Create a breakthrough for better brain health with Dr. Sanjay Gupta

[Music] hey everybody it's tony robbins uh we got a very special podcast today with a very special friend somebody i know you all respect and love uh but the subject we're gonna talk about is focus power the mind listen you know this is part of my life right because the mind and the heart i wouldn't leave the mind without the heart otherwise you're just in your head right at your head you're dead but the ability to focus to concentrate to learn to grow to expand it is what really makes life worth living it's what gives you the tools to make a difference to grow your business to be a great parent to be a great friend to be a great business person and yet there's something that can mess with it and it's probably one of the larger fears we have and no it's not coveted we're not going to talk about that you've heard enough about that for the day the week the month and maybe the year but it's something that has longer-term effects in most cases and that's dementia and alzheimer's and so i want to talk to you about solutions i want you to understand what the challenges are and i thought who better to do that than one of the most respected and beloved doctors in the world he's a neurosurgeon he's an emmy-winning broadcaster a journalist uh he's a man that goes to gone to iraq and operates on people he is a renaissance man and i'm a giant fan of them have been for a decade and a half and that's sanjay gupta sanjay thanks for joining us dr tony what what a pleasure one of the things i uh like to say the most about myself is i'm an fot friend of tony i i really cherish our friendship i do thank you for having me i just got done reading his new book that i recommend all you go get here it's called keep sharp build a brain you know a better brain at any age it's really like a 12-week action plan it's what i love about it isn't just cognitive understanding but here's what you can do to improve that not not only to avoid the problem but to strengthen yourself right now and so i want to start out sanji you know you really are that renaissance man i talked about that's not blowing smoke and i'm curious before we begin on your book to know a little bit about your journey i mean i think about 15 years ago or so we met for the first time in an interview with you and i remember afterwards you gave me a few minutes and i kind of was i was so interested in you as a person you know you just had one of your daughters if i remember right i think you told me i'm interested like what shapes people and you know here you have this incredibly broad background i want to know how that journey began and what influenced you know correct me if i'm wrong if a long time ago i think you said your mom was one of the first female engineers if i remember in india or maybe the first here in america at ford where your parents met is that true and how what role did she play and can you take us how do you go from neurosurgeon to one of the most respected medical you know people on television and shaping you know people around the world what they think and what they understand about how to take care of themselves well you're very kind to to sort of portray it that way you know it's it's interesting you we we all have these these sorts of journeys and sometimes we don't get a chance to reflect on it like this but one thing i do want to say though my mom um i think you know for a lot of people their parents do have this influence on them that maybe they recognize even more so later in life yes she was the first woman ever hired as an engineer at the ford motor company and which was incredible really i mean they just didn't have women engineers at that time and it was just tell you a funny story she goes there she she's she's determined my mom is one of these people she's determined tony you would love her she she doesn't she never says no she just doesn't give up anyways she's cold calling this is in the mid 60s in in dearborn michigan homa ford she's wearing a full sorry and it's winter time i'm just painting a picture for you you know and they're not used to seeing a sorry let alone an indian woman let alone someone who wants to be an engineer and she's cold calling and eventually you know gets these meetings and and they say look we we don't have any engineers here that are women and my mom says and if you don't hire me you never will so that was that was the line that kind of so that you talk about shaping people that i i remember that line my whole life but the other thing and you get a kick out of this my mom's name is damienty that it's a long name and so they immediately said you have to shorten your name they told her she had to have a nickname which you know just weird to even say that but regardless that's what they told her she thought quickly and she said okay it's going to be ronnie which means queen in hindi so she basically said if you're going to make me change my name you will call me queen for the rest of my professional life so that's my mom you know i mean it's almost like enough said right in terms of what what shapes you but she she you know i i think that's that's a big part of it i also think a lot of people uh maybe you as well tony i my parents sacrificed a lot for me they they they made a lot of sacrifices you know in order for me to get a good education and it was not easy for them my mom lived as a refugee for part of her life all that i do feel like there is a there is a uh a desire to just do as much as you can as a result almost just just do things so sometimes there's not even something that really ties it all together i got a little time here on earth i've been given this great gift of great parents and and let me just do as much as i can that that's really the the journey well you're you're you've you've been hungry like to learn and grow i'll tell you another thing i really respect about you um you know i i've never used drugs i'm not a prude just i grew up in a family where drugs were abused and alcohol was abused so you know my associations are pretty intense against it but i i saw you you talked about medical marijuana and i think you won an emmy if i saw for your series we did we said hey i was wrong there's new insight there's new science today that's one of the biggest difficulties we have you know we have a lot of science that contradicts each other and today it's only one voice like covet is a perfect example like people are equally qualified they're taking off social media and so forth today but you have a different attitude you have this attitude of like i just want to bring what's right where does that come from and how did you make that journey of shifting for example on something that you felt so strongly against and then you felt it really does make a difference in certain situations especially with brain issues well you know i i think with regard to the covet and again i appreciate you you portraying it this way tony i mean these are these are difficult times no question and you're right i mean you know you talk about the clashes uh between science and policy and yeah you know and the economy and all that these are real clashes people will write about this historically for you know hundreds of years to come so what i think you know um i don't think society has enough honest brokers to be perfectly candid with you yeah i think there's too many people for whatever reason and this isn't a criticism as much as an observation there's too many conflicts people are just conflicted and it's it's it's again i'm not saying it as a criticism but you have to acknowledge it i do think and i'm i'm biased but i i would think that journalists have a little bit of an honest broker role in here what did i do i i'm not i made a point of not being beholden to anyone or anything you know i don't have you know any kind of secondary gain issues or anything i do a lot of homework i'm reading the science all the time i mean during covet i woke up at 4 30 every morning for 14 months including the weekend so i could talk to my counterparts in china and taiwan and understand what was happening there wow and then i'm talking to patients and and scientists here and vaccine makers and policy makers i i just you feel like you got to get a master's degree in it and i think that that's that's the hunger but that translates as a journalist into something that i think is a is a a pure well-informed product so a lot of people do that i'm not the only one but i'm saying that that's that's kind of how i approach it with the marijuana thing i'll just tell you um this kind of dovetails nicely into it because i i did not see a lot of good evidence supporting medical marijuana i wrote a time magazine story about this 2009 time frame i think yeah and what i realized tony as i started to dig into it a few years later was that if you were to just go look at all the literature on medical marijuana on our big our big literature sites in medicine you were fine just at a macro level 94 of the studies were designed to look for harm six percent to look for benefit my point is that 94 of studies were being funded to look for a problem yeah and six percent of studies were being funded to look for a benefit already the system was so askew yeah so you you it depends how deep you want to go when you look at these things what i realized is when i looked at labs that weren't dependent on federal funding labs in other countries like israel a different picture started to emerge and it took me 18 months of just doing my homework to sort of arrive at this wait a second we have not been getting the full picture here because no one ever really wanted us to get the full picture here here is a fuller picture at least and it shows something very different yep i was moved uh by it changed my complete perspective a because i have so much respect in you but i don't think blindly even with somebody i respect right i want to read and understand i mean there's such a beautiful job of bringing the human emotion to it to show real patience and what's really going on and i think you know i've always said that people you know like something like war is overwhelming something happening in bosnia but if you follow one family you know and all of a sudden it's not so overwhelming people can see and feel and experience it i just thought i'm so glad you wanted me for it you deserved it i thought you did an amazing job and completely changed my perspective on it and it's like certain people i've recommended who are having problems with their children's therapy at least look at this and do the homework on it whereas before i would have thought it's absurd so i really appreciate that intellectual honesty that not only have with the world but you first have with yourself it's it's unfortunately a rare quality today so people are uh people are fearful of uh of saying that they're wrong i mean this is something you've talked about and written about i mean it is a it is it can be a paralyzing thing and and i mean we do live in a culture where if you say you're wrong the people will you know pounce on you and criticize you and maybe you wouldn't feel like to some extent you feel like if i lost trust if i admit that i'm wrong i don't know i mean i'm not i don't have all the answers but i will tell you that the the the tip of the spear has to be just total transparency god i sleep so well at night tony i'll show you my sleep i sleep like a baby because i'm you know i'm just i'm i put it out there i'm honest yes let's talk about your book um um what made you decide to write you know keep smart keep sharp excuse me but also keep sharp is