00:00:00
This is incontrovertible evidence that growing of hair is reversible and it can be pretty fast. Wow. And there's more.
00:00:06
So, we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like for example, if you have marijuana
00:00:12
6 months ago, it's going to be in your hair. >> I need to get a haircut. I'm joking.
00:00:18
>> So, my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this
00:00:21
person's life when this young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process.
00:00:27
>> So, what is secret to anti-aging? It's the proper allocation of energy. >> Can you can you how what's the simplest
00:00:34
way you can explain that to me? >> So, first energy is real and it's the difference between feeling like you can
00:00:39
change the world or feeling completely drained and a lot of people live on that end of the spectrum and it's because
00:00:45
there's a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. For example, we did an experiment
00:00:50
because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday. And
00:00:56
we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by 60%. Right? So, it needs to steal energy from
00:01:02
some of the things that keep you young. So, it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And
00:01:08
the third piece is this energy is from your mitochondria. And there's about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your
00:01:14
body. And so, they made our bodies possible. And they can change how you feel. Well, I read that studies on
00:01:19
brains of dead people have found that those with greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria.
00:01:25
>> Yes, we are really in service of the mitochondria. They allow us to be alive.
00:01:30
>> Okay, I've got so many questions for you based on what people wanted to know.
00:01:32
It's like how patients with me, chronic fatigue or long COVID safely rehabilitate their mitochondria? What I
00:01:39
consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy? if red light therapy impacts mitochondria and is
00:01:46
there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I've heard you say that most diseases or
00:01:50
disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. >> Yeah, we think there's increased energy
00:01:56
resistance in cancer than Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance.
00:02:01
>> So, is there anything I can do? >> There is. So, we can start by >> This is super interesting to me. My team
00:02:09
given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us according
00:02:14
to this that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right
00:02:19
now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're
00:02:24
approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free
00:02:30
thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over
00:02:35
year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll
00:02:40
ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every
00:02:46
single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want
00:02:50
to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the D of Co, and I will not let you down.
00:02:55
Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. >> Dr. Martin Picard, what is it that you
00:03:05
believe, know, or understand that most people out there don't believe, know, or understand?
00:03:15
>> We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. >> Mhm.
00:03:22
>> And and that sounds a little woo if you don't have context. And that's I think
00:03:28
something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to to understand to understand ourselves
00:03:33
from first principles as energetic processes. >> In a nutshell, what is it that people
00:03:38
are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy? >> Yeah, I think people want to understand
00:03:47
what is energy and how can I have more energy? I can relate to that because sometimes you know if I look through my
00:03:54
life sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing and I really have in my view done the same thing but then sometimes I
00:04:00
wake up and I don't feel amazing >> and it feels kind of like roulette like this sort of opaque mystery of how do I
00:04:08
wake up on with more days in a row and feel amazing like I can take on the world
00:04:13
>> and then there's also some friends that I have who are suffering with different
00:04:16
things whether it's chronic illness or long co or whatever who repeatedly wake up and feel low energy for years, you
00:04:23
know, at a time. >> Yeah, it's a really tough place to be when you wake up repeatedly and and you
00:04:30
don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world. It's it's a really tough place to be.
00:04:36
>> 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
00:04:43
experiences who who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons
00:04:48
and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious and then I
00:04:53
became a scientist and as I learned the tools of science I started to see and I discovered mitochondria I thought this
00:05:01
is an approach to start to bridge what's true about the human experience that we
00:05:06
know from first experience empirically and we know to be real not because you know some white coatwearing doctor or
00:05:13
scientist you just said yes energy is real it's in your mitochondria we know it to be real from first experience
00:05:19
right because we we feel it and then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies right and
00:05:25
about health and and disease and where diseases come from so I had these questions so I became a scientist to
00:05:31
bridge those domains of of existence the the science and the experience um so I've led a research group at Columbia
00:05:40
University for 10 years uh and founded an institute uh to really build the systems and technologies to to help
00:05:48
people grow, heal and and and transform. >> You have a PhD in mitochondria. >> Yep. My PhD was in mitochondrial biology
00:05:56
of aging. >> I mean, there's a an image here in front of me. Some people will just be
00:06:00
listening, so 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
00:06:06
and it kind of looks like a looks a little bit like an alien but I I I read that this video was quite formative for
00:06:14
you. What is that video and why was that formative moment in your career? >> I took this video in England uh in
00:06:20
Newcastle upon time in the north of England uh with my Jordy friends uh the medical school there. I was a graduate
00:06:27
student and went there for kind of an exchange and this is the first time I saw mitochondria moving. I saw like the
00:06:35
inner life of ourselves and when I saw this something struck me it's like oh my god I'm able to see this right and to
00:06:44
see living mitochondria because of the mitochondria inside of me. It's the energy that's flowing through my
00:06:51
mitochondria in my eye, right, that's allowing me to perceive to see this. Mitochondria made multisellular life
00:06:57
possible. They made our bodies possible and and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and
00:07:03
keep on living. So when I saw this like this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria
00:07:07
>> and then I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transforming energy. What they're known
00:07:14
for is they take the food you eat and then they take the oxygen that you breathe in and then those two things the
00:07:20
food the oxygen converge inside the mitochondria and then something really special happens. The electrons that are
00:07:26
stuck on food that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere right photosynthesis. What your mitochondria
00:07:32
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
00:07:37
electrical circuit. And that happens in like the 5,000 trillion mitochondria that are in your body. And then when the
00:07:43
electrons flow, they need to flow towards something just like in an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from
00:07:49
one pole of the battery to the negative to to the other pole of the battery. Uh and that circuit is closed in the
00:07:55
mitochondria. So the the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe and then it becomes
00:08:01
water. And and it's that vital flow of energy, electrons flowing towards oxygen that allows us to be alive. And uh
00:08:10
mitochondria do this. And then as they do this, they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into
00:08:18
signals and into heat. And the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria as they transform and flow
00:08:24
electrons like a little energetic circuit, they release heat. So the source of heat, right, that makes us
00:08:29
warm. You shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth. you were feeling they weren't from their mitochondria.
00:08:33
>> So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body? >> There's on average a thousand
00:08:39
mitochondria per cell. >> Per cell there's a thousand. So how many is there in my body?
00:08:44
>> About 5,000 trillion. >> Who should care >> about the mitochondria and why should
00:08:50
they care about it? >> Mhm. Anyone who cares about their energy, right? About having enough
00:08:55
energy to do what they really care about. >> Uh we all care about different things.
00:08:59
We're we're all gifted and talented for different things. Uh everyone has this, you know, unique authentic self that
00:09:07
wants to come out. The only way for this to come out and the only way for a person to flourish is through energy.
00:09:15
>> Mhm. >> If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead, right? And if
00:09:18
the energy doesn't flow efficiently, right, and smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard. Like
00:09:26
you're not at your best. you feel tired and and you feel like, you know, maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're
00:09:32
sick and your immune system is like draining all of your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic and it's hard to
00:09:38
be a good person and it's hard to be a good dad >> and it's hard to want to do good for the
00:09:44
world if you're struggling with energy. Do >> you know what it is? So many of us think
00:09:48
that that just is what it is and that we can do nothing about that. >> Yeah. You know, we we breathe in, we eat
00:09:54
food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. >> Yeah. >> There's this certain I think feeling a
00:10:00
lot of us have that we can't really control that much. >> Mhm. >> Where do we need to start to understand?
00:10:05
Cuz the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I
00:10:12
want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So where does one have to start?
00:10:16
I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff like things I can do
00:10:21
>> so that I live my life full of energy. >> Yeah. So there there are three things
00:10:24
that are really foundational to how energy works in the human body. One is that you are the energy that's flowing
00:10:31
through this body. >> I am the energy that's flowing through my body. >> Yes. >> So I'm not my body.
00:10:36
>> You're not your body. >> Okay. I'm the energy flowing through it. >> You Stephen.
00:10:39
>> Yeah. >> This expression now that I'm getting to experience. >> Thank you. This expression is an expression of the
00:10:47
flow of energy. If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain, like you
00:10:54
wouldn't be right. You'd be a cadaavver and we'd say Steven is gone. You know, a
00:10:58
dead body. >> Yeah. You'd be a dead body. The difference between a dead body, a cadaavver, and a living, thinking,
00:11:04
feeling, conscious person, who cares, is the flow of energy. >> Okay. >> You you get so indoctrinated in this
00:11:10
worldview that the only thing that's real is the physical stuff. and you know the nucle the the genes that that you
00:11:17
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
00:11:23
real >> right I think that's a reframe that's kind of a bigger picture mindset shift
00:11:29
that uh we need to and and scientists struggled with so number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms
00:11:36
uh through this body number two is there's a fixed energy budget right all of us have a fairly fixed energy budget
00:11:44
to deal with and and for example if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts to write more articles to uh
00:11:53
you know be more creative. The solution is not eating more because there's this fixed energy budget and if you overload
00:11:59
the system you feed it too much food especially too much sugar it's really hard on the system and then the system
00:12:05
like an electrical system you jack up the voltage right and then the system starts to overheat. Uh so inflammation
00:12:11
is this this overheating there's too much energy in the system and uh or the cells are are burning too much energy
00:12:17
and they need to kind of tell other cells that's and those signals we call inflam inflammation cytoines.
00:12:23
>> Mhm. So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with and over time
00:12:27
the organism does a lot of of uh finessing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget
00:12:34
>> and that's somewhat linked to stress I guess which is I read your work and it
00:12:38
talked about how stress was basically just like an over consumption of energy. It's requiring loads and loads and loads
00:12:43
of energy. >> Yeah. >> Okay. We'll talk about that too then because I think stress is a really
00:12:46
important one. What's the third? >> The third one is life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to to
00:12:54
grow, to learn, uh to transform, right, change your views, you need resistance to go through some resistance.
00:13:02
>> Mhm. >> You need energy to go through some resistance, right? If energy just flows
00:13:08
and there's no zero resistance, then there's no possible transformation. So if life was always easy
00:13:16
>> and you never faced any challenge any stress in your life then you would just
00:13:21
remain as is right and and it would be very boring and from first principles physics like we know this to be true you
00:13:27
know at a number of levels but for example the sun this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky shoots energy right
00:13:34
as photons. So light is a form of energy and as long as light you know just goes
00:13:42
and and photons travels in outer space photon will remain photon light energy will remain light energy until that
00:13:50
light energy hits a green leaf right and the green leaf basically breaks or stops
00:13:55
the photon in its path. So it's it offers a constraint right it offers resistance. So when light energy faces
00:14:02
resistance now it can be converted and that's the basis of making food. That's how nature makes food. It crystallizes
00:14:10
energy from sunlight into molecules. Life you know plants crystallize light energy into carbohydrates. Uh and then
00:14:20
those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat. We need resistance for energy to transform into
00:14:25
something meaningful. >> So what has um mitochondria got to do with all of this?
00:14:28
>> Mitochondria are basically little resistors, right? And and they are what allows the flow of energy through the
00:14:35
system. >> Have you got a picture of Okay, here we go. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So this is a an image of a
00:14:40
mitochondria. >> A mitochondria. O N is a singular and mitochondria is plural. Yeah. So this is
00:14:46
a mitochondrian and there's about a thousand of these in each of your cells. >> Okay. And there's about five trillion
00:14:53
cells in your body uh that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here,
00:14:59
these little wings, these are called christi. And the christi is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen
00:15:06
you breathe end up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There's like little electrical circuits here.
00:15:12
And as the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged like little batteries. So effectively a
00:15:18
mitochondrian like this has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and and food
00:15:23
consumption and then that gets transformed uh into a little charge battery and once the battery is charged
00:15:30
uh the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP adenosine triphosphate which
00:15:35
is kind of the the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract right a muscle cell wants to contract in
00:15:40
the gym it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria says I need ATP and then the mitochondria gets to work uh
00:15:47
and then flows uh electrons consumes some food burns some oxygen that's why you get out of breath right so when you
00:15:54
get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen what we've been
00:15:59
discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP >> okay >> they use their their energized state to
00:16:06
produce signals to receive information and then to produce signals >> oh so they're talking to each other
00:16:11
>> they're talking to each other >> and what are they saying? >> They're they're it's a whole collective
00:16:15
and and they're talking to each other kind of monitoring what's happening not only inside the cell but outside the
00:16:20
cell. So on the surface of mitochondria all along there are little receptors for
00:16:25
all sorts of signals that tells this mitochondrian is there enough energy? Is there are we running out of energy? Is
00:16:31
there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for you know something dangerous? Uh so mitochondria are like
00:16:38
like a little distributed brain right? Right. So they're like the intracellular brain.
00:16:43
>> Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria? >> They are. Yeah, they did. Yeah.
00:16:47
>> What What is that story? Cuz I I think someone said that to me before on the show that our mitochondria are actually
00:16:52
bacteria that from prehistoric times or something. >> So the story is about 1.5 billion years
00:16:58
ago. Uh that there was two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen to transform energy, right?
00:17:06
So it could fuel on oxygen and and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anorobic and the anorobic
00:17:14
bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a few more genes. Um, and it could only ferment its food and
00:17:20
kind of fermenting the food, spitting out, you know, like lactate or like yeast does. And what happened is the big
00:17:27
one either engulfed the small one, right? Or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized the big one. And
00:17:35
the story goes uh that this basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. That's one perspective. And
00:17:43
then with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity. The version I I favor based on the evidence
00:17:49
we have is that when mitochondria came in and then they there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship,
00:17:56
mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute
00:18:03
information in a different way. So maybe the the the coming of of mitochondria into this big cell made the big cell
00:18:10
social because before this event most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria
00:18:18
foraging for for for themselves and you know kind of operating from a very selfish uh perspective just trying to
00:18:25
replicate you know trying to survive. When mitochondria came in it like gave those cells a different view on life and
00:18:30
they're like woo we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right? And I become a cell that
00:18:37
uh moves, right? So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle and and then then together those two cells can
00:18:44
do a lot more, right? >> And fast forward a couple billion years and here we are.
00:18:47
>> Here we are. Yeah. And and that led to, you know, bodies with organs. You know,
00:18:53
the liver feeds the rest of the body. The heart keeps things flowing. The brain kind of computes and and plans. Uh
00:18:59
so that's division of labor. It's uh and it started with the mitochondria. >> You you talked about energy resistance.
