Heroic Interview: Change Your Brain, Change Your Life with Dr. Daniel Amen

You're listening to Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, an Optimal Living interview with Daniel Amen and Bryan Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Dr. Daniel Amen, MD, who, among many other things, is one of the world's leading psychiatrists, a clinical neuroscientist. I love that phrase, a clinical neuroscientist, which basically means that he uses brain imaging, which we're going to talk about today, to help his patients and clients optimize their lives and their brains. Of course, he's also the best selling author of a number of books and he's also just a really good guy. We, as I've discussed in different contexts, Alexandra and I have experienced some health challenges. Alexandra had a couple of seizures and we were almost certain it was related to mold exposure. And Alexandra had watched a documentary Dave Asprey produced on mold. And we very much wanted to reach out to Dr. Amen, who's a featured expert in that documentary, to get his perspective. And synchronistically, he reached out to me to talk about this new book that we're going to talk about today. We got a slot in his next available time went down, spent a couple days in his clinics in Orange county, and then a few hours unpacking brain scans on both Alexandra and Michael. My Brain, which was awesome. And we just appreciate Dr. Amen from a general perspective and from a very personal perspective. So, Daniel, thank you for dedicating your life to all this work and wisdom. And thank you for generously sharing that with the world and with my family in particular.

Wow. It was so much fun to spend time with you and Alexandra to share my work with the people who adore you.

Right on. Well, let's jump in. So Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. You published this book originally in 1999, I believe, and this is the revised and updated book. And I just want to start with one of the opening kind of thoughts in the book. You say psychiatrists, then and even now are the only medical specialists who virtually never look at the organ they treat. Can you talk to us about that and your work and how it differs from the majority of psychiatrists out there?

So I'm a classically trained psychiatrist. I'm double board certified in general psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. And when I graduated from medical school in 1982, you know, I wanted to be a really good psychiatrist and a writer. I wanted to translate other people's research into for the general public because I love teaching, but in the process, in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain spect imaging, and it just changed everything. I did that. The images gave me better direction. In fact, they changed what I did eight times out of ten with my patients. And I just fell in love with it. And I thought back in, you know, it's nearly 25 years ago. Well, of course, this is the future. Everybody would look. Why wouldn't you want to look? And I came up against a fair amount of resistance from my colleagues because they said, that's not what we do. And growing up, my dad called me a maverick. And to him, that was not a good thing. But I just thought it was unconscionable if you could get more information to help your patients. Well, why wouldn't you? And Nora Volkow, who's the director of nida, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, she and I had a debate once, and she said, well, you don't need to scan the brain because the brain has language. And I went, well, that's just not right, because the brain will never tell you if it's infected. It'll never tell you if it's been exposed to mold. It'll never tell you if it has been hurt. It'll tell you it's depressed, but you don't know why that is. And so we're really excited. We've now built this imaging database of 115,000 scans on people from 111 countries. And it's the right thing to do because without looking, you fly blind. And flying blind hurts people. And so what we've seen with imaging, it decreases stigma, it increases compliance. I know when you and I looked at your brain, you're like, I'm motivated. And that's what I love. Because people fall in love with their brains, and then they do the right things for them.

Yeah, this is great. And just to highlight it, I mean, it's the equivalent of I was telling my mother's husband about us connecting, and he has knee challenges right now. And I said, it's kind of like you walking into the orthopedic and saying, well, you know what? It hurts when I move this way. And it kind of sort of hurts when I move this way. And him saying, oh, okay, well, let me solve that this way. Right? Not actually looking at the. At the thing that he's treating. So it's one of those things that, on its face, just. It's hard to wrap my brain around. Once you've introduced the idea of why more psychiatrists don't do what you're talking about, which is obviously a longer conversation. For now, you talk about the one thing that you've learned in these, and when you wrote the book, it was 100,000. So we've already gone to 115,000 brain scans. What's the number one thing that you've learned? And then we'll talk about some details behind that.

