Anti-Aging Expert: This Reverses Gray Hair & Boosts Your Energy!

0:00 This is incontrovertible evidence that graying of hair is reversible and it can be pretty fast. Wow. And there's more. So we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like for example, if you have marijuana six months ago, it's gonna be in your hair. He's got hack up. So my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person's life when this young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process. So what is the secret to anti-aging?

0:29 It's the proper allocation of energy. Can you can you ex how what's the simplest way you can explain that to me? So first, energy is real. And it's the difference between feeling like you can change a world or feeling completely drained. And a lot of people live on that end of the spectrum. And it's because there's a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. For example, we did an experiment because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by 60%. So it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep you young. So it's not the the stress that burns us down. It's the response to stress. And the third piece is this. Energy is in your mitochondria. And there's about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your body. And so they made our bodies possible and they can change how we feel.

1:18 Well I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. Yes. We are really in service of the mitochondria. Allow us to be alive. Okay, I've got so many questions for you, based on what people wanted to know. Like how patients with ME, chronic fatigue, or long COVID safely rehabilitate their mitochondria. What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy? If red light therapy impacts mitochondria, and is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Yeah. We think there's increased energy resistance in cancer than Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So is there anything I can do? There is. So we can start by Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show

2:19 The most shared episodes, the most rated episodes. I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple easy free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so so much. Uh Dr Martin Picard. What is it that you believe

2:46 No, Or understand. That most people Out there. Don't believe, know, or understand.

2:53 Mm-hmm. We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing. Through the body. Mm-hmm.

3:03 And And that sounds a little woo if you don't have context. And that's I think uh something that we're just starting to have. The right scientific framework to to understand to understand ourselves from first principles.

3:14 as energetic. Processes. In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for? When they Listen to this subject of energy. Yeah.

3:25 I think people want to understand What is energy? Well how can I have more energy? I can relate to that because sometimes, you know, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing. And I really have, in my view, done the same thing. But then sometimes I wake up and I don't feel amazing. Yeah. And it feels kinda like roulette, like this would have

3:45 sort of opaque. Mystery of How do I wake up on in with more days in a row and feel Amazing. Like I can take on the world. Yeah. And then there's also some friends that I have who are suffering with different things, whether it's chronic illness or long COVID or whatever, who repeatedly wake up and feel

4:02 Low energy. For years, you know. At a time. Um That's a really tough. Place to be.

4:08 When you wake up repeatedly and and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world. That's it's a really tough place to be. And and who are you and why Did you commit your life to this subject? I'm a regular guy who with, you know, lived experiences who who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious. And then I became a a scientist and as a learned the tools of science, I started to see and I discovered mitochondria. I thought this is an approach to start to bridge

4:44 What's true about the human experience that We know from first experience, empirically. And we know to be real not because you know some white coat wearing doctor or scientist, you just said yes, energy is real. It's in your mitochondria. We know it to be real from first experience. Right, because we we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, right, and about health and and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. So I became a scientist

5:11 domains of of existence. The the science and the experience. Um so I've led a a research group at Columbia University for 10 years. Uh and founded an institute. Uh to really build the systems and technologies to to help people

5:29 grow, heal, and and and transform. You have a PhD in mitochondria. Yep. My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging. I mean there's a a an image here in front of me, some people will just be listening, so I'll we'll try and explain it for them, but there's an image here of a video. I'll play the video on screen now. And it kinda looks like a looks a little bit like an alien. But I I I read that this video. was quite formative for you. What is that video and why was that a formative moment in your career?

5:59 I took this video in England. Uh a new castle upon Tyne in the north of England. Uh with my Uh the medical school there. I was a graduate student and went there for kind of an exchange. And this is the first time I saw mitochondria.

6:13 Moving. I saw like the inner life of ourselves. And when I saw this Something struck me as like oh my god. I'm able to see this. Right, and to see living mitochondria.

6:27 Because of The mitochondria inside of me. It's the energy that's flowing through my mitochondria in my eye. Right, that's allowing me to perceive to see this. Mitochondria made multicellular life possible. They made our bodies and and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living. So when I saw this, like this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria.

6:47 Mm-hmm. And then I I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just Transforming energy. What they're known for is they take the food you eat. And then they take the oxygen that you breathe in. And then those two things, the food, the oxygen, the converge inside the mitochondria. And then something really special happens. The electrons

7:06 That are stuck on food. that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere, right? Photosynthesis. What your mitochondria do is they they kind of unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one. And then they flow them like a little electrical circuit. And that happens in like the five thousand trillion mitochondria that are in your body. And then when the electrons flow, they need to flow towards something.

7:26 Just like in an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from one pole of the battery to the negative to to the other pole of the battery. Uh and that circuit It's close in the mitochondria. So the the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe and then it becomes water. And and it's that Vital flow.

7:45 of energy. Electrons flowing towards oxygen. that allows us to be alive. And uh mitochondria do this. And then as they do this, they transform energy from food, biochemistry. into electricity and into signals and into heat and the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria As they transform and flow electrons like a little energetic circuit, they release heat. So the the source of heat, right, that makes us warm, you shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling the warmth of their mitochondria.

8:14 So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body? There is On average, a thousand mitochondria per cell. A cell is thousand like So how many is there in my body? About five thousand trillion.

8:27 Who should care about the mitochondria and why should they care about it? Mm-hmm. Anyone who cares about their energy. Right, about having enough energy to do what they really care about. Uh we all care about different things. We're we're all

8:41 Gifted and talented for different things. Uh everyone has this, you know, unique authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out. And the only way for a person to flourish. is through energy. Mm-hmm.

8:56 If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead. Right. Efficiently, right, and smoothly through you as an organism then it life feels hard, like y y you're not at your best, you feel tired. Uh and and you feel like

9:11 Maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're sick. And your immune system is like draining all of your energy. it's really hard to be optimistic. And it's hard to be a good person. And it's hard to be a good dad.

9:22 And it's hard to want to do good for the world. If you're struggling with energy. That just is what it is. And that we can do nothing about that. You know, we we breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. Yeah.

9:38 There's this certain I think feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much. Mm-hmm. Where do we need to start to understand'cause the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life With more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So why does one have to start? I I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff, like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy. Yeah. So there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works. in the human body.

10:09 is that you are the energy that's flowing through this body. I am the energy that's flowing through my body. Yes. So I'm not my body. You're not your body. Okay. I'm the energy flowing through it. You, Steven. Yeah. This expression now that I'm getting to experience. Thank you. This expression is an expression of the flow of energy.

10:29 If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain. Like You wouldn't be. Right? You'd be a cadaver. And we'd say d Steven is gone. Yeah, you'd be a dead body. The difference between a dead body a cadaver.

10:43 And a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person, who cares? Is the flow of energy. Okay. The only thing that's real is the physical stuff. And

10:55 you know, the nucle the the genes that you that you got from your parents and the body the physical body and that's the real stuff. What you can't see with your eyes, not real. Right. I th that's a reframe that's kind of a a a bigger picture mindset shift that uh we need to and and scientists struggle with. So number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms Uh

11:17 through this body. Number two is There's a fixed energy budget. Right? All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget And

11:27 And for example, if you want to have more energy. to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to uh you know, be more creative. The solution is not eating more. because there's this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it's really hard on the system. And then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, right? And then the system starts to overheat. Uh so inflammation is this this overheating. There's too much energy in the system. And Or the cells are are burning too much energy and they need to kind of

11:58 Tell other cells that's those signals we call infl inflammation cytokines. So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with. And over time the organism does a lot of of uh finessing and uh adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget. And that's somewhat linked to stress, I guess, which is for I read your work and it talked about how stress was basically just like an overconsumption of energy. It's it's r requiring loads and loads and loads of energy. Okay, we'll talk about that too then'cause I think stress is a really important one. Uh what's the third? The third one is

12:29 Life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to to grow, to learn uh to transform, right? Change your views. You need resistance to go through some resistance. Mm-hmm. You need energy to go through some resistance.

12:47 Right. If energy just flows. And there's no zero resistance. Then there's no Possible. So if life was always eas and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life.

13:00 Then It would just remain as is, right? And and it would be very boring. And from first principles physics, like we know this to be true, you know, at a number of levels, but for example, the sun, this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky. Shoots energy, right? As photons. So light is a form of energy.

13:18 And as long as light You know, uh Just goes and and photons travels in outer space. Photon will remain photon.

13:26 Light energy will remain light energy. Until That light energy hits a green leaf. Right, and the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it's it offers a constraint. Right. It offers resistance.

13:41 energy faces resistance, now it can be converted. And that's the basis of making food. That's how nature makes food. It crystallizes energy from Sunlight.

13:52 into molecules. Life, you know, plants. Crystallized light energy. Into Carbohydrates.

13:59 Uh and then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat. We need resistance. for energy to transform into something meaningful. So what has um mitocunja got to do with all of this? Mitochondria are basically a little resistors. Right, and and they are what allows the flow of energy.

14:15 Through the system. Have you got a picture of Okay, here we go. Yeah. Okay, so this is a An image of a mitochondria? I mitochondri on. Oh, N is a singular?

14:24 I think mitochondria is plural. So this is a mitochondrion and there's about a thousand of these in each of your cells. Okay. And there's about Five trillion cells in your body? Uh that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here, these little wings, these are called Christi. And the Christie is where the food you eat

14:45 end up and where the oxygen you breathe end up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There's like little electrical circuits here. And as the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged like little batteries. So effectively a mitochondri like this has all of these site of oxygen consumption and and food consumption and then that gets transformed.

15:06 Uh into a little charge battery. And once the battery is charged. uh that mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP. Adenosine triphosphate, which is kind of the the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract, right, a muscle cell wants to contract in the gym, it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria says, I need ATP and then the mitochondria gets to work, uh and then flows

15:28 Electrons. Consume some food. Burn some oxygen, that's why you get out of breath. Right. So when you get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen. What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP. Okay.

15:45 Their energized state. To produce signals. To receive information and then to produce signals. They're talking to each other. What are they saying. Kind of monitoring what's happening not only inside the cell, but outside the cell. So on the surface of mitochondria all along there are little receptors for all sorts of

16:07 Tells this mitochondrion, is there enough energy? Isn't there are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for you know something dangerous? Uh so mitochondria are like like a little distributed brain. Right. So they're like the intracellular brain. Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria? They are, yeah, they did. Yeah. What what is that story? Because I I think someone said that to me before on the show, that are mitochondria are actually bacteria that from prehistoric times or something. So the story is about one point five billion years ago.

16:39 uh that there was two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen. Transform energy.

16:46 Right. So it could fuel a lot of oxygen and and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anaerobic. And the anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a a few more genes, um and it could only ferment its food. And kind of fermenting the food, spitting out You know, like Lactate or uh like he's does.

17:06 And What happened is the big one either engulfed the small one. Right. Or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized a big one. And the story goes, uh that This basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. That's

17:22 one perspective and then with more energy what can you do? You can evolve more complexity. The version I I favor based on the evidence we have is that when mitochondria came in and then they they There was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship. Mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So Maybe the the the the coming of of mitochondria into this big cell

17:49 Made the big cell social. Because before this event, most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria foraging for e for for themselves. And you know, kind of operating from a very selfish uh perspective. Just trying to replicate, you know, just trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it like gave those cells a different view on life. And then they're like, ooh, we could work together. How about you become A a cell that gets energy, right? And I become a cell that

18:17 Uh moves. Right? So then you're the gut and I'm gonna be the muscle. And and then then together those two cells can do a lot more. Right and fast for couple of billion years and here we are. Here we are, yeah.

18:29 And and that led to You know, bodies with Organs, you know, the liver. feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, the brain kinda computes and and plans. Uh so that's division of labor. It's uh and it started with the mitochondria. You you talked about energy resistance. I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance.

18:51 Energy resistance. What we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Right? Diabetes affects millions in the world.

19:02 Fundamentally diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. Uh so if their resistance is too high. Because because you have Um

19:12 Too much energy pushed onto the system. Sugar, too much sugar, too glucose. Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria Or impaired. Right, and they can't flow energy. Then the the the the energy is gotta stuck. Faces.

19:26 Greater constraints. It's like it wants to go in that direction, but then there's a barrier and then another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing, right? Nice and and and and And smooth, and then there's like a dam. Right. And if the dam has Zero

19:41 Um openings. Right, then the the the water accumulates and then there's high pressure. And then at some point the the water accumulates and ends up flooding the the landscape and then damaging things. So it's a bit like the the same thing. If Now you open floodgates on the dam. Right, then then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example. You use the the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do.

20:05 Uh and if you move and you're physic, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work. Right, than to speed, than to Uh movement, right? And to lifting. Is this link to Cancer it all.

20:18 Because It sounds I mean, I don't know much about cancer. Yeah. But Cells dividing out of Um control seemingly randomly. Yeah. I think that there's a very good chance uh if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer. There's like a

20:36 a ten item flywhe of These are the core features of of cancer. Uh, all of those features have some relationship, some very direct with increased energy resistance. So if energy can't flow

20:49 smoothly and a cell uh is you know burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria, which is what cancer cells do. Cancer cells ditch your mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral you know, cell that didn't have mitochondria, it was anaerobic. It was piting out. Lack it. And we don't really know why cells do this. It's called the Warburg effect.

21:09 And the Warburg effect is when a cell in the presence of oxygen, right? If it wanted It could use oxygen, flow electrons to mitochondria, and transform energy and and live a nice social life, uh like every cell in in this social collective does in the body. Uh, what cancer cells do is they say, I'm not gonna use my mitochondria.

21:29 Even if there's oxygen, even if my mitochondria can respire. And by doing this It seems like cancer cells revert back to this ancestral. So Right?

21:40 The anti social cell. Yeah. Then the the the organism will and the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. It's called angiogenesis. So it's like d the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says bring me more oxygen. So it's kind of like there's a sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism and then it's gonna be selfish and demand more and more resources for itself. And it multiplies itself with

22:07 Equally selfish little aliens. Yeah. And then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources, is that what you're saying? Why do the blood vessels surround the cancer? Yeah, it's like it's the cancer calling for

22:20 You know, more energy. Okay. Yeah. So energy resistance is the product of two things. is how much energy is being Demanded.