00:19:05
I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Give me
00:19:11
a disease that's linked to energy resistance. >> The clearest is what we call insulin
00:19:17
resistance or diabetes, right? Diabetes affects millions in the world. Fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of
00:19:24
energy resistance. Uh so if the resistance is too high >> because >> because you have um too much energy
00:19:32
pushed onto the system, >> sugar, too much sugar, glucose. >> Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria
00:19:38
are impaired, right, and they can't flow energy, then the the the energy is kind
00:19:44
of stuck. It faces greater constraints. Like it wants to go in that direction, but then there's a barrier and then
00:19:50
another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing, right? nice and and and and smooth. And then there's like a
00:19:57
dam, right? And if the dam has zero um openings, right, then the the water accumulates and then there's high
00:20:05
pressure and then at some point the the water accumulates and ends up flooding the the landscape and then damaging
00:20:10
things. So it's a bit like the same thing. If now you open floodgates on the dam, right, and then you can use that
00:20:17
energy to make electricity, for example. You use the the movement of the water to
00:20:21
transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do. Uh and if you move and you're physically
00:20:27
active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, right? And to speed into uh
00:20:34
movement, right, into lifting. >> Is this linked to cancer at all? Because it sounds I mean I don't know much about
00:20:41
cancer, but >> cells dividing out of um control >> seemingly randomly. Yeah, I think that
00:20:48
there's a very good chance if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer,
00:20:55
there's like a a 10 item flywheel of these are the core features of of cancer. Uh all of those features have
00:21:03
some relationship some very direct with increased energy resistance. Right? So if energy can't flow smoothly and a cell
00:21:10
uh is you know burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria which is what cancer cells
00:21:15
do cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral you know cell that didn't have
00:21:21
mitochondria it was anorobic it was spitting out lactate and we don't really know why cells do this called the
00:21:27
Warberg effect and the Warberg effect is when a cell in the presence of oxygen right if it wanted it could use oxygen
00:21:35
flow electrons through mitochondria uh and transform energy and and live a nice social life like every cell in in this
00:21:43
social collective does in the body. Uh what cancer cells do is they say I'm not going to use my mitochondria even if
00:21:49
there's oxygen even if my mitochondria can respire. And by doing this it seems like cancer cells revert back to this
00:21:56
ancestral cell right that that just cares about itself >> the antisocial cell. >> Yeah. then the the the organism will in
00:22:04
the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. Right? It's called angioenesis. So it's like the the cancer
00:22:09
cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says bring me more oxygen. >> So it's kind of like there's a sort of
00:22:14
alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism and that it's going to be
00:22:19
selfish and demand more and more resources for itself >> and it multiplies itself.
00:22:25
>> Yeah. >> With equally selfish little aliens. >> Yeah. And then the body responds by
00:22:32
listening to it and giving it more resources. Is that what you're saying? Why do the blood vessels surround the
00:22:36
cancer? >> Yeah. It's like it's the cancer calling for you know more energy. >> Okay.
00:22:41
>> Yeah. So energy resistance is the product of two things. Is how much energy is being demanded right? Like how
00:22:49
much power is being deployed in in the in the tumor for example or in the working muscle. Uh and then how much
00:22:55
energy is can flow through the system. That's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. So if there's a
00:23:02
lot of demand, right, a lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but
00:23:09
there's not enough flow to to to support that activity, then that increases resistance.
00:23:18
>> So is there any understanding as to how those kind of cancers are caused? like
00:23:23
what what causes that moment where you know you talked about the Wahberg effect what causes that
00:23:27
>> the cancer community used to think that the main driver for cancer was genetic
00:23:32
mutations but there's an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism changes in the way electrons flow
00:23:39
through through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria can actually drive the uh instance of a of a new
00:23:46
cancer cell and then when a cell becomes cancerous ditches it its mitochondria it
00:23:51
goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself >> and it tries not to die. Explain that
00:23:56
part to me because I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death. >> Yeah. The best way to think about this I
00:24:02
think is as a a social collective, right? Every cell in this organism uh cares about the same thing which is pres
00:24:09
preserving the the life and and the health of the whole being, >> right? So every cell in in this body is
00:24:15
in a social contract with every other cell, right? A cancer cell basically uh gets out of this agreement and says no
00:24:24
no no I'm going to fair for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can uh and I'm going to make more of myself and
00:24:31
it it goes into you know bacterial mode that happens um sometimes because of mutations and it seems like there there
00:24:38
are other causes of this like for example hypoglycemia >> what's that >> high blood glucose
00:24:44
>> right uh diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer why is that I don't think there there
00:24:53
are good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of of disease and you know the the genetic
00:25:00
mutation perspective um if you look at cancer from an an energetic perspective and it's I think likely that the
00:25:08
increase in blood glucose increases the pressure right there's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells
00:25:15
to those mitochondria and when you push too much energy on a system that doesn't
00:25:18
need energy it's like you're trying to shove you know a lot of of water through a very small pipe
00:25:24
>> something goes wrong >> yeah something goes wrong some something can break. Uh so the the resistance is
00:25:29
uh if you push a lot of energy into a very small you know container or into a a channel that can't support that then
00:25:36
the the what happens kind of physically is an increase in in the resistance to the flow. Uh and then that can lead to
00:25:44
the cell trying to protect itself. Uh that's what insulin resistance is in diabetes. Right? Insulin resistance is a
00:25:51
protection mechanism. there's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, right? And so that causes this excess,
00:25:58
you know, energy coming in. The cell says, you know, too much and and it damages the mitochondria, this excess
00:26:04
resistance because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress.
00:26:09
>> I was thinking about smoking and how smoking also is carcoenic. It's cancer-causing. Yeah.
00:26:14
>> And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be
00:26:20
cancer-causing? Yeah, it's clear that in cigarette smoke there are carcinogens. They're molecules that can damage the
00:26:27
genome and cause mutations. Uh it there's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking, but for all of the
00:26:34
other cancers, there's much less of a a clear connection between exposure and cancer, right? The cancers that that
00:26:41
affect and and kill most people, uh we don't really know, you know, why they come, when they come. uh and it's clear
00:26:48
that there's kind of a long history and uh the the science behind you know connecting metabolism and cancer shows
00:26:56
that obesity and uh high blood glucose and diabetes especially which causes very high you know excursion have very
00:27:06
high spikes in in blood glucose. Those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle
00:27:12
says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance and it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is
00:27:20
flowing now? And then how much how much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to and if there's
00:27:26
an imbalance then that uh causes damage. >> Rather than being innocent bystanders,
00:27:33
mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor reprograms them to stop acting like the body's protective energy
00:27:39
factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting
00:27:45
mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising frontier in developing new cancer therapies.
00:27:51
>> Mhm. >> It hijacks the the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells. Mhm.
00:27:57
>> H. >> So a normal cell uh is driven its behavior is driven by the mitochondria. Like mitochondria are
00:28:05
in the driver's seat, >> right? Mitochondria can basically call the shots. If is the cell to live and
00:28:11
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
00:28:18
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
00:28:25
for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of most
00:28:31
cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective and
00:28:37
then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours. Let's get
00:28:41
rid of it, right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well. Uh but what cancer cells can
00:28:47
do is say, okay, I'm they ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth. uh and by
00:28:53
ditching their mitochondria they basically immunize themselves against the death that mitochondria could could
00:28:59
trigger. So mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death and cancer somehow is
00:29:03
able to kind of get away from that. >> And it's it's weird to think about because yeah the things that are cause
00:29:09
cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like you know as you said like having too much of this stuff
00:29:15
here too much sugar >> the white stuff. Yes. >> High blood glucose levels etc are linked
00:29:19
to cancer. And one would wonder why eating sugar in excess is going to increase my probability of cancer. But
00:29:27
obviously it points to the fact that it must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of
00:29:32
malfunction somewhere. >> Yeah. And what the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why
00:29:38
that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this.
00:29:46
And in a simple electrical system circuit, if you jacked up, you know, the voltage and the system is is too weak to
00:29:54
take this, then resistance goes through the roof. the transistors start to melt and then the system you know gets gets
00:30:00
damaged. The the same thing happens you know in the body if you overload the system with too much energy too many
00:30:06
electrons right very direct parallel with the electrical circuit there electrons stuck here on these little
00:30:12
glucose molecules if you ingest this now it increases the voltage in the body and
00:30:18
then if the mitochondria can't keep up and because they're they're not flowing energy because you're sedentary you're
00:30:24
you're not moving um then that increases the resistance right and then >> and they might die or malfunction ion
00:30:31
>> correct or things get damaged, right? The the clear connection here is too much energy increase energy resistance.
00:30:38
So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right, from
00:30:41
the food to your mitochondria, then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you're an electron and
00:30:47
you're trying to go through the the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen in a mitochondrian, but then at every at
00:30:55
every point in this cascade, you face resistance. there is more chance that that electron kind of jets out and and
00:31:02
then becomes oxidative stress. >> Well, then what's what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me
00:31:08
and they have two different colors of hair. Now, let's just pretend for argument sake and for the sake of this
00:31:15
uh explanation that this is someone's hair that's gone gray because of stress. Um, and this is what she used to look
00:31:24
like or he used to look like in terms of the color of their hair. What I found really interesting because it kind of
00:31:29
speaks to lots of things that are going on going on in the body is you're saying
00:31:34
you can actually reverse gray hair without dying it. And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is?
00:31:43
But more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between. >> Yeah. Uh what we discovered is that hair
00:31:50
graying is reversible. And and that was surprising because what I've learned and
00:31:56
what most people learn is that when you age, it's kind of this linear progressive decline and and there's kind
00:32:02
of nothing you can do about it. Uh but it turns out that if you look on most people's head,
00:32:08
um you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were white and
00:32:15
then all the hairs are are are dark. And if you take a hair like this, uh the tip
00:32:20
here, right, was inside the body long time ago. This is almost like if you looked at tree rings,
00:32:26
>> right? You take a tree and you cut it in cross-section, you see like the rings
00:32:29
and then you can say, "Ooh, this ring was uh 30 years ago, right? And this ring is today." Uh so you can use that
00:32:36
to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all
00:32:42
walk around with biological history crystallized in in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a
00:32:48
drug for example like a month ago or six months ago or two years ago depending how long the hair is, you can actually
00:32:54
use the hair and all along would be, you know, the chemical signature of what you
00:32:59
took. So you can find marijuana in in the hair, you know, here but not here. So if you if you have marijuana 6 months
00:33:06
ago, it's going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around uh with that trace, that physical trace in in your
00:33:12
body. >> He's got a haircut. I'm joking. And the idea was if we could find hairs
00:33:18
on someone's head that the tip was uh dark, right? And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white,
00:33:27
right? And you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old,
00:33:31
right? It lo it lost color. Hair growing is a a classic hallmark of aging. Um then we thought then you would know
00:33:39
something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person's body, right? that made this young hair
00:33:44
become old and then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process. So this became kind of an
00:33:51
interesting scenario and through doing this we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags you know
00:33:57
over the mail uh and we were looking for two colored hairs a single hair that has
00:34:02
two colors kind of like this uh and we found hairs that uh you know head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the
00:34:10
signature. the hair was dark and then it became white or the hair was white and it became dark again.
00:34:17
>> So we had physical evidence from like multiple people that showed white hairs
00:34:22
can go back to being dark and this contradicted this idea that you know aging is this linear progressive process
00:34:28
that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility. I was one of the participants in that study. I ended
00:34:34
up finding five hairs that had this pattern. And when we looked at when the reversal happened, we found that the re
00:34:41
reversal happened when I went on vacation. And I would go back in those days on annual uh cycling uh training
00:34:49
camps. So I would go for a week. Yeah. Where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep. Uh energy started to move
00:34:56
very differently in my body during that that time. Um, and then when we looked at the hair and we analyze the the
00:35:03
composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the
00:35:09
white segment, the dark segment, it's all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic
00:35:14
material, same food, uh, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs are like this or like that, uh,
00:35:21
was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old
00:35:27
back to young. Uh, and what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial
00:35:31
signal. And in the white hair, I thought there's going to be less color, right? Obviously, but also probably less
00:35:38
mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria
00:35:44
>> and there was an upregulation of the body, the the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old wasn't kind of
00:35:51
letting go of things. It was doing more. So that means during that period of time
00:35:57
you are more stressed and using more energy. >> When cells become old instead of just
00:36:03
dying right they struggle and when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly or for
00:36:11
some reason they accumulate damage they become old the cell struggles to make more mitochondria and it it tries to
00:36:18
kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. So on that hair what you looked at that
00:36:25
was gray let's call it um it had more mitochondria because it was struggling and why was it struggling?
00:36:33
>> It looks like stress hormones can you know make a cell struggle for example >> cortisol. Cortisol. Yes, if you're a
00:36:40
cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple, uh you don't have, you know, the senses
00:36:46
that, you know, we we enjoy, but you do never let us, you know, sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you
00:36:51
get the signal, uh it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous, right? You should be
00:36:56
preparing for having to fight or to flight or there there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells
00:37:01
evolved to interpret cortisol in that way. Um so, we did an experiment in the dish. We wanted to know how much energy
00:37:07
does it cost to worry about the future, right? Or how much energy does it cost to ruminate about yesterday?
00:37:14
>> Mhm. >> The thing you didn't do or the mistake you made at work or that conversation
00:37:19
that went sideways, you know, with your partner. Uh how much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be,
00:37:24
you know, engaging your stress system, to be releasing cortisol? Uh so two students in the lab, Gabriel and Natalia
00:37:31
did that experiment. They put you put cells in a dish. You give them the equivalent of cortisol. how much energy
00:37:37
is going to cost for these cells to prepare. There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol
00:37:43
is a signal that there might be something dangerous outside, right? That's like when you're sitting down,
00:37:48
you get an email, you're like, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract and then you you have this
00:37:54
whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost? Uh so in cells in a dish, we
00:38:00
can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure like the
00:38:07
cost of life by 60%. >> So when I'm stressed I'm using 60% more energy theoretically.
00:38:14
>> I don't know about you but cells in a dish. >> Okay. >> So there the beauty about like bodies
00:38:21
and you know with the mind and you know this complex organism they're buffering systems right? So you might I don't
00:38:26
think your energy expenditure increases by 60% if you're stressed out but it increases somewhat. What is that graph
00:38:32
there? >> So there are two graphs here. Uh the top one is the color of the hair of a single
00:38:39
hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here, this is called the hair pigmentation
00:38:45
pattern, the HPP that we we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively bring science to this to hair graying
00:38:52
and and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark and then it became white for two centimeters and
00:39:00
then boom completely regained color. Actually it regained it was darker here than it than it used to be. Right. And
00:39:06
then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received uh in the mail as we were starting to to collect uh two
00:39:14
colored hairs. Um and then when we when we saw this we we had found from a few different people white hairs that had
00:39:22
regained color. We've never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark. Right? So, I remember holding this
00:39:28
hair. I was like, "Oh my god, this is in the same hair." This was incontrovertible evidence that graying
00:39:35
of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about
00:39:42
one week, right? So, this white hair completely white regained color in just about a week. Um so then we developed an
00:39:48
instrument which was a simple sheet on the yaxis the vertical is most stressful thing that ever happened to you. No
00:39:56
stress at all. 10 and zero. And then on the x axis the horizontal was time. Yes.
00:40:03
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
00:40:11
people and we ask this uh lady put a dot on the graph that was the most stressful
00:40:16
time in the past year that anyone can do the exercise past year most stressful time.
00:40:22
Okay, maybe last March and then you put a dot right in March number 10 and then least stressful part zero and then put
00:40:30
other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along the
00:40:34
this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected
00:40:42
>> and it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. >> Correct. And what happened to her life?
