WEBVTT

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We have this white powder in front of me.

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You've got a big smile on your face.

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I do because I don't care who you are, you should definitely be having this.

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So let's talk about creatine.

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Phenomenal research shows you can creatine your way out of sleep deprivation.

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It can protect your brain against a concussion, stroke, from stress.

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And there was a study done on Alzheimer's disease patients and they found that patients not only preserved their cognitive functions, but they had more energy and they were able to exercise more.

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And I know this because I'm a clinician.

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And over the last decade, I've been surrounded by the greatest neurosurgeons in the world studying the brain.

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And so I'm here to tackle one disease, and that is Alzheimer's.

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Because it generally starts in our 30s.

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And 60 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's.

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70% being women and I get angry and I get passionate because women have been lied to, they've been underrepresented, they downplay their symptoms or they're too scared to ask their doctor for advice and what people don't really know is that it is a preventable disease but it's like end-stage cancer.

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Once you get the diagnosis, there is no cure.

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And the fact that so many people are at the mercy of a disease that is preventable is not okay with me.

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And I don't think people understand these things.

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Like people don't really know that we're becoming more sedentary, which is a disease.

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And there was a study that was done on this that showed that if you do 10%.

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10 air squats every hour.

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This can compensate for your sedentary lifestyle.

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And then we have several lifestyle factors that can lower your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.

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As well as showing you what five minutes a day can do for your brain performance just using a tennis ball and an eye patch.

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Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins.

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69% of you that listen to the show frequently haven't yet hit the follow button.

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And that follow button is very smart because it means you won't miss the best episodes.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.

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So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know.

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And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

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But also the fact that

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I think what 41% of you have chosen to follow the show that listen to it regularly is the reason why we've been able to improve everything.

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It's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better.

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And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.

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Thank you so, so, so much.

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Louisa, what is it you do in simple terms?

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And...

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I guess most importantly, why is it that you do it and why now?

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Over the last decade, I've been studying the brain.

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I'm both a clinician and an academic, so I get to see the brain and I also get to research it.

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And I'm really here to tackle one disease, and that is Alzheimer's disease.

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Why is this so important now?

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Right now, because 60 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's disease, that number is going to triple by the year 2050.

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110 million women will have Alzheimer's disease by the year 2050.

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This is a disease that robs you of who you are, your complete identity.

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So we're going to get really into this straight away because I brought Henry with me.

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And for anyone that can't see, Henry is a model brain that she's holding in her hands.

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This is around two pounds.

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And if you actually feel it, and if you actually feel a real human brain, it feels like tofu, but this is everything you are.

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And the fact that so many people are at the mercy of a disease that is preventable is not okay with me.

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It doesn't sit well with me.

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We used to think that women...

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were disproportionately affected by Alzheimer's disease because we lived longer, because age played a role in it.

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But we now have substantial evidence to show that it's not the fact that women live longer or people in general, because dementia and Alzheimer's disease are not part of the

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For women, and they differ from men, and we can separate the sexes and talk about it.

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For women, it is purely because being a woman is a risk factor for getting this disease.

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Now, if we go through and we have a look at all of the people that currently have Alzheimer's disease, 95% of them could have been prevented because this is not a disease of genetics.

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It's a disease of lifestyle.

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95% of it could have been prevented.

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Correct.

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We're born with our genetic makeup, meaning that, for example, if you have a genetic mutation on chromosome four, you will get Huntington's disease.

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There is nothing we can do about that.

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That's how you were born.

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But when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, there's around 20 to 30 genes involved in the disease.

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Yeah.

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Only around 3% of the disease cases right now were driven through those genetic mutations.

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The genetic mutations that you are born with, you get them from mom and dad, are presenilin 1, presenilin 2, and the amyloid precursor protein.

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So if you have a genetic mutation in one of these genes, you will get some form of dementia.

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What is the age range where people will start to experience Alzheimer's?

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Let's just actually take a broad overview of what Alzheimer's disease is.

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Okay.

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So you've probably heard of dementia.

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So dementia is the umbrella term.

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So Alzheimer's disease sits under the umbrella.

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It's a form of dementia.

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There's frontotemporal dementia, which is what Bruce Willis has.

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There's dementia with Lewy bodies.

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There's Parkinson's dementia.

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There's vascular dementia.

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This disease, dementia or Alzheimer's disease, is a disease of midlife.

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Okay.

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And so it generally starts in our 30s.

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It starts in our 30s, but the first symptoms show up in our late 60s, 70s and beyond.

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When you say it starts.

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Yes.

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Our brain fully develops at around 25 years old, 25 to 30.

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And after that, that's when we, if we don't take care of our brain, we start getting a decline in these functions.

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Now let's go back to the brain.

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The brain is 87 billion neurons, around five to 10,000 connections per neuron.

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My favorite area of the brain is the cerebellum, and the Purkinje cells inside the cerebellum have upwards of 50,000 connections per cell.

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So, so tightly dense, and there is so much happening, it takes 20% of the total calories that you consume every day to power this thing.

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And it's the most vascular-rich organ in the entire body.

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Over time, through things such as sleep deprivation...

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poor diet, lack of physical activity, environmental toxins.

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This slowly erodes at the functioning of the brain.

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And over time, this starts to compound because that's what biology is.

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Everything is compounding.

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One night of sleep deprivation raises your risk of amyloid beta, which is one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease pathology, by 4%.

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That's just one night of sleep deprivation.

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Imagine a new mother or a shift worker or a physician in their residency getting countless nights of sleep deprivation day in and day out.

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Imagine all of that compounding.

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And what happens?

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Well, we end up with either neuronal loss, which is like the complete atrophy of certain parts of the brain.

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And that's what is mild cognitive impairment.

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Mild cognitive impairment is a pre-dementia state.

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Right.

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So what is this that I have here, this photo of a brain?

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So you've got the sagittal view right now of the brain, and we're looking at a healthy brain on here.

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As you can see, I'm going to show it up here.

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On the left-hand side, you can see that the brain is thick.

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We can see that the integrity of the grey matter, which sits out here, is thick.

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It's voluminous.

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We can see that the ventricles are smaller.

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We go over here and we see thinning of the cortex.

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You can see these big spaces between the gyri.

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These are thick because the gray matter has atrophied.

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It's shrunk.

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You can see that the space between the cortex itself and the skull, there's a bigger space.

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You can see these ventricles here, these butterfly-shaped ventricles, this is thicker than

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This is thinner.

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We can see atrophy down here.

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So essentially, the brain is getting smaller and smaller.

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At the age of 30, if I do everything right, and we were to sort of plot this on a graph of where I land at 70, what is the variance of where I'll end up at 70?

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You know, my brain is quite important to me.

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And I do worry.

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I think, fuck, like,

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I think I worry in part because I sit and interview a lot of people at a lot of different ages.

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And one thing you notice as an interviewer is some people at 60 are razor sharp.

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And some people at 60 are not as razor sharp.

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Their ability to articulate their words, their memory recall, their ability to understand stats and stories, all of this.

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And I sit here and go, I wonder what the difference is.

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Yeah.

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And that's actually beautiful because it brings up this important concept in neuroscience called cognitive reserve.

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And that's your brain's ability to withhold capacity to overcome stresses.

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Okay.

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So you've probably heard, for example, let's use the analogy of physical performance.

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Your VO2 max, which is a measure of your peak respiratory fitness, you know, how well you can utilize oxygen when you are at a high intensity state.

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How well does your body utilize oxygen?

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The fitter you are, the more reserve you have to overcome stress.

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Stress such as an infection, everyday stresses, sleep deprivation, surgery.

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the more reserve you have in your bank to overcome that.

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The same is with your brain.

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The more cognitive reserve that you have, the more cognitive capacity that you have been training year on and year out will save you at 60 from harmful insults, such as you can get a woman at the age of 80 with a head full of amyloid beta.

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Amyloid beta being?

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One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.

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You can get somebody with a head full of amyloid.

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Which is like a plaque on the brain.

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Yeah, it's a protein that's actually, it's a protein that lives inside the neuron itself.

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And we can explain what that is, which I will in a second.

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But let me just tell you, you can have a head full of amyloid in this person and they have retained their cognitive functions.

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then you can have somebody else with hardly any amyloid, but they've lost their cognitive functions.

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And this all comes down to cognitive reserve.

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And cognitive reserve lives where in the head?

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You've got around 5,000 to 10,000 connections per cell.

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Over time, those connections fail.

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Now, those connections are responsible for your thinking, your processing speed.

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Every time you have a thought, you build a new connection.

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The more connections that you have, the more things that you see, the more novelty that you give your brain, the richer it gets, the more stable it gets.

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So the ends of the neurons, we have dendrites.

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And coming off the dendrites are these little trees.

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Imagine a branch, that's the dendrite, and all of the leaves that come off it, all these little dendritic trees, if you will, and they connect to nearby cells, 10,000 cells.

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Over time, those are the connections that fall.

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Those are the connections that fail.

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They fail because you don't utilise them.

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So the way that one would build reserve at the age of 30 is to...

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is by exercising.

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We can build reserve in a number of different ways.

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In fact, there was a really wonderful study that just came out that I just read about, and they found that those who preserved cognitive capacity at 75 years old were handwriting and reading.

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So handwriting and reading preserves cognitive functions.

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Exercise is one of the most potent stimulus-

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For brain health and Alzheimer's disease prevention and cognitive reserve, the more you exercise, the bigger your brain.

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What about scrolling on social media?

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Does it improve my reserve if I'm watching videos?

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It's in the opposite.

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Why would that be?

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Because I'm still learning stuff when I'm on the internet.

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Because what you're doing then is you are relying on short dopamine hits.

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Every time you scroll, you're sending signals to your brain that you're getting a dopamine hit and your brain gets used to it.

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Remember, your brain is only there for two things, survival and reproduction.

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So every time that you stress your brain in the smallest amount of times you're giving it dopamine hits, it doesn't allow us to do other things for a sustained period of time, like focus, read, have a conversation.

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So writing and reading are good for building up my neurological reserves.

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Yeah, neurological reserves.

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It doesn't compare to what exercise can do for the brain.

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And it's so sad because around 80% of the US population don't exercise for at least 30 minutes a week, which is actually quite scary.

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The physical activity guidelines are 150 minutes to 300 minutes of moderate to rigorous physical activity per week.

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What's the most compelling study you've ever encountered that proves that exercise is central to Alzheimer's prevention and brain health?

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When we look at all of the data, we can see that the biggest amount of return on investment is from resistance training.

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Resistance training being?

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Strength training.

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One of the most compelling studies was probably the SMART trial where they took a group of people with mild cognitive impairment and gave them two to three times per week of resistance training.

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And they not only preserved their cognitive functions, they enhanced their processing speed, they enhanced their fluid intelligence, and they had slowing of the gray matter.

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The gray matter.

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Yeah.

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So your brain consists of both gray and white matter.

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So gray matter are the cell bodies that lives on the outer side, outer portions of your brain.

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And the white matter is deep within the brain.

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And that's where all of our myelinated brain.

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neurons live.

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And over time, we see that we can have little lesions in the white matter of the brain.

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So a lot of the times people will ask me, Stephen, I'm scared.

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My mother had Alzheimer's disease.

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I'm scared I'm going to get it.

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And we were talking about genetics before.

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And there's another genetic risk factor that we didn't talk about.

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The APOE4 gene is one of the strongest risk factors of getting Alzheimer's disease, but it is not a foregone conclusion that you're going to get it.

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So Chris Hemsworth was tested and he has two copies of this gene.

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Yeah.

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So you get two copies, one from mun, one from dad.

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It's the apolipoprotein E gene.

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And it comes in three main variants.

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So you've got ApoE2, ApoE3, and ApoE4.

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So I'm a 3-3 carrier.

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I've been tested.

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And that's the general population.

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They're 3-3.

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So it doesn't raise my risk of getting the disease, but it also doesn't protect me.

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If you've got a copy of the APOE2 gene, it protects you against the disease.

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But when you have a copy of the APOE4 gene, it raises your risk by two to three times.

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If you have two copies of the gene, it raises your risk by 10 times.

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If you are a male, it raises your risk by 10 times.

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Here's the devastating thing.

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If you are a female with one copy of the gene, you are at doubled the risk than your male counterpart.

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So one copy of the gene, of ApoE4 gene for a female, raises your risk by about sixfold, whereas two copies raises your risk by 15fold.

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And how would one go and get checked?

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You can get the ApoE4 gene checked out with your doctor.

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It's a simple blood test.

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On this point of resistance training, I've heard you talk about how the legs are so important.

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Having strong legs.

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Having strong legs is by far the most important tool in your toolbox for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease.

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And this was made certain to me when I read a study done on identical twins, exact same genetic profile, and they tracked them and they did cognitive tests and MRIs.

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and they tracked them over a 10 year period.

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And what they found was that the twin who possessed the greatest strength and the most leg power had a bigger brain, larger gray matter volume.

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They preserved their cognitive functions.

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They did better on different cognitive tests.

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Why is resistance training increasing the size of my brain?

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Resistance training does so much for your brain.

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The first thing is we have to think about the journey that we're going on, right?

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So when you look at all of the studies, I want to make it really clear.

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All of the studies show that in order to produce the neural effects of resistance training, you need to be lifting at around 80% of your one repetition max.

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So 80% of one RM.

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So that's quite heavy, right?

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There is so much controversy on social media right now.

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Should I lift heavy?

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Should I lift light?

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And when it comes to hypertrophy alone, so increase in muscle mass, muscle cell size, you can get there.

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Men can get there.

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Women can get there by lifting light, high reps.

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You can get there by lifting heavy and low reps.

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It just depends on who you are and how much time you have.

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But when it comes to the brain specifically, you want to be lifting heavy for several reasons.

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The first one is when we lift heavy, when we literally, when we contract our muscle like this, we are releasing a whole set of chemicals.

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They're called myokines.

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And when they're released from the muscle, they go up to the brain and they do beneficial

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And they help with the growth and proliferation of new neurons in the hippocampus.

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And it's the first thing to go during Alzheimer's disease.

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It actually shrinks.

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This holds our memory.

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This is where a lot of our memory consolidation happens.

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and learning takes place, which is why short-term memory is the first thing to go during this disease, okay, and as we get older.

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And what we've found is that you can grow new neurons in the hippocampus from structured exercise and consistent exercise.

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The biggest growth is going to occur because of BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor.

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So this is a growth factor for the brain, and it gets released when we exercise.

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It gets released abundantly when we are doing aerobic training, when we're running, when we're cycling for long distances, but it also gets released when we do resistance training.

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Now, here's the beautiful thing about it.

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When we do resistance training...

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and we're releasing all of these myokines.

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These myokines are signaling molecules, they work together.

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So we've got one called irisin, okay?

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And that's a messenger molecule.

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So what it does is it actually helps BDNF express itself.

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So when we release this myokine, it goes into the brain, crosses the blood brain barrier, and it tells BDNF to express itself.

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But then we've got another myokine.

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Let's just take IL-6, interleukin-6.

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It comes from the interleukin family.

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What is that, sorry?

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The interleukin family is a class of pro-inflammatory cytokines.

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So these get released when we are under stress or you've got an infection or a virus, for example.

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But when we exercise, it depends on where the site is, interleukin-6, instead of acting as a pro-inflammatory cytokine, instead of creating inflammation, it acts as an anti-inflammatory cytokine.

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So it goes into the brain and it lowers inflammation.

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In fact, this was one of the first ever myokines to be studied.

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Yeah.

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And they showed that interleukin-6 is also responsible for the downregulation of tumour cell growth.

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So exercise is a potent anti-cancer intervention as well by way of myokines.

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How much exercise does one need to do to avoid the cancer-related side effects, but also the Alzheimer's problem?

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Well, just 30 minutes a day of aerobic physical activity can downregulate 13 types of cancers.

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And the most prominent ones being breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.

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So these three have been studied most and you get your anti-cancer effects on

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from the myokine release.

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So quite specifically, when we exercise, we're getting a robust release of something called natural killer cells.

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And when we get these natural killer cells into the plasma and into the bloodstream, they go into the tumor site and they do what they were born to do.

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They kill.

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So they go into the tumor site and they start to kill the tumor.

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And this is where you get your anti-cancer effects of it.

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But you can also get it from the anti-inflammatory effects of resistance training, anti-inflammatory effects of aerobic training.

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So these myokines are really powerful.

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In fact, pharmaceuticals are spending billions of dollars trying to replicate these myokines in a bottle and they can't do it.

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I want both men and women lifting heavy because you've got areas in your brain right across here lives your motor cortex.

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Think of your brain as real estate.

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There's real estate in your brain reserved for lifting heavy.

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So every time you lift a heavy weight as opposed to a lightweight, it takes more neural real estate to lift that heavy weight.

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So the heavier you lift, the greater the neural drive.

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The greater the neural drive, the better it is for your brain.

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If you had to do just one exercise for the rest of your life to protect your brain, and you could only pick one, what would it be?

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deadlift.

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Why?

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If done correctly, the deadlift can use almost every muscle in your body, erectospinae.

305
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You've got the glutes, you've got the quads, you've even got serratus anterior, you've got your calf muscles.

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There is so much compounding in that one lift would probably be comparable to a barbell squat as well.

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According to the World Health Organization, we're getting increasingly more sedentary.

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We're moving less and less, in part because of technology.

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But also, there was this really interesting study done by the Cleveland Clinic, where they talk about people who are active sedentary.

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And this...

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This felt a little bit personal, if I'm honest.

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It says a major finding in 2025 found a danger of being active sedentary, which is people who exercise for like 30 to 60 minutes, but sit for the remaining 10 hours a day.

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If you sit for more than 10 hours a day, your risk of cardiovascular disease increases, even if you meet weekly exercise goals, because prolonged sitting shuts down lipoprotein, lipase, an enzyme essential for burning fat and cleaning glucose from the blood.

314
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That's annoying to read because I feel like that's me.

315
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Yeah.

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And being sedentary is a disease.

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You can change the trajectory of your life by doing 10 air squats every hour on the hour.

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And there was a study that was done on this that showed that if you do 10 air squats every hour, this can compensate for your sedentary lifestyle because unfortunately, this is the life we're living in.

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We are becoming more sedentary in our day-to-day lives.

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We're sitting more.

321
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We're not going out as much.

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There's younger kids on video games.

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They're scrolling.

324
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There's so much happening that is involving our sedentary lifestyle, which is obviously, like you said, increasing our risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, et cetera.

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Yep, you can do it.

326
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Like this?

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There you go, 10 of those.

328
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If you do 10 of those, you can outweigh the benefits of a 30-minute power walk.

329
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Every hour?

330
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Yeah.

331
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For how many hours?

332
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Eight.

333
00:25:16.052 --> 00:25:16.232
Okay.

334
00:25:16.513 --> 00:25:17.693
So I could set an alarm on my phone.

335
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Every hour.

336
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Just get up or every 45 minutes, get up and do an air squat.

337
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And this is primarily because have you heard that when you eat, you get a massive spike of glucose?

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And the best way to bring that glucose spike back down is by doing any form of exercise.

339
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You can, albeit go out and go for a fast run, do an air squat, bring that glucose level back to baseline.

340
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And do you think much about aerobic training as a preventative measure for Alzheimer's?

341
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I love aerobic training.

342
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Women are facing a dilemma on social media because they're being given so much information.

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There is this huge uproar of, should I do zone two exercise or should I not do zone two exercise?

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What is zone two exercise?

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So we can think of physiology in zones.

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Zone one is what you and I are in right now, right?

347
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Zone two is that next level up.

348
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And that's generally when we're looking at exercising at around 60% of our maximum heart rate.

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It's where you're jogging, but you can have a conversation, but where you're huffing and puffing.

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When we're exercising, we need to produce energy.