22:28 Right, like uh how much power is being deployed in in the in the tumor, for example, or in the working muscle. Uh and then how much energy is can flow. Through the system. That's like the equivalent of current. In an electrical system.

22:41 So if there is a lot of demand Right. A lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but there's not Enough flow. to to pro to to support that activity. Then uh that increases resistance.

22:58 So is there any understanding as to how Those kind of cancers. are caused. Like what what causes that moment where, you know, you talked about the Wahlberg effect. The cancer community used to think that The main driver for cancer was genetic mutations.

23:13 But there's an emerging perspective. That changes in metabolism. Changes in the way electrons flow through through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria can actually drive the Uh.

23:25 instance of a of a new cancer cell. And then when a a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its might its mitochondria. It goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself. And it tries not to die. Explain that part to me,'cause I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death. Yeah. The best way to think about this, I think is as a a social collective.

23:45 Right? Every cell in this organism uh cares about the same thing, which is pres preserving the the life and and the health of the whole being. Right. So every cell in in this body is in a social contract with every other cell. Right. A cancer cell basically. Uh.

24:03 gets out of this agreement and says, No, no, no, I'm gonna fare for myself. I'm gonna take all the energy I can, uh and I'm gonna make more of myself and it g it goes into, you know, bacterial mode. That happens Um Sometimes because of mutations and it seems like there there are other causes of this. Like for example, hyperglycemia.

24:22 What's that? High blood glucose. Mm-hmm. Uh diabetes. is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that?

24:32 I don't think there there are good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of of disease and you know the the genetic Uh mutation perspective. Um If you look at cancer from an an energetic perspective and uh

24:47 It's I think likely that the increase in blood glucose Increases the pressure, right? There's more electrons that are being pushed On to those cells or two those mitochondria.

24:56 And when you push too much energy on a system that doesn't need energy, it's like you're trying to shove, you know, a lot of of water through a very small pipe. Something goes wrong. Uh so the the resistance is uh if you push a lot of energy into a very small, you know, container or into a a channel that can support that, then the the What happens

25:19 kind of physically is uh an increase in in the resistance to the flow. Uh and then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself. Uh that's what insulin resistance is and diabetes. Insulin resistance. is a protection mechanism. There's too much glucose being

25:34 Pushed onto the cell. Right. And so that causes this Excess. You know, energy coming in the cell says, Oh, you know, too much. Uh and it damages a mitochondria, this excess resistance, because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. I was thinking about smoking. And how smoking also is carcinogenic, it's cancer causing. Yeah. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could

25:57 something like smoking be Cause cancer causing. Yeah. It's clear that in s uh cigarette smoke there are carcinogens, there are molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. Uh it there's a strong link between

26:12 Lung cancer and smoking. But for all of the other cancers th there's much less of a a clear connection between exposure and cancer. Right the cancers that that affect and and kill Most people.

26:24 Uh we don't really know. Yeah. Why they come, when they come. Uh and it's clear that there's kind of a long history. And uh the the science behind, you know, connecting metabolism and cancer shows that Obesity and

26:38 Uh high blood glucose and Diabetes especially, which causes very high you know, excursion uh very high spikes in in blood glucose, those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says.

26:53 Is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance. And it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now and then how much How much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there's an imbalance.

27:08 Then that's Uh causes damage. Rather than being innocent bystanders. Mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor reprograms them to stop acting like the body's protective energy factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising frontier in developing new cancer therapies. It hijacks the m the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells. Mm-hmm.

27:37 Hm. So a normal cell. Uh Is driven it's behavior it's driven by the mitochondria. Like mitochondria are in the driver's seat.

27:47 Right. Mitochondria can basically call the shots. If is the cell to live and divide. Right? Or is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell, or if it's a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell? Uh or Is it to die? Right, and cells have to make these decisions all the time. And cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of

28:15 uh defects from the social collective, and then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours, let's get rid of it, right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well. Uh but what cancer cells can do is say, okay, I'm they're they ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth. Uh and by ditching their mitochondria they basically immunize themselves. Against the death that mitochondria could could trigger. So mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death, and cancer somehow is able to Kind of get away from that.

28:46 And it's w it's weird to think about because, yeah, the things that are cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like You know. As you said, like having too much of this stuff here. The white stuff. High blood glucose levels, et cetera, are linked to cancer. And one would wonder why Eating sugar.

29:04 in excess is gonna increase my probability of cancer. But obviously it points to the fact that It must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of malfunction somewhere. Yeah. And What the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is

29:18 Why that is. And what's really happening. If you overload your body With Excess energy. The body has to deal with this.

29:26 And in a simple electrical system. Circuit. If you jacked up you know, the voltage and the system is is too weak to take this, then resistance goes through the roof, the transistors start to melt, and then the system, you know, it gets gets damaged. The the same thing happens, you know, in the body. If you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons. Right. Very direct parallel.

29:48 with the electrical circuits. There are electrons stuck here on these little glucose molecules. If you ingest this, now it increases The voltage and the body. And then if the mitochondria can't keep up and because They're they're not flowing energy because you're sedentary. You're you're not moving. Um then that increases the resistance. And they might die or malfunction.

30:11 Correct? Or Things get damaged, right? The the clear connection here is too much energy, increased energy resistance. So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism. Right? From the food to your mitochondria. then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if if you're an electron and you're trying to go through the the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and a mitochondrion, but then at every at every point in this cascade that you face resistance, there is more chance that that electron kind of jets out.

30:42 And And then becomes Well then what's what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me and they have Two different Colours of hair.

30:52 Now let's just pretend for argument sake and for the sake of this uh explanation, that this is someone's hair that's gone grey. Because of stress. Um and this is what she used to look like, or he used to look like in terms of the colour of their hair. What I found really interesting,'cause it kinda speaks to

31:11 Lots of things that are going on going on in the body. Is your saying you can actually reverse Grey hair. Without dying it. And if so, what does that tell us about what grey hair is, but more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between? Yeah. Uh

31:29 What we discovered is that hair grain is reversible. And and that was surprising. Because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age it's kind of this linear progressive decline and and there's kind of nothing you can do about it.

31:44 Uh but it turns out that if you look on most people's head. Um you can see things like this. This is obviously you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were White and then all the hairs are are. And if you take a hair like this, Uh the tip here, right, was inside the body.

32:03 Long time ago. This is almost like if you look at tree rings. Right. You take a tree and you cut it then cross section, you see like the rings. And then you can say ooh, this ring was Uh thirty years ago.

32:13 Right, and this ring is to the. Uh so you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history. crystallized in in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a a drug, for example. Like

32:30 a month ago, or six months ago, or la two years ago, depending how long the hair is, you can actually use the hair and all along would be You know, the chemical signature. of what you took. So you can find marijuana in and the hair, you know, here, but not here. So if you if you have marijuana Six months ago, it's gonna be in your hair and you're gonna walk around.

32:49 Uh with that trace, that physical trace in y in your body. And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head That the tip was Uh Dark.

33:04 Right. And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white. Right, and you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old. Right? It l it lost color. hair growing is a a a classic hallmark of aging. Um then we thought Then you would know something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person's body.

33:23 Right, that made this young hair become old. And then maybe we could understand the mechanisms. Of the aging process. So this became a kind of an interesting scenario. And through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in ziplug bags, you know, over the mail, uh, and we were looking for two colored hairs. A single hair that has two colors, kind of like this. Uh and we found hairs that

33:46 Uh you know, head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark. And then it became white, or the hair was white. And it became dark again. Mm-hmm. So we had physical evidence from like

34:00 Multiple people. That showed white hairs can go back to being dark. And this contradicted this idea that you know, aging is just linear progressive process that we're kinda doomed to experience without any flexibility. I always wanted to participate in that study. I ended up finding five hairs that had this pattern. And when we looked at when the reversal happened

34:20 We found that the reverse will happen when I went on vacation. And I would go back in those days on annual uh cycling uh training camps. So I would go for a week. You bike, you eat, you sліp. uh energy started to move very differently in my body during that that

34:38 Time. Um and then when we looked at the hair and we analyze the the composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, it's all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, uh same physical activity, same everything. Why some hair is or like this or like that? Uh was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. And what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair.

35:14 I thought there's gonna be less color, right, obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs Have more mitochondria. And there was an up regulation. The body the the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old.

35:31 wasn't kind of letting go of things, it was doing more. So That means during that period of time You were more stressed? And using more energy.

35:43 Instead of just dying. Right? They struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly, or for some reason they accumulate damage, you become old. The cell struggles to make more mitochondria. And it it tries to kind of compensate.

36:00 And then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. So on that hair, what you looked at that was grey. Let's call it. Um it had more mitochondria. Because it was struggling.

36:12 And why was it struggling? It looks like stress hormones can, you know, make a cell struggle, for example. Cortisol. Cortisol, yes. If you're a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple. Uh you don't have you know the senses that you know we we enjoy, but you do nevertheless, you know, sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal Uh It means There's something out there in the environment that's dangerous, right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight or there there there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolve to interpret cortisol in that way.

36:44 Um so we did an experiment in the dish we wanted to know how much energy does it cost? To worry about the future. Right. To ruminate about yesterday. Mm-hmm. The thing you didn't do, or the mistake you made at work, or that

36:59 conversation that went sideways, you know, with your partner. Uh, how much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be, you know, engaging your stress system? To be releasing cortisol. Uh Two students and a lot, Gabrielle and Natalia did that experiment. They put you put cells in a dish. You give them the equivalent of cortisol.

37:17 Energy is gonna cost for these cells to prepare There's nothing damaging. to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol does a signal that there might be something dangerous outside. Right. That's like when you're sitting down, you get an email, you're I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract. And then you you have this whole stress response, your heart starts to beat faster.

37:37 How much energy does that cost? Yeah. So in cells in a dish. We can isolate that question really well. We found that Distress hormone increased energy expenditure. Like the cost of life by sixty percent.

37:51 So when I'm stressed, I'm using sixty percent more energy theoretically. I don't know about you, but sells in a dish. So there The beauty about like bod you know, with the mind and you know just complex organism, they're buffering systems. Right. So you might yeah I don't think your energy expenditure increases by sixty percent if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat. What is that graph there?

38:13 So there are two graphs here. Uh the top one is The color of the hair. A single hair from uh a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here, this is called the hair pigmentation pattern. the HPP that we we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively, bring science to the to hair grain and and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark.

38:37 And then it became white. For Two centimeters and then boom. Completely regained color. Actually it regained it was darker here than it than it used to be. Right, and then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received uh in the mail uh as we were starting to to collect

38:53 uh two colored hairs. Um and then when we when we saw this, we we had found from a few different people White hairs that had regained color. We've never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark. Right. So I remember holding this hair. I was like, Oh my God This is in the same hair. This is Incontrovertible evidence.

39:14 That Gray of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty Pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week. And so this white hair, completely white, regained color in just about a week.

39:27 Um so then we developed an instrument which was a a simple sheet On the Y axis the vertical is Most stressful thing that ever happened to you. No stress at all. Ten and zero. And then the X axis, the horizontal was time. Yes.

39:44 On the far right is now. Right. This is now, this is a year ago. And then we labeled all the months. And then we ask people and we ask this uh lady What?

39:54 A dot on the graph. That was a most stressful time in the past year. But anyone can do the exercise past year, most stressful time. Yeah. Okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot, right, and March number ten.

40:07 And then least stressful part. Yeah, zero. And then put other like meaningful things that happen that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along the this last year, then connect the dots, right? They're red? Graph. Is her dots connected?

40:22 And it Correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. Correct. And what happened to her life, she said she finished her PhD thesis And She was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies.

40:35 And then Broke up with your boyfriend. Oh damn, and I went grey. Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. Uh she said these were the la the most stressful two months of my life.

40:50 There's a killer question here which is If that remains chronic. Does that hair follicle go gray forever? Yeah. I If I go through an a a s a stressful period for two to three weeks.

41:04 And my hair goes a bit grey. As long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible. Does that hair then return to to black or dark? Do you see what I'm saying? It seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible. Why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible, but we know it you know very well. If you have a full head of gray hair and you're seventy years old, you're not gonna regain your color. Yeah. So there seems to what the model The mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity.

41:35 Right, where a hair slowly accumulates damage. Energetically inefficient. So there's more and more energy resistance and then there's a barrier. And then when the the hair hits that threshold, now it loses color. It's done. Yeah. But then if something changes in the body. Right, you go on a vacation or you start to

41:55 Do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair. Now it can be reversed, right? Because you can go back up. But then eventually this hair is gonna go gray again. And then if you're way way down, like this hair turned gray ten years ago, and you go back up, you're too far away from threshold to regain color. Okay. So it suggests some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity. For some something as binary as hair color. It's uh black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where you can reverse gray hair. Yes.

42:27 I I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think'cause you you added a layer of nuance there, which is about the mind. Mm-hmm. Like if I go through my life Um with a more resilient mind. And you get that bad email and you go And I get the bad email and I go fuck it, he goes. Yep.

42:43 Am I therefore gonna be a way more productive person throughout those twenty four hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there's less cortisol. Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. So it it's not the stress that burns us down. It's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to beat a little faster, if you mount a response to that

43:05 Email. Right. You're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your y you know, your your shoulder. That's burning energy. Now your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the the anx the anxiety that and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy. So

43:24 The chain of events is I get the email. It's a very bad email. It says you're fired, Steven. Yeah, we found a different host. Yeah. Um I look at the email That goes into my psychology, my mind.

43:35 I then have a story I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever. Which then causes a physiological response of like Yeah. Um Which goes into my cells, my mitochondria.

43:50 Which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy. Mm-hmm. Which is ultimately then gonna mean that I'm More tired. Because I have a finite amount of energy. Per day.

44:02 Is that is that sequence of events? I I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point. Yes. Yes. Don't open the laptop. Or like get a little bit better with bad news. Yeah. Or you know learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to to feel and and Um you know sit with Be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of sh to to cutting that Sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it.

