Editor’s Notes: In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan sits down with Dr. Tommy Wood, a neuroscientist and elite performance consultant, to discuss his new book, Stimulated Mind. The conversation explores how lifestyle factors—ranging from physical activity and diet to meaningful cognitive challenges—play a critical role in preventing dementia and maintaining brain health at any age. Dr. Wood breaks down the common misconceptions about cognitive decline, explaining that while genetics play a part, a significant percentage of neurodegenerative diseases are preventable through active engagement and “future-proofing” the brain. Together, they highlight why stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing the frustration of learning new skills is essential for long-term mental sharpness. (Feb 6, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
The Genesis of Stimulated Mind
JOE ROGAN: All right, nice to meet you, sir. Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain. Is that possible? Future proof? Why can’t I say that? I already have dementia. Future-proof your brain from dementia and stay sharp at any age. First of all, what prompted you to write this?
TOMMY WOOD: So I’ve spent a long time working in a whole range of different spheres related to the brain. How to treat newborn brain injury, how to treat and maybe even prevent certain traumatic brain injuries and concussions. Looking at what affects long-term cognitive decline in dementia, as well as working with elite professional athletes, particularly Formula One drivers, trying to help them stay on top of their game for as long as possible.
And I saw across all those different areas, there are these core things that the brain seems to thrive on that are required either for development or maintenance of cognitive function. And these are things that people can apply to themselves on a day-to-day basis, improve their focus and well-being now, and then long-term that translates to a lower risk of dementia.
Understanding Dementia: Genetics vs. Lifestyle
JOE ROGAN: So is dementia a genetic thing or is it a function of atrophy? Is it a combination of those things?
TOMMY WOOD: It’s a combination of those things. Certainly there’s a genetic component. So maybe I will zoom out to start with and just think about what is dementia. Dementia is the clinical diagnosis of losing so much cognitive function that you’re not able to take care of yourself on a day-to-day basis.
There are several different types of dementia. The most common is Alzheimer’s disease. That’s something like 60 to 80% of cases of dementia. The next most common is vascular dementia, something like 10 to 20%. And then there are others like frontotemporal dementia, Lewy Body dementia, dementia you get with Parkinson’s disease.
But those first two, something like 70 to 90% of dementias, they are directly tied to lifestyle and the environment. And right now it’s estimated that somewhere between 45 and maybe even 70 or more percent of dementias are preventable. And most of those fall into those two categories.
There is a genetic component. So Alzheimer’s disease has two broad types. There’s early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, that’s caused by a single mutation in a single gene, something like the amyloid precursor protein gene or one of the presenilin genes. Those people get Alzheimer’s in their 30s to 50s. It’s a very predictable and quite rapid decline sometimes. But that’s maybe 1% of Alzheimer’s.
The vast majority, like when we think about Alzheimer’s, we think about an age-related dementia and this is much more related to the environment. So there is a genetic component you might have heard of: ApoE4.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: So you can have three different flavors of ApoE, apolipoprotein E: 2, 3, and 4. You get two copies.
JOE ROGAN: Which is the one that makes you more likely to get CTE? Is that two?
TOMMY WOOD: No, that’s four as well. Yeah. So four essentially has an effect of amplifying certain inflammatory effects in the brain. That’s probably why it makes CTE worse, makes it more likely for you to get CTE, because if you’re getting repetitive impacts, repetitive injuries, then it sort of exacerbates or makes that inflammatory response worse.
But when you think about that in terms of Alzheimer’s, if you have one copy of ApoE4, your risk of Alzheimer’s is increased by sort of two to six times. If you have two copies, it’s six to 20 times, depending on how you look at it.
But all the data suggest that ApoE4 is a risk multiplier. Right. So it’s not that if you have a copy of ApoE4, you’re definitely going to get dementia. It’s that in the setting, particularly of the modern environment, risks of dementia or risk factors for dementia are amplified, like excessive alcohol intake, physical inactivity, low-quality diet. So that also means that if you have—
JOE ROGAN: Have.
TOMMY WOOD: If you then address those risk factors, you have greater benefit. Right. Because you’re offsetting some of that additional risk. So however you look at dementia from a genetic standpoint, and it can also be family history. Right? If you have a family history of dementia, you have an increased risk of dementia.
But a lot of what comes with family history is shared environment and shared lifestyle. Right. You eat and sleep and move like your parents did. And so if they had a lifestyle that might increase their risk of dementia, you get that as well. So even if you do have an increased genetic risk, you can offset a large part of that through lifestyle and other environmental factors.
JOE ROGAN: Okay, so for some people there’s an increased genetic risk. But do some people who do not have this increased genetic risk, do they still have a possibility of getting dementia just from atrophy or just from sedentary lifestyle? No stimulation whatsoever?
TOMMY WOOD: Yes. So the way we would say it is that not everybody who has ApoE4 gets Alzheimer’s and most people who have Alzheimer’s do not have ApoE4.
The Brain as a Muscle: Use It or Lose It
JOE ROGAN: Okay, so is it just like everything else? Like your muscles atrophy, your bones weaken when you don’t put load on them? Is that what it is?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So that’s like the core thesis of my book. Right. It’s called The Stimulated Mind for that reason. I think that in the—and the title is slightly provocative, because in the modern world, we are hyper-stimulated, overstimulated.
JOE ROGAN: Nonsense.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly. So we’re overstimulated and understimulated at the same time.
JOE ROGAN: Right. We’re getting a lot of input, but we’re not doing any calculations, we’re not formulating new ideas, we’re not being creative, we’re not problem-solving. We’re just being inundated with nonsense.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly. So the function of any tissue in the body—right, you mentioned the muscles, the bones, the liver, the immune system—their function is dependent on the stimulus you apply to them. And so the brain is exactly the same. And if you want functions and networks in the brain to function, to perform well, you need to challenge them in order to enhance capacity in them.
JOE ROGAN: Do you think you need to keep your liver working healthy by drinking every now and then?
TOMMY WOOD: So it’s the example of—yes. If you drink a lot of alcohol, your liver gets better at metabolizing alcohol. So it proves the point. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the alcohol is there to keep your liver healthy. Probably not.
JOE ROGAN: Didn’t they used to do that with people that had—if they had lung problems, they would give them cigarettes?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Like people with asthma.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah. And that didn’t turn out so great. The theory was okay, but I think—
JOE ROGAN: They should have just been breathing heavy. That would have been a better application of that.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: Because it’s just like, you don’t want to torture—your lungs aren’t a filter to torture you. Yeah. So when you started studying this, do you have someone close to you that has Alzheimer’s or is it just a field of study that you were interested in?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, there were two different things. One, I focused initially on the brain early in life, and then your elite-level cognitive performance in athletes. And you kind of see that these things sort of tie together, like what happens early in life, what happens during life affects what happens later in life.
But I also had—my grandfather died of dementia. He was an alcoholic, and he had a combination of alcoholic, you know, alcohol-induced brain atrophy plus vascular dementia.
The Modern Paradox: Overstimulated Yet Understimulated
JOE ROGAN: I really wonder about people today. And this is one of the reasons why I was so interested in this, because what we were just talking about before—that people are being oversaturated with nonsense, but not stimulated in any way that challenges your mind. I mean, this is a constant state today.
And then on top of that, you’ve got a lot of people that are using AI throughout their day to solve all their problems where they don’t think at all.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And there’s been some studies on that that show that it’s a decrease in cognitive function. Like when they ask them to actually use their brain, the brain works less well than it did before they started. So you’re not getting educated by ChatGPT.
TOMMY WOOD: No.
JOE ROGAN: Or any of these. What you’re doing is you’re letting it think for you.
TOMMY WOOD: Absolutely. So one—maybe one of the studies you’re thinking of was a study they did at MIT and they had students write essays, and they could either just write it using whatever they had in their head already or using Google or using an LLM.
And what they showed was that as you increase the amount of outside support you got, you know, Google, and then I think it was ChatGPT, then there was less activity in the brain networks associated with actually doing the task, and students remembered less well afterwards. So, I mean, this isn’t surprising.
JOE ROGAN: Not at all.
TOMMY WOOD: You’re not using your brain, therefore it doesn’t engage in the task. But what’s interesting is that they found a version. So some of the students who had previously written an essay just for themselves, then they asked them to go back and use ChatGPT on top.
And what they found was that the final output was better. So the way that we can use these tools, rather than just asking it to do all the stuff for us, which is what most people are doing and I think will cause skills and maybe even parts of the brain to atrophy because they’re not being used, is we use them as orthotics. Like they can expand our capacities. Right.
You try writing it all first and then you say, “Hey, what did I miss? What am I not thinking about?” And you can kind of build on it from there.
JOE ROGAN: And that might perhaps actually stimulate your mind.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: Why didn’t I think of that? Like, next time I’m writing a paragraph, I’ll consider these options.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, exactly. So you actually have to fully engage your brain in that process. But then the end result might be better.
Social Media: The Illusion of Connection
JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just such uncharted territory for us. Yeah, right. All this, especially social media, I mean, completely uncharted territory that people are staring at their hand for eight hours a day. I mean, that’s really what you’re doing. You’re staring at your hand and you’re hoping, usually unsuccessfully, to get something that really excites you and something that’s really unique and changes your perspective on things.
I mean, I think maybe when I was using social media every day, maybe once a day I would get something that was really interesting that I would save. I’d go, “Oh, that’s actually interesting.” And I would think, “Okay, that’d be a good subject to bring up on the podcast.” But the rest of the time it was just horseshit.
TOMMY WOOD: Well, part of the algorithm—and this, you know, I’m not an expert in training algorithms to do this—but part of the goal of the algorithm is that you don’t get everything that is perfect that immediately captures your attention up front. Right. Because you want it to be random and there’s method in the randomness that keeps you scrolling. Right. Because eventually you’ll get those small bumps that then keep you going.
But what’s particularly interesting about social media is it leverages the fact that we are social beings, so we prioritize information that is called—the acronym is PRIME: prestigious, in-group, moral, and emotional. And this is even greater in social context. Right. Because we are trying to learn about our social environment so that we can survive our group and be fitter.
And so social media makes us think that we will get that information whilst at the same time offering us the exact opposite, which is essentially isolation. But it leverages that desire of the human brain to find this social information and this social connection whilst not giving us any of that.
JOE ROGAN: Also without getting any feedback from another human being while you’re communicating ideas. So you could say the most horrible s* to people in a comment or a text message. You don’t think about it because it’s like there’s not a person there. Yeah, not right in front of you.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: It’s designed for—it’s like an anti-human device. Very weird.
TOMMY WOOD: But I mean if your goal is to capture attention, they’re doing a great job of it.
JOE ROGAN: Well, not just that—they’re acquiring enormous wealth and also enormous influence over just all sorts of things: politics, economics. I mean, some of the richest corporations in the world, they gather a thing that we never thought of was valuable, which is data.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: I mean when people first started using these things, when people first started using the Internet, nobody really thought that data was going to be one of the biggest commodities in the world.
Yeah, but now if they know what captures your attention and what you’ll spend money on, that’s a perfect way to get as much out of you as possible.
Future-Proofing Your Brain
JOE ROGAN: So the concept is future-proofing your brain. What are the things that you think people should be doing to try to future-proof, other than avoiding social media and avoiding a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about here?
TOMMY WOOD: I think every tool has a possible use. For instance, social media, if you have crafted a social media that allows you to maintain connections that you wouldn’t have otherwise. The original version of Facebook as it existed 25 years ago was just posting pictures and you could chat with some family members. Right?
JOE ROGAN: Right.
TOMMY WOOD: So if you use social media like that, and there are studies that show that if you’re using online tools, including social media, and it increases communication and connection beyond what you would have had otherwise, that can be a net benefit. If it’s all you use and it’s replacing in-person human connection, then it’s a net negative.
So there can be ways that it could be beneficial. And if your Instagram feed is just cute dogs running around in the snow, which is what most of mine is right now, that can be a nice five-minute break in between cognitively demanding tasks.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
TOMMY WOOD: That’s fine. But when you think about future-proofing your brain, this idea that there is some unknowable future—we don’t know what the future is going to look like—but if we want to exist in that future, we’re going to need good processing speed, good decision-making skills, good working memory, good emotional and social skills.
In order to maintain those, we need to challenge and stimulate them. So I think the most important thing most people can do is think about new, challenging, and often creative skills. There’s a lot of evidence for creative arts, music—what they do is they improve the function of networks in the brain that are at risk during the processes of aging, particularly because they’re important for attention and social connection.