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And that energy firstly starts in the mitochondria.

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So we need all of that energy gets created.

353
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We create ATP and that's how we are able to perform the given task.

354
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As soon as we get out of that zone and we go into zone three, zone four and zone five, we're producing energy outside of the mitochondria in the cytoplasm.

355
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And when we're doing that,

356
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In order to do that, we're breaking down glucose so fast via a pathway called glycolysis.

357
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The byproduct of that is lactate.

358
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And then we produce lactate.

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And that's actually a fuel source for the brain.

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It's also a myokine, right?

361
00:27:14.569 --> 00:27:17.711
So that's when we're in zone three, zone four, zone five.

362
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So a lot of women have been doing zone two.

363
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They've been going to the gym.

364
00:27:23.914 --> 00:27:25.295
They've been doing zone two.

365
00:27:25.395 --> 00:27:29.618
And I'm trying to push women to get out of zone two for several reasons.

366
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Not because it's not good for you.

367
00:27:34.801 --> 00:27:37.202
I think all forms of exercise are good for you.

368
00:27:37.342 --> 00:27:39.503
The more you move, the better, right?

369
00:27:40.664 --> 00:27:41.705
But let's be really honest.

370
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Right?

371
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A lot of people in midlife are busy.

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They're time poor.

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Men actually get a greater return on investment by doing zone two.

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women don't get the same return on investment from doing zone two.

375
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So I'm trying to push women to first work on zone five, zone three, zone four, zone five.

376
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If they can just do zone five, then do two to three sessions of resistance training a week.

377
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And if you have time left over, that's right there.

378
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I've just described around four hours of exercise.

379
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If you have time left over, then you can work in zone two.

380
00:28:17.574 --> 00:28:18.695
Now, zone two is great.

381
00:28:18.915 --> 00:28:20.897
If you're going to go out and go for a long run,

382
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you're doing many things.

383
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You are secreting a lot of BDNF, which we need.

384
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It's a growth factor for the brain.

385
00:28:28.040 --> 00:28:33.723
You're getting a massive amount of blood that's going into the brain, which is great as well.

386
00:28:33.743 --> 00:28:37.284
It's sustained blood delivers oxygen and nutrients to the brain.

387
00:28:37.604 --> 00:28:39.025
You're doing a lot of things, right?

388
00:28:39.585 --> 00:28:46.208
But what you're not doing is having a complete effect on the chambers of your heart.

389
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Is it better for me to do five kilometres on a treadmill or outside?

390
00:28:52.785 --> 00:28:59.377
I would say it's better for you, for the brain, to do a smaller amount of exercise and a higher threshold.

391
00:29:00.045 --> 00:29:06.253
Because I think I read somewhere one time that running outside is better for the brain because it stimulates the brain.

392
00:29:06.674 --> 00:29:08.937
Well, you're outside, so you've got so many things around you.

393
00:29:08.997 --> 00:29:12.241
Imagine your brain, I told you, it's got prime real estate.

394
00:29:12.341 --> 00:29:15.185
Every part of the brain is responsible for a different function.

395
00:29:15.225 --> 00:29:17.668
From what you see to what you hear, you go outside.

396
00:29:18.308 --> 00:29:20.489
And you can see so many things.

397
00:29:20.669 --> 00:29:22.049
You've got forward ambulation.

398
00:29:22.289 --> 00:29:26.230
So that's going to help you with drive, motivation, dopamine.

399
00:29:26.590 --> 00:29:29.310
But then you're also taking in the sounds, the senses.

400
00:29:29.370 --> 00:29:31.291
It down regulates inflammation.

401
00:29:31.631 --> 00:29:33.851
So you get so many other things from doing that.

402
00:29:34.191 --> 00:29:41.473
Yes, but five kilometers outside compared to 20 minutes of high aerobic physical activity.

403
00:29:41.493 --> 00:29:42.133
Yeah.

404
00:29:42.413 --> 00:29:43.374
What is better for the brain?

405
00:29:43.814 --> 00:29:46.597
I would say that the zone five is better for the brain.

406
00:29:46.957 --> 00:29:50.220
The zone five training does a lot for the chambers of your heart as well.

407
00:29:50.641 --> 00:29:51.802
Now I'm going to grab this.

408
00:29:51.882 --> 00:29:58.108
We've got a little model here and we can see that we have a left chamber.

409
00:29:58.208 --> 00:29:59.249
We have a right chamber.

410
00:29:59.629 --> 00:30:01.351
We have actually four chambers of the heart.

411
00:30:01.611 --> 00:30:04.532
But we have something in the heart called a ventricle.

412
00:30:04.712 --> 00:30:06.892
We've got a left ventricle and we've got a right ventricle.

413
00:30:07.412 --> 00:30:11.453
Now, the left ventricle delivers oxygenated blood to the entire body.

414
00:30:11.493 --> 00:30:18.875
It's really interesting because the chamber of the left ventricle is like a muscle, right?

415
00:30:19.215 --> 00:30:23.196
It's responsible for pumping blood to your entire body.

416
00:30:23.256 --> 00:30:27.817
It first gives blood to the brain, which means it's the most important part of your body.

417
00:30:28.297 --> 00:30:30.998
After it's done giving blood to the brain, it goes through to the rest of the body.

418
00:30:32.079 --> 00:30:43.833
As we get older, we get stiffening of these arteries, okay, stiffening of all of the arteries in the heart, and we get something called left ventricular hypertrophy.

419
00:30:44.154 --> 00:30:46.076
So that's when the ventricle

420
00:30:47.117 --> 00:30:49.838
the left ventricle, it starts to get thicker.

421
00:30:50.159 --> 00:30:58.143
And when it gets thicker, that means that we can't, it's not as strong, it can't pump a lot of blood as much as it could when it was younger to the rest of the body.

422
00:30:59.323 --> 00:31:07.808
Ben Levine, Dr. Ben Levine, he's a sports cardiologist, and he did this landmark study, which changed how I thought about zone five training.

423
00:31:08.328 --> 00:31:11.790
He took a group of sedentary males and

424
00:31:12.210 --> 00:31:16.593
average age, I think it was around 47 to 55, so around 50 years old.

425
00:31:17.353 --> 00:31:18.894
And he scanned their hearts.

426
00:31:18.914 --> 00:31:21.675
He did, you know, he looked at, he did echocardiograms.

427
00:31:21.715 --> 00:31:23.116
He took photos of the heart.

428
00:31:23.436 --> 00:31:28.039
He did everything he could to see when I was first starting the protocol, what does their heart look like?

429
00:31:29.159 --> 00:31:34.103
He then subjected them to around four hours of exercise per week.

430
00:31:34.244 --> 00:31:38.087
And that was stratified against, he did one resistance training session a week.

431
00:31:38.667 --> 00:31:45.793
One was high intensity physical activity at around 90% of the maximum heart rate, the VO2 max heart rate.

432
00:31:46.274 --> 00:31:49.396
And then in between, he did some long sessions as well, right?

433
00:31:49.416 --> 00:31:53.240
But it was all moderate to rigorous exercise.

434
00:31:53.980 --> 00:31:55.441
And that was done over two years.

435
00:31:56.001 --> 00:32:02.524
At the end of those two years, what he found was that he remodeled the heart by 20 years.

436
00:32:02.704 --> 00:32:15.631
So he reversed the age-related effects and defects of the heart by 20 years, essentially turning the 50-year-old hearts into 30-year-old hearts, just from physical activity alone.

437
00:32:15.851 --> 00:32:17.011
Four hours a week for two years?

438
00:32:17.251 --> 00:32:18.352
Four hours a week for two years.

439
00:32:19.272 --> 00:32:20.513
And what kind of exercise was it?

440
00:32:21.158 --> 00:32:29.605
So he got them to do, like, let's say, for example, one of the protocols was exercising at 90% of your maximum heart rate.

441
00:32:30.166 --> 00:32:35.070
So when we do this, we're generally looking at increasing our VO2 max.

442
00:32:35.471 --> 00:32:44.098
So you've probably heard that VO2 max, along with strength, but VO2 max is the strongest predictor of all-cause mortality, right?

443
00:32:44.478 --> 00:32:46.981
So if you want to improve your VO2 max,

444
00:32:47.661 --> 00:33:04.458
And if you want to get the heart-related changes that he did, what you want to do is you want to do 20 minutes of VO2 max per week just to keep your VO2 max because it does decline year on and year out, starting at the age of around 35, we start to see a decline in VO2 max.

445
00:33:05.239 --> 00:33:09.543
So if we want to work on our VO2 max, we want to be doing...

446
00:33:11.200 --> 00:33:13.664
what we call the Norwegian 4x4.

447
00:33:14.245 --> 00:33:16.929
It's the gold standard of increasing your VO2 max.

448
00:33:17.210 --> 00:33:25.583
So you want to get your heart rate elevated to 90% to 95% for four minutes on, four minutes off, repeat four times.

449
00:33:27.072 --> 00:33:28.513
So how do I do this?

450
00:33:28.913 --> 00:33:34.017
Well, I actually do this twice a week because the more you do, the better.

451
00:33:34.598 --> 00:33:36.059
I do this on a stepper.

452
00:33:36.359 --> 00:33:46.567
I do this at the gym and I put my stepper onto, I think I'm at like a level 14 and I'm working my way up and I'm staying on there for four minutes.

453
00:33:47.368 --> 00:33:50.810
And then I'm having a complete stop and a complete rest for four minutes.

454
00:33:51.851 --> 00:33:53.913
And I'm repeating that four times.

455
00:33:55.557 --> 00:34:03.805
So what I'm doing in that moment, I'm not just getting a massive shunting of blood to the brain, okay, which is good.

456
00:34:04.765 --> 00:34:09.790
I'm not just getting a massive release of myokines and exokines to the brain.

457
00:34:10.491 --> 00:34:11.992
I'm also remodeling the heart.

458
00:34:12.813 --> 00:34:15.115
I'm down-regulating tumor cell growth.

459
00:34:15.635 --> 00:34:17.717
I'm improving my cognitive performance.

460
00:34:18.098 --> 00:34:20.500
I'm doing so much more than just exercising alone.

461
00:34:22.067 --> 00:34:28.413
So that's once a week in Levine's study that reversed these guys' hearts by 20 years.

462
00:34:28.593 --> 00:34:29.193
Yeah.

463
00:34:29.974 --> 00:34:31.135
That you do that once a week.

464
00:34:31.355 --> 00:34:32.817
You only have to do that once a week.

465
00:34:32.837 --> 00:34:38.222
But he also did, he did around 70% of maximum heart rate for around two hours a week.

466
00:34:38.262 --> 00:34:41.164
And he also threw in one resistance training session.

467
00:34:42.645 --> 00:34:44.027
So consistency is key.

468
00:34:44.047 --> 00:34:44.207
Okay.

469
00:34:44.653 --> 00:34:46.974
I'm just looking at some of the findings of that study.

470
00:34:47.014 --> 00:34:57.056
And one of the surprising things is it showed that there is a biological exploration date, per se, for the reversal of the heart.

471
00:34:57.176 --> 00:35:01.617
And then the heart retains its plasticity, the ability to remodel itself until the age of 65.

472
00:35:02.017 --> 00:35:08.999
If this intervention had started after the age of 65, the heart was too stiff to be physically remodeled to get that 20-year reversal.

473
00:35:09.659 --> 00:35:11.900
You have to start in late middle age.

474
00:35:12.327 --> 00:35:12.868
Exactly.

475
00:35:13.249 --> 00:35:18.978
So midlife is the window of opportunity for brain health and for longevity.

476
00:35:19.379 --> 00:35:22.480
I didn't realise you could sort of remodel the heart yourself.

477
00:35:22.500 --> 00:35:23.160
That's interesting.

478
00:35:23.340 --> 00:35:24.500
Yeah, you can remodel the heart.

479
00:35:24.800 --> 00:35:28.561
And the heart is amazing, okay, because what you see with the aorta, right?

480
00:35:28.861 --> 00:35:37.563
So the aorta goes up and we've got two – the main blood supply for the brain exists in the vertebral arteries, okay?

481
00:35:37.583 --> 00:35:45.384
So there's branching off of the aorta, comes from the heart, vertebral arteries which supply the posterior part of the brain and the cerebellum with blood.

482
00:35:45.864 --> 00:35:48.805
And then you've got the carotid arteries, so one on each side.

483
00:35:49.145 --> 00:35:54.533
branching off the aorta, which supply the frontal and middle part of your brain with blood.

484
00:35:55.014 --> 00:35:57.338
The brain is the most vascular-rich organ in the entire body.

485
00:35:58.079 --> 00:36:01.705
In times of stress such as hypertension,

486
00:36:03.307 --> 00:36:13.533
that is elevated blood pressure, we see that we can actually kill off the tiniest parts of the blood vessels, which are called the capillaries.

487
00:36:13.553 --> 00:36:14.954
You can see the capillaries up here.

488
00:36:15.274 --> 00:36:21.537
They supply even the blood-brain barrier, so they supply mainly the outer cortex of the brain with blood.

489
00:36:22.258 --> 00:36:24.099
When we have elevated blood pressure,

490
00:36:25.623 --> 00:36:29.345
we are starting to kill off those tiny little capillaries of the brain.

491
00:36:29.645 --> 00:36:36.549
Those capillaries are feeding different neurons in the brain and also feeding the blood-brain barrier.

492
00:36:36.910 --> 00:36:52.338
So when we get breaking off of these, we lose the blood supply, we lose the oxygenation, we get a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier itself, which is scary, and we see that in patients who have got mild cognitive impairment.

493
00:36:52.398 --> 00:36:54.540
You've heard of leaky gut, we can call it leaky brain.

494
00:36:55.160 --> 00:37:01.867
If you have a leaky brain, what happens eventually is, so your blood-brain barrier sits like this, okay?

495
00:37:02.067 --> 00:37:08.674
And there are cells, and we call them parasites, for example, and they're bound together by tight junctions.

496
00:37:08.714 --> 00:37:10.195
That's what the blood-brain barrier is.

497
00:37:10.515 --> 00:37:11.376
It's like a...

498
00:37:12.257 --> 00:37:15.899
You think of the blood-brain barrier as the bouncer of a nightclub.

499
00:37:16.259 --> 00:37:22.942
They are all standing there like this, responsible for who can come in and who can't, and they don't allow some molecules to get in.

500
00:37:23.462 --> 00:37:28.704
But over time, when this starts to degrade and become leaky, they start to spread apart.

501
00:37:29.185 --> 00:37:36.668
And when they do, you can have the passive diffusion of all these molecules coming in, and that's really bad for your brain.

502
00:37:36.688 --> 00:37:38.769
So we want to maintain the integrity of...

503
00:37:39.109 --> 00:37:43.132
of the blood-brain barrier by maintaining the capillary health.

504
00:37:43.273 --> 00:37:45.014
We don't want the capillaries to die.

505
00:37:45.054 --> 00:37:46.175
They're one cell thick.

506
00:37:46.896 --> 00:37:49.638
Any type of damage can damage them and kill them.

507
00:37:50.258 --> 00:37:52.040
Hypertension, there was a really great study.

508
00:37:52.120 --> 00:37:58.845
It was actually the sprint child, and it's now the gold standard for the recommendation of 120 over 80.

509
00:37:58.865 --> 00:37:59.466
What's that?

510
00:38:00.967 --> 00:38:05.871
So when you have your blood pressure taken, we get the systolic over diastolic.

511
00:38:06.071 --> 00:38:17.019
And you've probably, I don't know if you take your blood pressure, but doing your blood pressure every day is a really great, inexpensive and effective tool for maintaining good brain health.

512
00:38:17.699 --> 00:38:19.641
So you measure your blood pressure.

513
00:38:20.101 --> 00:38:26.185
And if you are hypertensive, this is anywhere over 135, okay, systolic over 135.

514
00:38:31.088 --> 00:38:33.449
that's when things start to break down.

515
00:38:34.149 --> 00:38:39.290
That's when we start to get the breakdown of those small, one-cell-thick capillaries.

516
00:38:39.970 --> 00:38:52.194
So in this trial, in the SPRIN trial, what they found was that when they aggressively manage these patients and they bring their blood pressure down, they did it pharmacologically through something called an ACE inhibitor.

517
00:38:52.234 --> 00:38:54.414
It's a medication to drive down blood pressure.

518
00:38:54.875 --> 00:38:56.575
When they bring it down pharmacologically,

519
00:38:57.245 --> 00:39:02.089
these patients preserved their brain, grey matter, and their cognitive functions.

520
00:39:02.549 --> 00:39:04.110
So we now have a gold standard.

521
00:39:04.510 --> 00:39:06.272
And this is what I would recommend to anybody.

522
00:39:07.072 --> 00:39:12.416
On Amazon, it costs about $25 for an automatic blood pressure monitor.

523
00:39:12.796 --> 00:39:15.779
Do it every single morning and watch your blood pressure.

524
00:39:16.039 --> 00:39:17.340
And then if it's high, what do I do about it?

525
00:39:18.325 --> 00:39:25.570
Well, outside of pharmacology, if we don't want to take a medication, we want to get stronger and we want to do this via exercise.

526
00:39:26.691 --> 00:39:29.734
Stress is one of the biggest things driving high blood pressure.

527
00:39:30.294 --> 00:39:38.080
Manage stress, manage cortisol, manage chronic inflammation by way of exercise, sleep, all of the things that Mother Nature gave us.

528
00:39:39.078 --> 00:39:45.480
I was just looking at the study that reversed the heart by 20 years and trying to figure out what exercises they did.

529
00:39:45.500 --> 00:39:49.040
And as you said, the first one was the high intensity workout, the four by four.

530
00:39:49.321 --> 00:39:49.741
Yeah.

531
00:39:49.901 --> 00:39:51.701
Then they did a long aerobic exercise.

532
00:39:51.841 --> 00:39:52.821
Again, this is all once a week.

533
00:39:52.841 --> 00:39:59.003
So 60 minutes once a week doing a longer exercise like it could be hiking or tennis or cycling.

534
00:39:59.283 --> 00:40:03.184
A moderate intensity workout, 30 minutes where they did the talk test.

535
00:40:03.204 --> 00:40:05.525
You should be able to break a sweat but still be able to speak.

536
00:40:06.165 --> 00:40:06.845
So that was once a week.

537
00:40:06.945 --> 00:40:08.685
And then lastly, strength training once a week.

538
00:40:08.705 --> 00:40:14.287
So it's really a variety of exercises that caused such a profound impact on the heart.

539
00:40:16.187 --> 00:40:19.688
And I think cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer.

540
00:40:19.949 --> 00:40:20.129
Yeah.

541
00:40:20.549 --> 00:40:21.770
Cardiovascular disease.

542
00:40:23.111 --> 00:40:27.112
Dementia is the number one killer of women in the UK.

543
00:40:27.593 --> 00:40:28.153
The number one.

544
00:40:28.293 --> 00:40:28.573
Really?

545
00:40:28.633 --> 00:40:32.995
It's the number one cause of death in Australia for both men and women.

546
00:40:33.115 --> 00:40:34.076
How does it kill you?

547
00:40:34.376 --> 00:40:36.477
Because we all think about memory loss and stuff like that.

548
00:40:36.517 --> 00:40:36.717
Yeah.

549
00:40:37.177 --> 00:40:39.418
And so this is the actual devastating part.

550
00:40:39.458 --> 00:40:43.078
We don't die of Alzheimer's disease specifically.

551
00:40:43.678 --> 00:40:50.740
Over time, what happens is in these patients, you have to remember, Alzheimer's disease is like end-stage cancer.

552
00:40:51.440 --> 00:40:54.001
Once you get the diagnosis, there is no cure.

553
00:40:54.301 --> 00:40:55.521
There is no going back.

554
00:40:55.781 --> 00:40:56.941
There is no reversal.

