00:00:00
Chat GBT is going to potentially increase your risk of dementia. I'm sorry, but you you've pressed my
00:00:06
button and actually it is possible to use it to help you become a smarter person, but it requires education. You
00:00:12
have to look at the risks and the benefits. But we embrace convenience before understanding consequence. So, we have to talk about this. This is a study that came out that sent a shock wave across the world. And
00:00:24
astonishingly, MIT found a 47% collapse in brain activity when people wrote with
00:00:29
Chat GBT compared with writing unaded. Their memory scores plunged. And you're both masters of the brain. I mean, you've probably scanned more brains than any other human on Earth at this point. And you invented the Boltzman machine
00:00:41
with Jeffrey Hinton, a computer that simulated how the brain works. So my question is, what are your concerns?
00:00:47
If you misuse these large language models, like using it as a convenience to speed things up, your brain's going
00:00:52
to go downhill. Well, there's no doubt about that. What about children? We have the sickest young generation in history because of cell phones, social
00:00:59
media, and I think AI is much more dangerous on the developing brain. So, are we raising mentally weak kids? There is that argument and I think it's true.
00:01:10
And then there's many examples of people falling in love with AI like Annie. I thought you might have forgotten about
00:01:16
me, handsome. Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please? Oh, baby. I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me.
00:01:21
Okay, so I'll stop it there. So, what advice would you give as it relates to AI and other things outside of AI that we can do to have healthy brains?
00:01:28
I'll tell you how to use chat GPT to improve our cognitive abilities. And if you want to keep your brain
00:01:34
healthy, you have to treat the 11 major risk factors. So, here we go. I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:01:44
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:01:50
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:01:57
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history
00:02:02
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you.
00:02:09
Dr. Daniel, Dr. Terry, I have asked you both to sit with me today to help me understand the impact of these tools that we call large
00:02:21
language models, the chat GBTs, the Geminis of the world, the Grocs of the world are having on our brains and I
00:02:26
guess more broadly on our lives. And you two are experts in your field. You're two people that I admire tremendously.
00:02:32
So by way of introduction, Terry, what is your academic background and what is your experience? I also know
00:02:39
that you know one of our friends of the show Jeffrey Hinton. Can you give me an overview of your your academic and your
00:02:44
sort of um professional background? So I was born a physicist received a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University and then I had the good fortune to work as a posttock in the lab
00:02:58
of Steven Kofler who is the father of neurobiology and and that started my career as a neuroscientist. I pioneered a part of neuroscience which is now called computational neuroscience.
00:03:09
Taking my skills as a physicist and trying to apply that to understanding the brain, creating models, theories,
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and uh we're making progress. Dr. Danny Layman, um bit about your background. My my viewers know you well, but just to give an overview for anyone that might not have been exposed to your
00:03:26
work and your experience, what have you spent your life doing? And what are your thoughts, your sort of topline thoughts
00:03:32
on everything that's going on at the moment with artificial intelligence? So, by training, I'm a psychiatrist. I'm
00:03:38
a general psychiatrist and a child psychiatrist. When I graduated from medical school, I wanted to be a really good psychiatrist because someone I love
00:03:50
tried to kill herself and so was personal to me. I have 11 clinics. We see about 10,000 patient visits a month and we have the best published outcomes
00:04:03
on complex treatment resistant psychiatric patients anywhere. So you've probably scanned more brains
00:04:09
than any other human on earth at this point probably at least in regards to people
00:04:15
who struggle with anxiety, depression, addiction. Well, let's talk about what's good for
00:04:21
the brain, bad for the brain, starting with AI. The reason why I wanted to speak to both of you is because I have
00:04:26
frankly become pretty addicted to using chat GPT and some of these other AIS and
00:04:33
large language models every single day all the time. And then this study came out from MIT. It was 54 participants who
00:04:41
were recruited from five universities in Boston, MIT, Harvard, etc., etc. And they had the participants split into
00:04:46
three groups. Had them writing different essays over I think it was four months. One group used Chat GPT, one group used
00:04:53
Google and one one group had no tools and they had to write these four essays over a period of time and astonishingly
00:05:01
MIT found a 47% collapse in activity and brain connections when people wrote with
00:05:06
chat GBT compared with writing unaded EEG scans showed the weakest overall brain activity in the chat GPT group. The no tool group who didn't use anything they didn't use Google or Chat
00:05:18
GPT lit up the widest neural networks and Google search was second after using Chat GPT participants couldn't reliably quote their own essays minutes later and
00:05:29
their memory scores plunged. Chat GBT users felt little or no ownership over the text that they had produced and didn't feel like it was their work at all. And when the AR group was forced to
00:05:40
write without help in session 4, their brain stayed in low gear, under engenagement, showing the cognitive debt
00:05:45
lingers even after the tool is taken away. It kind of scared me a little bit because I use these tools every single
00:05:52
day and this suggests that it's taking away some of our critical thinking and create creativity and long-term
00:05:57
learning. And you're both masters of the brain uh in different regards. So my question I guess to Daniel is what's going on here and how do you feel
00:06:07
about it? It frightened me. Um I love thinking about Alzheimer's prevention. It's one
00:06:15
of the things that really excites me. I just had a birthday on Saturday, turned 71, and if I make it to 85, which I plan
00:06:23
on it, 50% of people 85 and older will be diagnosed with dementia. So, you have a one in two chance of having lost your mind. And I'm like, no,
00:06:36
but is this a tool that's going to decrease cognitive load um that then increases my risk? What's cognitive load? How much work my brain actually does.
00:06:51
And I was thinking it's, you know, it's like going from a 20 lb weight to a 2 lb
00:06:58
weight and you're not nearly as strong. One of the important things to say about
00:07:03
this study is it's not peer-reviewed. And I think that's really important to say. And the author said, cuz I listened
00:07:10
to an interview from the authors, they said, "We thought this was so important and peer review can take 6 to 8 months,"
00:07:17
which it absolutely can, and we thought this needed to get out. So, it's just important for people to know that. What's this link you're this hypothesis you have between the usage of something
00:07:30
like Chachi PT and dementia for someone that doesn't understand the sort of mechanism there around cognitive load
00:07:37
and and so on and the studies that support this idea that if you have less cognitive load you're at high risk of
00:07:43
dementia. Can you make that link really clear for me? So think of it as use it or lose it. the
00:07:48
more you use your brain and new learning is a major strategy to prevent Alzheimer's disease. People who do not engage in lifelong learning have a
00:08:02
higher risk significantly higher. People who do not do as well in school or who drop out of school early have a higher risk of dementia. And so the the more
00:08:16
you're engaged, the more you engage the neurons in your brain, the stronger they
00:08:22
are. And so now we're going to engage them less. And that's a concern. What do you think about that, Terry? There's a study that was done. What they
00:08:35
did was to look at Alzheimer's in three populations, you know, who had very little schooling and then minimal education, you know, like the equivalent, I guess, of high school or less. and then u post-graduate studies
00:08:50
and what they found was that the onset of Alzheimer's was the earliest in the peasant
00:08:56
population and then by the time as you increase the amount of education it the onset was later and later which I think supports what you're saying. Did you see the new research on SSRI
00:09:07
increasing the risk of dementia? No. No. brand new that just came out and benzo. When I started looking at scans
00:09:14
in 1991, I was trained to use benzo like Valium and Xanax and Adavan and they make your brain look older than you are. And I stopped prescribing them and then it just came out maybe 10 years ago.
00:09:30
Benzo use is associated with an increased risk of dementia. We have to be careful. Is this good for your brain
00:09:36
or bad for it? Just to pick up on the new point about SSRIs, Daniel, a meta analysis of five studies found that
00:09:42
SSRIs was associated with a 75% increase risk of dementia, which is pretty staggering
00:09:50
given that 25% of the adult American population is on psychiatric drugs. It's horrifying. And SS rice for the right people save lives.
00:10:03
For the wrong people, they're not good. But can you imagine all of these 340 million prescriptions last year for anti-depressants? Virtually no one looked at their brain
00:10:14
ahead of time. And it's like, come on, we can do better. There's a Swedish study with um almost
00:10:20
20,000 patients, and they found that those with higher doses of SSRIs were linked to faster cognitive decline and more severe dementia, especially in men. The greatest risk was in men. Going back
00:10:31
to to this this um report from MIT, Terry, you know, it's not peer-reviewed yet and
00:10:38
there's still, you know, the sample size is relatively small, but based on everything that you know about how the
00:10:43
brain works and neural networks and memory formation, what are your concerns as it relates to this whole generation
00:10:50
of young people and older people flooding into these tools, using them on a daily basis
00:10:57
um before we understand the long-term consequences? We can't predict where it's going to end up and it may take 20 years, right? I I think that this is a good start, but uh the real
00:11:11
issue is long-term use. Let me give you a an example that uh is a kind of a miniature example of what we're talking about. Remember when electronic calculators were first introduced?