If we really invest time in doing these things that we suck at and get better at them, we maintain these broad cognitive skills that we’re going to need in the future, regardless of what happens. And some of that is also personal. The goal is to build as much cognitive capacity as possible.
I have this idea of “headroom,” which is the difference between what you need on a day-to-day basis versus what you’re truly capable of. It’s the difference between, on a day-to-day basis, your legs need to be strong enough to get you up off the toilet, but your maximum capacity is like, what’s your max back squat? The difference between those is your headroom.
That gives you capacity to perform when you’re injured or sick or you need to lift your car off your body because it got flipped in a car accident. When you need to draw on greater resources, you want those resources to be there. Because we are going to be stressed, sleep-deprived, sick, and we still want our brains to function.
So investing in really challenging tasks and skills builds that capacity so that we have access to it when we need it.
The Power of Sucking at Something
JOE ROGAN: What is the function? What is the effect on the brain when you learn a new skill, like sucking at something, which I always tell people is one of the best things you can do? A lot of people don’t enjoy it because of their ego. They don’t like being frustrated that they’re terrible at something. But there’s something about not being good at something and dedicating yourself to it and seeing marked improvement that stimulates all sorts of areas of your mind, which I find really interesting.
TOMMY WOOD: Most people don’t realize that the process of learning, which in itself is the core process of neuroplasticity—the brain making new connections and cementing new connections—that whole process is driven by failure essentially, and making mistakes.
Because your brain is a prediction machine, it’s constantly predicting what’s going to happen next based on the world around you and what you’re trying to do. Imagine that you’re trying to do some kind of new move in jiu-jitsu or something, and you have no idea how to do it. You’re going to try it and there’s going to be this big gap between your expectation and reality. That’s going to be frustrating. That’s the feeling of failure.
But that’s what diverts resources in the brain to say, “Hey, we need to close the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened.” And that’s what drives neuroplasticity. This is also what drives the cementing and function of these networks in the brain associated with that.
So the idea that you start sucking at something and you get better at it over time, that is exactly the thing that the brain needs in order to improve and maintain its function.
How Many Skills Should You Pursue?
JOE ROGAN: How many of those things should you take on at once though? This is my issue. I have a problem. I wish I could have four lives that I could run simultaneously. I would do four. I’d have four different occupations. So I try to smash as many things into a day as possible. But there’s many times where I think, boy, I think I’m doing too many different things that I’m trying to get good at. And maybe it would be better if I just concentrated on one.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And maybe it would be better if I just concentrated on one.
TOMMY WOOD: So there’s a few different ways to look at this. I think that a broad base and a broad range of different skills is probably something that we should all hope to have.
JOE ROGAN: Like talent stacking.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, exactly. And if you think about one of my favorite books, “Range” by David Epstein, which talks about the broad range of skills that people who then really succeed in academia or sports have—they didn’t specialize really early. They had a broad base of talents that they can then draw upon as they specialize later in life. And I think that’s something that we can all aspire to.
But equally, what’s probably more common is that we try something and we do it for a little while and then we just kind of give up on it and we try something else. And yeah, there’s a little bit of benefit to that. But when you look at some of the studies that really examine the effect of learning some of these creative skills—and they’ve done it with tango dancers and painters and video gamers—when you compare an expert to an amateur and where you’re seeing the benefits of expertise in terms of the function of some of these networks in the brain, it really is the development of some level of expertise is probably required to see the maximum benefit.
Obviously, the learning curve is steepest at the beginning, when you’re beginning to learn something. That’s when you’ll learn the fastest. But there is also some benefit to expertise. So pick one or two things that you’re actually excited to continue getting better at for a long period of time.
Maybe you do have to try a bunch of different things until you find the thing that really gets you going. But across all those different skills, they have similar core effects on the brain. So you don’t have to do one or both. You can just pick the one that you enjoy the most.
Learning Languages and Finding Time
JOE ROGAN: So it’s just about the struggle of trying to get better at something, essentially.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And my wife is learning a new language right now, and she’s been so excited about it. It’s really interesting because she starts talking around the house in French. And it’s one of those things where I’m watching her do it. She wasn’t doing it, and then she’s been doing it over the last couple months. And I’m seeing this excitement in this new project.
We were talking about it, about how that is one of the things that’s very difficult to do. But it’s more complex than learning because it’s learning and interacting. It’s not just learning. You’re learning, but you have to—it requires this back and forth with another person. You have to understand sentence structure. It’s just complex. And especially French is so different than English. There’s so much weird s* involved in it.
But you could see, I could see in her that this is very stimulating to her mind.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And it made me go, “Ah, man, I should learn a language.” But I’m like, f, where do you have the time to learn a language? But then I thought about when I was on social media all the time, I would look down on my phone some days and it would say, “Screen use today: six hours.” I’m like, fing six hours.
TOMMY WOOD: That’s where your time is, right.
JOE ROGAN: If you spent six hours just learning Spanish, you’d be fluent. I’d be able to go to Taqueria and order in Spanish. It’s like we spend so much time doing nonsense that anything that you can do that requires your brain to be in that uncomfortable state of “What is this? Oh, it’s this. Is that this? Got it.”
TOMMY WOOD: Got it.
JOE ROGAN: That dance, that firing of the synapses and forcing your brain to figure this puzzle out. So many people don’t have that. And I see it in people that get stagnant where they’re doing the same thing every day. Their job is fairly mundane and kind of boring. And maybe they like it, but there’s nothing stimulating about it. They’re talking to the same boring a people. They don’t exercise, they go home, they watch TV and then they shut off and they do it all again.
And then you talk to them five, 10 years later and it’s almost like they’re slipping.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: You see it. You can see it in people that have mundane existences. Their stimulation is so low that their ability to be stimulated is low.
The Decline of Cognitive Function and Modern Lifestyle
TOMMY WOOD: I think that thing you describe is so baked into our society that we’ve started to believe that it’s normal. When you look at the trajectory of cognitive function over your entire life, imagine a graph where on the one side you have cognitive function and it could be something basic like processing speed. How quickly does your brain process information? On the bottom is age.
It tends to peak sometime around our mid-20s to early 30s. It’s usually the peak on average, tends to be higher and later the more time we spend in education. So the more time we spend essentially as professional learners, the more we can build that kind of final capacity. After that it’s just sort of an average decrease downwards.
A colleague of mine, Josh Turknett and I, he’s a neurologist, we wrote a paper a couple years ago where we theorized that the reason why we see that decline at the population level in cognitive function from about that age is because we go to work, we do the same thing again and again and again and then everything else that life gets in the way. And we never spend that same time investing in building our cognitive capacities the way we did when we were kids and when we were in school. And so the decline is partly because we just stop doing that.
One of the theories of aging is that it’s just a continuation of development, a process of development. And most of the processes of development in the brain are refining connections based on the environment and the stimulus the brain receives. So if you start removing stimuli because you’re no longer engaging in these cognitively challenging things, the brain’s going to start removing connections. Hey, I don’t need that. I’m not using this part of my brain. And as a result, you start to see decline.
And so there are studies that show if you have a very stimulating job, it’s very complex, problem solving skills, lots of social interactions, you have a slower rate of cognitive decline as an adult and a lower risk of dementia. You see in individuals who continue to engage in reading, writing, lectures, dancing, a whole bunch of hobbies, again, you see a slowed rate of decline. So some of what we just expect to happen with age is because of the way we stop engaging with the world and we stop challenging ourselves.
JOE ROGAN: Well, it completely makes sense, right? If you think about physical activity, it goes along the same kind of path.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: I have friends. I’m 58, which is crazy to say it sounds so old, but I have friends that are 58 that are basically, they’re skeletons with meat hanging around various parts of it. But my physical ability is very similar to what it was when I was in my 30s. The only way that I could really test it was physical competition. And I’m not really interested in that. I don’t want to get hurt. But my capacity for work is very similar.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And I know that because I force it. I make myself do it. And I would imagine the same thing is true with the mind. I mean, it has to be. I think it’s all together. It’s use it or lose it. And if your mind doesn’t have a need to be constantly intrigued and stimulated, you got to think for survival.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
ADHD: Disorder or Evolutionary Advantage?
JOE ROGAN: One of the things that’s speculated. Maybe I can ask you about this, because this is one of, I think about this a lot. What is ADHD and whether or not it’s actually a problem. I think it’s a superpower, because I’m pretty sure I have it. But yet I’m very functional. I can focus on things. And as long as I tire myself out from activity, I can relax and I can concentrate on things. And I’m very interested in certain things and I can lock into them and concentrate.
But if I was forced to be in a classroom with a very boring teacher teaching a subject I’m not that interested in, and I was a child, if I had the wrong parents, luckily I didn’t, I would be medicated.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: But I think that this ability to focus on certain things, hyper focus, was probably a function of a persistent hunter.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: Because if you wanted to catch an animal, you couldn’t be a person that gives up quick. You had to be a person that, you keep looking for tracks. You keep trying to find sign. You’re trying to figure out a way. I’ve got to keep pushing one more hour. We got 20 minutes of daylight left. I’ve got to figure this out.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: That thing had to be in you in order to be a successful hunter.
TOMMY WOOD: So I’m sure that’s part of it. The current picture of ADHD, I think, is quite complicated. So I have family members with ADHD, when they then started on medication, they were like, oh, actually, all of a sudden, my brain works. So…
JOE ROGAN: Right. But that medication is Adderall.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: If I took Adderall, I would say the same f*ing thing. I don’t need a stimulant. Yeah, but if I took a stimulant right now, I’d be like, dude, I’m so much better.
TOMMY WOOD: So, no, but you know what happens in certain individuals with ADHD when you give them stimulants? They calm down.
JOE ROGAN: Right, right.
TOMMY WOOD: So I think there’s a combination of multiple things. Some is, yes, these can be very beneficial traits in the right settings, but you also have to consider that we’re layering on a modern environment that’s bright light at night, a whole bunch of caffeine and stimulants. And yeah, of course, some of it is, I think, the teacher is boring and they’re just not engaged. Because the majority of people with ADHD can still focus on things that they’re interested in focusing on.
JOE ROGAN: Yes.
TOMMY WOOD: Or on…
JOE ROGAN: Even without any kind of medication.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So, but there’s a sliding scale, and I think there’s a whole bunch of different reasons why for one individual, they might experience symptoms of ADHD or not. So I think it’s complicated.
Physical Activity as a Biological Requirement
JOE ROGAN: Can I ask, before you go any further than that, can I ask you how much of that is dependent upon physical activity? Do we study ADHD based on whether someone is physically active or not? Because, look, if I’m not physically active, I’m a mess. If something happened and for some reason, I got a court order, you’re not allowed to exercise for six months or you go to jail. Oh God, I’d probably be a f*ing complete basket case.
And maybe I would have full on ADHD, maybe I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything. My brain would be bouncing all over the place. How much of it is a biological requirement that your body has to release energy?
TOMMY WOOD: So I think you can, I would expand that even further than that because physical activity is a core requirement of our biology and physiology. There’s a nice quote by Inigo San Milán, who’s a well known exercise physiologist who says that physical activity is baked into our evolutionary development. So much so that now we’ve had to invent exercise in order to prevent what happens when we don’t move. So the lack of movement is a disease causing pro-aging situation.
JOE ROGAN: So to stop you there.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: What if, I mean, or do they, when they treat kids with ADHD, do they take that into consideration?
TOMMY WOOD: So as I’m not an ADHD researcher, so I genuinely don’t know, but…
JOE ROGAN: I would think that before you would give someone a stimulant, maybe track and field, you know what I mean? Maybe play badminton, do something where you’ve got to run around where you’re like, oh, oh boy. I can focus now.
TOMMY WOOD: I think that’s, again, I would say that’s needed for all kids regardless of any potential diagnosis. So of course we need, I think that should be taken into consideration. Whether that’s going to be enough for every kid, hard to say. But we know that all humans require significant amounts of physical activity just for their biology to work properly. So certainly if that’s not being taken into account or it’s not available or it’s not encouraged, there are a whole host of conditions where that’s going to become a problem.
The Case for Exercise Before Medication
JOE ROGAN: Well, it just only makes sense, right? And I mean this has been talked about forever. The Stoics used to talk about it, this quieting the mind. I mean samurais used to talk about it. Physical activity, one of the main benefits the Chinese used for Kung Fu thousands of years ago, quieting the mind and the propensity that we have in the society this direction of almost immediately prescribing a medication for something when it seems like, well, what you’re doing is you’re dulling a biological requirement. You’re dulling the impact of this biological requirement that you’re not needing.