Well, I mean, the most exciting thing that I've learned. I mean, the images have just taught us so many important lessons. But the number one is that you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, and I can prove it. So we literally have thousands of before and after scans where on a brain smart program that you can get better blood flow to your brain. It's actually did an interview with my friend Majid Fatoui from Hopkins on Monday, and he said it's not just blood flow. You can actually grow your hippocampus, which is one of the major memory structures in the brain. So do the wrong things, it will hurt and shrink your brain. Do the right thing, you can optimize and improve your brain. And that, to me, is just so exciting. I just turned 61, and I remember when I turned 60 was a little weird because I've seen thousands of brains, as they age, they get less and less active. They shrivel, sort of like your skin. But that doesn't happen for everyone. That if you are serious. In the new book, I actually introduce a concept of being a brain warrior. Because you're in war. Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat, a toxic thought into your head, a gadget that hooks your attention and ruins your relationships. If you just know you're in a war. And you know, being 16, I'm gonna be 1661. I know I'm in a war for the health of my brain, but it's one I'm committed to because I never want to be a burden to my children, and I want to be the leader of my family. But the only way that is possible is. Is if I have frontal lobes that work right, that I have good forethought, judgment, impulse control, planning. And the exciting thing is, I have a choice.

That's amazing. So, again, the number one lesson is the name of the book. We can change our brain. In the process change our lives. We can optimize the most important thing that we have in our bodies. Right. As you said, your brain is the most amazing organ in the universe. It is the organ responsible for learning strategizing loving, creating and behaving as such. It's important to know about it, love it, and maybe even be a bit obsessed with it. And then as you say throughout the book, become a brain warrior. Our culture is in a literal all out war against our health and optimization and I'm excited to explore some of my favorite kind of practical ideas. Let's talk about one of the phrases that I love and it's such a kind of common part of the self help literature now that I actually didn't know that it originated with you until a little bit later. But this idea of ants, an ant spray, automatic negative thoughts. I love the way you share the story in the book and then walk us through how to go about dealing with the ants that creep up. Can you tell us about automatic negative thoughts and how you came up with that phrase?

So you know, there are obvious things that hurt the brain, brain injuries, drugs, alcohol, sleep apnea. But one of the things that we learned is, is that negative thought patterns. So focusing on what you hate about your life also decreases activity in the brain. And I remember this one day where I saw really sick people, suicidal people, couples who hated each other, teenagers who were running away from home. And when I got home, I had an ant infestation in my kitchen. And, and as I was cleaning up the thousands of ants, I'm thinking, ants, automatic negative thoughts, the thoughts that run into people's minds automatically. My patients are infested with this negativity. And so I brought a can of ant spray to work the next day and I started talking to people about we need to get rid of these ants because they're ruining your life, infecting your relationships, or even making you want to kill yourself. So here's the exercise and it's going to sound really simple, but it takes discipline to actually do. Whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous or out of control, write down your thoughts and then ask yourself, are they true? Can you absolutely know that they're true? We have nine different species of ants, like focusing on the negative mind reading, fortune telling, guilt, beatings, blame, and so identify well what kind of ant this is. My wife never listens to me. That's what we call an always aunt, where you're thinking in words like always, never, everyone, every time. And if I have that thought, it's a really negative, isolating thought and it actually gives me permission to be rude to her. And so even though it's not true, I mean, there are times she doesn't listen to me, but there are a lot more Times she does. But if I believe the nonsense going through my head, it can actually drive depression, drive panic disorders. And what we discovered, when you write them down, identify them, talk back to them, that's how you eliminate them. It's a primary treatment for depression, a primary treatment for relationship problems and a primary treatment for anxiety disorders. It's just so helpful. And what we discovered is your brain actually works better if you can allow your mind to focus on what's true rather than the nightmare scenarios your brain often plays. Because we're wired for anxiety. That's what helped our ancestors survive, but we don't need it now.

So good. And in the book you walk through those nine species and I just love it. You and I share a fortune telling habit and you have some really funny and super practical applications of that. Can you just spend a moment and talk to us about, okay, so we have these negative thoughts that if we let run rampant like an infestation in our head. It looks like this type of brain, as you intervene and coach your and work with your both clients and patients to really do this work with the ant spray, tell us about how the brain changes just to bring that to life in our minds a little bit more.