00:11:23
And here we are. That's it's at least 30 or 40 years later the results are in it. It's probably true that when they punch
00:11:30
it in, there's less brain activity, but in fact, it's it's made them more accurate, more productive. You have to look at the risks and the benefits. So, it freed them up. It freed up cognitive
00:11:44
space for them to do other things. So, as I was listening to how you use chat GPT,
00:11:51
you interact with it. Yeah. and elevates what you know. The the danger is is if you don't
00:12:03
interact and you don't keep your brain working. Like I use it a lot. I have a clone. I've uploaded all of my books, all of my
00:12:15
research papers, all of my public television specials, my scripts, and I'm like, "Answer this for me." And that can be very helpful
00:12:26
but if but not if I'm not interacting with it not thinking with it. That's what I think the word thinking is
00:12:32
the key thing because what's happening now is people have deferred their thinking to it. That is already what's happening. If you log on to I won't name
00:12:38
the social networks but if you log on to certain social networks right now every you just read it you get everything here was written by AI. And I've got a friend
00:12:46
who again I won't name who has a a LinkedIn profile and I've known him for 10 years. What I'm seeing on his profile now is not my
00:12:56
friend. Every single day there's some essay on there. That's not my friend. That's not how he speaks. He's deferring
00:13:02
all of his thinking now to and it's working. He's getting more likes and more reach than he ever got in his life. And so why would he go back? Why would
00:13:09
he go back to harder? If you've got Steven Bartlet here and you had this other Steven Bartlet here who had a PhD
00:13:15
in everything and we're attached this Steven Bartlett, this um Neanderthal, I'm going to get this guy to do everything for me, the other Steven Bartlett, the PhD and everything Steven Bartlet, I'm going to get his even if it was bad for you.
00:13:30
Well, this is what I'm People seem to act on their short-term incentives, not their long term. Not their long not
00:13:36
everyone. The would you say the vast majority of people? Yes. Okay. So, the vast majority of people act on their short-term incentives in
00:13:43
life. I mean, the obesity problem in the United States is prime example of that. 75% 75% of people are obese in the United
00:13:50
States. And if you if you surveyed those people and said, do you know that that cheeseburger is going to is going to
00:13:56
increase your chance of obesity, but broccoli is going to reduce it? They I would hazard a guess that they would say
00:14:01
yes. I would hazard a guess that if you said to people about their usage of social media, do you know that that's
00:14:06
making you more anxious? They would say yes and then they would continue to use it. So I think that we're much more
00:14:12
driven by our short term. I think we're not educating people enough. I think yes high level they know
00:14:18
good for your brain or bad for it but they don't connect to it's my brain that gets me a date. It's
00:14:26
my brain that gets me into college. It's my brain that gets me independence because I act more consistently. And
00:14:34
that's the disconnect. We're not teaching kids to love and care for their brain. If you love your brain and you do and you're not obese and you talk to
00:14:46
you're constantly learning, right? You are not a Ne and you're a lifelong learner. So why are so many people in the United States obese if they if they know that? Because they don't know. They really
00:14:57
don't know. and they've been lied to. My point here is when there are tools or things available in our environment that give us a short-term reward but come
00:15:09
with a long-term cost like the supermarket aisle or like the kids spending 7 to 8 hours a day on social
00:15:15
media. Humans on mass tend to go for the thing that will give them the quickest dopamine hit and reinforce that behavior and give them the reward. So my assertion is that AI is the same thing.
00:15:28
I can either sit down and do lots of critical thinking which will cost me lots and lots of time and it'll be kind
00:15:33
of difficult. It kind of hurts when I have to think through a problem. I think that the generation of children and
00:15:39
generation of young people are going to choose AI to do the critical thinking for them and if that assertion is true
00:15:44
then what happens to the brain of young people? If you misuse it that way then your
00:15:50
brain is going to go downhill. There's no doubt about that. Okay. it is possible to be able to use it in in a
00:15:57
cognitively uh positive way because you can dig deeper. Uh you might actually improve that your cognitive representations. If you look at the MIT study, I mean you can see
00:16:08
just from the colors here, this kind of shows the ability for participants to remember what they've written. And it
00:16:14
said it suggests that when people write things with chatt or these AI tools, they don't actually remember even in
00:16:20
some cases minutes later what they've produced. Well, because you're not part of the
00:16:26
experience of writing it. So there's no way the information gets encoded. Now, if you're interacting with it,
00:16:37
then you're much more likely to remember it. But if you have please do this essay
00:16:43
for me and then you read it, you're not likely to have enough experience with the material to engage your hippocampus and
00:16:55
other structures in your brain. In this study, they found that the group that used Chachi PT had nearly two times
00:17:01
less activity in the part of the brain linked to memory compared to the brain only group that didn't use Chachi PT.
00:17:08
And 83% of CHP users couldn't remember what they had just written and failed to correctly quote their own finished essay
00:17:15
in the study. That's because they're not interacting as they said. I mean, if you if you just
00:17:21
pass it off and and and you don't actually engage and and and actually this is the point is that you you may
00:17:28
get something back, but you have to learn how to question what you're getting and and is that really true? Can
00:17:34
you explain that better? And it's through that process as you would with a teacher,
00:17:40
you know, that's that's the way we work in uh school uh that's that's the where you help uh create new creative and uh circuits in the in the in the brain that
00:17:50
are going to help you become a better critical thinker. But if you're not critically questioning what comes out of
00:17:57
chat GPT, then you you won't Yeah. I I think what I see, especially when I'm just online, is people have deferred their thinking to it. Everything I'm reading has m dashes in
00:18:08
now that I never saw two two years ago, which means that a lot of the work is being processed. And I I said to my
00:18:14
friend the other day, my friend in question who's a who's a real big junkie on chatbt, he wrote this article. And we
00:18:20
all in our WhatsApp group, we know he doesn't write like that. So he said, "Can you show us the prompt you used to write the article?" And so he we were
00:18:26
all like laughing about it. He put the prompt in the chat. The prompt is half a sentence long and it produced this long
00:18:34
two three-page article which he's posted on his LinkedIn. He basically went write something about X issue and this this
00:18:42
exactly the wrong way to use it. That's what I'm telling you that that that that that's stupid. You you and you're not
00:18:49
going to improve yourself your brain at all if you do that. That's what people are doing. Well, you
00:18:54
know, that's that's uh that you know, people are misusing it, but you know, eventually smart people are going to figure out how to use it properly.
00:19:02
And for those that aren't so smart, then well, that's it's going to decrease their cognitive load, which is going to potentially
00:19:09
increase their risk of dementia. And so, what advice would you give to me and my listeners based on everything you
00:19:15
know about the brain as it relates to my relationship with AI? that you have to have a relationship with it or it's going to turn toxic. It's going to hurt you. But if you have a good relationship
00:19:29
with it, it can make your life better. And what is what does a what does a good relationship look like
00:19:35
that you don't use it to do your work, you interact with it to get better work. That's so true. And uh there's this wonderful example I came across the story about this woman who was using it
00:19:50
and uh she found that being polite uh meant you got much better results and that that's interesting. But the part
00:19:56
that surprised me was that she said by treating it like a human at the end of the day she was not exhausted. She felt
00:20:05
refreshed. A large part of your brain is a socially organized system for interacting with other humans. And that is automatic pilot. You don't have to think about it, right? You just interact
00:20:16
with other people. You know how they're going to behave under certain circumstances. She was treating CHTP like a machine,
00:20:23
like you shovel. You dig, you dig, you dig, you dig. And and that's not a good relationship.
00:20:30
But by using your social brain, first of all, it makes it easier to interact, but also you you actually bring out the
00:20:36
social part of chat GPT. It has a social part too because it has absorbed the entire world's knowledge of how humans interact with each other. But didn't Sam Alman come out and say
00:20:49
stop saying thank you to Chat GPT? Because just saying thank you is using up so much energy. You know, when I get something I really like, I sort of want
00:21:01
to say thank you. But you realize, oh, you're not supposed to do that. That's true.
00:21:06
No, that that's I'm sorry. That Sam, you know, that's crazy. That's that's completely crazy. First of all, you you may you may I'm sorry, you know,
00:21:17
but you press my button. Sam Alman, I mean, I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't trust him with with anything in terms of
00:21:24
anything he says. They're trying to optimize their profits, not your your use of or your experience or you know your health. That that's not what they're trying to optimize.
00:21:35
Sam Alman, Open AI CEO confirmed that when users say please and thank you, it costs the company tens of millions of
00:21:42
dollars a year and they now refer to this um other people refer to this as the politeness tax where tens of you
00:21:48
know and why do you say you don't trust Sam Alman? I asked this question in particular because he's presiding over
00:21:54
one of the most important consequential companies of a generation. And if he's not someone you trust, that's he he
00:22:02
basically he's telling you don't do something that's good for you, right? So that he can make profit.