555
00:40:57.101 --> 00:41:00.402
You have the disease, and that's the scariest part.

556
00:41:00.942 --> 00:41:04.284
mild cognitive impairment, you can slow the progression of that.

557
00:41:04.625 --> 00:41:08.347
Like I said to you, it goes for 20 years, mild cognitive impairment.

558
00:41:08.727 --> 00:41:11.269
You can slow the progression of mild cognitive impairment.

559
00:41:11.289 --> 00:41:19.434
But as soon as you get diagnosed on that awful day that your mother or your friend gets diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, it's a sad day.

560
00:41:20.014 --> 00:41:25.798
And what ends up happening with these patients is you can die of asphyxiation.

561
00:41:26.159 --> 00:41:27.740
You can die of...

562
00:41:28.400 --> 00:41:31.983
Your brain loses the signal to swallow.

563
00:41:32.643 --> 00:41:36.986
It loses the signal to maybe you fall because you've lost balance.

564
00:41:37.527 --> 00:41:44.412
It's a really scary moment, but it's not like you die of Alzheimer's disease specifically.

565
00:41:44.432 --> 00:41:47.654
If you were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease...

566
00:41:51.470 --> 00:41:52.511
It's an interesting reaction.

567
00:41:54.192 --> 00:41:55.673
Because I would have no hope.

568
00:41:56.513 --> 00:42:00.036
I think a better question is... You'd have no hope?

569
00:42:00.376 --> 00:42:04.479
If I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, there is nothing I could do.

570
00:42:06.180 --> 00:42:11.383
How would that change your life and the decisions you make?

571
00:42:11.743 --> 00:42:12.704
Or would it at all?

572
00:42:13.227 --> 00:42:16.709
I would aggressively, aggressively exercise.

573
00:42:16.909 --> 00:42:18.930
I would monitor my diet.

574
00:42:19.610 --> 00:42:36.259
I would aggressively monitor my diet and I would potentially have a ketogenic diet because what we've found is that during this metabolic crisis that happens in your brain, okay, where you lose the ability to use glucose as your primary fuel source.

575
00:42:36.279 --> 00:42:40.861
So the brain doesn't know how to use glucose as its primary fuel source.

576
00:42:41.161 --> 00:42:42.242
So it's under attack now.

577
00:42:42.502 --> 00:42:43.363
During Alzheimer's.

578
00:42:43.503 --> 00:42:49.486
During Alzheimer's, but also during this window for women as well in the perimenopause state.

579
00:42:49.886 --> 00:42:58.051
So the brain cell, when it's under attack and it can't utilize glucose effectively and it doesn't have any energy, it starts to think about survival.

580
00:42:58.311 --> 00:43:00.152
It starts to think, what can I do?

581
00:43:00.252 --> 00:43:01.273
I'm under attack.

582
00:43:01.593 --> 00:43:04.556
So it starts to break down the myelin sheath.

583
00:43:04.696 --> 00:43:07.199
And in that moment, it's actually the astrocytes.

584
00:43:07.239 --> 00:43:10.502
They're the supporters of the brain cells.

585
00:43:10.522 --> 00:43:14.106
So they start to think, okay, let's break down the myelin sheath.

586
00:43:14.507 --> 00:43:18.311
From that, the astrocytes produce ketone bodies.

587
00:43:18.751 --> 00:43:21.073
And then the ketone bodies get shuttled into the brain.

588
00:43:21.113 --> 00:43:22.155
And that's how we use...

589
00:43:22.995 --> 00:43:23.996
energy in the brain.

590
00:43:24.256 --> 00:43:35.741
So in that state of metabolic crisis, I would make sure that I am having a ketone-rich diet, or I may be getting exogenous ketones.

591
00:43:35.801 --> 00:43:37.622
I would aggressively exercise.

592
00:43:37.702 --> 00:43:40.224
I would aggressively manage my lipids.

593
00:43:40.304 --> 00:43:48.528
I'd have a high intake of omega-3 fatty acids, and I would preserve, if I could, any form of cognitive function by way of

594
00:43:49.408 --> 00:43:54.791
talking to people by going outside, socialising, having hard conversations.

595
00:43:54.891 --> 00:43:59.913
If I was intact and I could do so, I would throw tennis balls to the wall.

596
00:44:01.514 --> 00:44:12.800
So on that point of the ketogenic diet, the reason is because ketones are an alternative fuel source to glucose and the brain likes ketones.

597
00:44:13.175 --> 00:44:18.399
The brain loves ketones and actually utilizes them more effectively than glucose.

598
00:44:18.439 --> 00:44:21.522
But glucose is the primary fuel source for the brain.

599
00:44:21.902 --> 00:44:26.106
And here's what's really interesting and devastating, if you will, for females.

600
00:44:26.786 --> 00:44:32.691
During the onset of perimenopause, when we see a decline in estrogen,

601
00:44:34.153 --> 00:44:35.394
We see a decline in estrogen.

602
00:44:35.714 --> 00:44:40.839
What happens is a 30% reduction in brain glucose metabolism.

603
00:44:41.439 --> 00:44:49.206
So when these receptors start to die because we don't have a lot of estrogen circulating in the bloodstream anymore...

604
00:44:50.147 --> 00:44:50.808
What happens?

605
00:44:50.988 --> 00:44:54.332
Well, we can't utilise glucose as effectively.

606
00:44:54.792 --> 00:45:04.623
So during that state, that's when we start to get the breakdown of the myelin sheath to use that as ketone bodies as an alternative brain fuel source.

607
00:45:05.404 --> 00:45:07.707
So do you think women going through menopause should be...

608
00:45:09.305 --> 00:45:10.547
considering a ketogenic diet?

609
00:45:10.607 --> 00:45:11.948
Yes, I do think that.

610
00:45:12.029 --> 00:45:24.024
I think that women who are going through perimenopause and who are at the mercy of this brain energetic crisis should be adopting, if they can, a ketogenic diet.

611
00:45:24.224 --> 00:45:26.326
It's one of the best diets for the brain.

612
00:45:27.071 --> 00:45:36.075
I didn't really understand this idea that during menopause, there was a glucose deficiency or metabolism problem in the brain.

613
00:45:36.095 --> 00:45:38.517
30% reduction in brain glucose metabolism.

614
00:45:38.777 --> 00:45:42.258
Is this why women report having brain fog and all these kinds of things?

615
00:45:42.278 --> 00:45:43.219
Yeah, absolutely.

616
00:45:43.279 --> 00:45:48.641
Because when the brain can't utilize its fuel source effectively, what happens?

617
00:45:48.681 --> 00:45:50.923
Well, metabolites start to shift.

618
00:45:51.663 --> 00:45:53.224
We don't sleep properly.

619
00:45:53.304 --> 00:45:54.404
Around 60 to 65%

620
00:45:56.185 --> 00:46:00.926
of women in menopause report having a hot flash or night sweats.

621
00:46:01.326 --> 00:46:02.306
It wakes them up at night.

622
00:46:02.526 --> 00:46:06.647
That's also causing cognitive decline and brain fog.

623
00:46:07.227 --> 00:46:10.207
So, I mean, this graph is pretty shocking.

624
00:46:10.707 --> 00:46:11.868
Can you explain what it shows?

625
00:46:12.468 --> 00:46:22.850
Oh, this is showing the estrogen levels at birth, going through all of the life cycles that a woman will go through, puberty, perimenopause, and then eventually menopause.

626
00:46:23.150 --> 00:46:25.550
There is one thing that is certain that

627
00:46:27.050 --> 00:46:33.853
After age, I mentioned earlier, being a woman is the next strongest risk factor for getting this disease.

628
00:46:34.673 --> 00:46:35.453
For getting Alzheimer's.

629
00:46:35.473 --> 00:46:36.234
For getting Alzheimer's.

630
00:46:36.794 --> 00:46:45.197
And that largely lies in our menopausal shift that occurs, the downsizing of estrogen.

631
00:46:45.237 --> 00:46:51.560
However, we do have forms of estrogen that we can supplement with.

632
00:46:51.860 --> 00:46:56.644
So I just need to keep the estrogen up because then the brain health is gonna be up and normal.

633
00:46:57.065 --> 00:46:59.487
This is where the controversy lies, yes and no.

634
00:46:59.607 --> 00:47:02.369
So I want everyone to understand, I am sitting right now.

635
00:47:02.449 --> 00:47:07.574
So my entire doctoral thesis is focused on women and Alzheimer's disease.

636
00:47:08.174 --> 00:47:12.356
And I'm Switzerland right now when it comes to hormone replacement therapy.

637
00:47:12.436 --> 00:47:14.857
That is replacing your hormones.

638
00:47:15.017 --> 00:47:15.658
You're Switzerland.

639
00:47:15.978 --> 00:47:16.658
I'm Switzerland.

640
00:47:17.158 --> 00:47:20.380
Meaning that there is no evidence to suggest.

641
00:47:20.700 --> 00:47:27.463
Right now, we don't have large scale randomized control trials to show that hormone replacement therapy prevents dementia.

642
00:47:28.163 --> 00:47:30.664
So what I will tell you is this, it is a signal.

643
00:47:31.005 --> 00:47:32.165
It is a supporter.

644
00:47:32.665 --> 00:47:33.846
It will help you

645
00:47:34.467 --> 00:47:38.051
do the things that can lower your risk of dementia.

646
00:47:38.672 --> 00:47:48.324
We've seen multiple times that having hormone replacement therapy can reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease by up to 30%.

647
00:47:48.785 --> 00:47:49.385
We know that.

648
00:47:49.686 --> 00:47:50.787
But it's not because

649
00:47:51.817 --> 00:47:54.398
Estrogen alone is minimizing your risk.

650
00:47:54.798 --> 00:48:00.320
It's because when you have estrogen, it helps get rid of the hot flashes.

651
00:48:00.520 --> 00:48:02.240
It helps with the night sweats.

652
00:48:02.560 --> 00:48:14.564
Because during menopause, when we actually have a dysregulation of estrogen in our brain, what happens in the hypothalamus, which is an area in the brain that controls our temperature regulation.

653
00:48:15.384 --> 00:48:18.665
When we lose the ability to monitor our temperature,

654
00:48:19.105 --> 00:48:28.790
for a woman, what will happen is when she feels the slightest bit hot, her temperature, you know, is rising a little bit.

655
00:48:28.810 --> 00:48:30.471
The hypothalamus doesn't know what to do.

656
00:48:30.511 --> 00:48:32.292
So it signals, I'm super hot.

657
00:48:32.312 --> 00:48:35.974
So it'll raise your temperature right up and that's a hot flash and then it'll bring it right down.

658
00:48:36.594 --> 00:48:39.576
And as a result, this is keeping women up at night.

659
00:48:39.916 --> 00:48:43.158
And we know that sleep deprivation is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

660
00:48:43.178 --> 00:48:43.858
Of course it is.

661
00:48:44.759 --> 00:48:46.780
Compounding sleep deprivation is

662
00:48:47.500 --> 00:48:50.841
will accumulate amyloid beta in your brain.

663
00:48:51.101 --> 00:49:00.864
So if we can use hormone replacement therapy as a signal and as a support to help us sleep at night, then that's a good thing.

664
00:49:01.824 --> 00:49:05.906
Another thing, estrogen is anabolic to muscle.

665
00:49:06.606 --> 00:49:07.106
What does that mean?

666
00:49:07.546 --> 00:49:10.547
It means that it helps with muscle protein synthesis.

667
00:49:11.002 --> 00:49:11.943
Oh, it helps me make muscle.

668
00:49:12.063 --> 00:49:14.004
Yeah, we've got estrogen receptors on our bone.

669
00:49:14.024 --> 00:49:15.985
We've got estrogen receptors on our muscle.

670
00:49:16.466 --> 00:49:35.719
So if estrogen is anabolic to muscle, if estrogen helps with muscle protein synthesis, if estrogen helps with bone mineral density, then replacing estrogen during that menopause state is going to help us with all of the risk factors of Alzheimer's disease.

671
00:49:35.739 --> 00:49:36.299
Yeah.

672
00:49:36.519 --> 00:49:41.023
So when does oestrogen, I mean, it really, in this image, drops off a cliff.

673
00:49:41.043 --> 00:49:41.944
Yeah, and it varies.

674
00:49:42.084 --> 00:49:46.508
So it tends to generally happen at around 45 years old as an average.

675
00:49:46.608 --> 00:49:51.473
And that perimenopause stage lasts around 10 years.

676
00:49:51.693 --> 00:49:53.615
But it starts going down on this graph at about 30.

677
00:49:54.276 --> 00:49:56.898
It starts to go down and everyone's different, okay?

678
00:49:57.238 --> 00:50:04.042
You can have a woman in her late 30s go into perimenopause or the general age is around 42 to 45.

679
00:50:04.422 --> 00:50:12.867
Most OBGYNs that I've spoken to say that you need to start checking in with your doctor at around 40 years old to check for this.

680
00:50:13.127 --> 00:50:21.132
So do you think, thinking about my fiancé now, do you think that someone like her should go on hormone replacement therapy at like 40?

681
00:50:21.627 --> 00:50:23.508
Well, so that's the big question.

682
00:50:23.528 --> 00:50:24.508
That's the elephant in the room.

683
00:50:24.628 --> 00:50:27.029
Should you go on hormone replacement therapy or should you not?

684
00:50:27.049 --> 00:50:29.669
And that's definitely a conversation between you and your physician.

685
00:50:30.109 --> 00:50:38.352
However, we've got large scale studies right now to show that we don't have to be afraid of hormone replacement therapy.

686
00:50:39.032 --> 00:50:51.479
And without going too deep into the weeds, there was a massive study that was done, the Women's Health Initiative, that scared women out of taking hormone replacement therapy in fear of getting breast cancer.

687
00:50:51.519 --> 00:50:51.899
Correct.

688
00:50:52.319 --> 00:51:00.544
We went from having 40% of women on hormone replacement therapy to just 4% of women on hormone replacement therapy.

689
00:51:00.944 --> 00:51:04.046
We know that even at the onset of menopause,

690
00:51:04.926 --> 00:51:09.592
A woman's risk of having a heart-related event triples.

691
00:51:10.432 --> 00:51:16.559
A woman's risk of getting Alzheimer's disease increases.

692
00:51:17.240 --> 00:51:25.109
So there is something to posit here about the benefits of hormone replacement therapy that we still haven't yet studied yet.

693
00:51:25.881 --> 00:51:27.563
Will you do hormone replacement therapy?

694
00:51:27.743 --> 00:51:28.443
I definitely will.

695
00:51:28.844 --> 00:51:29.364
And what kind of hormone?

696
00:51:29.624 --> 00:51:31.406
And look, so this is really interesting.

697
00:51:31.446 --> 00:51:33.708
So this was given to me by a friend.

698
00:51:33.788 --> 00:51:36.230
And this is the capsule.

699
00:51:36.270 --> 00:51:39.073
So this is estradiol and progesterone.

700
00:51:39.573 --> 00:51:39.793
Okay.

701
00:51:40.054 --> 00:51:43.237
So progesterone is that one that's going to help you sleep at night.

702
00:51:43.597 --> 00:51:45.619
This one here is vaginal estrogen.

703
00:51:45.639 --> 00:51:45.759
Right.

704
00:51:46.099 --> 00:52:00.852
So this is a cream that actually gets, you know, depending on how it is, it can get inserted and the vaginal estrogen, apparently, if you put it on your face, is probably the best form of skincare that you could ever have.

705
00:52:01.012 --> 00:52:05.878
Yeah, we have estrogen receptors all over our tissues, including our skin.

706
00:52:06.298 --> 00:52:09.182
These are estradiol inserts, so that's not the cream itself.

707
00:52:09.582 --> 00:52:18.292
But if you get vaginal estrogen in the form of a cream, you can put it on your face and it can help with skin elasticity, collagen, dermal thickness.

708
00:52:18.432 --> 00:52:20.395
This is why I'm actually most excited about it.

709
00:52:21.254 --> 00:52:24.676
So, I mean, are these the only ways that one can do hormone?

710
00:52:24.916 --> 00:52:28.899
No, there's also a patch, and that's what most women are opting in for.

711
00:52:29.039 --> 00:52:31.301
What will you do when the time comes?

712
00:52:32.021 --> 00:52:34.182
I will probably do the patch.

713
00:52:34.943 --> 00:52:35.103
Why?

714
00:52:35.966 --> 00:52:37.748
Because it's the easiest.

715
00:52:37.768 --> 00:52:40.110
That's the one that I've researched the most.

716
00:52:40.510 --> 00:52:43.233
I'm not afraid of hormone replacement therapy in the slightest.

717
00:52:43.293 --> 00:52:45.816
You do have to, you know, everyone has to check with their doctor.

718
00:52:46.276 --> 00:52:54.364
But I definitely think that this is going to be one thing that is going to help with the Alzheimer's disease crisis that is occurring.

719
00:52:54.384 --> 00:52:56.426
Go ahead.

720
00:52:57.538 --> 00:53:00.702
I mentioned earlier plaques, right?

721
00:53:01.363 --> 00:53:08.130
So a lot of people ask, well, what distinguishes Alzheimer's disease from the rest of the dementias?

722
00:53:08.431 --> 00:53:13.076
And it comes down to two proteins, amyloid beta and tau protein.

723
00:53:13.417 --> 00:53:16.821
And here's where it gets really interesting and actually dates back to 1901.

724
00:53:18.042 --> 00:53:21.724
the first ever Alzheimer's disease patient, Augusta DT.

725
00:53:22.164 --> 00:53:25.326
She was 52 years old and she went to the hospital.

726
00:53:25.566 --> 00:53:35.391
Her and her husband went complaining of difficulties of word finding, word fluency, and she couldn't remember where she put her keys.

727
00:53:35.892 --> 00:53:38.873
And her husband said she is delirious.

728
00:53:39.674 --> 00:53:44.757
And Augusta told the doctor on board, he was a psychiatrist.

729
00:53:44.837 --> 00:53:46.898
His name was Eloise Alzheimer's.

730
00:53:47.618 --> 00:53:52.266
She said to him, and I quote, I don't know who I am anymore.

731
00:53:53.769 --> 00:53:56.553
As I mentioned, this disease robs you of who you are.

732
00:53:57.435 --> 00:53:58.877
In 1906, Augusta Ditti died.

733
00:54:01.865 --> 00:54:08.746
And that was the first ever patient to be recorded of having Alzheimer's disease.

734
00:54:09.506 --> 00:54:22.769
And so post-mortem, they cut her brain open and they found that she had these plaques in her brain and they didn't really know, they didn't really understand what it was, but that was the first ever induction of this disease in society.

735
00:54:23.049 --> 00:54:27.710
And ever since then, ever since then, we are still trying to tackle this disease and

736
00:54:28.510 --> 00:54:41.340
In the 2000s, we had this notion that Alzheimer's disease was the amyloid cascade hypothesis, meaning that, great, Alzheimer's disease means when you get a head full of amyloid, this toxic protein that builds up.

737
00:54:41.360 --> 00:54:43.562
So we were demonizing this protein.

738
00:54:44.222 --> 00:54:47.503
We were demonizing this peptide protein that builds up in the head.

739
00:54:47.963 --> 00:54:54.625
And so then came the medications, okay, in the form of IV drugs.

740
00:54:54.765 --> 00:54:59.866
So you go to the hospital, you get an IV in the promise that it will clear out amyloid.

741
00:54:59.966 --> 00:55:01.006
Great, we've got a cure.

742
00:55:01.546 --> 00:55:04.727
But what they found was that when they were taking out the amyloid,

743
00:55:05.107 --> 00:55:11.155
in these brains, they were taking with them brain tissue and causing micro hemorrhages.

744
00:55:11.756 --> 00:55:14.659
And in some patients, it was resulting in death.