keep smart to me that's what i want as well but but you did it in the middle of colbit and tell us a little bit about the journey why'd you write it and you know how did you originally plan to have it come out this time did people really see it because you know so much of our world is tied to that right now yeah here's something that affects people a lot more than go but a lot more people and a lot for a much longer time affects families and yet i don't know if anybody's paying attention to the lakota but that's one of the reasons i want to spot like this i'm only one person but we'll get a million or two people to look at this and they'll tell other people and i know you don't just need us you've got plenty of exposure more than i've got but tell me about the journey of why you wrote it and tell me how people are responding in the middle of code to this are they paying attention because it does affect family so deeply yeah well i i got i got to let you in on a little secret um and you'll appreciate this but we i wrote this book before covid okay that makes sense okay it makes sense and we were going to release it in the spring i think was march of 2020 got it and you know it was just one of these times where there was two things that were going on one is that i was as i just described earlier very very focused on covid at this releasing a book on a totally different topic it's just just toggling my my mental sort of bandwidth i just didn't think i could be as as authentic in both areas yeah that's the thing is that it just you know will people read this as you say the urgency of covid will people read a book on a totally different topic what we decided to do then was release it at the beginning of 2021 in part because we said look there has been a significant mental sort of impact of this disease yeah i'm sure maybe as a whole not just people who are afflicted with the virus so maybe this will be of help and and we released it and and i think you know i think people have found it helpful in that regard you know but it's it's it's um it was a little it was a little challenging to figure that timing out again something that i think you appreciate yeah of course what i what i tony what i tried to do here and this is this is a inflection point i think in life because i've been straddling these two worlds of being a journalist and i still practice neurosurgery but it's still sort of my first love if you will you know i think i identify most with my colleagues who are doctors i go to the neuroscience meetings i do all these things and i'm learning all these things in that world that aren't necessarily totally translatable to my other world every now and then there are things that i learn in the neuroscience world and i say that is so interesting and yet 99 of the world doesn't really know about it yet isn't this what i'm supposed to do aren't i supposed to be a translator of this kind of information and so and just i'll tell you just briefly one of the things that was coming out in the neuroscience community which i thought was revelatory was that you could build new brain cells at any age yeah yeah you used to think you got a certain number that's right there's no neuroplasticity before the 90s right but even even the idea so neuroplasticity harnessing existing brain cells to do different things oh but you're saying making new brain no brain cells new brain cells used to think that you would drain the cash that was it alcohol would accelerate that that uh decreasing of neurons and now we learn that you can grow new brain cells at any age we thought you did it when your baby like you're three week old building lots of new brain cells or you did it after a brain injury like a stroke or a traumatic brain injury but the fact that a healthy brain at any age could grow new brain cells so you're essentially saying you're you have an organ in the body which happens to your brain which can continuously actually lay down new brain cells and have all the benefits of that being sharper being happier being more productive everything as you get older which i thought was just really inspiring as long as you make demands is that correct yes anything else right if you don't make the demand then there's no reason there's no need is that true there is a use it or lose it phenomenon but we are learning so much more about what that means right because i think we have a tendency to to i'm going to do you know 10 crossword puzzles and that's my use it or lose a thing and there's that can be great but i when i learned about how the brain actually grows these new brain cells and what that means it made me reflect more on how i actually keep my brain optimized i do it totally differently now well let's talk let's dig in how about what are three of the biggest things you know that you could share that make the difference between a toxic brain and a healthy strong fit brain one thing one thing i just want to define a little bit is is that healthy brain thing you know because i think a healthy brain i really found this interesting tony people define this in different ways a healthy brain a healthy heart so every time it pumps the chamber it it pushes so much blood out yeah it's easy yeah it's a pump you can imagine that what is a healthy brain and some people will say what's a brain that doesn't you know devoid of mental illness and things like that people have all these different definitions this evolutionary biologist i spoke to said a healthy brain is a brain that has a wide circle of you that's what he said like what explain that to me and he said the more and more people that you are truly willing to let in to your circle is evidence of a healthy brain wow that's so interesting right you when you're and not healthy brain you get very insular yeah really you know you know maybe just you and sage healthier brain obviously and it's it's really interesting because you can start to say well that's empathy um but no that's more than empathy that's that's actually creating a group of people who are your sort of tribe these are people who you swap ideas with these are people who are intellectually stimulating they have all these purposes so the wider circle of you is a healthy brain and i really like that because again we don't know how to measure a healthy brain otherwise i can measure your cholesterol right or your blood pressure but a healthy brain a wide circle of view so so a couple things i would just tell you and and you know some of this is is i think um changing your perspective a little bit but some of it's like really specific we use our brains kind of like we live our coveted lives right now you're probably primarily at home maybe you go to the kid's school grocery store a few places and you got that down pat right that's kind of our brains we use our whole brains but we use ten percent of our brains ninety percent of the time okay what a healthy brain is is basically starting to to use other parts of the brain to kind of if your brain that ninety percent of the time you're spending is your city this is about visiting other cities creating new cities and things like that so when you're doing things that you do over and over again crossword puzzles playing the piano whatever those are great things that's like driving in your city really well like you've got this yeah i can get to these points no problem my eyes closed when you start to do things that are very different get you out a little bit that's when you're starting to really stimulate this process of neurogenesis which we didn't even know you could do until recently so so here you've got now new cities that you're essentially constructing in your brain and that is a joyous experience yeah that is a place that literally and figuratively expands the circle of view so what does that mean uh it could mean something as simple as tonight when you have dinner tony i want you to eat your dinner with your non-dominant hand okay you're right-handed i want you to eat your entire dinner with your left hand yes now i know that sounds silly no it doesn't i understand you're creating new pathways you're creating new pathways you're laying down new brain cells and you're making new roads if the road that you know so well tony in your city gets blocked one day what are you gonna do you don't know these other roads you haven't built them so your your road is great until it gets blocked and then all of a sudden cognitive dysfunction memory loss smaller circle of view if you've built like 20 roads around that road no problem you still get to your destination it's like the how we think of the heart heart's got a blood vessel's got a blockage you bypass it i'm being a little bit simplistic but it's the same sort of thing oh it's really helpful for people to understand i think it's very clear so do something different in the the crossword puzzles practice makes perfect but it is change that builds resilience i think that's the key use your non-dominant hand take up a new hobby you know what whatever it may be my wife started painting with her non-dominant hand it does a pretty good job by the way so this is a skill that she we didn't know she had so and other skills that you've never tried learning a language singing you know other things that you might enjoy but that will cause you to use a whole different aspect of your brain i learned how to play the ukulele did you really yeah cool my wife is going to play the ukulele they taught her in school in canada all right playing the ukulele but no but it's i i would have never in my life thought i'd play the ukulele it's kind of a you know it's you know i take the guitar something or the piano ukulele because it was so different and and you're a sage your wife knows it is really different yeah who think it's just a guitar but smaller no it's a whole different strumming pattern you you know so i did it because it was totally different it involved my motor cortex i think hobbies that you pick up that do involve your hands painting pottery some sort of instrument uh it was great i i used to play an accordion when i was a kid i brought my accordion out again and started playing the accordion who plays an accordion anymore it's me and a bunch of italian waiters you know so but you don't think of these things as being intellectually stimulating activities necessarily yeah the fact that i learn things because i want to grow new brain cells i play the ukulele because i want to grow new brain cells it's a different way of thinking tony and does it uh in my experience but i don't know if it's just me i'm maybe i'm wired because i love learning so much but is there some link to dopamine or anything of that nature that comes from creating these new pathways or mastering something new or is that something completely different when i talk to these neuroscientists about the impact of creating these new pathways yeah they didn't so much talk to me about whether there was a objective dopamine release what they described though was a an ability to see patterns that you'd otherwise miss yes connect dots that you would otherwise miss like this i got this oh wait because i've been building these new pathways i can connect these two dots yes and they brought it up in a way tony that suggested that's a very joyous experience when you connect a pattern ah you got it that that's how this goes together is that dopamine release i i to be honest i don't know is it joyous yeah that feels pretty good when suddenly you find a connection like that i think it's it makes me happy maybe maybe it's the i don't know what the principle is but i know at least it's true for me i don't know it's true