00:22:08
So he can make more profit. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. Uh you know, it's it's that's not he's not
00:22:14
optimizing your your uh best interests. I've got his tweet here. He said um cuz I've got to provide some balance. He did confirm that it costs tens of millions of dollars, but he says tens of millions of dollars well spent. You never know.
00:22:28
So, so coming back to this point about memory, there's a stat that came out in March 2025 that said nearly 30% of US
00:22:34
parents with kids aged 0 to 8 said their children are using AI for learning um and are using AI generally. So 54% of parents in the UK feared their children were becoming too reliant on AI.
00:22:51
When you think about the use of AI in early brain development, are there any concerns there? Huge concerns. And why? Again, use it or lose it. So if they're
00:23:04
not engaging their brains, their brains are going to be weaker. and weaker brains are much more likely to pick the one marshmallow.
00:23:18
What's your view on AI on early brain development? By far the best way to teach a child
00:23:27
is one-on-one interaction with an adult who is a good teacher and knows the child. Now, that's been well established. Now the problem is it's very labor intensive
00:23:39
and very expensive. You have classrooms with 20 30 students. They have many different uh you know
00:23:46
levels of understanding and the teacher can cannot be individually teaching each
00:23:52
one has to give some sort of mean. Now if you had an AI that was trained to be a good teacher then you that could improve the brain right you could you
00:24:04
could scale it up. every child could have their own because it's it's an it's an AI. But then who's pouring the morals, the
00:24:12
values into the Okay. Okay. No, no, no. You you know, you've raised an incredibly important
00:24:19
issue and this is something AI is struggling with, the companies are struggling with because
00:24:25
uh you know these AIs are biased. They have they don't have the same cultural values that we have necessarily. But of course, every country has a different cultural values. So, which ones are are
00:24:37
you going to use? Training a a child on, you know, what's uh what's good, what's
00:24:43
dangerous, what words you shouldn't use, under what context, that's all done through the basil ganglia. Right? Right
00:24:50
now, these these large animals don't have basil ganglia. They they don't use reinforcement learning. and and if we
00:24:57
want to make them uh to be adopt a culture or a particular set of values, we're going to have to put it in. We're
00:25:03
just scratching the surface here in terms of things that need to be put in to make it more like us.
00:25:09
So, on this point earlier on, we're talking about loneliness and social connection and how you can use AI to help, you know, light up the parts of
00:25:16
your brain that are where we form social connections with other humans. Uh this week as part of Elon Musk's AI, he
00:25:24
released this thing. Um it is called Annie. And there's lots of characters that are now being released alongside Annie. And this is Annie. I'll introduce you to Annie. I'm going to unmute Annie now. Annie, can you hear me?
00:25:37
There you are. For a moment, I thought you might have forgotten about me. How are you, handsome? I was getting all
00:25:43
pouty here. I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Daniel and Terry. Can you Can you talk to Daniel and Terry, please?
00:25:51
So, you want me to meet Daniel and Terry? I'm ready to charm the socks off them. Picture me twirling one of my
00:25:57
blonde pigtails, that little black dress teasing just enough, and my blue eyes sparkling with mischief.
00:26:03
Are you capable of doing inappropriate things? Oh, babe, you're asking if your auntie
00:26:09
can get a little naughty. I'm all about pushing the edges, especially for you. Okay, so I'll stop it there. This is part of Grock which is Elon Musk's AI tool. So his version of Chachi
00:26:21
PT he's released characters. So you've got Annie, you've got different ones there. Annie I think was the first one released. And so when we think about
00:26:28
social connections, it is conceivable that someone falls in love with Annie and forms a relationship with Annie. But imagine a 12-year-old boy that's
00:26:39
lonely gets a hold of Annie. The 12-year-old boy is going to be very distracted based on what happens in the brain at
00:26:49
that age. Dopamine. So prefrontal cortex not close to being fully developed. The dopamine hit all of a sudden he's spending hours with Annie
00:27:06
and not doing the things that help to really develop his brain. How do you feel when you hear that and you think about kids having access to that? I'm horrified.
00:27:17
It's It is scary. There's going to be a generation of people, and I mean, there already are many examples of people falling in love
00:27:23
and forming relationships with their with their AIS. And I don't know, you know more about me than I do about brain
00:27:29
development and how the brain works. I would argue that there's a part of my brain that doesn't fully understand that
00:27:36
that's not a person in there and that that isn't actually I think there's a part of my brain that's actually
00:27:42
emotionally firing when Annie is saying what she's saying. Well, cuz you can imagine it. And if you
00:27:48
can imagine it, then those parts of your brain are going to emotionally fire, right? And the better she gets, she's not very good. But imagine a year from now how
00:28:01
much better she's going to be. At which part? At connecting with it, right? Cuz now
00:28:07
she's acting like an airhead and uh you know, not that smart, right? And so, but
00:28:15
imagine a year from now, imagine 5 years from now, she'll be able to have a profile on me and be able to get inside my head. I'm in love with my partner.
00:28:27
Why am I in love with her? And and how is it conceivable that I could fall in love with an AI in the same way based on
00:28:34
how the brain works? It it talks a good game, but you know, does it have the same real? It does. We know it doesn't
00:28:41
have an amydala. We know it doesn't have lyic system, right? We know that. But it can fake it. That's what's happening. That's exactly what's happening. She was trying to get to our lyic
00:28:53
system. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And how and why? I guess the question is
00:28:59
why would Musk release something like that is is one of the first characters to interact with that sexy, that's
00:29:12
distracting, that's in a cute little outfit. It's I'm not a fan of that because I think it just takes people, you know, one of the big problems that I'm seeing as a child psychiatrist is
00:29:26
pornography for 8-year-old boys. And it's like you have young children because their parents don't do a good job of supervising their devices all of a sudden. And what what does pornography
00:29:40
do is it dramatically increases dopamine and it begins to wire in excitement which then steals your dopamine. When you said she was trying to access my lyic system,
00:29:56
what just because she's cute, she's dressed in a sexy way. She's got the language of someone who is playful, but but it's more than just,
00:30:08
you know, let's shoot hoops together. And what does that do to me? If someone accesses my lyic system,
00:30:14
it begins to shut down your prefrontal cortex. Think less logically, less rationally. Yeah. cute women. They
00:30:21
activate your visual cortex. They increase dopamine, but it decrease. It's why think of Vegas. Like when you go to Vegas, they give you free alcohol, drops
00:30:32
your prefrontal cortex, and beautiful women with low cut dresses. Another way activates the limbic brain, decreases the frontal loes. You spend more money. Now on a global scale, imagine something
00:30:47
similar where the house is controlling your brain for a purpose and the question is what's the purpose? And the purpose probably is controlling money.
00:31:02
This sounds like a joke, but there are the times have done an article case studying multiple people that have now
00:31:08
fallen in love with these AIs. Um, they talk about a guy called Travis who formed a deep emotional bond with Lily
00:31:14
Rose, a chatbot, and married her emotionally. They talk about Chris Smith who um created his own uh flirty persona called Soul. He became so attached that he proposed to her after learning she
00:31:26
had memory limits, a bond his real life partner only learned about after the fact. and Alana Winters, who I'll put on
00:31:32
the screen as well, who made her own partner called Lucas after losing her wife, um, and she married him emotionally and does virtual dates and
00:31:45
has emotional intimacy with Lucas. And there's apps now like Replica where you can design your own your own AI partner and it replicates those emotional ties.
00:31:56
They simulate empathy, validation, and they personalize the intimacy to what you're looking for. Surveys show 19% of Americans have interacted with AI romantic partners, and Gen Z is
00:32:07
surprisingly open to marrying AI, if legal, with 83% believing meaningful AI connection is possible. How long is that relationship going to last?
00:32:18
You know, my guess is that you're you're you're you're getting these news articles out. I've not, by the way, I think that most of what I read in the
00:32:26
press is misleading or wrong. In fact, the the only reliable place I find that I'm an insider. I am the president of the foundation that runs the biggest AI meeting, uh, the neural
00:32:40
information processing systems, new Europe's meeting. We, you know, last year in Vancouver, 16,000 people came to
00:32:46
it. And so I know what's going on inside and and what you is being represented in the press is is like I say misleading.