Why wouldn’t we prescribe exercise first and then think about those things? For instance, like hormone replacement. If you have a good doctor, an ethical doctor that is working with someone and they find out you have low testosterone, one of the first things they do is adjust your diet. They say, well, you have so much food in your diet that causes inflammation, you have a very high rate of complex carbohydrates, you have a lot of sugar in your diet, you drink too much alcohol, you smoke cigarettes. Let’s remove those things first and then, let’s see what happens.
And then you increase your protein and you start drinking water and you go, oh, look, your hormone levels are going up naturally. Well, because you’re f*ing poisoning yourself. So wouldn’t you, I mean, why don’t they prescribe exercise for kids? Other than the fact that you can’t make money off of it, wouldn’t it be a good idea?
TOMMY WOOD: So I think that all kids should absolutely get several hours, ideally of movement and physical activity of different kinds every day. Part of the problem, it’s not that scientists or doctors don’t think that’s important right now. The systems that we have make it very difficult for those things to be put in place.
So making sure that every kid has the time and the resources to be able to exercise and the right kind of people so that they know what they’re doing and they’re supervised. And it’s the same with say with testosterone replacement. If your testosterone is low, the primary cause or one of the most common cause of low testosterone in men is that combination of metabolic disease, being sedentary, poor quality diet. We know that.
But creating the systems that allow people to change those things and then supporting them to do that is really hard. Nobody has solved the behavior change problem. If we think about the modern environment and we think about what that drives us to do and not do. But we know, we have all this information. We know how to prevent these diseases, we know how to reverse many of them, and a lot of it is driven by lifestyle and the environment. But supporting people to change those behaviors and make sure they have the resources and time to do it, that’s really hard. Nobody solved that problem yet.
The Challenge of Behavior Change
JOE ROGAN: Boy, that seems like a problem that’s easy to solve. It’s just based on personal responsibility.
TOMMY WOOD: No, but it’s not.
JOE ROGAN: But if you can tell someone, this is your requirement for the day. I want you to run one mile, I want you to do 100 push ups and 100 sit ups and write it down.
TOMMY WOOD: But how are you, so first of all…
JOE ROGAN: But you’re saying something, saying it like it’s impossible.
TOMMY WOOD: I’m not, very, very difficult. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I think that those of us for whom this has become a part of our personality and our lives, like you and me, of course it’s like, of course you just do that. You just go for the run, you do the 100 push ups.
But for people who have never had anything like this and it’s never been a part of their environment, it’s never been a part of who they are, changing that actually requires a ton of work and coaching. And it’s actually really difficult when I say it’s difficult.
The Challenge of Starting a Fitness Journey
JOE ROGAN: But it’s totally doable physically. It’s not like I’m asking you to breathe underwater. Like people have done it. And you can draw inspiration from like my friend Jelly Roll. You know Jelly Roll, the musician? Jelly roll was 500 pounds and he’s lost 300. And he did it with no Ozempic, no GLP1s. He just started walking and started cutting sugar out of his diet.
And slowly, but not even slowly, over the course of just a couple of years, he shrunk to like a normal sized human. It’s f*ing amazing. But he drew inspiration from a lot of other people. You know, one of them, he’s good friends with my good friend Cam Haynes, who’s an ultra marathon runner and endurance athlete. And so, you know, he’s taken him on runs and worked out with them and helped him and just watching YouTube videos and just all he started doing was just walking, you know, where he couldn’t walk up hills and he would just walk around his block and walk up the hill when he didn’t want to do it and he did it.
It’s like it’s not you can do it, you just have to start doing it. And I think the starting doing it is the most difficult. I don’t think it’s difficult to do it once you gather momentum. Because there’s a thing that happens with people when they start doing something, they get excited and then they look forward to doing it again.
As long as you don’t like, you don’t take a guy who’s 500 pounds and say, today we’re going to do 100 push ups, hundred sit ups, we’re going to do kettlebells and then we’re going to do laps around the block. You can’t do it. It’s not possible. But you could just go for a walk and then tomorrow we’re going to go for a walk a little bit further and then in two weeks we’re going to double that walk. And then in three weeks, you know, we’re going to incorporate some light body weight squats and along the way we’re going to adjust your diet. And then write these things down. Like this is, it’s not impossible. It’s just they need motivation.
TOMMY WOOD: So I agree it’s not impossible. But you know, I’ve worked with several digital health companies who are working in the behavior change space and people don’t need more information. Like they know that they need to walk more and they know that they could eat better and they know that they could sleep better. Right.
But the process of trying to first of all understand, like, how should I do that, what should I do that, when should I do that? And then some people may absolutely not have the time or the environment. Maybe they live somewhere where actually, you know what, they don’t want to be walking around outside. Right. That’s relatively common. Or they don’t have a kitchen. Right. So then how do you cook food? Like, how do you navigate that food environment?
So I agree, I completely agree with you. All of this is doable. It’s just that different people are going to need different levels of support to do that initially. Right. Gain that momentum, understand how that feels, how it changes them. And right now the majority of people don’t have access to that kind of support. And I absolutely hope that that changes. Right. The food environment changes so that it’s much easier to change the way that you eat and that the built environment changes. So it’s much easier to go out and have a walk and do a lot of that. So I think we just have to consider that it’s both. Right. There’s an individual component, but there’s also like a societal component where we have to make this as easy for people as possible and sort of like build it into their lives, such as they are.
Implementing Societal Change for Better Health
JOE ROGAN: Okay? So let’s consider the societal aspect of it. Let’s consider the, like, how would you implement something? Like, let’s imagine that you get appointed to some committee that’s in charge of trying to facilitate this growth and improvement in people. What would you do?
TOMMY WOOD: So I think you need a few different parts to it. One great part would be to say through, you know, if you could dramatically improve quality and access of like, education at all levels and make physical activity just be a regular part of that. That has been slowly removed from many educational curriculums around the world over time. Right. So bring some of that back and it just becomes part of day to day life.
And then you would also teach people the skills involved in some of these other things. So like teach people how to cook and how to do that within the bounds of what they have access to their, you know, cultural preferences, dietary preferences, you know, financial abilities, that kind of stuff. Right.
JOE ROGAN: That should be a part of a school curriculum.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Just like you should teach kids about taxes and all these other things. And so I think if you start early on and you do this with sort of curiosity and skill building, then you release people out into the, you know, that. I think that’s the place to start because when you get out into the real world and you’re working three jobs and you live somewhere where you don’t want to go for a walk outside and like you can barely get six hours of sleep every night and you know, you’ve got three kids that you’re trying to look after saying, oh, hey, you should do 100 push ups every day. Like that’s not going to happen. Like other things are going to happen that are more important.
So I think there’s that part, maybe the skill building part. Then it’s thinking about like how people have opportunities to do those things. And then I would think about, you know, access to high quality health care, psychological care, like these things that sometimes people need help that they can’t get access to or it’s expensive or whatever. So I think giving more of that so that they get support when they need it would definitely help as well.
JOE ROGAN: I think one great way would be to devise a website, make like maybe like even a government website where you put in like your body weight. When was your last physical activity? What, this, that, the other thing, what’s your diet? And then they implement a program and you could follow online with a bunch of other people that are doing the same thing and post your results. Yeah, so you have a community aspect to it.
You have a dedicated program that you can follow so you don’t have to think about, oh, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to do this. It’ll just tell you, just do this, just do this. Oh, you weigh 400 pounds, you’re 39 years old, you haven’t worked out in 10 years. Okay, here’s day one.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And follow along, post your weight, post what you’re eating. I mean, that. I mean, and with AI, I mean, that’s one of the good things about an LLM, right. With AI, you could ask it to formulate adjustments.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And you could say, okay, what nutrients should I be consuming? What, how much protein do I actually need? How much, how many calories do I need? How many calories are in this and that? And you know, what is, how much protein do I get from, you know, 20 ounces of broccoli or whatever the f* it is. You know what I mean?
Self-Determination Theory and Behavior Change
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So when you look at some of the most successful trials of behavior change, and most of them are based around weight loss studies, right? That’s a very typical way to do it when you see, when you want somebody to change their behavior and feel good about it. One of the sort of constructs is self determination theory. You probably heard of, right. Humans need three things. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
So autonomy is the, like, I am in charge of my life and I’m in charge of my decisions. So what are the things that I want to work on today? I have some choice there. Competence. Like, how do I help somebody feel like they know what they’re doing? Like, a lot of the hurdles with exercise or diet is like, I don’t know what I’m doing. And like, this guy says that I need to do sprints, and this guy says I need to lift weights, and this guy says I need to do X amounts of zone two. But I like, what does that even mean? Like, do I even know what I’m supposed to do? So how do you build competence in people and then relatedness?
That’s the point that you were making, right? You have a group. Like, you support each other, maybe you do stuff together. So one of the most successful weight loss trials of all time was called the Broad study. And one of the things they did so they lost a lot of weight and they kept it off. And so most weight loss studies, people regain it afterwards is they met several times a week. They did like, potlucks, group activities. Like, they helped each other.
JOE ROGAN: Community.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, community. The one downside of that is that there were, there was an app, I can’t remember the name of it, that tried to build that for exercise. So, like, you’d have these buddies and they’d be your accountability buddies. But what happened was that when people started to slip, they left the platform much faster because they were like, I don’t want my buddies to know that I’m not doing what they are supposed to be helping me do. So you kind of have to like build in multiple buffers and different ways to help people depending on what it is that motivates them or not.
The Case for Public Gyms
JOE ROGAN: I mean, we have public education.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: We have universities, we have public high schools and middle schools. Why don’t we have public gyms?
TOMMY WOOD: Why don’t.
JOE ROGAN: I mean, how much money would it cost to have community gym set up where you don’t have to have money to join, where it’s paid for by your taxes. You’re not talking about something that’s outside of, you know, like financially it wouldn’t be feasible. Yeah, it’s not that hard to do.
TOMMY WOOD: So I think that was the, I don’t know what the financial model is now, but that was the idea of like the YMCAs. Right. So like it becomes a community focus point. Like my wife grew up in North Carolina. It’s like she talks about how they were down the YMCA all the time, like playing basketball.
JOE ROGAN: I used to have a YMCA when I lived in Boston that I used to go to. It was really cheap. They had weights, they had a track, they had a swimming pool, they had all sorts of stuff. It was way cheaper than a regular gym. And they had classes you could take.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, and there was something very similar close to where I grew up in the UK. Just like for a couple of pounds you go do some kind of martial arts class or something.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I had that too. Does Austin even have a YMCA? Yeah, definitely.
TOMMY WOOD: Oh yeah, there’s one. There’s like a big one downtown. I’ve driven past it once. Like, big glass front, like a. I mean, I don’t know what it costs.
JOE ROGAN: How much does it cost to get into the YMCA in Austin? Let’s find that out. I mean, that should be paid for by taxes.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Why? I mean, if we pay for all this other s* that we don’t need, why don’t, why don’t you know when.
TOMMY WOOD: When a big hurdle is accessibility and.
JOE ROGAN: One year new progress pack. Join today. How much? 125 value for a year. Is that what it says? How much does it cost?
TOMMY WOOD: It doesn’t say how much it costs.
JOE ROGAN: What does it cost? Join today. How much? So the secret of most memberships for gyms, they don’t list their prices. Yeah, but it’s some YMCA. Click on join that. Join today. They want you to come in and say hi so they can talk to you. Oh, is that what it is? Everybody that’s how everyone works. But it’s probably cheaper than most. Well, why don’t you put it into perplexity or something like that? Say, what is, how much does it cost to join a YMCA?
TOMMY WOOD: Here we go.
JOE ROGAN: Let’s guess how much you think it costs. 20 bucks a month?
TOMMY WOOD: 50? Yeah. I think it can’t be much more than a Planet Fitness. Right.
JOE ROGAN: Or else Planet Fitness is pretty cheap. But the thing about Planet Fitness is they kind of the, a lot of these big gyms, not just singling out Planet Fitness, they kind of hope that you don’t show up.
TOMMY WOOD: Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s the big. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: You generally look at 40 to 80 dollars per month, depending on age and household type. That’s not too bad.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, but for some people, that’s a lot of money, right?
JOE ROGAN: 40 bucks a month.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. That’s a good chunk of their food bill. So there should be some sliding scale where this becomes very, very heavily subsidized.
JOE ROGAN: Or free.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah. Ideally.
JOE ROGAN: I mean, why wouldn’t it be free?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, I think it should be.
JOE ROGAN: But then homeless people go in there and shower.
TOMMY WOOD: There are. Well, I mean, I’m okay with that, too.
JOE ROGAN: Depends on who they are.
TOMMY WOOD: I mean, if they shout.