745
00:55:16.181 --> 00:55:18.584
So we now know that

746
00:55:19.798 --> 00:55:23.121
The problem here isn't amyloid.

747
00:55:23.801 --> 00:55:28.445
In fact, amyloid is an antimicrobial peptide.

748
00:55:29.205 --> 00:55:32.428
So amyloid is actually a good thing.

749
00:55:33.348 --> 00:55:36.951
Amyloid beta is a good thing because it protects the brain cells.

750
00:55:37.432 --> 00:55:38.993
Now, here's what happens.

751
00:55:39.113 --> 00:55:43.176
We have this beautiful process during sleep that occurs.

752
00:55:43.496 --> 00:55:47.920
When we get into deep sleep, we activate the glymphatic system.

753
00:55:48.560 --> 00:55:53.765
Okay, so the glymphatic system comes from the word glial cells.

754
00:55:53.805 --> 00:55:55.186
We have glial cells in the brain.

755
00:55:55.586 --> 00:56:02.092
They sit outside of the neurons, and this is what is responsible for immunity.

756
00:56:02.112 --> 00:56:04.774
They're our chief immune response cell.

757
00:56:05.455 --> 00:56:10.039
During deep sleep, they shrink, and when they shrink, all of this amyloid beta that's

758
00:56:10.619 --> 00:56:14.064
floating around in the cerebral spinal fluid gets washed out.

759
00:56:14.084 --> 00:56:18.030
So it's like a washing machine that occurs in your brain, right?

760
00:56:18.651 --> 00:56:24.921
But what tends to happen in Alzheimer's patients is they don't get a chance to wash out the amyloid.

761
00:56:25.882 --> 00:56:36.435
What happens in perimenopause and menopause due to the hot flashes, you don't get to get into deep sleep because you're having a fragmented sleep because you're waking up due to hot flashes and night sweats.

762
00:56:36.755 --> 00:56:40.860
So that is what's causing the buildup of amyloid.

763
00:56:41.420 --> 00:56:42.161
Now stick with me.

764
00:56:42.742 --> 00:56:44.744
We've got another protein here.

765
00:56:45.445 --> 00:56:47.987
That is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.

766
00:56:48.627 --> 00:56:49.748
It's tau protein.

767
00:56:50.128 --> 00:56:53.490
And tau lives in the axon of the cell.

768
00:56:53.690 --> 00:56:56.172
The one that I said is covered in the myelin sheath.

769
00:56:57.132 --> 00:57:03.997
And what happens under times of stress, what happens is this tau protein phosphorylates.

770
00:57:04.577 --> 00:57:10.979
So it breaks off and basically tau protein stabilizes the microtubules.

771
00:57:11.359 --> 00:57:11.539
Okay.

772
00:57:11.579 --> 00:57:15.081
Imagine these railroad tracks in the axon.

773
00:57:15.441 --> 00:57:15.681
Okay.

774
00:57:15.701 --> 00:57:17.161
Just going up and down the axon.

775
00:57:17.381 --> 00:57:19.202
The axons in the cell or in the brain?

776
00:57:19.562 --> 00:57:27.165
So the brain cell itself, the neuron, is the neuron cell body and the axon is like the trunk of the tree.

777
00:57:27.365 --> 00:57:27.625
Okay.

778
00:57:29.058 --> 00:57:35.781
So holding up the tree are microtubules and those microtubules are bound by tau proteins.

779
00:57:36.141 --> 00:57:38.602
The tau proteins keep the microtubules intact.

780
00:57:38.862 --> 00:57:42.163
So the trunk of the tree is stabilized and it sits there.

781
00:57:42.604 --> 00:57:43.904
Why does it need to be stabilized?

782
00:57:44.124 --> 00:57:46.405
Because that's how speed of thought travels.

783
00:57:46.785 --> 00:57:49.286
Information processing speed travels up there.

784
00:57:50.447 --> 00:57:53.088
When the tau protein phosphorylates,

785
00:57:53.951 --> 00:57:56.054
it starts to form tangles.

786
00:57:56.074 --> 00:57:58.537
They're called neurofibrillary tangles.

787
00:57:58.917 --> 00:58:00.559
So that happens in the axon.

788
00:58:00.919 --> 00:58:09.350
And when all these tangles clump together, we get the collapse of this axon, the collapse of these microtubules.

789
00:58:09.830 --> 00:58:19.213
So we're not just having a cascade of environmental disaster inside the cerebral spinal fluid of the brain and inside the brain outside the cells.

790
00:58:19.433 --> 00:58:23.394
We've also got this cascade happening inside the cell body itself.

791
00:58:23.795 --> 00:58:27.956
So the brain is under attack inside the cell and outside the cell.

792
00:58:29.316 --> 00:58:29.536
Why?

793
00:58:29.556 --> 00:58:30.397
Why exactly?

794
00:58:30.517 --> 00:58:30.757
Why?

795
00:58:30.857 --> 00:58:32.137
Why does this happen?

796
00:58:32.437 --> 00:58:34.258
Because of how we treat our brains.

797
00:58:35.150 --> 00:58:36.451
Because of how we treat our brains.

798
00:58:36.471 --> 00:58:36.751
Yes.

799
00:58:37.852 --> 00:58:45.597
The reason why your brain is hyperphosphorylated and the reason why these tau proteins are hyperphosphorylated is because of many things.

800
00:58:45.797 --> 00:58:57.425
One is we have seen time and time again that we have estrogen receptors that are in the brain cell themselves in the axon.

801
00:58:57.805 --> 00:59:03.771
So when we don't have adequate estrogen, estrogen actually is so smart.

802
00:59:04.092 --> 00:59:11.720
What it is doing, it's blocking an enzyme that is responsible for phosphorylating the tau.

803
00:59:12.220 --> 00:59:19.468
So if we don't have the estrogen there, then the tau, the enzyme is there to phosphorylate the tau.

804
00:59:20.581 --> 00:59:22.982
and break it down and cause these neurofibrillary tangles.

805
00:59:23.462 --> 00:59:30.946
But let's just say you're a man and you don't need the testosterone, you don't need the estrogen there, although testosterone is neuroprotective.

806
00:59:31.426 --> 00:59:39.629
Testosterone actually aromatizes into estrogen, which is why you actually have an extra added protection in your life.

807
00:59:42.251 --> 00:59:43.131
What else causes this?

808
00:59:43.191 --> 00:59:44.251
Well, stress.

809
00:59:44.372 --> 00:59:45.172
You're talking about sleep.

810
00:59:45.292 --> 00:59:49.554
Yeah, so sleep is, I think by far the most underrated

811
00:59:50.763 --> 00:59:53.524
Alzheimer's disease prevention tool that we have.

812
00:59:54.005 --> 01:00:01.648
It's underrated because we have been doing it all our lives and we think that we can just go to sleep and the magic happens.

813
01:00:01.728 --> 01:00:06.591
But I think now in 2026, we actually need to train for sleep.

814
01:00:07.111 --> 01:00:15.775
So during deep sleep, we activate the glymphatic system and sadly, a large proportion of us aren't getting into deep sleep.

815
01:00:16.996 --> 01:00:19.257
So sleep is one of the reasons.

816
01:00:19.577 --> 01:00:20.077
How do you sleep?

817
01:00:21.517 --> 01:00:24.159
Yeah, I make sure I sleep seven and a half hours a night.

818
01:00:25.280 --> 01:00:27.262
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819
01:00:27.602 --> 01:00:29.383
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828
01:00:57.261 --> 01:00:58.642
All I had to do was brain dump.

829
01:00:58.842 --> 01:01:10.486
Imagine if you had someone with you at all times that could take the ideas you have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct, and write them down for you.

830
01:01:10.946 --> 01:01:12.847
This is exactly what Whisperflow is in my life.

831
01:01:13.147 --> 01:01:16.448
It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I wanna say.

832
01:01:16.808 --> 01:01:26.592
And it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out and about, I can respond to emails and Slack messages and WhatsApps and everything across all of my devices just by speaking.

833
01:01:26.872 --> 01:01:27.652
I love this tool.

834
01:01:27.732 --> 01:01:30.573
And I started talking about this with my behind the scenes channel a couple of months back.

835
01:01:30.593 --> 01:01:34.514
And then the founder reached out to me and said, we're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you.

836
01:01:34.634 --> 01:01:35.974
So we'd love to be a sponsor.

837
01:01:36.054 --> 01:01:37.394
We'd love you to be an investor in the company.

838
01:01:37.555 --> 01:01:39.235
And so I signed up for both of those offers.

839
01:01:39.355 --> 01:01:43.296
And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called Whisper Flow.

840
01:01:43.556 --> 01:01:44.376
You have to check it out.

841
01:01:44.556 --> 01:01:46.937
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842
01:01:47.277 --> 01:01:52.818
So if you want to give it a try, head over to whisperflow.ai slash doac to get started for free.

843
01:01:53.158 --> 01:01:56.499
And you can find that link to Whisper Flow in the description below.

844
01:01:57.579 --> 01:02:01.701
A lot of people struggle with sleep and they've just kind of gotten used to it.

845
01:02:02.962 --> 01:02:08.284
I hear this from friends of mine that will say, you know, I saw my bad sleeper, I'll sleep for five hours and they kind of have just gotten used to it.

846
01:02:08.664 --> 01:02:10.485
Do you think that's okay?

847
01:02:10.785 --> 01:02:10.965
No.

848
01:02:12.906 --> 01:02:17.028
And they will pay for this in their 60s and 70s.

849
01:02:17.348 --> 01:02:17.768
How do you know?

850
01:02:18.468 --> 01:02:24.851
Because I know that just one night of sleep deprivation is raising your risk of amyloid beta by at least four to five percent.

851
01:02:26.303 --> 01:02:26.924
Just one night.

852
01:02:27.324 --> 01:02:28.085
Just one night.

853
01:02:28.866 --> 01:02:31.068
So you can imagine the accumulation of this.

854
01:02:31.468 --> 01:02:40.818
Not only that, we know that you're interrupting with the hormones that are responsible for hunger and satiety.

855
01:02:41.219 --> 01:02:46.404
We know that you're increasing your risk of type 2 diabetes with sleep deprivation.

856
01:02:47.565 --> 01:03:01.081
But not just that, we also see that this compound effect can't be reversed, meaning that a lot of people think I'll just sleep for six hours a night and then just bank on it on the weekend.

857
01:03:01.101 --> 01:03:03.444
But sadly, that's not how our brain works.

858
01:03:03.544 --> 01:03:05.386
It's not like debt that we can repay to the bank.

859
01:03:06.807 --> 01:03:09.770
I heard from Matthew Walker the other day, though, that we can save it up.

860
01:03:10.571 --> 01:03:12.232
He said, you can't make up for lost sleep.

861
01:03:12.452 --> 01:03:12.933
Exactly.

862
01:03:13.073 --> 01:03:23.583
But if on Monday I've got something where I know I'm going to be deprived, he says on the weekends, like Saturday and Sunday, if I got a huge amount of sleep, it's kind of like I can use that.

863
01:03:23.783 --> 01:03:26.266
Yeah, it's kind of like the reserve.

864
01:03:26.326 --> 01:03:26.566
Yeah.

865
01:03:26.906 --> 01:03:27.827
Actually, I do this.

866
01:03:27.947 --> 01:03:29.249
I do long-haul flights.

867
01:03:29.309 --> 01:03:33.913
I'll be at like six hours between LA and New York, but also to Australia.

868
01:03:34.274 --> 01:03:42.963
And so if I know I'm going on a long-haul flight, I'll bank on my sleep for about a week leading up to that because I know I'm going to be sleep-deprived on the plane.

869
01:03:42.983 --> 01:03:43.143
Yeah.

870
01:03:43.412 --> 01:03:53.576
So if you were one of those people that struggles with sleep, that's listening right now, and they're slightly concerned that, you know, you talked about this glymphatic system, which sort of comes out at night and cleans up the brain.

871
01:03:54.117 --> 01:03:57.738
And they're hearing, shit, my glymphatic system isn't going to be optimal if I'm not sleeping.

872
01:03:58.238 --> 01:04:04.261
If that was you, and for whatever reason, you start sleeping poorly, what would you do about it?

873
01:04:05.120 --> 01:04:10.545
I would get really serious about examining my lifestyle the day before.

874
01:04:10.986 --> 01:04:12.808
So this generally involves two things.

875
01:04:12.828 --> 01:04:16.171
You have to ask yourself, are you having trouble falling asleep or are you

876
01:04:20.212 --> 01:04:25.780
Women report trouble falling asleep, meaning they've got a racing mind.

877
01:04:26.161 --> 01:04:26.662
Men too.

878
01:04:26.702 --> 01:04:27.904
They've got this racing mind.

879
01:04:27.924 --> 01:04:34.053
They can't, you know, just stop that default mode network and the racing thoughts that happen.

880
01:04:34.093 --> 01:04:34.794
That's one thing.

881
01:04:36.295 --> 01:04:42.020
And then there's the, I can't stay asleep, meaning that I'm waking up due to heat.

882
01:04:42.281 --> 01:04:46.184
I'm waking up because I'm stressed and I'm having bad dreams.

883
01:04:46.204 --> 01:04:48.006
There's all different reasons as to why you wake up.

884
01:04:48.026 --> 01:04:53.892
So for the person who is having trouble falling asleep at night, I would strongly recommend

885
01:04:55.545 --> 01:05:01.791
introducing a supplement called GABA, which is gamma amino bruteric acid.

886
01:05:02.351 --> 01:05:05.454
It's our chief inhibitory neurotransmitter.

887
01:05:06.074 --> 01:05:10.278
And when you have this, it really helps stabilize all those thoughts.

888
01:05:10.318 --> 01:05:14.281
It helps with a racing mind and it can help calm you down at night.

889
01:05:14.302 --> 01:05:14.362
And

890
01:05:15.310 --> 01:05:19.873
The next thing I'll do is I will think about what I'm eating.

891
01:05:20.053 --> 01:05:33.802
Actually, it turns out that eating starchy vegetables, something that's going to make you like, you know, sweet potatoes, for example, it's going to have a better benefit backloading your carbs at night for helping you sleep.

892
01:05:34.762 --> 01:05:52.404
If you start training for sleep, as if sleep is your marathon, and start preparing for that at 8pm at night, getting off, you know, don't email, don't have any hard conversations, don't watch anything crazy at night, you'll settle your mind down, you'll settle your nervous system down.

893
01:05:54.117 --> 01:06:01.027
But where I think most of the optimization occurs is when you're actually in sleep.

894
01:06:01.868 --> 01:06:04.531
I would also work on sleep regulation.

895
01:06:05.032 --> 01:06:10.800
So what we know is that in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees.

896
01:06:11.801 --> 01:06:16.566
And I'm doing this with a temperature controlled mattress because it's working on thermal regulation.

897
01:06:16.926 --> 01:06:30.659
A lot of people who don't have that can do several things like sleeping with their feet outside of the sheets or turning the air conditioning on the thermostat on to cooling the room to cooling down your body temperature, core body temperature.

898
01:06:31.339 --> 01:06:34.762
One thing that you can supplement with is glycine.

899
01:06:35.523 --> 01:06:40.485
which I think is amazing because it helps with sleep by way of temperature regulation.

900
01:06:41.025 --> 01:06:42.665
It can bring down your core body temperature.

901
01:06:43.046 --> 01:06:54.109
And in fact, and I don't know too much about the mechanism behind this, glycine itself has one of the greatest longevity benefits for improving lifespan.

902
01:06:54.629 --> 01:06:57.130
So taking glycine can also help with that.

903
01:06:57.490 --> 01:07:01.852
Now, in terms of the person who is having trouble staying asleep,

904
01:07:02.710 --> 01:07:03.250
What about this one?

905
01:07:03.530 --> 01:07:06.472
You don't talk about the old ashwagandha ganda.

906
01:07:06.692 --> 01:07:07.453
Oh, yeah.

907
01:07:07.833 --> 01:07:08.773
Ashwagandha is great.

908
01:07:09.094 --> 01:07:09.334
Okay.

909
01:07:09.774 --> 01:07:13.236
Ashwagandha is going to help you with stress.

910
01:07:14.076 --> 01:07:16.798
And you've got here ashwagandha rhodiola.

911
01:07:16.878 --> 01:07:18.459
So what they both are.

912
01:07:18.859 --> 01:07:20.140
They are adaptogens.

913
01:07:21.141 --> 01:07:27.705
And basically an adaptogen is great because it goes in and it adapts to what is happening in your body.

914
01:07:27.725 --> 01:07:30.447
So let's just say you have elevated cortisol.

915
01:07:30.767 --> 01:07:38.572
And this tends to happen during different cycles, mainly during the daytime when we wake up where cortisol levels are at its peak.

916
01:07:39.093 --> 01:07:40.714
But it can also happen at night.

917
01:07:41.134 --> 01:07:47.238
Having this can actually stabilize that cortisol because it can go in and combine to cortisol and bring it down.

918
01:07:47.598 --> 01:07:52.503
likely if something is not elevated and it's low, it can bring it up.

919
01:07:52.823 --> 01:07:53.564
So it's really good.

920
01:07:53.604 --> 01:07:54.465
It's an adaptogen.

921
01:07:54.645 --> 01:08:00.591
And studies show that you can actually take this three times a day and you won't feel fatigued.

922
01:08:01.091 --> 01:08:06.677
It doesn't disrupt anything and it pairs really well with caffeine, for example, so does theanine.

923
01:08:07.057 --> 01:08:11.682
So this is actually a really great adjunct to your supplement stack.

924
01:08:12.495 --> 01:08:18.098
And you really talk about how you need to sort of warm up to warm down or warm up to go to sleep.

925
01:08:18.238 --> 01:08:18.559
Oh, yeah.

926
01:08:18.739 --> 01:08:25.043
Starting at like 7 p.m. Yeah, starting at like 8 p.m. And that's in line with circadian rhythm and circadian biology.

927
01:08:25.523 --> 01:08:29.765
You want to try and when it comes to sleep and your circadian rhythm –

928
01:08:30.846 --> 01:08:33.389
You kind of want to mimic the sun and mother nature.

929
01:08:33.949 --> 01:08:35.631
And when does the sun start to go down?

930
01:08:35.891 --> 01:08:39.835
It starts to go down at around 8 p.m., depending on where you are in the world.

931
01:08:40.756 --> 01:08:49.003
And when this happens, we also get the natural release of, I love that you're taking that, by the way, you must be stressed right now.

932
01:08:49.664 --> 01:08:52.346
You get the natural release of melatonin.

933
01:08:53.027 --> 01:08:56.811
So melatonin is that sleepy hormone that gets released in response to darkness.

934
01:08:57.111 --> 01:09:02.816
This may also be another reason why somebody is having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.

935
01:09:03.376 --> 01:09:05.198
So we want to get the natural release of that.

936
01:09:05.258 --> 01:09:11.764
So these biohacks that occur right now, sleeping with our red light mask on, dimming the lights, look.

937
01:09:12.024 --> 01:09:13.186
Dimming the lights is great.

938
01:09:13.926 --> 01:09:21.154
I've actually replaced all of my light bulbs at home with, in my bedroom as well, with red light bulbs.

939
01:09:21.495 --> 01:09:25.118
So I'm getting rid of the blue light, the junk light.

940
01:09:25.419 --> 01:09:28.602
I'm replacing it with red light to help downregulate the nervous system.

941
01:09:29.483 --> 01:09:33.384
Yes, I do wear blue light blocking goggles or glasses, I should say.

942
01:09:33.764 --> 01:09:38.325
Do I think that they're providing an immediate and huge benefit?

943
01:09:38.445 --> 01:09:42.766
I don't know, but they could have a minor benefit there.