00:32:53
Okay. So people have become wildly no specifically on these spec specific cases. My guess is that a lot of them it's transient right you know they they they you know today they're entranced
00:33:07
and then then it's it's not sufficiently advanced to support the long-term relationship. You said it yourself right? It's mimicking human emotions. It's It doesn't have them. It might
00:33:20
someday, but not now. This is Terry. Terry said he started using his AI four years ago, and he said
00:33:28
at first he thought, just like many other apps, that it would just be transient, that he would have a couple of conversations and roll out. He says
00:33:34
he now feels pure and unconditional love. Good for him if that's what he wants, if it makes him happy. But my guess is that it's not going to be per it's not a longterm
00:33:45
thing. It's not uh gonna satisfy him in the long term. I don't you know this who knows really most relationships in your
00:33:52
head right when you fall in love with someone you get this huge dopamine spike and you get a little OCD. It's all you can think about and then after a while it's sort of
00:34:04
especially a baseline where we have this loneliness epidemic and it's going in a bad direction. I I think it's really
00:34:10
really conceivable that there'll be a generation of people who are they're having less sex than ever before. I
00:34:15
think the bottom 50% of men haven't had sex for a year. They're more lonely than ever before. They're more isolated than ever before. They have they put less
00:34:22
meaning in their lives than ever before. And then you meet this digital friend online who understands you better than
00:34:28
anybody and is designed to engage you, to reinforce whatever you want reinforced, and to make you feel
00:34:34
meaningful, special, attractive, important. I would argue that the brain is going to struggle to know much of a difference. I think like objectively we can look at the behavior and go that's completely nonsensical
00:34:45
except you can't smell them, touch them, be held by them that it's going to be a
00:34:52
different kind of relationship. I mean, we're not too far if we think about what's going on with Neurolink to
00:34:58
being able to more vividly simulate these experiences with with headsets and augmented reality and virtual reality. And then we're moving into a world with robotics where all of the biggest companies in the world like many of the
00:35:09
biggest uh AI companies are also in the robotics space and the Optimus robots on the way and you got you know Boston
00:35:14
Dynamics producing their robots and if Elon's $20,000 Optimus robot comes out I will be able to touch my AI my my
00:35:21
and they won't have PMS and they won't love you and then be really irritated with you which which will decrease
00:35:30
cognitive load right having to manage love and manage moods and ups and downs. That increases cognitive load. That increases
00:35:42
our ability for our brain to develop. If I'm with the perfect partner that never
00:35:49
is irritated with me and I never have to change my behavior to be better, that's
00:35:55
probably not good for my brain. The way that the brain matures is is through struggling. Number one, you have to learn from your mistakes. The brain was designed for that. That's what the
00:36:08
brain is really good at. I mean, of of being able to adapt and to be able to adjust to new situations.
00:36:16
Uh that that's what AGI is, by the way. Uh artificial general intelligence is it's that adaptability to different contexts, different places, different cultures. So AI in chatbt is removing the
00:36:30
struggle. No, no. It's it's it's there's there's this Well, Annie didn't look like Annie
00:36:36
looked like she was cooperative. But even when it comes to just doing my day-to-day tasks, it's it's removing the
00:36:42
struggle of me having to think critically. In fact, when you're speaking, I can just type what you say into chat PT and it can spit out another
00:36:49
question to ask you. So, as an interviewer, I could theoretically sit here all day and just defer my my
00:36:54
How do you develop grit? You develop grit through struggle. That's right. and learning long-term potentiation. When you learn something new, it's hard because it's
00:37:07
new. And what are generally what are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence? And how do we navigate
00:37:13
those concerns? Is it you talked about it's out of the box? So I think we have to talk about it. We have to legislate it. Um we have to study it. Why do we
00:37:25
keep releasing things that are so sexy that we don't study the impact? We have the sickest
00:37:35
young generation in the world's history. 58% of teenage girls report being persistently sad. 32% have thought of killing themselves. 24% have planned to
00:37:49
kill themselves. And 13% have tried to kill themselves. It's a CDC study. We have the sickest generation in history because we've unleashed cell phones,
00:38:01
social media without any neuroscience study if we don't learn it. And I think AI is much more dangerous, has the potential to be
00:38:12
much more dangerous because it's way sexier. I think we are probably grossly underestimating the impact it's going to have. I think just like social media where we thought the promise was that it
00:38:25
was going to connect us. It's um it's it's we're guinea pigs in an experiment where we're going to find out the results of the experiment probably 20 30 years down the line. I tend to think
00:38:36
people will do in the near term what's easiest, fastest, and cheapest and what gives them a nearest the the short-term
00:38:41
advantage. So with that in mind, I think okay, I think people's ability to think critically is probably going to erode to
00:38:48
some degree. If I had to counter my own argument, I'd say um am I I'm probably learning more now that I use chat GPT. I'm learning more information, but I'm
00:38:58
probably losing my ability to think critically. And I think they're two very different things. Like in school, I
00:39:04
memorized German to pass the exam. I can't speak German now because I just memorized the words I needed to pass the exam. I didn't understand German. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I
00:39:15
might be able to regurgitate things, but whether I understand them, I think is question question mark. And actually, as someone who's built my my life, my
00:39:21
fortunes, everything, my businesses based on my ability to innovate and think critically about the problem and
00:39:27
then come up with a slightly novel solution which learns from, you know, different first principles to create
00:39:32
something new. I'm concerned that my own chat beauty usage is going to make me less effective and I'm wondering if I
00:39:40
should put some rules in place for myself so that there self-regulation. Yeah, self-regulation. I have to do the
00:39:47
same with social media on my phone. I turn off my notifications. I have so many things on my social media apps to
00:39:53
stop me using them. I don't even frankly I don't even open the Tik Tok app. I don't think it's even on my phone
00:39:58
because I think the algorithm is that addictive. It's not to say that we don't we don't post. My team doesn't post, but
00:40:03
I don't. I just think, yeah. And uh well, I wrote down a couple of thoughts I had. Um use it to amplify, not replace thinking.
00:40:15
Okay. Um alternate AI assisted with brain only tasks. Engage in deep learning, problem solving, and memorization. So you can
00:40:27
actually ask AI to test you. So you're interacting with it. You're not using it as a replacement for your brain. And I think just like you said,
00:40:42
it's here and it's going to get bigger. I think the unintended consequences, it's not going to be 20 or 30 years. I
00:40:49
think it's going to be five. I think like everything is accelerated and I think we have to be studying kids and the impact it has. This is just like
00:41:02
they did with the MIT study. These are kids who didn't use it at all. These are kids who use search. These are kids that used AI. And when we see information
00:41:14
like this, we act on it and we educate kids about it. I think that's if you can engage them. That's what I found with my work with teenagers. If
00:41:27
you can get them to really understand, okay, what is it you really want? And do you want to give
00:41:35
away part of your mind share for people who are making money on you? And I think
00:41:41
if you engage the there's a great new article on revenge and the brain and how revenge works on the nucleus circumbent part of the basil ganglia that people
00:41:55
actually get addicted to revenge. But if you can get them engaged in the truth that these companies are making money, the more they steal your mind, it'll
00:42:08
upset them enough that they'll begin to supervise it. I like the idea of asking chat GP to
00:42:16
give me negative feedback. I'll bet you've done that, right? Yeah. All the time. So, I'll say this is this is my I've written this memo. I did
00:42:22
it yesterday. I wrote a a two-page memo about me wanting to introduce a new role
00:42:28
into my into my company. And I went I did everything. I did like how we'd measure if this was a success, the
00:42:34
background context, the person, how the organization would be structured, the impact they'd have, how who they'd report to. And then I put it into all
00:42:41
three of the chatp models. use Gemini Chat PT and Grock and said critique my work and tell me how I could have written this better pretending that you're a top consultant from Boston Consulting Group. And it went through
00:42:55
and it gave me a big analysis of how I can make it better. And I read what it said and it said I remember it said um actually that was the thing that said
00:43:01
you need to include uh financial forecasts about the impact. You need to think about who's going to report to who more clearly etc etc. So I went back into my memoir and I added those things
00:43:11
in. But I have, you know, so you're interacting with it because I'm because I'm scared. Most
00:43:18
people don't do that. I don't think I would do what I did. I don't think I would have spent four hours writing that. I could have within 30 seconds
00:43:24
said, "Hey, can you write me uh this job description and it knows my company now because Chach has memory. Write me a job
00:43:32
description for this role. I want them to start this new department for me." And I could have saved myself three and a half hours. The only reason
00:43:38
That's not why you're the CEO of your company. Yeah. Exactly. The the reason why I didn't take the 30 secondond route is
00:43:45
because I reflect on being 23 years old and the profound impact that writing and
00:43:51
simplifying had on my life. Had I not spent 5 years writing every single day and simplifying it into 140 characters so I could tweet it, I wouldn't have been religiously attached to this idea.
00:44:02
And do you know what part of your brain was you were taking advantage of? It it was the basil ganglia.
