Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2450 - Tommy Wood
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T18:00:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2450 - Tommy Wood' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2450 - Tommy Wood' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2450 - Tommy Wood

Joe Rogan podcast check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day. All right nice to meet you sir. Stimulated mind. A future proof
for 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. Um what first of all what
prompted you to write
this? So I've spent a long time working in a whole range of different spheres
related to the brain.
Um 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 uh professional athletes particularly formula one drivers
trying to help
them you know 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 um and well-being now. And
then long-term
that translates to a lower risk of dementia. So is dementia and is it is a gene
is it a genetic thing
or is it a function of atrophy? Is it a combination of those things? 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 like
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 percent
of cases of dementia.
The next most common is vascular dementia. Something like 10 to 20 percent. 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 percent 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
presenillin 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 one percent 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. So
you can have three different
flavors of ApoE, ApoE protein E, 2, 3, and 4. You get two copies. Which is the
one that makes you more
more likely to get CTE? Is that two? No, so 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. It 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, 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.
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?
Yes. So the kind of 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. So absolutely.
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?
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.
Over-stimulated and...
Nonsense.
Exactly. So we're over-stimulated and under-stimulated at the same time.
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.
Exactly.
We're just being inundated with nonsense.
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, right?
Right.
And so the brain is exactly the same. And if you want functions and networks in
the brain
to perform well, you need to challenge them in order to enhance capacity in
them.
Do you think you need to keep your liver working healthy by drinking every now
and then?
So it's the example of, yes, if you drink a lot of alcohol, your liver gets
better at
metabolizing alcohol. So it kind of, it proves the point, but it doesn't
necessarily mean that
the alcohol is there to keep your liver healthy. Probably not.
Didn't they used to do that with people that had, if they had lung problems,
they would give them cigarettes?
Yeah.
Like people with asthma?
Yeah. Yeah. And that didn't turn out so great.
The theory was okay, but...
I think they should have just been breathing heavy.
That would have been a better application of that, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because it's just like, you don't want to torture...
Your lungs aren't a filter to like 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?
Yeah, there was two different things. One, I focused initially on the brain
early in life
and then, you know, 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.
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.
Yeah.
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.
No.
Or any of these, what you're doing is you're letting it think for you.
Absolutely. So this 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 NLM. And what they showed
was that as you
increase the amount of like 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.
Not at all.
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 like 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.
And that might perhaps actually stimulate your mind to think, "Why didn't I
think of that?"
Like, "Next time I'm writing a paragraph, I'll consider these options."
Yeah, exactly. So you actually have to fully engage your brain in that process,
but then the end result might be better.
Well, it's just such uncharted territory for us, right? All this, especially
social media.
I mean, completely uncharted territory that people are staring at their hand
for eight hours a day.
Yeah. 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 I was really interested
in 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.
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 or that
immediately captures your attention upfront, right? Because you want it to be
random. And there's a
method in the randomness that keeps you scrolling, 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.
Also, without it getting any feedback from another human being while you're
communicating ideas,
so you can say the most horri