Well, we actually did a study and we had people focus on what they hated about their life. And what we saw, significant decreased activity in the cerebellum. And the cerebellum is fascinating. It's the back bottom part of your brain. It means little brain, 10% of the brain's volume, 50% of the brain's neurons. And it's involved in coordination, but also thought coordination, how quickly you can integrate new information and when that drop confused. So negative thinking actually goes to being uncoordinated. You're going to bump into more walls, you'll get into athletic slumps, but you'll be confused in how you deal with other people. When you're focused on the negative, your left temporal lobe, involved with learning, memory, mood stability and temper control also goes down. So you're going to be much moodier and more likely to be irritable and angry and you're not going to be able to remember things and your frontal lobes drop. So focus, forethought, judgment, impulse control. So focusing on the negative will actually make your life literally more negative because it won't have the good function it needs. Now we have to be really clear. This is not positive thinking. I am not a believer in positive thinking. I think positive thinking kills way too many people. It's like, oh, I can eat this piece of cheesecake and it won't hurt me. Well, we actually discovered, and actually there's a big study from Stanford over 90 years. They looked at what went with health, success and longevity. And it was not positive thinking, happiness, or a lack of worry. In fact, the don't worry, be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. So you need some anxiety because the fact is you're in a war. You just don't have to believe every stupid thing you think.

Again, so powerful to make that distinction. And when we allow ourselves to step back and allow a healthy amount of anxiety to come into our lives, then we can challenge the thoughts and choose the most constructive reaction or response rather than sugarcoat over it and delude ourselves that everything's fine when it simply isn't. Right.

Well, my favorite Bible verse, I quote this all the time at work, is John 832, know the truth and the truth will set you free. So what I coach my patients to and what I always try to stay in personally is what's the truth? So if I think, you know, my wife never listens to me, well, that's not true. But if I don't question my thoughts, I believe them and then I act out of the erroneous thoughts I have. But if I look at the, you know, eight Oreos that I would really prefer eating, it's like, oh, well, that really won't hurt me. And it's like, no, that's a lie. Let's be in truth. Your brain, as you mentioned, uses 20 to 30% of the calories you consume. And if you consume bad things, you're not going to be able to think in ways that are optimal.

Let's go there. So your hungry brain is the way that I framed the big idea. You point out the fact that our brain uses 20 to 30% of the calories we consume. Therefore, we want to pay attention to what calories we're consuming. Can you unpack that for us?

Well, you know, it's just so interesting that even though your brain is only 2% of your body's weight, about 3 pounds, it uses 20 to 30% of the calories you consume. So the nutrients in your food or the toxins in your food are either helping or hurting your brain. And we've been sold a lie, actually, by the federal government that low fat diets are good for us. Kill the fat, low fat, fat free, and 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat. So I always say, if somebody calls you a fathead, say, thank you that it's not the fat in our diet that kills us, that gives us heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, it's the sugar. And simple carbohydrates raise inflammatory markers and inflammation has been associated with depression and dementia. And so getting your food right. And think of a plate, 70% plant based foods because plants have medicine in them and 30% high quality protein with healthy fat mixed in with both the vegetables and the protein. And you will think better, you will feel better. Not only will you lose weight, but you'll also lose things like brain fog, depression, irritability that you know, and I wasn't trained at all nutrition when it came to the brain, you know, I was trained. You have these symptoms, get this medicine. And over time I went, well, I wasn't all that happy with how the medicines made my patients brains look. So what are the natural ways? Because in medical school where I went, they teach you first, do no harm, use the least toxic, most effective treatment. And so I'm thinking diet, exercise, not believing every stupid thought you have natural supplements. What are natural ways? Not opposed to medicine when it's needed, but I am opposed to going there first. When you've not really educated people about diet and exercise.

Again, we can talk about this for a weekend. And of course you go off in the book on the brain warriors nutritional approach for those listening. And I'm thinking of parents too, especially right now. If you were thinking, and obviously all of us and if we want to be great parents, we need to take care of ourselves. If you had to just come up with kind of the three things that toxins that we may not be aware are damaging us, what would they be? You mentioned sugar, but what would those top three be?

So pesticides and not for what you might think is a lot of people don't know that you have over 100 trillion bugs in your gut, bacteria and so on. And the reason not to eat pesticides is they kill the bugs in your gut because you know, pesticides kill bugs, including the ones living in your body. And so I think eating pesticide free food as much as possible becomes really important. I know it's been associated with adhd, which is skyrocketing, autism and so on. So if we think of sugar pesticides and if you are symptomatic, you have to ask yourself, have you been exposed to mold? It's an epidemic that very few people know about. But I know one of the questions that I always ask is did your house have a flood near or around the time your symptoms started? Because if it did, you need to have your house checked.