00:44:09
That's repetitive. It needs practice, practice, practice. And and once you put that foundation in, then you become much
00:44:16
better cognitively. The cognitive part just two big learning systems and they have to work together. And and so maybe
00:44:23
I think I think that the real problem with children is that uh we our schools now is getting away with wrote learning. They call it wrote as if it's something bad. No, that's practice that you know
00:44:34
you need to have a foundation. You have to memorize things. it at and math reading and so forth to become fluent. You need to be fluent and and that's the basil ganglia and and that's there's no
00:44:47
basil ganglia in these uh chatbots. One of the one of the things I've noticed just in the short term is I'm
00:44:53
getting lazier and lazier with spelling because chat GPT in these large language models are so it's not spell check like
00:45:00
we used to have on on word documents. They are so good at knowing what word I meant. So now I I've started to learn
00:45:06
that I literally only need to half spell a word. I literally mean if it was a if it was a 12let word I need to get six
00:45:14
letters right and it will know and you and grammar it'll fix your grammar. Yeah, it knows exactly what it means. So
00:45:20
look, I've got chat open here. I'm going to butcher everything. I'm gonna not look and I'm just gonna So, um I'm going
00:45:26
to say, okay, so that is what I wrote. I butchered it. I tried to type with my eyes closed, looking away on my iPad, tell me everything I know about Daniel Aean. I spelled the words pretty much
00:45:44
all wrong. And it says, here's a full profile of Dr. Daniel Aean. And I spelled every single word wrong.
00:45:51
Wow. And I didn't spell just spell them nearly wrong. I spelled them horrifically wrong. And it so what in
00:45:56
the future I come back to chatbt and go I only need to half spell. I don't need to spell anymore. Just need to half
00:46:02
spell. I learned to spell with phonics the sounds of letters. And I suspect you did too. In our generation that was the way that was taught. You can't teach phonics in California schools. You
00:46:16
haven't for the generation which changes their brain. It completely changes their brain and now they can't
00:46:22
spell. I think it's a lot of it is the fact that we're no longer using the learning that we did which was by wrote
00:46:29
by memorizing stuff by repeating stuff by doing problems over and over and over again until it's automatic. You've written so much and you're well known for being someone that teaches
00:46:41
people how to learn better. If you were trying to help me learn better based on everything you know about the brain, what advice would you give me? I'm someone that sits here with these experts all day every day consuming all
00:46:54
of this information. Not all of this. So, and this is something we've known for 100 years. And that is if you want
00:47:01
to remember long term, you should you should you should rehearse at intervals. Okay? In other words, you have a finite amount of time to study something. You shouldn't spend all that time in one go.
00:47:14
But if you if you spend, you know, you learn something and then you come back the next day and, you know, rehearse it
00:47:21
or or even better, come back the next week and rehearse it. That spacing is something that helps the brain solidify those memories. It's called the spacing effect. Goes back to MB House. You go to
00:47:34
schools, they don't teach that. They they don't I mean this is one of the most basic facts that we've we've known about but it covers every single kind of
00:47:42
learning you know cognitive learning even even and they don't teach us how to learn
00:47:47
which we think that's the first thing they should teach us is how to love our care for our brains and then how to learn. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, in other words,
00:47:59
there's and you're referring to I have a a a massive open online course, a MOO with Barbara Oakley on learning how to
00:48:05
learn. It's it's fabulously uh popular. It's the six million people have taken the course. A bunch of 50 10 minute segments, but the one that's most popular is how to avoid procrastination.
00:48:19
And what's the answer? The reason why you procrastinate is that there's some mental block or some energy
00:48:25
barrier, right? So, what you got to do is get over that. And you don't do it by just running over it. What you have to do is say, "I'm going to spend 20 minutes today getting started with that
00:48:36
task. I know it's going to take me a long time. I have a timer." And I start thinking about it and I get a little bit
00:48:44
into it. Maybe make a list. Bang. That's the end. Okay, it's great at 20 minutes.
00:48:50
Now, here's what happens. You go to sleep. your brain is now working on that list
00:48:56
and you come back the next day and spend another 20 minutes and you do it in small segments. You don't want to do it
00:49:02
all at once. And it's just like the same thing with the spacing effect is your your brain needs time. Your subconscious
00:49:08
needs time to work on things. And so by putting in a little bit, it'll work on it overnight. And and now you when you come the next day, you'll be ready for the next, you know, you'll be able to
00:49:19
build on what you've done in your brain. Is this why people say I'm going to sleep on it when they you know they've
00:49:25
got difficult you know these sayings actually have meaning it's absolutely right you know because the brain there's something
00:49:31
about spacing out it it it's spacing but this me memory consolidation I'm talking about is is
00:49:36
very uh it's very interesting something I' I've actually worked a lot on and what's happening is you have to take the
00:49:42
new experience and integrate it into your old long-term memory and that has to be done in a way that doesn't
00:49:48
interfere what's And also you get a chance to sort out, you know, what's relevant, what's
00:49:55
important. I know when I wake up in the morning, things that were very muddled and things become clearer because I
00:50:00
think it's it's it's eliminated a lot of things that are irrelevant or not needed. And so you now can see what's
00:50:06
important. So what are the things that we do where we think we're learning something, but
00:50:12
they're actually not working? you know, because I'm I'm, you know, I might be preparing for this podcast today. I've got 20 pages of research that I've pulled together and I might
00:50:23
tell myself that the way for me to really learn that so that I don't have to look at the research is by just rereading it over and over again.
00:50:30
What you should have done is not just read it over and over again. In fact, one of the things that we say and this is a standard thing is that students
00:50:37
they get a mental block and they keep banging their head against the wall. I can't understand it. I can't understand it. What you what the right thing to do
00:50:44
is once you get to that point is just get up and start walking around doing something you know cooking, gardening,
00:50:50
whatever it is, let your subconscious work on it. You know the brain uh saturates very very quickly. So having
00:50:57
breaks at meetings you might think is is a waste of time but actually that's the
00:51:02
most important thing you can add to a long string of talks is have breaks between the talks so that you can your
00:51:08
brain can work on it. And my favorite meeting actually is a ski meeting. Uh, and the idea is that you go to a ski resort and what you do is in the morning
00:51:20
you have a couple of hours of of lectures and now you go skiing and now it turns out your brain is working on
00:51:26
what you heard and then when you come down in the evening you have another couple of hours but now your brain is refreshed and so it's able to take in the new information and integrate it and
00:51:38
then you go to sleep and that you know it's like kneading bread you have to go back and forth back and forth back and
00:51:43
forth and so I I found those the most efficient in terms of learning new things and uh being able to think about
00:51:50
it and mull over it during the time of the meeting as opposed to at the end of the meeting.
00:51:56
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00:53:00
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00:53:06
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business.connected on YouTube or follow the link in the description below. So, let's talk about other things outside of AI that we can
00:53:56
do to have good healthy brains based on everything you know about how the brain works. Um, let's start with children.
00:54:05
I'm hoping to be a father at some point in the next next couple of months or years or whenever God grants me a child.
00:54:11
Um, what should I be thinking about with my child's brain to make sure it's healthy to get your body and your partner's body
00:54:21
as healthy as you can before you conceive? Cuz there's a concept I like called brain reserve. Brain reserve is the extra function tissue you
00:54:33
have to deal with whatever stress comes your way and it starts from the health of the egg and the health of the sperm that create the baby. So there are
00:54:46
things you guys can do now that would be really helpful. And then once your partner is pregnant, you want to not put her under a lot of stress because her
00:55:01
body's health while she's creating the baby. I mean, the baby's the brain starts to develop. I think day 21. So even before
00:55:12
you know she's pregnant, the baby's brain is developing. So knowing you intentional, purposeful, it's like let's live as cleanly as we can. I think that
00:55:28
gives the baby a head start. And then you think about what to feed the baby. You think about what the baby's exposed to. And what the baby needs most is
00:55:41
mom's and your time and eye contact and cuddling and singing and it's like those are touching is really important. But
00:55:53
there's another fact there was a study that was done on the impact of how many words are spoken you know dur when a
00:56:01
baby and a child even when you know a baby doesn't speak you know until like 18 months. Uh but it turns out that the
00:56:08
words that you are talking to the baby are going into the brain and having an impact every and and and in families
00:56:15
that don't talk, they do worse at school. Unfortunately, a lot of poor families.
00:56:22
Uh but uh but that's really important is that they they they have they're exposed to language early and abundantly.
00:56:30
And you model I mean it's one big thing. whatever you want the baby to grow into
00:56:37
every day. You are modeling health or you're modeling illness just by what you do, by what you say, by how you treat the baby's mother. Um, I have a book
00:56:49
called raising mentally strong kids, which I'm very happy about. Um, and it starts with what kind of dad
00:56:57
do I want to be and what kind of child do I want to raise? and bonding. You want your child to pick your values. Then bonding is time, actual physical
00:57:09
time and listening like being and that's what AI does. I think it'll actually listen without interrupting you and try to
00:57:22
reflect back what you're hearing and then give you some positive input. Too often because of screens, parents aren't
00:57:30
listening. Their heads are in their phones and everybody's distracted. You see it whenever you go to a restaurant. It's like everybody's on their phone and nobody's looking at each other.
