way, then I'm so excited about it. I mean, look, we've even seen, Charles Raison, uh, believe he's a neurologist. I interviewed him. He's working on people with mild, depressed, uh, with, uh, major depression and he's seeing if he can replace an SSRI with sauna therapy and he did. With, with sauna therapy? Yeah. He got these patients, right? And he basically split the two, split them up into two groups. Okay. And he put one group, he gave them all, you know, he put one group into the, um, sauna therapy and gave them a sugar tablet. So not an SSRI. They didn't know that because it was an RCT randomized control trial. They thought they were still taking the, um, SSRI. He subjected them to really, really hot saunas. And I think around 200 degrees or something like that, uh, seven days a week. And he did this for a period of time. And he found that over a, over the, the course of a few months, he was able to replace, they felt, they felt good. There was no suicidal ideation. All of the depressive like symptoms eliminated just because of the heat. So they found out that the heat shock proteins are actually having a natural therapeutic effect that can mimic the SSRIs. So when I found that out, I thought that that was so interesting. So he could actually eliminate the SSRIs from these patients, but obviously you're not going to be doing sauna therapies, you know, seven days a week at this extreme heat. And I think it was like eight hours a day as well. It was a long period of time, but there is a mechanism there. So that's what got me excited about the potential mechanism of psychedelics. Do you think that there are any possibilities that it could be some type, some type of a cure for, or deterrent for Alzheimer's dementia? Yes. I think not a cure. I think it could be a therapeutic agent. I don't think there is no elixir. There is no cure. There is no cure for Alzheimer's disease. What you're basically saying is if we have a head full of amyloid and we've lost our cognitive functions, we don't know who we are. Could we take a pill? I guess I meant more of a preventative. Preventative is a different story. I think eventually we'll have a cocktail. Of therapies that can be your prevention bucket for saving you from Alzheimer's disease. It may even be, can we inject laptaic into our brains or into our peripherally, which can go up to the blood brain barrier? Could we do that? Could it be the... I do think psychedelics will fall under that bucket, mainly because if we can solve for the depression problem, that's another risk factor. If we can solve for that, then we've eliminated a risk factor, just like GLP ones. If we eliminate obesity, then instead of having 14 modifiable risk factors, we go down to 13. Do people that have psychedelic experiences or therapy, do they have less shed? What are we, less... Especially for people with PTSD, the cortisol dump. Does that take care of that? I'm not sure. I mean, I don't even know the complete mechanism of action of what it would do if it would increase. I don't think it increases, maybe it does, parasympathetic activation, which is the rest and digest, which is what will probably slow down cortisol. But I could probably posture that if it is getting into the brain and it's helping neural networks and eliminate these depressive lack symptoms, then yeah, it must also have something to do with the neuronal energy, because we're seeing now that you can alleviate depressive lack symptoms with creatine, and that's because of the energy crisis that's happening in the brain. So people should be taking creatine. Yes. How much creatine should they be taking? We can segue into creatine, if you like. Well, over the last, what, 50 years from the Arnold Schwarzenegger days, people have been taking five grams of creatine a day, and what five grams does is it saturates the muscles, because the muscles are so hungry, they get first dibs. As soon as you have creatine, they get first dibs of it, saturates the muscles. But after that five grams, if you have more, then that gives it room to go elsewhere. So we now have studies to show that taking 10 grams to 12 grams a day can effectively raise your brain creatine levels. So remember, creatine, what it does, it's a naturally occurring molecule. And we release it every day, but we release it in really small amounts, or maybe around one to two grams a day. Right? So when it gets released, when we take that 12 grams, it goes into the brain, it helps the brain cells produce energy better, namely the mitochondria. So it helps the mitochondria produce more energy in the form of ATP. And it's been said that in diseases, like neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's disease, we have an energy crisis. Right? The brain's trying to repair itself, so it needs a lot of energy to do that. It doesn't have energy. Right? The mitochondria is all dysfunctional. We've got plaque to deal with. There's so many things that the brain has to deal with. It needs more energy. So if we can give it more energy, then it has more energy to fight. Right? And this is the same thing with depression. People don't realize it takes energy to be happy. Our brain didn't want us happy. That's not what evolution put the brain there for. It was here for two things, survival and reproduction. It wasn't there to make you happy. Didn't care about that. So every day we have to fight to be happy. It takes energy to do that. And imagine a person who has got clinical depression. They're fighting with everything that they have in their brain to not feel that again, to not have those suicidal ideations. Like it's a brain chemistry problem here. And the psychiatrists that are actually working on these studies and who have clearly showed the effectiveness of creatine on major depression, the effectiveness of creatine on sleep deprivation. You can almost eliminate a bad night's sleep with a bolus of 15 grams of creatine. The first ever pilot study done on Alzheimer's disease patients, very small group, 20 groups of Alzheimer's patients, not mild cognitive Alzheimer's disease. Meaning that they've gone to the doctor, they've gotten a spinal tap, meaning they've gotten fluid from their spinal cord. And they've seen that they've got amyloid beta, which means they've got the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, took 20 grams of creatine per day for eight weeks. And then after the eight weeks, they increased their global cognition scores, right? They did tests, they increased their global cognition scores, they felt happier, their mood increased. And on top of that, they were able to go to the gym. Wow. Yes. People are fighting against this because they're saying, but it was only a group of 20 patients. I said, great. That's, we have to start somewhere. And if you're going to get at that end stage, you're going to get somebody to increase their cognitive scores and go to the gym and feel better. Why wouldn't you do it? But the reason why it needs 20 grams is because the barrier on your brain is called the blood brain barrier. It becomes dysfunctional. That's what allows drugs to get into your brain and other drugs to not pass the brain. And this can get into the brain. Okay. Creatine can cross the blood brain barrier, but it takes a lot for it to get past the bouncer. That's why it takes a lot of grams of it per day. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Creatine. What do you, rabbit hole here? What do you think of neurolink? I mean, it sounds exciting. They've done the first one, haven't they? Oh, they did. I forgot about that. Yeah, they did the first one. I mean, whoever's deciding to get elective brain surgery just for Elon Musk, I mean, interesting character. I think that it's, it's scary. But look, do you know what deep brain stimulation is? That's when we can go into the brain. We literally drop electrodes into the brain, just like if you were to have a pacemaker and we can stimulate different parts of the brain to do certain things. And a lot of neurosurgeons are doing it right now. And it's phenomenal. I've been in surgery where they've done that. And it's helping in patients with Parkinson's disease. So where you have tremors. So when patients that you can stop the tremor by doing deep brain stimulation. So this shows it's just so hard to do. Like, it's so hard to do to stimulate, like the brain is like, it's so intricate. Like when you see like the way it is to stimulate a certain part of the brain to stop doing a certain thing or stop producing its actions. It's very hard to get to. But I think it's phenomenal. Neuralink, I mean, look, if it can help in disease states, like if you can help you walk again, maybe I just don't know what he's doing it for. Is it would it be possible to to project an entire false reality into somebody's head with that? Probably. That's scary. Of course, it's very scary. I mean, if we can do that with drugs, right? I've seen somebody very close to me started, you know, going down a bad path and started with cocaine and ecstasy and then moved on to an Australia, we call it ice and methamphetamine, one with the pipe and induced psychosis and schizophrenia. So if you can do that, that's a lifelong thing. Wow. Yeah. So if you can do that with a drug, and I saw it come alive right over a seven year period. So if you can do that with a drug, then you could most likely do that with a chip. What about marijuana? Terrible. It's terrible. Yeah. Why is that? Apart from its ability to induce psychosis and hallucinations, which happens with heavy marijuana usage over a given period of time, most people are taking it to help them sleep better. But what they don't realize is it's not helping you sleep. It's pretty much sedating you. And so you're not getting into the deep sleep and the REM sleep that we need. You're pretty much just sedating yourself. And it's highly addictive and it's not doing anybody any good. There is a part of the THC plant, which is the other one. I'll see now I need my creatine. I did have 10 grams today. Anyway, it's a part of the plant that is actually not psychoactive and it's helping with patients with epilepsy. See now do I have Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment or just malnourished? How many people do you guys, how many people do you get that think they have it that are just paranoid? Depends on your gender, your age. Look, I don't think I have mild cognitive there. I feel so on points as right now. I can't get that CBD CBD or CBD. Yes. So CBD oil, which is part of the plant as well. This is fine. It's not psychoactive. And it's being shown to help patients with epilepsy. Okay. Yeah. All right. Is there anything, anything I should be asking you that I'm not? I think, I think when it comes to nutrition, like one thing that a lot of people can be doing is they can be taking omega three fatty acids. I think it's up there as well. If you get it from a reputable brand, a lot of the mega three fatty acids on the market are highly rancid and they exceed the normal oxidation level. So you have to make sure you go to a good brand, but I've got got to tell you like 70, you know, 70% of your brain is made of fat, right? It's fat and water. And most of the fat that it's made from is DHA and omega threes comprise of three molecules. You've got EPA, DHA and ALA. So when you feed the brain, EPA and DHA from omega three fatty acids, you're literally feeding the brain what it's made of. And there's abundance amount of research on Alzheimer's disease patients and omega three fatty acids. In fact, there is a transporter on the outside of your brain, MFS2DA transporter that actually helps shuttle in DHA into the brain that becomes dysfunctional in Alzheimer's disease patients. So if you can be helping your brain with omega three fatty acids every day, that's another thing that is really good. So two grams of each, two grams of DHA and two grams of EPA per day. It's also been shown to eliminate and clear out some of those plaques. So that's a huge one. But look, if you are exercising every day, at least two days a week of resistance training, if you are doing your aerobic training and your high intensity training, if you're sleeping seven and a half hours a night, I say that because PNAS, okay, it's a very big journal, they showed in humans that just one night of sleep deprivation, which was classified as six hours or less, increases your amyloid beta just after one night by 5%. That was a well established landmark study. So you don't want that. So you want to be sleeping more. So I need to get a sleep study. Yeah, or you need a stress less. Yeah, that would be great. Other than that, my message is just read more, do more, do what you can to be happy, invest in yourself, you know, exercise, get outside, increase your daily steps per day, because we don't, we don't realize this in our 20s and 30s, but you'll regret it. And get your shingles vaccine after 50. Get your shingles vaccine, yes. Well, doc, I appreciate you coming. Thank you so much. That was so informative. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What's next for you? So many things. Actually, I want to tell me about your consulting business. Yeah. So I take on private clients and I run them through, I'm basically your private health consultant. So you can come to me, we do everything from extensive blood biomarkers, imaging, everything. All of it. We do, yeah, head to toe. Absolutely. Every single, every single selling your body and whatever goal you're optimizing for, whether it's health, whether it's longevity, we hope you're there. So, yes, I'm taking on people. Got an entire team around me as well. Definitely. Thank you. Thanks, Sean. All right. Cheers. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. 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