944
01:09:43.186 --> 01:09:50.367
So warming down involves doing these things that are going to help you downregulate your nervous system so you can fall asleep faster.

945
01:09:51.728 --> 01:09:53.868
Sticking on supplements for a second.

946
01:09:55.759 --> 01:09:56.521
Omega-3.

947
01:09:57.062 --> 01:09:57.783
Yes.

948
01:09:57.983 --> 01:09:58.805
I've got some Omega-3 here.

949
01:09:58.845 --> 01:10:00.087
I've only got two of them here.

950
01:10:01.270 --> 01:10:07.441
But when I brought both of them out, you said that I've got to be quite careful about what brand I buy, but also something about temperature.

951
01:10:07.863 --> 01:10:10.986
So by far out of all of the supplements, omega-3 is probably the only one that you have to make sure that you look at the supplement label for.

952
01:10:11.006 --> 01:10:27.083
There was this study that was done that showed that around 95% of the supplements were used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be used to be

953
01:10:27.223 --> 01:10:37.128
of the most popular omega-3 supplements in the US, and there was about 85 of them that were tested, exceeded the normal oxidation level.

954
01:10:37.528 --> 01:10:47.872
Meaning that these pills, because they're omega-3 fatty acids, they come from fish oil, they are oil, they can become rancid and oxidized.

955
01:10:48.153 --> 01:10:52.254
And they usually do this when they're in a heated environment.

956
01:10:52.274 --> 01:10:53.295
Here are the rules of thumbs.

957
01:10:54.016 --> 01:10:59.426
One, you want to look for a manufacturer that is highly credible and that is certified.

958
01:11:00.768 --> 01:11:01.269
Certified?

959
01:11:01.555 --> 01:11:01.755
Yeah.

960
01:11:02.216 --> 01:11:03.877
So NSF certified.

961
01:11:03.957 --> 01:11:10.742
So it's an external governing board that certifies them on, you know, everything, heavy metals.

962
01:11:10.762 --> 01:11:17.208
They make sure that the oxidation levels are met and they make sure that, you know, what's in the capsule is actually in the capsule.

963
01:11:17.528 --> 01:11:18.909
That's another thing that is scary.

964
01:11:18.929 --> 01:11:21.631
The supplement industry is highly unregulated.

965
01:11:22.192 --> 01:11:25.735
And I treat my omega-3s the same way I treat my olive oil.

966
01:11:26.475 --> 01:11:30.997
You want to get oil that is sourced in the area that you are.

967
01:11:31.057 --> 01:11:32.378
We're in California right now.

968
01:11:32.418 --> 01:11:36.800
So you might want to find an Omega-3 that is sourced in California.

969
01:11:37.000 --> 01:11:37.920
Do I want to put it in the fridge?

970
01:11:38.080 --> 01:11:39.881
You want to put it in the fridge the moment that you get it.

971
01:11:40.161 --> 01:11:40.421
Really?

972
01:11:40.521 --> 01:11:40.762
Yeah.

973
01:11:40.842 --> 01:11:41.962
Why does nobody talk about that?

974
01:11:42.302 --> 01:11:42.842
I'm not sure.

975
01:11:43.183 --> 01:11:45.824
But it's just the same as olive oil.

976
01:11:46.204 --> 01:11:50.866
You don't want the olive oil to become rancid, so you don't leave it near the stove.

977
01:11:50.886 --> 01:11:53.167
You want to put it in a cupboard away from the stove.

978
01:11:54.108 --> 01:11:54.928
And these are good for the brain?

979
01:11:55.892 --> 01:12:00.934
Omega-3 is by far one of the most potent stimulus that you could have for the brain.

980
01:12:00.954 --> 01:12:03.756
They help with cell membrane fluidity.

981
01:12:03.816 --> 01:12:08.338
So where your cells meet, neuron to neuron, they create something called a synapse.

982
01:12:08.418 --> 01:12:14.060
And in order for that to occur, we have a massive influx of all of these neurotransmitters.

983
01:12:14.801 --> 01:12:22.204
Dopamine, serotonin, we've also got calcium and potassium, and these help our brain cells communicate, okay?

984
01:12:22.963 --> 01:12:31.371
We want to make sure that our membranes, the cell membranes, are fluid and they glide in order to help with that synaptic transmission.

985
01:12:32.092 --> 01:12:41.240
Another thing that they do is they are comparable to an NSAID, an anti-inflammatory virus.

986
01:12:41.654 --> 01:12:42.295
medication.

987
01:12:43.256 --> 01:12:46.760
These have massive anti-inflammatory effects.

988
01:12:46.900 --> 01:12:56.371
In fact, I think that these have the safety profile of an FDA approved drug and there's only benefits from it.

989
01:12:56.451 --> 01:12:57.712
There's no side effects from it.

990
01:12:58.673 --> 01:13:02.958
Not just that, 60% of our brain is made of fat.

991
01:13:04.998 --> 01:13:09.039
70% of that is made of DHA.

992
01:13:09.860 --> 01:13:13.721
And DHA comes from omega-3 fatty acids.

993
01:13:13.741 --> 01:13:21.143
So why do I not want to replace my brain or the fat in my brain with what it's made of?

994
01:13:21.443 --> 01:13:23.784
And that's what you do when you have omega-3 fatty acids.

995
01:13:24.164 --> 01:13:38.817
In fact, there's been several trials to show that omega-3 fatty acids are most beneficial and most effective for mild cognitive impairment patients, people who have the APOE4 gene.

996
01:13:40.399 --> 01:13:42.201
and people who have got Alzheimer's disease.

997
01:13:42.761 --> 01:13:53.390
Because when I told you that we get the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier, those parasites on the blood-brain barrier require DHA.

998
01:13:53.470 --> 01:14:03.379
In fact, there's a transporter on the outside of our brain that allows the DHA to come in and get into the brain.

999
01:14:05.010 --> 01:14:09.492
And I know you're a big fan of vitamin D as well, because there's been some very encouraging studies done there.

1000
01:14:09.512 --> 01:14:11.373
Vitamin D is phenomenal.

1001
01:14:11.393 --> 01:14:21.158
We have vitamin D receptors all over our brain, brainstem, and they're abundantly found in the hippocampus and the memory centers of our brain.

1002
01:14:21.918 --> 01:14:23.559
And there was actually a study done

1003
01:14:25.600 --> 01:14:27.821
And centenarians in China.

1004
01:14:28.141 --> 01:14:28.741
Centenarians.

1005
01:14:28.841 --> 01:14:31.542
Yeah, those who live to 100, but it was done in women.

1006
01:14:32.222 --> 01:14:44.066
And they showed that the women who preserved their cognitive functions and who didn't get Alzheimer's disease had high levels of vitamin D. So they weren't vitamin D deficient.

1007
01:14:44.767 --> 01:14:49.828
In fact, being vitamin D deficient can increase your risk of all-cause dementia by 40%.

1008
01:14:51.567 --> 01:15:03.438
Likely, having a high level of vitamin D, which is around 60 nanograms per deciliter, can lower your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease by around 80%.

1009
01:15:04.499 --> 01:15:07.622
And then we have this white powder in front of me.

1010
01:15:09.706 --> 01:15:10.767
You've got a big smile on your face.

1011
01:15:11.688 --> 01:15:18.413
I do because there is just so much benefit to this, depending on which brand you've bought, of course.

1012
01:15:18.893 --> 01:15:23.117
But I can't say enough about creatine.

1013
01:15:23.617 --> 01:15:25.178
I have my parents on creatine.

1014
01:15:25.198 --> 01:15:27.160
They're 71 years old.

1015
01:15:27.180 --> 01:15:28.941
I've got my dad on high dose creatine.

1016
01:15:28.962 --> 01:15:31.163
I've got my mother on low dose creatine.

1017
01:15:31.824 --> 01:15:34.366
It's the most widely studied supplement on the market.

1018
01:15:35.086 --> 01:15:36.207
I've never seen you this excited.

1019
01:15:36.347 --> 01:15:49.073
I'm so excited because I think that this is a really cheap and effective way to get everything you want from both your physiology, an upgrade on your physiology and your neurophysiology.

1020
01:15:50.153 --> 01:15:57.617
So let's actually talk about creatine because I know it gets a lot of airtime, but women and men are still scared of it.

1021
01:15:57.998 --> 01:15:59.498
And they're scared of it for two reasons.

1022
01:16:00.179 --> 01:16:02.380
One, they're scared it's going to cause kidney damage.

1023
01:16:02.800 --> 01:16:05.642
And two, it's they're scared their hair is going to fall out.

1024
01:16:05.862 --> 01:16:08.644
And I'm going to address both of those fears.

1025
01:16:08.924 --> 01:16:10.645
But first, let's talk about what it is.

1026
01:16:11.225 --> 01:16:15.988
So creatine is a naturally occurring molecule.

1027
01:16:16.449 --> 01:16:19.271
We produce around two to three grams of creatine per day.

1028
01:16:19.291 --> 01:16:22.793
It gets secreted from a bit from the brain, but a lot from the liver.

1029
01:16:23.614 --> 01:16:26.976
And two to three grams a day is great, but it's not enough.

1030
01:16:27.156 --> 01:16:28.557
So we have to supplement with it.

1031
01:16:29.158 --> 01:16:34.181
And all through the 90s and all through the 2000s, people were supplementing with five grams a day.

1032
01:16:34.221 --> 01:16:35.282
That is this scoop here.

1033
01:16:35.702 --> 01:16:37.144
Five grams of creatine per day.

1034
01:16:38.084 --> 01:16:47.092
Now that we're getting more rigorous with our brain health studies, we have found that creatine has enormous benefits for the brain.

1035
01:16:47.512 --> 01:16:48.533
But here's the problem.

1036
01:16:49.354 --> 01:16:52.977
When you have five grams of creatine, you're saturating the muscles.

1037
01:16:53.497 --> 01:16:59.723
Okay, remember, the muscles are so hungry, so they get first dibs and they take up all of that creatine.

1038
01:17:00.123 --> 01:17:01.524
So then there's none left for the brain.

1039
01:17:02.365 --> 01:17:06.590
We also lose a bit of the bioavailability when the creatine goes into the brain.

1040
01:17:06.630 --> 01:17:07.952
It crosses the blood-brain barrier.

1041
01:17:08.413 --> 01:17:11.116
But when it goes into the brain, we lose some of it.

1042
01:17:11.216 --> 01:17:14.941
So we have to supplement with more than five grams.

1043
01:17:15.742 --> 01:17:19.507
And one of the studies that changed my thinking came out last year.

1044
01:17:19.527 --> 01:17:21.209
It was the first ever pilot study.

1045
01:17:21.849 --> 01:17:23.851
done on Alzheimer's disease patients.

1046
01:17:23.871 --> 01:17:27.695
You're talking about patients whose brains are under attack.

1047
01:17:28.015 --> 01:17:30.137
They're in an energetic crisis.

1048
01:17:30.738 --> 01:17:33.240
They cannot produce energy effectively.

1049
01:17:33.380 --> 01:17:35.502
ATP is all skewed.

1050
01:17:35.963 --> 01:17:37.584
Brain glucose metabolism is skewed.

1051
01:17:37.605 --> 01:17:39.386
They don't remember left from right.

1052
01:17:39.406 --> 01:17:40.768
Cognitive functions are declined.

1053
01:17:41.028 --> 01:17:45.272
They put them on at 20 grams of creatine per day.

1054
01:17:45.452 --> 01:17:46.174
Which is how much?

1055
01:17:46.274 --> 01:17:51.144
I mean... That... Well, actually, that is four of this.

1056
01:17:51.305 --> 01:17:52.267
So you want to go one...

1057
01:17:53.561 --> 01:18:01.646
And I don't know if they did this all at once, that's two, or if they did it like me over four separate intervals throughout the day.

1058
01:18:01.686 --> 01:18:02.127
There we go.

1059
01:18:02.147 --> 01:18:03.447
That's a lot of crazy.

1060
01:18:03.467 --> 01:18:09.011
That's a lot, which is why you probably want to have this skewed throughout the day, which is what I did.

1061
01:18:09.051 --> 01:18:10.132
I had 20 grams today.

1062
01:18:10.152 --> 01:18:15.835
I had five grams in the morning, five mid-morning, and then I think I had 10 all at once before I got here.

1063
01:18:17.016 --> 01:18:19.098
So that is a lot for all at once.

1064
01:18:19.719 --> 01:18:32.510
And what they found was that these patients not only preserved their cognitive functions, but they had more energy and they were able to exercise more.

1065
01:18:33.330 --> 01:18:35.793
And it blew my mind that...

1066
01:18:36.859 --> 01:18:38.941
It does not matter how old you are.

1067
01:18:39.742 --> 01:18:41.664
It doesn't discriminate based on gender.

1068
01:18:42.064 --> 01:18:44.487
Creatine doesn't discriminate based on age.

1069
01:18:44.787 --> 01:18:46.929
It doesn't discriminate based on weight.

1070
01:18:47.309 --> 01:18:53.636
It doesn't discriminate based on pathology or disease states or ethnicity.

1071
01:18:54.949 --> 01:18:55.729
It is just there.

1072
01:18:55.910 --> 01:18:57.010
It is there to support you.

1073
01:18:57.090 --> 01:18:59.111
It's the most widely studied supplement on the market.

1074
01:18:59.271 --> 01:18:59.732
What is it doing?

1075
01:18:59.752 --> 01:19:01.593
And it's all risk.

1076
01:19:01.633 --> 01:19:02.413
It's all reward.

1077
01:19:02.473 --> 01:19:03.394
There is no risk.

1078
01:19:04.294 --> 01:19:06.035
It's helping with cell energy metabolism.

1079
01:19:06.055 --> 01:19:11.398
So basically it's helping ATP create energy.

1080
01:19:13.036 --> 01:19:16.158
So if you're someone that is low energy, you should definitely be having creatine.

1081
01:19:16.378 --> 01:19:17.339
I don't care who you are.

1082
01:19:17.359 --> 01:19:18.820
You should definitely be having creatine.

1083
01:19:18.920 --> 01:19:20.201
People with brain fog.

1084
01:19:20.281 --> 01:19:21.642
Yeah, people with brain fog.

1085
01:19:22.182 --> 01:19:29.508
You know, I think one of the greatest benefits are men who are in football, football players,

1086
01:19:30.328 --> 01:19:33.671
You can actually, it's actually a protective molecule.

1087
01:19:33.691 --> 01:19:44.121
So what studies have shown is that at high doses of creatine, around 30 grams a day, it can protect you against insults.

1088
01:19:44.602 --> 01:19:47.605
Insults meaning you take a hit to the head like a concussion.

1089
01:19:48.706 --> 01:19:48.846
Hmm.

1090
01:19:49.472 --> 01:19:51.395
It can protect your brain against a concussion.

1091
01:19:51.435 --> 01:19:53.999
It can protect your brain against a stroke.

1092
01:19:54.019 --> 01:19:56.502
It can protect your brain from stress.

1093
01:19:56.562 --> 01:20:00.027
The best thing about creatine is that it works in the background of stress.

1094
01:20:00.628 --> 01:20:04.734
I think that's where you'll get most of the benefits from.

1095
01:20:05.810 --> 01:20:09.354
After hearing so much about creatine on this podcast, I started recommending it to all the people in my life.

1096
01:20:09.895 --> 01:20:20.426
There's one particular person, actually, that's probably out there in my house at the moment who had gone through cancer treatments and had survived cancer treatments and...

1097
01:20:21.207 --> 01:20:24.268
in their words, wasn't the same on the other side of the cancer treatments.

1098
01:20:24.748 --> 01:20:38.973
And I talked to her about creatine and she said to me the other day, she, I think the exact quote was, I feel like I've got my life back because she's been taking creatine every single day for the last, I'd say five months or so.

1099
01:20:39.777 --> 01:20:49.982
It's funny you said that because just recently in the last two weeks, this study was done to show the anti-cancer effects of creatine.

1100
01:20:50.583 --> 01:20:55.786
And if my memory serves clear, they dosed it at 0.36 grams.

1101
01:21:00.448 --> 01:21:01.769
per kilogram of body weight.

1102
01:21:02.109 --> 01:21:12.633
So if you are a 70 kilo person, if my mathematics is correct, you're looking at around 25 grams of creatine per day that can have the effects, the anti-cancer effects.

1103
01:21:13.304 --> 01:21:16.307
So the study you're referring to, I'll put up on the screen as well for anyone that wants to see it.

1104
01:21:16.447 --> 01:21:25.995
It's the NAN's 2025 study, which was a major study involving over 25,000 adults, found a linear negative association between dietary creatine and cancer prevalence.

1105
01:21:26.656 --> 01:21:35.364
For every standard deviation increase in dietary creatine intake, the risk of having cancer decreased by roughly 5% to 18%, depending on the demographic.

1106
01:21:36.385 --> 01:21:37.846
That is wild.

1107
01:21:38.897 --> 01:21:49.831
This protective association was strongest in adults over the age of 50, suggesting that as we age, maintaining higher creatine levels might be more critical for cellular health and immune surveillance.

1108
01:21:50.933 --> 01:21:51.173
Hmm.

1109
01:21:51.418 --> 01:21:57.203
Well, if you think about life and think about energy, we need energy to survive.

1110
01:21:57.844 --> 01:22:00.546
We need energy to fight off infections.

1111
01:22:00.826 --> 01:22:06.772
We need energy to fight off stress, preserve our normal bodily functions.

1112
01:22:06.832 --> 01:22:12.236
So when we are at the mercy of a low energy crisis, we can't fight off

1113
01:22:12.977 --> 01:22:13.517
tumor cells.

1114
01:22:13.897 --> 01:22:17.879
We can't fight off these debilitating diseases.

1115
01:22:17.919 --> 01:22:27.602
So it actually makes sense that with more energy and with more functional energy, meaning that if our cells can function better, it makes sense that you can see a reduction in cancer incidence.

1116
01:22:28.142 --> 01:22:31.143
Likely you can see a reduction in Alzheimer's disease incidence.

1117
01:22:31.703 --> 01:22:35.625
When I said that creatine works in the background of stress,

1118
01:22:44.220 --> 01:22:47.102
basically creatine your way out of sleep deprivation.

1119
01:22:47.162 --> 01:23:05.852
So if you've had a long night and you're sleep deprived, maybe you slept four, five, six hours, you're sleep deprived, you can take high dose creatine in the form of around 15 to 20 grams a day, and you can reverse the negative effects associated with that sleep deprivation.

1120
01:23:06.753 --> 01:23:08.834
Does it matter what time you take the creatine?

1121
01:23:09.475 --> 01:23:11.696
It doesn't matter what time you take the creatine.

1122
01:23:11.896 --> 01:23:13.957
It doesn't degrade in hot water.

1123
01:23:15.557 --> 01:23:17.818
You can take it anytime throughout the day.

1124
01:23:18.899 --> 01:23:24.160
And it doesn't matter whether you're taking it right before exercise, during exercise, after exercise.

1125
01:23:24.321 --> 01:23:25.501
It works phenomenally.

1126
01:23:25.941 --> 01:23:32.946
Some people, researchers are now wondering if taking it at night before bed helps with sleep performance.

1127
01:23:33.047 --> 01:23:35.008
And I think that that's a really exciting area.

1128
01:23:35.508 --> 01:23:42.634
But the one thing that I want to tell everybody, because a lot of people are scared of this biomarker called creatinine.

1129
01:23:43.254 --> 01:23:45.835
meaning that there's- Oh, my doctor said that to me.

1130
01:23:46.075 --> 01:23:50.517
Yeah, so meaning that you've got a high creatinine level.

1131
01:23:50.997 --> 01:23:58.660
And this is a marker of, it's one marker of kidney function, but this is where I find it really invaluable.

1132
01:23:58.940 --> 01:24:03.042
And this is where a lot of the nonsense comes around on Instagram and social media.