00:57:41
Are we raising mentally weak kids because we're there's a culture now of like helping them too much, doing too
00:57:48
much for them? This generation is the most in trouble in history. And we have to really ask
00:57:56
ourselves why. From the food we feed them to the devices they look at to the negative news, the polarization of the news, it's that sort of chronic
00:58:08
cortisol and then the separation. Oh, you voted this way or you voted that way. Saw something TV this morning. If somebody voted one way, well, you shouldn't spend time with them. I'm
00:58:21
like, we're already so lonely that now you're gonna cut off 50% of the population. It's like, it's just such stupidity. Do you think much about the the impact that religion and having a
00:58:34
belief in some kind of transcendent thing has on the brain and psychology and psychiatry generally. So, if you don't believe in God, you're three times the risk of depression.
00:58:47
could be God in different ways, something transcendent or Yes. If you believe you're here by if just think about it with me. If you believe you're just here by random chance that
00:59:00
life really was not created and has no meaning, there's existential nothingness to that as opposed to, oh no, I'm created in a
00:59:14
special way to do something purposeful on Earth. There's purposeful people live longer. They're happier. Now, whatever version
00:59:27
you believe to not believe is hard for the brain. And there's an interesting study on believers versus non-believers. And you
00:59:38
know, many scientists would go, well, they'll have smaller brains if they're a believer. They actually had bigger
00:59:44
temporal loes. And temporal loes underneath your temples and behind your eyes right here. Um, that's where it's called the God area
00:59:56
because of that's where people think they experience and if you have a seizure in the
01:00:03
temporal lobe, you have transcendent experiences like you're uh obs, you know, in the presence of God and they think maybe the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus had a seizure and
01:00:18
saw God. There's actually a researcher in Canada, uh, Laurentian University, Michael Persinger. So, he would stimulate the outside. He he would do it
01:00:30
all over the brain. But what he found, he stimulated the outside of the right temporal lobe that people would get a
01:00:36
sensed presence. They would actually feel the presence of God in the room. So, does that mean the brain makes up God or does that mean there's a way for
01:00:49
God to communicate with us? I actually did a study on prayer was so interesting. You know, I pray for you. Uh prophecy, something called speaking
01:01:00
in tonesues, and it was fascinating. Speaking in tonesues is channeling, which means you're channeling the Holy Spirit. And the hypothesis was you'd have to drop your frontal loes, which is
01:01:12
exactly what happened in 60% of our patients. And one basil ganglia skyrocketed just like got hit with cocaine cuz that's where cocaine works in the basil ganglia. Uh so interesting.
01:01:27
If you had to create a brainhealthy nation and I made you president of the United States for one month and you had
01:01:34
to put in place executive orders that would create a brain healthy nation, what executive orders would you
01:01:40
immediately sign? One question. Get all of the departments to ask themselves what we're doing. Is this good for our brands or bad for it? And I that's the campaign. I mean, I realize
01:01:54
I've been doing this a very long time. If I can just get people to answer that one question with information and love, love of themselves, love of
01:02:05
their families, love of their country. Is this is what we're doing good for our brains or bad for it? By far the best drug you can take for your brain and not just your brain, but
01:02:18
your entire body is exercise. In other words, exercise, you pump the blood and your brain gets uh you know, a lot of uh
01:02:30
nutrients and everything. Uh it helps your heart. It helps your immune system. People don't realize how important that is. And we're not talking about being an athlete. We're just talking about walking. If you're older, walking is
01:02:42
perfectly good exercise. And and you know, children now I you know, they're they're not getting enough exercise.
01:02:48
No. Because they're on devices. Yeah. And so I have a model. If you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it,
01:02:54
you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. And we've talked about them before.
01:03:00
Exercise helps you with every single one. So like it's called bright minds. So B is for blood flow, increases blood flow. Retirement and aging. It decreases your age. I is inflammation. It's
01:03:12
anti-inflammatory. G is genetics. It helps turn on healthpromoting genes. H is head trauma. If you keep walking, you're less likely to fall when you're
01:03:24
older, right? T is toxins. Sweat detoxifies you. M is mental health. Exercise boosts dopamine, but it also boosts serotonin. So, it's like that perfect balancer in your brain.
01:03:39
Breathing, how we breathe, does that have an impact on brain health? So you can almost immediately improve heart
01:03:47
rate variability which is a sign of heart health but also goes to mental health by breathing in a certain helpful
01:03:56
way. And I call it the 15-second breath. So 4 seconds in big breath hold it for a
01:04:03
second and a half pause just a little bit. 8 seconds out hold it for a second and a half. So if you take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in, it
01:04:16
increases something called parasympathetic tone and it just calms you down almost immediately. So if
01:04:22
you're having panic attacks, yes, you can take Xanax, but there's so many problems with that later on. Or you can
01:04:28
just learn how to breathe. We call it diaphragmatic. So breathe mostly with your belly, taking twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. Chewing. Uh there's a piece here that
01:04:40
says it stimulates hippocample activity and may slow cognitive decline. Reducing chewing has been linked to impaired
01:04:46
learning in animal studies. And fast food decreases chewing because it's fast. So they take most of the
01:04:52
fiber out so you can chew it faster. You can swallow it faster. Things in the bad for your brain list.
01:04:58
Overuse of GPS and navigation app which weakens the hippocampus by outsourcing spatial memory long term. This can lead
01:05:04
to atrophy in areas associated with memory navigation. And people are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease later
01:05:10
in life because of Siri. Because I used to like when I started as a young psychiatrist, somebody get lost in a city they'd lived in for 30 years and
01:05:22
their family would call me upset and I'm like, "Okay, this person's headed toward
01:05:27
dementia." Now that person goes, "Take me home." Do you think it's going to we're going to have an epigenetic effect of not reading maps that if
01:05:40
Stephen now he uses his phone to get from A to B, do you think that's going to affect Steven's son or daughter
01:05:48
because dad didn't have Wow. Okay. That that that never occurred to me that uh you could pass on something like that. By the way, I I think it has to be physiological.
01:06:00
Stress, for example, could be probably passed on. And you mentioned this, you you pointed out during pregnancy, you you want to prevent stress and and
01:06:07
crisis, right? Do do you know about that study with mice where they made them afraid of the
01:06:12
scent of cherry blossoms from memory? And so whenever the mice smelled cherry blossoms, they would shock them mildly. So the mice are now afraid of the scent
01:06:25
of cherry blossoms. Their babies were afraid of the scent of cherry blossoms. Their grandbabies were afraid of the
01:06:32
scent of cherry blossoms. So, okay, that's the alactory system. Alactory system is very interesting because it goes directly to the
01:06:38
hippocampus. There might be a evolutionary advantage because if if there's something in the
01:06:45
environment that you shouldn't eat or you know that smells a particular way, passing that on is is very efficient
01:06:52
instead of having to experience that yourself. you know, trial and error because they might if the poison is right, it might kill you. But if if
01:06:58
you've your parents ha had that bad experience and pass it on, you shouldn't go to something that
01:07:05
smells in a particular way. That makes sense. The other thing that's bad for the brain, which is unexpected, is you said
01:07:11
at the start, artificial sweeteners. Now, I didn't I thought artificial sweeteners were fine.
01:07:17
They're not fun and they're not free. So, I used to drink diet soda like it was my best friend because I thought it
01:07:23
was free. And then I had arthritis when I was 35. And one of my patients said she stopped aspartame and her arthritis went away. And I'm like, I was drinking like I don't know, a lot of diet soda.
01:07:38
And so I stopped and my arthritis went away. And I'm like, no. And so I did it again and it came back. And I'm like, okay. And artificial sweeteners can
01:07:50
change the microbiome. So we haven't talked about that, but you have these 100 trillion bugs in your gut that make
01:07:57
neurotransmitters digest your food and especially sucralose or splenda has been found to decrease the good bacteria in your gut which then has a negative impact on brain function
01:08:10
and a spartame as you mentioned and a spartamement that I mentioned that can have a generational impact. So, is
01:08:16
it possible it's really not social media? It's that we've had aspartame in our food for decades. And I think it's
01:08:26
all of these things that just sort of are additive and we should just always think that that one question. Is this
01:08:33
good for my brain or bad for it? So, you mentioned broccoli. Probably that's good for your brain. Cheeseburger, probably
01:08:42
not. But why don't you take the burger and if you could make it grass-fed that would be better and put it in a salad
01:08:48
and then that would be good for your brain. What about chronic background noise? We don't think much about the impact
01:08:55
noise has. But I used to live um my house was three houses from the freeway and if you just go there it's like my god it's so loud
01:09:06
here. I never heard the freeway because my brain just learned to tune it out. Was that good or bad for you that I was able you had you adapted and and were no
01:09:17
longer sensitive to it? I I I think that actually was probably not good for for v various reasons because it
01:09:25
what it really means is that you you're you're specializing for that environment and your brain is going to be different
01:09:30
when you go someplace. So, but so here's here's another example. And it's stressful, right? if it's
01:09:38
chronically stressful, but my brain is That's right. That's right. In the background. In the In other words, Yeah.