for everybody most people it seems to me it's true for but again you know i'm biased whenever i got a bias i try to look some other direction but one thing i do know is you know the someone's self-esteem is greatly enhanced or diminished by how much they feel they control events versus events control them and you brought up on the most important elements there's one things that i i respect about you personally and it's one of the reasons i i think you're so good at what you do is you're incredibly good at pattern recognition i i i talk to people all the time like you know you've got young kids i've got young kids i've got a brand new young kid and i got grandkids and i like i look at 2040 and go that's that sounds like a long time to some people but i know a decade goes like this in 2040 you know i read all these studies about you know they're done at oxford about like we're going to see a billion jobs disappear and everybody's like we'll create all the new ones i'm sure we will long term but you know sanjay you know that you look back and 150 years ago we were like 90 85 farmers and we went from that to 3 we feed the world but it went over a century and a half right and now we've got changes that are happening like you know self-driving cars three years five years 10 years i don't know but it's gonna happen who's gonna buy you know pay for a truck driver to work eight hours who wants health insurance and might go on strike when they can buy a vehicle they can work 24 hours a day and have lower insurance and they can write down the cost so that you know you take uber drivers truck drivers you know you know you take taxi drivers that's 5 million people in the u.s alone that's the entire job loss that we saw in 2008 and so no one's preparing these people so one of the things i'm passionate about and that's one of the reasons i really want people to get your book as well is pattern i think there's three pieces that make somebody powerful what they do i don't care if it's a dancer a singer the best financial traitors you and i know some of the best people world a variety of categories where they own a domain like you do and what makes them great pattern recognition is number one but then it's pattern utilization right you can see a pattern but if you can't figure out how to use it for a greater good and then ultimately what makes them masterful is pattern creation and i think those three patterns are what i'm trying to teach my grandkids and my children because that's what's going to make them it doesn't matter what job changes are those skill sets are going to be there but you can't have those skill sets if not all this is functioning the highest level i i i totally agree with you obviously tony i mean i think that the the one of the one of the not ironies but one of the things i think that was a real insight for me was basically what you're saying but in the form of fundamentally i do believe that people generally know the right thing to do i agree so in some ways it becomes a question of why did you do the wrong thing right you knew the right thing to do but you did the wrong thing again i'm telling you tony i mean people come to you for this sort of knowledge i'm learning from you brother keep going but i think i just i think it's very interesting like how your how you perceive something is it that you didn't know the right thing or you chose to do the wrong thing and if you cho you use bad judgment bad decisions why is that like what's the what's the the root cause of that problem and i think this gets back to healthy brain someone who's feeling better about themselves someone who feels more empathetic is wider circle of view they are their aperture of life is wider they're not looking so much in the reactionary moment they're able to look further down the line and and sort of imagine themselves further down the line and still having a good life further down the line that is that is that is impart the healthy brain but i i didn't you know i like when you bring up the example of these drivers you know five million jobs lost yeah like probably like you i imagine your mind immediately went to so what are we going to do about that right what are we going to do about that person who's saying what are we going to do about that they they're able to have a wider circle of them because you're wanting to solve that problem you know it's we got to be thinking about you know different levels of education we're going to figure out what the next sector of society is it's going to require these types of skills so you think that comes from a healthy brain as opposed to a value system or do you think it's bold okay that's that's a very fair question i mean i don't think that it's it's necessarily the same for everybody a healthy brain doesn't immediately equate to this ability i don't think but if you define a healthy brain as that larger circle that you care for and you're tied to maybe it does yeah i guess the core motivation is that i that i i actually i'm worried about these five million people i mean you know that's my core motivation it's just i'm not looking at this from a strict policy standpoint i'm really feeling empathetic towards these people then i think the healthy brain part kicks in i mean it doesn't give you immediate talents to be able to recognize patterns for some people that's a real skill but it's putting you on that in that direction of i'm going to solve this problem and and there's there's different ways to solve the problem you know i mean an educator may look at this problem different than a than a you know a tech person versus uh someone who's a policy maker but they can all bring something to the table very true you've designed this as your book i want to get back to your book make sure we get people to pick up your book because it's fantastic um you've decided for me to talk to you tony well no it's true but it's a you know i like it because you chunked it you know most people get overwhelmed when they read a book and then they don't they don't do anything with it and my whole thing when i read a book you can see i've got yours all marked up and tabulated and so forth when i read a book i'm consuming to figure out what am i going to do with it because i believe if you let your learning lead to knowledge become a fool you know my original teacher said let your learning lead to action that's how you really make a difference for your life and the people you care about so what i loved was the 12-week chunking so i know you can't get the whole book in here but can you give us just a little bit of an idea of why the 12 weeks you know what are some of the key steps just so we can get people to have some information right now they can act on and i'm sure they'll pick up your book as well yeah absolutely i mean when i when i started to try and translate this one thing i did that i always do is i will try and bounce things in these things off my teenage daughters and just stand what i'm talking about yeah and they are let me tell you they're sharp critics tony i'm not going to lie to you ooh dad no [Laughter] i do want to you know make sure i you know can can explain things in a way that's going to be accessible for people but the second and i think you'll appreciate this i needed to be able to do it my own life yes i'm a busy guy and a lot of people are and so you know it's great to suggest things but if it's totally impractical it kind of misses the mark to your point i want action not just the knowledge you know it's kind of translatable so um and and and what what i start try to figure out where people are already in their lives with regard to the big sort of basic things you know in terms of movement in terms of how they nourish in terms of how they rest and i use those words specifically movement as opposed to exercise nourishment instead of diet rest instead of sleep because i wanted to explain what the value of these things were know we know that it's good to move we know that it's i mean that's not a surprise we know that it probably doesn't make sense to either sit or lie for 23 hours a day and then go to the gym for an hour we kind of know that but what i thought was interesting was that the brain is different and if you believe the thing everything begins in the brain you want to make the brain as healthy as you can so you make all the best decisions and for your body your diet your relationships then the type of movement for the brain is really important we want to we want to do a type of movement that actually releases a lot of these neurotrophic factors that help grow new brain cells and we don't want at the same time to do things that diminish those neurotrophic factors so what does that translate to and i'm not just making this up look at the data brisk walking is going to be far better than intense exercise when it comes to your brain if you want to intensely exercise that's great and you know you want to win your triathlon time fantastic but if you're specifically thinking i am right now engaged in a period of time when i'm going to optimize my brain it is brisk walking why because the neurotrophic factors are released in abundance to brisk walking but you don't get the corresponding stress hormones and cortisol in the effect right simple as that i mean sometimes these things were not that complicated so that's that's an example of of something that i introduce people to sort of in the first couple of weeks and really explain why and then i would layer something into that we know connection is really important again that's not new knowledge but what we're learning more and more is that it's the profundity of the connection and by the way i can measure that i can measure the depths of your connections in a way one of the ways to develop a particularly profound connection with somebody quickly is to be vulnerable to ask for help and it's uncomfortable but if you do that you rapidly rapidly increase the profundity and power of that connection and and so you know when i was thinking about the the things that i would ask people to do it would be to to be to take a brisk walk with a close friend and talk about your problems do you think of that as brain sort of movement brain brain sort of nourishment it is out of all the things i could tell you read these these these great books eat this certain meal taking a brisk walk with a close friend and talking about your problems may be one of the most beneficial things you can do for your brain overall it gets at some of the biggest things and i use that as an example tony of how i layer people through these 12 weeks getting that point and that vulnerability and how to get to that vulnerability writing letters how to ask for help all that sort of stuff which i never thought would be part of a brain book but that those are the steps you need to take to get the optimization that we're talking about you know and again sanjay i sound like i'm a fanboy for you i guess i probably am that's because i catch you i think i think one of your great uh skills on screen is that you are vulnerable like you share information but it's not just intellectual like you can feel your concern you can feel when you're not sure the answer and you don't know the answer and you'll say that which i don't see many doctors say i think it's one of the reasons people respect and love you so much i think that's beautiful give us give us one more piece i love that because first of all you hear it on the surface and you go come on right but the beautiful part about it is it's so actionable and it's and you and i both know about 48 roughly depending on which research project you read what we