44:32 Yeah, become aware of it. Yeah. Interrupt us and People who study contemplative practices and and meditation and Yeah, mindfulness approaches

44:43 I think many of them think this is kind of the key. Right, the the the awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. So if you feel into your your bodily responses you become free of do I mount a response? Is that needed now or not? There's different types of stress, right there. There's like the acute stress, which is just you get the email, you feel a little bit of a spike, but five minutes later you're fine. Yep.

45:05 And then there's The more chronic type of stress where You're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many, many days in a row, many weeks in a row. Yeah. Um I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful.

45:20 But it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body? And If it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive, but if there's too much resistance then You you get drained. How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I'm really struggling with like understanding it. Maybe one good example to to frame this is exercise. Yeah. Right. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance.

45:46 In your muscle. Right. you muscles are contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance. So the the energy is trying to flow through the muscle and then there's you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training. Um now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. And so that imbalance of demand

46:12 to flow capacity. Now the the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance. Okay. So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your your your sprint, uh, but you don't have a lot of mitochondria, right? It's gonna feel terrible. Uh and then because the resistance creeps up. And then your muscle, you know, becomes really hot and then eventually there's inflammation, uh, and then it it burns and and then it's uncomfortable.

46:37 Uh but then So that's a an acute bout. of of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is Once you recover.

46:45 Right. The benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise, they happen after during the recovery. So if you recover now you Your the muscles are relaxing and you're resting. Eventually you go, you know, for You go to sleep. Uh it's the in during the decrease in the resistance, now the cell says Next time this happens, I better be ready.

47:04 Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it. Right. So I need nec I'm gonna make more mitochondria. So that that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right, to Training for a marathon. You can double The amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles.

47:22 And that's the system. feeling the the rise in resistance. Like I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy and then uh adapting for this for the next time. And the next time I'm gonna be ready, let's make more mitochondria. So that's probably what I Where the benefits of exercise come from?

47:38 This A spike and and and why stress is is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process the the the it stimulates the body To put in place Things that In the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life.

47:56 with uh with less resistance. Coming back to this grey hair thing. So if if we consider grey hair, my hair going grey. To be the last Domino that fell.

48:07 So like the symptom. Yeah. Then what is what are the what what is the first domino? Mm-hmm. And can you walk me through the sequence of events because One would assume that if I understand that sequence of events, I can also understand how to then reverse it. How to kinda take I've got a couple of grey hairs now. And I actually anecdotally do think Weirdly, now you said this. That I have like Grey hair flower ups.

48:28 Where I'll go th I'll, you know, go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and I'll look in the mirror and be like, What, I have twelve now? Being generous there, there's more like twenty five. I have I have twenty five now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that that falls and what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicle? So there's a finite energy budget. And then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business, right? You have this budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put you know more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here, right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young. Right.

49:07 Uh there's a a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs. in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. You know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? Yeah. Yeah. So Maslow's insight was Uh my God, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just A cute stress response. Yeah, I just caught it's off lead. Sorry. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. So there's there's a hierarchy of

49:32 Energy needs. And the body. works similarly to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow said Uh for a human being to be fully realized. First, you need to have safety and food and shelter secured, right? Once you have this and you feel

49:46 this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people. Right, loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. Uh and then once you have this covered, Now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, what do you call self-actualization, and kind of becoming your best self, flourishing. So he saw this very much as uh This is this needs to be covered uh and when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid.

50:20 Right, your meditation practice or the long term type like I'm gonna be a better person. No, like I need to make sure we can Put food on the table. Next week. Right. Um So this hierarchy of of human needs.

50:33 I think aligns with hierarchy of uh of energy needs and the body And As far as The importance of hair colour goes.

50:42 It's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to uh be less efficient. Right, their mitochondria working a little

50:54 you know, less efficiently and Uh and then there there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy and uh there's And all of these things kinda stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there. We call them growth, maintenance, and repair. These are like the anti aging processes in in the body. And those need energy, but they're not as important as

51:19 You know, facing the stressor that you think is life threatening now. So if there's a lion chasing me. my body's gonna commit all the the energy I have to getting away from this line and it might say, Listen, Steven We're not gonna repair

51:32 the skin next to your eyes, you're gonna get a couple more wrinkles and we're not gonna make your we're not gonna Commit energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce Black pigment or whatever. So I would then look aged. I would look old. Older. But that's because all of my energy's been going to something else which my body considers to be a high priority. Correct. Which also brings me to, I guess The famous uh what we always talk about with presidents because presidents go into office often with dark hair.

52:00 And they come out with grey hair. And usually one does not age that quickly in eight years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic, and uh two years later they have have grey hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged ten years. So you're telling me actually that the The real secret to anti aging if there was one. Is this proper allocation of energy.

52:28 So if you don't waste energy. stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things. Which uh it's kind of a a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti aging. Can I also pour more energy in the top? Like can I just i if I get more energy, does that mean that there's

52:52 less likelihood that we're gonna run out of energy when it comes to my h hair follicles being black or grey. Yeah. The thing is it doesn't look like we have that flexibility. Like if you wanna have more energy and you wanna age More slowly. Uh eating more does w is not gonna give you more energy. So is there anything I can do to have more energy available?

53:10 Uh You be you can become more efficient. I can become more efficient, but I can't put more in. Yeah. Hm.

53:16 And how does one become more efficient then? Uh you know, you said about stress. Okay, I'm gonna live a less stressed life. Yeah. It seems like uh there's a few things that we know makes Organism more efficient. One is exercising. Okay. Right. Because when you exercise again, you're increasing energy resistance, uncomfortable, potentially you're damaging things, right? Because you're you're uh Increasing what we call dissipative losses, right?

53:40 uh oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the Yeah. During the exercise, but then when you recover Now the body's like Next time this happens, I'm gonna be ready.

53:51 And The process of getting ready Two Resistance

53:58 you know, gym session is that you make more mitochondria. Right. bigger and stronger and your heart becomes more efficient and your arteries you know, become more it become softer and you develop, you know, the the confidence that you can do this well. Um and then it becomes rewarding. You you know, it becomes enjoyable. So all of these things, now that you're off the gym

54:21 session right you spent an hour in the gym Telling the body, this is what we're gonna do in the future. And then the body's like, Okay, I'm gonna get ready. if there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to to get ready for this is to become more efficient. So by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid um and kind of flexible cardiovascular system and uh by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation.

54:45 Right, all of these things make m energy more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost. Of doing the activity. And then there's more energy available for anti-aging, growth, maintenance and repair, vitality. So I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise.

55:00 But you feel like you have more. And you don't actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy's flowing more smoothly through this thing. It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria. Yeah. Okay. What what else?

55:14 What about food? Uh I've got coffee here. I've got S Alcohol here, I've got the sugar. What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency

55:29 of the energy th flowing through my body. Yeah. Great question. Alcohol. What we know about alcohol is that

55:38 Nothing is free in biology. Right. So if you put Something in the body that shouldn't be there. Effectively a toxin like ethanol. Which is what's in there. Uh it's gonna cost energy to get rid of it.

55:48 So there are detoxification systems in your liver uh primarily that takes alcohol, breaks down the molecule, and then you can pee it out. Right, or you metabolize it for energy even. Uh so there's a bunch of Of uh energy in ethanol. But when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like shit. Because what happens is you you waste energy

56:11 Degrading the alcohol. Right, and and even though it's a net plus, you're putting calories in the machine in the body, uh but Yeah. What ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it.

56:22 So there's a a a cool study where they brought people in They gave them a bunch of alcohol. Yeah, effectively uh effectively drunk. And then they measured how much energy are they burning. And you can do those kind of studies. We we've done those studies in the lab. In a small room you put a human being and then you just measure how much energy Does it cost for them to stay alive?

56:42 Right. Then you ask them to not do too much in the smaller room, they're just sitting down reading a book. Um And then then you can ask them, Okay, now drink this alcohol. And then you measure, you look, you're minute by minute, they drink the alcohol and then you start to see, ooh, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside under the hood, the body's like burning energy. And other toxins probably work the same way, you know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating. The reason why those things might be bad for health may be because they they steal energy.

57:13 away from, you know, a growing body, for example. Uh there's good data in uh South America. Children who are exposed to more pathogens, right? Th there's no sanitation. They walk barefoot, they they eat stuff, you know, that's not clean, then um they have more pathogens. Uh in their gut, right? There there's more. uh virus, bacteria and parasites uh It costs energy to fight those things off.

57:38 That's why you feel like shit when you're burning uh when when you're fighting a flu, for example. Right, your immune system, your immune cells are like Whoa. you know, virus like Covid or you know, any you know, seasonal flu virus, the immune system goes into overdrive. to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then that the immune system steals energy.

57:58 away from the brain, from from your mind and then you feel like oh everything's so difficult. You just want to be in bed. over covers, you feel cold, which is strategy to basically Save energy. So all of the what's called sickness behavior. Right, all of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. Uh all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies. Stressors.

58:25 Alcohol. Parasites. Oh kind of have this increase the the cost of living. Uh and then

58:32 Because there's a cap on your energy budget. Uh then That energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. And if you're in those states for long periods of time. You're in a chronic state of um I guess like energetic distraction is the way I'd think about it. That's that's a cool way to think about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it like if you you ha y uh my body has an army of ten soldiers.

58:52 And usually those ten soldiers are like at work doing the things that I need to do to survive and grow and flourish. And then when I have one of these I don't know, uh some sort of toxic substance comes into my body You're basically saying that For those soldiers. Have to be reassigned to go deal with this invader.

59:10 And so now I only have six that are focused on Everything I need to flourish. Which is why I'm I probably feel shit sometimes. Yep, exactly. Um And w if if there's only six working on My You know,

59:23 fundamental requirements to flourish. Then Some of those things are gonna have to give way. And I might end up with grey hair and I might end up with wrinkles or Maybe my brain won't function the same, maybe.

59:35 Disease. Yeah. My immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. Yeah. Immune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. Um and the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, right? Clearing out proteins that you don't need, uh repairing damit DNA that's g gotten damaged, or making you mitochondria. All of these Processes happen like every day.

59:58 Every day you go through a little phase of getting rid of the things that don't work too well to make More of the things that work well, like mitochondria, quality control, it's called. Right. So there's this quality control cycle. Old mitochondria don't that don't work too too well anymore. They get degraded. Called mitophagy. Autophagy is self-eating, mitophagy is self-eating of the mitochondria.

1:00:19 So when a cell, for example, is Is hungry. If you pull energy away. From the cell, the cell goes into a mode like oh shit. I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share, uh, and then I'll have just a best functioning mitochondria. And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. It made me think of

1:00:42 Alzheimer is in dementia, weirdly because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's and dementia, but I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques. Mm-hmm. And I you know, you often hear that there's lots of things we consume or do that increase our probability of getting Alzheimer's and dementia. So is that at all linked to the same sort of like energy distraction? It's been long believed that the plaque Right that you've heard about. Uh amyloid plaques and uh tau tangles and there's kind of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's.

1:01:14 I think that's what most people have heard. Uh what most people believe because it came from you know white coat wearing scientists and Uh university professors. That is not the truth. And

1:01:25 What is more true Is in and and Let me just say why it's not the truth. You can have people in their sixties and their seventies and their eighties Zero protein deposits in the brain.

1:01:37 We can image this now pretty well with neuroimaging. You can have people zero protein deposited in the brain. And they have full blown Alzheimer's. And dementia. And you have the other extreme

1:01:48 People with loads of Of Amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Completely normal cognition. So d those extremes really tell us this hypothesis, this amyloid, you know, protein uh aggregates in the brain as a driver of

1:02:05 Dementia? And neurodegeneration is not correct. Uh what we know happens energetically. in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy. demand in the there's specific brain regions that tend to be more affected and some people, not all not all people tend to have those protein deposits. Those regions c start to burn more energy.

1:02:26 This is early phase, right? And then at this point probably this is the brain trying to cope. Right, it's like something's not working great, but it's working harder. Like with the gray hair. Yeah, exactly. And then Over time.

1:02:41 the those brain regions become hypo metabolic and then that's when you start to have symptoms. What does that mean? That's that's when people start to have memory issues and uh hypermetabolic. Hypometabolic, yes. This is hypermetabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about. Like there's more energy being burnt here. normal metabolic is You know, you use a hundred units of energy for the brain and this me let's say this brain region. A hundred units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal

1:03:10 healthy functions. If there's a problem. with the mitochondria or there's a problem with, you know, the cell communicating with the synapses. Right? Cells talk to each other through these things called synapses. Uh there's a problem now. the the that part of the brain is gonna need to do more work.

1:03:27 To compensate. Uh and then we know something happens with neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's is Inflammation. Neuroinflammation. That basically means there are some cells that are trying to heal the brain.

1:03:40 And part of that healing process is Kind of a stress response locally. And then that stress response leads to the secretion of little proteins we call cytokines. And then it's basically those cells saying, Something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. So y do you have those cells that get activated, they they secrete those proteins to say Please help, you know, the we need to reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish

1:04:04 Normal, healthy balance. But that process of reestablishing of healing. cost energy. Just like when you're post exercise, your muscle invest energy. So and that's the same thing. kind of early phase hypermetab metabolism is when you spend more energy.

1:04:20 hyper Uh function. Some people have called it. And then eventually. It seems like those brain regions get tired out and then uh they become hypo metabolic, so they burn less energy. So if you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer's,

1:04:34 There are these regions that are That burn less energy. And energy is so central to everything, including cognition. Right, in order to have an idea. And to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy.

1:04:47 So the the brain kind of uh burning less energy in later stages kind of reflects Yes. lack of function. You know, the the it's difficult to remember you know, old memories, it's it's remembered, it's difficult to to make associations, it becomes difficult to plan in the future, um and to regulate your emotions and you know, a lot of people with uh dementia end up having

1:05:08 kind of mood issues, you become really depressed and it Is this is this why they call it type three diabetes? Yeah. So My hunch is that

1:05:20 Alzheimer's and dementia more generally. is a disorder of energy. And Specifically it's a disorder of

1:05:29 you know, increased energy resistance. So there's type three diabetes comes from the fact that When the brain gets Sick. Right, and symptoms of dementia start to appear, like loss of memory and mood and depression and that constellation of symptoms. When you look in the brain, it's burning less energy. But it's also harder for glucose to get inside the brain.