JOE ROGAN: Okay. With some of them, you know, f*ing crazy people shitting in the sub, in the shower. Blue Cross Blue Shield. Many health insurance plans offer gym membership through reimbursements, discounts, or programs like Active Fit or Global Fit. Benefits can include $20 to $400 annual reimbursements.
TOMMY WOOD: Some people can use their health insurance to get some of that fee covered.
JOE ROGAN: Okay, well, that’s nice. But the thing is, again, it’s just like Planet Fitness or any of these places. The thing is, like, they want to recruit you and then you go. And you’re like, okay. And then you never go again.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we genuinely want people to go. Like, that’s the whole idea.
JOE ROGAN: Well, the thing is, like, there’s one thing, like, for someone, and I’ve taken friends to gyms before that don’t work out, and they’re like, what do I do? They have no idea what to do. Classes. Yeah, Classes is what should be.
TOMMY WOOD: Absolutely. Classes. Learn a new skill, move, make a friend. Like, so much amazing stuff happens.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And they should have multiple different classes available.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: At the same time.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: There should be a class for people that have done nothing. Like, okay, these are dumbbells.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: This is. Pick up a light one. I’m going to show you how to do a shoulder press. And then it should be for, you know, more advanced people, intermediate people, something.
TOMMY WOOD: And a whole range of different skills. Yoga, Zumba, Pilates, tai chi, slightly different, not dumbbell weights.
JOE ROGAN: But in Austin, they have a bunch of public free gym equipment and different parts. Playgrounds and parks. Yeah, that stuff’s great. Well, in New York City has a whole. Look at these guys, look, Staring at each other, talking shit.
The Importance of Any Movement
TOMMY WOOD: I think one of the problems is that, well, first of all, like, a lot of people might just look at that and be like, what do I do? What do I do with that? And then the second is that a lot of what we see around fitness and movement is kind of the extremes, right? They’re idolized professional athletes. Like, this is what the best of the best do. And we often, we internalize this idea that that’s what we need to do. And if we’re not doing that, then we’re not doing anything. Right.
Whereas all the data suggests that literally any type of movement above what you’re doing right now is beneficial. Cardiovascular health, cognitive health, dementia risk. So I think some of it is just like letting people know and having people understand that it doesn’t take that much to move the needle. And then when they start to do a little bit, right, you get a bit of a bug. Maybe you enjoy it, you find a thing that you enjoy, you do more of it. And so that’s part of it too. Like having people understand that it doesn’t take that much to really start having an impact.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And it’s also, for a lot of people, this is a society that really emphasizes quick fixes on things. And it’s not a quick thing. It’s, you have to trust in a process. And so that has to sort of be, that has to be, people have to be educated to that. It has to be taught to you.
Like, this is a process and you’re on a process. You should be very excited about being on this process. It’s going to be weird because it’s going to take a long time for you to see any results. But that long time, like in that time period, you will eventually see results. And then you’ll be excited, you’ll feel better, you’ll have more energy. It’ll help every aspect of your life. You just got to do it.
TOMMY WOOD: One of the things that I like when I talk about movement in particular or exercise and say cognitive function, is that you will start to see benefits relatively quickly. So if you go and do a six second max sprint a couple of times, right, and there are studies that show this, you will acutely, like immediately see an improvement in cognitive function, better blood flow to the brain. You’ve created arousal, which is really important for focus and attention.
If you go out, go for a walk outside, right, you will sleep better that night so you’ll feel better the next day. And so, yes, you’re absolutely right that this is a lifelong thing. Right. You can’t just do it for a couple of months and then hope that it’s going to translate to benefits for decades to come. But you can see immediate benefits if you start to do some of this stuff and you can feel it very quickly. So I think that that’s going to be important because not everybody is going to feel in the position to invest in their future selves. Right. So if you start to see benefits straight away, you’re more likely to keep going with it.
Working with Formula One Athletes
JOE ROGAN: Okay, so that’s for people. We were just, I mean, I’m glad we covered it, but we’re essentially talking about people that don’t know what to do for people who do know what to do. You said you work with a lot of Formula One athletes and what do you do for like, what is Formula One is fascinating to me. I’ve been to the Cota racetrack. We’re actually putting up a studio. We’re going to have a studio at Cota. We’re have a second studio at the racetrack and the idea is to take people around the racetrack.
I think it would like stimulate their mind and then come in and do a podcast. A lot of fun. Yeah, I’d be like, you’d be like racing mind. It’d be like, woo. That is an incredible sport where it’s fractions of a second, split second decisions. Your ability to react has to be like incredibly fast. Like, have you ever seen the thing where they drop things? Lewis Hamilton is like better at anybody than anybody. He’s f*ing intense. What do you do with them? So you already have people that are primed, right? They’re the best in the world, but they are constantly looking for an additional edge. What are you doing for them?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, so there’s a few things there. My work with Formula One drivers happens mainly through a company called Hintsa Performance. It was founded by Aki.
JOE ROGAN: What is it? Hintsa Performance.
TOMMY WOOD: Hintsa, H-I-N-T-S-A, named after Aki Hintsa, who was a Finnish orthopedic surgeon. He worked with Harley Gabbroslassi, with Mika Hakkinen, he was a two time Formula One world champion. And then now this is like a big sports enterprise and I’m the head scientist for motorsport. So that’s all motorsport categories from like karting in kids up to Formula One.
And we work with several Formula One drivers and we provide coaching and medical services. Each driver or most of the drivers have a coach, right? So like you know, when you watch Formula One there’s like somebody holding the umbrella, holding the helmet, right? That’s usually, well that’s often one of our coaches. They’re usually a strength and conditioning specialist or they might be a physio or a nutritionist. Like they have a ton of really high level skills and they’re there every day, right? They do the sleep, they do the training. Like they’re traveling with them the whole time. They sort of can manage as much of their life as possible.
And when you’re thinking about that level of skill, the stimulus part has taken care of itself, right? One of the reasons why these guys are so good is because it’s all they’ve done every day for two plus decades, four decades if you’re Lewis Hamilton or close to that. And that’s slowly building these skills first in karting, then in these different formula categories, Formula 3, Formula 2, up into Formula One.
And so the kinds of things that we might work on. And so like I’m helping the coaches, working with the drivers, we have like a huge team, you know, doctor who works with a bunch of Olympic athletes as well. And so it’s a combination of, are there any individual performance limiters? So we might do some blood tests, look at nutrient status and various other things, you know, make sure they’re really on top of that with their diets.
But then in that kind of world, and like, I’m sure you experience this yourself, everybody’s got a thing for you to try or a thing for you to do, right? Like you’re constantly being bombarded with the latest, greatest technology and like this guy wants to study this thing. So a lot of what we do is like be really careful about the things that get added and maybe even take stuff away if we need to, like what are we trying to work on, what are we trying to build? What does this one driver need? Because they’re all very different, they need a difference. You know, they have different diets, they have different training programs, they have different warm up strategies for when they get in the car.
Recovery and Jet Lag Management
And so a lot of what we end up doing is focusing on the other side. Right. So if you stimulate your brain, it adapts when you rest and recover afterwards. So because they’re essentially jet lagged nine months of the year right there in a different country every week.
JOE ROGAN: That’s a factor. Yeah, that’s a huge factor.
TOMMY WOOD: Huge factor. And like, on top of like, every race weekend, they’ve got to go meet sponsors, they’ve got to do media days. Right. They’re constantly moving. So it’s, what can we do to maintain their level of performance throughout the season? And this is something that the coaches do a ton of work in. Like, how can we, what kind of exercise? And how can we do targeted training to maintain performance throughout the year?
And then the other part is how can we get as much recovery as possible? Because if we want them to adapt to all the work they’re doing and come back each weekend at the top of their game or as close as possible, we need to get them to rest and recover and come back and do it again. So often we’re not focusing on the stimulus part. We might be in driver training. We might be thinking about how can we develop cognitive skills and these kinds of things and these driver physical skills in Formula One, often it’s, how can we get these guys to recover better, how can we get these guys to sleep better?
And then that might be technology, but it might also be, you know, just like, how can we nail the basics again and again and again? Make sure they’re getting enough time in bed. Right. Especially when you’re traveling a bunch, that gets really difficult. So we’re often focused on the recovery side and how we track. Like, how do we collect those data, how do we know when something’s starting to slip and get on top of it early? That’s the kind of stuff we tend to focus on.
JOE ROGAN: So let’s talk about the jet lag aspect. What are the strategies for mitigating jet lag? And like, how do you, like, let’s say if they fly in for a race, like, if they’re going from Europe to the United States and they have to race, how many days in advance do they arrive and how do they shift their circadian rhythm and eliminate jet lag? What are the strategies?
# Jet Lag Management and Performance Optimization
Strategic Timing for Travel and Recovery
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, the time for them, like the number of days they come before the race will depend on how long it was since the last race, plus what other things they’ve got going on. But it’s often like two or three days. They’ll try and get it come in the beginning of the week at least like Monday, Tuesday if the race is then going to be on Sunday.
And then as much as possible you might start to try and shift things earlier. So shift your light exposure so that it aligns more closely with your destination a couple of days before you travel. Shift your sleep if you can, shift exercise and caffeine timing again because those things shift circadian rhythm so that you can kind of get closer to what you’re going to do when you land.
And so those are probably the primary tools: exercise, light, caffeine. Some of them use melatonin. You can also change when you eat. So like food timing is a zeitgeber, it’s a fancy word for like time giver. Like helps to drive circadian rhythm. So often when you’re flying they’ll give you a meal that’s happening like in the middle of the night in the time that you’re going to land, right? So often you might try and avoid eating while flying and then have your next meal in time with like a normal meal timing when you land.
JOE ROGAN: I’ve heard that one of the things to help jet lag is just eliminate meals when you’re flying, period. There’s something about eating even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the timeline. Like say if you’re flying from Los Angeles to New York. One way to eliminate jet lag they say is just to not eat on the flight. So six hour flight, don’t eat at all usually.
TOMMY WOOD: I think most of that is to do with circadian timing because you’re usually flying at a time when you wouldn’t normally eat. Or like you often like they give you dinner at like 9 p.m. or it’s even midnight, right?
JOE ROGAN: But is that all it is? Because the way it was explained to me is that just there’s something about your body processing food when you’re flying that actually exacerbates jet lag.
TOMMY WOOD: So I can’t think of a, you know, other than the fact, other than the fact that I mean you’re obviously, you know, sat still for long periods of time which might not normally happen at that time of day as well. I think the majority of it in terms, certainly in terms of jet lag plans is thinking about the timing of meals relative to circadian rhythm. Because you normally break your fast at a certain time of day, have dinner at a certain time of day. So I think most of it is related to circadian timing.
Exercise as a Jet Lag Countermeasure
JOE ROGAN: Okay, what about rigorous exercise? Because one of my strategies, like say if I have to fly to London or something like that, and I want to avoid jet lag, I immediately go to the gym. That’s the first thing I do. I put my stuff in the hotel room, I go right down to the gym. No negotiation whatsoever. And I get in at least an hour.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, I have to. That’s a great way to help to offset some of the jet lag because you start to tell your body, oh, hey, like, even though it’s whatever, midnight in Austin, right, this is the time when I want to be awake. So it starts to advance the circadian phase. So exercise. Some people like to do cold exposure, right? It does a similar thing, right? Increases adrenaline, increases heart rate, increases arousal. Can do it with light, can do it with caffeine. And so like some combination of those things can definitely help.
JOE ROGAN: Okay, so there’s the sleep, adjusting the sleep, there’s the light exposure, there’s exercise and food. Is there anything else? Like what kind of supplementation is effective to mitigate that?
Supplementation and Drug Testing in Formula One
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, so they might use melatonin. One of the issues that we have, it’s not an issue, it makes perfect sense is that the supplements that we use with the drivers have to be third party tested. Right. NSF for Sports certified. Informed Sports certified. So some of the things that we might like to try—
JOE ROGAN: Because the drivers get tested.
TOMMY WOOD: Because the drivers get tested.
JOE ROGAN: And what do they ban? What’s banned?
TOMMY WOOD: Everything. It’s the same as like all the wider drugs. It’s the same, they’re under wider regulations.
JOE ROGAN: So are they allowed to use peptides?
TOMMY WOOD: It’s a gray area in general. I don’t believe anybody does. And we certainly don’t recommend it for that reason because we just don’t know what’s in there.
JOE ROGAN: Are they tested for peptides?
TOMMY WOOD: So they’re not tested for peptides? Well, that’s, it depends on whether it’s actually a peptide that has good, high quality evidence in humans.