do is habit they have the same thoughts the same feelings and so your whole description about doing something different taps into that but to take something that is so natural and so easy and so effortless and be able to develop brains that someone could do this at any age right that's what i love about this and it doesn't matter if they're you know advanced in age or they're young this is something that we all desperately need and want it's what makes us feel more alive and makes us more more human give us another tip if you would out of the 12 weeks yeah by the way just just with the the the walking thing in in the brisk walk that that is i mean that was the whole point that you like i think we we're always making choices in our life right a lot of people may who are thinking about their brains people may who may be listening right now they're thinking okay i want to do the best thing for my brain kind of like i would go for a run for my heart whatever the best of my brain i i really you know i i know that people sort of fundamentally understand this but there are best ways to live this isn't just a random sort of way that we're navigating our way through life there is a best way to live for your body for your brain for your mind and all that it will be exists yeah for so it it sometimes people feel like it's just preordained what's going to happen is going to happen you know what control do i have it's very it's this very sort of hapless sort of you know way of looking at things it doesn't have to be that way that that and that's not trying to make you do something that's making you think differently about what is likely to happen or not i think another big one though you know we talked about the idea of discovery in the form of new hobbies and preferably ones with your hands i think when it comes to nourishment um it's a really interesting sort of paradigm because again i fully believe that once people get to the healthy brain they're going to make good food choices it just it's like evolutionarily speaking i want to be here yes i want i i'm not doing nothing new momentum doesn't it like a new identity for somebody i want to be here when it comes to nourishment in order to get to that healthy brain where you make those good decisions i really do spend a lot of time getting very specific about sugar yeah and and i'm not the first i i did a 60 minutes piece on this years ago called the toxic truth which you know a lot of people took issue with but the the the thing about it is is that the brain is exquisitely sensitive to sugar let me just put it like that so at a time when you're taking in lots of calories in the form of glucose what often happens is you get all these receptors in your body that are basically saying come on in you know tons of energy we'll store it you know and that's great and that ends up you know leading to overweight obesity putting at risk of diabetes all the things that we talk about what is interesting about the brain is that as you saturate glucose into the bloodstream there the brain because it's so sensitive can immediately turn off the receptors so it just says it just shuts the door on it right so you run into a situation where you may be overly indulging your body and starving your brain at the same time i found that fascinating tell people what the long-term impact of that is let's talk about obviously tell them the short term but also the long term so they understand the short-term impact is that that's the wall that's the wall that people talk about you you you were the most creative guy in the world 10 minutes ago and now you can't even think straight yeah i mean this isn't memory loss this isn't the beginnings of dementia this is an acute phenomenon as you're describing but the problem tony to your point is that when you start to starve the brain that way you set off these metabolic processes that are probably though we're still learning about this a breeding ground for for plaques and tangles and inflammation and things like that that become a forest fire of changes in your brain that could potentially you know be a setup for dementia i don't want to overstate it i want to be careful i'm not suggesting everyone who eats too much sugar is going to get dementia but you once you start to understand the process of what's happening here it'll change the way you eat right away you just won't do it i'm going to eat this sugar and i'm going to starve my brain and i'm going to i know i'm going to not be able to think straight i'm not going to enjoy myself i'm not going to have as quality time with the kids why would i do that you know so it's that's another big one wow i you know as an aside i know on coven i just read the other day that the 77 percent of people that die of cope and not get coveted are obese yes it seems to be other than age the highest other criteria that could influence you and i got them you know you talk about people also talking about postcoded brain fog and so forth and the majority of them are obese i was reading yesterday that in uh in thailand they have 66 million people there's 128 coba deaths 128 right it's like trying to figure that out well part of it is they don't have a test that goes 40 times so they don't classify people but the bigger part is they're not obese there it's pretty wild where's the link between you know do you see any link between what's happening with people as some of the side effects of code afterwards that are also related to obesity in your mind or not and obesity obviously being the sugar uptake in the brain or lack thereof totally well you know i got to tell you uh first of all it is an interesting when you when you draw those comparisons between countries for sure taiwan i mean we're going to have 600 000 people who have died of cove in this country and there's other countries that that count their debts in the hundreds maybe even lower than that and some of that is certainly the matrix you know the substrate of the country the health of the country some of it was you know i i'll be honest with you this may not have even been the black swan event that people necessarily talk about the black swan event where you got this highly contagious virus that is also very lethal this was highly contagious and it was very lethal but you start talking about 10 mortality rates versus 1 that's a real obviously that'd be a disaster and we've already got that with heart disease and cancer and but no one that talks about anymore because they're so used to it right what is it three thousand or four thousand people die if they have cancer heart disease it was like that that's like uh you know a 911 happening every day but they're moms and dads but we don't see it and so i've gotten used to it somehow well heart disease does heart disease is still the biggest killer in the country 600 000 people die of heart disease every year although covid a disease that didn't even exist a year ago yeah probably surpassed that so i think it is dramatic when something that didn't even exist to go suddenly becomes the biggest killer citizens in a country but nevertheless you know i think that the the idea especially now as we sort of think that we are starting to come out the other side of of this you know i feel the light on my face for the first time in a while i'm looking at me in my basement by the way this is the basement closet where i'm talking to you from this is this is my life i've been in this sensory deprived closet for i mean it's the system i mean i wouldn't do this to my good friends or my worst enemies but anyways the the idea that it's going to get better i think is is definitely true but it has it has sort of revealed or reminded of this problem we got 30 obesity rates in this country and that was one of the biggest risk factors uh for for getting really sick and even dying of covet what are we gonna do about that i mean you know we're gonna do lots of things different we're going to be more pandemic proof we're going to search for viruses so that they don't turn into that's as big a problem we'll create antivirals we have better public health but we got you know it starts with us it really does we we see that how big a risk factor that was so what does recovery look like for you know i that that's a big that's a big big objective of mine going forward to really take whatever good we can whatever inspiration we can out of this and use it for good which is to get america healthier yeah because what because we're having impact we can have an impact on our immune system as we can have an effect on our brain but we seem to be you know outsourcing that to the pharmaceutical industry and they can do a great job for us but they only do so much if you aren't doing your part true absolutely i mean we it is amazing how much we outsource of that stuff that's that's a really good way of putting it i mean people spend more time figuring out the grocery store in their local community than they do like their own medical care i mean it's it we outsource it and you know what going back to being a little humble about this and acknowledging you know blame part of that's probably just a medical establishment overall it's been too didactic it's too top-down people people are you know told what to do not always why they're doing it or you know how to feel empowered around that that's too bad there are countries around the world that spend a hundred a thousandth of what we spend on healthcare every year and have much better healthcare systems because they don't outsource yeah they're not they're not we we're brilliant in terms of taking care of end stage cancer all these different problems but just the basic care gets lost maybe that's the hubris of a wealthy country tony maybe we always want to wait for the home run and the touchdown the knockout punch we don't want to just lean into the basics why would i why would i eat right i could take the purple pill you know that's it that's the metaphor i feel for doctors though too because you know you see the metaphor i try to give people is you know doctors out there i know you're an example of it like here you're doing all this in your nurse church and i can only imagine i can try to manage all this and be a father and be a husband and be i got my own versions of that but i know what that must be get a sense like for you and then you know here you are trying to help somebody and you're seeing all these people like i feel like they're drowning in water you jump in you swim save one and then there's two and you save two then there's four there's no time to go upstream see who's throwing them in you know and it's like and i i look at that today it's really fascinating and there's so much new data coming out i was looking at the screw called new amsterdam genomics i don't know if you're familiar with that company i love what they do because every two weeks they don't just give you a genome breakdown because your genome is you know is the light bulb the light switch is epigenomics like that's what's going to trigger it two people the same genes have a different life but what i love is like how do you keep up with this and they literally have an ai for those you're not familiar with a company and every two weeks it reads all the new journals and it's an average of three million pieces of literature every two weeks how would a doctor ever keep up with that i mean there's you know the half-life of medical education i know it is now four or five years i've read the most recent study but holy cow it's a tough job and that's why i think we got to be the ceo of our own health that's why i'm having you on i want people to take charge