00:40:48
She said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies
00:40:55
and then broke up with her boyfriend. >> Oh, damn. And her hair went gray. >> Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend. She
00:41:02
didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There
00:41:05
was some family drama. Uh she said these were the la the most stressful two months of my life.
00:41:10
>> There's a killer question here which is if that remains chronic does that hair
00:41:17
follicule go gray forever. >> Yeah. >> I.e. if I go through a a stressful period for 2 to 3 weeks and my hair goes
00:41:25
a bit gray. As long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible, does that hair then return to to black
00:41:31
or dark? >> Yeah. >> Do you see what I'm saying here? >> Yes. It seems like and we ran some like
00:41:35
fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like now for this hair and then
00:41:41
be reversible. But we know, you know, very well if you have a full head of gray hair and you're 70 years old,
00:41:47
you're not going to regain your color. Yeah. >> So there seems to what the model the
00:41:50
mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity, right? where a hair slowly accumulates damage,
00:41:57
becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient, right? So there's more and more energy resistance
00:42:02
and then there's a barrier and then when the the hair hits that threshold now it
00:42:07
loses color. >> It's done. >> Yeah. But then if something changes in the body, right, you go on vacation or
00:42:13
you start to do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair. Now it can be reversed,
00:42:19
right? Because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray
00:42:24
again. And then if you're way way down like this hair turned gray 10 years ago and you go back up, you're too far away
00:42:30
from threshold to regain color. >> Okay? >> So it suggests some threshold model that
00:42:35
there's a window of opportunity for some something as binary as hair color. It's
00:42:41
black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where
00:42:44
>> where you can reverse gray hair. >> Yes. I I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think
00:42:49
because you you added a layer of nuance there, which is about the mind. >> Like if I go through my life um with a
00:42:56
more resilient mind and you get that bad email and you go and I get the bad email, I go, "Fuck it. Who cares?"
00:43:02
>> Yeah. >> Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24
00:43:06
hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there's less cortisol?
00:43:10
>> Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. So, it's not the stress that burns us
00:43:16
down, it's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to beat a little faster, if you
00:43:22
mount a response to that email, right, you're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your, you know, your
00:43:29
your shoulder. That's burning energy. Now, your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and
00:43:34
then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the
00:43:38
anx the anxiety and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy. So the chain of events is I get the
00:43:45
email. It's a very bad email. Says, "You're fired, Stephen, from the dire. We found a different host."
00:43:50
>> Yeah. >> Um I look at the email that goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story
00:43:57
I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever. Which then causes a
00:44:02
physiological response of like chemicals like cortisol. >> Yeah. um which goes into my cells, my
00:44:09
mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy, >> which is ultimately then going to mean
00:44:15
that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. >> Mhm. >> Is that is that sequence of events? I
00:44:24
ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point.
00:44:27
>> Yes. >> Yes. That's a great way to think about it. >> Don't open the laptop >> or like get a little bit better with bad
00:44:34
news. >> Yeah. or you know learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to to feel and
00:44:40
and um you know sit with be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of to to cutting that sequence
00:44:49
of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it. >> Yeah. Become aware of it. Yeah.
00:44:54
>> Right. uh so you can kind of interrupt this and people who study contemplative
00:44:59
practices and and meditation and you know mindfulness approaches I think many of them think this is kind of the key
00:45:06
right the the awareness the somatic awareness or introsception so if you feel into your your bodilies responses
00:45:13
you become free of do I mount a response is that needed now or not >> there's different types of stress right
00:45:19
there's like the acute stress which is just you get the email you feel a little bit of a spike but 5 minutes like you're
00:45:24
fine. >> Yep. >> And then there's the more chronic type of stress where >> you're waking up every day with the same
00:45:30
feeling of stress deep inside you for many many days in a row, many weeks in a row.
00:45:35
>> Um I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful,
00:45:40
>> but it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. >> Yeah. And I think that brings us back to
00:45:44
the concept of how is energy flowing through the body. And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can't
00:45:50
survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained. >> How do I think about this resistance
00:45:55
thing? Because I'm really struggling with like understanding it. >> Maybe one good example to to frame this
00:46:00
is exercise. >> Yeah. >> Right. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your
00:46:06
muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also
00:46:11
energy resistance. So the the energy is trying to flow through the muscle and then there's you have mitochondria. If
00:46:16
you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard like
00:46:20
you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training. Um, now
00:46:24
the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is
00:46:28
asking, right? So that imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now the the product of this the demand divided by
00:46:36
flow capacity is resistance. >> Okay? So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your your your sprint
00:46:43
uh but you don't have a lot of mitochondria right it's going to feel terrible uh and then because the
00:46:48
resistance creeps up and then your muscle you know becomes really hot and then eventually there's inflammation uh
00:46:54
and then it burns and and then it's uncomfortable uh but then so that's like an acute bout of of energy resistance.
00:47:01
What happens with exercise is once you recover right the benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise they
00:47:08
happen after during the recovery. So if you recover now you you're the muscles are relaxing and you're resting
00:47:15
eventually you go you know for you go to sleep. Uh it's the in during the decrease in resistance now the cell says
00:47:22
next time this happens I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy
00:47:26
shoved into a system that couldn't take it right. Right? So, I need next I'm going to make more mitochondria. So,
00:47:31
that that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right, to training for a marathon. You can
00:47:38
double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the the rise in
00:47:45
resistance like I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy and then adapting for this for the next time
00:47:51
and next time I'm going to be ready. Let's make more mitochondria. So, that's probably what where the benefits of
00:47:57
exercise come from. this spike in and and why stress is is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a
00:48:04
spike of stress, it stimulates the process the the the it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the
00:48:11
long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with with less
00:48:17
resistance. >> Coming back to this gray hair thing. So if if we consider gray hair, my hair
00:48:23
going gray to be the last domino that fell. So like the symptom >> y >> then what is what are the what is the
00:48:30
first domino >> and can you walk me through the sequence of events because one would assume that
00:48:35
if I understand that sequence of events I can also understand how to then reverse it
00:48:39
>> how to kind of take I got a couple of gray hairs now and I actually anecdotally do think weirdly now you've
00:48:44
said this that I have like gray hair flare-ups where I'll go I'll you know go through a couple of weeks or months of
00:48:50
doing something and I'll look in the mirror like what I have 12 now I'm being generous there's more like 25 I I have
00:48:57
25 now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that that falls? And what is the
00:49:03
sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicule? >> So there's a finite energy budget and
00:49:08
then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places like a business, right? You have this
00:49:13
budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put, you know, more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from
00:49:19
here. Right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young,
00:49:26
right? So there's uh there's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the
00:49:31
same way. Do you know Maslo's hierarchy of human needs? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So Maslo's insight was uh
00:49:37
>> Oh my god, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's
00:49:40
head. It was just I was >> acute stress response. >> Yeah. I just Yeah. Caught us off. Sorry.
00:49:48
Maslo's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. >> So there's there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that's works similarly
00:49:55
to Maslo's hierarchy of needs. Maslo said for a human being to be fully realized first you need to have safety
00:50:02
and food and shelter secured. Right? Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you
00:50:08
can start to think about building relationships with other people, right? Loving relationships. Once you have this
00:50:13
settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. Uh
00:50:18
and then once you have this covered now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality what
00:50:25
do you call self-actualization and kind of becoming your best self flourishing. Uh so he saw this very much as uh this
00:50:32
is this needs to be covered uh and when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life the first thing
00:50:38
to go is the top of the pyramid right your meditation practice or the long-term type like I'm going to be a
00:50:43
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
00:50:51
human needs I think aligns with hierarchy of uh of energy needs in the body and as far is the importance of
00:51:00
hair color goes, it's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and
00:51:05
you have more and more cells in the body that start to uh be less efficient right
00:51:11
there mitochondria working a little you know less efficiently and uh and then there there's more inflammation in the
00:51:18
body that's costing energy and uh there's more worries about you know professional
00:51:24
obligations and all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there we call them
00:51:30
growth maintenance and repair. These are like the anti-aging processes in in the body and those need
00:51:36
energy, but they're not as important as, you know, facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening. Now,
00:51:42
>> so if there's a lion chasing me, my body is going to commit all the the energy I
00:51:46
have to getting away from this lion. And it might say, "Listen, Stephen, we're not going to repair the skin next to
00:51:54
your eyes. you're going to get a couple more wrinkles and we're not going to make your we're not going to commit
00:51:58
energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever.
00:52:03
>> So, I would then look aged. I would look older. >> But that's because all of my energy has
00:52:08
been going to something else which my body considered to be a high priority. >> Correct. Which also brings me to I guess
00:52:13
the famous uh what we always talk about with presidents because presidents go into office often with dark hair
00:52:20
>> and they come out with gray hair and usually one does not age that quickly in
00:52:24
8 years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk
00:52:27
in on that first day they look very spritly and energetic and two years later they have gray hair, bags under
00:52:33
their eyes, wrinkles and they look like they've aged 10 years. >> Yeah. So, you're telling me actually
00:52:37
that the the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is this is the proper allocation of energy.
00:52:48
So, if you don't waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment
00:52:56
not being overly reactive to things, which uh is kind of a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go
00:53:04
towards anti-aging. Can I also pull more energy in the top? Like, can I just if I
00:53:09
get more energy, does that mean that there's less likelihood that we're going to run out of energy when it comes to my
00:53:15
hair follicles being black or gray? >> Yeah. The thing is, it doesn't look like we have the flexibility. Like, if you
00:53:20
want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, uh, eating more does is
00:53:25
not going to give you more energy. >> So, is there anything I can do to have more energy available?
00:53:30
>> Uh, you you can become more efficient. >> I can become more efficient, but I can't
00:53:33
put more in. >> No. Hm. And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about
00:53:39
stress. Okay, I'm going to live a less stressed life. >> Yeah, it seems like there's a few things
00:53:44
that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising. >> Okay. >> Right. Because when you exercise again,
00:53:50
you're increasing energy resistance, uncomfortable, potentially you're damaging things, right? Because you're
00:53:55
you're uh increasing what we call dissipative losses, right? Oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen
00:54:02
during the the during the exercise, but then when you recover now, the body's like, "Next time
00:54:09
this happens, I'm going to be ready." And the process of getting ready to to go through a high resistance, you know,
00:54:18
gym session is that you make more mitochondria, right? your muscles get bigger and stronger and your heart
00:54:25
becomes more efficient and your arteries, you know, become more become softer and you develop, you know, the
00:54:31
the confidence that you can do this well. Um, and then it becomes rewarding. You, you know, it becomes enjoyable. So,
00:54:37
all of these things now that you're off the gym session, >> right, you spend an hour in the gym
00:54:43
telling the body, "This is what we're going to do in the future." And then the body's like, "Okay, I'm going to get
00:54:47
ready." if there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to to get ready for this is to become more
00:54:52
efficient. So by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid um and kind of flexible cardiovascular
00:55:00
system and uh by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation,
00:55:05
right? All of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost of doing the activity and
00:55:12
then there's more energy available for anti-aging, growth, maintenance, and repair, vitality. So, I suspect that's
00:55:18
why you burn more energy when you exercise, but you feel like you have more. And you don't actually have more.
00:55:23
The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smoothly through this thing.
00:55:29
>> It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What What else? What about food?
00:55:34
You know, I've got uh I've got coffee here. I've got some alcohol here. I've got the sugar.
00:55:45
what I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through
00:55:50
my body? >> Yeah, great question. Uh alcohol, what we know about alcohol is that as we
00:55:56
talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology, right? So, if you put something
00:56:01
in the body that shouldn't be there, effectively a toxin like ethanol, which is what's in there, uh it's going to
00:56:06
cost energy to get rid of it. So there are detoxification systems in your liver primarily that takes alcohol, breaks
00:56:14
down the molecule and then you can pee it out, right? Or metabolize it for energy even. Uh so there's a bunch of of
00:56:20
energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you
00:56:26
feel like because what happens is you you waste energy degrading the alcohol, right? and and even though it's
00:56:34
a net plus, you're putting calories in the machine in the body. Uh but uh what ends up happening is you burn energy
00:56:41
getting rid of it. So there's a a cool study where they brought people in, they gave them a bunch of alcohol, they're
00:56:48
you know effectually effectively drunk and then they measured how much energy are they burning and you can do those
00:56:53
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
00:56:58
measure how much energy does it cost for them to stay alive, right? Then you ask
00:57:02
them to not do too much in this smaller room. They're just sitting down reading a book. Um and then then you can ask
00:57:08
them, "Okay, now drink this alcohol." And then you measure, you look, you minute by minute they drink the alcohol
00:57:13
and then you start to see, oo, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel
00:57:16
relaxed inside under the hood, the body's like burning energy to get rid of the alcohol. And other toxins probably
00:57:23
work the same way. You know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating. The reason why
00:57:29
those things might be bad for our health maybe because they they steal energy away from you know a growing body for
00:57:35
example uh there's good data in South America children who are exposed to more pathogens right there's no sanitation
00:57:42
they walk barefoot they they eat stuff you know that's not clean and um they have more pathogens uh in their gut
00:57:50
right there there's more uh viruses bacteria and parasites uh it costs energy to fight those things enough.
00:57:58
That's why you feel like when you're burning when when you're fighting a flu for example, right? Your immune
00:58:03
system, your immune cells are like, whoa, you know, virus like COVID or, you know, any, you know, seasonal flu virus.
00:58:10
The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then that the immune system steals
00:58:16
energy away from the brain, from from your mind. And then you feel like ah everything is so difficult. You just
00:58:22
want to be in bed over covers. you feel cold, which is strategy to basically save energy. So all of the what's called
00:58:30
sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more
00:58:35
sensitive, so you avoid moving. Uh it's like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation
00:58:42
strategies, stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increase the cost of living. Uh and then
00:58:51
because there's a cap on your energy budget, uh then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else.
00:58:58
>> And if you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of um I guess like energetic
00:59:04
distraction is the way I'd think about it. >> That's that's a cool way to think about
00:59:06
it. >> I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it like if you you my body has an
00:59:10
army of 10 soldiers and usually those 10 soldiers are like at work doing the things that I need to do to survive and
00:59:16
grow and flourish. And then when I have one of these, I don't know, some sort of
00:59:21
toxic substance comes into my body, you're basically saying that four of those soldiers have to be reassigned to
00:59:28
go deal with this invader. >> And so now I only have six that are focused on everything I need to
00:59:34
flourish, which is why I probably feel sometimes. >> Yeah, exactly. Um, and what if if
00:59:39
there's only six working on my, you know, fundamental requirements to flourish, then some of those things are
00:59:47
going to have to give way and I might end up with gray hair and I might end up with wrinkles or maybe my brain won't
00:59:53
function the same. Maybe a disease, >> you know, my immune system won't be taken care of in the same way.