1133
01:24:03.522 --> 01:24:08.904
A lot of people say, well, I had so much creatine that my doctor told me to get off it because my creatinine levels were high.

1134
01:24:08.944 --> 01:24:11.485
But creatinine levels are high during times of stress.

1135
01:24:11.905 --> 01:24:22.427
during times of intense physical activity, and also people who have a lot of muscle mass, higher muscle mass, that's you, have higher creatinine levels.

1136
01:24:22.827 --> 01:24:38.750
What you want to test, a greater marker of kidney function and GFR, is cystatin C. So all you have to ask, it's really easy, ask your doctor, could I please get cystatin C in my blood work?

1137
01:24:39.230 --> 01:24:41.010
And if that is elevated,

1138
01:24:41.528 --> 01:24:47.050
and not within normal range, then maybe get off creatine.

1139
01:24:47.430 --> 01:24:54.193
But right now, I cannot see any reason as to not have creatine every single day.

1140
01:24:54.253 --> 01:25:00.615
I think every single person, no matter what age you are, everybody should be supplementing with creatine.

1141
01:25:01.195 --> 01:25:06.737
Now, there was this recent study that came out on menopausal women and...

1142
01:25:07.077 --> 01:25:09.358
And it was a really small study.

1143
01:25:09.638 --> 01:25:11.299
It was a randomized control trial.

1144
01:25:12.039 --> 01:25:16.561
And they split women into four groups.

1145
01:25:16.641 --> 01:25:18.562
And these were perimenopausal women.

1146
01:25:19.062 --> 01:25:23.484
They split them into low-dose creatine, where I think they were having 750 milligrams a day.

1147
01:25:25.805 --> 01:25:29.546
medium dose, which was around 1.5 grams a day.

1148
01:25:30.486 --> 01:25:38.668
Then they had them supplement with a range of both creatine monohydrate and creatine hydrochloride.

1149
01:25:38.768 --> 01:25:41.568
This was a hydrochloride creatine study.

1150
01:25:41.748 --> 01:25:43.169
And then there was a placebo group.

1151
01:25:43.629 --> 01:25:46.749
What they found was a very small study, very small group.

1152
01:25:47.229 --> 01:25:49.850
What they found was that those in the medium dose,

1153
01:25:50.590 --> 01:25:58.273
range having the 1.5 had substantial increases in their mood and their cognitive functions.

1154
01:25:58.293 --> 01:26:09.698
So creatine is now being explored in females across the lifespan as it relates to perimenopause, pregnancy, menopause, and dementia.

1155
01:26:10.339 --> 01:26:11.299
So it's phenomenal.

1156
01:26:14.553 --> 01:26:19.257
The only thing I want to point out, what you want to look for when it comes to creatine are two things.

1157
01:26:19.777 --> 01:26:25.282
When it comes to manufacturing standards, you want to look, A, has it been NSF certified?

1158
01:26:26.243 --> 01:26:30.486
And B, you want to look for, is it CreaPure?

1159
01:26:30.947 --> 01:26:33.148
And that's the gold standard of creatine.

1160
01:26:33.389 --> 01:26:34.990
And it comes from Germany.

1161
01:26:35.671 --> 01:26:39.414
And a lot, so the one that you've got there, I can tell it's not CreaPure.

1162
01:26:39.794 --> 01:26:40.234
Excuse me.

1163
01:26:40.394 --> 01:26:41.375
I know my creatine.

1164
01:26:41.636 --> 01:26:43.297
How can you tell what it is by looking at it?

1165
01:26:43.577 --> 01:26:53.446
I can just tell, I bet you a million dollars that it is the brand that I think it is because it's got this powdered icing sugar substance.

1166
01:26:54.046 --> 01:26:58.450
If it was pure, gold standard Crea Pure, it would be gritty.

1167
01:26:59.271 --> 01:27:07.393
The reason why it's like this is because a lot of manufacturers want to add these different agents in there in order for it to mix well.

1168
01:27:07.713 --> 01:27:09.973
This probably mixes really well.

1169
01:27:10.353 --> 01:27:16.035
A lot of people also complain of feeling GI distress when they take it.

1170
01:27:16.455 --> 01:27:20.056
And all I have to say is that's not a reason to stop taking it.

1171
01:27:20.336 --> 01:27:26.157
Maybe take two grams at a time, maybe take three grams at a time, but don't stop taking it.

1172
01:27:26.777 --> 01:27:30.619
What do you test for with your own health and how frequently do you test?

1173
01:27:31.139 --> 01:27:33.099
I test every three to four months.

1174
01:27:33.320 --> 01:27:33.860
What do you test?

1175
01:27:34.300 --> 01:27:35.520
Oh, I do everything.

1176
01:27:35.620 --> 01:27:35.941
Really?

1177
01:27:36.461 --> 01:27:43.844
Oh, I just did lab work December 15th, the day before my birthday.

1178
01:27:43.884 --> 01:27:45.164
I do it, you know, around that age.

1179
01:27:45.404 --> 01:27:47.965
But every year, funnily enough, I test my biological age.

1180
01:27:48.425 --> 01:27:49.346
What is your biological age?

1181
01:27:49.486 --> 01:27:50.326
It came back as 22.

1182
01:27:50.366 --> 01:27:51.747
Fucking hell.

1183
01:27:52.207 --> 01:27:55.508
What's the most important test they don't typically do that you think everybody should be doing?

1184
01:27:56.356 --> 01:28:06.116
Lipoprotein little a raises your risk of having a heart-related event or raises your risk of getting cardiovascular disease, but it's hereditary.

1185
01:28:06.457 --> 01:28:07.118
And then for dementia?

1186
01:28:07.219 --> 01:28:07.579
Dementia.

1187
01:28:08.150 --> 01:28:10.472
This is a really exciting part, at least in the US.

1188
01:28:10.532 --> 01:28:24.043
We now have a predictable way of picking up on mild cognitive impairment and picking up on these Alzheimer's hallmarks, tau protein, P-tau 217, it's called on blood work, and amyloid beta.

1189
01:28:24.383 --> 01:28:29.528
So we can now pick up on this with 90% accuracy of a PET scan.

1190
01:28:30.288 --> 01:28:31.229
What are those cards over there?

1191
01:28:33.231 --> 01:28:35.713
These are here to test your processing speed.

1192
01:28:36.675 --> 01:28:36.895
Pink.

1193
01:28:37.855 --> 01:28:38.056
So.

1194
01:28:38.296 --> 01:28:38.956
It says pink on it.

1195
01:28:39.116 --> 01:28:39.336
Yeah.

1196
01:28:39.576 --> 01:28:41.897
So this is actually a great measure of brain function.

1197
01:28:41.997 --> 01:28:46.619
Your brain processes visual information 15 times faster than written words.

1198
01:28:46.819 --> 01:28:49.700
And so this is going to test your brain function.

1199
01:28:49.720 --> 01:28:50.240
Okay.

1200
01:28:50.740 --> 01:28:52.781
So what I want you to do is you're going to see the color.

1201
01:28:53.401 --> 01:28:55.702
I want you to actually say the color of the card, not the word.

1202
01:28:55.962 --> 01:28:56.203
Okay.

1203
01:28:56.403 --> 01:28:57.603
Let me just program my brain.

1204
01:28:58.603 --> 01:29:00.564
Say the color, not the word.

1205
01:29:01.164 --> 01:29:01.545
Are you ready?

1206
01:29:02.245 --> 01:29:02.525
Green.

1207
01:29:03.853 --> 01:29:18.270
orange, yellow, green, orange, green, orange, yellow, pink, orange, green.

1208
01:29:18.983 --> 01:29:19.963
Now let's do the reverse.

1209
01:29:20.044 --> 01:29:20.944
I want you to say the words.

1210
01:29:21.224 --> 01:29:22.245
Wait, let me just break away.

1211
01:29:23.785 --> 01:29:24.005
Okay.

1212
01:29:25.086 --> 01:29:25.346
Yellow.

1213
01:29:26.387 --> 01:29:26.627
Blue.

1214
01:29:27.387 --> 01:29:27.627
Green.

1215
01:29:28.588 --> 01:29:28.848
Black.

1216
01:29:29.748 --> 01:29:30.108
Purple.

1217
01:29:31.129 --> 01:29:31.409
Brown.

1218
01:29:31.829 --> 01:29:32.710
Okay, so you're good.

1219
01:29:32.890 --> 01:29:33.230
Thank you.

1220
01:29:33.590 --> 01:29:34.230
Let's do it to Jack.

1221
01:29:34.250 --> 01:29:35.531
Jack, you come sit in the chair.

1222
01:29:35.611 --> 01:29:36.511
It's your turn.

1223
01:29:37.452 --> 01:29:40.413
You caught him off guard, and he hasn't got creatine, that's unfair.

1224
01:29:40.473 --> 01:29:41.094
I knew it was coming.

1225
01:29:41.154 --> 01:29:42.454
It's like, I'm behind there.

1226
01:29:42.554 --> 01:29:43.675
It's an unfair advantage.

1227
01:29:46.312 --> 01:29:46.672
Okay, you ready?

1228
01:29:46.692 --> 01:29:47.272
Wait, so what am I doing?

1229
01:29:47.292 --> 01:29:48.113
Just say the color of the card.

1230
01:29:48.133 --> 01:29:49.113
Okay, just the color of the card.

1231
01:29:49.133 --> 01:29:50.254
Yeah, ready?

1232
01:29:50.274 --> 01:29:51.354
Green, orange, pink, yellow, yellow, orange, pink.

1233
01:29:51.374 --> 01:29:51.955
Now, let's roll reverse.

1234
01:29:51.975 --> 01:29:53.115
I want you to say what's on the card itself.

1235
01:29:53.135 --> 01:29:54.296
So just read it.

1236
01:29:54.316 --> 01:30:14.905
Okay, brown, purple, pink, green, black, yellow, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red

1237
01:30:15.265 --> 01:30:15.546
Okay.

1238
01:30:16.207 --> 01:30:17.909
So now we're going to test it even more.

1239
01:30:17.949 --> 01:30:18.931
That was a starting one.

1240
01:30:19.311 --> 01:30:20.012
Not too bad.

1241
01:30:20.052 --> 01:30:20.974
That was not too bad.

1242
01:30:21.595 --> 01:30:26.142
So I want you, this actually involves us standing up and using a tennis ball.

1243
01:30:26.242 --> 01:30:30.288
So we're going to train your visual cortex, which sits at the back here in the occipital lobe.

1244
01:30:30.528 --> 01:30:35.051
We're going to train your processing speed, your reaction time, your hand-eye coordinations.

1245
01:30:35.112 --> 01:30:42.097
One of the best exercises that you can do, physical exercises, is actually hand-eye coordination drills, tennis, racket sports.

1246
01:30:42.437 --> 01:30:51.263
But I'm going to show you what five minutes a day can do for your cognitive reserve and your brain performance, just using a tennis ball and an eye patch.

1247
01:30:51.904 --> 01:30:52.784
Okay.

1248
01:30:53.245 --> 01:30:57.488
So, first things first.

1249
01:30:58.472 --> 01:30:59.532
I'm gonna give you this tennis ball.

1250
01:31:00.012 --> 01:31:04.814
And for the whole time, I want you to throw the ball with an overhand grip.

1251
01:31:05.054 --> 01:31:05.574
Oh, like this?

1252
01:31:05.614 --> 01:31:05.794
Yep.

1253
01:31:06.654 --> 01:31:06.874
Okay.

1254
01:31:07.074 --> 01:31:09.895
So I want you to just throw it with the right arm and catch with the right arm.

1255
01:31:10.955 --> 01:31:12.115
Over, I mean, what's this?

1256
01:31:12.135 --> 01:31:12.836
That is underarm.

1257
01:31:13.276 --> 01:31:14.076
I'm just checking the wall.

1258
01:31:14.596 --> 01:31:14.856
Okay.

1259
01:31:15.916 --> 01:31:16.116
Okay.

1260
01:31:16.397 --> 01:31:18.457
So you might wanna move back where the chair is.

1261
01:31:18.737 --> 01:31:19.337
Okay, no, you would.

1262
01:31:20.618 --> 01:31:21.618
Cut that, cut that out.

1263
01:31:25.951 --> 01:31:26.192
Good.

1264
01:31:26.472 --> 01:31:30.480
So now throw with the right and catch with the left and alternate.

1265
01:31:31.342 --> 01:31:31.522
Yep.

1266
01:31:32.243 --> 01:31:32.544
Okay.

1267
01:31:37.673 --> 01:31:38.093
You've got it.

1268
01:31:38.133 --> 01:31:42.656
So what we're doing, we're engaging almost all the executive functions now.

1269
01:31:42.676 --> 01:31:43.616
You've got hand.

1270
01:31:43.676 --> 01:31:45.337
You should be able to do this for a minute.

1271
01:31:45.618 --> 01:31:45.918
Okay.

1272
01:31:46.058 --> 01:31:46.238
Okay.

1273
01:31:46.478 --> 01:31:47.699
Now we're going to make it even harder.

1274
01:31:47.739 --> 01:31:48.819
It's like placing weights on you.

1275
01:31:48.839 --> 01:31:50.240
Go on, you do it as well.

1276
01:31:50.260 --> 01:31:51.801
Well, I'm not going to do the one with the eyepatch.

1277
01:31:51.981 --> 01:31:52.682
I'll do the next one.

1278
01:31:53.082 --> 01:31:53.342
Okay.

1279
01:31:53.602 --> 01:32:00.266
So basically what you want to do, and if you do it with a black ball, it's actually even better.

1280
01:32:02.300 --> 01:32:05.443
So now we're going to make it a bit hard and a bit neurally demanding.

1281
01:32:05.463 --> 01:32:09.886
We're going to put an eye patch on you, which is really going to block out like 50% of the vision.

1282
01:32:10.667 --> 01:32:11.507
Okay.

1283
01:32:11.667 --> 01:32:12.088
Which eye?

1284
01:32:12.628 --> 01:32:12.948
Any eye.

1285
01:32:13.569 --> 01:32:15.370
Let's do the left one.

1286
01:32:15.390 --> 01:32:16.591
Let's see how many you can do.

1287
01:32:16.671 --> 01:32:18.833
I think we counted around eight before.

1288
01:32:18.973 --> 01:32:20.074
A pirate.

1289
01:32:20.094 --> 01:32:20.434
What?

1290
01:32:21.715 --> 01:32:24.217
Wait, this is not flattering.

1291
01:32:25.178 --> 01:32:27.200
Okay, cool.

1292
01:32:27.440 --> 01:32:27.760
Let's go.

1293
01:32:28.201 --> 01:32:29.061
Oh, that's so different.

1294
01:32:29.081 --> 01:32:29.281
Yeah.

1295
01:32:29.301 --> 01:32:29.402
Okay.

1296
01:32:30.127 --> 01:32:32.229
Wow, this feels significantly harder.

1297
01:32:32.389 --> 01:32:34.310
I know, let's go.

1298
01:32:34.330 --> 01:32:35.952
This feels like really hard, let me just double check.

1299
01:32:36.292 --> 01:32:36.792
Fucking hell.

1300
01:32:38.494 --> 01:32:40.375
That's really, that's so hard.

1301
01:32:42.417 --> 01:32:42.677
This is.

1302
01:32:42.697 --> 01:32:45.219
There you go, you've got it.

1303
01:32:45.419 --> 01:32:45.939
I'm joking.

1304
01:32:46.860 --> 01:32:49.702
Okay, let's alternate now.

1305
01:32:49.922 --> 01:32:50.743
Left hand, right hand.

1306
01:32:52.104 --> 01:32:53.365
Left hand, right hand, like this.

1307
01:32:53.565 --> 01:32:53.725
Yeah.

1308
01:32:56.448 --> 01:33:01.210
You're training your visual system to work under load and under stress.

1309
01:33:01.751 --> 01:33:04.792
So when you do this, I'm interrupting you.

1310
01:33:05.052 --> 01:33:05.652
No, it's okay.

1311
01:33:07.393 --> 01:33:07.773
You got it.

1312
01:33:07.793 --> 01:33:08.114
You got it.

1313
01:33:08.134 --> 01:33:08.474
You got it.

1314
01:33:09.374 --> 01:33:09.975
Good, good, good.

1315
01:33:10.415 --> 01:33:15.037
And then to even make it even harder, okay, stand on your right foot.

1316
01:33:15.677 --> 01:33:15.797
Yeah.

1317
01:33:15.817 --> 01:33:16.518
And put your other foot.

1318
01:33:16.598 --> 01:33:17.398
There you go.

1319
01:33:17.478 --> 01:33:17.818
On one leg.

1320
01:33:17.878 --> 01:33:18.058
Yep.

1321
01:33:18.158 --> 01:33:21.240
Standing on one leg is now engaging the cerebellum.

1322
01:33:22.726 --> 01:33:24.047
We're getting spatial awareness.

1323
01:33:24.507 --> 01:33:24.907
Let's go.

1324
01:33:25.227 --> 01:33:25.648
Posture.

1325
01:33:25.668 --> 01:33:26.368
Left, right, left, right?

1326
01:33:26.388 --> 01:33:26.548
Yep.

1327
01:33:28.569 --> 01:33:29.290
Oh my gosh.

1328
01:33:34.693 --> 01:33:35.113
You got it.

1329
01:33:35.634 --> 01:33:36.514
I want to see you do it.

1330
01:33:37.755 --> 01:33:38.775
With the eye patch on?

1331
01:33:38.955 --> 01:33:39.156
Yeah.

1332
01:33:39.496 --> 01:33:39.756
Wow.

1333
01:33:42.878 --> 01:33:44.939
I mean, I can bet.

1334
01:33:45.259 --> 01:33:46.540
Great, my eyelashes have gone now.

1335
01:33:47.000 --> 01:33:47.500
It's okay.

1336
01:33:47.581 --> 01:33:48.701
We can AI that out.

1337
01:33:48.941 --> 01:33:49.842
This actually looks great.

1338
01:33:51.083 --> 01:33:51.703
Okay, we're ready?

1339
01:33:54.394 --> 01:33:55.474
Well, I blame my nails.

1340
01:33:56.515 --> 01:33:57.896
I blame my nails, let's do it.

1341
01:34:01.037 --> 01:34:01.337
Okay.

1342
01:34:02.598 --> 01:34:03.138
It's hard.

1343
01:34:03.518 --> 01:34:04.438
It's so hard.

1344
01:34:04.458 --> 01:34:05.459
And so what is this doing?

1345
01:34:05.939 --> 01:34:11.641
This is engaging executive functions, processing speed, hand-eye coordination.

1346
01:34:11.962 --> 01:34:13.502
And you did this with NBA players?

1347
01:34:13.542 --> 01:34:19.785
I did this with NBA players to improve their executive functions, decrease their reaction time.

1348
01:34:20.908 --> 01:34:23.532
And this will change my brain if I do this frequently.

1349
01:34:23.572 --> 01:34:26.696
Not just that, but you're also improving cognitive reserve.

1350
01:34:27.236 --> 01:34:29.880
You're building new connections between the brain cells.

1351
01:34:29.900 --> 01:34:31.822
You're strengthening neural networks.

1352
01:34:32.503 --> 01:34:34.306
And you're doing something incredible.

1353
01:34:36.173 --> 01:34:44.182
You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer.

1354
01:34:44.402 --> 01:34:55.694
And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com.

1355
01:34:57.015 --> 01:34:57.916
as a game changer.

1356
01:34:57.956 --> 01:35:05.944
But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk.

1357
01:35:06.004 --> 01:35:06.945
I had no idea what it was.

1358
01:35:07.446 --> 01:35:10.149
Lily and my team says that this company have been in touch.

1359
01:35:10.289 --> 01:35:13.732
So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history.