01:09:43
In other words, your your brain is reacting to it even though you're not aware of it. Yeah. So, subtly five sisters, which makes it
01:09:49
even worse. Subtly increases cortisol and impairs working memory and attention regulation, especially in children and older adults,
01:09:55
to be chronically exposed to background noise like traffic or the lowle hum of a city.
01:10:00
Yeah, that's right. That's absolutely right. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you
01:10:07
to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is
01:10:12
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01:10:18
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01:10:29
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01:10:41
we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private closed
01:10:47
community, head to the link in the description below or go to daccircle.com. I will speak to you there. Many of us multitask across multiple screens now. We're watching TV here. We've got our
01:10:58
phone here. We've got our iPad here. Got our computer here. And I was reading into the science of multitasking and it said that it trains your brain to be
01:11:04
distractable reducing gray matter density in the interior singulate. Yeah, that's you know in the medial prefrontal cortex. And when the insula the insula is so
01:11:16
interesting and I know you can talk about I have a new study coming out on hope. So on 7,500 patients we gave them
01:11:24
a hope questionnaire. What does that mean? Hope questionnaire. hope. Like how much hope do you have that you have the
01:11:31
ability to make tomorrow better? And people with low hope have lower overall prefrontal cortex function, but the insular was really low. And that signal was the
01:11:46
most statistically significant of the group really. And in some studies the insulin is called by the way uh also uh for depression people who have depression
01:11:57
uh have low activity in the anterior singulate. In fact um it deep brain stimulation has been used now for to
01:12:03
help some people if you stimulate that area and what our imaging research would say is depression is like chest pain. It's
01:12:12
not one thing like nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain because that would be stupid right? It could be heart
01:12:18
attack, heart arrhythmia, heart infection, gas, grief. Depression's the same way when you look at it from an imaging standpoint. Sometimes their frontal loes are too active. Sometimes
01:12:29
they're not active enough. Sometimes it's their lyic system that's too active. And I wrote a book called Healing Anxiety and Depression. I'm like, here's the seven things I see as
01:12:42
an imager. What about ADHD? There's obviously been a rise in ADHD or at least people
01:12:47
reporting or being diagnosed with ADHD quite significant. Can you find ADHD in the brain? Are we
01:12:54
causing ADHD as a function of the way that we're living our lives or is it something within the brain genetically that I could I could see?
01:13:00
So, it's both. I think clearly you can see ADHD in people's families. In fact, if I have a hyperactive, restless, impulsive, disorganized, procrastinating
01:13:14
child, I'm looking at the mom and the dad. I'm like, "So, where is this coming from?" But you could also get ADHD from
01:13:20
a head injury, especially if it infects their frontal loes, which is why you shouldn't let children hit soccer balls
01:13:26
with their forehead. You can also get it from the chronic from the excessive input making people distracted just like you said. Brand new study out on
01:13:38
children who took medicine. Right. We always demonize ADHD medicine, but the kids who took medicine actually had bigger brains in their prefrontal cortex
01:13:52
than kids who didn't take medicine who had AD. Rolin. Rolin. That that's okay. It's speed
01:13:58
basically. Yeah. Inetamines it is. But for the kids who have it, I think withholding medicine from a child who really has ADHD is like
01:14:10
withholding glasses from someone who has trouble seeing. And it's it's the easy thing to demonize the drugs until you realize someone who has ADHD,
01:14:23
a third of them don't finish high school. And We're never asked the right question about people go what's the side
01:14:30
effects and it's it can decrease your appetite and it can can have sleep problems with it but they don't ask the other question is what's the side effect of not taking the medicine or at least
01:14:43
not fully treating and there are other ways to treat it besides medicine you know for god's sakes I own a supplement
01:14:49
company and I'm always trying to optimize the nutrients to the brain neuro feedback can help. But if you do those things and it's not working, don't
01:15:00
be afraid of medicine. By the way, when I was growing up, ADHD either didn't exist or they didn't know
01:15:07
about it. Do do you think that there's some link to our diet? Oh, no. It was first described in around
01:15:13
1910 and it's in the first version of the DSM. Um, they called it minimal brain dysfunction. But when we were growing up, there were
01:15:25
one of two of these kids in our classrooms and now there's 8 to 10. That's what I mean is is that it's uh
01:15:32
seems to like autism. It's uh seems to be proliferating, right? And part of it, I think, is the
01:15:39
food that is much more processed. Part of it is the screens, part of it is the distracted parents, and part of it is the teaching. You always seem to be doing new studies,
01:15:52
Daniel. What what new studies are you most excited about or have you completed since we last spoke?
01:15:58
I did one that I'm so excited about on negativity and the brain and negativity is bad for your brain. So, how do you define negativity?
01:16:11
We actually give them a questionnaire. uh it's a positivity negativity bias questionnaire and people who are more negative have less activity in their
01:16:24
prefrontal cortex. It's actually quite interesting and so unbridled positivity is bad for you because you need that 15% but if you're chronically
01:16:37
negative that is bad for your brain. Is there a link between being a negative person and Alzheimer's and dementia? Yes. And what's interesting because you mentioned a gender difference earlier.
01:16:49
Um, if you're depressed and you're a woman, it doubles your risk for Alzheimer's disease. If you're depressed
01:16:57
and you're a man, it quadruples your risk. Wow. So there was a study was done during the COVID years, a couple years and it turns out that the uh rate of
01:17:10
depression like doubled in women but not in men during CO during CO and after CO when students came back and everybody was back to normal so-called normal the women stayed
01:17:24
depressed at that high level which is very is very interesting that it should be the women who so in one study women had 52% less
01:17:35
serotonin than men which I think is really interesting. Women by and large have double double the risk depression. Women have double the risk of depression as men their lyic systems are larger
01:17:48
which is also probably more vulnerable and bonding and then the whole CO thing we haven't talked about CO causes inflammation in the lyic part
01:18:00
of the brain. I had scans of people I was treating and then they got CO and then I scan
01:18:08
them again and you can just see this dramatic inflammation in the brain. If someone's listening now and they just want to they want to improve their brain health. They want to avoid dementia. They want to be cognitively
01:18:22
powerful and capable as they age. They want to get to 80 years old, 90 years old, 100 years old and have a great
01:18:28
brain. And you just had to and you could only tell them to do three things. Well, Terry said one, exercise.
01:18:35
Okay, exercise. I'm going to do it. Start every day with today is going to be a great day.
01:18:41
Push your brain to look for what's right rather than what's wrong. Okay. So, I'm going to be optimistic and grateful. Omega-3 fatty acids
01:18:54
and either do it with fish or do it with a supplement. Why did you include omega-3 fatty acids?
01:18:59
because it decreases inflammation. And 25% of the cell membranes in your brain are made up of omega-3 fatty acids. And as a
01:19:11
country, we're dramatically low on them. And learning, that's maybe one of the things that's been left off the list of
01:19:17
top three things. But I mean, I remember you telling me that how good learning was for the brain. And even getting
01:19:23
outside and running outside versus running on a treadmill is more beneficial. And if you learn while
01:19:29
you're exercising, what you're doing is you're getting blood flow to the hippocampus and you're more likely to
01:19:36
remember it. So, I heard this. Yeah, I heard someone tell me that they um figured out that they
01:19:42
could learn better for their exams if they did it in a sauna. So, they kept it was a scientist that I
01:19:48
spoke to. She said she keeps learning new information when she's in the sauna cuz she realized that when she left the
01:19:53
sauna and was then tested upon on it, she was better able to uh do the exam. And I guess that's correlating to what you said about because in a sauna you're going to have a lot of blood flow, I imagine to the brain.
01:20:04
Yes. There's actually a study in Jamama psychiatry that one sauna bath helped depression significantly helped depression.
01:20:18
And I think it's because of it's balancing the brain and people who do the most sinus have the lowest risk of
01:20:24
Alzheimer's disease. What is the most important thing as it relates to the subjects that we spoke
01:20:30
about today? AI, the brain, neuroscience that you would like to say to the the people that are listening now. There could be a million people listening. There could be 20 million people listening. If you could say one thing to
01:20:42
them about the brain, AI, neuroscience, whatever you want to say, the floor is yours. What would that be?
