The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia (#851)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Tommy Wood (@drtommywood), an associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on brain health across the lifespan. Alongside his academic work, Tommy is head scientist for Motorsport at Hintsa Performance, overseeing health and performance programs for multiple Formula […]
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia (#851) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

by

Tim Ferriss

January 28, 2026

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia (#851)

4 comments

Topics: The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Tommy Wood (@drtommywood), an associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on brain health across the lifespan. Alongside his academic work, Tommy is head scientist for Motorsport at Hintsa Performance, overseeing health and performance programs for multiple Formula 1 drivers. He also helped to found the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, is head of research for the dementia prevention charity Food for the Brain, and serves as chief science officer for brain-health coaching company BetterBrain. He is co-host of the Better Brain Fitness podcast and author of the forthcoming book The Stimulated Mind.

Full bio

Products, resources, and people mentioned in the interview

Legal conditions/copyright information

Listen onSpotify

Listen onApple Podcasts

Listen onOvercast

Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia

Additional podcast platforms

**Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.**

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, nice to see you.

Tommy Wood: Nice to see you.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for making the time.

Tommy Wood: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. And as mentioned before we started recording, this is just going to be like our last conversation, because I wanted to reach out to you because cognition, cognition, cognition. Boy, oh, boy, is that on the mind. And pun intended on one level, but we are going to bounce all over the place, and I hope to give people, including myself, a lot of tactical, practical recommendations. Also being clear where the science is solid and where the science is maybe a little thinner ice.

Tommy Wood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Tommy Wood: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Or where something is plausible but not yet proven out. And you’ve got me chewing xylitol gum, you’ve got me looking at air purifiers, but I’m skipping ahead. Let’s go back to the beginning, and I want to give the good old Dr. Chatterjee a nod here because it came up in a conversation you had with him and I was like, “Wow, I never would have thought of that.” Why are human babies so plump? Why are they so fat compared to other species?

Tommy Wood: If you look at human babies compared to pretty much every other mammalian species, we are the only species that’s born fat, even compared to other primates. And it’s thought that the primary reason for this is that that fat is a repository for things that the brain needs in order to develop. And the two that are probably most interesting to you and seem to be particularly important are DHA, the omega-3 fatty acid, and fats as a source of ketones for the brain. When the brain is developing in particular, and I think this is also very relevant to recovery from brain injuries and other states, the preferred synthetic precursor, as in the thing that the brain uses to make structure like fats and cholesterol and that kind of stuff, which makes up a significant chunk of the brain. Ketones are the preferred source, particularly in the developing brain, but I think also later on in various states as an adult.

And so in order to support that very hungry brain, which it is particularly in humans, we’re born fat so that we can generate a bunch of ketones to support that brain developing for the first — you know? Especially for the first few weeks, but maybe even for months after that.

Tim Ferriss: Also, lots of, as I understand it, beautiful bat brown adipose tissue, to keep those little hairless —

Tommy Wood: Keep them warm. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — monkeys warm. Yeah. All right. So we’re going to talk about, because I think the, in a sense, the extremes inform the mean, but not the other way around. So we can talk about certain maybe edge cases, things that people might not view as immediately relevant to themselves.

But since we’re talking about newborns, I’m curious, you’ve looked at therapies, various types of research into brain injury and newborns. What do you do? What can you do? I mean, what’s the state of the art when it comes to treating brain injury in newborns or in infants?

Tommy Wood: There’s two main brain injuries of babies that I study, and they’re probably also the two main brain injuries that are most broadly studied, just because of their impact. And so the first is preterm brain injury. So that’s a baby’s born early, the earlier you’re born, the greater the risk of neurodevelopment of impairment or some other kind of neurological disorder, cerebral palsy, other impairments later in life. And the other is something that we call hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is essentially you get to normal full term, something happens —

Tim Ferriss: Not enough oxygen? Exactly.

Tommy Wood: Exactly. Not enough blood flow, not enough oxygen gets to the brain. Something happens, usually during childbirth, and people think about the cord is wrapped around the neck or you can get placental abruption, right? The placenta kind of tears off the inside of the uterus or the uterus can completely rupture. But sometimes we don’t know what happened, the baby just comes out and something has happened. In that scenario, the second one, HIE, as we call it, those babies are cooled down. So this is something that I studied a lot in my PhD. You take that baby, and as long as you start within a few hours of birth, you cool them down to 33.5 degrees Celsius for 72 hours. And that significantly reduces death and disability.

Tim Ferriss: That’s 92.3 degrees Fahrenheit for yankees out there.

[...]

Original source