1360
01:35:13.772 --> 01:35:20.419
In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer.

1361
01:35:20.759 --> 01:35:24.281
So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com slash Stephen for 30% off.

1362
01:35:24.621 --> 01:35:27.142
You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment.

1363
01:35:27.522 --> 01:35:34.425
And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge.

1364
01:35:35.681 --> 01:35:40.143
If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today.

1365
01:35:40.483 --> 01:35:51.108
And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again.

1366
01:35:51.268 --> 01:35:53.770
We feel deeply connected to each other.

1367
01:35:53.950 --> 01:36:01.113
At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've turned them into these conversation cards.

1368
01:36:01.493 --> 01:36:04.635
And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting.

1369
01:36:04.915 --> 01:36:08.596
And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards.

1370
01:36:08.636 --> 01:36:09.777
This is the brand new edition.

1371
01:36:10.037 --> 01:36:15.899
And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me.

1372
01:36:16.059 --> 01:36:20.861
But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards.

1373
01:36:21.121 --> 01:36:24.342
So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone.

1374
01:36:24.622 --> 01:36:25.883
Head to the link in the description below.

1375
01:36:28.168 --> 01:36:35.611
So doing hard things is what is going to improve brain function over the lifespan.

1376
01:36:36.411 --> 01:36:40.973
Doing hard things tells your brain that you can do hard things.

1377
01:36:41.213 --> 01:36:49.917
Meaning, have you ever heard of this brain area, a little area in the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex?

1378
01:36:50.177 --> 01:36:50.797
Yes, I have.

1379
01:36:51.438 --> 01:36:52.278
What do you know about it?

1380
01:36:53.160 --> 01:36:53.820
I'll let you say it.

1381
01:36:54.100 --> 01:37:05.164
Well, it's shown that it's larger in what we call super ages and people who age really well and who can withhold a lot of cognitive capacity.

1382
01:37:05.944 --> 01:37:08.825
And it's really profound in people who can diet well.

1383
01:37:09.245 --> 01:37:12.746
It gets bigger when we do hard things.

1384
01:37:12.986 --> 01:37:16.227
So when we do really hard things, this area in the brain gets bigger.

1385
01:37:16.287 --> 01:37:17.148
And basically...

1386
01:37:18.168 --> 01:37:22.531
What that is, it's reserve for when life gets hard.

1387
01:37:22.791 --> 01:37:35.598
It means it basically tells your brain that no matter what happens, no matter what event comes my way, I have the ability to go in, welcome it and push through it no matter how hard it's going to be.

1388
01:37:36.833 --> 01:37:43.018
When you give up or when you don't do hard things, this little area doesn't grow.

1389
01:37:43.578 --> 01:37:44.479
It doesn't get bigger.

1390
01:37:45.280 --> 01:37:58.710
So doing these neural activating drills that we just did, going to the gym and pushing well above your threshold and pushing really hard is going to help grow this area of the brain.

1391
01:37:59.051 --> 01:38:01.272
And they call this the willpower muscle.

1392
01:38:01.292 --> 01:38:01.893
The willpower.

1393
01:38:01.913 --> 01:38:09.378
This is why I think that when people go out to set their goals during the year and they say, I'm going to lose 20 pounds.

1394
01:38:09.818 --> 01:38:10.538
I'm going to do this.

1395
01:38:10.578 --> 01:38:12.219
I'm just going to increase my willpower.

1396
01:38:12.320 --> 01:38:14.841
I think it's not willpower.

1397
01:38:14.941 --> 01:38:15.962
It's neurobiology.

1398
01:38:17.020 --> 01:38:23.747
I think it's really important to just spend a little bit of a moment talking about this part of the brain, because when I discovered it, I found it absolutely fascinating.

1399
01:38:23.767 --> 01:38:32.997
And I think it was Andrew Huberman who said either to me or he said publicly that he thinks it's one of the most fascinating or important discoveries of the last century.

1400
01:38:33.017 --> 01:38:33.137
Yeah.

1401
01:38:33.357 --> 01:38:43.581
Of course, when you think about how we're living our lives, we're punishing ourselves for not being able to read a book, for not being able to pay attention.

1402
01:38:43.801 --> 01:38:52.384
How many people are now self-diagnosing themselves with ADHD, low attention spans, and they're blaming it on environment.

1403
01:38:52.404 --> 01:38:59.506
They're blaming it on circumstances when they should be blaming it on neurobiology, and they should be blaming it on their brain state.

1404
01:39:00.106 --> 01:39:01.247
This area of the brain

1405
01:39:02.127 --> 01:39:06.910
If you can push, and this is why these super-agers seem to have... What's a super-ager?

1406
01:39:07.470 --> 01:39:10.232
A super-ager is somebody who is aging well.

1407
01:39:10.272 --> 01:39:15.175
So they're going through life, low cardiovascular disease state.

1408
01:39:15.215 --> 01:39:17.256
They've maintained their cognitive functions.

1409
01:39:17.336 --> 01:39:24.500
They're at the age of 80, 90 with a VO2 max profile of maybe a 50 or 60-year-old.

1410
01:39:24.560 --> 01:39:27.822
So they're aging quite well biologically.

1411
01:39:27.842 --> 01:39:28.843
So...

1412
01:39:29.895 --> 01:39:37.403
These superages have many, many different facets to them, and one of them is a larger mid-singular cortex.

1413
01:39:38.865 --> 01:39:47.194
Conversely, the AMCC, anterior mid-singular cortex, shrinks in people who live sedentary lives or avoid challenges.

1414
01:39:47.695 --> 01:39:51.058
It literally atrophies if you play it safe in life too often.

1415
01:39:52.012 --> 01:39:54.093
Growth only occurs during resistance.

1416
01:39:54.394 --> 01:39:58.156
If you love taking ice baths and you take one, your AMCC doesn't change.

1417
01:39:58.577 --> 01:40:03.460
If you hate the cold but force yourself to do it anyway, the AMCC grows.

1418
01:40:04.020 --> 01:40:08.043
Scientists now view the AMCC as the seat of the will to live.

1419
01:40:08.283 --> 01:40:16.729
Its size and activity level are strong predictors of how long an individual will survive after a major setback in their life, whether it's a health setback or a surgery.

1420
01:40:18.770 --> 01:40:22.052
There's something really philosophical about that as well.

1421
01:40:22.572 --> 01:40:36.420
You know, I don't know if you read Stoicism or anything, but it really dates back to how the Stoics lived their life, especially Marcus Aurelius, with being able to push through hard times.

1422
01:40:36.681 --> 01:40:39.082
Little did they know that it was this little area in the brain.

1423
01:40:40.761 --> 01:40:53.590
Yeah, I think I was telling the story the other day of Roosevelt and what happened in his life as a young man when he came home one day on Valentine's Day and found that his mother and his wife, who had just had his newborn baby, had both died, one upstairs, one downstairs.

1424
01:40:54.190 --> 01:40:56.992
And he went off to the Badlands for two, I think it was two to four years.

1425
01:40:57.652 --> 01:41:09.161
The Badlands in America were just this horrific, natural place where he'd get up at 4am, ride these horses in the freezing cold where the horses would literally die standing still because it was so horrific.

1426
01:41:09.641 --> 01:41:11.423
He did that to two years to deal with the grief.

1427
01:41:11.923 --> 01:41:17.147
But when he came back to New York City after two years in the Badlands, all of his friends said he was just a completely different man.

1428
01:41:17.907 --> 01:41:24.871
And what they now know from a neuroscience perspective is that he didn't just build his muscles, he literally like rewired his brain.

1429
01:41:25.211 --> 01:41:27.332
He went on to become the youngest US president of all time.

1430
01:41:27.372 --> 01:41:30.593
He got shot during a speech and carried on doing the speech.

1431
01:41:31.114 --> 01:41:32.955
He led the charge in various wars.

1432
01:41:32.975 --> 01:41:35.216
He's just this unbelievable, I think he won the Nobel Prize.

1433
01:41:36.176 --> 01:41:42.121
And they point at those two years in the Badlands and say, actually, that forged not just the man, but his brain, his AMCC.

1434
01:41:42.741 --> 01:41:48.385
The studies also show that athletes consistently show much larger AMCC volume.

1435
01:41:49.026 --> 01:42:00.294
And studies show that individuals struggling with obesity often have smaller AMCCs, but it begins to grow the moment they start a successful challenging dietary or exercise interventions.

1436
01:42:00.622 --> 01:42:08.768
It's that word challenging because when you place stimulus upon a system, it adapts and grows.

1437
01:42:09.448 --> 01:42:13.811
And that is neurobiology at its most infinite source.

1438
01:42:14.752 --> 01:42:18.874
And this is why we get the breakdown of these synapses.

1439
01:42:18.914 --> 01:42:25.699
This is why we get into a place of going from 5,000 to 10,000 connections to 2,000 or no connections, these synapses.

1440
01:42:27.480 --> 01:42:32.022
dendritic spines end up breaking down because we don't do the hard thing.

1441
01:42:32.402 --> 01:42:39.124
And I also think being deep rooted in neurobiology, you can see that everything is cause and effect and it's a cycle.

1442
01:42:40.304 --> 01:42:44.386
If you don't do the hard thing, you don't grow the AMCC.

1443
01:42:44.646 --> 01:42:47.187
You don't grow the AMCC, you don't do the hard thing again.

1444
01:42:47.407 --> 01:42:47.487
And

1445
01:42:48.027 --> 01:42:56.671
It's just this loop and it's this cycle, which is why so many resolutions, New Year's resolutions, end by February 1st.

1446
01:42:57.132 --> 01:42:59.493
It's why we have the obesity epidemic.

1447
01:43:00.053 --> 01:43:07.077
It's largely why I think we've got a crisis of people not being able to meet their goals.

1448
01:43:08.517 --> 01:43:13.380
I'm just fascinated from an evolutionary perspective as to why we needed one and why it wasn't just always big.

1449
01:43:14.046 --> 01:43:27.805
in the pursuit, you know, evolutionarily in the pursuit of hunting and going out and hunting for food sources and being motivated to do that in a near starvation state when times were tough.

1450
01:43:29.237 --> 01:43:35.340
And so when times got easier, we didn't need it as much so we could conserve, I guess, our energy.

1451
01:43:35.420 --> 01:43:38.062
So we could like scale down our willpower when times were good.

1452
01:43:38.242 --> 01:43:43.585
Well, it's interesting that you say that because this brings up the whole brain rot and AI era.

1453
01:43:43.725 --> 01:43:49.608
Just like with, you know, in 2024, Oxford Dictionary, I think, named brain rot the word of the year.

1454
01:43:51.001 --> 01:44:09.659
And it's interesting because it plays into evolution and what's happening with this AMCC, meaning like we're just there scrolling at mindless information every day, training our brain to get these small dopamine hits, these small rewards from doing absolutely nothing.

1455
01:44:11.277 --> 01:44:17.078
What do you think of these chatbots that everybody's using at the moment to write for them and think for them, etc.?

1456
01:44:17.338 --> 01:44:26.000
Oh my God, I think it's on the spectrum of being so incredible, but being so detrimentally harmful.

1457
01:44:26.620 --> 01:44:27.681
I know this with myself.

1458
01:44:27.901 --> 01:44:29.261
So I was a mathematician.

1459
01:44:29.281 --> 01:44:33.062
I did my master's of mathematics and I was able, Stephen, to...

1460
01:44:34.302 --> 01:44:41.069
the trigonometry and pure calculus that I could do back then with just my head and a pen was fascinating.

1461
01:44:41.149 --> 01:44:50.438
Now I'm going out and I'm calculating on ChatGPT the bill, the 20% tip on top of this bill, how much does it cost?

1462
01:44:50.458 --> 01:44:53.221
And I think, how dumb am I actually getting?

1463
01:44:53.801 --> 01:44:54.502
So I think

1464
01:44:55.026 --> 01:44:56.147
It's both good and bad.

1465
01:44:56.227 --> 01:45:11.754
I think the rate of decline we're seeing in people reading books and exercising their brain is declining and our ability to think and use our cognition is declining.

1466
01:45:13.755 --> 01:45:23.780
Louise, I've waited a long time to ask you one particular question, which is, I think is very important, which is you're clearly very passionate about this stuff.

1467
01:45:25.252 --> 01:45:26.816
One might say you're pretty obsessed with it.

1468
01:45:27.557 --> 01:45:28.680
You come across as pretty obsessed.

1469
01:45:29.462 --> 01:45:29.762
Do I?

1470
01:45:30.063 --> 01:45:30.484
You do, yeah.

1471
01:45:31.526 --> 01:45:31.727
Why?

1472
01:45:33.362 --> 01:45:41.224
We are living in a society that doesn't allow women to ask for what they want.

1473
01:45:41.944 --> 01:45:46.566
We're living in a society that doesn't allow women to ask for what they need.

1474
01:45:47.406 --> 01:45:53.428
And when this happens, it results in 70% of all Alzheimer's disease cases being women.

1475
01:45:53.528 --> 01:45:59.349
It results in 80% of all autoimmune diseases being female.

1476
01:46:00.310 --> 01:46:00.470
And...

1477
01:46:01.650 --> 01:46:24.610
These are largely preventable diseases and when I ask why and I hear that women are wildly misrepresented in academic literature, when I see women who downplay their symptoms or they're too scared to ask their doctor for advice or they're too scared to ask somebody else for advice because of what they're going through or they're ashamed of some of their symptoms,

1478
01:46:25.050 --> 01:46:27.152
I get angry and I get passionate.

1479
01:46:27.772 --> 01:46:32.795
And it reminds me of my grandmother who, she was my best friend.

1480
01:46:32.835 --> 01:46:33.816
Her name was Louisa.

1481
01:46:34.657 --> 01:46:36.178
And- You're named after her.

1482
01:46:36.198 --> 01:46:37.399
I was named after her, yes.

1483
01:46:37.739 --> 01:46:39.760
And we spent every day together.

1484
01:46:40.361 --> 01:46:42.882
And I'm getting emotional now because I remember her.

1485
01:46:43.483 --> 01:46:46.485
And she sadly died of pancreatic cancer.

1486
01:46:46.845 --> 01:46:48.086
It was ovarian cancer that

1487
01:46:51.841 --> 01:46:57.931
She never asked for what she wanted and she never asked for what she needed, which was help.

1488
01:46:57.951 --> 01:46:59.633
She didn't understand her symptoms.

1489
01:47:00.355 --> 01:47:06.785
She didn't go to the doctor when she needed to because she was just more...

1490
01:47:08.257 --> 01:47:12.560
inclined to look after the family and look after the household.

1491
01:47:13.481 --> 01:47:18.264
And when the time came that she was given her diagnosis, I was sitting there with her.

1492
01:47:18.324 --> 01:47:24.868
It was at home and the doctor came, she did a house call and my grandmother looked at her.

1493
01:47:25.068 --> 01:47:27.430
She hardly spoke that much English and she said,

1494
01:47:28.751 --> 01:47:30.192
please, is there something I can do?

1495
01:47:30.212 --> 01:47:31.193
I don't want to die.

1496
01:47:31.974 --> 01:47:35.696
And the doctor said, I'm sorry, there's nothing you can do.

1497
01:47:36.257 --> 01:47:38.659
And I spent every day with her in the hospital.

1498
01:47:39.339 --> 01:47:40.380
And I think about that.

1499
01:47:40.400 --> 01:47:47.545
It's been almost 20 years now, but I think about that moment and I kick myself thinking, why didn't we...

1500
01:47:48.426 --> 01:47:50.107
Why didn't we get her a scan?

1501
01:47:50.468 --> 01:47:53.930
She told us several times that her stomach was hurting.

1502
01:47:53.990 --> 01:47:56.592
She told us several times that she felt pain.

1503
01:47:57.513 --> 01:47:59.475
She never, she hid her symptoms.

1504
01:47:59.895 --> 01:48:06.420
She hardly ever ate at one point and we never stopped to think about why and she never stopped to think about why.

1505
01:48:06.460 --> 01:48:08.001
So I think about her every day.

1506
01:48:09.002 --> 01:48:10.803
And then I think about my mother too.

1507
01:48:10.823 --> 01:48:10.923
Yeah.

1508
01:48:11.844 --> 01:48:28.920
And these women, you know, first generation, we migrated to Australia from a country called Cyprus, and they've just been so, they put themselves second and they just look after the family.

1509
01:48:29.080 --> 01:48:30.982
And I can't stand that.

1510
01:48:31.002 --> 01:48:33.544
And when I see women coming in as patients,

1511
01:48:34.742 --> 01:48:40.987
or caregivers, I think to myself, do you not know that there is something for you to do?

1512
01:48:41.087 --> 01:48:42.208
And most women don't.

1513
01:48:42.969 --> 01:48:58.401
And I can't believe the amount of money that we are spending that is going towards putting us on rockets to go to Mars, but we haven't yet found a cure for this disease that is largely preventable.

1514
01:48:58.482 --> 01:48:59.803
It's just not okay with me.

1515
01:49:00.723 --> 01:49:02.965
And I would hate to see women

1516
01:49:04.550 --> 01:49:08.732
The emotion is still very present in your face, even though it was so long ago.

1517
01:49:09.132 --> 01:49:10.052
It was so long ago.

1518
01:49:10.572 --> 01:49:11.933
I mean, I was very close to her.

1519
01:49:11.973 --> 01:49:13.274
I'm very close with my mother.

1520
01:49:13.294 --> 01:49:16.955
I check in with her twice, three times a day.

1521
01:49:17.715 --> 01:49:19.136
And I just don't think it's fair.

1522
01:49:19.216 --> 01:49:21.417
I think women deserve the truth.

1523
01:49:22.157 --> 01:49:23.238
They've been lied to.

1524
01:49:23.778 --> 01:49:25.118
They've been underrepresented.

1525
01:49:25.739 --> 01:49:28.480
And we need to change that.

1526
01:49:28.860 --> 01:49:30.140
With Louisa, your grandmother, what...

1527
01:49:32.255 --> 01:49:36.899
are those range of emotions that have turned into this incredible fire you have?

1528
01:49:37.519 --> 01:49:37.839
Anger.

1529
01:49:39.220 --> 01:49:40.622
Anger is one of the emotions.

1530
01:49:41.482 --> 01:49:56.514
Anger at society that places women to be everything, to be a mother, a caregiver, to go to work, to represent the family.

1531
01:49:56.994 --> 01:49:59.356
Women represent 51% of the total population.

1532
01:50:02.266 --> 01:50:05.529
And then it becomes, I feel, political if that's an emotion.

1533
01:50:06.149 --> 01:50:21.702
Because you think about healthcare, you think healthcare should be accessible to everybody, but it seems as though, especially in this country, that healthcare is only really accessible by those with a high socioeconomic status, and that I'm not okay with.

1534
01:50:21.982 --> 01:50:27.567
So it does become political, even though healthcare, I guess healthcare is political

1535
01:50:31.810 --> 01:50:32.632
is apolitical.

1536
01:50:33.774 --> 01:50:35.837
And my grandmother was apolitical.

1537
01:50:36.639 --> 01:50:41.266
And her needs just were not met.

1538
01:50:42.969 --> 01:50:43.310
Anger.

1539
01:50:44.639 --> 01:50:58.664
Frustration at the system, frustration at the fact that we still have only 4% of women taking hormone replacement therapy in fear that they're going to get this disease, that they're going to get breast cancer.

1540
01:50:59.565 --> 01:51:06.787
Utterly frustrated at the cycles of administration who vouch to help you.

1541
01:51:07.067 --> 01:51:11.309
You look to your government and your administration and say,

1542
01:51:11.409 --> 01:51:23.280
to look up to, to guide you when you have Secretary Kennedy in 2014 go on national television and say, vaccines are totally safe.