1:05:51 It's so there's yes. resistance, right, or a decrease in conductance for energy for glucose, for example, to get inside the brain to be processed and and be used. Trevor Burrus And why might that be? Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system. Oh okay. If you load up the system all the time with with Glucose.

1:06:13 With sugar in the blood and glycemia is high. You have diabetes, perhaps. This is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto this the system that's like really delicate. And it's not like jacking the the voltage on your lamp that eventually, you know, is gonna catch fire. Uh we are a slow burning fire. Right, like the inside of our our cells, you have the electrons flowing. And when there's sparks flying, it damages the mitochondria. It damages this, damages that and that increases that's what aging is. Aging the the most basic mechanism of aging. including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's is the accumulation of a little damage, little mutations, a little defects, little uh imperfections. And as the imperfections accumulate, the system becomes less efficient.

1:06:56 Insulin resistance basically in diabetes refers to the fact that muscles, but also the brain can H has the capacity to say. I I can't anymore. Like glucose too much for me, too much resistance, too much you know, damage that I that I'm exposed to. So if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess Energy pressure.

1:07:17 Right, from the glucose, from the from the electrons. Uh you can become Insensitive or resistant to insulin. So then you s you take the the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the cell You th you pull those out. Right, so then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin.

1:07:33 So then the body's like whoa, like glucose is way high. What you n a normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the surface of uh of your muscles and then says, Take in the glucose because there's too much glucose in the blood, it's we're gonna damage the brain, we're gonna damage the eyes, we're gonna damage the nerves. So muscle, please take in that glucose. But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria are starting to be Uh yeah, at capacity. In terms of how much energy they can

1:08:01 uh resist and and and flow, then they shut down the valves. Right. So the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant. And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells. Uh but then gluca blood glucose uh start to increase. So the next step in this cascade is Well If there's too much energy and circulation, too much sugar, too much fat. What what can we do with this?

1:08:23 And that's where Fat stores, you know, a a deposity. Uh it comes in. So obesity. Is

1:08:31 A protection mechanism. Against excess energy resistance. W I one way to think about this hypothesis that Dementia, Alzheimer's is linked to An overflow of

1:08:44 Glucose, let's say. is to look at other civilizations or um I don't know tribes that had the tribe in Africa. Who don't have a lot of glucose, do they still get Alzheimer's and dementia?

1:08:55 I don't know the the literature on this. Uh but it's clear that people who if you if we look at What Makes you more likely to have Alzheimer's? Uh what makes you less likely to have Alzheimer's? All the things that make you more likely to have Alzheimer's contribute to increasing

1:09:10 This energy resistance, right? Too much sugar in the blood. Diabetes. Physical inactivity. Right. If you don't move Energy doesn't flow through a mitochondria. So it just stacks up, accumulates. And and the things that protects

1:09:24 the brain protects you against Alzheimer's and dementia or things that let energy flow. physical activity, uh, not eating too much. Especially not eating too much sugar. Uh and and then ketones, there's new you know data now showing that Keetones can

1:09:38 uh you know enter the brain and be metabolized. more easily and can even kind of improve cognition and the ketogenic diet, which I know you've tried. Uh many people report more energy on the ketogenic diet. It's not because you eat more calories, it's because Those Uh electrons that are stuck on ketones instead of being stuck on glucose.

1:09:59 Can flow. more more easily. Are made by mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of this the sociality of mitochondria in the organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat Make fat, right?

1:10:13 Avocados and oil and and meat and uh butter and uh those fat molecules and go in the liver and then the mitochondria in the liver take those fat, transform them into ketones, and then put the ketones into the blood. The kidneys also do a little bit of this. And then the ketones go to the brain and then they feed the mitochondria in the brain. So you have mitochondria in the liver. talking and feeding mitochondria in the brain. And the path

1:10:35 For a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria. is much shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors, if you want to think about it energetically, uh than for glucose. That path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter. I just want to make sure on that point that I don't misunderstand, because you know it sound it could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's, but actually you're saying You know what I mean?'Cause I think of ketones as energy and I'm I'm I'm shotting, you know, ketones all the time. I don't want to flood my brain with energy so that, you know, malfunctions. Yeah, Alzheimer's.

1:11:08 It's it for some reason it's really hard to overwhelm the brain. And with ketones. Or overwhelm the body if you eat fat. Like it's it's very easy to feel like I'm full. I've had you know a good enough meal If you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat Now things like

1:11:25 taste so good and there's a kinda extra reward and a lot of people eat for different reasons, not just because they're hungry. That's because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary, uh especially the the sugar part, then you you lose regulation. And that's why I think the GLP one drugs are are so powerful because they they address a problem where it starts. Like how much food are you putting into the system? Yeah. I I did look at the stats there on the tribes in Africa and it says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe in Tanzania or

1:11:57 A rural agrarian populations, like the Yoruba. They find that Alzheimer's and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare. Mm-hmm. Which again means that it Points to

1:12:10 Western diets. Western diet, Western lifestyles. Yeah, these people move all the time. Um and they don't eat too much. Um most of them don't need to kind of rely on their fat capacitor.

1:12:25 They don't have excess energy to just store away. And for for some people there's Congenital leanness. Right. Like you're you're born lean and you're gonna like You can't put on fat. If you eat too much. the the high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood and then it it it gets lodged in ectopic ways. So in the i it g it gets lodged in the muscle or in the liver or in the brain. Um and and then the

1:12:48 Causes damage because of you know this like excess energy pressure and then the system overheats. Skinny fat. Skinny fat, yeah. And that stores it in the around your livers and stuff. Exactly. What's that called, that fat inside just Visceral. Visceral fat. And the visceral fat is linked to increased inflammation and it's linked to a bunch of diseases. But this is just a symptom. Like the increased fat And I think the reason why obesity in general we say obesity is bad is because obesity reflects a deeper

1:13:15 State, a more important state. With the which is this increased energy resistance. Like there's too much energy in the system. And the system can't flow it. Like the mitochondria can't keep up. So to protect themselves.

1:13:28 They store that and uh store that away and and then uh then then you become obese. If you're gonna take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound for pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Johnny Bones Jones. John is a co-owner of our show sponsor, Keetone IQ, alongside myself. And when you hear why. It probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he's training or fighting, he needs high quality, steady, laser like focus without the crash. And ketones give him exactly that. And unlike caffeine, ketones don't stimulate your brain, they fuel it. So your brain actually loves ketones because it runs on them much more efficiently than anything else. And right now ketone IQ is giving away one MMA gloves from John Jones himself, and the upcoming gold medal wrestler he's coaching called Gable Stevenson.

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1:15:36 So on this point of food then. Fasting, autophagy, all these words that I've heard. Uh if you were giving me advice on everything you know about how to create a body that is very, very efficient in how I deal with the energy that I have. W what advice would you give me as it relates to eating? Develop that awareness of what your body needs. So when I think about how I eat, I don't think about

1:15:56 you know, my weight or my body, I think about How am I feeling? And do I need more food? Right. Am I like depleted or Uh am I tired and exhausted because there's too much food on board and my organism is like struggling to keep up with this excess like friction or excess, you know, energy pressure. and on my brain, on my on my mitochondria. So I think about it from the perspective of my

1:16:19 Might a country. What do my mitochondria need? Uh and In general It's much harder to uh you know deplete the mitochondria, like not eating too much.

1:16:30 So if you're thinking about Ducky, there's this food there. Do I snack? Do I not snack? Uh. uh generally eating too much there there are clear consequences to this. Like it increases the resistance or the friction in in your mitochondria. Not eating enough is typically innocuous for most people. Because we we have stores, don't we, of glycogen and we have stores of glucose in our body and our muscles anyway. So if we were running low, then our our body can go get some fat.

1:16:54 Metabolize it. Exactly. Make ketones. Make ketones. Yeah. Yeah, the y most people have enough energy on board, right, in the form of fat, some glycogen in your muscles and your liver, uh to live at least a month. But I mean I I'm a big, big fan of survival documentaries. And one of the most remarkable things you see in survival documentaries, I'm even thinking about some that I've watched, is people can survive for Seemingly months without eating anything.

1:17:20 Um they can't survive long without water. Yeah. But they can survive for months without eating anything. Um because their body will start to kind of go into its reserves. Yeah. And break down muscle and all these other things. Yeah. Yeah, the record is The world record for not eating is over three hundred days.

1:17:36 Wow. Irish man. Um and he lost I forget the exact numbers. Two hundred fifty pounds, three hundred pounds. What does this say about hunger?

1:17:47 But and also what does it say about this society we live in where we have some people have like five meals. Some people basically just eat from morning till night, you know? Yeah. Uh. I think uh a lot of us Eat. Not

1:17:58 Because we're hungry. I think a lot of us as have learned to eat to to s serve some other need. And eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know, as gambling and Um kind of connecting with other human beings. So uh We know some people eat emotionally, right? When they're stressed out they they they eat more and

1:18:18 Um so I think hunger is is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge on hunger. Like if you feel sad, you feel like bored, um hunger will kind of get you out of boredom. because of the salt, because of the sh especially if you had salty, sugary things around. Uh it's a rewarding thing that will get you out of uncomfortable Other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat.

1:18:44 Um a good general assumption to make. You're probably overeating. I think I probably am. Um it's harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window. Right, then it's that works really well for some people. Um like eating, for example, a very severe kind of w window would be two PM to six pm. Right, so you eat for four hours. And you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that. That tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating.

1:19:13 Um and my dad you know, still things d to this day he's sixty nine now. Um that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's what he learnt when he was a kid, and he wants to believe that this is true. I don't think it's true for most people.

1:19:27 And especially if you're in your sixties, seventies, right, the the metabolism changes and if you're always eating, you the body never goes into this state of I must be efficient. Right. And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient, you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria. And then there's more friction, you know, in in your whole body, there's more inflammation. And then you don't feel as good, right? And you don't feel you have as much energy.

1:19:55 So many people who go from eating three meals a day Plus or minus snacks. to like intermittent fasting. I'm gonna eat. Whatever I want, h however much I want, but just in those four hours or six hours. Most of those people

1:20:08 uh have a lot more energy. They experience right that they have more energy. It's not because there's more energy in their body. If anything, they're putting fewer calories in the body, but the way energy flows now, it flow more efficiently. And we don't perceive the amount of energy we perceive The flow energy or the transformation of energy. And I was just reading there that it says that this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day came from an advertising campaign.

1:20:34 That was designed to sell cereal and bacon. Um Before the industrial revolution breakfast wasn't a heavily scrutinized meal. People often just ate Whatever was left over from the night before, or they ate a quick heavy meal before going out to do physical farm labour.

1:20:51 But as people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs. Those heavy greasy breakfasts started causing widespread injection. Ingestion. Ingestion. And uh

1:21:02 Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that catalogs. He ran a famous health. sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain based diet would cure ingestion and improve overall health. He co-invented cornflakes And he and other serial pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy

1:21:22 Cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day and your dad Yep. I mean a lot of people did. Everybody did. And and I did until recently, until I started to like feel into this. I would have this big That's how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low like this

1:21:41 Um You know, low energy. And I think now I understand why, because I was overloading my system with way too much Kind of rapidly available sugary energy. That I didn't need. Uh and then

1:21:52 The body needs to find a way to he handle this. Either you get fat, which I can't do, so then it goes kind of to my brain and then makes me feel lousy. So on this point then, just to close off on this diet. Question. If I wanna feel really, really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window and I probably want to eat Just what I need. And I wanna not overeat. I don't wanna undereat, but I don't want to overeat. If you're undereat, you're gonna pick it up tomorrow.

1:22:16 I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway, so I'll be fine tomorrow. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is gonna impact my performance today. Correct. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. Um

1:22:30 And and just maybe to close the loop on that example. Like when you're sick and you're fighting an infection. Yeah. I I had a a beautiful opportunity to understand not just under understand, to experience this. One day. It was New Year's Eve.

1:22:44 Uh thirty first in the evening and I start to feel like little scratchy throats. I'm like oh Mm. So I I go to you know the the evening.

1:22:53 dinner. I didn't cough or anything. I I don't think I was contagious, but I just could feel, right? That something was was coming up. I felt terrible. I was tr had I started to have like Full blown flu symptoms. Went home early, at like ten nine PM. Um And then I went to bed. It was horrible night.

1:23:11 Where I felt the I was in pain. And then my I had like massive fever. I took a bath, a warm bath, to help my fever kind of, you know, go up so that it could fight the high fever. stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So it's a it's it's usually a good thing. Um

1:23:28 And then it's next day. I was out and I was so depressed. And I was like I should write about this. I'm writing a book on on energy and energy constraints and like the the the vision partitioning of energy in in the body. I was like I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system has been full blown.

1:23:46 Defense mode. And It's not like I I was Like I could feel my heart, I'm wearing this aura, my heart rate was like a hundred and ten at at at rest, instead of being like sixty, you know, normally. So there's all of this energy flowing through. It's like wow, like my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We know this is true from from you know good studies on that that when you're fighting something, you burn more energy. Uh Yet I'm feeling completely drained.

1:24:11 So it's not like the amount of energy that's flowing through that I should feel more energetic. the my immune system in that moment uh was draining all my energy. Dra sucking away my energy from you know, from my from my mind, from my brain perhaps. Um and

1:24:27 I remember thinking It wouldn't be a whole lot of energy if I just pulled my laptop, like prop myself on the bed and then start to write what I'm experiencing in the moment. Right. Like the Yeah. And but I couldn't muster this trend. It's like what the what the fuck? Why would I care? I couldn't care. Right, and I this is w the stuff I care about on a daily basis, but in that state

1:24:47 Of my energy being disrupted. I couldn't care about this. And then I start to think about the work and about, you know The lab and about You know, family things like Whoa it's

1:24:59 My whole life feels so different. I don't care about anything. Yeah, I don't care about anything. I just I'm just trying to fucking survive. That's so interesting'cause I can relate so much. Yeah. I mean everyone has been through like a difficult like you when you're really sick. Or when you're really stressed. Yeah. Or just anything that's Exactly. That's like Maslow's pyramid, right? Survival. Where where did I go? Where's where I remember. So I was still me.