00:59:59
>> Yeah. Immune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. Um, and the repair processes that happen
01:00:05
all the time in the brain, right? clearing out proteins that you don't need, uh repairing dam DNA that's get
01:00:12
gotten damaged, making new mitochondria. All of these processes happen like every
01:00:18
day. 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
01:00:23
things that work well like mitochondria, quality control, it's called, right? So
01:00:27
there's this quality control cycle. Old mitochondria that don't work too too well anymore, they get degraded. It's
01:00:32
called mphagy. Autophagy is selfeing. Mphagy is selfeing of the mitochondria. So when a cell, for example, is is
01:00:41
hungry. If you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, oh
01:00:46
I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So let's get rid of those mitochondria that
01:00:52
aren't really contributing their share. Uh, and then I'll have just the best functioning mitochondria, and then when
01:00:58
food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia,
01:01:03
weirdly, because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's and dementia, but I know that something
01:01:09
clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques >> and and you know, you often hear that
01:01:14
there's lots of things we consume or do that increase our probability of getting
01:01:17
Alzheimer's and dementia. >> So, is that at all linked to the same sort of like energy distraction? It's
01:01:21
been long believed that the plaque right that you've heard about uh amaloided plaques and tow tangles and there's kind
01:01:28
of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's. I think that's what
01:01:34
most people have heard and what most people believe because it came from you know white coatwearing scientists and
01:01:40
university professors. Um that is not the truth. And what is more true is and and let me just say why it's not the
01:01:49
truth. You can have people in their 60s and their 70s and their 80s zero protein
01:01:55
deposit in the brain. We can image this now pretty well with neuroiming. You can
01:02:00
have people zero protein deposit in the brain and they have full-blown Alzheimer's and dementia. And you have
01:02:06
the other extreme people with loads of amaloid plaques and towangles completely normal cognition.
01:02:16
So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis this amaloid you know protein aggregates in the brain as a driver of
01:02:24
dementia and neuro degeneration is not correct. Uh what we know happens energetically in the brain is that
01:02:31
initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's there's kind of an increase in energy demand in the there's specific
01:02:38
brain regions that tend to be more affected in some people not not all people tend to have those protein
01:02:43
deposits. those regions start to burn more energy. This is early phase, right? And then at this point, probably this is
01:02:50
the brain trying to cope, right? It's like something's not working great, but it's working harder, right?
01:02:57
>> Like like with the gray hair. >> Yeah, exactly. And then over time the those brain regions become hypometabolic
01:03:03
and then that's when you start to have symptoms. >> What does that mean? >> That's that's when people start to have
01:03:08
memory issues. And uh you said >> hyper metabolic. >> Hyper metabolic. This is hyper metabolic
01:03:14
is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about like there's more energy being burned here. Normal
01:03:20
metabolic is you know you use 100 units of energy for the brain and this let's say this brain region 100 units of
01:03:26
energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. Uh if there's a problem with
01:03:33
the mitochondria or if there's a problem with you know the cell communicating with the synapses right the cells talk
01:03:39
to each other through these things called synapses. uh if there's a problem now the the that part of the brain is
01:03:44
going to need to do more work to compensate uh and then we know something happens with neurodeeneration and
01:03:51
Alzheimer's is inflammation neuroinflammation that basically means there are some cells in the brain that
01:03:58
are trying to heal the brain and part of that healing process is kind of a stress
01:04:03
response locally and then that stress response leads to the secretion of little proteins we call cytoines and
01:04:09
then it's basically those cells saying something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. So you have those
01:04:16
cells that get activated. They they secrete those proteins to say please help. You know the we need to
01:04:21
reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish normal healthy balance. But that process of reestablishing of
01:04:27
healing costs energy just like when you're post exercise your muscle invests energy to to become stronger. So in that
01:04:35
kind of early phase hyper meta metabolism is when you spend more energy hyper uh function some people have
01:04:43
called it and then eventually it seems like those brain regions get tired out and then they become hypom metabolic so
01:04:50
they burn less energy. So if you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer's, there are these regions that are that
01:04:56
burn less energy and energy is so central to everything including cognition, right? In order to have an
01:05:02
idea and to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy. So the the brain kind of burning less energy in
01:05:09
later stages kind of reflects this lack of function. You know, the the it's difficult to remember, you know, old
01:05:16
memories. It's it's remembered. It's difficult to to make associations. it becomes difficult to plan in the future
01:05:22
um and to regulate your emotions and you know a lot of people with dementia end up having kind of mood issues. They
01:05:29
become really depressed and it >> is this is this why they call it type three diabetes because I've just heard
01:05:34
that phrase quite a lot recently. >> Yeah. And so my hunch is that Alzheimer's and dementia more generally
01:05:43
is a disorder of energy and specifically it's a disorder of you know increased energy resistance. So there's type three
01:05:53
diabetes comes from the fact that when the brain gets sick, right? And symptoms of dementia start to appear like loss of
01:06:01
memory and mood and depression and that constellation of symptoms. When you look
01:06:05
in the brain, it's burning less energy, but it's also harder for glucose to get inside the brain.
01:06:11
>> It's less efficient. >> It's so there's yes a loss of efficiency but an increased resistance, right? or a
01:06:17
decrease in conductance for energy for glucose for example to get inside the brain to be processed and and be used.
01:06:24
>> And why might that be? >> Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system.
01:06:28
>> Oh, okay. >> If you load up the system all the time with with glucose, with sugar in the
01:06:34
blood and glycemia is high, you have diabetes perhaps. This is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto this
01:06:40
the system that's like really delicate and it's not like jacking the the voltage on your lamp that eventually you
01:06:46
know is going to catch fire. uh we are a slow burning fire right like the inside
01:06:51
of our our cells you have the electrons flowing and when there are sparks flying
01:06:55
it damages the mitochondria it damages this damages that and that increases that's what aging is aging the the most
01:07:01
basic mechanism of aging including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's is the accumulation of little damage little
01:07:08
mutations little defects little imperfections and as the imperfections accumulate the system becomes less
01:07:15
efficient insulin resistance basically And diabetes refers to the fact that muscles but also the brain can has the
01:07:23
capacity to say I I can't anymore like glucose too much for me too much resistance too much you know damage that
01:07:30
I that I'm exposed to. So if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess energy
01:07:36
pressure right from the glucose from the from the electrons uh you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin. So
01:07:43
then you you take the the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the
01:07:47
cell, you pull those out, right? So then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin. So then the body's like whoa,
01:07:54
like glucose is way high. What you a normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the
01:08:01
surface of uh of your muscles and then says take in the glucose because there's too much glucose in the blood. It's
01:08:07
we're going to damage the brain. We're going to damage the eyes. We're going to damage the nerves. So muscle please take
01:08:12
in that glucose. But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria are starting to be uh you know at capacity
01:08:18
in terms of how much energy they can uh resist and and and flow then they shut down the valves right so the muscle
01:08:25
cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant and that protects the
01:08:30
mitochondria in the muscle cells. Uh but then gluc blood glucose uh starts to increase. So the next step in this
01:08:36
cascade is well if there's too much energy in circulation too much sugar too much fat what what can we do with this
01:08:43
and that's where fat stores you know adeposity uh comes in so obesity is a protection mechanism against excess
01:08:53
energy resistance >> one way to think about this hypothesis that dementia Alzheimer's is linked to an
01:09:01
overflow of glucose let's today is to look at other civilizations or um I don't know tribes the tribe in Africa
01:09:11
who don't have a lot of glucose do they still get Alzheimer's and dementia I don't know the literature on this but
01:09:16
it's clear that people who if you if we look at what makes you more likely to have Alzheimer's what makes you less
01:09:23
likely to have Alzheimer's all the things that make you more likely to have Alzheimer's contribute to increasing
01:09:29
this energy resistance right too much sugar in the blood diabetes physical inactivity, right? If you don't
01:09:37
move, energy doesn't flow through your mitochondria. So, it just stacks up, accumulates, and and the things that
01:09:42
protects the brain, protects you against Alzheimer's and dementia or things that
01:09:46
let energy flow, physical activity, uh not eating too much, especially not eating too much sugar, uh and and then
01:09:54
ketones. There's new, you know, data now showing that ketones can uh, you know, enter the brain and be metabolized more
01:10:01
easily and can even kind of improve cognition. And the ketogenic diet, which I know you've tried, many people report
01:10:08
more energy on the ketogenic diet. It's not because you eat more calories. It's because those uh electrons that are
01:10:15
stuck on ketones instead of being stuck on glucose can flow more more easily. And those ketones are made by
01:10:22
mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of this the sociality of mitochondria and the
01:10:27
organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat like fat, right, avocados and oil and and
01:10:34
meat and uh butter and uh those fat molecules and go in the liver and then the mitochondria in the liver, take
01:10:41
those fat, transform them into ketones and then put the ketones into the blood. The kidneys also do a little bit of this
01:10:45
and then the ketones go to the brain and then they feed the mitochondria in the brain. So you have mitochondria in the
01:10:51
liver talking and feeding mitochondria in the brain. And the path for a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria is much
01:10:59
shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors, if you want to think about it energetically uh than for
01:11:04
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
01:11:11
misunderstand because you know it sound it could have sounded like you're saying
01:11:14
that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's but actually you're saying you're not saying because I think of
01:11:19
ketones as energy and I I'm I'm shot in you know ketones all the time. I don't want to flood my brain with energy so
01:11:25
that you know malfunctions gets Alzheimer's. It's it for some reason it's really hard
01:11:30
to overwhelm the brain >> with ketones >> and with ketones or overwhelm the body
01:11:35
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
01:11:41
you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat now things like taste
01:11:45
so good and there's like an extra reward and a lot of people eat for different reasons not just because they're hungry.
01:11:51
That's because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary, especially the sugar part. Then you you lose
01:11:57
regulation and that's why I think the GLP-1 drugs are are so powerful because they they address the problem where it
01:12:04
starts. Like how much food are you putting into the system? Yeah, I did look at the stats there on the tribes in
01:12:10
Africa and it says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe in Tanzania
01:12:17
or rural agrarian populations like the Euraba they find that Alzheimer's and vascular
01:12:24
dementia are exceptionally rare. >> Mhm. which again means that it points to western diets,
01:12:31
>> western diet, western >> lifestyles, >> behavior. You know, these people move
01:12:36
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.
01:12:45
They don't have excess energy to just store away. And for for some people, there's congenital leanness, right? Like
01:12:51
you're you're born lean and you're g like you can't put on fat if you eat too much. the the high sugar or high fat
01:12:58
just accumulates in the blood and then it it gets lodged in ectopic ways. So in the it gets lodged in the muscle or in
01:13:04
the liver or in the brain um and and then that causes damage because of you know this like excess energy pressure
01:13:12
and then the system overheats >> skinny fat. >> Skinny fat. Yeah. >> And that stores it near around your
01:13:17
livers and stuff. What's that called that fat inside you? >> Visceral. >> Visceral fat. And the visceral fat is
01:13:22
linked to increased inflammation and it's linked to a bunch of diseases. But this is just a symptom like the
01:13:27
increased fat. And I think the reason why obesity in general we say obesity is bad is because obesity reflects a deeper
01:13:35
state, a more important state with which is this increased energy resistance. Like there's too much energy in the
01:13:42
system and the system can't flow it. Like the mitochondria can't keep up. So to protect themselves, they store that
01:13:49
and store that away and and then uh then then you become obese. >> If you're going to take tips from anyone
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So on this point of food then fasting, autophagy, all these words that I've heard. If you were giving me advice on
01:16:00
everything you know about how to create a body that is very very efficient in how I deal with the energy that I have.
01:16:08
What advice would you give me as it relates to eating? >> Develop that awareness of what your body
01:16:12
needs. So when I think about how I eat, I don't think about, you know, my weight
01:16:16
or my body. I think about how am I feeling and do I need more food, right? Am I like depleted or am I tired and
01:16:25
exhausted because there's too much food on board and my organism is like struggling to keep up with this excess
01:16:30
like friction or excess you know energy pressure and on my brain on my on my mitochondria. So I think about it from
01:16:37
the perspective of my mitochondria. What do my mitochondria need? Uh and in general it's much harder to uh you know
01:16:47
deplete the mitochondria like not eating too much. So if you're thinking about okay there's this food there do I snack
01:16:53
do I not snack uh generally eating too much there there are clear consequences to this like it
01:17:00
increases the resistance or the friction in in your mitochondria not eating enough is typically innocuous for most
01:17:06
people >> because we we have stores don't we of glycogen and we have stores of glucose
01:17:10
in our body in our muscles anyway so if we were running low then our our body can go get some fat metabolize it
01:17:15
>> exactly make ketones >> make ketones >> y yeah the Most people have enough energy on board, right, in the form of
01:17:22
fat, some glycogen in your muscles and your liver, uh, to live at least a month.
01:17:27
>> I mean, I'm I'm a big big fan of survival documentaries. And one of the most remarkable things you see in
01:17:32
survival documentaries, I'm even thinking about some that I've watched, is people can survive for seemingly
01:17:38
months without eating anything, >> and they can't survive long without water. Yeah.
01:17:42
>> But they can survive for months without eating anything um because their body will start to kind
01:17:47
of go into its reserves. Yeah. >> And break down muscle and all these other things.
01:17:51
>> Yeah. Yeah. The record is the world record for not eating is over 300 days. >> Wow.
01:17:56
>> Irish man. Um and he lost I forget the exact numbers. 250 lb 300 lb. >> What does this say about hunger? And
01:18:07
also what does it say about this society we live in where we have some people have like five meals. Some people
01:18:11
basically just eat from morning till night, you know. >> Yeah. I I think a lot of us eat not
01:18:18
because we're hungry. I think a lot of us as have learned to eat to to subserve some other need and eating is quite
01:18:26
rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know, as gambling and um kind of connecting with other human
01:18:31
beings. So, we know some people eat emotionally, right? When they're stressed out, they they they eat more.
01:18:37
Um, so I think hunger is is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge
01:18:46
on hunger. Like if you feel sad, you feel like bored, um, hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the
01:18:53
salt, because of this, especially if you had salty, sugary things around, uh, it's a rewarding thing that will get you
01:18:58
out of uncomfortable other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat.
01:19:03
That's um a good general assumption to make. You're probably overeating. >> I think I probably am.
01:19:09
>> Um it's harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window, right? And that works really well for some people.
01:19:16
Um like eating, for example, a very severe kind of window would be 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., right? So you eat for 4 hours
01:19:24
and you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that. Uh that
01:19:29
tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating. Um and my dad, you know,
01:19:35
still thinks to this day, he's 69 now. Um that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's what he learned
01:19:42
when he was a kid. And he wants to believe that this is true. I don't think it's true for most people. And
01:19:47
especially if you're in your 60s, 70s, right? Like metabolism changes. And if you're always eating you, the body never
01:19:55
goes into this state of I must be efficient, right? And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient,
01:20:01
you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria and then there's more friction, you know, in your whole body.