because there's little things that we can do that can prevent you ever being in that place so let's talk about those two words nobody wants to think about within themselves with their family and that's obviously dimension alzheimer's what you know the second part of your book there you kind of you focus on not losing your mind a little bit i think it's the language you remember right and tell me what what do i what do you know about science now that can help us not have to deal with this or if we are dealing with what are some of the things that we can do to help someone ourselves start to turn things around what's the latest science showing us the their the latest science is is um revealing that we probably will have something that comes in the form of a pharmaceutical sometime it's i'm not i'm i'm only stating that at the beginning to just give you a sense of we've gone 20 years basically 15 to 20 years now without any new therapeutics right with regard to alzheimer's i mean possibly going to be one of the biggest neurodegenerative diseases of our lifetime we don't have anything really yeah i mean i'm not trying to sound dramatic but just you just think about that for at a macro level think about any other disease that's going to be that prevalent where we basically say well i don't know what to do you know so that's that's that's an issue what i what i think from a scientific perspective though is most exciting there will be something exciting in that arena but what i think is most exciting is that we can now visualize the brain in a way that we couldn't before and this is really relevant the brain was like a black box a black box is something that you measure by its inputs and its outputs you never really get an idea of the internal mechanisms of the brain now we can because we can image it and measure it and measure its function in different ways so that's really that's really um i think very important in terms of determining what's going to work best to basically handle you know a burgeoning sort of crisis of alzheimer's and dementia because the numbers are increasing one thing i found extraordinarily inspiring in my case although it was presented i think as a piece of bad news was that if you look at people with dementia what you now know is that the process began in their brains decades earlier yes so they're in their 70s whatever 80s and they have now diagnosed alzheimer's but we know from lots of data that people who had their brain imaged decades earlier actually have the signs of of plaque and tangle things that be associated with what they call pre-clinical disease you have the disease you just don't have any symptoms yet now people were horrified 45 million people they think in the country are in this position right now to me that meant one thing which is you can have a brain that has plaques and tangles in it and still be functioning normally that's what i want you to focus on yeah don't focus so much on getting rid of the plaques and the tangles because we know that you can still function normally if you have those in your brain so who who are the people who continue to have these plaques and tangles and never develop symptoms who are they why does that happen for them and how can i how can i get myself into that position that's really in so many ways i'm simplifying that's where the science is sort of headed we know who these people are and that gets back to a lot of what we were talking about in terms of cognitive reserve cognitive resilience building those extra roads it's not that i don't have plaque in my brain it's just that that plaque that blocked the road i drive that's not a problem for me i got 50 other roads i can drive around it right around it so do i have alzheimer's if you were to objectively measure plaque in my brain you could say that that's someone who has evidence of alzheimer's disease is it consequential for me no i'm living it cognitively not only am i living a cognitively normal life i'm continuing to grow new brain cells so that's i think that's that's one of the exciting areas just overall about about where the science is headed there's going to be all these other interesting things in terms of injecting ai platforms into our behavior yes what is the best way by the way it's not it's not 10 000 steps for you you're actually much better with 9 000 steps and by the way don't ever call your mom on tuesdays because you always have a busy meeting on tuesday afternoons and running in the morning is definitely better for you than running in the afternoon there's going to be ai that's going to really inject and infuse how we live but ultimately what i'm describing i think this idea that there is a best way to continue to rewire the brain exists and now we'll just figure out the best ways to get there there's a there's so many companies right now too that are you know there's so much money going at just dealing with aging you know the the the benefit i think of having a silicon valley and the kind of innovation that's gone there's also there's been wealth there that's ridiculous wealthy could never be spent and these individuals are now funding like the guys from google types of research that has never existed before just traditionally through medicine the funds are flowing and we're also starting to digitize health right you know it's like we know just you know crispr is an example of it obviously or the new version of prime that we're starting to know that we could the whole human mechanism is code so every technology that we've seen grow that we now take for granted that you know on our hand we got a phone that's what a thousand times more powerful and a millionth the price of what took us to the moon right but it now grows as we all know it doubles in its power halves and its cost but now we're digitizing health and to me that's the most exciting thing about the time you and i are alive and our kids and our grandkids i mean that we're literally on the verge of breakthroughs and that's what people need to understand it but they got to do the things you're talking about so they can hang around long enough for the five 10 15 years for some of this stuff to kick in do you agree or how do you feel about it i i look i totally agree with you tony h here's the thing i think and and this may be more of a philosophical discussion which i'm i'm love to have with you and that is that yes we will figure out through genomics through proteomics through a lot of the the research that's happening in aggregating large data like that so we can find these patterns and all the things that you're talking about and we can edit gene edit you know in the form of crispr and all these types of things in order to what in order to live a long happy life right right my and i think it's wonderful and i think it's i think it's great because it's it's it's an intellectual sort of pursuit that entire industries and and smart people get around the only thing i'm saying and this is the irony is that we don't actually need all that stuff to get there no i i agree with you brother i agree with you we're creating technologies to solve a problem that we can solve ourselves that's another way right and and that's that's that's okay i mean it really is okay because you know it's kind of like we sent a man to the moon why yes but what did that do for us well we got gps out of we got better flying golf balls autonomous vehicle all these things in some ways derive from that so there's all these halo benefits of saying i want to promote you know these these longevity therapeutics and all that sort of stuff part of me does think tony that's we'd be better spent just doing the basics that get us there easy cheap and focusing all that intellectual capital yeah bigger problems you know i think not not that this isn't a big problem but but like important life-sustaining you know we got like these huge things everyone's planning for the future like what does that mean right now i mean i don't want people thinking about that you know so and when we're healthy brains right which by your definition means like we have these larger connections and larger levels of caring you tend to do that because when you care about somebody you think about consequences in their life that's part of it right that's what compassion is you step in their shoes yes you and i were three years ago yesterday we were in a place that really shifted my life you and i were together we're at the vatican and there's a conference the pope does every two years it's a regenerative medicine conference stem cell is a big part of that believe it or not but it's not fetal stem cells so the pope sees this as a gift from god it's a way to transform life you and i met people with stage three cancer turn around all these different rare diseases turned around i was blown away i got the privilege of being the cleanup speaker at the end but i said i'm not coming for the end i'm going with the whole thing you know i'm gonna learn and i'd have this experience of stem cells where i torn my rotator cuffs so severely in a silly snowboarding accident chasing a 25 year old who snowboards all the time and i turned so bad that the pain was nine nine and three different surgeons said that the only way you gotta have surgery this is torn there's no way and then the you know the the process can as you know sometimes your shoulder can get frozen it takes three six months for rehab and i was like i met dr bob ferrari became my friend who spoke at that conference and now my partner he's kind of one of the founders of stem cells and he said don't get the stem cells here here's where to go here's what to do i have those stem cells not only did my spinal stenosis disappear i stood up for the first time without pain in 14 years but nothing on my shoulders so i thought that was the breakthroughs and then i went there and discovered things like the wind pathway and and it was amazing to be there and so there are these tools that are coming and i'm interested in those i still think i want people to do what they can do that's why i'm having you on but i think it's good for people to know like for example if they have alzheimer's i know at ucsf there's a new video game they've created and it's not complex it's driving a car but with all these distractions and it's it allows people who are in their 70s and 80s within four to six weeks go to ucsf to have the same cognitive capacity as somebody in their 20s again like because it interrupts you and you have to recover and that's i guess part of what happens sometimes now you lose your point of view and you can't get back to it so there's some tools out there that are amazing and i i want people to know about them but what do you i'm curious what are you most excited about that's coming besides what we can do now i'm not negating everything you said because you know i'm in your corner ceo of your own health is who you need to be but what are some of things coming so if somebody is already in a bad position that they could say oh these are some of the things that could make a difference in any of these areas around brain health or just anything around vitality as a whole that you're excited about well yes and where did you pull from that conference i'm curious if that was three years ago i didn't speak with you well okay so the the conference the the cell-based therapy conference was was i think a pretty indelible experience for me as it sounds like it was for you as well i i i found it very interesting because there hasn't really been a lot of there hasn't been a good regulatory pathway in the united states for stem cells so i think a lot of times it gets