1:25:26 Right? I was still Martin, but I I I felt completely different. The quality of my of my mind, the quality of Of my intention. was a completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn't care about anything else.

1:25:38 So that episode went on for like two days or so. Th day number three, I was able to take my computer and like Start to feel again. The purpose. But it was so interesting that just the what what it felt like when I was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffuse energy.

1:25:57 Like the light, for example, right, there's a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and A uh an incandescent light bulb? Like an old style filament light bulb, is not the amount of energy is the the way the energy is patterned.

1:26:14 And in a laser you have every photon that are kind of in phase with one another. Mm, and then there's a coherence to it, right? And it's the coherence that gives the laser its power. Uh it's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy if you put in an incandescent light bulb. Now it's the same energy, but it's diffuse, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all over the place. And then if you wanna look at how far can these photons go? Right? How far can my mind go? Caring about things. The diffuse energy doesn't go very far.

1:26:45 Uh but the the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like A diffuse Incandescent light bulb. Uh I the two things came to mind when you said that.

1:26:55 The first is In my previous company, because we were a startup fast growing, we had cash flow issues. Mm. Huh. Making sure we had enough money coming in from our clients, whatever.

1:27:07 to pay our staff was always a problem. For anyone that doesn't know. um when a business is growing quickly, it's usually spend more today than it's receiving f in. So even if you're you're growing from like one million to six million to twelve million to twenty five million or whatever, as we did. you you still have a cash flow problem. And there would be times when we're nearing the end of the month and months months in a row. And I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team. They they always got paid. They never knew. We always figured it out.

1:27:33 But what I'd notice is in those moments of really, really high stress Sometimes. Not always, but there were periods where I lost motivation. And what I meant by that is I literally, as a twenty-three, twenty-four year old C like CEO of all these hundreds of people, some of them older double my age. I basically hide at home. And what I mean by hide at home is like I didn't have the I lost purpose for this fucking business. Like I I'd wake up for it might last a week or two weeks, and I just didn't have

1:28:01 the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it, to like go out and be a leader. And now as you say it I go, Oh, it's because I was stressed. And it would last for when the cash flow issue would resolve. My motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this is Zoomed back into focus. Yeah. And I think that's really important'cause uh you know, that we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching this show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation. And as a founder and as a CEO, it's you feel so guilty that you the the source of motivation and inspiration and leadership for this group of people. You could lose it, but now I understand what it was. Now I understand that I was at like an a chronic well

1:28:38 Uh Yeah, a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. Yeah. The other thing actually made me think about as well. When you s you said about this diffusion of energy, you actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals.

1:28:50 It made me think about if you take ten ten people in a startup. And they're all really, really focused on the same goal. They're way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal. And you're all pointing in different directions. Yes. So there's incoherents. There's incoherents. Yes. Yeah. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OKRs are so important, because you can point all the energy at the problem. Yes. This is traction towards a particular goal. This is what Purpose.

1:29:16 Purpose focuses energy. And I think the reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right? To to feel it. I I I wanna say like You have purposes, it kinda becomes this must find my purpose, you know, must like I'm on a A spiritual journey to which you out and then you're impedimentary. Yeah, exactly. But when you

1:29:38 Uh Somehow Find your yourself in a place where you feel Like

1:29:45 those things, you know, that are in your life are meaningful, right? And that the path you're on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffused, like a a light bulb, and boom it brings it like a laser. And then you can go That distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month. Right, where it's like you have all all of these meetings. And it doesn't feel as difficult

1:30:09 As it would. If you were going kind of all over the place. Focus I think brings our energy State.

1:30:18 And then it feels like coherent, right? It feels like I know what I'm doing this. It's then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing.'Cause there's this coherence Not just energetic coherence that uh you know allows you to do more with less energy. Uh but also this cohesive of mind, right? And and maybe of spirit if we want to go there. Um I'm gonna ask the theme to play a clip. It's a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about this idea of signal and noise. Uh and he's referencing his experiences with um Steve Jobs, who he used to work with, and also Elon Musk. Look how wildly successful he was.

1:30:52 But here's why. There's a concept that he understood. that very few people focused on back then in the early nineties of signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about jobs is Th that I tell every CO now. And I don't care if you're an S P five hundred CEO or you're just starting a business.

1:31:13 His vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next eighteen hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next eighteen hours you're awake. You're going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission.

1:31:34 They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So the s signal to noise ratio to be successful For Steve Jobs. It was eighty twenty.

1:31:45 Eighty signal. twenty noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at two thirty in the morning and expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts, it was all email. He was right. He was right.

1:32:00 And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that Zon Musk. He has no noise. He does not deal with noise. He is one hundred percent signal twenty four seconds.

1:32:12 I mean the guy is just Sixty seconds of every minute. Sixty minutes of every hour. The eighteen hours he's awake, it's all signal. Look what he's achieved. Now that's very awkward for him socially.

1:32:26 Because Noise is dealing with your family sometimes, or noise is saying hi to a friend, or noise is Is is listening to some doom scrolling on, you know, some social media app. That just takes your mind, or maybe playing your guitar. But

1:32:40 Very few people on earth and if you go back in history, you're gonna find out that the geniuses of their time We're close to a hundred percent signal. And so I can Really sort of summarized this for my Audience, signal is the most urgent thing you should be focused on right now, and noise is basically everything. No, the goals you set for that the the way the w that you were awake. If you're gonna be aware eighteen hours.

1:33:02 And you've determined that there's three things you have to get done. You're gonna get those done. No matter what it takes, you're gonna get those done. And you're not gonna let anything distract you from the three to five things. If you're a CEO. And you achieve that.

1:33:15 And you can get those done. With eighty percent of your time based on that. You're extraordinarily successful. You are absolutely and you're Steve Jobs, or you're an Elon Musk, or you're somebody if you If you even talk to Bezos.

1:33:29 I don't know him personally, but I've heard in many interviews. Like I knew uh you know, I've I've I've met Elon just a few times, I spent a lot of time with jobs. But They say the same thing. Basels will not make.

1:33:41 a decision after one o'clock in the afternoon because he felt that the noise was too high. The signal for him was in the morning hours. It this is a crucial aspect of success that that I now understand to be The ability of s of of It defines uh an entrepreneur.

1:33:59 A man or woman that understands the signal noise ratio, that focuses on that They'll be successful. The ones that can't that get down to a fifty fifty signal noise, they'll fail. It's that simple. In that clip.

1:34:12 He's basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are Are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80% signal. He wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these interviews with Johnny Ives. I'll actually also play the Johnny Ives interview because I send this around to everybody, so I'm gonna play it where Johnny Ives talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was. really simplistic, but it still shocks me. How few people actually practice this.

1:34:43 um and it's a struggle to practice. But is is this issue a focus? Um Steve was the most r remarkably

1:34:53 focused person I've ever met in my life. And um And the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you dis you decide on Monday. You know what, I'm gonna be focused. It is a

1:35:08 Every minute I Why are we talking about this? This is what we're working on. You can achieve so much.

1:35:16 When you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say Um because I think he was concerned that I wasn't. Um He would say

1:35:26 Um how many things have you said no to? And I would Honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things. I I mean. wanted to be very honest about it and so I say I said no to this.

1:35:39 A no to that. And um He but he he knew That I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. Um so there was no real sacrifice.

1:35:50 What what focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it. But you say no to it. Because you're focusing on something else. And Steve Jobs would walk in and say to Johnny Ives

1:36:09 Oh. On a weekly basis. Tell me what you said no to. And Johnny said I'd had these sacrificial things, but he knew he goes Steve's definition of focus was saying no to things with every bone in your body and every fiber of your being you thought were good ideas, but you say no to them.

1:36:25 Because we're focused on this other thing. this extreme level of focus on the most important thing. And this is a pattern that I've seen in these exceptional entrepreneurs. They have such high signal and they they they're very good at dealing with distraction in this regard. And it kinda again, it made me think about what you're saying about like focusing your energy on a particular thing like a laser. means that your ability to solve that thing. becomes like drastically different. Mm-hmm. I've come to learn in life that if you give ninety percent of your energy to something

1:36:56 Or you're focused to something. It gets ninety percent. But when you give a hundred percent, it's like it gets a hundred and fifty percent. There's something in giving your entire being a focus to something. Maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is. That means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically, drastically increases.

1:37:17 Solv problems is hard. Yeah. Yeah. But these great, great founders, they they solve them because they're s they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing. Mm-hmm. Yes. I think the reason this is Is because of a physical principle about energy.

1:37:33 She's called Resonance. Right, if you walk through life with such clarity Of mind. Right? This is

1:37:42 What the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And and you live and you breathe that. You become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your actions and your email, it comes out in the way you speak and then it comes out in the the things you turn attention to, right? It turns out in your tone of voice, in the care that you, you know, look at people with. It comes out in every facet of you. Right. So you become the emblematic leader, I guess, uh for for that thing that you're a hundred percent into. What this does Is that it's picked up by other people. But maybe this gets like vibes. You have that vibe. You have like the founders vibe, right? Or like the entrepreneurs vibe.

1:38:20 I think this is real. And this is the energy that's flowing through mitochondria somehow becoming coherent. And you know, aligned and it feels meaningful, it feels purposeful, and then you live Like that. Other people around you that Resonate with it.

1:38:35 Right? Like people are drawn to Uh uh. A pure signal. Like if you have that disp specific Signal, it's like a a music, like a symphony.

1:38:44 Like when it sounds When it's on tune. Then people that want to come on board, like they feel this and then it gets amplified. It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often side is a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with his en with with his energy. And what you've just described sounds almost perfectly

1:39:03 like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field. probably heard this term. Um the reality distortion field, they called it his RDF, was a term coined by Apple software engineer Bud Triple in nineteen eighty one to describe Steve Jobs uncanny. Almost Hypnotic ability. To convince everyone around him to believe practically anything, and people who work closely with jobs described the RDF, the r reality distortion field.

1:39:30 As a confounding mix of intense charisma and Unyielding will power. And sheer persistence in a certain direction which pulled you with him. Mm-hmm. That's an energetic quality. And

1:39:42 In physics if you have something that's yeah has a a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance. And then it looks spooky. It looks like whoa, this thing, you know, synchronicity or this you know, this thing happened, and somehow, you know, they we he was able to mobilize this this donor and you know, fundraising is like easier than it should be. And so then like all of these things snowball because you hold that you know that That vibe. You hold that energy. It amplifies. I mean exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs. Um and he said that it would cause two things. It would be like he was casting spells on you, but he was also bending time in physics. They said Apple engineer Andy

1:40:22 Hertzfield. recall that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take six months, he would look you in the eye and say You can do it in two weeks. Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in two weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Job's charisma.

1:40:42 Thing I was like a minor wizard. Because he was casting spells. And I would see people mesmerized, so much so that I was so jealous. Gates noted that even when Jobs was lying or wrong,

1:40:57 He had everybody completely hooked. What's clear to make some like something like this happen is You need to Um feel that there's something compelling. Like you need to feel something's important.

1:41:09 And again, that's not a rational thing. Like you need to feel it in yourself. Um, and then you need to kind of bring that energy into focus. and bring attention to it, right? And then then that's where ideas start to come. You build a structure around it to to sustain that flow. You said um at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves. And if I think about the fact that Every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people. Like that is true. Like for me to become the president, prime minister, best salesperson, well, best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy.

1:41:43 To change its shape. I think that's what amazing people do. Uh they're able to You know, see something, hold that vision so strongly, and then mobilize others. Right. And then new things become uh possible. I think that's what great leaders do. And I I now approach, you know, other human beings. And you know, my my son, like my my six year old son, Noah I see him as Yes, a little boy, and yes, a lot of energy and yes, you know, some

1:42:08 Some challenges that come with this. But he's this beautiful little energy pattern. Right. He's just energy flowing through this little child's body. But my role as a parent is provide just around the right amount of resistance, right? The right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint as a do whatever you want, have whatever you want, Yeah, you know, any time, then like that's not good for development. Kids need to feel, you know, some boundaries. And so those are like resistance, right? Little constraints.

1:42:38 But if every minute Like me putting constraint, No you can't do this, no you can do that, then it damages the system. It traumatizes the system. Exactly. So the the art really of parenting and I think the art of of leadership is Providing the right structure, right? So that the energy has some constraints. Like there's a challenge. There needs to be a challenge for the team to meet.

1:43:00 Right. Challenge is like a barrier. It's like a little resistor. Of course, there's challenges, you're like it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult, then everywhere everyone's bored. If It's like, yeah, we're gonna do the same thing as we did last year. And then next year we should do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to double the the you know the year after. This kind of goal or challenge. is a form of constraint, something you have to work through.

1:43:23 I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. Like What's the next challenge? Why go down deep in the ocean to discover new creatures? Why go in the Amazon trying to discover new species of little bugs? Why go into space? Like this is all curiosity driven. It's like the mind wanting to have something to hit against. Because if there's nothing to hit against if there's no resistance, then It's

1:43:45 There's no purpose. I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You think about going to the moon. The moon pulled energy towards it. So we found ourselves to the moon. And actually, if you bring that down into your own life as like a leader of a company, you go Okay, if I set a worthwhile goal I'm gonna pull

1:44:02 People. towards it. Yeah. And if I have an unworth worthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So maybe a worthwhile goal is actually Philosophically a Mackinac. For energy. Yeah. I think so. And people are energetic processes.

1:44:15 So m my my six year old son is this beautiful movement of energy. My goal is to nurture it. Right? And not just with food and physically, but to nurture his curiosity. Uh and is transformation. Link to this I read

1:44:29 that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. This is this beautiful study in uh it was run in Chicago. Every year people would come to the hospital and then fill out questionnaires and meet with a a therapist and psychologist and they would ask them questions and test their memory and their cognition. And then every year they would report How Much purpose. They felt like they had.

1:44:56 how much sense of connection with other human beings or with something greater than themselves, how optimistic they were about the future. Right. And some people are like more Optimistic, happy, and and and purposeful than than others, but there's always kind of fluctuations, right? Like we go through fluctuations. We go through life. No matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being Challenging in in some ways. How people felt

1:45:19 how much purpose people experience before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died. Right. So then you have how the person felt. Right before the how much purpose the experience. And then you look at the mitochondria. After they die?