We did a whole other conversation. It's just so powerful to bring awareness to these ideas that just aren't typically part of the discussion. Let's talk about straight lines. And we talked about this. You had a little chart in your office, and I actually just love the diagram you have in the book. You say that straight lines is just not how we grow. Can you talk to us about the process of growth?

Well, I'm always at the whiteboard, like I was with you in my office. And I say, you know, when people come to see me, they have good days and bad days, but they're generally bad. And that's why they're my office. And we intervene with their diet, with supplements, learning how to kill the ants, and they get better, but no one just gets better. They get better, and then they fall back, and then they get better still, and then they fall back. And a lot of people, when they fall back or when they fail, they get discouraged, and then they stop the new course. And what I always tell people is, is failure is your friend if you are paying attention to it, because failure will teach you what went wrong. So I was doing really good with my diet. I was doing really good with killing the ants, and then I had an uncle die. I got really stressed, and I just. The whole program, you know, went bad. And I'm like, I need you to be curious about what's happening in your life, not furious. If you can take a student's approach, why did that happen? I didn't sleep. I went too long without eating. I believed every stupid thought that went through my head. If I can teach my patients, and that's what I spend a lot of time doing, failure is not fatal. It's not learning from failure. That's what gets people into the biggest problems in their life.

So good. And the way you visually represented that on the whiteboard and you do in the book, is you draw a line that rather than linearly going up from a lower point to a higher point, you draw a jagged line that kind of goes up, then comes down, then goes up, then comes down, each at a higher level than before, but not as a straight line. And simply embracing the fact that that's how it works allows us to be curious rather than furious and shift from the fixed mindset of something's either completely right or completely wrong to a growth mindset. And I love that line. Failure is your friend. If you pay attention to what went wrong right, then you can go back to work. And optimize just a little bit more and compound that over time to where you want to be. Right.

Well, and it's a process. I mean, nobody shows up at a dojo and gets black belt, right? But you know, what is black belt? It's a white belt that kept coming back. And so it's a process to really becoming a brain warrior. I mean, the first thing is caring and just being aware. And then in the book, I talk about a game I play with my daughter, who's 12. I'm so proud of her. She just brought home straight A's. And she's a worker. I mean, she's not one of kids where it just comes easy. She's a worker. But ever since she was 2, Chloe and I have had this game. I call Chloe's game. And I look at her and I said, sweetheart, is this good for your brain, bad for it? And so if I say avocado, she'll say, two thumbs up. God's butter. If I say blueberry, she'll put her little hands on her hips, and she's got red hair like her mother, so she can have an attitude. And she's like, well, are they organic? You know, non organic blueberries hold more pesticides than almost any fruit. Like honey, they're organic. And she said, God's candy. Two thumbs up. So I say, football. She says, are you crazy? Like, your brain is soft, your skull is hard, the skull has ridges. Why would you ever put a developing brain at risk? Two thumbs down. And then if I say, well, what about talking back to your redheaded mother? Just go, two thumbs down. Way too much stress.

Is it good for your brain? I love that. And what a powerful way for us to operate. Let's jump to then what, because that's kind of tied to then what, right? In the sense of, I do this, then what? Can you. Can you share that story with us and that wisdom?