01:20:06
There's more inflammation, which is a signal of that energy friction or resistance and then you don't feel as
01:20:12
good, right? You don't feel you have as much energy. So many people who go from eating three meals a day plus or minus
01:20:18
snacks to like intermittent fasting, they just say, "I'm going to eat whatever I want, however much I want,
01:20:24
but just in those four hours or 6 hours." Most of those people uh have a lot more energy. They experience, right,
01:20:30
that they have more energy. It's not because there's more energy in their body. If anything, they're putting fewer
01:20:34
calories in the body, but the way energy flows now, it flows more efficiently. And we don't perceive the amount of
01:20:41
energy, we perceive the flow energy or the transformation of energy. >> And I was just reading there that it
01:20:46
says that this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day came from an advertising campaign
01:20:53
>> that was designed to sell cereal and bacon. >> Um before the industrial revolution,
01:21:00
breakfast wasn't a heavily scrutinized meal. People often just ate whatever was left over from the night before or they
01:21:07
ate a quick heavy meal before going out to do physical farm labor. But as people
01:21:11
moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs, those heavy greasy breakfasts started causing widespread in
01:21:18
ingestion. ingestion. Enter Harvey Kelloggs. Yes, that Kelloggs. He ran a famous
01:21:27
health sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain-based diet would cure ingestion and improve overall
01:21:34
health. He co-invented cornflakes and he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy cold cereal
01:21:43
breakfast was essential for a productive day. And your dad bought it hookline and
01:21:47
sinker. >> Yep. I mean, a lot of people did. >> Everybody did. >> And and I did until recently until I
01:21:52
started to like feel into this. I would have this big bowl of cereals. That's how I grew up as well. And then I would
01:21:58
feel like this low like this um you know low energy and I think now I understand
01:22:04
why because I was overloading my system with way too much kind of rapidly available sugary energy that I didn't
01:22:10
need. Uh and then the body needs to find a way to handle this. Either you get fat
01:22:14
which I can't do. So then it goes kind of into my brain and then makes me feel lousy.
01:22:19
>> So on this point then just to close off on this diet question. If I want to feel
01:22:23
really really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window
01:22:27
and I probably want to eat just what I need and I want to not overeat. I don't want to undereat, but I don't want to
01:22:33
overeat. >> If you undereat, you're going to pick it up tomorrow. >> I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway. So,
01:22:37
I'll be fine tomorrow. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today.
01:22:42
>> Correct. >> And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it
01:22:48
flows. Um and and just maybe to close the loop on that example like when you're sick and you're fighting an
01:22:54
infection. >> Yeah. >> I had a a beautiful opportunity to understand not just under understand to
01:23:00
experience this one day. It was New Year's Eve uh 31st in the evening and I started to feel like a little scratchy
01:23:07
throat. I'm like, "Oh, I think I'm getting sick." So I I go to, you know, the the evening dinner. I didn't cough
01:23:14
or anything. out of I don't think I was contagious, but I just could feel right like something was was coming up. I felt
01:23:20
terrible. I was I had started to have like full-blown flu symptoms. Went home early at like 10 9:00 p.m. Um and then I
01:23:28
went to bed. It was horrible night. Hor I felt even I was in pain and then my I had like massive fever. I took a bath, a
01:23:37
warm bath to help my fever kind of, you know, go up so that it could fight the high fever stimulates your immune cells
01:23:43
and weakens the virus. So, it's a it's it's usually a good thing. Um, and then next day I was out and I was so
01:23:52
depressed and I was like, I should write about this. I'm writing a book on on energy and energy constraints and like
01:23:58
the the division partitioning of energy in and the body. I was like, I should write about this. This is so
01:24:03
interesting. My immune system is in full-blown defense mode. And it's not like I I was like I could feel my heart.
01:24:11
I'm wearing this aura. My heart rate was like 110 at at rest instead of being like 60, you know, normally. So there's
01:24:19
all of this energy flowing through. It's like wow. Like my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We know this is
01:24:24
true from from you know good studies on that when you're fighting something you burn more energy. U yet I'm feeling
01:24:30
completely drained. Right? And so it's not like the amount of energy that's flowing through that I should feel more
01:24:35
energetic. My immune system in that moment uh was draining all my energy drain sucking away my energy from you
01:24:43
know from my from my mind from my brain perhaps. Um and I remember thinking it wouldn't be a whole lot of energy if I
01:24:50
just pull my laptop like prop myself on the bed and then start to write what I'm
01:24:54
experiencing in the moment. Right? Like the uh and but I couldn't muster the strength. It's like what what the
01:25:00
like why would I care? I couldn't care, right? And this is the stuff I care about on a daily basis. But in that
01:25:06
state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn't care about this. And then I started to think about work and about,
01:25:13
you know, the the lab and about uh, you know, family things. I was like, whoa, it's my whole life feels so different.
01:25:20
>> I don't care about anything. >> Yeah. I don't care about anything. I just I'm just trying to survive.
01:25:24
>> That's so interesting cuz I can relate so much. >> Yeah. I mean, but everyone has been
01:25:28
through like a difficult like you when you're really sick >> or when you're really stressed.
01:25:32
>> Yeah. >> Or just anything that's all consuming like that. >> Exactly. That's like Maslo's pyramid,
01:25:37
right? The the top is squished and you're like survival and >> like where where did I go? Where's
01:25:42
where's Yeah, I remember that. >> So, I was still me, right? I was still Martin, but I I felt completely
01:25:49
different. The quality of my of my mind, the quality of of my intention was like
01:25:54
completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn't care about anything
01:25:57
else. So that episode went on for like two days or so. Through day number three, I was able to take my computer
01:26:03
and like start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting that just the what what it felt like when I
01:26:12
was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffused energy like the light for
01:26:18
example, right? Is a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and a an incandescent
01:26:25
light bulb like an old style filament light bulb is not the amount of energy is the the way the energy is patterned.
01:26:34
>> And in a laser you have every photon that are kind of in phase with one another
01:26:38
>> and then there's a coherence to it, right? And it's the coherence that gives a laser its power.
01:26:44
>> Uh it's not the total amount of energy. the same amount of energy if you put in
01:26:47
an incandescent light bulb. Now it's the same energy but it's diffused, right? Every photon is doing its own thing.
01:26:52
They're all going in all over the place. And then if you want to look at how far
01:26:56
can these photons go, right? How far can my mind go? Caring about things. The diffused energy doesn't go very far. Uh
01:27:05
but the the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb.
01:27:12
>> I the two things came to mind when you said that. The first is in my previous
01:27:17
company because we were a startup fast growing we had cash flow issues cash making sure we had enough money
01:27:24
coming in from our clients whatever to pay our staff was always a problem for anyone that doesn't know um when a
01:27:30
business is growing quickly it's usually spending more today than it's receiving
01:27:34
in. So even if you're you're growing from like 1 million to 6 million to 12 million to 25 million or whatever as we
01:27:39
did you you still have a cash flow problem. And there would be times when we're nearing the end of the month and
01:27:45
months months in a row and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team. They they always got paid.
01:27:51
They never knew. We always figured it out. >> But what I'd notice is in those moments
01:27:55
of really really high stress sometimes, not always, but there were periods where
01:28:00
I lost motivation. >> And what I meant by that is I literally as a 23 24 year old like CEO of all
01:28:07
these hundreds of people, some of them old double my age, I basically hide at home. And what I mean by hide at home is
01:28:13
like I didn't have the I lost purpose for this business. Like I I'd wake up for it might last a week or two
01:28:19
weeks and I just didn't have the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it to like go out and be a leader.
01:28:26
And now as you say I go, oh, it was because I was stressed and it would last for when the cash flow issue would
01:28:31
resolve my motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this >> zoomed back into focus. And I think
01:28:39
that's really important because you know we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching the show and they'll beat
01:28:42
themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation and as a founder and as a CEO it's you feel so guilty that you
01:28:49
>> the the source of motivation and inspiration leadership for this group of people. You could lose it but now I
01:28:54
understand what it was. Now I understand that I was at like an a chronic well uh
01:28:58
yeah a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. >> Yeah. The other thing actually made me
01:29:03
think about as well when you you said about this diffusion of energy. It actually made me think about businesses
01:29:08
and OKRs and goals. >> Yeah. >> It made me think about if you take 10 10 people in a startup and they're all
01:29:14
really really focused on the same goal. >> They are way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal
01:29:20
and you're all pointing in different directions. >> Yes. So there's incoherence.
01:29:23
>> There's incoherence. >> Yes. >> Yes. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OKRs are so important
01:29:28
because you can point all the energy at the problem. Yes, >> this is traction. >> Yes.
01:29:32
>> Towards a particular goal. >> This is what purpose does. >> Purpose focuses energy. And I think the
01:29:39
reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right? To to feel it. I I I want to say like you
01:29:47
have purpose, it kind of becomes this must find my purpose, you know, must like I'm on a a spiritual journey to
01:29:53
find >> stresses you out and then you're imp. >> Yeah. Exactly. Uh but when you uh
01:29:58
somehow find your yourself in a place where you feel like those things, you know, that are in your life are
01:30:06
meaningful, right? And that the path you're on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your
01:30:13
energy that might be diffused like a light bulb and boom, it brings it like a laser. And then you can go that
01:30:19
distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right, where it's
01:30:25
like you have all all of these meetings and it doesn't feel as difficult as it would if you were going kind of all over
01:30:32
the place. Focus, I think, brings our energy into a coherent state. And then it feels like coherence, right? It feels
01:30:40
like I know what I'm doing this. then it becomes very easy to say no to this and
01:30:44
to say yes to just the right thing because there's this coherence not just energetic coherence that you know allows
01:30:50
you to do more with less energy uh but also this coherence of mind right and and maybe of spirit if we want to go
01:30:56
there >> um I'm going to ask the team to play a clip it's a clip of Kevin Olirri talking
01:31:00
about this idea of signal and noise and he's referencing his experiences with um
01:31:05
Steve Jobs who he used to work with and also Elon Musk >> look how wildly successful he was. But
01:31:12
here's why. There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back
01:31:18
then in the early 90s of signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about jobs
01:31:27
that I tell every CEO now and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business. His vision of
01:31:35
signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business
01:31:41
next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours you're awake. You're going to get those three things
01:31:49
or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops
01:31:56
you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 8020. 80
01:32:05
signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning, expect me to get
01:32:13
back to him because back then we didn't have texts. It was all email. He was right. He was right. And the only
01:32:21
other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. He does
01:32:28
not deal with noise. He is 100% signal 24 seconds, you know, every cycle. I mean, the guy is just 60 seconds of
01:32:35
every minute, 60 minutes of every hour, the 18 hours he's awake, it's all signal. And look what he's achieved.
01:32:42
>> And so I can really sort of summarize this for my audience, signal is the most
01:32:47
urgent thing you should be focused on right now. And noise is basically everything.
01:32:50
>> No, the goals you set for the the wake the that you were awake. If you're going
01:32:54
to be awake 18 hours, >> yeah, >> and you've determined that there's three things you have to get done, you're
01:32:59
going to get those done. No matter what it takes, you're going to get those done. And you're not going to let
01:33:03
anything distract you from the three to five things. If you're a CEO and you achieve that and you can get those done
01:33:10
with 80% of your time based on that, you're extraordinarily successful. >> In that clip, he's basically saying that
01:33:18
the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on
01:33:23
the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80% signal. I he wakes up in
01:33:28
the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watch these interviews with Johnny Ives. I'll
01:33:34
actually also play the Johnny Ives interview because I send this round to everybody. So, I'm going to play it
01:33:37
where Johnny is talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was. >> This sounds really simplistic, but it
01:33:44
still shocks me how few people actually practice this. Um, and it's a struggle to practice, but is is this issue of
01:33:52
focus? Um, Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life.
01:34:01
And um, and the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you you decide on Monday, you know
01:34:10
what, I'm going to be focused. It is a every minute a why are we talking about this? This is what we're
01:34:18
working on. You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say, um, because I
01:34:26
think he was concerned that I wasn't, um, he would say, um, how many things have you said no to? And I would,
01:34:35
honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things because I, I mean, wanted to be very honest about it. And
01:34:41
so I say, oh, I said no to this and no to that. and um he but he he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those
01:34:51
things anyway. Um so there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying no to something that you with
01:34:59
every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but
01:35:07
you say no to it because you're focusing on something else. >> There's something in giving your entire
01:35:13
being of focus to something. Maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is. That means your probability of being
01:35:20
successful at that particular thing drastically drastically increases. >> Solving hard problems is hard.
01:35:27
>> Yeah. >> But these great great founders they they solve them because they're so they're
01:35:32
focusing every available unit of energy on the thing. >> Mhm. Yes. I think the reason this is is
01:35:38
because of a physical principle about energy which is called resonance. Right. If you walk through life with such
01:35:45
clarity of mind, right, like this is what the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And and you live and you
01:35:52
breathe that you become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your
01:35:59
actions and your emails. It comes out in the way you speak and it comes out in the the things you turn attention to,
01:36:04
right? It turns out in your tone of voice, in the care that you, you know, look at people with. It comes out in
01:36:09
every facet of you, right? So you become the emblematic leader I guess uh for for
01:36:14
that thing that you're 100% into. What this does is that it's picked up by other people, right? Maybe this gets
01:36:21
like vibes. You have that vibe. You have like the founders vibe, right? Or like the entrepreneurs vibe. I think this is
01:36:28
real and this is the energy that's flowing through your mitochondria somehow becoming coherent and you know
01:36:33
aligned and it feels meaningful. It feels purposeful and then you live like that and then other people around you
01:36:41
that resonate with it, right? Like people are drawn to a a pure signal. Like if you have that specific signal,
01:36:49
it's like a a music like a symphony, right? Like when it sounds when it's on tune, then people that want to come on
01:36:56
board like they feel this and then it gets amplified. It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs
01:37:01
being often side as a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with with with his energy and what
01:37:08
you've just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a
01:37:13
reality distortion field. >> You probably heard this term. Um, the reality distortion field, they called it
01:37:18
his RDF, was a term coined by Apple software engineer Bud Trible in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs uncanny, almost
01:37:27
hypnotic ability to convince everyone around him to believe practically anything. And people who work closely
01:37:34
with Jobs described the RDF, the reality distortion field, as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding
01:37:41
willpower, and sheer persistence in a certain direction, which pulled you with him.
01:37:46
>> Mhm. That's an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that's
01:37:51
has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the the source resonator is strong enough, people will
01:37:58
come in resonance. And then it looks spooky. It looks like wa this thing you know synchronicity or this you know this
01:38:03
thing happened and somehow you know he was able to mobilize this this donor and you know fundraising is like easier than
01:38:09
it should be and so like all of these things snowball because you hold that you know that that vibe you hold that
01:38:16
energy and amplifies. >> I mean exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone that
01:38:20
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
01:38:26
you but he was also bending time in physics. They said Apple engineer Andy Herzfield recalled that if you told
01:38:32
Steve Jobs a task would take 6 months, he would look you in the eye and say, "You can do it in 2 weeks." Because of
01:38:39
the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in 2 weeks, completely
01:38:44
rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Job's charisma
01:38:50
saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he was casting spells and I would see people mesmerized so much so
01:38:59
that I was so jealous." Gates noted that even when Jobs was lying or wrong, he had everybody completely hooked. M
01:39:07
>> what's clear to make some like something like this happen is you need to um feel
01:39:13
that there's something compelling like you need to feel something is important and again that's not a rational thing
01:39:18
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
01:39:26
it right and then then that's where ideas start to come you build a structure around it to to sustain that
01:39:31
flow >> you said um at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves and if
01:39:36
I think about The fact that every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people. Like that is
01:39:41
true. Like for me to become the president, prime minister, best salesp person in the world, best
01:39:44
philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy to change its shape.