JOE ROGAN: Well, also you should get them from a real good compounding pharmacy. Make sure you’re getting it from a quality source. Which is the real problem with peptides today is that since they’re not regulated, there’s a lot of gray market, there’s a lot of real, you know, bullsh corporations that are selling you stuff that’s nonsense. And even things that are tainted.
TOMMY WOOD: So yeah, so the main thing that you’re worried about is contamination. Like what else have they put in there? Right, to make it to get better.
JOE ROGAN: Same thing as supplements.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, same thing as supplements. But in reality, like there aren’t many peptides where I’m like where I would say, or actually I couldn’t think of any where I’m like, this will have a definite benefit based on high quality studies in humans. Right. Those studies just don’t exist. And so until we get to that point, plus the sort of like the gray area of the sort of legality of it, we tend to focus on the real, I mean it’s the basics, but we know that they work.
The Peptide Debate
JOE ROGAN: But there are peptides that have shown to increase sleep and increase REM sleep in humans. Yes. I wish I could tell you because they talked about it, but I never tried it. I know Tom Segura is on it. See if we can find what it is. Jamie, it’s, boy, it’s f*ing with my head. Is that what it is?
TOMMY WOOD: I’m asking.
JOE ROGAN: No, delta sleep inducing peptide.
TOMMY WOOD: I want to see the randomized control trial. I have to. I couldn’t recommend it unless I know that it’s third party tested, it’s legal and there’s a high quality trial in humans. Like all those things have to align.
JOE ROGAN: The problem with high quality studies is they take time and money and these aren’t FDA approved. So you’re not going to get those things. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work. And this is the problem is that like you could try it and then if you show benefit—
TOMMY WOOD: In that setting, I can’t try it.
JOE ROGAN: You can’t?
TOMMY WOOD: No.
JOE ROGAN: Well, you can’t because of Formula One drivers and all this stuff. But yeah. So with the way drug free sport works, which is the governing body of the UFC drug testing, they don’t allow anything, unfortunately. But there are studies that show that BPC-157 increases tissue recovery and helps you heal from injuries.
TOMMY WOOD: In humans?
JOE ROGAN: True, but there’s look the same thing with the COVID vaccine. They weren’t tested in humans either before they started trying them.
TOMMY WOOD: There were some. There was for the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, there were some pretty good quality trials in humans. Right.
JOE ROGAN: But all it showed is that it showed an antibody. It didn’t show that it—
TOMMY WOOD: Oh no. Against hospitalizations and death in the first waves.
JOE ROGAN: We could argue about that because it’s very sketchy.
TOMMY WOOD: Okay.
JOE ROGAN: It’s very sketchy data that has been disproven.
TOMMY WOOD: I think that those, I think those first waves were high quality.
JOE ROGAN: But I think we’ve seen it say that it decreased hospitalization and death. It was stopping transmission and infection which was just a lie. So that’s what they claimed that. So it’s all sketchy because it was based on profit. The whole thing is weird. It’s a weird one. It’s a weird one.
TOMMY WOOD: I can’t. Yeah. I can’t talk about myself.
JOE ROGAN: Maybe it’s not a good example. Yeah but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence especially with professional athletes with BPC-157 and TB-500 particularly for tissue injuries, for recovering quicker from tissue injuries.
TOMMY WOOD: So I know, I know there’s anecdote. I know that people say it benefits them in the environments that I operate in. That’s not enough.
Third-Party Testing and Supplement Recommendations
JOE ROGAN: I understand you’re an actual doctor, Dr. Tommy Wood, he’s legit. I’m just a dork. I’m allowed to just say try it, f* it. But so with drug free sport like with the UFC, they use Thorne supplements. That’s what the UFC recommends which is very good third party tested. So you have to find whether it’s Pure Encapsulations or some legitimate, well proven established company that provides you with third party tested supplements.
What supplements have been shown like for, I would, let’s stick with Formula One drivers, reaction time is critical. Your ability to function at a very high cognitive state. Right. You’re thinking constantly. You’re always calculating and movements. What supplements are these guys taking that benefit them?
Arousal and Performance Optimization
TOMMY WOOD: So when you think about complex skill performance and there’s like a whole chapter on this in the book, the most important driver is arousal. Right. How aroused is your physiology and are you set up with the right level of sympathetic activation, noradrenaline, adrenaline, cortisol to kind of get the best level of performance?
JOE ROGAN: And you don’t want any one of those overwhelm the other ones.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the curve is bell shaped, right? It’s the Yerkes-Dodson curve named after a couple of guys who actually did studies in mice that then translated actually surprisingly well over to humans.
And so what it says is that if you’re sort of under aroused, you’re kind of disengaged, a bit lethargic, right? You’re not really going to perform well. If you’re over aroused, you’re sweaty, anxious, right. Again, you’re not going to be able to sort of pay attention to the task. So there’s this sweet spot at the top of the curve. You’re capable of flow states, clutch states, which is where you can perform at your best. But it’s still like, it’s hard work.
And so what you’re trying to do is get the guys to the top of that curve. And this for many involves some element of routine. Right. Knowing that I’ve done the thing that I know that’s going to make me feel good. And so it’s a combination often of the things that we’ve already mentioned. They might use some warm up sprints, they might use music, they might use bright light, they might use breath work, they might use cold. Certainly if it’s going to be a hot race, they might do some pre-cooling to bring down core temperature that improves endurance.
Pre-Cooling Strategies for Performance
JOE ROGAN: Oh, do they bring like cold plunges to Formula One bays?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah. So some of them have like a cold plunge or, you know, you can fill a wheelie bin with water and ice and jump in that. It doesn’t need to be that cold actually. So for increasing endurance performance, like 20 minutes at around 20 degrees Celsius or like 60-ish Fahrenheit, that significantly improves endurance.
JOE ROGAN: Is there a benefit to 20 minutes at 60 degrees Fahrenheit versus 3 minutes at 34 degrees?
TOMMY WOOD: So the problem is that when you get too cold, you can actually decrease cognitive performance. So there’s a fine line when it’s really cold that what you want to do is you want to decrease core temperature without negatively affecting cognitive function. And so that’s easier to manage at slightly less cold temperatures because just like if you did really, really exhaustive exercise, right, you go out and so I was a rower in college.
So like a 2K test on a row machine, like after that my brain doesn’t work for like hours afterwards. And so like very, you know, very cold ice baths for several minutes for some people that can decrease cognitive function. So you can find a sweet spot.
JOE ROGAN: That makes sense, that makes a lot of sense because my mind is very bad after brutal workouts.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Like if I have a really hard workout and I come in and do a podcast, there’s a moment where like it’s just not firing.
Cognitive Performance and Exercise
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, and that’s perfect. And that’s normal. We know that if you do very fatiguing exercise for a period of time you experience a decline in—
JOE ROGAN: But a light exercise stimulates.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly. So like one of the best studied exercise modalities to improve cognitive function is literally just like a 20-minute jog, right? It’s like, exactly. But you’re kind of warming everything up, you know, increasing sympathetic activation, increasing release of all those hormones you mentioned. And that increases arousal, that improves cognitive performance.
So they might be doing some of those things in the car. Right. There’ll be differing types of caffeine use depending on sensitivity and timing.
JOE ROGAN: Are they taking it in pill form so that they could regulate it quickly or accurately rather?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So some do, sometimes pills, sometimes gels, some guys just like cappuccino. Some might use like green tea because like the theanine in there might balance some of like the jitters that you can get with caffeine. Some people find creatine stimulating or mildly stimulating. So they might take creatine before they get in the car.
JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s been studies on creatine and cognitive performance that are really interesting, particularly—
TOMMY WOOD: In the setting of sleep deprivation.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: And so when they’re jet lagged, like I think that that one makes sense. There are some newer caffeine related compounds that if we can get them when they’re third party tested, you know, some may try those, so theocrine or T crene and paraxanthine, which is a metabolite of caffeine.
Some of they, they may have some fewer of the like anxiety promoting, high blood pressure, high heart rate effects, but maintain some of the cognitive effects, especially in combination with caffeine. So you have a little bit less caffeine plus a bit of those, they’re harder to get sort of third party tested and stuff but, and some of the evidence is newer but that’s looking sort of promising as another thing that people might try.
Nootropics and Supplementation
JOE ROGAN: You mentioned theanine, which is a nootropic. There’s quite a few different ones that people enjoy, you know, beta choline, there’s a bunch of different ones. Like do Formula One drivers, do they supplement with that kind of thing?
TOMMY WOOD: So you think like alpha GPC, like—yeah, yeah. So like it’s a choline type of choline that’s like preferentially turned into acetylcholine and acetylcholine is really important for like focus and attention. Some of that stuff isn’t regularly used, like, mainly because it’s hard to get a third party tested source.
JOE ROGAN: Is it really?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, like most of the things that you take there probably isn’t. Or that anybody would take. There might not be an NSF for Sport certified version. There’s very few companies that do that routinely for all their supplements.
JOE ROGAN: God, you’d think that that would be really accessible because nootropics are so common now.
TOMMY WOOD: So, but so there’s that plus there’s the—when we’re working with different drivers, they each have very unique needs. So it’s trying to—it’s a combination of what do I think is really going to move the needle and not overcorrect.
I think most coaches I’ve spoken to in Formula One have a story where their driver had three espressos before it got in the car and then he overcooked the first corner. Right. So it’s a really tricky balance of trying to make sure that they can systematically get in the zone to perform well in the car without sort of pushing them too far over the other side.
And so that’s where supplements become trickier because it’s very easy to down regulate if you’ve overcooked it through some of those physiological means. Right. I can do some breath work or something to kind of calm myself down, but if I’ve like stuffed myself full of caffeine, it’s really, it’s going to be hard to like come back from that and then you sort of step in the car and it could cause some issues.
So we tend to focus on some of the physiological stuff and then maybe a little bit of supplementation because that seems to be the sort of like best balance across those different needs.
Individualized Performance Protocols
JOE ROGAN: Well, it seems like Formula One would be a great place to develop framework for this because there’s so much money involved. It’s such a massive sport and you would think that they would have that dialed in like you’re 168 pounds. This is when you woke up. This is what you need right now. You need this much protein, this much this stop eating X amount of hours before the race.
TOMMY WOOD: So yes, we do a lot of that, but it’s different for each guy and nobody wants to share what they’ve got.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: So like, even like your, you know, your biggest rival is your teammate in many respects, right? Because that’s the only guy you can go up against, truly head to head because you’re in the same car. Right. So yeah, you know, a lot of what we do, we have to silo within a driver. Like, this is the stuff that works for this guy and I can’t use that to help this guy. Right. That’s one reason.
That’s one reason why they don’t share information. Yeah. And that’s one reason why Hints has been very successful as a company is because they’ve been—we’re very good at walling this stuff off. Like we know what’s good for this guy. We know what’s good for this guy. And we sort of leave those separate because, right, different frameworks, different approaches might be needed.
JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s such an extreme example because any little deviation that you wouldn’t normally feel in everyday life could be disastrous in a Formula One race.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah.
Cognitive Training and Video Games
JOE ROGAN: What about different things to stimulate cognitive function like playing chess or doing—is there anything that those guys engage in specifically to improve the way they think?
TOMMY WOOD: Again, it depends a little from driver to driver. A lot of them like play some kind of video games which actually have some interesting evidence to support them in terms of improving cognitive function. I think for them though, a lot of that is it’s almost like relaxation. Like when you drive a Formula One car for a living, like playing a video game isn’t necessarily as challenging. Right.
And so a lot of it tends to be very car focused. Right. They get tons of time in the simulator. Like during the season, they get a lot of time in the car. So there’s nothing that like consistently would work or that everybody does.
I think a lot of where the cognitive training side comes from is during driver development. Right. How can we get more sports specific or sports supporting cognitive challenges in younger drivers as they’re developing? So we might use some cognitive training tools and some other things to try and support some of those development processes.
Because by the time they’re at the top, especially if you want to maintain it, the main thing that you need to do is obviously maintain those driving skills which you’ll get through like the day to day aspects of the job. Plus then it’s really continually paying attention to sustained physical health, physical performance, especially because of the like arduous schedules and all that kind of stuff.
So often again they’re focusing on the other areas because they know that will help them stay at a high level for longer.
Recovery and Downregulation Techniques
JOE ROGAN: So they’re focused on recovery from all the unavoidable aspects that are going to mitigate your performance.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So sleep, some of them use different meditation or breath work or other devices just to kind of help. Maybe you like gamify it slightly or you make it a slightly more enjoyable experience. It’s easier to do easier to switch off if you’re doing things related, sort of like vibration and that kind of stuff.