Well, I was on the Dr. Phil show, and we did a show on cheaters. You know, guys that couldn't stay faithful to their wife. And I scanned Jose, and he had just terrible frontal lobes. And I'm like, did you have a brain injury? And he initially said, no, but his brain looked like he had a brain injury. And so I push him. It's one of the big lessons we've learned. Mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives. And nobody knows because psychiatrists don't have images, so they never push. So I pushed him. Turned out he played linebacker, got his bell rung many times in high school, and he was a mixed martial artist. Oh, my goodness. And then he would actually. He was a headbanger. And I'm like, what do you mean? He said, well, it's like a party trick, you know, they'd see who could put the biggest holes in the walls with their heads. And I'm thinking, this is not the sign of intelligent life. But, you know, for whatever reason, he fell in love with me. Just did everything I said from diet supplements. And I kept talking to him about his frontal lobes and how they're involved with foresight and it's the then what part of your brain. So if you get a thought, I want to ask that woman out, well, then what? Well, then you'll have an affair. Your wife will find out she's already has guns at home because she's so mad at him. And it was really the then what part? And he actually turned me on to a song by Clay Walker called Then what? Which is, you know, well, this guy was thinking about cheating on his wife. And it's like, well, then what's going to happen when you're visiting your children? You know, lose half your net worth, Nobody trusts you. And he ended up actually giving me a carving that I have in my office called Then what? It's the two most powerful words in the English language when it comes to your health. If I do this, then what happens? If I say this, then what happens? And the first thing he and I did, this is another exercise and change your brain, change your life. There's an exercise called the One Page Miracle. On one piece of paper, write down what do you want in your relationships? Work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. What do you want? Because that really, then everything you do is related to, does this get me what I want? I mean, that's really the sign of mental health, is you know what you want and you're able to consistently act in ways to make that happen. And he wanted to be married. I'm like, you've cheated on your wife eight times in four years. Why don't you just be single? And he's like, no, I don't want my daughter raised by someone else. I want to make this work. Then you need to have that thought forefront in your brain so that you can match your behavior to get you what you want. Then what? I love it.

And you went exactly where I was hoping we would go, which is the One page miracle. So then what? And you talk about. Let's just talk about the one page miracle for a moment longer in your work. You, you know, with all the children and the adults that you've seen, the most successful among them, have had very clear sense of what they wanted. Can you tell us about that and how that relates to the one page miracle and how that ties into the brain that we want to have, et cetera?

Well, your brain makes happen what it sees. And I mean, your brain is just the most masterful organ. But if you see anger and you see fear and you see catastrophe, and you just have to watch the news and you'll see all those things. So if you feed that into your brain, then you're going to be constantly anxious and afraid. But if you actually take time to plan, every good business does this. They have a business plan, but very few people actually have a business plan. So it's really a way to clearly define what you want in a balanced way so you don't get burned out. So it's not all about money, it's not all about relationships. It's not all about your body. It's about all of them. And so that every day you just get your eyes on this and you ask yourself, is my behavior getting me what I want? So if I think of saying something awful to my wife and anybody who's been married, you know, at some point, they have awful thoughts. But women remember that stuff because of how they're wired. So it's very important to supervise yourself and go, well, is this helpful? Does this. It's not that I shouldn't do it, because shoulds are not a good motivator of behavior. And we learned that in Genesis, right? God said to Adam and Eve, you shouldn't go to the Tree of Knowledge. And the next scene there at the Tree of Knowledge. I mean, what he should have said is like, adam, do you like it that she's not wearing clothes? Because if you guys go to the tree, she's gonna wear clothes and, you know, have a really clear idea, what do you want? And is your behavior getting you what you want?

Amen. You got me stuck on Eve, too.

Just kidding.

Gosh darn it, Adam.

I'm thinking I'm probably going to hell for that one.

But.

But it's so clear. Very few people start with, what do I want? And if. And it applies to parenting, too, because a lot of parents, in their mind, they want their child to like them. And so they give in to them with the bad food, with the tantrums, and it's just a nightmare when, if you really get them to define what they want, I mean, what they really want with their child which is they want to raise someone who is competent, who is constructive, who will, you know, have meaning and purpose in their life. Then that really begins to eliminate, oh, well, I'll just give him things so he won't be mad at me. It just changes everything. In my experience, it's amazing.

It's the question of a creator vis a vis a victim. Right. The victim's complaining about what they don't like. The creator is saying, well, what do I want? And you're one page miracle is such a powerful way to articulate that. And then, as you said, our brain moves in the direction we are impressing it with. So let's have that clear, concise articulation of what's important to us and align our behaviors with it as a healthy, functioning brain human being would do. Right.

That's exactly it. It's just like what we do at business. And you know, another business principle I really like is you can't change what you don't measure. And it's why people don't get scanned. They really don't know. And they're literally flying blind. If you don't know your important health numbers, like your C reactive protein or ferritin, which is iron stores, or your blood sugar, you know, half of America has diabetes or pre diabetes. It's just a disaster. You know, getting back a little bit to the brain, but warrior concept, if you're not really diligent, disease is coming for you, and I'm not okay with that. For the people I serve and the people I love.