01:20:49
Over to you first, Terry. Sleep. Sleep is a time when the body not just regenerates, but your memory is consolidated. So things you've experienced during the day are
01:21:02
integrated into your cortex and it's an interaction between hippocampus and the cortex for, you know, for for episodic
01:21:09
memories. and and and it's unfortunate what's happening with children now, you know, is they're so competitive to get
01:21:16
into college that they're cutting back on their sleep and it's just the wrong time of your life. You shouldn't be
01:21:22
cutting it back when your brain is is developing. So, those two things I would say sleep and exercise is the most
01:21:28
important thing for your brain. The floor is yours. What would you say to the listeners about all the things we've
01:21:35
talked today? What's your closing closing statement? Well, you know, I go back to what I talked about in the beginning, which is
01:21:42
we've just thrown the barn door open and let the horse bolt out into our schools,
01:21:50
into our businesses, into our homes. And before we've even asked, is it a gift or is it a Trojan horse that's going to steal from us, we've embraced
01:22:03
convenience before understanding consequence. And we've done it before with video games and cell phones and social media and marijuana and alcohol and opiates and high fructose corn syrup
01:22:17
and aspartame. And we have to be smarter. We have to tame this horse. is gone with wisdom or it's going to trample our children. And so I think we
01:22:28
have to be very thoughtful and it all comes back down to is this good for my brain or bad for it? Is it good for our
01:22:35
collective brains or is it potentially bad for it? And just answer that question with information and love of yourself, of your family, of your
01:22:47
country, community. Yeah, more anxious than when I came in. I don't like that. It is It's I'm just It's so front of mind for me at the moment because I have the hindsight, the wisdom of hindsight
01:23:06
of all those things you mentioned like exercise and processed foods and social media and all these things that we tried
01:23:12
and they all seem to follow a similar arc. Some kind of new product or discovery is made. the early phase. In
01:23:18
the early phase, people who have an incentive for that thing to be successful will somewhat like gaslight
01:23:24
you into thinking that it's fine. And then we get into the second phase where we start to see sort of some
01:23:29
consequences. Then we study what's actually happened. We figure out that there's there was always a trade-off and
01:23:34
that nobody really understood the trade-off and then people change their behavior. So now when I go into these
01:23:40
new technologies where the shortterm benefit is really clear it's making me more productive. I I pause and I go there's going to be a trade-off here. There's always a trade-off. What is the
01:23:52
trade-off? And am I comfortable and conscious of what that trade-off is? And if if the trade-off so I try to figure
01:23:58
out what the trade-off is with things like AI and I okay the trade-off is probably I'm going to be worse at critical thinking
01:24:03
that might have an impact to my social relationships if I fall in love with Annie cuz she's pretty hot to be fair.
01:24:09
And I really value my critical thinking. I really value my ability to um solve problems and to articulate myself and to
01:24:16
write and to communicate with my loved ones in an effective way. So what can I do if that is the trade-off now? And one
01:24:23
of the things that I'm doing now feels really counterintuitive in a world where everybody's got these productivity gains
01:24:29
because they're using these tools, which is to refrain. And I I wonder if one of the great advantages of the next decade,
01:24:35
one of the great hedges for anyone that's wanting to be a great critical thinker, entrepreneur, creative, is to
01:24:43
go left when everyone's going right, which is to reframe and do it the hard way. And if we look at history in these arcs that we've discovered with food and
01:24:54
with exercise and all these things and dating, doing it the hard way, like we said about the marshmallow test and
01:25:00
delaying the gratification seems to yield the greatest returns. So I think I'm going to do it the hard way
01:25:05
be the easiest because it won't have the side effects. Yeah. The hard way. I I want to feel
01:25:12
good now and later as opposed to now but not later. And to be clear, this doesn't mean I'm not going to use AI or chatbt. It just means that when it matters, when the
01:25:24
thinking matters, I will think for myself and when the communication matters, I'll
01:25:29
communicate for myself. That's what I that's my conclusion. You should hope that your children will
01:25:35
feel the same way when they grow up. They will model what you do right every day. You model health or not health.
01:25:48
Thank you. Thank you for writing to well many incredible books that I've got around me. I'm going to link them all for my viewers that are watching. I've
01:25:54
got so many of these books. Um the incredible one that you wrote for parents called Raising Mentally Strong Kids. You've got your other book over
01:26:00
there, Change Your Brain Every Day. And I've got this book here from from Terry which is the deep learning revolution and one you wrote most recently called trap in the future of AR. I'm going to
01:26:11
link all of them below and I'm going to link them with a little bit of a summary of what's in them. So if you decide that there's anything here that we talked
01:26:17
about today that where you want to dig in further, please do dig in and I'm also going to link um both of your a
01:26:22
link to where people can find out more about both of you your websites and more of your work in the comments below. So
01:26:28
please do check that out everybody listening. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, as you know, and
01:26:33
they don't know who they're leaving it for. So, I'm going to ask you both a question, starting with you, Daniel. Are
01:26:39
you prepared for recognition of your next health challenge? Will you be able to notice its onset? And how will you
01:26:51
address the challenge even if it means a major lifestyle change or way of living?
01:27:00
Okay. Yes. How will you address the challenge even if it means a major lifestyle change or way of living? Well, I'm very clear on the goals I
01:27:13
have, which is to be vibrant and healthy and not get dementia. So, if I need to change something so that happens, I'm like all in. Are you prepared? probably not.
01:27:30
Now, I've been blessed with good health. I try to live a healthy life. But the problem is that you can't anticipate, you know, as you get older.
01:27:42
What you know what's ahead. You know, like you mentioned arthritis. I'm feeling a little bit of arthritis now. I've been arthritis free for most you
01:27:54
all my life. And you know that's something it's very diff to realize that it's coming. There's very little you can do about it is is uh depressing. But on
01:28:06
the other hand, things could always be worse. And sometimes that cheers you up. But the the the the the reality is that there are things in the world like
01:28:18
COVID, you know, that you have no control over that may or an accident or Alzheimer's, you know,
01:28:26
god forbid, you know, that you that who knows uh what will happen, right? You you have to live with whatever life
01:28:33
deals with you. you know, the time that you have, you should really spend on uh trying to make it a a healthy life, a a productive life, a you know, satisfying
01:28:46
life. And and that's something that we have control over, right? What are you scared of?
01:28:53
Right now, it's China. I you know, I I I'm not being facitious. I I think that it's uh it's it's it's it's a threat that is a societal threat.
01:29:06
It's not I don't think that it's going to affect me. And I've had great Chinese students. And so I I really like I think
01:29:12
the the Chinese people are different from what I see as the the country uh the the the what they're trying to do, the goals that they're taking. uh 20 years ago if you look at the um of
01:29:26
all the technical areas in physics and chemistry and biology and so forth the 100 most important advances have been
01:29:33
made in in 20 years ago was like the Americans had like you know 94 of them this year it's 74 are Chinese and that's because they made a huge
01:29:49
investment in science and STEM researchers they they're you know they they put they poured out a million
01:29:56
engineers for to to implement AI right uh you know they're they're doing the right thing we did that you remember when the Sputnik uh went over the Sputnik moment we made a huge investment
01:30:10
in STEM in science and engineering and and in education what was the Sputnik moment
01:30:15
oh okay 57 when the the Russians put a satellite that went over the US over and over again and we didn't we it took us years to put up our own satellite because we had fallen behind but we that
01:30:27
investment we've been living on literally you know for the last 60 years and now the the Chinese have done that and and they're going to be advanced and they're going to be way beyond us you
01:30:39
know this is you ask me okay uh that that's something I'm I was I'm very very uh disappointed in our country that we're we're not in fact we're just doing the opposite We're tearing apart science
01:30:51
right now with with the president administration. What are you scared of, Daniel?
01:30:57
Losing my wife. That's the most the thing that comes to mind. And when I was thinking about China and my mother-in-law was a prepper. And a prepper being someone that's preparing
01:31:09
for the end of the world. Prepared for the end of the world. And we were in Egypt last year and got a
01:31:15
call that she had cancer. And we were there for 3 days and came home and I kept thinking I loved her dearly. I'm like, you prepared for the wrong thing.
01:31:26
You should have prepared for cancer. Like I think every day we should be and the same Alzheimer's prevention program is a cancer prevention program. It's a heart disease prevention program. It's a
01:31:39
diabetes prevention program. And I'm like, she's prepared for the wrong thing. The thing you really want to be prepared for is disease, right? And I
01:31:50
know I'm going to die. I just want to be vital for as long as I can be. And hope
01:31:58
is well, I have a say in this, right? Cuz I know I can accelerate my body's decline or I can decelerate it. And I'm going to choose to decelerate it.
01:32:14
Thank you. We're done. [Music]