JOE ROGAN: You mean like pressure plates like those standing on?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, so like shaky plates. No, there’s turbosonic, there’s a chair that some guys use. And I mean, this is used in a ton of different sports and like in other military groups as well, called the shift wave. Have you heard of this?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I have one.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: So some of the guys, some of the guys have a shift wave. It just kind of depends on what works well for them in terms of like allowing them to downregulate, allowing them to kind of sleep better. And again, we sort of often focus on the more sort of physiological, environmental side rather than, you know, trying to throw a bunch of supplements at it.
Subjective Well-Being as Performance Predictor
JOE ROGAN: Well, it seems like that’s a great place to study Formula One drivers because you’re dealing with these, like, fine lines, this tiny differential between success and failure.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah. And the, one of the interesting things is that the sort of, the real performance stuff is kind of siloed within the team. So then, right, because that’s related to performance in the car and that’s sensitive information.
So a lot of the time we’re kind of thinking about—and this actually, across most sports, the best predictor of performance is subjective well-being. How does the athlete feel? How—and so, like, there are tons of studies even like coming out now. Like, you compare that to blood tests and HRV and all this other kind of stuff. How they feel, am I tired, am I achy, do I feel alert? You know, all that kind of stuff that seems to predict performance really well.
So how can we—or, and better, some of those better than some of those other things. The best is a combination as much as possible. But so we do a lot of work aggregating data, but then really the rest of the time is how can I make sure this guy feels good every day. Right. And feels confident when he gets in the car?
And so then we have psychologists that are a big part of that, plus like keeping an eye on their body and all that, you know, all those sort of things to sort of put them in the best spot possible when they get in the car.
Relationships and Performance
JOE ROGAN: Do you coach them to avoid toxic relationships?
TOMMY WOOD: I’m not, I’m not sure if anybody’s ever gotten into that for fighters.
JOE ROGAN: It is like one of the number one predictors. Poor success in a competition. I’ve seen it over and over again. Guys with horrible relationships.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: You know, whoever’s fault it is both fault, both parties, whatever it is. But those are the ones, like when they have like really bad relationships. Like there was this one guy that I know that was a really high performer, very good fighter, but he had this crazy girlfriend and she required so much, so much attention that it would drive her nuts when he was getting ready for a fight because he was spending all his time concentrating on the fight.
And it would peak literally the night before the fight. Like their relationship was so toxic. She would always start fights and all the coaches knew it. She would start fights after he weighed in because he was so locked in on the fight the next day that he wasn’t paying attention to her. So she would storm out of the hotel room and go down to the bar by herself and he would freak out and he would always wind up performing poorly.
TOMMY WOOD: At least I personally haven’t seen any evidence of that in that world.
JOE ROGAN: I will say that fighters are kind of crazy though. It’s an interesting group to study because it’s a very bizarre activity to begin with. You know, it’s the way I describe it is high level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. And you know, although you could say that Formula One is similar in that respect, right?
JOE ROGAN: Very similar.
TOMMY WOOD: The, there are certainly, you know, a lot of drivers come into the sport with—is often driven by family relationships. So I think that that may be an influence sometimes.
JOE ROGAN: Overbearing parents are another one.
TOMMY WOOD: Coaches overbearing?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because they come in with this long history of, right, of like what got them there. So maybe that affects some of them. I’m not sure.
Most Challenging Athletes to Work With
JOE ROGAN: What are the most challenging athletes? I assume you’ve dealt with a bunch of different athletes from various sports. What are the most challenging ones to deal with?
TOMMY WOOD: The one—I think the ones that I found most challenging are—it’s usually because they’re pulled in so many different directions that it becomes difficult for them to really engage in the things that we know is going to help them perform long term.
And so as, and like I have friends who work in the NBA for instance, where I think this is amplified even more. Right. You have teenage millionaires who can literally do whatever they want.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
Working with Professional Athletes
TOMMY WOOD: But you have to keep them on task. And we see that in a lot of professional sports. It’s that kind of stuff that’s distracting them. What are the other things that they’re doing that’s stopping them from being able to engage in these processes?
You can have really good conversations and put together really good plans. In the moment, they’re really engaged and they’re interested. They want to do well. This is their job and they love it. But when other things start to come into play outside of that conversation, they don’t engage with things. They don’t do it. They don’t see the results that they want. They get demotivated.
But it’s usually because other things in their life could be like the toxic relationships, but it tends to be other distractors that kind of pull them away from that core goal.
JOE ROGAN: Unfortunately, success is a big one, right? Because the motivation to succeed in the first place is you want financial gain, you want recognition, you want all these things that you’re chasing after. And then once you get them, now what?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, and some people maintain really dead dedication to the craft. This is the thing that I love and I want to do it every day. And the longer you do it, the more you have to take care of the little details.
Early on in your career, you can train however you want, eat however you want. If you have a certain set of skills and training up to that point, you’ll do pretty well. But you want to sustain that for a very long period of time. It requires an increasing amount of dedication to the other areas of your life to make sure that you can still do that.
I think sometimes people just aren’t honest with themselves in terms of what they really want to do or what they’re going to spend their time doing. That’s the most frustrating thing is when you hear one thing, but you see another thing because of the other areas of life that are taking over.
JOE ROGAN: So what do you do if you have an athlete, like say an NBA athlete, and you see all this talent, all this potential, but then you notice that they’re getting pulled in all these different directions. Maybe they’re just spending money all the time and partying and hanging out with girls and how do you get them back on track?
TOMMY WOOD: So I don’t do a ton of work in NBA. When I intersect with that, I’m generally advising on the data portion rather than interacting with the human. So I don’t have good tips, but luckily, because I’ve never had to deal with that because I imagine it’s quite frustrating.
JOE ROGAN: So what athletes do you deal with? Like what sports?
TOMMY WOOD: So Formula One is the one where I primarily I’m face to face with athletes. In other professional sports, I’m an advisor to the team that works with them on data, health, nutrition.
Formula One vs Other Professional Sports
JOE ROGAN: Got it. And when you compare notes, what are the differences between dealing with Formula One athletes versus dealing with NFL or NBA or baseball?
TOMMY WOOD: A lot of the stuff comes down to differences in travel schedule and training and the ability to capture data, for instance. So data capture in Formula One is really hard because of the types of travel. You don’t get to aggregate across a team, whereas you’re part of a big team. There’s several people you can work with and aggregate data across to understand what’s happening with individuals as well as overall.
But I think that Formula One is unique because it’s so individual in terms of each driver has their one specific team and it’s often very difficult to capture some of the data that we might want to capture, like getting blood tests on guys who are in a plane every other day. Really difficult. Whereas other places where they have a home base and this kind of stuff, as usual, you might be able to get at that better.
So I think that’s maybe one of the biggest differences is the travel schedule and how easy or not it is to capture and aggregate data.
JOE ROGAN: When you’re working with these Formula One athletes, how much are you changing the methods that you use year to year?
The Fundamentals vs Innovation in Elite Performance
TOMMY WOOD: It will depend on whether… I mean my job is to stay on top of the latest research. So what’s come out recently that we think will meaningfully move the needle in reality. And I think this is the case in the majority of professional sports that I’ve interacted with.
The main thing is getting the boring basics done consistently and again and again and again. We know that’s foundational to sustained performance. And yeah, some of the tools and technology for recovery and some of the supplements, especially if you’re trying to address nutrient insufficiencies based on an inadequate diet, which is also very common. Those things do make a difference.
But the main struggle, at least from the guys that I regularly see is having an environment and framework that allows them to keep doing that stuff like stay on top of a specific training program or stay consistent with a certain sleep routine that allows them to sleep well. Those are the things that make the biggest difference.
So that’s where we tend to focus. And then maybe every year or so, we’re constantly improving our data capture and our data analysis. We’re constantly trying to improve the support processes because we know that with better support, we can make sure they’re more likely to do the stuff that’s going to make a big difference.
And then maybe every year or two, there’s a new thing that comes in and we’re like, “Oh yeah, we’re fairly confident this is low risk, high potential benefit. It’s not going to take a ton of their time.” That’s another thing is when I first walked into the paddock in Austin. It was the first time I went to Formula One to start working with these guys. I showed up and I’m like, “I’ve got 100 things that these guys are going to love. It’s going to be really important. It’s going to revolutionize everything.”
And then you speak to a coach for the first time. They’re like, “We’ve got time for maybe one thing and you better be really confident that this thing is going to make a difference or else you wasted our time.”
JOE ROGAN: So how do you decide?
TOMMY WOOD: So a little bit of it is, of course there’s going to be some trial and error, and it does depend on…
JOE ROGAN: But the error is like, consequences are huge.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. You just have to acknowledge that up front. And the error is biggest when you’re telling some guy to do something before he gets in the car because that’s going to immediately have an effect.
So there are ways to offset some of that. They have practice periods. And so it’s like right now, as a new generation of cars for this season, nobody’s driven them before. They’re getting more extended track time to practice with them. So that might be a time when you could try a new supplement or something before you get in the car because it’s a much lower risk setting. You’re not racing. There’s not 19 other guys or now 21 other guys trying to get past you.
So some of it is that trial and error. You acknowledge that you just have to be really confident that you know what problem you’re trying to solve and that it’s an important problem. So I’ve worked with coaches and their driver where reaction time was a very specific thing. Off the line, we think we need X amount improvement.
So then it’s a combination of practice, maybe tinkering with some supplements, maybe tinkering with some of that arousal stuff that we talked about earlier. So you need to make sure it’s an important problem. Then you need to think about what’s the hierarchy of things that have the highest likelihood of benefit and the lowest risk and then work your way through it.
And I realize that this is all kind of in the abstract because it just really depends on the problem that’s in front of you.
The Psychology of Elite Performance
JOE ROGAN: What about the psychology aspect of it? I mean, this is a very controversial aspect of mixed martial arts in particular, because there’s kind of two schools of thought. There’s, I have a good friend who’s a coach that recently told me he’s not working with any fighters anymore that need a mental coach. And I said, “Why?” And he’s like, “You just can’t count on them. They’re just too fragile. They need a mental coach. Because I want a motherf*er who just knows that this is what he’s supposed to be doing and just go out and do it.”
But that kind of limits your athletes. Do you think that there’s benefit in mental coaching or do you think, to reach a championship level, there’s an inherent mindset that you must have going into that, and you can improve upon that, but if you do not have that mindset, you’re not going to be successful. This is my friend’s idea. I don’t want to call him out because, you know, the athletes he works with.
But he recently had a bad result with one of his athletes. He’s like, “I’m done. No more guys who need mental coaches. I want killers.”
TOMMY WOOD: So I think that you’re going to need some element of a mindset to get to that level to begin with. But we have psychologists on our team who work with the drivers regularly, other drivers who aren’t working with us. Bring in sports psychologists.
JOE ROGAN: Do you collaborate with these psychologists? Do you talk to them and get her notes?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, so we have…
JOE ROGAN: What are common issues?
TOMMY WOOD: I mean, again, it’s just so dependent on the individual. But it’s also very common across all athletes. So it’s overcoming failure or fear of failure or maybe it’s dealing with difficult relationships which for various reasons that they can experience and then it’s how their inherent thought processes when that happens.
So we know that the most resilient athletes are those that tend to be self compassionate.
JOE ROGAN: Interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting. I would have thought the opposite.
The Mental Skills of Elite Athletes
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. And so there’s this idea that you want killers, you want people hard on themselves, the guys who are hard on themselves for sustained. And so this is looking across like as broad as possible across sport. Those who are most successful, most often—of course there’s going to be the killer who’s just hard on himself and gets the job done. Of course.
But these elements of self-compassion that include things like mindfulness, like thinking about the world and understanding it and about their place in it, and common humanity—which is like treating themselves as they would treat other people and acknowledging that we all make mistakes and stuff always happens, but I can overcome this. This has happened to me before. Like I’ve sucked, I’ve crashed, I’ve done something wrong and hey, I overcame it and now I’m succeeding again.
Those mental skills are most common amongst the high level athletes. So I give an example. I don’t know him, but like Roger Federer has a very famous quote. He gave it some graduation address or something where he says that across his career he only won 54% of his points on court. So that means that 46% of points he lost. So that means that every time he makes a mistake, every unforced error, he has to come back and be like, “Hey dude, you’ve got this. I know I can do this.” And that’s the point that he’s making in this address.
And it’s those kinds of mental skills that seem to be most important. So when you’ve had a history of beating yourself up and being hard on yourself and that’s kind of gotten you to that point, there will often be a stage where there’s so much accumulated pressure or stress or failure that just working harder and being hard on yourself isn’t going to get you past it. But athletes who are successful for a long period of time tend to have those other abilities to think about the bigger picture, understand what they’ve overcome previously, treat themselves more like they would treat others. And they seem to be the ones who overcome failure and then continue to succeed.