Yeah. That's awesome. Again, the brain warrior. Let's circle back a little bit and talk about one idea that we haven't discussed yet that I know is a big part of your life. Fat Freddy. You talk in the book about your experience with a penguin trainer and your now collection of 600 or something penguins. I know you're writing a new children's book, which we can't wait to see. No, you have the children's book on Fat Freddy. You're writing a new one. Tell us about Fat Freddy.

Well, yeah, I collected penguins. Goodness. 31 years. Crazy. When my son was 7, I was struggling with him. I was a child psychiatry fellow at the time, which means I was in training to be a child psychiatrist. And I'm struggling with him. And so as a way to have a better relationship with him, I take him to a little place in Hawaii where we were living at the time called Sea Life park. And we went to the whale show and the seal show, and that was all Fun. And at the end of the day, we went to the penguin show. And the penguins name was Bet Freddy. And he was this amazing little thing. He climbed a 20 foot high ladder to a diving board, to a high dive, and went to the end of the board, bounced on it, and then jumped into the water. And then he got out and bowled with his nose and counted with his flippers and jumped through a hoop of fire. And at the end of the show, the trainer asked Freddy to go get something. And I'm having a really great time. I have my arm around my son, I'm feeling close to him. And then the trainer asked Freddie to go get something and Freddy went and got it and he brought it right back. And in my mind I went, wow. I asked this kid to get something for me. He wants to have a discussion for about 20 minutes and then he doesn't want to do it. And I knew my son was smarter than the penguin. So I went up to the trainer and I said, how did you get Freddie to do all these really cool things? And she looked at my son and then she looked at me and she said, unlike parents, whenever Freddy does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him, I give him a hug and I give him a fish. And the light went on in my head that even though my son didn't like whole raw fish, that whenever he did what I wanted him to do, I didn't pay any attention to him at all because I was a busy guy. But when he didn't do what I wanted him to do, I gave him a ton of attention because I didn't want to raise bad kids. So I was inadvertently teaching him to be a little monster in order to get my attention. So I collect penguins as a way to remind myself to notice the good things about the people in my life more than the bad things. That I am so powerful when it comes to my relationships. I can make them better or I can make them worse when I stay out of blame. You are bad. You did this. You hurt me. And into my own power. What is it I can do today to make this better? Relationships change. And in dramatic, positive way. When I was a young psychiatrist, you know, wives or husbands would come in and they'd complain about their spouses, and I would be so empathic. And over time I went, so what do you do to make this better? And what do you do to make this worse? Because that's where I could empower people. And it just works so much better for my patients.

So good. And for Us too. Right. Because this is the. As you were describing that story, it made me think of Lanny Basham, who's one of the most decorated Olympic medalists in rifle shooting. And he had this thing of cultivating your self image in almost the identical way of we always notice the things we do wrong. And his whole thing was, look, you got to reload, let that be neutral rather than what you get so excited about, and then imagine what you wish you would have done in that situation, the ideal outcome, and move on. But then when you do something that you actually want to do more of, he'd made a big deal out of it. That's like me. The exact same fat Freddy. Let me reward that behavior and see more of what I want to see, not just in those outside of our lives, outside of ourselves, but in our own lives as well, Right?

Absolutely. And that's what you can reinforce. Yeah.

And change your brain in the process. And change your life in the process. Obviously, you talk about so much in the book and we've barely scratched the surface, but is there anything in particular that you'd like to chat about that we haven't discussed so far?