1543
01:51:23.300 --> 01:51:25.142
I had all my kids vaccinated.

1544
01:51:25.162 --> 01:51:30.026
They've eradicated some of the most deadliest diseases that have plagued this world.

1545
01:51:30.086 --> 01:51:31.387
Vaccines are so safe.

1546
01:51:31.487 --> 01:51:33.029
To fast forward to 2025, vaccines.

1547
01:51:34.410 --> 01:51:39.561
saying vaccines are so unsafe, do not trust your medical doctor.

1548
01:51:39.581 --> 01:51:41.745
You need to take your health into your own hands.

1549
01:51:42.968 --> 01:51:45.312
You start to lose trust now

1550
01:51:46.351 --> 01:51:47.932
And it's not that we're uninformed.

1551
01:51:48.853 --> 01:51:54.556
It's the fact that we are confused because we hear vaccines are bad.

1552
01:51:54.896 --> 01:51:55.917
Oh, vaccines are good.

1553
01:51:56.277 --> 01:51:58.278
Vaccines are really good.

1554
01:51:58.418 --> 01:51:58.899
Take them.

1555
01:51:59.239 --> 01:52:00.419
Don't get your kid vaccine.

1556
01:52:00.439 --> 01:52:04.142
You've got women here who don't even know that.

1557
01:52:04.782 --> 01:52:10.145
They don't even know how to get on the internet or order a blood testing.

1558
01:52:10.165 --> 01:52:12.726
You're expecting them to take their health into their own hands.

1559
01:52:13.266 --> 01:52:31.636
So it upsets me that you see women who are so vulnerable being sold a vaccine lie, which could potentially save them from a disease, which could potentially save them or their child from getting the flu, hepatitis B.

1560
01:52:33.520 --> 01:52:36.961
meningitis, which was just eradicated from the vaccine schedule.

1561
01:52:38.001 --> 01:52:40.142
I'm not, this is not meant to be political.

1562
01:52:40.442 --> 01:52:42.342
I am, I'm a scientist.

1563
01:52:42.522 --> 01:52:44.363
I am not, this is not propaganda.

1564
01:52:44.663 --> 01:52:45.943
This is not ideology.

1565
01:52:46.303 --> 01:52:51.184
This is just women who deserve to be treated better.

1566
01:52:52.925 --> 01:52:54.965
You're 36.

1567
01:52:57.065 --> 01:52:59.206
Louisa passed away when you were how old?

1568
01:52:59.581 --> 01:53:02.624
Oh, I was probably 18 at the time.

1569
01:53:02.804 --> 01:53:03.465
You were 18?

1570
01:53:03.885 --> 01:53:05.367
Around that, 18, 19.

1571
01:53:05.647 --> 01:53:06.708
When she got the diagnosis?

1572
01:53:06.948 --> 01:53:07.208
Yeah.

1573
01:53:07.449 --> 01:53:08.309
It was very fast.

1574
01:53:08.349 --> 01:53:11.933
It was within a two-month time frame, not even.

1575
01:53:12.553 --> 01:53:22.443
And had she not got that diagnosis and had you not sat there and watched her ask that doctor if there's something that she could do, do you think your career would have taken this course?

1576
01:53:22.503 --> 01:53:22.563
No.

1577
01:53:23.709 --> 01:53:31.356
I became utterly obsessed with disease management, but when I first saw a human brain, I was 21.

1578
01:53:31.376 --> 01:53:40.183
I was in a lab and we had to go into a cadaver lab and I saw a brain being harvested from a body that was donated.

1579
01:53:40.523 --> 01:53:42.385
And I stayed back that day, I remember.

1580
01:53:43.226 --> 01:53:46.408
And I helped in the pathology lab.

1581
01:53:46.609 --> 01:53:50.012
And when I saw that brain, I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to it.

1582
01:53:50.712 --> 01:53:55.113
So ever since then, I've been in ORs and it's where I feel most alive.

1583
01:53:55.353 --> 01:53:55.593
Why?

1584
01:53:56.214 --> 01:53:57.654
Why did you want to dedicate your life to it?

1585
01:53:57.914 --> 01:54:10.658
Because when you know what the brain is, that it is responsible for the life that we have and you can use it for your advantage to overcome any obstacle that comes your way, you become obsessed with understanding it.

1586
01:54:11.198 --> 01:54:15.379
Metacognition is thinking about your thoughts.

1587
01:54:16.039 --> 01:54:18.680
And every day, if you can think about why you think,

1588
01:54:19.380 --> 01:54:26.422
about the things you think about, you can challenge yourself to overcome any adversity.

1589
01:54:27.182 --> 01:54:29.222
Is there a cost to your obsession and your passion?

1590
01:54:29.542 --> 01:54:29.782
Yes.

1591
01:54:30.023 --> 01:54:30.623
What's the cost?

1592
01:54:30.803 --> 01:54:36.204
I moved away from my family to be surrounded by the greatest neurosurgeons in the world, which I am.

1593
01:54:36.904 --> 01:54:38.264
And I'm very thankful for that.

1594
01:54:38.324 --> 01:54:43.386
I moved away from a population of 22 million to come to the hardest city in the world.

1595
01:54:43.406 --> 01:54:44.246
New York.

1596
01:54:44.466 --> 01:54:45.086
New York City.

1597
01:54:45.106 --> 01:54:46.406
Are you still paying a cost?

1598
01:54:46.926 --> 01:54:48.087
I'm still paying a cost.

1599
01:54:48.107 --> 01:54:49.187
My health pays a cost.

1600
01:54:50.569 --> 01:54:54.292
I've missed family events, traveling for my career.

1601
01:54:56.994 --> 01:55:04.460
But I wouldn't have it any other way because the people that I've met have forged the way for me to live the life that I want.

1602
01:55:04.740 --> 01:55:08.744
I'm surrounded by incredible thought leaders in health and medicine.

1603
01:55:09.564 --> 01:55:12.667
And so what is success to you then?

1604
01:55:13.957 --> 01:55:15.858
At the deepest possible level, what is success?

1605
01:55:16.038 --> 01:55:17.238
We meet again in 10 years time.

1606
01:55:17.258 --> 01:55:21.160
You say, my life has been a success or I feel successful.

1607
01:55:22.280 --> 01:55:24.441
Louisa says, I am a successful woman.

1608
01:55:24.821 --> 01:55:25.441
What does that mean?

1609
01:55:25.461 --> 01:55:25.921
What happened?

1610
01:55:26.861 --> 01:55:30.523
Being able to control my brain states.

1611
01:55:31.423 --> 01:55:33.464
Being able to control your brain states.

1612
01:55:33.704 --> 01:55:36.445
I think that the ultimate form of success,

1613
01:55:37.531 --> 01:55:48.451
success and high performance, or being able to perform at your peak, is being able to go from brain state to brain state and then be able to recover.

1614
01:55:48.471 --> 01:55:50.074
What do you mean by brain state?

1615
01:55:50.637 --> 01:56:05.180
Meaning like being able to get switched on when you need to be switched on and invite the neurotransmitters involved in that, norepinephrine, adrenaline, dopamine, but not having that in constant overdrive and being able to know when to switch off.

1616
01:56:05.220 --> 01:56:07.620
And I think that that is what high performance is.

1617
01:56:08.020 --> 01:56:13.922
The book that changed my mind on that was Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which actually speaks about the flow state.

1618
01:56:21.264 --> 01:56:22.765
Any goals outside of your professional?

1619
01:56:25.246 --> 01:56:26.667
Kids, family, life.

1620
01:56:26.688 --> 01:56:27.448
You love kids, family?

1621
01:56:27.488 --> 01:56:28.949
Yeah, definitely.

1622
01:56:30.450 --> 01:56:30.991
It's tough, isn't it?

1623
01:56:32.412 --> 01:56:32.772
It's tough.

1624
01:56:32.812 --> 01:56:38.316
I was saying earlier to my friend that I kind of just thought the minute I wanted to have kids, they would just appear.

1625
01:56:38.516 --> 01:56:39.177
It's not so straightforward.

1626
01:56:39.197 --> 01:56:44.541
That's what I thought too until I realized, oh, but I'm the woman.

1627
01:56:44.961 --> 01:56:47.703
I actually have to bear the children as well.

1628
01:56:48.910 --> 01:56:49.950
Which is a big sacrifice.

1629
01:56:50.431 --> 01:56:51.231
And an honor and a privilege.

1630
01:56:51.271 --> 01:56:57.374
It's an honor and a privilege and a sacrifice that I think everybody, yeah, I mean, I think I definitely want.

1631
01:56:59.095 --> 01:57:01.976
Are you hopeful for all of your professional endeavors?

1632
01:57:03.217 --> 01:57:03.417
Yes.

1633
01:57:03.757 --> 01:57:04.297
You are hopeful?

1634
01:57:05.277 --> 01:57:06.018
I'm in control.

1635
01:57:08.499 --> 01:57:15.002
You think we're gonna move in a good direction as a society, as it relates to Alzheimer's and

1636
01:57:17.081 --> 01:57:19.503
Yes, I am hopeful for that.

1637
01:57:20.064 --> 01:57:22.866
I'm hopeful for the message that I'm getting across.

1638
01:57:22.946 --> 01:57:31.534
I think social media is providing the platform for free education and for people to understand that they have agency over their brains.

1639
01:57:32.515 --> 01:57:40.082
I'm not hopeful for anybody saving us or coming in and giving us an easy way forward.

1640
01:57:40.517 --> 01:57:43.978
Do you ever have days where you wish you were less obsessed with your craft?

1641
01:57:45.339 --> 01:57:48.801
Has there ever been a day where you're like, you know, I wish I was just a little bit less captivated by this?

1642
01:57:49.261 --> 01:57:49.981
Sometimes I do.

1643
01:57:50.041 --> 01:57:50.261
Yeah.

1644
01:57:50.421 --> 01:57:57.744
I think if I didn't, well, I'd be probably back home in Australia living an average person's life.

1645
01:57:57.764 --> 01:57:58.525
I'm not saying that that's it.

1646
01:57:58.565 --> 01:58:02.466
I'm just saying, you know, maybe I would have done it, done my life differently.

1647
01:58:02.486 --> 01:58:03.887
I have days like that where I think...

1648
01:58:05.971 --> 01:58:09.253
obviously, because the obsessed brain is the one making this decision.

1649
01:58:09.273 --> 01:58:10.754
So it's quite difficult to detach.

1650
01:58:10.794 --> 01:58:15.697
But like, if you put a knob in front of me and I could just turn it down just a little bit, would I?

1651
01:58:16.437 --> 01:58:19.399
Now, my obsessed brain is the one making this decision.

1652
01:58:19.419 --> 01:58:20.860
So my obsessed brain is like, fuck it, turn it up.

1653
01:58:21.540 --> 01:58:25.123
But I think I do wonder sometimes, I am the way that I am, right?

1654
01:58:26.003 --> 01:58:33.408
But I do wonder sometimes if I would be happier overall if I could just turn it down a little bit.

1655
01:58:33.812 --> 01:58:40.536
But isn't the whole point of life to know thyself in pursuit of something bigger and better?

1656
01:58:41.076 --> 01:58:41.617
Yeah, it is.

1657
01:58:41.777 --> 01:58:51.583
But I just sometimes worry about what I'm sacrificing and whether at some point, I don't know, when I'm on my deathbed at 80 years old, I'm going to look back and say, actually, I made a bad trade.

1658
01:58:51.603 --> 01:58:52.263
Yeah.

1659
01:58:52.385 --> 01:58:53.446
Well, exactly.

1660
01:58:53.846 --> 01:58:54.767
But we're never going to know that.

1661
01:58:55.067 --> 01:58:55.988
I think about that often.

1662
01:58:56.289 --> 01:58:57.189
I know.

1663
01:58:57.229 --> 01:59:04.116
You think about that often and you think, well, if the world came to a collapse tomorrow, what would you regret today not having done?

1664
01:59:06.418 --> 01:59:08.940
I think it would be like making more memories with people I love.

1665
01:59:09.020 --> 01:59:10.101
I think that's one of the big ones.

1666
01:59:10.161 --> 01:59:10.522
I think...

1667
01:59:11.065 --> 01:59:12.086
Did you hear what you just said?

1668
01:59:12.106 --> 01:59:12.506
Yeah.

1669
01:59:12.526 --> 01:59:13.587
Making more memories.

1670
01:59:14.348 --> 01:59:15.889
And imagine losing those.

1671
01:59:15.989 --> 01:59:24.816
Imagine a life full of like, you know, creating these experiences and these memories to have them being taken away from you.

1672
01:59:25.977 --> 01:59:26.237
Yeah.

1673
01:59:27.017 --> 01:59:33.863
To not being able to recognize your wife, your kids, and looking in the mirror and not being able to recognize yourself.

1674
01:59:33.883 --> 01:59:34.083
Yeah.

1675
01:59:35.220 --> 01:59:40.886
That's why Alzheimer's is just such a disgusting, sinister, horrific thing.

1676
01:59:40.946 --> 01:59:48.295
Because it's just the most heartbreaking thing to lose someone while they're still alive.

1677
01:59:49.036 --> 01:59:49.957
And to lose yourself.

1678
01:59:50.097 --> 01:59:54.742
We've got this one woman who looks in the mirror and she says, who's that?

1679
01:59:55.925 --> 01:59:56.205
Really?

1680
01:59:56.325 --> 01:59:56.646
Yeah.

1681
01:59:56.786 --> 02:00:02.250
And, you know, it's sad because two years ago she knew who I was and now she asks, are you my daughter?

1682
02:00:03.271 --> 02:00:09.416
And when you're confronted with that every single day, it gets you thinking you don't live a normal life.

1683
02:00:09.816 --> 02:00:14.840
You don't live an average life because you do think about every facet of medicine.

1684
02:00:14.860 --> 02:00:16.041
You think about history.

1685
02:00:16.341 --> 02:00:20.765
You think about diseases and then you think about life and the people that you spend the most time with.

1686
02:00:22.352 --> 02:00:26.734
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves the question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1687
02:00:27.415 --> 02:00:30.476
And the question left for you is, what is God to you?

1688
02:00:31.637 --> 02:00:39.200
God is that power that you feel and have faith in that you cannot see.

1689
02:00:40.401 --> 02:00:50.646
The power that basically makes you feel like there is somebody there that has you and that is guiding you.

1690
02:00:52.823 --> 02:00:58.569
that always has a path for you.

1691
02:00:58.589 --> 02:00:59.150
You believe in God?

1692
02:00:59.690 --> 02:01:01.812
Yes, I'm Christian.

1693
02:01:01.833 --> 02:01:02.653
I'm Greek Orthodox.

1694
02:01:03.154 --> 02:01:10.722
When you see the brain deteriorating in such a way and you think about this concept of prayer, like asking God to help me with something...

1695
02:01:11.492 --> 02:01:17.176
Doesn't it feel pretty, I mean, it's the definition of like hopelessness is watching your brain deteriorate.

1696
02:01:17.317 --> 02:01:25.663
And I think some part of my struggles with religion since I was an 18 year old and I came from a very religious family was seeing injustice in the world.

1697
02:01:25.703 --> 02:01:31.447
And there doesn't seem to be much greater injustice than watching someone's brain just deteriorate in front of their family.

1698
02:01:32.228 --> 02:01:32.448
Yeah.

1699
02:01:32.648 --> 02:01:37.332
Or somebody going through losing their child and you start to think about God.

1700
02:01:38.302 --> 02:01:41.485
People pray for, I can't find my keys, I want my football team to win.

1701
02:01:41.505 --> 02:01:42.746
And I go, there's no point.

1702
02:01:43.147 --> 02:01:48.592
If people praying for an Alzheimer's cure are having no luck, then maybe I should stop praying for Manchester United to win.

1703
02:01:49.095 --> 02:01:49.375
Yeah.

1704
02:01:50.436 --> 02:02:13.477
If you understood the intricacies of how we were actually brought into this world from the point of conception, from the point of conception to the point of neural development, how a baby is formed and how precise everything has to be for you to come out the way you did.

1705
02:02:15.052 --> 02:02:26.942
It is so beautiful and so miraculous and so rare, even though there are billions of people in this world, that you cannot just turn to biology anymore.

1706
02:02:26.982 --> 02:02:29.724
You have to turn to something bigger.

1707
02:02:30.325 --> 02:02:43.115
And I used to, trust me, even as a Christian who's read the Bible, even in my early 20s when I was getting into medicine and science, I was so gung-ho about it.

1708
02:02:44.665 --> 02:03:00.472
We are born in a body, we die in a body, but then when you get so deep into the literature of science and medicine and biology, it's hard to ignore God and it's hard to ignore that there is a higher power out there.

1709
02:03:00.892 --> 02:03:04.694
And why is it that there are chapels in hospitals?

1710
02:03:07.475 --> 02:03:08.616
Because people want to go to heaven.

1711
02:03:09.924 --> 02:03:21.688
people want an alternative method of getting through whatever it is that they can get through, something that science and medicine cannot offer.

1712
02:03:22.928 --> 02:03:27.730
And believing in something that is not there or something that hasn't occurred yet is having faith.

1713
02:03:31.965 --> 02:03:37.008
I work in neurosurgery and some of the cases you think this person's not coming out of here alive.

1714
02:03:37.408 --> 02:03:55.678
And the fact that they do and they preserve their cognitive functions and they look next to normal after they've had a massive tumor resected, which is a true story from here, the tumor was going all along this one woman's face who was 78 years old, who traveled here from France to have the tumor resected.

1715
02:03:56.538 --> 02:04:01.600
How is it that she's walking and she's cognitively normal and she's not even on any medication the next day?

1716
02:04:01.680 --> 02:04:02.700
How is that possible?

1717
02:04:03.380 --> 02:04:03.900
Is it God?

1718
02:04:03.960 --> 02:04:05.961
Is it just miraculous neurosurgeons?

1719
02:04:06.441 --> 02:04:09.642
There's just some things that medicine can't answer.

1720
02:04:09.662 --> 02:04:11.563
I agree with that.

1721
02:04:12.343 --> 02:04:15.324
I am, I don't think I'm arrogant enough to say that I know.

1722
02:04:17.245 --> 02:04:20.566
And I'm curious and I think I'll never know.

1723
02:04:20.846 --> 02:04:21.046
Yeah.

1724
02:04:21.266 --> 02:04:22.747
So I guess that's why we need to have faith.

1725
02:04:23.900 --> 02:04:24.801
Louisa, thank you so much.

1726
02:04:25.041 --> 02:04:39.892
It's very important that you do the work that you do because it's people like yourself that are so passionate, so obsessed and so good at communicating that help average people who don't have access to the wisdom and the research and the studies and information that you have understand all of these things.

1727
02:04:39.932 --> 02:04:43.594
And it's through this understanding that we can make better choices and preserve our life, preserve our brains.

1728
02:04:43.935 --> 02:04:46.016
And if we preserve our brains, we preserve everything that matters.

1729
02:04:46.637 --> 02:04:46.937
Correct.

1730
02:04:47.197 --> 02:04:47.437
Thank you.

1731
02:04:47.457 --> 02:04:48.358
So thank you for doing what you do.

1732
02:04:48.398 --> 02:04:51.200
And I appreciate your passion and dedication to it because it's very, very important.

1733
02:04:51.220 --> 02:04:51.740
Thank you for having me.

1734
02:04:51.760 --> 02:04:52.461
And I know it comes at a cost.

1735
02:04:52.481 --> 02:04:52.721
Thank you.

1736
02:04:52.921 --> 02:04:57.510
So I feel obliged to tell you that as a normal person who isn't involved in your field, we're grateful.

1737
02:04:57.871 --> 02:04:59.013
Thank you so much, Stephen.

1738
02:04:59.193 --> 02:04:59.494
Thank you.