Letting Go of Bad Shots
JOE ROGAN: I’m really into professional pool. I play pool and I follow a lot of professional pool players. And there’s a trait amongst the elite pool players that’s pretty consistent for the ones that are successful and win tournaments—is the ability to let a bad shot go.
TOMMY WOOD: Exactly.
JOE ROGAN: Because the guys who beat themselves up over bad shots, you see it. They slump in their chair, they start running their fingers through their hair, they f*, they throw their head back, they take a deep breath and then they’re carrying that with them when they go out to make a shot again.
And for a high level pool player, there’s performance scores and a really high TPA performance score is like, I think the best in the world right now is Joshua Filler, who’s this guy from Germany, and he’s arguably, if not the best, one of the top two or three guys in the world. His performance score is about, I think it’s like 850 out of a thousand. So that means if he makes a thousand shots, he’s going to make 850 of those shots, which is very elite.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: So you got to think like even the best, because they’re playing on four inch pockets. But this guy never gets upset. When he misses, he just sits down and he’s got a dead look on his face.
The Chinese Taipei players are the best at it. I don’t know how they coach them over there. There’s some of the best in the world, the Chinese Taipei players. So these guys from Taiwan, they have no expression when they miss a shot. They just go and sit down and maybe they’ll smile, but they never get upset.
Whereas a lot of the American players, they get pissed off and you see it. Some of the European players do the same thing and those guys, they fall off a cliff.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Their performance is elite. They’ll make a couple of bad shots and then the match goes downhill and they wind up getting steamrolled.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. And I think, though there’s other stuff going on, you can think about it in terms of that arousal curve we talked about earlier. As you get stressed and worked up about a missed shot, you’re pushing yourself further and further away from the level of arousal that’s required for performance.
JOE ROGAN: And dwelling on failure.
TOMMY WOOD: Right. And then you’re thinking about what happened previously rather than the shot that comes next.
JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s one of the most important things about a shot because even if your mechanics are good, if you think you’re going to miss, you’re going to miss. It’s weird. It’s a weird thing because you know what to do, you know how to do it. But if you think, “F*, I can’t miss this shot,” you’re going to miss. Like nine times out of ten. It’s very weird.
So the game, a giant percentage of it once the skills are acquired—because most of them, when they get to an elite level, have all the skills—it’s a mental thing. It’s ability to perform under pressure.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Because it’s fine motor skills.
Psychology Drives Physiology
TOMMY WOOD: You know, there’s, I mean, across every different aspect of cognitive performance, well-being, again and again you see that psychology drives physiology and drives performance. You can measure these things as you think them as they then change physiology which then alters how you perform.
So I mean that this is a very long answer to your question of like, is psychology and mental skills important? Absolutely. Because I think that’s going to be foundational to whether you can even achieve those high levels of performance. And everybody needs help occasionally. That’s perfectly normal. And different people are going to need different tools and different skill sets.
So like different psychologists are going to provide different things for them to do. So yes, that’s always something that we have on hand as needed as part of the team, because that’s going to be really important.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the mind controls so much of what you do in life, even if you have skills. And that’s something that elite performers either figure out or don’t.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: They either never achieve their true potential because they keep tripping over themselves, or they go, “Okay, this is not helping me. It’s only hurting me. I keep allowing myself to spiral into this same sort of mental state and I have to find a method.”
And so like when you talk with psychologists, what tools and what sort of strategies do they give these athletes to abandon negative thinking?
Tools for Managing Stress and Failure
TOMMY WOOD: There are a few different ways to approach it. And again, don’t want to pretend I’m a psychologist. These are, we have other people with these skills for a reason. But I think a lot of what becomes important again is thinking about the causes of maybe initially the causes of mistakes and then the causes of stress and why that may or may not be beneficial in the way that you can leverage it.
So there’s a lot of research on understanding that stress responses are there to divert resources to something that matters and something that either requires your attention or adaptation to it. So understanding that actually stress in the moment, in that kind of moment is a good thing and you want to leverage it rather than be scared of it.
And we know that people who are trained in this mindset—so this is work by Alia Crum at Stanford—stress, the “stress is enhancing” mindset also predicts how well Navy SEALs do during training. Like how much they sort of appreciate that stress response is important. “This is me rising to the occasion.”
Not only that you still get stress, you still can measure stress hormones, that still happens, but you release other things that help to also counteract that and drive adaptation. And it results in better decision making when stressed.
So reframing some of these responses can be important as well as then thinking about like after a mistake happened, you’re thinking about other examples of times when you did that and you overcame it or having these different parts of understanding what it is to be a human. Even when you’re performing at an elite level, maybe some of it is building in routines so that you feel confident in a given situation. Like these are the things that I do and when I do these things, I know I’m going to perform well.
That can be a double-edged sword for some people because, and I think we see this a lot in the world of sort of health optimization, we assume that we need to do all these things in order to perform well. And so then if those things don’t happen, we think we won’t perform well. So that’s another way for us to get in our own way. So you kind of have to balance that depending on the individual.
And then some of it can be in the moment. So you are those pool players and you’re getting increasingly frustrated because you’re not making your shots. It’s almost impossible to think your way out of that. Your brain is too busy being dunked in adrenaline to make good decisions.
So that’s where you might have tools like leveraging your physiology, breath work, closing your eyes, visualization. Those things sort of work from the bottom up to kind of help your mind get a grip and get back in the game.
So it’s a whole bunch of different things depending on what you might need. Is it I need to regulate myself in the moment? Is it how do I set myself up for success through a series of—and it could be like, what’s my warm up? What am I thinking through? What am I visualizing before I perform? Or is it tools to kind of deal with the processes of failure afterwards?
JOE ROGAN: And I would also think that even just the knowledge that these high stress situations where you do encounter failure can produce a result inside the mind that can be beneficial if harnessed.
TOMMY WOOD: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so one of the ways that this is taught to other people, not just athletes, is like think about all the people who’ve performed under significant stress. This is what the human mind and human body is capable of if only we allow it to do.
JOE ROGAN: Right, right. That’s what’s important.
TOMMY WOOD: Right.
JOE ROGAN: I think inspiration is one of the most powerful fuels that we can use. And inspiration from other people’s examples is one of the best versions of that.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
Breaking Records Through Inspiration
JOE ROGAN: Because I think there was a young kid who recently broke the world record of the mile. Did you see that?
TOMMY WOOD: Oh yeah. Yeah. I watched. 16. It was 3:40 something. 3:48.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, 3:48. Which is nuts. We didn’t think that people can get below four minutes before. This 16-year-old kid hits 3:48. And I immediately thought, wow, through the inspiration of this kid being able to do this, who’s going to break 3:40?
TOMMY WOOD: Now you know that I heard from somebody that in the run up to the race he was like, he hadn’t raced a bunch recently. This was just going to be like a run out. He was just going to loosen his legs up, get back into the race. And so in that situation he’s put no pressure on himself. All the brakes are off. Whatever. He’s got nothing to lose. And so in that situation incredible performances are possible.
JOE ROGAN: And it’s crazy because that’s only the 11th fastest indoor mile. That’s it. It says here, I thought it was the fastest ever, but it’s the under 18.
TOMMY WOOD: Under 18 record. Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: So crazy. That’s so fast to run a mile. Whoo.
TOMMY WOOD: I mean I’m not sure I could go that fast full stop ever, like for any period of time.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, 20 feet.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, exactly.
The Power of Observation and Setting Standards
JOE ROGAN: I can’t run that fast. It’s kind of amazing. But I mean, this is one of the things we talk about all the time with mixed martial arts athletes in particular, is that today is such an amazing time for them because there’s so much access to video so you can watch all these performances by all these elite athletes, and then it raises your personal standards because you’re mirroring what these people are capable of doing.
And in your head, you have a very high standard because you’ve seen it, and that inspires people to become better. And so the athletes that we’re seeing today, I say all the time that martial arts has evolved more in the last 30 years than it has in the last 30,000 years. And it’s true. Just based on my own personal experience of seeing athletes from 1997, when I first started working with the UFC, to 2026, it’s completely different standard.
There’s so much better, there’s so much more elite. They have so much more balance. They have so much more balance in terms of their game is balanced, striking, grappling, wrestling, all of it together. It’s amazing because they’re walking on the foundation that was set by the athletes before them. So it’s the mind recognizing what’s possible.
TOMMY WOOD: Absolutely. Or not thinking that something is impossible. Right. It’s the opposite too. And maybe that’s more of it. Right. It’s the same with Roger Bannister and the four minute mile. Right. As soon as he did it, not everybody, but lots of people started to do it.
JOE ROGAN: Well, and also the ignorance of youth, which is why young athletes are so damn good sometimes.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. Because they don’t worry about their own limitations.
JOE ROGAN: And they also don’t have mortgages, they don’t have wives, they don’t have kids, they don’t have bills.
Social Comparison and Mental Health
TOMMY WOOD: But this is also the thing, right? If we think about these traits that we’d maybe like to carry over that help us perform or maintain performance for long periods of time later in life, like some of that curiosity, not worrying about these burdens, continuously continuing to engage in these things that challenge ourselves, that kids just readily do. Right. The brain is exploring and trying to learn. I think we need more of that as adults.
But when you think about the standard being set or thinking that things aren’t impossible, there’s two parts to that. One, yes, that’s a huge aspect of achieving higher and higher levels of athletic performance. But for many of us, like us regular people, when you spend a lot of time seeing other people performing so much better than you, it can have the opposite effect. Right.
I think this is something that we see on social media. There’s some really interesting studies on social rank. Right. So we are always trying to see where we rank in the world compared to others. Right. It’s part of us being social beings. And so if you spend all day looking at people who are richer, more beautiful, more jacked than you are internally, you demote yourself, right?
JOE ROGAN: You.
TOMMY WOOD: You give yourself a lower social rank, and that creates a social stress that triggers genuine stress responses. Right. Increased sympathetic activation. Activation of some inflammatory processes in the body. Very similar to if you’re socially isolated.
So for some people who are on a trajectory to improve their performance, you know, because they’re elite athletes and they’re seeing these other guys do it, and they’re like, oh, yeah, I can do that. Right. That’s really beneficial. But in the general world, the rest of us, when we spend so much time seeing other people do other things better than us, it can almost have the opposite effect.
JOE ROGAN: But not with everybody.
TOMMY WOOD: No, no. It’s the thing.
JOE ROGAN: That’s the thing between the difference between an athlete and someone who is intimidated by other people’s performances instead of being inspired.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So, but that’s what I mean is that when you’re an athlete and you’re seeing other guys do this thing, right, that’s like, oh, yeah, that creates a bar you want to try and hit. But that same thing is very different for the rest of us based on seeing how we compare to others.
JOE ROGAN: Well, particularly in things you can’t control, like your looks or your wealth.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: But wealth, in some ways, you achieved.
TOMMY WOOD: But your mind doesn’t interpret it that way. Right. You don’t immediately rationally think, well, I can never be that. Right. I’m never going to look like Brad Pitt. Right. You can’t apply that sort of rational thinking to it.
JOE ROGAN: Well, then even worse for young girls, because a lot of them are getting surgery because they know that some girls have radically improved their looks through surgery. And so they think this is the solution to everything and I just need to get a nose job and a chin job and a this and that.
TOMMY WOOD: Which of course, never.
JOE ROGAN: And also, it’s the psychological aspect of being controlled by paying attention to other people’s lives is very weird. And it’s, you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote a great book about it called “The Coddling of the American Mind” about the impact of social media and particularly on young girls. It’s really bad.
TOMMY WOOD: So he did write “Coddling of the American Mind” that was more about changes in academia and helicopter parenting and safetyism. “The Anxious Generation” was the one about social media.
JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. And that aspect of it, of comparing yourself to other girls is particularly devastating. It’s like there’s, you see when the impact of social media, when social media gets introduced into the world, immediately you see more self harm, suicidal ideation, all these different things increase.
Whereas those same stressors, if you were in a position like an athlete and you’re a competitive athlete and you see someone who’s elite, you would be inspired but you feel helpless to achieve these goals that you know, you can’t get any taller, you can’t get any better looking, you can’t, it’s just this is what you got.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: And then you see these. And then you see people that are using filters. So it’s not even what they really look like.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So I think that’s why there’s this. It’s interesting that very similar exposures depending on who you are and what you’re trying to achieve and what you have the ability to achieve can have dramatically different effects on mental and other well being. Right.