01:39:51
>> I think that's what amazing people do. Uh they're able to, you know, see something, hold that vision so strongly
01:39:58
and then mobilize others, right? And then new things become uh possible. I think that's what great leaders do. And
01:40:04
I I now approach, you know, other human beings and, you know, my my son, like my
01:40:08
six-year-old son, Noah, I see him as, yes, a little boy and yes, a lot of energy and yes, you know, some some
01:40:16
challenges that come with this, but he's this beautiful little energy pattern, right? He's this energy flowing through
01:40:22
this little child's body, but my role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance, right? The
01:40:30
right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint, I say do whatever you want, have whatever you
01:40:35
want uh you know any time then like that's not good for development. Kids need to feel you know some boundaries
01:40:42
and so those are like resistance right little constraints but if every minute like me putting constraint no you can't
01:40:48
do this no you can't do that then it damages the system it traumatizes the system
01:40:52
>> going to grow in exactly so the the art really of parenting and I think the art
01:40:57
of of leadership is providing the right structure right so that the energy has some constraints like there's a
01:41:05
challenge there needs to be a challenge for the team to meet right challenge is like a barrier It's like a little
01:41:10
resistor. Of course, there's challenges. You're like, it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult, then
01:41:14
everywhere everyone's bored. If it's like, yeah, we're going to do the same thing as we did last year. And then next
01:41:19
year, we do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to
01:41:24
double the, you know, the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you have to
01:41:30
work through. I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges like what's the next
01:41:35
challenge? Why go down deep in the ocean to discover new creatures? Why go in the
01:41:40
Amazon trying to discover new species of little bugs? Why go into space? Like this is all curiosity driven. It's like
01:41:46
the mind wanting to have something to hit against. Cuz if there's nothing to hit against, if there's no resistance,
01:41:51
then it's there's no purpose. >> I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You
01:41:58
think about going to the moon. The moon pulled energy towards it. So, we found ourselves to the moon. And actually if
01:42:03
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
01:42:08
going to pull >> people energy >> towards it >> and if I have an unworthwhile goal
01:42:14
energy won't be attracted so maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically a magnet for energy
01:42:19
>> yeah I think so and people are energetic processes so my my six-year-old son is
01:42:24
this beautiful movement of energy my goal is to nurture it right and not just with food and physically but to nurture
01:42:31
his curiosity uh and is transformation >> linked to this. I read that studies on
01:42:38
brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria.
01:42:45
>> This is a beautiful study in it was run in Chicago. Every year people would come
01:42:49
to the hospital and then fill out questionnaires and meet with a a therapist and neuroscychologist and they
01:42:54
would ask them questions and test their memory and their cognition. And then every year they would report how much
01:43:01
purpose they felt like they had, how much sense of connection with other human beings or with something greater
01:43:06
than themselves, how optimistic they were about the future, right? And some people are like more optimistic, happy
01:43:12
and and and purposeful than than others, but there's always kind of fluctuations,
01:43:16
right? Like we go through fluctuations. As we go through life, no matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being
01:43:21
challenging in in some ways. So we asked how people felt, how much purpose people
01:43:27
experience before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this
01:43:32
question is to look at the brain after the person died, right? So then you have how the person felt right before they
01:43:39
how much purpose they experienced and then you look at the mitochondria after they die
01:43:43
>> where >> in in the the dorsal prefrontal cortex. So that little part of the brain that's
01:43:48
involved in, you know, uh, active reasoning and executive function and the mitochondria in the people who felt more
01:43:54
purpose had a greater energy transformation capacity. >> What does that mean in simple terms?
01:44:00
>> The resistance was lower. This could mean uh that if you feel more life purpose, the mitochondria in your brain
01:44:07
can flow energy more easily. >> Or it could mean the inverse of that. Well, it could mean that having
01:44:12
mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily just changes how you
01:44:16
see life. >> Makes you feel more purposeful. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Or it could mean that purpose itself is
01:44:20
creating more efficient mitochondria. >> Exactly. People have done studies in animals and we've done some of those
01:44:24
studies where you can basically change the state of mind of a mouse by like stressing it out chronically and then
01:44:31
you make it feel defeated and like a really stressful life and you ask, does this change the mitochondria in the
01:44:36
brain? Right? Can the experience of stress change a mitochondria in the brain? 100%. That happens. Now you can
01:44:43
say okay now let's change a mitochondria in the brain. You can like open up the brain inject a little something that
01:44:48
either boost the mitochondria or inhibit and activate the mitochondria increase or decrease resistance. And then you ask
01:44:54
does this change how the animal appears to feel? How the animals behave in terms
01:44:58
of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance 100%. So the the best science shows it
01:45:06
goes both ways. So how you feel can change the mitochondria. The mitochondria can change probably how you
01:45:10
feel. >> And so and again we're theorizing here. If I don't have purpose in my life, it's
01:45:15
going to change the mitochondria. And then if it if my mitochondria becomes more inefficient
01:45:21
>> then what what will I notice as the next symptom? >> Yeah, probably fatigue is the first
01:45:26
thing that kind of starts to pop up. You feel drained. You don't feel you have you know enough energy. burn out
01:45:32
>> probably feels like burnout and you start to lose enthusiasm for you know for the future you become more
01:45:39
pessimistic. So there's kind of a constellation of things we call depression or you know burnout or we put
01:45:44
labels on these things but really every person starts to experience life as less
01:45:48
enjoyable, less purposeful, less meaningful um regardless of the the diagnostic title we put on it. which is
01:45:56
interesting because I've I've interviewed a few people that are experts on the subject of depression and
01:46:00
also addiction frankly. And one of the things that I remember Johan Hari saying to me who wrote a book called Lost
01:46:05
Connections is that in some cultures the cure that they apply for depressive symptoms is giving someone purpose in
01:46:13
their life. >> Mhm. Yeah. That's so powerful. My hunch is that most of what we call depression
01:46:20
is a loss of coherence. And when we're isolated, we did a study recently to look at the energetics of mental stress.
01:46:27
When you feel like you're being pulled aside and judged and right, what does that do energetically to the body? And
01:46:33
and there's this protein marker in the blood that reflects energy friction, energy resistance, right? If the
01:46:41
mitochondria can't flow energy smoothly, this protein gets made and then it's in
01:46:46
kind of a blood biomarker. It's elevated in cancer where we think there's increased energy resistance. It's
01:46:52
elevated in Alzheimer's where we think there's increased energy resistance in the brain. It's elevated in diabetes
01:46:57
where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It's elevated in all sorts of
01:47:03
pathologies, hypertension and the heart disease. And it's a marker that the organism energetically is not doing
01:47:09
well. there's it's not efficient, right? It's almost a marker of inefficiency. We
01:47:13
did this study where you bring people in, we put an intravenous line so we can measure the blood markers uh and then we
01:47:20
tell them, "Okay, just relax. Everything's fine. You're doing great." And then they they sit down, they relax
01:47:24
for 30 minutes, cortisol goes down, heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down, and then our lovely study
01:47:29
coordinator, Katherine, walked into the room and then looked at the participants
01:47:34
said, "Now you're going to be judged. You're going to have to deliver a speech. And here's a situation. You were
01:47:39
in a shopping mall. You were, you know, you grabbed this this scarf. You put it on just to try. But then the security
01:47:45
guard caught you. And then they're accusing you of shoplifting. So now you're in court. You need to defend
01:47:49
yourselves in front of the the the judge and you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard.
01:47:55
Should you lose his job or and then we tell them you have two minutes to prepare your three minute defense in
01:48:02
front of the judge. Most people start to feel the the anxiety and then we we monitor heart rate at the same time and
01:48:09
blood pressure and and then we draw blood and so you can see everyone's physiology wasting energy, right? The
01:48:15
energetic cost of stress. You see this on the monitor on the other side, you know, in the control room. And then we
01:48:20
put a camera in front of them that mocks, you know, video records him. And then we have a white coatwearing old
01:48:26
white man who stands six feet in front of them, looks at them straight in the eyes, they start talking. And then they
01:48:32
have to look into into the camera and they do their their defense and they know someone's looking at them. And what
01:48:38
we saw was that this energy stress marker goes up just with mental stress. You're not doing exercise. You're not
01:48:45
doing anything strenuous. You're just going through this phase of what's going to happen to me, to my ego,
01:48:52
to to my sense of self. >> So, what's the downstream consequence of this thing, this stress chemical being
01:48:56
in your body? >> Yeah. So, that protein is called GDF-15. >> Yeah. >> Growth differentiation factor 15, the
01:49:02
name doesn't matter, but that energetic stress marker, you're asking the right question. What does it do and what does
01:49:08
it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain. >> Yeah. And that protein can be made by
01:49:12
any organ in the body except one, the brain. What is it doing? It's very useful to know where where's a receptor,
01:49:21
right? Because you need to have for signaling and biology to happen, you need a signal and you need a receptor, a
01:49:27
sensor, right? Uh where's a receptor for this protein, do you think? Only in one
01:49:32
organ in the body. >> Is it in here? >> It's right in here. Yeah. So in the brain stem the the brain stem is where
01:49:42
kind of the the basic survival systems of the body are and there's a region in the brain stem called the area postrema
01:49:50
doesn't matter it's it's known as the vomiting and nausea center for the brain >> wait so if something happens I'm
01:49:55
extremely stressed the world is judging me this protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brain stem and
01:50:01
it docks in there >> correct >> and then what happens >> and then turns out the brain interpret
01:50:05
this as there's something running out of energy >> there's something running out of energy
01:50:10
Okay, >> something in the body is not right. There's something running out of energy
01:50:14
and then the brain makes two decisions very similar to when you're sick. That protein GDF-15 is called a cytoine. It's
01:50:21
the same thing that immune cells produce when they're activated during an infection.
01:50:25
>> Okay. So, your body thinks you're sick. >> Yes. >> And then what? >> And then does two things. Save energy.
01:50:31
Conserve energy. >> So, you lose motivation. >> Yes. Lose motivation. >> Feel depressed.
01:50:36
>> Feel depressed. >> Can't go to the gym. >> Yes. doesn't feel worth it. We know this
01:50:41
specifically from animal studies. If you inject animals with GFD, they hunch in a
01:50:45
ball and they don't do anything, right? They go into this sickness behavior. That's number one. Number two, the brain
01:50:51
says something's running out of energy first. Let's conserve energy, number one. But two, let's mobilize energy,
01:50:58
right? Let's put glucose into the blood. Let's put fat into the blood because there might be cells out there that are,
01:51:03
you know, running out of energy and we need to rescue them. >> Are you going to get belly fat? visceral
01:51:08
fat. Yeah. >> Yeah. You're going to get belly fat from this. >> Yeah. When stress hormones are up,
01:51:12
right, and you're increasing blood glucose, increasing uh blood lipids, if the rest of the body doesn't need it,
01:51:17
which is what kind of happens during a stress response like this, that fat gets lodged where it shouldn't called ectopic
01:51:25
fat. And that's what belly fat is. >> Okay. So, let's go a bit further. This is happening. Um, if this is chronic, I
01:51:32
guess it's going to lead at some point to disease. >> Mhm. What the best studies show on this
01:51:37
is when you have high level of this energetic stress marker this protein you're more likely if you follow people
01:51:43
then studies were done where you take the blood you measure this protein some people have very high levels some people
01:51:48
have very low levels uh and then you wait 14 years this is actually a study from the UK called the UK bioank so if
01:51:56
you measure the protein and stress cytoine and you ask what happens to people with high GDF-15 versus people
01:52:02
with low GDF-15 turns out people with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop mental illness, h bipolar disease,
01:52:09
depression, schizophrenia. People with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension.
01:52:17
People with high GF are more likely to be dead. At this point, we don't know if it makes a difference, if it's from
01:52:23
mental stress, if it's from physical stress, if it's from an organ struggling, right, that's sick and
01:52:28
trying to to heal itself. High energy stress, high energy resistance in the body based on this marker is called a
01:52:37
prognostic indicator. It's an indicator that something bad might happen. And uh and and people with high GDF-15 also,
01:52:44
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
01:52:49
don't like to go out with friends. >> They don't like to exercise. What would >> correct? Yeah. Because it it if you're
01:52:54
getting the signal like when you're sick, right? If GF15 is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain,
01:53:00
you're getting the signal, you're running out of energy. >> So, I guess the the question everyone's
01:53:04
asking as they're listening to this now is, how do I prevent GDF-15 or whatever it's
01:53:11
called, this stress cytoine thing that goes and docks in my brain? How do I prevent it from floating around in my
01:53:16
blood so often? >> Good question. Taking the time to feel. >> Meditation. >> Meditation. My bloody fiance is right.
01:53:24
uh what we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF-15 increases throughout the day, right? Uh so the
01:53:32
purpose of sleep then might be to reduce energy resistance, right? Like what we were talking about earlier, it's not
01:53:38
about having like finding this one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It's about this movement of
01:53:45
increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance and increasing resistance, decreasing resistance. It's
01:53:49
kind of this movement of life. And I guess all the other things we talked about earlier as it relates to lifestyle
01:53:54
factors like keeping away from these sort of extreme stresses, eating way too much, starving oneself, oxidative
01:54:01
stress. None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? >> Mhm. >> Do you know what I mean?
01:54:05
>> Mhm. >> If we just look back in time of how we used to live, you know, a little bit
01:54:08
more human out in nature with people, with friends, offscreens. >> Yeah. >> Eating stuff that grows in the ground or
01:54:13
has legs and runs. >> A lot of that is pretty like a pretty simple playbook for like how to live a
01:54:18
good life. >> Yeah. and to not be so bloody stressed out all the time. >> I think part of it is yes, living a life
01:54:24
that is more aligned with the way we evolved, >> right? Which is connecting to other
01:54:30
human beings and not eating too much. And um I think that's one piece and but that's like everyone knows this.