1:45:37 In in the the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. So that little part of the brain that's involved in you know uh active reasoning and executive function. And the mitochondria and the people who felt more purpose. Had a greater energy transformation capacity. What does that mean in simple terms? This could mean

1:45:56 That if you feel more life purpose The mitochondria in your brain can flow energy more easily. Or it could mean the inverse of that. Well it could mean that having mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily. just changes how you see life. Makes you feel more purposeful. Yeah, exactly. Or it could mean that purpose itself is creating more efficient mitochondria. Exactly. People have done studies in animals and we've done some of those studies where you can basically change the state of mind.

1:46:21 of a mouse by like stressing it out chronically and then you make it feel defeated and like a really stressful life. And you ask, does this change the mitochondria in the brain? Right? Can the experience of stress change a mind of canton marine? Hundred percent. that happened. Now you can say, Okay, now let's change your mitochondria in the brain. You can like

1:46:39 open up the brain, inject a little of something that either boost the mitochondria or inhibit and activate the mitochondria, increase r or decrease resistance. And then you ask, does this change how the animal appears to feel? How do animals behave in terms of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance? Hundred percent. So the the the best science shows it goes both ways. So how you feel can change mitochondria, the mitochondria can change probably how you feel. And so and again, we're theorizing here. If I don't have purpose in my life. It's gonna change the mitochondria.

1:47:10 And then if it if my mitochondria becomes more inefficient, Then what? What will I notice as the next symptom? Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that kind of starts to pop up. You feel drained, you don't feel you have, you know, enough energy. Burn out? Probably feels like burnout.

1:47:26 And you start to lose enthusiasm for you know for the future, uh you become more pessimistic. So there's kind of a constellation of things we call depression or you know burnout, or we put labels on these things, but really every person starts to experience life as less enjoyable, less purposeful Less meaningful. Um Regardless of the the diagnostic title we put on it. Which is interesting because I've in I've interviewed a few people that are

1:47:50 experts on the subject of depression and also addiction, frankly. And one of the things that I remember Johan Hari saying to me, who wrote a book called Lost Connections, is that in some cultures, the cure that they apply for depressive symptoms. Is Giving someone purpose in their life. Yeah. It's so powerful.

1:48:08 But my hunch is that Most of what we call depression is a loss of coherence. And when we're isolated. the energetics of mental stress.

1:48:20 when you feel like you're being pulled aside and judged and Right. What does that do energetically to the body? And and there's this protein marker in the blood that reflects Energy. Friction, energy resistance.

1:48:32 Right. If the mitochondria can't flow energy. Smoothly. This protein gets made. And then it's in the kind of a blood biomarker. It's

1:48:41 Elevated in cancer. where we think there's increased energy resistance. It's elevated in Alzheimer's, where we think there's increased energy resistance in the brain. It's elevated in diabetes, where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin. Resistance. It's elevated in All sorts of pathologies, hypertension and the heart disease and it's a marker that The organism energetically is not doing well. There's it's not efficient.

1:49:03 Right. That's almost a marker of inefficiency. We did this study where you bring people in, we put an intravenous so we can measure the blood markers, uh, and then we tell them, Okay, just relax, everything's fine, you're doing great. And then they they sit down, they relax for thirty minutes, cortisol goes down, the heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down. And then her lovely study coordinator, Catherine, walked into the room And then looked at the participants and said, Now you're gonna be judged.

1:49:28 You're gonna have to deliver a speech. And here's the situation. You were in a shopping mall. You were, you know, you grab this this carf you put it on just to try, but then the security guard caught you and then they're accusing you of shotlifting. So now you're in court. You need to defend yourselves in front of the s the the judge and you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard. Should he lose his job or And then if we tell them you have two minutes to prepare your three minute Defense.

1:49:54 In front of the judge. Most people. start to feel the the anxiety and then we we monitor heart rate at the same time and blood pressure and and then we draw blood and so you can see everyone's physiology. Wasting energy. The energetic cost of stress. You see this on the monitor on the other side, you know, in the control room. And then we put a camera in front of them that mocks, you know, video re records them. And then we have a white coat wearing old white men who stands

1:50:20 six feet in front of them, looks at them straight in the eye and say, Start talking. And then they have to And what we saw was that this Energy stress marker. Goes up.

1:50:35 Just with mental stress. You're not doing exercise, you're n not doing anything strenuous. You're just going through this phase of what's gonna happen to me, to my ego, to to my sense of self. So what's the downstream consequence of this thing this stress chemical being in your Yeah. So that protein is called GDF fifteen. Yeah. Growth differentiation factor fifteen. The name doesn't matter, but that energetic stress marker You're asking the right question. What did it do? And what does it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain.

1:51:03 Yeah. And that protein can be made by any organ in the body except one. The brain. What is it doing? It's very useful to know where where's a receptor. Right, because you need to have for signaling and biology to happen, you need a signal and you need a a receptor, a sensor, right? Uh where's a receptor for this protein, do you think? Only in one organ in the body.

1:51:28 Is it in here? It's right in here. Yeah, so in the brainstem. The the brainstem is where kind of the the Basic survival Systems of the body.

1:51:39 Uh R and there's a region in the brainstem called the area postrima. Doesn't matter. It's it's known as the vomiting and nausea center for the brain. This protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brain stem and it docs in there. Correct. And then what happens? And then turns out the brain interpreted this as There's something running out of energy. There's something running out of energy, okay. Something and the body is not right.

1:52:05 There's something running out of energy and then the brain makes two decisions. Very similar to when you're sick. Got Protein GDF fifteen is called a cytokine. It's the same thing that immune cells produce. When they're activated during an infection.

1:52:18 Okay, so your body thinks. Yes. And then what? And then does two things. Save energy, conserve energy. So you lose motivation. Yes.

1:52:27 Lose motivation. Feel depressed. Feel depressed. Can go to the gym. Yes. Doesn't feel worth it. We know th this specifically from animal studies, if you inject animals with GFN, they hunch in a ball and they don't do anything.

1:52:39 They go into this sickness behavior. That's number one. Number two. The brain says Something's running out of energy first. Let's conserve energy, number one. But two, let's mobilize energy.

1:52:50 Right. Let's put glucose into the blood. Let's put fat into the blood. Because there might be cells out there that are you know running out of energy and we need to rescue them. Are you gonna get f f belly fat? Visceral fat. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna get belly fat from this. Yeah. When stress hormones are up, right, and you're increasing blood glucose, increasing uh blood lipids. If the rest of the body doesn't need it, which is what kinda happens in during a stress response like this, that fat gets lodged where it shouldn't. Called ectopic fat. And that's what belly fat is.

1:53:19 Okay, so let's go a bit further. This is happening. Um if this is chronic. I guess it's gonna lead at some point to disease. Mm-hmm. What the best studies show on this is when you have high level of this energetic stress marker.

1:53:33 This protein. You're more likely if you follow people, then studies were done where you take the blood, you measure this protein, some people have very high levels, some people have very low levels. Uh and then you f wait fourteen years. This is actually a study from the UK called the UK Biobank. So if you measure the protein Energetic stress codichine, and you ask, what happens to people with high GDF-15 versus people with low GDF 15?

1:53:56 Turns out people with a high G D fifteen are more likely to develop mental illness. Hm. Bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia. People with high G D fifteen or more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension.

1:54:09 People with hygiene fifteen are more likely to be dead. At this point we don't know if it makes a difference if it's from mental stress, if it's from physical stress, if it's from an organ struggling, right, that's sick and trying to to heal itself. Energy stress, high energy resistance in the body. based on this marker. Is

1:54:29 called a prognostic indicator. It's an indicator that Something bad might happen. And uh and and people with high GDF fifteen also, they don't like to take the stairs. They don't like to walk for pleasure. They don't like to go out to the gym. They don't like to go out with friends. They don't like to exercise all the time. Correct. Yeah.

1:54:46 If you're getting the signal. Like when you're sick, right? If g G fifteen is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain. You're getting the signal that's You're running out of energy. So I guess the the question everyone's asking as they're listening to this now is How do I

1:55:01 Prevent. GDF fifteen or whatever it's called, this stress cytokine thing that goes and docs in my brain. How do I prevent it from floating around in my blood so often? Good question. Taking the time to feel. Meditation. Meditation with bloody feeling to his right.

1:55:17 Uh what we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF fifteen increases throughout the day. Right. Uh so the purpose of sleep then might be to Reduce Energy resistance.

1:55:29 I like what we were talking about earlier. It's not about having like finding this one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It's about this movement of increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance. And increasing resistance, decreasing resistance. It's kind of this movement of life. I guess all the other things we talked about earlier as it relates to lifestyle factors, like Keeping away from these sort of extreme stresses being way too much. Starving oneself. Oxidative stress.

1:55:54 None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? Mm-hmm. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. If we just look back in time of how we used to live at l you know, a little bit more human, out in nature, with people, with friends, off screens. Yeah. eating stuff that grows in the ground or has legs and runs. A lot of that is pretty like a pretty simple playbook for like how to live a good life. Yeah.

1:56:11 And to not be so bloody stressed out all the time. I think part of it is Yes, living a life that Is more aligned with the way we evolved. Right.

1:56:21 Connecting to other human beings and Not eating too much and Um I think that's one piece and But that's like everyone knows this. Yeah. Why aren't we doing it? And I think

1:56:33 Part of the reason is because we we have this kind of misconception of ourselves as a molecular machine. Right. Need to maintain your car. If I'm like a a machine, if I'm like a car, then I'm just gonna put more fuel in and I should feel better. And then you do it, then you y you eat more and then you don't feel better.

1:56:49 And that's I think extremely disempowering. People want to be empowered. And people wanna have knowledge, but they wanna know what to do. So they can be their best version of themselves. So they can flourish.

1:57:01 So you know what's interesting, before you arrived, I I did something I've never done before. I went through All of the interviews you've done. And I looked at all the comments. Because I wanted to understand the people that I've listened to you frequently. What what what what is it they feel like they would love to ask you or they haven't gotten from other interviews? One of the most popular comments which was seen roughly ten percent of time.

1:57:20 Where's the audience? asking about supplements. And the question that they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle interventions, but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like Methylene Blue. Urethylen A And N N A D plus boosters.

1:57:36 In your opinion, what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut Are they a band aid? Are they useful? I think there are shortcuts to To some States

1:57:49 I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there's a magic pill To solve. a complex issue to solve in the way that you're feeling becomes like the ooh there's a magic pill for this. And then you don't need To bring awareness. To

1:58:04 What you are. But Can I do both? I don't really know how methylene blue. Does everything it's supposed to be doing.

1:58:15 Uh biologically, methylene blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that methylene blu can kinda relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria. N A D plus Is probably the best supported uh intervention to reduce inflammation. Also, it's an electron carrier. So we take electrons from food.

1:58:35 And then gives them to the electron transport chain. So the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance. So if you're depleted Of an A D. There's that's gonna cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through Yeah, the this metabolic circuit. So N A D plus seems calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing and if

1:58:54 Yeah. And Most people are not deficient of N A D plus, so giving more to the system might not help, but uh for for reasons I don't really understand, it seems like it helps some people and it it makes people Uh feel more energetic. Is that in pill form? Like how do people take NAD plus?'Cause I know there were some like drips one time that some guy gave me. Yes, I think there there's uh oral supplements that are uh precursors to N A D if you eat N A D directly, it doesn't the bioavailability it's called, it doesn't get into, you know, your cells very well. You can inject infuse IV intravenously uh

1:59:29 an A D plus directly and then that that gets to your cells better. Um that's not a uh an approved or kind of recommended medical intervention, but I've seen people with mitochondrial disease You're saying that it helps them and Normal, healthy people as well, who feel more energy. U lithent A is a a new compound that

1:59:50 Симс то стимулейт. the degradation of bad mitochondria. So we talked about autophagy, mitophagy earlier. So A cell that has a thousand mitochondria. There are always some that are getting a little old, and then eventually they're degraded, especially if you fast, right? If the cell is a little starved, it's gonna degrade.

2:00:09 The ones that are least functional. And there's kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get Targeted and then they get degraded. if you're fasting or if you're pushing the system like drink exercise. What U Uroluton A seems to do is to kind of accelerate this process.

2:00:29 Right. So it accelerates the degradation of the bad mitochondria, the mitophagy. So that w the cell has to make more of the good ones. I'm looking at some of the studies here and it says the c clinical evidence for Urolithin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years, transitioning from a compelling animal data Study. to highly rigorous placebo controlled human clinical trials, and overwhelmingly the human research confirms that Ulithin A targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation. With one study In two thousand and twenty two in the Jama Network Open Study journal.

2:01:00 Um, where they took adults aged sixty five to ninety. And gave one of them placebo, one of the groups placebo, and the other You're less than A. For four months. And at the end of that they found

2:01:11 That the group that were given Urolithin A showed statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial inefficiency. Mm-hmm. I should be on Ulithmane, then. Everyone should. Do you take any of that? You don't take any supplements. I don't I'm skeptical of this. You know, there there's always kind of a new supplement that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions. And uh so the term mitochondrial dysfunction is I think a little misleading. Like there was a lot of hype about N A D, there was a lot of hype about coenzyme Q, co q ten, uh there was a lot of hype about all sorts of things. Anti inflammatory, you know, berries and

2:01:48 Antioxidants was a big thing like ten, twenty years ago. Turned out not. Uh actually. Impairs normal adaptation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants.

2:02:00 Um so U feels like the next fad. Uh maybe it's real. Uh I think the science is fairly compelling, but I'm I I trust d the wisdom of my body and my mitochondria more than I trust the the pharma company that's trying to to make and sell this. And what does that mean in in practical terms trusting the wisdom of your body? Like what does that mean for you? It means um recognizing that I am the the energy that's flowing through this thing and this thing is nature. Like we are a piece of nature. Something that's true across the animal kingdom and the the living kingdom is things heal. And we don't think about this in biomedicine. We think about diseases, we study, you know, when things go wrong and we try to understand the molecular, you know, features of diseases.