Well, you know, it's new in this book, and this book is 50% new. And the reason I revised it is I wrote it in 1998. 1997. 1998. And the world is just so different. At the time, we'd done 5,000 scans and now 115,000 scans. We've learned so many new things. Before, more traditional psychiatry and medication. Now many more natural ways to heal the brain. I am just so excited. But I talk about two big things that have been important in my life. One is Amen clinics. We have six clinics around the US where we do this work. Did the world's first largest study on active and retired NFL players at a time when the NFL. The kindest thing I could say is that they were in denial. They had a problem, but they were acting like they were studying it. And so we have scanned and treated 175 players. 96 of them have evidence of brain damage. And that's just not me saying that. Boston University just came out and said the same thing in a study they did after we did ours. And so it's now a world discussion topic. And we are very proud to be one of the leaders in that. But that's not the cool news. You know, I think most thoughtful 9 year olds with brain is soft, skull is hard hitting it repeatedly is stupid. So I think most thoughtful 9 year olds would get that concept. The really exciting part is you're not stuck with the brain you have. We could make them better 80% of the time. In a follow up study we published, 80% of our players showed significant improvement in blood flow, mood, memory, sleep and motivation. Which just goes to the title of the book. So the message of the book is the same, it's just a better book and has really the best of all the 36 books I've written is this is the book to read for people. The second thing that I talk about in the book that has just been near and dear to my heart is Pastor Rick Warren. And I and Mark Hyman created a plan for Saddleback Church called the Daniel Plan. Not named after me, but the prophet in the Old Testament who I was named after, who wouldn't eat the king's bad foods. And we put this health plan program based on the principles I talk about in Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. The first week, 15,000 people signed up for the program. The first year, they lost a quarter of a million pounds. And better energy, mood, memory, decreases in medication improvement and cognitive performance, sexual function. And we were like so excited. And now we literally have to thousands of churches around the world where we have planted health principles, but especially brain health.

So cool.

And the big lesson is we get better together or we get sick together. And the weapons of mass destruction are everywhere, including your child's school, including your workplace, and including churches. My first fight with Pastor Warren was, you got to get rid of the donuts. And he's like, but we were raised on donuts. And I'm like, I don't care if you're raised on cocaine. It still has to go. It's not one good thing. And it's a weapon of mass destruction. Given 50% of us are either diabetic or pre diabetic, why would we ever encourage that?

Well, can you tell us briefly too? You joked in our office about what got Pastor Warren so into you and your work. I think he was watching one of your PBS specials and you said something along the lines of, the bigger you get, the smaller your brain gets. And that got his attention. Is that accurate?

Right. It's actually something I have coined called the dinosaur syndrome. Big body, little brain, you're going to become extinct. And he said, I wasn't getting healthy for my heart. I didn't really care about it. I wasn't getting healthy to live longer. I'm going to heaven. I don't care about that. To be sexier, he said, quite frankly, I'M already sexy. But when I heard you say, as your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down. Now I'm paying attention because that's my influence, ultimately. Your influence, my influence, Alexandra's influence, our children's influence has to do with the moment by moment functioning of your brain. And when it works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you have trouble in your life.

This is amazing. All right, well, we're going to point people to where to find the book and all that good stuff in all the different places that we share this. I like to wrap up these chats with one final question. If you could only share one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be? And it might be something we've already discussed discussed or something outside of that, but what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Well, I mean, I guess what I would say the thing that hooked me when I got scanned. So I scanned my mom and myself the same week. Her brain was stunningly beautiful and mine wasn't because I played football, I had meningitis, and I had bad brain habits. And I fell in love with my brain and developed this concept I call brain envy. I always say Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of most of your problems. He was two and a half feet too low in your body. It's brain envy. You want to envy what's between your ears and then do the right things so that it can be better. That if you start loving and caring for your brain, everything changes especially and it's really simple, right? Three things. Brain envy. Got to care. Avoid anything that hurts it. Do things that help it. And in Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. I give people a very clear plan that all at once, this plan improves your focus, improves your mood, decreases your anxiety, and is an Alzheimer's prevention program all at the same time. I think that's one of the coolest things I've learned. It's like do these four steps and attacks all of them at once.

Amazing. You're taking care of the most amazing organ in the universe. Where's the best place for people to dive deeper into your work?

You know, I think they can go to changeyourbrainbook.com and we have all sorts of giveaways. People go and buy the book right away. We're trying to get it into the hands of a million more people because the book sold just about a million copies. We also have a brand new contest. So we're really excited about that. You know, I see very few new people just because of how crazy busy I am. But we're going to give away a full evaluation scan and I'm the one that's going to do it. And the contest is we want them to tell us the best story on how they've changed their brain and change their life based either on this book or on one of my PBS specials. What we're really looking for is to develop a movement around change your brain, change your life.

That's awesome. So changeyourbrainbook.com changeyourbrainbook.com check it out. Get all the extra goodies. I highly recommend this book. Just appreciate you, everything that you've done and everything you continue to do to help us optimize and actualize and give our gifts to the world. Thank you, Doc.

Thank you so much.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview.

Please visit BrianJohnson me for more.

Sa.