01:54:37
>> Yeah. >> Why aren't we doing it? >> And I think part of the reason is because we we have this kind of
01:54:43
misconception of ourselves as a molecular machine, right? And it's like need to maintain your car. If I'm like a
01:54:50
a machine, if I'm like a car, then I'm just going to put more fuel in and I should feel better. And then you do and
01:54:54
then you you eat more and then you don't feel better. And that's I think extremely disempowering. People want to
01:55:00
be empowered. And people want to have knowledge, but they want to know what to do so they can be their best version of
01:55:07
themselves, so they can flourish. >> So, you know what's interesting? Before you arrived, I I did something I've
01:55:11
never done before. I went through all of the interviews you've done and I looked
01:55:15
at all the comments because I wanted to understand the people that have listened
01:55:18
to you frequently. What what what is it they feel like they would love to ask you or what they haven't gotten from
01:55:22
other interviews. One of the most popular comments which was seen roughly 10% of time was the audience asking
01:55:29
about supplements and the question that they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle
01:55:34
interventions but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like methylene blue urethylene
01:55:40
A and NAD plus boosters. In your opinion what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about
01:55:47
these supplements? Are they a shortcut? Are they a band-aid? Are they useful? I think there are shortcuts to to some
01:55:56
states. I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there's a magic pill to solve a complex
01:56:03
issue to solve the way that you're feeling becomes like the there's a magic pill for this and then you don't need to
01:56:10
bring awareness to what you are. >> But can I do both? >> I think so. In in some cases, I don't
01:56:17
really know how metalene blue does everything it's supposed to be doing. What uh biologically metine blue seems
01:56:25
to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that metaline blue can kind of
01:56:30
relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria. NAD+ is probably the best supported uh intervention to reduce
01:56:38
inflammation. Also, it's an electron carrier. So it take electrons from food and then gives them to the electron
01:56:44
transport chain. So the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance. So if you're depleted of
01:56:50
NAD, there's that's going to cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through the this metabolic circuit.
01:56:58
>> So NAD+ seems to calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing. And if
01:57:02
>> Yeah. And most people are not deficient of NAD+. So giving more to the system
01:57:07
might not help. But for for reasons I don't really understand, it seems like it helps some people and it makes people
01:57:14
uh feel more energetic. So >> is that in pill form? Like how do people take NAD+? Cuz I know there was some
01:57:19
like drips one time that some guy gave me. >> Yes, I think there there's uh oral
01:57:23
supplements that are uh precursors to NAD. If you eat NAD directly, it doesn't the bioavailability it's called, it
01:57:30
doesn't get into you know your cells very well. you can inject infuse IV intravenously uh NAD+ directly and then
01:57:38
that that gets to your cells better. Um that's not a an approved or kind of recommended medical intervention but
01:57:45
I've seen people with mitochondrial disease you know saying that it helps them and and normal healthy people as
01:57:51
well who feel more energy. >> What about this uralithn A? >> Uralithin A is a new compound that seems
01:57:58
to stimulate the degradation of bad mitochondria. So we talked about autophagy, mphagy
01:58:05
earlier. So a cell that has a thousand mitochondria. There are always some that are getting a little old and then
01:58:10
eventually they're degraded. Especially if you fast, right? If the cell is a little starved is going to degrade the
01:58:16
ones that are least functional and there's kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to
01:58:22
know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded
01:58:27
if you're fasting or if you're pushing the system like during exercise. What uralin a seems to do is to kind of
01:58:34
accelerate this process. Right? So it accelerates the degradation of the bad mitochondria the mphigy so that the cell
01:58:42
has to make more of the good ones. I'm looking at some of the studies here and it says the clinical evidence for
01:58:46
uralythin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years transitioning from a compelling animal data study to highly
01:58:54
rigorous placeboc controlled human clinical trials and overwhelmingly the human research confirms that uriththan a
01:58:59
targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation with one study in 2022 in the JAMAMA network open study
01:59:07
journal um where they took adults aged 65 to 90 and gave one of them placebo one of the groups placebo and the other
01:59:14
uriththan A for 4 months. And at the end of that they found that the group that were given uraliththn A showed
01:59:20
statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial
01:59:26
inefficiency. >> Mhm. >> I should be on uriththn A then >> everyone should. >> Do you take any of that? I
01:59:32
>> don't. >> You don't take any supplements? >> I don't. I'm skeptical of this. You
01:59:35
know, there's always kind of a new supplement that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial
01:59:40
dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions. >> Yeah. And so the term mitochondrial
01:59:45
dysfunction is I think a little misleading. Like there was a lot of hype about NAD. There was a lot of hype about
01:59:50
co-enzyme Q, CoQ10. Uh there was a lot of hype about all sorts of things. Anti-inflammatory, you know, berries and
01:59:55
antioxidants was a big thing like 10, 20 years ago. Turns out not to be so useful. Uh actually impairs normal
02:00:03
adaptation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants. Um so urin feels like
02:00:09
the next fad. Uh maybe it's real. Uh, I think the science is fairly compelling, but I'm I I trust the wisdom of my body
02:00:17
and my mitochondria more than I trust the the pharma company that's trying to to make and sell this.
02:00:22
>> And what does that mean in in practical terms, trusting the wisdom of your body?
02:00:26
Like, what does that mean for you? >> It means um recognizing that I am the the energy that's flowing through this
02:00:32
thing and this thing is nature. Like we are a piece of nature. Something that's true across the animal kingdom and the
02:00:39
the living kingdom is things heal. And we don't think about this in biio medicine. We think about diseases. We
02:00:46
study, you know, when things go wrong and we try to understand the molecular, you know, features of diseases. There's
02:00:51
not really a science of the healing process. But the basis of health, it's clear you need to heal continuously.
02:00:58
Heal, you know, repair the DNA that's damaged. Repair the mitochondria that are getting old. You get rid of them.
02:01:03
You make new ones. like preserving the wholeness of the system. To heal means to become whole again.
02:01:08
>> Is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature to heal? Because if you think about me and
02:01:16
you sat in here now, we're sat in a like a dark bunker basically with no sunlight. And listen, most of us live in
02:01:22
such a dark bunker with very little sunlight. So we then have to take vitamin D.
02:01:27
>> So because we live outside of our true nature, I'm wondering if actually we do
02:01:31
need to take some supplements cuz >> we're not going to heal. we are going to heal
02:01:35
>> even but if I sit in here all day I'm not going to get vitamin D and then that's going to cause problems.
02:01:38
>> Yes. So we're not in the optimal environment when you're in that kind of environment. So I think there and
02:01:42
there's good research showing if you put a plant in a hospital room patients recover faster. There's been studies
02:01:48
looking at like windows with natural light and you see nature if you're in a hospital for example people recover
02:01:54
better. And there's good data on like nature exposure. Is it like the more better oxygen? You know a little tiny
02:02:01
bit more oxygen if you're in a forest. Is it like the phyitochemicals, the things that are produced by the by the
02:02:06
plants? Like we don't really know what it is. Is it just seeing green, seeing something that hears that sounds and
02:02:12
looks like what you evolved to be around? So, we don't really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps
02:02:18
calm the body and somehow improve recovery. >> Whoa. What's that on your face? >> This is my Bon Charge face mask. I've
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The deal applies sitewide. One type of help people also wanted to know about from you which was even more
02:03:29
discussed was about red light therapy. >> Red light therapy as a support for your
02:03:35
mitochondria. >> Interestingly, the red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are
02:03:39
hundreds of different devices, helmets, a hairbrush band. >> I think I've got one here actually. I
02:03:46
think this is this this is a red light >> therapy hairbrush. >> Therapy hairbrush.
02:03:52
>> Yeah. Uh someone was just telling me their dad is part of a study now. He puts a helmet with red light, you know,
02:03:57
every day because he has like predmentia. By doing this, the idea is uh light is energy.
02:04:05
>> Yeah. >> Right. Energy is not a thing, but it's the potential for change. It's the
02:04:08
capacity to change something. Red light like this, especially the red, the infrared that you don't see with your
02:04:14
eye, can penetrate tissue. It can go through your hair, through your skull, and then into your brain. And then there
02:04:20
it seems to do something and change metabolism. So how is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that for
02:04:27
light to do something in biology, there needs to be something in biology that resonates with it, right? That can uh
02:04:33
offer the right amount of resistance, right? To the photons, the red light photons hit and then there's
02:04:38
transformation of energy. That receptor, the antenna, the cellular antenna for red light seems to be mitochondria. So
02:04:44
there's something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then boom they meet with oxygen to become
02:04:50
metabolic water. Uh that is called cytochrome C oxidase. >> I'm going to try and say this in
02:04:55
layman's terms. It 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
02:05:01
close to my skin. >> The red light is going into the mitochondria of my cell and it's helping
02:05:07
the mitochondria to become more efficient. >> That's the idea. >> So why should you wake up every day and
02:05:12
do bloody red light? If you're deficient in that in that way, that might be good.
02:05:16
Uh that might also offset, you know, the the natural order that your body has has
02:05:22
created. >> Oh, what do you mean by that? you think it might be. I think that in in general
02:05:26
that's why I kind of veer away from supplements because the organism is this beautiful dynamic equilibrium of like
02:05:32
everything you know energetically dancing with each other where you have the mitochondria that transform energy
02:05:37
and then you know genes are expressed and then this other cell is doing this this cell is doing this and there's this
02:05:42
beautiful balance and uh when the system is out of balance now there's signals like inflammation right signals of this
02:05:49
imbalance uh at an energetic level and then that turns into molecular level and then the system tries to come back into
02:05:56
balance, right? And >> wow, I never realized this that too much red light can be bad for you.
02:06:02
>> I don't know if there's studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but there's like phototoxicity is a
02:06:08
thing and there you can buy a whole bed of like really intense light. And I think if you stay too long in those,
02:06:14
that's probably not good. There's a a very compelling study that was published last year uh on blood glucose regulation
02:06:23
and I know you've talked about blood glucose on other episodes. >> How much glucose in the blood is really
02:06:29
important because it causes this like energy resistance energy friction in all of your cells especially the brain
02:06:35
perhaps. So when you eat a bunch of sugar or you eat a meal with carbohydrates blood glucose typically
02:06:41
spikes. If you get stressed out just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can
02:06:47
increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging and so on. So what the body does in the
02:06:53
normal healthy organism is able to regulate blood glucose. So if you eat a big meal, there's amount enough insulin
02:06:59
that's released and then the glucose can come into cells and to the muscles and and to the fat and and then you
02:07:04
preserve, you know, what's called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose. It turns
02:07:09
out if you shine a red light on the back of people as they ingest a big bunch of
02:07:14
glucose, the spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured
02:07:21
mitochondrial metabolism through the mouth. You can measure oxygen coming in and CO2 coming out which is coming from
02:07:28
mitochondria. So you can measure the the energy metabolism which is really the mitochondrial metabolism as people are
02:07:35
doing this. And what they found is that people who had red light on their back, their metabolism was actually uh a
02:07:42
little higher. So the electrons, the flow of energy was increased with the red light and and they think that might
02:07:48
be why the glucose didn't spike as much because the electrons that came into the
02:07:53
blood were able to flow through the mitochondria. Um, so this points to some regulation of energy regulation in
02:08:00
inside the mitochondria that I don't fully understand, but I think there there's something promising here and it
02:08:06
certainly supports, you know, the idea that energy modalities outside of ourselves, you know, light or
02:08:12
electromagnetic fields under human beings that are, you know, you energy energetic process is affecting my
02:08:18
metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically, metabolically. Uh, I think it it supports that idea
02:08:26
that you're in an energetic process and you're influenced by other forms of energy even if you don't see it.
02:08:31
>> I'm really um stunned by this idea that there is such thing as getting too much
02:08:36
red light and that that can have harm for your cells because there is I'll be honest you know there's been a couple of
02:08:40
times where I just put that thing on and maybe like read a book for a long time like an hour or two.
02:08:45
>> Did you ever feel adverse effects from this? >> I never felt adverse effects. However,
02:08:52
looking at some of the studies, it seems to suggest that red light therapy follows a bell curve model.
02:08:59
>> Mhm. >> They found in this one particular study I was reading about in 2009, that low to
02:09:04
moderate doses of light perfectly stimulate the mitochondria to produce ATP and a healthy small burst of ROS,
02:09:10
reactive oxygen species to trigger cellular repair. However, this particular study also showed that when
02:09:16
the dose is pushed too high, the light creates massive amounts of reactive oxidative species and this excess
02:09:23
oxidative stress overwhelms the cell's antidioxidant defenses completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration
02:09:30
and in inducing cellular aptosis, cell death instead of healing. Mhm. Yeah. That this bell-shaped relationship is
02:09:39
something we see in many domains of biology and physiology. Same as like workout exercising like most people know
02:09:48
if you do a workout that's like half an hour, an hour or two hours. If you're an
02:09:51
athlete and you're like really well conditioned, it's fine. And then you recover for you know 23 hours after your
02:09:56
1 hour workout and that's great. It actually makes you more efficient. gives you the idea the impression you have
02:10:02
more energy which is really energy flowing more efficiently but if you work out for eight hours
02:10:08
>> that's not good right so the too much you you crash not enough you're not at your optimal so there's where is the
02:10:14
optimal state and biology and the whole mind body unit has kind of worked out through evolution and through your life
02:10:22
and development to find this sweet spot >> if you know how to listen to it >> and that's that's easier said than done
02:10:28
>> yes if you can live in alignment and There's a lot of noise out there. >> There is, you know, for the same reason
02:10:33
you closed your eyes earlier when I asked you to kind of feel inside. This is a good analogy for I think what it
02:10:40
means to kind of listen to her energy. And maybe we could do a little exercise if you're interested.
02:10:44
>> Sure. >> Yeah. >> So, we'll do a little exercise. Uh you can close your eyes if you want.
02:10:49
>> Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. >> Yeah. And we'll use the breath. So, you
02:10:54
can start by just feeling your body. You can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair.
02:11:02
And then we'll take a little breath in and then breath out and then all the way down. And then hold your breath with
02:11:10
empty lungs and then hold there for as long as you can. And just pay attention to the sensations
02:11:22
that are emerging in your body, whether it's on your belly and your chest and your neck and your head.
02:11:33
And the longer you wait, the more intense those sensations are. You can hold for as long as you want and
02:11:44
when you can't and just take a take a breath. Deep breath. What did that feel like?
02:11:50
>> It felt I felt lots of vibrations. >> It's kind of like waves. I felt like kind of like waves going across my body,
02:11:57
but I It was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body. >> Mhm.
02:12:01
>> It's kind of how it felt. >> I suddenly was very apparent clear of my heartbeat. I could feel everything.
02:12:06
>> Mhm. >> In a way that I can't typically feel everything. >> Yeah. Any kind of negative feeling or
02:12:13
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
02:12:18
a bit uncomfortable. >> Yeah. What did that feel like? >> Like like I was starving for oxygen.
02:12:23
Like I was starving for air. >> Yeah. You know running out of air and like drowning is one of the most
02:12:29
horrible like aversive experience that I think we evolved to dislike. Right. So what what was happening there in our
02:12:37
bodies as we were doing this is oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously. Right. every millisecond
02:12:43
mitochondria consume oxygen and now you're not bringing oxygen through your breath and then they produce CO2 carbon
02:12:49
dioxide right so mitochondria are burning the oxygen little bit by a little bit and then they're producing
02:12:54
carbon dioxide CO2 and we evolved to feel those signals very very sensitively >> so that's the pressure that I felt
02:13:03
>> well I think that yes so the subjective experience right what you described there is an experience of energy
02:13:11
starting to stall Because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electrons like h where do I go? And then
02:13:16
there's like extreme level of resistance. >> Like the most extreme case of energy
02:13:20
resistance I think that most people will be familiar with is like a heart attack.