2:02:43 There's not really a science of the healing process. But the basis of health, it's clear. You need to heal continuously. Heal you know, repair the DNA that's damaged, repair the mitochondria that are getting old, you get rid of them, you make new ones. Like preserving the wholeness of the system. To heal means to become whole again. Is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature? To heal.

2:03:07 Because if you think about me and you sign here now, with that in a like a dark bunker, basically, with no sunlight. And listen, most of us live in such a dark bunker with very little sunlight. So We then have to take vitamin. Yeah. So because we live outside of our true nature, I'm wondering if actually we do need to take some supplements'cause we're not gonna heal.

2:03:26 Yeah. We are gonna heal. But if I sit in here all day, I'm not gonna get vitamin D and then that's gonna cause problems. Yes. So we're not in the optimal environment. When you're in that kind of environment, so I think there and there's good research showing if you put a plant in a hospital room. Patients recover faster. There's been studies sh uh looking at like windows with natural light, then you see nature. If you're in a hospital, for example, people recover better. And there's good data on like nature exposure.

2:03:50 Is it like the more better oxygen, you know, a little tiny bit more oxygen if you're in a forest. Is it like the phytochemicals, the things that are produced by the by the plants? Like we don't really know what it is. Is it just seeing green, seeing something that hears that sounds and looks like what you evolved? to be around. So we don't really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps Calm the body and somehow improve recovery. Oh.

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2:05:17 One type of help people also wanted to know about from you. Which was even more discussed was about red light therapy. Mm-hmm. Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria?

2:05:28 Interestingly, the red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices, helmets. A hairbrush. I think I've got one here actually. Okay. Therapy hairbrush. Therapy hairbrush. Yeah. Uh someone was just telling me their dad uh is part of a study now. He puts a helmet with red light, you know, every day because he has a

2:05:52 Pre dementia. By doing this, the idea is Uh light is energy. Yeah. Right. Energy is not a thing, but it's the potential for change. It's the capacity

2:06:02 To change something, red light like this, especially the red, the infrared that you don't see with your eye. can penetrate tissue, it can go through your hair, through your skull, and then into your brain. And then there it seems to do something and change Metabolism. So how is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that

2:06:19 for light to do something in biology, there needs to be something biology that resonates with it, right? That can uh offer the right amount of resistance, right? Do the photons, the red light photons hit and then there's transformation. Energy. That receptor, the antenna, the cellular antenna for red light seems to be mitochondria. So there's something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then boom they meet with oxygen.

2:06:41 metabolic water. Uh that is called cytochrome C oxidase. I'm gonna try and say this in layman's terms. I if I take red light and I put it on my skin, it doesn't even need to touch my skin, I can put it just close to my skin. Yeah. The red light is going into the mitochondria of my cell. And it's helping the mitochondria to become more efficient.

2:07:03 That's the idea. So I should wake up every day and do bloody red light then. If you're deficient in that in that way, that might be good. Uh that might also offset You know, the the natural Order that your body has has created.

2:07:17 I think that in in general that's why I kind of veer away from supplements because The organism is this beautiful dynamic equilibrium of like everything you know, energetically dancing with each other, where you have the mitochondria to transform energy and then, you know, genes are expressed and then this other cell is doing this, this cell is doing this, and there's this beautiful balance and When the system is out of balance. Now there's signals.

2:07:39 Like inflammation, right? Signals of this imbalance uh at an energetic level and then that turns into molecular level and then the system tries to come back Into balance, right? And Wow. I never realized this. That too much red light can be bad for you.

2:07:55 I don't know if there's studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but there's Like photo toxicity is a thing. And they're You can buy a whole bed of like really intense light. And I think if you stay too long in those, that's probably not good. There's a a very compelling study that was published last year uh

2:08:13 On Blood glucose regulation. And I know you've talked about blood glucose on other Episodes. How much glucose in the blood is really important because it causes this like energy resistance, energy friction in all of your cells, especially the brain, perhaps.

2:08:28 So when you eat a bunch of sugar or you eat a meal with carbohydrates, blood glucose typically spikes if you get stressed out. Just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can Increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging and so on. So the what the body does in the normal healthy organism is able to regulate blood glucose. So if you eat a big meal, there's amount enough insulin that's released, and then the glucose can come into cells into the muscles and and to the fat, and and then you preserve, you know, what's called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose. It turns out if you shine a red light on the back.

2:09:04 Of people as they ingest a big bunch of glucose. The spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured Mitochondrial metabolism. through the mouth. You can measure oxygen coming in.

2:09:19 And CO two coming out. Which is coming from mitochondria. So you can measure the the the energy metabolism, which is really the mitochondrial metabolism, as people are doing this. And what they found is that people who had red light on their back, their metabolism was actually Uh a little higher. So the electrons, the flow of energy

2:09:38 was increased with the red light. And and they think that might be why the glucose didn't spike as much because the electrons that came into the blood were able to flow through the mitochondria. Um So th this points to some regulation of

2:09:51 Energy regulation in inside the mitochondria that I don't fully understand, but I think there there's something promising here and it certainly supports You know, the idea that we're going to do it. Energy modalities outside of ourselves. uh you know light or electromagnetic fields under human beings.

2:10:08 That are you energy energetic process is affecting my metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically, metabolically, uh I think it it supports that idea that you're in an energetic process and you're influenced by other forms of energy, even if you don't see it. I'm really um stunned by this idea that there is such thing as getting too much red light and that that can have harm for yourselves because there is I'll be honest, you know there's been a couple of times where I just put that thing on and maybe like read a book for a long time. Like an an hour or two. Did you ever feel

2:10:39 Adverse effects from this? I never felt a a versus Effects. However Looking at some of the studies, it seems to uh suggest that

2:10:49 Red light therapy follows a bell curve model. Mm-hmm. They found in this one particular study I was reading about in two thousand and nine. that low to moderate doses of light perfectly stimulate the mitochondria to produce ATP and a healthy small burst of ROS reactive oxygen species to trigger cellular repair. However

2:11:07 This particular study also showed that when the dose is pushed too high, the light creates massive amounts of reactive oxidative species, and this excess oxidative stress overwhelms the cell's antideroxin defenses, completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and in inducing cellular Apatosis cell death instead of healing. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

2:11:29 Th this bell shaped relationship is something we see. In many. domains of biology and physiology. Same as like Work out, exercising, like most people know if you do a work out that's like half an hour, an hour, two hours, if you're an athlete and you're like really well conditioned, it's fine. And then you recover for, you know, twenty three hours after your one hour workout.

2:11:50 That's great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the idea the impression that you have more energy, which is really uh energy flowing more efficiently. But if you work out for eight hours. Yeah. That's not good.

2:12:01 Right. So the too much you you crash not enough, you're not at your optimal. So there's where is the optimal state? And Biology. And the whole mind body unit has kind of worked out through evolution and through your life and development to find this sweet spot. If you know how to listen to it. Yeah.

2:12:19 And that's that's easier said than done. Yes. There's a lot of noise out there. There is. Yeah, for the same reason you close your eyes earlier. When I ask you to kind of This is a good analogy for I think. what it means to kind of listen to her energy.

2:12:34 And maybe we could do a little exercise if you're interested. Sure. Yeah. So we'll do a a little exercise. Uh you can close your eyes if you want. Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. Yeah. And we'll use the breath.

2:12:46 So we can start by feeling your body, you can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair. Then we'll take a little breath in. And then breath out.

2:12:58 And then all the way down. And hold your breath. With empty lungs. And then hold there.

2:13:08 For as long as you can. And just pay attention. To the sensations that are emerging in your body. Whether it's in your belly, and your chest, and your neck, and your head. The longer you wait, the more intense

2:13:28 Those sensations are. You can hold for as long as you want then. You can't just Take a breath. Deep breath.

2:13:41 What does that feel like? I felt I felt lots of vibrations. It's kind of like waves. I felt like kinda like waves. going across my body. But I it was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body. Mm-hmm. Kinda heartfelt.

2:13:55 I suddenly was very apparent clear of my heartbeat. I could feel everything. Mm-hmm. In a way that I can't typically feel everything. Yeah. Any kind of negative feeling or

2:14:06 Any sensation that was uncomfortable? I mean it near the end when I couldn't when I hadn't breathed in a while it was a bit uncomfortable. What did that feel like? Like like I was starving for oxygen, like a starving fair. Yeah. You know, running out of air and like drowning is one of the most horrible, like a a aversive experience that I think w we evolved to dislike. Right. So what w what was happening there in our bodies as we were doing this is

2:14:31 Oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously. Right, every millisecond mitochondria consume oxygen. And now you're not bringing oxygen through your breath. And then they produce CO2. Carbon dioxide, right? So mitochondria are burning the oxygen little bit by little bit, and then they're producing carbon dioxide, CO two. And we evolved.

2:14:50 Very sensitively. Well I think that yes, so the subjective experience, right? What you described there is an experience. Of Energy

2:15:03 Starting to stall. Because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electron's like oh where do I go? And then there's like extreme level of resistance. Like the the most extreme case of energy resistance, I think that most people will be familiar with is like a heart attack. My dad had a heart attack. A few years ago.

2:15:21 And he woke up during the night with this terrible contraction, like a pressure in in the chest, and he said it was like four hundred pounds, like uh pressure on his chest, terrible pain, worst pain he's ever had. What what's happening? Like where where what is that pain? The source of that pain really is blood flow can no longer bring oxygen to mitochondria in the heart. Oh, so that much control. Panicking. So

2:15:46 Panicking is kind of a we're imposing now an experience onto a biological process, but you have the electrons are flowing through mitochondria all the time. They're flowing on oxygen onto oxygen, right? From food to oxygen, and they're just Nice, freely floating that feels great. It f or it feels like you know just normal life. And then all of a sudden there's no more oxygen, so the electron U I have nowhere to go. That

2:16:07 Feels terrible. the the electrons can't flow, so they start to backflow. That is what causes oxidative stress. That's why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack. Right,'cause the electrons can't flow to oxygen because of this little clot. Uh and for some reason that we don't really understand uh this feels extremely aversive. So what you experience there by holding your breath, and anyone who's listening to this can try on their own, hold your breath for as long as possible. It feels horrible. And now imagine living your life with just like five percent.

2:16:36 Ten percent. Of this horrible feeling. Like you wake up in the morning and you have this like Trace. of like running out of energy.

2:16:46 We're running out of oxygen. Uh. I think that's what Some mental illnesses feel like And there's very interesting data showing that if you inject people with a signal of energetic stress.

2:16:57 Liked it. you can trigger a panic attack. You're not messing with the brain there. You're not like Yeah, uh kind of doing something to d to neurochemistry. What you're doing is you're injecting the human body with a signal

2:17:12 that the mitochondria can't keep up with energy flow. You're tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance is just been jacked up to very high levels. This feels like anxiety. And people with traumatic memories, a post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, uh simple injection.

2:17:29 Of an energetic stress signal of lactate in the blood can reawaken traumatic memories. So there's this emerging notion in psychiatry called met in metabolic psychiatry, uh where people understand mental illnesses. as energetic disorders of the brain. And what I think is is happening in those kind of chronic state of of ill being right where people don't feel themselves, they don't feel well, they you know, the hypervigilance, the anxiety. Uh it's quite likely at this point, I think, that part of that is driven by energy not flowing properly. And then the body just lives in high energy resistance all the time. And there's data

2:18:02 directly measuring energy resistance in the brain from a group uh McLean in in Harvard. Uh and then lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness and this marker, GDF fifteen, also is elevated in mental illness. And so the cure again, or the the thing to ease that is all the lifestyle factors that we talked about. Purpose and we've covered that ground. Trevor Burrus Yeah. Life changes, you know, changing your life circumstances, that's really hard to do. Exercising seems to help a lot of people, but a lot of people don't feel they have the capacity to exercise. And ketones seem to be Uh life saving for some people. Going on a ketogenic diet And I've met now dozens of individuals

2:18:41 Whose life. We're crushed by you know, kids of affective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder. And They were treatment resistant, right? Meaning like the pharmacotherapy, the drugs that they were given were not helping, in some cases were making things worse, uh with like difficult side effects.

2:18:58 And then they Change your diet. Cutting all sugars and they went on a ketogenic diet, medical ketogenic therapy. Uh and then they started to monitor ketones.

2:19:09 And many people reported, you know That This was life changing. Like first the first thing that many people notice is they have more energy. The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone. Mm-hmm. We don't know why.

2:19:23 And the same way that we're all different. We all respond differently to even medications, right? That are supposed to work the same for everyone. We have a scientist. Like The science that we use to get knowledge to inform our lives Is

2:19:38 Almost entirely a science of averages. Meaning like all of the studies we do. Like the the highest gold tend standard studies we consider to be RCTs, randomized controlled trials. These R C T's If you run an RCT, what you do is you take, let's say, a thousand people, then you randomize half, five hundred into this group, normal diet, and then five hundred into ketogenic diet. And then you say, Great. Now let's look at their depressive symptoms, right? Or or their anxiety symptoms. And then you have them on the diet for

2:20:06 Two months and then after USS and then you compare the groups. Right. You lump five hundred human beings together. And you say what's the average depression or anxiety symptoms in this in these five hundred people? Then you average these people together and then you Group them, and then you compare means. And I guess the other important point here is gender, which is so many of these studies were

2:20:25 Skewed towards men. Uh in many cases and that doesn't apply to women a lot of the time. And this is part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health is because we're just now discovering that, you know, once upon a time scientists would treat Women like little men and assume that everything just applied. But actually we're entirely different and so

2:20:45 Right. This averages thing. You also need to think about the nuances of like who, gender, where they're from, their biology, their DNA. You just said that you you get s the skinny fat thing or the visceral fat, whatever. I don't get that. Mm-hmm. But if we were doing an average of like three people. Yeah, maybe we'd come to a conclusion based on me and h me and the other person who's like me, but that wouldn't apply to you. Yeah. And that's really problematic. Like all of the the health recommendations. We

2:21:09 have and the the way drugs get approved. Uh and the way we determine whether a drug is useful or not for disease X or or Y is by comparing groups. And whenever you you peel the surface of a clinical study of an RCT, you find some people like are amazing responders and they're cured. They don't have symptoms. And then some people don't respond. These are called non responders. And then some people will get worse. The most commented thing across the videos you featured on. Um, and the most passionate thing

2:21:37 Uh the most urgent thing according to the the people that were l watching your work. That they wanted to ask you. was about long covid M E C F S, I'm not sure what that is, and fibromyalgia. Um for patients with Amy?

