Welcome to Unconfuse Me. I’m Bill Gates.
We’ve got to get science caught up,
and that’s why our other focus, of course,
is brain health and teaching people,
everyone, teenagers, college students, adults
that you can care for your
brain and perhaps delay,
maybe prevent altogether, but delay until perhaps,
as you say, ten years from now
when there is a drug.
What we’ve found as we’ve
gone down this brain health journey
is that the average person does not even know
you can conceptually do things
to take care of your brain.
If they are aware of that,
they have no idea
what those things are basically.
Maybe crossword puzzles
is the thing they’ll say.
Which is not true.
Which is not even helpful.
So I think that to us is something
that has also been very inspiring,
and especially with young people.
They love nothing more than to hear
where previous generations have failed them.
To see them perk up
when they hear there’s a whole,
maybe the most important part of your body
you were never told how to take care of,
they completely neglected that conceptually,
it really engages people, and they really like it.
There’s studies that show right now
up to 40% of cases of Alzheimer’s
are preventable through brain healthy habits.
It’s not 100%, but that’s a lot.
That’s almost half.
I would—everyone should take that.
I think that’s something that’s been
really a great focus for us
and something that especially as people
who have a line to a younger generation
from a communication standpoint,
they’ve been very engaged with.
People really like to know that they
can do things to take care of their brain.
Just like if you don’t smoke,
you won’t get lung cancer probably.
If you don’t eat french fries all day, every day,
you won’t die of a heart attack probably.
There are things you can do to really
help your chances of not getting Alzheimer’s.
One of the strongest things to emerge
in that area is the importance of good sleep.
Yeah.
I’ve gone from my thirties and forties
when there’d be a conversation about sleep.
Sadly for me, that’s a long time ago.
It would be, I only sleep six hours.
The other guy is, no, I only sleep five.
Sometimes I don’t sleep at all,
and it would be, wow, those guys are so good.
I have to try harder.
Because sleep is laziness, and unnecessary.
Right, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
Sleep when I’m dead.
Now what we know is that
to maintain brain health, getting good sleep,
even back to your teen years is super important.
It’s one of the most predictive factors
of any dementia, including Alzheimer’s,
whether you’re getting good sleep.
I’ve swung all the way to
looking at my daily sleep scores.
Oh yeah, we do all that.
The same.
Competing, okay, who’s who got a 90?
How the heck did you do that?
Generally, I do better than him.
I take the dog out.
When I was young, the convention was
you’ll sleep when you’re dead,
sleep isn’t that important,
you don’t need sleep.
Now already,
we know that that’s completely
oppositional to the truth.
If anything, it’s maybe
the single most important thing
you can do to keep your brain healthy.
They used to think smoking was healthy.
It is similar.
That’s where we are culturally
the things people think and understand
about their own brains are where they were
in like the fifties and sixties, you know?
It’s just like so far off from what
actual science is reflective of,
and it’s nice to be able
to communicate that to people.
Yeah. We have these conversations
that sleep is actually the funniest one.
Because someone ask, how can I improve?
I can’t improve my sleep.
There’s nothing to be done.
That is so not true. You can do so many things.
You ask them three questions, and, oh yeah.
Yeah, you know, that’s been a fun thing
to change my own sleep.
Now because I do track and I look every day,
I know that I sleep really well,
and that’s really important.
She sleeps with 400 contraptions.
But I get great sleep because of it.
She does sleep really well though.
But it’s a team of people.
It’s a shuttle launch every night.
So, HFC, we have our five brain healthy habits,
which of course, sleep, exercise, nutrition, mental fitness,
and then emotional well-being.
Interesting.
Those are things that seem obvious,
but they’re not things that people
incorporate into their daily lives.
I wasn’t doing that.
Now I do, and I feel better,
and my health is better.
I feel optimistic about that information
when I’m given it and I find that people like it.
So we created this coursework
for high school students and college students
to learn about this stuff because
it seemed to us like they wanted to know.
Literally 100% of them said that
they were more interested
and would be taking steps
to live a brain healthy lifestyle.
80-something percent of them
said they were interested in studying neurology,
which would be another thing
which would help this field.
Yeah, and I think what we found
from the neurologists and doctors we know
is that a lot of people in the medical field
don’t understand that there are things you can do
to keep your brain healthy.
That’s how far off,
that’s how big the disconnect is,
which was alarming in some ways.
What’s funny is the one scientific study
that we did that we actually had published
is that I taught this course work of brain health.
Nice.
And we also had a neurologist
teach the coursework,
and we scientifically proved
that people retain information better
from celebrities than doctors.
Wow.
Which is a heavy burden. So just know that.
All right.
But it is true. Yeah, it was published.
Yeah. And then we’re in the next couple of weeks
shooting five more courses with
five more celebrities.
With five more celebrities,
because young people
only want to hear from them. Yeah.
So yeah, we’re doing that soon.
Then hopefully we’ll get it out there,
because when we talk about the main issue
in my mind is people not sharing their stories
and it’s because they’re scared.
We give them some hope,
and they become less scared.
They share the stories,
and that leads to energy that leads to movement.
Yeah.
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