ignored to be honest even sort of stigmatized a bit because so many of the the initial sort of uh forays into stem cell therapies were not were done in unregulated way so i think it's sort of black in the eyes of stem cell and what you and i saw when we went to the vatican which i also found quite interesting that the you know a cell-based therapy conference happening at the vatican with the post-independence um it was very interesting but what we saw was data from people who have uh more more lacks regulatory pathways in their countries like germany like israel doing studies on everything from injured knees and painful joints to children with autism yes i mean i i'm fascinated by it i think that the the knock was well you don't have any data and maybe this is going to be dangerous there is data that exists this kind of reminds me in some ways of the marijuana story i had to start looking overseas to find the real data because just that those studies weren't getting funded in the states and that happened a lot in the united states as well and some of that was the collision of science and theology dating back to you know 2000 2001 time frame it put us behind other countries really took the lead on stem cells so i found it really interesting tony and like you i spent a lot of time talking to patients just tell me about your experience i obviously you and i connected over that and i heard about your experience one thing i'll never do as a doctor is tell some a patient you didn't have that happen to you you you didn't benefit from that who am i to tell somebody they didn't benefit from something yeah this is this is a truism that i'll always keep it doesn't i i it is my job to make sure you're safe i wouldn't i would not want you to do anything and harm you but if you take something in your and you say you benefit from it i'm not going to say no you did not and that's a little bit of where we are with stem cells right now i think i think it's just a fascinating idea that you could take cells from your own body minimally manipulate them and then inject them back into your own body what is that is that a drug is that a device no it's something totally different it's your own body you know so i i i really took a lot a lot out of that uh for sure and i'm excited about that area to answer your second question i you know i think that the the idea of to me in some ways it's an extension of the same thing we all contain the capacity to heal ourselves yes i don't i i want to be careful when i say that because there are people who truly have problems that require extraneous treatment so i don't i don't want to overstate that but i think largely within us we have the capacity to heal ourselves of body and of mind and i think the cell-based therapies is a is a good example of that sometimes it's through this you know we're going to take cells from one part of your body that are highly regenerative cells inject them into another part and get these benefits i think is just really fascinating i'm really fascinated tony by the artificial intelligence and machine learning platform yeah me too you're seeing this stuff i'm seeing this stuff this to me gets back to this idea that there is a best way to live i i envision a world where i live my happiest and healthiest life but i also because of the wonderful technology and and innovation around me that the perfect meal for me shows up wherever i am at the right time that i need it the right food right person right place right time that technology exists right now we spend about i read a study 30 to 40 percent of our time we spend thinking about food like what are we going to eat how am i going to cook it and almost 100 of the time we get it wrong so we spent all this time thinking about food and we almost always get it wrong there is a right answer out there i know that tony woke up early this morning tony had a late night last night he's gonna need more protein before nine o'clock you know that juice that he normally drinks that'll upset his stomach that comes at 11 o'clock you know you don't know that stuff you can't process all that that's like the three million journals that you know the ai platform is reading but that knowledge exists so optimizing our lives through technology in a way that is frictionless just part of our life i expect the food to be there when i need it i am right as i'm getting hungry the food shows up and it is the perfect meal for me yes i know the perfect time to move i know how to check in on my kids in a way to have those profound connections that i was talking about i don't know what it like was like when your kids were teenagers but right now like i'm struggling i i really you know i have three teenage girls in the house all at the same time you got a lot of hormones going on in there too i write books about the brain and i do all this stuff i cannot figure out these three teenage girls i can't i'm thinking i'm a good dad right this is a conversation often as my head's hitting the i'm a good dad right rebecca you know yes yes you're a good dad why do they talk to me oh my gosh well listen you wrote in your book about the synapse project about these uh super agers i think you call their super brain people in their 80s and 90s and they have cognitive abilities that are the same as people in their 30s what did you learn from them that was more a in some ways what ended up being a confirmation of what we thought was already possible okay okay you originally approached it as exactly as you as you describe and we call them super brainers because in the context of things they still are but there was really you know there was a few specific mutations that we find uh that may be beneficial but the thing that really jumped out at us and you know we spend a lot of time talking to longevity researchers about people who are super agers super brainers and all that and they haven't really basically said okay well this is the super brain gene if you have this you will have a super brain it's the collection of things that's almost always influenced as you talked earlier about the more about the environment and the epigenetics even more than the genetics so it was more a confirmation that the brain can even as you age continue to get sharper that was that was basically it we met 90 year old stock brokers who are still doing five digit math in their head just like that yeah i can't do five digits i probably never could because that wasn't a thing that it did yeah you wouldn't think that you would still be able to do those things and and you know we think of memory as i remember what to buy at the grocery store when sage sent you over to the grocery store whatever it might be it's not that it's it's really that ability to to assimilate all this different knowledge and make it meaningful i think you just said the key word there is meaningful it seems like to me in my own experience and i don't have your scientific background it's the more meaningful it is the more connections you make in the brain right the more you remember it the more it's there and so the things that are meaningful that people associate to meaningful are the things they remember that and emotion because you know if you ask anybody where were you in 9 11 do you remember the moment you heard about it anybody even in other countries will tell you but he asked him where were you on 8 11 of the same year they don't have a clue because information without emotion is barely retained but when it's meaningful when there's an emotion connected to it i think my guess is i'm not a neuroscientist you've got to be making more connections in the brain and therefore you know you have more roadways to be able to hang on or pull back that information how true so so it's it's it's very true and it actually has led to a whole new way of thinking about things when we have strong emotion associated with an event you tend to release again a lot of the same adrenal cortical stress hormones that we talk about that that's a fight or flight you know you get a little stomach you know it feels a little queasy whatever it might be that's that's all that that's the physiological response what we also know is your blood pressure goes up your heart rate goes up and those stress hormones actually in a way sear the memories into your hippocampus even stronger yeah so that's absolutely true what is fascinating tony and again you know you read so much you know you may know this already but it can be too much right you got to get to the point of post-traumatic stress exactly you're incurring the memory over and over again and it's repetitive and it's destructive and what people have started doing based on the knowledge that you just described is actually giving anti-hypertensive medications in the emergency room someone has had a traumatic experience i'm going to lower their blood pressure because when i lower their blood pressure fewer stress hormones less likely to become an impenetrable repetitive destructive memory fascinating right so fast are you doing they're doing that mail sunday bring that now people who've had traumatic they got hit by a car on their bicycle women who have been raped um you know their antihypertensives beta blockers yeah you know people take i don't know if you've ever done it probably not because it would take away your energy but sometimes people who have terrible straight stage fright will take a little beta blocker before they go out on stage it's that same type of medication to basically just bring down your stress hormone levels and make it less likely to be a destructive memory wow tell me you wrote about uh something in the book uh this dementia village i think was in amsterdam i remember correctly and tell us a little bit about that and what you learned from it and are you familiar with dr langer's work we're back i think was in the 1980s she's a friend i met her she's those not familiar with her work she uh did a lot of work with pipa in their 70s and 70s late mid 70s i've been describing this properly i remember she put him in a monastery and she's telling me the story in depth and i read about it later but what she basically did is have them go back in time she made the monastery where all the pictures were of them when they were young in their 20s it was the equivalent of their 20s on the radio and the music and ask them to act like it and then she took a group where she put in the same monastery but they didn't act like it they didn't change the visuals and not only did they change like a variety of things like they sat up straighter their posture was better you know those are things you can guess on but their hearing increased and their sight increased and not only that but the quality of their life increased are you familiar with that study and and can you give us any feedback about dementia village and how do we deal with people as they age so that besides all things you've talked about so perhaps the environment because the biggest thing i got from her was that expectations the expectations of the people around you radically affect the unconscious thinking i mean i know this obviously of how people respond and so in our culture as people get older very often it's different than let's say you know an asian culture where sometimes elderly is wisdom our culture used to have that but we're so youth obsessed it's a little different so i guess i have two questions out of this so if you look at this study and how much does the expectations of the people around us and our expectations of ourselves affect how we age or how our minds or brains work and anything you want to share about dementia village because i