The Athlete’s Mindset
JOE ROGAN: And but you would imagine that for competitive athletes you’ve already developed a certain amount of resilience already. You already have a competitive spirit and you are working towards a thing that’s a high level of achievement and something you’re already doing.
So seeing a Michael Jordan, seeing a LeBron James, seeing if you’re a basketball player, you would be inspired and instead of being like, I’ll never be as good as that guy, you’d be like, f*, I want to be as good as that guy. What do I have to do? Well, Kobe Bryant worked out every day and he did this and he did that, so I’m going to do that.
TOMMY WOOD: So, but that’s the key difference, right? Is that something else? We didn’t talk about this in terms of the approaches of the most successful athletes is that they don’t just say I want to be like LeBron or Kobe, they say what did he do? Yeah, what can I do? So they focus on the process. Right?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: You have to love and focus on the process because you can’t guarantee a certain outcome. Right? So, and I talk about this in the book and I give the example of the 2012 Olympics, right?
JOE ROGAN: The.
TOMMY WOOD: The guys who came second, third and fourth ran personal best times. Several other national records were set during the whole 100 meter sprint competition, all the different rounds. But Usain Bolt ran, right. And so you could, no, you can be the best you’ve ever been and be amazing.
You can run fast enough to have won a gold medal any other year, but sometimes you’re out of luck as Usain Bolt shows up. Yeah. So you’ve got to focus on the process because you can’t guarantee the outcome, but by focusing on the process, right, you’re going to get much closer.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s interesting, because if you are a person trying to be the best in the world and you happen to be in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, it’s going to be tough. Yeah. But I mean, that’s always been the case. That’s the thing in championship level fighting.
You find that when someone is a real outlier, that what happens is all the other people in that weight class tend to achieve a very high level. Even if they never wind up being as good as Anderson Silva or whoever it is, they wind up being a very competitive contender class.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
JOE ROGAN: Underneath it. And much more competitive than divisions that are not being dominated by elite fighters.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah.
Inside the Book: Future-Proofing Your Mind
JOE ROGAN: It is a very large book. Right. So I know it can’t just be the stuff that we’ve already covered. What other things do you think are in here that are important? When you’re talking about future proofing your mind.
TOMMY WOOD: I will say you’re looking at a dummy copy. So all the pages.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You just tricked me.
TOMMY WOOD: Look at this, folks.
JOE ROGAN: I was saying this is a really large book. It’s a f*ing empty book.
TOMMY WOOD: So that’s crazy.
JOE ROGAN: I read this, I’m like, maybe it’s a trick.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, you’re just not paying attention enough. The book is as thick as the real one will be.
JOE ROGAN: I believe you.
TOMMY WOOD: So. And that’s on purpose.
JOE ROGAN: I’ve never been given a dummy copy of a book before, so. Does it even have writing? No writing. Good. I’m going to use this as my new joke book. Notes.
TOMMY WOOD: Well, once the full thing is printed, we’ll send you a real one.
JOE ROGAN: Okay. You did trick me, though. Thank God I didn’t try to read from it.
TOMMY WOOD: So the first part of the book is about some of the history of neuroscience and why we think about the brain the way we do and some of the limitations that’s created, like why we think about Alzheimer’s disease as just being the accumulation of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which people might have heard of. Right. That’s what it’s been boiled down to when there’s actually a much bigger picture and many other things that are important.
The Alzheimer’s Controversy
JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t that, was it Alzheimer’s, where the amyloid plaque, where that idea was sort of proven to be a little bit bullshit?
TOMMY WOOD: So there have been a. So not really, but kind of. So there are several seminal papers in.
JOE ROGAN: There were hoaxed, right.
TOMMY WOOD: There were manipulated in some way. They change the figures, you manipulate these blots to make them show different things, and you kind of move them around and copy and paste and it kind of shows what you want to show. And so, like, for some of the seminal papers in Alzheimer’s, that turned out to be the case. But it doesn’t discount the fact that it’s still a part of it.
But people have increasingly looked away from just the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain for two reasons. One is that we had as a field, they had to create new ideas like resilience. And there’s this thing called cognitive resilience, which is how much cognitive function do you maintain in the face of these proteins building up in the brain? And that’s because the amount of amyloid you have in your brain doesn’t really predict cognitive function and cognitive decline that well. So some of that is related to other things.
So we know that exercise is an important part of that. And then we know that these other things that are important as well, so inflammation, other cells in the brain that become critical. So the white matter is a really critical structure in the brain. It’s what allows us to have really fast processing speed, decision making, executive function, the function of the prefrontal cortex. All of that is kind of dependent on white matter structure. And that seems to be really related to vascular function, vascular health. Resistance training is really important to support that.
So all these other things become important as well. That’s kind of the first part of the book is saying, hey, we kind of focused a lot here, but actually that’s not important. But there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that’s important too, and a lot of it is related to things that we have control over.
The 3S Model: Stimulus, Supply, and Support
So then I talk about all the different types of exercise, how different types of exercise affects different parts of the brain in different ways. Nutrition, talk a lot about cognitive stimulus, social connection, sleep, stress management and stress mitigation and how you can kind of manage your performance in the moment. And then all of that comes together in terms of into a model that I call the 3S model of how these different things kind of interact and affect you on a day to day basis.
So the first S being stimulus. We’ve talked about all the reasons why that’s important. The second S being supply, which is if you stimulate a part of the brain or a network in the brain with a new skill, that area of the brain, the neurons and the astrocytes there, they ask for more blood flow. So the blood vessels have to widen, they dilate to bring in more oxygen, bring in more glucose or whatever metabolic substrate you’re using, ketones, lactate, etc. And so you need really good cardiovascular health. That’s critical. So that’s a big part of what we talk about.
You also need good metabolic health. So high blood pressure and high blood sugar are two of the biggest risk factors for later dementia because they affect this supply component. Either the blood flow, getting there or being able to regulate energy. And then there’s a bunch of nutrients that are important in that bucket as well. So omega 3, vitamin D, iron, magnesium, because they have very B vitamins, they have very specific functions in the brain that we know that if you’re deficient, you have an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia.
And then you’ve stimulated a part of the brain, you’ve kind of given it all the substrate it needs to do its job. Adaptation occurs and function gets enhanced when we sleep or when we recover. So that’s support is the third bucket. So sleep is a part of that other support you might get. Hormonal status is important. Trophic factors, hormones that get released or proteins that get released that support neuroplasticity in the brain, things like brain derived neurotrophic factor.
And then you want to avoid things that kind of inhibit that process. So chronic stress can do that. It creates an overtraining kind of picture in the brain. Smoking, excessive alcohol, air pollution, those kinds of things can have a negative effect.
The Interconnected Nature of Brain Health
So that’s how they all interact. And the fact that they interact means that depending on what feels most impactful to you, what’s the thing that you think you can move the needle on? By focusing on one area, the whole network starts to shift. And we see that in multiple different studies.
So if you focus on sleep and you sleep a bit better, then the next, then we see that inflammation decreases and blood pressure improves and blood sugar improves, and the next day you feel more sociable, so you’re more likely to interact with other people in a friendly way and you’re more likely to engage in cognitively stimulating tasks, because when we’re tired, we kind of shy away from those things.
And it’s the same if you, so there are studies in older adults where you give them a brain training program and they sleep better, because when you stimulate a tissue, you then drive greater need for recovery afterwards. The same if you exercise more, you sleep better. So it’s not like this long list of things that everybody has to do. Because when you give somebody a list of 37 things, they’ll do zero things. We know that.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah.
TOMMY WOOD: So if you just know that they all kind of communicate and interact anywhere you come in, you can start to kind of shift things in your favor.
JOE ROGAN: Now, when you’re compiling a book like this, I would imagine there’s a lot of editing. And so how do you decide what to leave? And I mean, this looks like it’s, I mean, obviously these are all blank pages, not numbered, but it looks like this is at least a 300 page book.
TOMMY WOOD: The final book is about 450 pages, 165,000 words. And the reference list, so unlike most health books, every time I make a statement or I mention a study, there’s a little number and that gives you the paper or papers that I’m talking about that supports that. It’s 2,000 papers long. And so that all has to go online because they couldn’t, of course, they couldn’t afford to print it in the book.
JOE ROGAN: But that’s probably better anyway.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. Because there’s seven people who will do that.
JOE ROGAN: Right.
TOMMY WOOD: And then they’ll go and look.
JOE ROGAN: Psychos.
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah. So it’s important to me. Anyway, people who want it, people who want to do that can do that. But I’m not quite sure how it ended up being this way, but I actually had to cut very little. There were things where I kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. And my editor was like, man, I’m not sure we really need this. But I basically wrote until I got to the word limit, and then I stopped and I focused on the things that I knew that were important. And we’re going to stay important, even in the age of AI and as technology improves and changes. So there wasn’t a ton that ended up getting cut out.
JOE ROGAN: But when you’re putting it together, how do you decide the what’s prominent? What’s the most important thing to focus on, where to put things?
Writing Process and Structure
TOMMY WOOD: So when I started writing, as you saw, I’m going to disagree with my former self. I wrote the first part of the book three times. And the first time I wrote it, it was 40,000 words all focused on psychology and super esoteric and academic. And I was like, nobody’s going to read this. So it had to be scratched a couple of times.
So then the core middle part of the book is all those different areas that we know are important, like the big rocks and practical frameworks for how to address those. And then there’s an introduction to why should you care about this? In individuals over 40, dementia is the most important health concern. More than 10% say they’ve experienced changes in cognitive function. We know that the rates of dementia are going to double or triple in the next two or three decades. So why do people care about this? And some history there.
And then the middle part is, which I always knew I was going to write, these are the most important things, and they’re always going to remain the most important things. And then the last chapter, sort of just kind of bringing it together. Does that answer your question?
JOE ROGAN: It does. It does. Well, I’m glad you wrote it, because I think it’s a very important thing, and I think there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand the risks of being sedentary and that these are things that you can change and that you can improve the quality of your life by making those changes. And it might make you uncomfortable to begin something like that, but there is some real value in that uncomfortable feeling of trying something new.
TOMMY WOOD: Absolutely.
JOE ROGAN: And then it really does change the way your brain functions, and it’ll improve the quality of your life. And in this case, if possible, hold off dementia and just hold off cognitive decline without calling it dementia. So many people experience cognitive decline because of atrophy.
Maintaining Cognitive Function Throughout Life
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of the worst possible end state we want to avoid. But you want to maintain your current level of cognitive function for as long as possible and possibly improve it. And possibly improve it. And there is evidence you can improve it even later in life.
And so a big part of this is that when you write the, earlier we talked about this graph of cognitive function. It increases to your sort of 20 or 30, and then it declines. When we’re doing studies that show that kind of thing, what we’re doing is we’re looking at a whole bunch of people, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and we’re saying you plot them all on a graph and yeah, as you sort of increase in age, there are some people who are going to lose function. You kind of draw the average down.
But we’ve known essentially since for the last 50 years that when you look at the same person over several decades, it’s actually very normal for us to maintain function. So the Seattle Longitudinal Study was run by a guy called Warner Schaie in Seattle. And it was one of the first studies where they measured cognitive function in the same people every seven years for several decades. And every seven years they measured the same people and brought in new people. And so they ended up with people who were in their 20s, up to over 100 years old.
And they found that the average effect by that, I mean that more than 50% of people maintain the same level of cognitive function into their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. And those data were used to actually raise the retirement age in the US in the 1980s because they showed that it actually wasn’t normal for people to decline.
But the problem is now we’ve embodied this idea that as you get older you will decline and as a result you stop engaging in all the things that we’ve talked about. Feel like, oh, I’m too old to lift that, I’m too old to learn a new skill, I don’t have time to do that. And as a result, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You stop engaging in those processes and decline happens as a result. But if we know that it’s possible to maintain function and we continue to engage in those processes, the norm should be that function is maintained.
JOE ROGAN: Last question. Did you do an audio version of this?
TOMMY WOOD: Yeah, I’m recording at the moment.
JOE ROGAN: All right, when will that be available?
TOMMY WOOD: Be out on the same day. March 24th.
JOE ROGAN: March 24th. Stimulated Mind, Dr. Tommy Wood. Go get it. Folks, I promise it won’t be like this. Thank you, Tommy. I really enjoyed this.
TOMMY WOOD: Thanks so much.
JOE ROGAN: Thank you very much. I think it’s really important information, too, and I think it’s something that everyone should apply.
TOMMY WOOD: Thank you.
JOE ROGAN: All right, thank you. Bye, everybody.
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