2:21:51 CFS and you'll have to explain to me what that is, or long COVID. The standard advice given is to exercise for mitochondrial health. Um but for them it often triggers severe crashes. What is happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken, and how can these individuals safely rehabilitate their mitochondria without causing further damage? Yeah. That's a really tough problem. And

2:22:16 This was the most Repeatedly the most liked, the most commented thing on your videos. Because these people are suffering and they're just not being given answers, I guess. Yeah. In the US there's an estimated like three to five million people who have either Myelic encephal encephalomitis, uh chronic fatigue syndrome, M E C F S, or you know, long COVID version of this.

2:22:38 Uh, in the UK it's somewhere between like two and three million, I think. And then worldwide there's twenty, twenty four million people. Have these syndromes. What are the symptoms for someone that hasn't experienced a What are the symptoms that they're experiencing? Chronic fatigue. Just always being sort of tired and low energy. Feeling low energy. Yeah.

2:22:57 Feeling low energy, um is is an experience, right? So it's You go to your doctor and say, I feel so tired. And then you look in the blood works, everything's fine. But so there's a disconnect between what we know how to measure biochemically and then what the person is experiencing. We don't have a good understanding of the connection between The biology

2:23:17 and the biochemistry in the blood and even process in the brain and how people feel. So there's a disconnect here and uh M E C F S, chr you know, chronic fatigue Uh long Covid. these people have been a little bit ostracized uh from the medical Yeah, community because

2:23:33 doctors are are really stuck. Uh they have the these patients which are really difficult, you know, patients to what's wrong with them. And second, they don't have tools to help them get better. Uh and and then the classical thing is well exercise, but then many of these people, when they exercise, they actually get worse. And and there's some Studies that show increased inflammation.

2:23:55 So those signals of energy resistance increase energy friction in the body, uh go up after exercise in a normal person and these people with chronic fatigue, it seems like th they can skyrocket, and then that leads to this uh post exertional malaise. Right.

2:24:13 the marker of energetic stress, GDF fifteen, can go through the brain and make you feel sick, right? Make you feel you know, nauseous or you know, tired. Other cytokines from the immune system when you're sick. Uh when you're fighting an infection, do the same thing. The best study in on mitochondria. And

2:24:27 Uh chronic fatigue syndrome was published. last year or the year before and it showed that there is A deficiency. in energy transformation in the mitochondria of the muscle. They took muscle biopsies, little piece of muscle from the from the quad, from the the thigh. And then they looked at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome flow energy.

2:24:48 And what they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can't flux energy properly, you should feel like you don't have The capacity to push. Right to exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have

2:25:00 You lower mitochondrial energy transformation capacity? We don't know. There's so many stories and I've I've been curious and interested about this. Uh and I remember uh this uh family friend who came for dinner uh one night. And she

2:25:16 Uh, she was asking me, What do you work on? And what do you do? And so I tell her we work on mitochondria and psycho biology, mitochondrial psychobiology, how the mind and the body relate you know, energetically. And she said, Well, I have an interesting story for you. Take it. What's the story? So I used to have chronic fatigue syndrome.

2:25:32 So I I perked. I was like, What happened? She was visibly an energetic person. She didn't look like she had You know, uh an issue. So she said uh she was in her twenties and she had like she was debilitated, she couldn't work and you know, she lived in displaced and you know, her life would kind of You know

2:25:51 Completely upside down because she didn't have energy to do anything. which is I think a a common story. And she was in bed like multiple hours, you know, every day and struggling to go get groceries and Everything was a drag about life. And then one summer Uh this guy from Hawaii, which was a friend of a friend, came over Uh for the for the summer, just do'em for a little trip. And they had an affair.

2:26:13 She had A boyfriend. And this was long time that she that you had had a a you know a human connection like this. So you're saying I I'm not What What and uh what ended up happening as she said, my chronic fatigue kind of lifted.

2:26:29 And I didn't have to do anything. And then after that summer, she never had chronic fatigue again. Uh and she kind of reintegrated the normal life. I don't know what the lesson is here. I don't know if there's a generalizable principle, but there's a lot of those stories where people end up in a really dark place in their life. And either they're diagnosed with the mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome or with kind of uh a somato you know, psychosomatic uh, you know, label or w whatever that is, there's always kind of precipitating conditions. Uh sometimes it's in response to the medical interventions like uh immunization, sometimes it's in response to

2:27:05 Uh you know, an infection or like a parasite. Yeah. Very often there's like the a trigger. There's like sometimes a a lingering Kind of. condition and then sometimes there's an acute trigger and the body's never able to fully recover. So wha what do we take from that?

2:27:25 You know, story of a of a summer fling. Well I I I take from it hope. Yeah. But you know, even when the cards seem to be stacked against you and it feels like you might have to live with this thing for a long time. Uh in many cases. M miraculous things happen that defy the odds. And hope itself, I think, keep can keep us

2:27:43 In an optimistic mind f mindset. I've seen this in patients with mitochondrial diseases as well. You know, these people are diagnosed with a genetically defined mitochondrial disease. Their mitochondria can't flow energy properly. So every day they live Probably with this kind of discomfort of you're holding your breath for too long and everything's difficult about life. Many of them lose hope.

2:28:02 And and when the you see them losing hope, they start to go downhill physically, and many of them die very early. The people who do the best. Like their mitochondria don't work the way they should. But they they're able to find something that they love. They're able to, you know, find an expression for for themselves and they're to have supportive family almost a a universal theme for people to do well is they have

2:28:25 a supportive, you know, uh environment and cultivating this is is so precious and that brings us back maybe to social connections. You don't you Energetic process, me, energetic process. When we interact.

2:28:38 You know, through Um through sounds and and you know, physically shaking hands and Uh, and I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine, and then you know, we we might vibe and resonate and and then maybe, you know, you find someone and you feel love for that person. I think love is the experience of resonance. Right. And and when you feel that with someone it feels so special. Which goes back to the affair point.

2:29:00 Yeah, maybe. On this point of exercise, which we talked about earlier, if someone wants to maximise mitochondrial biogenesis, what is the sweet spot for training? Is it strictly zone two cardio or high intensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is there like an optimal type of training? Yeah. I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder. Yeah. means that your mitochondria are working harder. Okay, but you don't want to do it too long.

2:29:25 If you're not trained. Right? Like you're regular guy. I'm not trained now. I I I I run for like twenty minutes every other day. That's my you know routine. That's what I I have enough time to do and I feel like it moves energy through my body in the right way. But if I go and I try to run a marathon, I'm gonna

2:29:44 injure myself. You know, I'm gonna hurt myself. So that would be too much for me. And so Y I think that comes back to the point of like feeling into your energy. We call this mitoception, right? Feeling into your mitochondria and what's sustainable. So I think there's a an individualized

2:30:00 you know, stands that we need to take towards this. And the last question from the audience was Right now mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible, reliable tests? like ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function.

2:30:20 Working on it. You're working on it. Yeah. So our team is working on it, uh and so we're building Uh a platform. a technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria to mitosept.

2:30:32 Right, so t you feel your energy through your mitochondria. Uh, and then you can make better decisions. Like ketogenic diet. Is this helping you? Is this not helping you? Uh this new relationship. Is this sucking away your energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new you know, direction in life. Um there's so much. I mean All of the important decisions we make Really we you know, we make what How we feel. Like y you wake up in the morning and either

2:30:58 You feel great and you can change things or you wake up and and you don't wanna be here. Uh that's an experience. And before you get there, you know, on the on the dark side, there's all of these decision point that that we face and the power of discernment. Right, then what we talked about like with Steve Jobs, like This is the way and uh and then you you know you feel strong about this. Disning what's right for you, what's not right for you, what's the right direction, is it the right time or not. Those are decisions we make, you know, with our guts. And

2:31:27 There are many people who who swear that this is the only way they make decisions. And if they make decisions rationally, that ends up biting them in the butt. Because I I think the This thing. And this energetic system. Is

2:31:40 The most sensitive instrument. That we have. The content of our lives is aligned with who we are. As individuals.

2:31:49 And that requires that we feel into This movement and into her sensations and into Um The experiences we have. So that's the the barometer that really m guides us through life, like a GPS.

2:32:02 An energetic GPS. Dr. Martin, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you Is what is the most Difficult thing. You ever overcame.

2:32:18 And how did it make you The person you are today. So I just felt my energy change. Hm. I saw it change. I felt like this sinking feeling.

2:32:37 About a year ago, um My Fiance and I were expecting a baby. And we were about Three months into the

2:32:47 pregnancy and It was great. We were excited. Um we were calling this. New life. New life. And we talked, you know, affectionately about it and

2:32:59 We said like you know, when new life comes this and we both have a a child and Um and she was in Canada, she came back and then Uh and that evening in in bed she had this like crazy pain it started and Uh

2:33:16 And we were both super scared. There was a bit of bleeding. And then And then the contraction started to come really fast. Not supposed to happen. At three months. Um and then I was like, Oh, maybe this is just like a bump in the road and and you know, things are gonna be fine.

2:33:32 Um So We ended up having a miscarriage and Nerosha didn't want to go to the hospital, so we did this at home. And it was terrible.

2:33:42 It was Really, really sad, really You know, gut wrenching. So we were were both devastated when you know, new life left us and

2:33:53 And then I had this moment of like why me? Like why the fuck this has happened to me? Like I'm I think I'm a good person. I'm doing my best to bring good in the world. I try to be a good

2:34:05 Partner good. Um Yeah, leader I try to Yeah. Why is this happening to me? So this was like this victim, you know, mentality mindset. And I've learned through

2:34:18 My forty or so years that I think uh A useful stance to take in life is To assume that There's something to learn from everything you go through.

2:34:26 Mm. I don't know this. For sure. That's not a a scientific Fact, it's more of a uh of an experience turned into kind of a way of of living, more of a belief.

2:34:38 But How could there be something to learn from something so terrible? Um And I I have to sit with this and uh Two days later.

2:34:49 after the baby had gone and Nirosha and I had s sat in the shower and cried and The smell was horrible and just it was death. Like death was around us, around me, and I felt angry and I felt sad. Um I just

2:35:04 And that's my way now of letting things Flow different people have different ways and and and I was writing about My experience and

2:35:15 Why now and And I ask what is there to learn from this? And a very cleaner. Came up. Slowing down.

2:35:30 And that hit really hard because True. My whole life I've moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very Short.

2:35:38 Yeah, PHD then I became a professor very quickly and Um And grew a team and Um and like moving fast is kind of something that's like a personality trait.

2:35:49 That I I do and Uh and I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that It would not have been possible otherwise, but At other times I think it's hurt me and It's like this drive, this inner drive of like things must happen now, must move fast.

2:36:05 I think has hurt other people around and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader because I Then the maybe I lacked sensitivity to other people who don't move at my pace. Uh

2:36:17 Slowing down. Um Hit home. W things were like clear.

2:36:24 It was like looking at a canvas and There was more contrast. Like the things that really mattered were like sharper. Right. And all of this other shit, like these obligations and these things that I had said yes to or like, you know, the contrast was so much sharper.

2:36:41 Um And this lesson. I took this as a lesson slowing down. I think has allowed me to be a better listener, to be a better you know, more compassionate father and

2:36:54 Uh scientist. Uh I think it's changed me. And I don't know. That I would have learned that lesson.

2:37:04 And another way. We are the This energetic process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences. And the people we meet, like I'll never be the same. After it.

2:37:14 From having sat with you at this table. And you opening the door. Not just to scientific inquiry, but to human experience.

2:37:23 Yeah. Yeah. W we we change all the time. We transform and what shapes us is those kind of Energetic interactions and Um

2:37:35 Yeah, everything we go through. Well I'll never be the same either. So for I think all the best reasons. I'm I you know I have to say that I'm I'm I'm hesitating my words here because

2:37:48 from the wisdom that it's given you. But I'm terribly sorry that that h you you had to go through that. I can only I just can't imagine it's one of my wanna say it's like one of my like worst nightmares, especially at the season of life I'm in when me and my partner and my fiancee are trying to have a kid. It's just like I think I think I'm thinking about those things now. And how I would I'm like preempting how I would handle those kinds of things. So to hear that it happened to you is just it's um It's really hot. It's really difficult to hear. Um it happens to about twenty million people a year.

2:38:18 Most people don't talk about it either, do they? People don't talk about it. Yeah. 'Cause it's shrouded in mixed emotions and Yeah, I can understand that. Yeah.

2:38:28 But I am better off for having this conversation with you. And I think, you know, I speak on behalf of my audience for sure this time when I say that I think my audience are as well. I've learned so much. It's actually kinda like completely rechanged how I think about life itself, which is a weird thing. And I hope I can just l sit in this moment a little bit and think about how I am energy and how How that's determining everything. Um Around me and others and

2:38:51 And it's um it's really, really wonderful. I think what you know what you're doing, people might think of you as like a m mitochondrial scientist, but actually it's much more Deeper, much more philosophical than that. when we think about what energy is to us. It's it is everything. And that's really the lens that you've given me today is you've completely changed my mind on like how I think about life, which is such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast. I don't say this like I don't kiss people up people's asses like this. Like I genuinely my mind is like fucking hell. Mm. It's also changed how I think about business, which is really weird and unexpected. Um business is is an extension of of us, of you know, energetic

2:39:23 Like everything is. Everything is. Quite literally. And it's also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, aim my energy. Um So Doctor Martin Pickard, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your generosity and your wisdom. It's not very often that I have conversations that actually like instantly ha cause the shift in me, but this is one of them today. If people want to learn more about you

2:39:47 And the work you're doing. Where do we Channel that energy. Where do they go? The best place for people to go is website martinpicard.energy. Okay. And then from this website You'll see information about the book, you'll see information about the research, core energetic principles.

2:40:04 that cover what we've covered today. There are little animations and there's information about the institute. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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