found it interesting i i you've got me thinking tony right now because i i read some of langer's work and this is from 30 40 years ago i did not even know some of those findings about improved senses and things like that it's really interesting and hearing um so let me i want to answer the question let me tell you about dementia village which i i just thought was really interesting it was basically these two hospice nurses who were friends and and they were sitting around talking and about some of their worst fears for their own parents and you know given that they take care of people in these these settings they sort of both came to this conclusion that one of the worst things uh was if one of their one of their parents developed alzheimer's and needed to be in a inpatient medical facility of some sort they found that all those types of setups that they had seen were very dehumanizing they didn't actually change the outcome at all or improve the outcome or lengthen the duration of life it was basically just a really really sterile unfamiliar non-empathetic holding ground for people who are slowly becoming losing their their memory so they wanted to create something different probably some of it was based on langer's work because there was this belief uh initially with music that the more that you can actually immerse someone in in things that are familiar the better it is overall for them in terms of their thinking not necessarily bring back all these memories but their thinking and their judgment and their ability to interact what would improve so what they did was this is in amsterdam they basically just bought a little village um and and turned the entire village i'm talking movie theaters and hair salons and restaurants and piano bar and all these things and and living accommodations into a village every single resident there has dementia every single person who works there is a caretaker um they they live in these settings like if you came from a a engineering background you would be in a housing that would be with people who are familiar to you artists would live in another area people who are business people would live in another area so they could immerse them in that sort of comfortable familiar setting and there was two things that jumped on me i loved doing the story because i um just thought it was a really humane way to take care of people i mean just felt like they they they were happier and they're not being medicalized it's more just where we recognize here's what you know is happening with your your mind and your brain here's the best way to live in that situation i thought that was beautiful they also found that like you found with some of langer studies people lived longer they took fewer medications they ate better they reported better happiness scores their families reported better happiness scores all this sort of stuff it was it was really remarkable and when we did the cost analysis on this because people immediately said well why don't we do that in the united states why doesn't you know why isn't there something in florida and california and texas and places where people retire that are these villages well you anyone can do the cost analysis on it i did it's cheaper so you could create these villages now and recognizing that there's going to be a large number of people who develop dementia over the next you know few decades and really understand that this is a a really cost effective but also humane way to take care of elderly people who develop these problems i worry about this myself my grandfather had dementia i thought my mom maybe she'll still develop dementia i like i'm a doctor i live in this world and i still don't know exactly what the right thing to do in terms of facility and care and all of that has the average person figure that out think about a village searching for the solution ahead of time like you do seeing the pattern which is very evident in doing something about it so that's what dementia village was really all about let's hit another subject that sounds overly simple and boring but you talked about that you didn't call it sleep you called it rest i've i've had this attitude i got to be honest up until only a few years ago and probably since i started studying it in depth i'll sleep when i die you know i'm a four hour four and a half hour sleeper i can only do that so long but five pretty consistently i get six you know maybe once or twice in a month and maybe seven every two or three months now recently i've tried worked really hard to change that because i read some studies and the one that blew me away was the 1.65 billion person experiment which is we see every single year i'd see you nodding your head so maybe i'll pass the ball to you on this one tell them about the experiment that we do and tell me a little bit about rest and sleep experiment being daylight savings time and what we've learned about it statistically around heart disease for example so this has been a big topic of discussion for some time but probably going back to our early agricultural days when we where's daylight savings came from in the first place but really trying to understand the impact overall on our um i think it was a there was a productivity study that was part of it uh look at our overall uh life expectancy and all that and how that was impacted by daylight saving i think that's the study you're talking about right yeah well so and i want to relate to that to brain health but the idea that i think it's 24 more heart attacks right after within a week and then but when we go back it drops almost proportionately 23 less heart attacks that's the thing that like grabbed my brain right for just just that one hour change for a society the one hour change that gave us that much more rest you know yeah you know so i think that there's lots of good data about the the health benefits of sleep i mean there's been literally encyclopedias written about this and and i i'm like you uh in that i know those things but i still will try and hit the corners in terms of how much sleep i need right what what i think will resonate with you tony because this resonated with me is that most of our memory most of our ability to actually recall things that process by which those memories are stored happens during sleep yeah and rem sleep right not just during rem sleep and and when you're getting that good quality sleep and you're storing those memories that is that is the movie track of your life those are your memories that's your narrative if you aren't getting good sleep you have all these amazing experiences you aren't getting good sleep you will not recall those experiences as well if at all later on in life and i just say that as almost again a little bit of a broader look at talk about the health impacts of lack of sleep but if if your goal is to have a life that you can continue to replay the wonderful movie track narrative in your life you can share those experiences with others all that you want to remember these things you need to get good sleep it's it's just that simple you need to actually sleep at the time you're having these experiences so that you can really impregnate these memories into your hippocampus i tell my kids this all the time by the way when they're trying to decide do i stay up all night cramming or do i get some sleep it's a pretty it's a pretty when you when you understand the brain it's a pretty easy answer yeah there is another rinse cycle that happens in the brain as well when you sleep yeah you're rinsing away these metabolic byproducts that we talked about earlier and they if they don't get you know efficiently cleared they can be a breeding ground for inflammation dementia all the things that we talk about so yeah there's all there's all kinds of good reasons to get sleep i i would say for you just as your friend please you should get more sleep and and you know right do i mean if i might get the kettle calling the pot black there or i'm telling you i'm your friend right we don't always practice what we i'm your friend but here but i wear this i've wear this freaking move because one thing i know is what gets measured gets you you start to make improvements on and i started wearing this loop and i have been now conscious about getting enough sleep and specifically rem because i know that's where the hippocampus stores your memories and if you do that you know it's going to affect if you don't get that rem sleep it's going to affect your capacity yes so i hear you don't notice it in the short term but like if i start to ask you about a year ago or periods in your life where you're really getting poor sleep they're going to get blurry on you and maybe there were some wonderful experiences that happened there but you know it it is it is really interesting tony i think you are really one of the most relentlessly positive people i know so i wouldn't say that you know getting getting more sleep will make you happier because i really feel like you're you are the guy i envision i mean i i i've told you this before i'll say it again sometimes i need to imagine someone when i'm writing uh what is the embodiment of of the good that i'm trying to elicit you know in the in the reader's mind and you are often the person that comes to mind you really are no you it's just it's the energy it's the relentless positivity i feel like you are always so kind to me but i think you are just that kind of person kindness to me what i what i really think i've learned is that kindness to me is the ability to be kind but i think almost more importantly it's the act and the ability to interpret other things as kindness mm-hmm you look at how people behave and you see the good in them that's a that's a profound kind of kindness and and so you really um but imagine you want sleep all that you already have would be like turbocharged so i think you should definitely tony on sleep i hope out of this podcast one things that people will do is i when i listen to something you hear so many beautiful things what i always try to do the ends go okay out of this what am i going to act on and you're not going to do everything but you know are you going to say okay i'm going to create a brand new habit before i eat for 20 minutes we're going to go walk with my wife or my friend or whoever it is i'm going to do this piece i'm going to make sure i sleep one more hour or 30 more minutes or whatever the pieces are that you get here or from dr gupta's book here that you just make them a habit because you know one of the things is people don't realize how easy it is to establish a habit habit stacking is one of the easiest ways like you're brushing your teeth you do your vitamins at the same point and after a while you don't have to think about it just happens or just starting small i think that's one of the great things that you do sanjay is you make things easy so you start with three push-ups you know and you might feel like an idiot but and then all you do is next step you increase one percent two percent a day before you know it you're doing 50 or 100 push-ups you know or just eliminating the decision you know all the research shows doing something every day is easier than three times a week that's why certain certain things like i get up in the morning i do my cold plunge every morning i don't there's never a morning look forward to it but i do it every morning and there's not a question i don't negotiate with myself it just happens so a lot of what you want in your life you can turn into positive habits but if you learn something it just becomes cognitive that's useful it means it's useful information but will you retrace it and the other thing i just want to put is you brought up something really important which is those memories i don't think we're gonna remember everything no matter what we do but we're gonna remember certain moments in our lives magic moments i call them and it's like i remember one time i the one thing i felt i could help people with anything but the one thing i didn't feel effective at was when someone was dying especially when someone was dying you know you know of a disease that's incurable it's like what do i do and i think part of this i handle that within myself and one day i was with this man i just what can i do to help him and it's like i thought you know i can help him polish up his memories and so i spent two hours just asking him questions which i naturally do anyway i love people about his life and what he's been through and the loves of his life and the biggest challenges and things he was most proud of and what he was most grateful for and i watched this man come to life with a level that was just so beautiful but the secret sanjay was stacking it not one question or two but one after another after another and you know you know and i know that you know you can have 10 minutes of anger and it's going to suppress your immune system for about 45 minutes to two hours man which research study you read right but i found that you can stack positive emotion and it'll flow for hours after that and it starts to create a different pattern in the brain and so it brings up one more question and i want a final question for you and that is there's a four-letter word that has become an obsession in the last 12 months and it is not necessarily the one the overuse of this thought is antithetical to almost all progress and that word that little four-letter word really is relating to how we take risks today in society you know it's like you look at people today and now everybody kobe being the driving force of it is like no risk like you know we've known you know since the lancet last june that our kids could be in school right you know i mean they did three feet studies versus six feet studies you know but today regardless of the individual issue it's like these same kids staying home it's like i'm gonna stay home i'm gonna stay away from everything where does you know where is the asymmetrical risk reward it's like you know 1.2 million people die every year of car accidents right you know and you and i both know if i'm driving down the street there's a lot of risk there's somebody on this side of the street there's nothing dividing this crazy or this person who's drunk or this person reading their text or this person who's fallen asleep from crosstalk and kill me because it happens every day but we still drive our cars why because otherwise you're gonna stay home and do nothing how do we find that balance in our culture that has now been pushed to no risk so that we still have freedom and lives what's your view of that i'm curious well i think i i think it's a really good point i think there's a there's a couple of things i think when we talk about risk to some extent it does i think matter when we evaluate something what our level of control is with regard to the outcome yeah there are some things that are sort of you know um we feel like we have a greater sense of control over which is why people will tend to drive instead of fly even thinking flying flying is a lot safer control you relinquish control you know so if you you know there is a human instinct to to feel like you're in control with covid versus car accident you know sort of the same thing like yeah i'm i'm with the car i feel like i you know i can absolutely get into a car accident there's no question but i feel like i have greater control of covid it's this thing that's floating out there in the air i could become infected all of that and then there was also the notion that i don't even know what this does to me longer term you know like the the brain fog and the long-hauling symptoms but fundamentally tony i think this has been one of the great learnings for me during this whole thing is that if i come to you and i say something has a point five percent mortality okay let's just say and that's not even the right number but let's just say that's the number for this this discussion there's a group of people who will say 0.5 mortality so you're telling me one in 200 people will die and oh my goodness we better be careful we got to you know really protect ourselves one in 200. another population of people hearing the same objective data will say so you're telling me i'm 99.5 percent good what's the plus right same data yeah exactly but the issue a little bit so that's just the truth right and that's that's how people's minds will work but i think what what i've learned and the insight beyond the fact that the subjective interpretation of objective data is so different is that if you are living a life where you don't have to really take risks you know you point five percent could be a lot would you put your kid at a point five percent risk of mortality let's just say if that was the issue right if this was something that predominantly affected kids yeah would put your kid at that risk probably not you know you could take spring break but it's point five percent mortality i don't know if i want to do spring break anymore right so it's that sort of thing on the other hand if you if you are a frontline worker and a central worker or somebody who has to be out there and you're taking risks all the time anyways you may err on the 99.5 good and and this breaks down across socioeconomic lines it breaks down across racial lines there's huge health inequities so you're absolutely right i mean i how do you how do you evaluate risk i mean i i'm surprised sometimes i've had friends of mine who say well they told me that it would be a point one percent chance of this happening so of course i didn't do it and i was saying they were telling you a point one percent chance because they're trying to tell you the preponderance the likelihood is that it's not going to happen exactly we're not willing to take the risk it's it just that's it's it's i think in part based on where you're coming from but it's it's fascinating to to analyze the human behavior it's also though a part of it is the narrative that we give both in our education system and our media systems and all the systems that people start to do about how they look at things because this country certainly was developed by people that took gigantic risks not 0.1 not 0.5 and you know for my own child i would look at it differently i'd say okay what is what is the cost of avoiding that risk that's the piece that's missing in these discussions so often and our society has really shifted there let me ask you one final question and i could go on with you forever but you've been so generous with your time and i really appreciate it i've been learning a lot from you i'm making notes here tony i understand that there's a japanese word i think it's icky guy is how you say it ikigai guy which is really your sense of meaning and purpose what is your icky guy wow you you end on a good one um i have i have a a very practical one and i have a a sort of more profound one um the practical one stems from the belief that um i think that i can help figure out some problems to solve here and and i like taking i i don't mean this in a way that that that sounds uninspiring but i like to tackle problems that i feel like i can solve yes have an impact on and it's not that these other problems that we deal with as a society aren't big problems but childhood hunger to me is just an absolute travesty i i just will never understand it i i went to somalia a couple of times and i covered the famine in somalia and that was probably i've covered wars natural disasters all kinds of things that was probably the worst story and the hardest story i've ever covered hundreds of thousands of children starving to death starving i mean we are going to figure out these amazing things and we're going to come up with ways to de-proliferate nuclear weapons and deal with climate change hopefully on these things children should not starve to death and i know i'm preaching to i'm not i don't mean to sound preachy but it really was just so like that's something we could solve within crops you know figuring out what anticipating what the climate's going to be like in these areas pre-positioning food there's no reason that shouldn't have happened and without any major breakthrough of any sort or even a lot of money for that matter we could absolutely solve that problem everywhere in the world everywhere in the world i think i think the statistic is i don't want to get it wrong but i think about one in six children in the united states wake up food insecure that's right that's crazy like come on wait that's when we can solve tony you and i could solve this problem children would not be hungry again if we actually decided you know so that's that that's a big icky guy for me and i think the other one is sort of more um more general which is that um going back to the very beginning of this discussion i don't want to be the guy that was running in place while i was here on earth i don't want to just run in place i i feel like it's an unbelievable gift we've been given on this goldilocks planet i have my parents to thank for instilling some incredible values in me i am lucky to to you know i think reasonably have reasonably good judgment and be curious about the world and i want to just experience it fully you know i don't want to be i don't want to sound pollyannish that i'm going to solve all the world's problems but i think it's a great crime to not fully appreciate this gift we've been given and does that mean having a lot of fun yeah does it mean doing important work yeah you know all those things together that's beautiful well listen i i um i share your values i know you know and uh i'm gonna donate a hundred thousand meals in your name just out of this conversation today america and your name today i'm gonna do that just as an additional i do a lot there anyway 100 million people a year there because i'm looking to create those solutions i created an x prize that i'm doing in partnership with uh muhammad ben zayad the mbz from his highness from the uae uh 20 million dollar prize to feed the next billion people worldwide and bringing some of the smartest minds together for that so we're aligned with that but i want to make that little donation in your name just as a token of my appreciation for your time and your energy and for what a beautiful soul you are sanjay you're everyone here can experience who you are it's not just blowing smoke you're just you're incredibly humble man your parents uh should be honored and you should be honored they i know they played a role in it but then you've made your own choices along the way you're a gift to us because you're always looking for solutions and your gift to us because of that same vulnerability and that same depth of caring that i hope uh you know all healers all those in medicine or any form of healing will model if they haven't already by your example i love you dearly my friend and everyone please go out pick up keep sharp right it'll change your life and it'll help somebody maybe that you love as well dr sanjay gupta thank you for your time brother mr tony robbins i love you like a brother thank you for your time [Music] you

Channel: Tony Robbins

Views: 53,493

Keywords: tony robbins, motivation, inspiration

Id: oxZkwX4i-14

Length: 85min 24sec (5124 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021