02:13:25
>> Mhm. >> My dad had a heart attack a few years ago and he woke up during the night with
02:13:31
this terrible contraction like a pressure in in the chest and he said it was like 400 lb like pressure on his
02:13:38
chest. Terrible pain. Worst pain he's ever had. What what's happening like where where what is that pain? The
02:13:44
source of that pain really is blood flow can no longer bring oxygen to mitochondria in the heart.
02:13:49
>> Oh, so the mitochondria are like panicking. >> Yeah. >> So panicking is kind of a we're imposing
02:13:55
now experience onto a biological process. But you have the electrons that are flowing through mitochondria all the
02:14:01
time. They're flowing on oxy onto oxygen, right? From food to oxygen and they're just nice freely floating. That
02:14:06
feels great or it feels like you just normal life. And then all of a sudden there's no more oxygen. So the electron
02:14:12
I have nowhere to go. That feels terrible. The electrons can't flow. So they start to backflow. That is what
02:14:18
causes oxidative stress. That's why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack, right? Because the electrons
02:14:24
can't flow to oxygen because of this little clot. Uh and for some reason that we don't really understand
02:14:31
this feels extremely aversive. So what you experience there by holding your breath and anyone who's listening to
02:14:36
this can try on their own. hold your breath for as long as possible. It feels horrible. And now imagine living your
02:14:42
life with just like 5% 10% of this horrible feeling like you wake up in the morning and you have this like
02:14:50
trace of like running out of energy, right? Running out of oxygen. Uh I think that's what some mental illnesses feel
02:14:58
like. And there's very interesting data showing that if you inject people with a
02:15:03
signal of energetic stress, lactate, you can trigger a panic attack. You're not messing with the brain there.
02:15:11
You're not like, you know, kind of doing something to the to neurochemistry. What
02:15:16
you're doing is you're injecting the human body with a signal that the mitochondria can't keep up with energy
02:15:22
flow. You're tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance has just been jacked up to very high levels. This
02:15:29
feels like anxiety. And people with traumatic memories like post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, the simple
02:15:36
injection of an energetic stress signal of lactate in the blood can reawaken traumatic memories. So there's this
02:15:42
emerging notion in psychiatry called met in metabolic psychiatry uh where people
02:15:46
understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain. And what I think
02:15:51
is is happening in those kind of chronic state of of ill-being, right? where people don't feel themselves, they don't
02:15:56
feel well, they you know the hypervigilance, anxiety. Uh it's quite likely at this point I think that part
02:16:02
of that is driven by energy not flowing properly and then the body just lives at
02:16:06
high energy resistance all the time. And there's data directly measuring energy resistance in the brain from a group
02:16:12
MLAN in in Harvard uh and then lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness and this marker GDF-15
02:16:19
also is elevated in mental illness. And so the cure again or the the thing to ease that is all the lifestyle factors
02:16:26
that we talked about purpose and you know check we've covered that ground. >> Yeah life changes you know changing your
02:16:32
life circumstances that's really hard to do. Uh exercising seems to help a lot of
02:16:36
people but a lot of people don't feel they have the capacity to exercise. Uh and ketones seem to be a lifesaving for
02:16:44
some people. going on a ketogenic diet and I've met now dozens of individuals whose lives were crushed by you know
02:16:52
schizoffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and they were treatment resistant right
02:16:58
meaning like the phicotherapy the drugs that they were given were not helping in
02:17:02
some cases were making things worse uh with like difficult side effects and then they changed her diet cutting all
02:17:09
sugars and they went on a ketogenic diet medical ketogenic therapy Uh and then they started to monitor
02:17:16
ketones and many people reported you know that this was life-changing like first the first thing they many people
02:17:23
notice is they have more energy. The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone. >> Mhm.
02:17:28
>> We don't know why. And the same way that we're all different, we all respond differently to
02:17:34
even medications, right, that are supposed to work the same for everyone. We have a science of averages. Like the
02:17:41
science that we use to get knowledge to inform our lives is almost entirely a science of averages. Meaning like all of
02:17:48
the studies we do like the the highest gold standard studies we consider to be RCTs randomized control trials. These
02:17:56
RCTs if you run an RCT what you do is you take let's say a thousand people then you randomize half 500 into this
02:18:02
group normal diet and then 500 into ketogenic diet. And then you say great now let's look at their depressive
02:18:08
symptoms right or or their anxiety symptoms and then you have them on the diet for two months and then after you
02:18:15
assess and then you compare the groups right you lump 500 human beings together and you say what's the average
02:18:20
depression or anxiety symptoms in this in these 500 people then you average these people together and then you group
02:18:26
them and then you compare means >> and I guess the other important point here is gender which is so many of these
02:18:32
studies were skewed towards men uh in many cases and that doesn't apply to women a lot of the time. And this is
02:18:39
part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health is because we're just now
02:18:43
discovering that, you know, once upon a time scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything
02:18:49
just applied >> but actually we're entirely different. And so >> this averages thing, you also need to
02:18:54
think about the nuances of like who, gender, where they're from, their biology, their DNA. You just said that
02:18:58
you you get the skinny fat thing or the visceral fat, whatever. I don't get that.
02:19:02
>> Mhm. But if we were doing an average of like three people, >> maybe we'd come to a conclusion based on
02:19:07
me and me and the other person who was like me, but that wouldn't apply to you. >> Yeah. And that's really problematic.
02:19:13
Like all of the the health recommendations that we have and the the way drugs get approved uh and the way we
02:19:20
determine whether a drug is useful or not for disease X or or Y is by comparing groups. And whenever you you
02:19:26
peel the surface of a clinical study of an RCT, you find some people like are amazing responders and they're cured.
02:19:33
They don't have symptoms. And then some people don't respond. These are called non-responders. And then some people get
02:19:38
worse. >> The most commented thing across the videos you featured on um and the most
02:19:43
passionate thing uh the most urgent thing according to the the people that were watching your work that they wanted
02:19:49
to ask you was about longcoid mefs. I'm not sure what that is. and fibromyalgia.
02:19:57
Um, for patients with me, CFS, and you'll have to explain to me what that is, or long COVID, the standard advice
02:20:03
given is to exercise for metitochondrial health. Um, but for them, it often triggers severe crashes. What is
02:20:10
happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken and how can these individuals safely rehabilitate
02:20:16
their mitochondria without causing further damage? >> Yeah, that's a really tough problem. And
02:20:24
>> this was the most repeatedly the most liked, the most commented thing on your
02:20:28
videos >> because these people are suffering and they're just not being given answers, I
02:20:32
guess. >> Yeah. In the US there's an estimated like 3 to 5 million people who have
02:20:37
either myalgic and sephil ancilitis uh chronic fatigue syndrome, ME/CFS or you know longcoid version of this. Uh in the
02:20:47
UK it's somewhere between like two and three million I think. And then worldwide there's 20 24 million people
02:20:53
have these syndromes, right? >> What are the symptoms for someone that hasn't experienced it? What are the
02:20:58
symptoms that they're experiencing? >> Chronic fatigue, >> just always being sort of tired and low
02:21:03
energy. Feeling low energy. >> Yeah. Feeling low energy um is is an experience, right? So it's you go to
02:21:10
your doctor say I feel so tired and then you look in the blood works, everything's fine. But so there's a
02:21:14
disconnect between what we know how to measure biochemically and then what the person is experiencing. We don't have a
02:21:20
good understanding of the connection between the biology and the biochemistry in the blood and even process in the
02:21:27
brain and how people feel. So there's a disconnect here and uh ME/CFS you know chronic fatigue uh long COVID these
02:21:35
people have been a little bit ostracized uh from the medical you know community because doctors are are really stuck uh
02:21:43
they have the these patients which are really difficult you know patients to to deal with. first they don't know what's
02:21:49
wrong with them and second they don't have tools to help them get better uh and and then the classical thing is well
02:21:55
exercise but then many of these people when they exercise they actually get worse and and there's some studies that
02:22:01
show increased inflammation so those signals of energy resistance increase energy friction in the body uh go up
02:22:08
after exercise in a normal person in these people with chronic fatigue it seems like they can skyrocket and then
02:22:14
that leads to this postexertional malaise Right? We talked earlier about how the
02:22:20
marker of energetic stress GDF-15 can go to the brain and make you feel sick, right? Or make you feel, you know,
02:22:25
nauseous or, you know, tired. Other cytoines from the immune system when you're sick, uh, when you're fighting an
02:22:31
infection do the same thing. The best study on on mitochondria and chronic fatigue syndrome was published last year
02:22:37
or the year before and it showed that there is a deficiency in energy transformation in the mitochondria, the
02:22:45
muscle. They took muscle biopsies, little piece of muscle from the from the quad, from the the thigh. And then they
02:22:50
looked at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome flow energy. And what
02:22:55
they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can't flux energy properly, you should feel like
02:23:01
you don't have the capacity to push right to exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have you lower
02:23:08
mitochondrial energy transformation capacity? We don't know. There are so many stories and I' I've been curious
02:23:15
and interested about this uh and I remember uh this uh family friend who came for dinner uh one night and she uh
02:23:24
she was asking me what do you work on and what do you do and so I tell her we work on mitochondria and psychobiology
02:23:29
mitochondrial psychobiology how the mind and the body relate you know energetically and she said well I have
02:23:35
an interesting story for you I said okay what's the story I used to have chronic
02:23:39
fatigue syndrome so I I perked up I was like what happened. She was visibly an energetic person. She didn't it didn't
02:23:45
look like she had, you know, an issue with energy. So, she said, uh, she was in her 20s and she had like she was
02:23:52
debilitated. She couldn't work and, you know, she lived in this place and, you know, her life would kind of, you know,
02:23:58
completely upside down because she didn't have energy to do anything, which is, I think, a common story. and
02:24:04
she was in bed like multiple hours, you know, every day and struggling to go get
02:24:08
groceries and everything was a drag about life. And then one summer, uh, this guy from Hawaii, which was a friend
02:24:15
of a friend, came over, uh, for the for the summer just to for a little trip and
02:24:20
they had an affair. She had a boyfriend and this was a long time that she that she had had a, you know, a human
02:24:27
connection like this. So you're saying >> I I'm not saying what what end what ended up happening is
02:24:34
she said my chronic fatigue kind of lifted and I didn't have to do anything and then after that summer she never had
02:24:40
chronic fatigue again uh and she kind of reintegrated the normal life. I don't know what the lesson is here. I don't
02:24:47
know if there's a generalizable principle, but there's a lot of those stories where people end up in a really
02:24:52
dark place in their life and either they're diagnosed with the mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome
02:24:57
or with kind of a somato, you know, psychossematic, you know, label or whatever that is, there's always kind of
02:25:05
precipitating conditions. Uh sometimes it's in response to medical interventions like immunization.
02:25:11
Sometimes it's in response to uh you know an infection or like a parasite >> mold and stuff like that. I know some
02:25:17
people have like mold poisoning or whatever and they get >> yeah very often there's like a trigger.
02:25:22
There's like sometimes a lingering kind of condition and then sometimes there's an acute trigger and the body is never
02:25:29
able to fully recover. So what do we take from that you know story of a of a summer fling?
02:25:35
>> Well I I take from it hope. >> Yeah. that you know even when the cards seem to be stacked against you and it
02:25:41
feels like you might have to live with this thing for a long time that in many cases miraculous things happen that defy
02:25:47
the odds and hope itself I think can keep us in an optimistic mind mindset >> I've seen this in patients with
02:25:53
mitochondrial diseases as well you know these people are diagnosed with the genetically defined mitochondrial
02:25:58
disease their mitochondria can't flow energy properly so every day they live probably with this kind of discomfort of
02:26:05
you know holding your breath for too long >> and Everything's difficult about life.
02:26:08
Many of them lose hope. And and when you see them losing hope, they start to go downhill physically and many of them die
02:26:15
very early. The people who do the best like their mitochondria don't work the way they should, but they they're able
02:26:22
to find something that they love. They're able to, you know, find an expression for for themselves. And
02:26:27
they're have supportive family. Almost a universal theme for people who do well is they have a supportive, you know,
02:26:34
environment. And cultivating this is is so precious. And that brings us back maybe to social connections. You know,
02:26:40
you energetic process, me energetic process. When we interact, you know, through um through sounds and and you
02:26:49
know, physically shaking hands and uh and I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine. And then, you
02:26:55
know, we we might vibe and resonate and and then maybe you know, you find someone and you feel love for that
02:26:59
person. I think love is the experience of resonance, right? And and when you feel that with someone, it feels so
02:27:05
special. >> Which goes back to the affair point. >> Yeah. Maybe >> maybe >> on this point of exercise which we
02:27:11
talked about earlier, if someone wants to maximize mitochondrial biogenesis, what is the sweet spot for training? Is
02:27:17
it strictly zone 2 cardio or highintensity interval training or resistance training or something else?
02:27:22
Is there like an optimal type of training? >> Yeah, I think the key principle here is
02:27:27
anything that will make you breathe harder. >> Yeah. >> Means that your mitochondria are working
02:27:31
harder. >> Okay. But you don't want to do it too long >> if you're not trained, right? Like
02:27:35
you're regular guy. I'm not trained now. I I I I run for like 20 minutes every other day. That's my, you know, routine.
02:27:43
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
02:27:49
and I try to run a marathon, I'm going to injure myself. You know, I'm going to hurt myself. So that would be too much
02:27:55
for me. And so I think that comes back to the point of like feeling into your energy. We call this mitoception right
02:28:02
feeling into your mitochondria and what's sustainable. So I think there's an individualized you know stance that
02:28:08
we need to take towards this. And the last question from the audience was right now mitochondrial health feels a
02:28:15
bit invisible. Are there any accessible reliable tests like ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers that a normal person
02:28:24
can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function. >> Working on it. >> You're working on it.
02:28:29
>> Yeah. So our team is working on it. Uh and so we're building uh a platform, a
02:28:34
technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria to mito, right? So do you feel your
02:28:41
energy through your mitochondria? Uh and then you can make better decisions like
02:28:44
ketogenic diet, is this helping you? Is this not helping you? Uh this new relationship, is this sucking away your
02:28:49
energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new, you know, direction in life. Um there's so much I
02:28:57
mean all of the important decisions we make really you know we make what how we feel like you wake up in the morning and
02:29:05
either you feel great and you can change things or you wake up and and you don't
02:29:09
want to be here. Uh that's an experience and before you get there you know on the
02:29:14
dark side there's all of these decision points that that we face and the power of discernment right and what we talked
02:29:22
about like with Steve Jobs like this is the way and then you know you feel strong about this discerning what's
02:29:28
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
02:29:32
make you know with our guts and there are many people who who swear that this is the only way they make decisions and
02:29:39
if they make decisions rational definitely that ends up biting them in the butt because I think the this thing
02:29:45
and this energetic system is the most sensitive instrument that we have to know whether
02:29:52
the content of our lives is aligned with who we are as individuals and that requires that we feel into this
02:30:00
movement and into our sensations and into um the experiences we have. So that's the the barometer that really
02:30:07
guides us through life like a GPS, an energetic GPS. >> Dr. Martin, we have a closing tradition
02:30:14
on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
02:30:18
And the question that has been left for you is, what is the most difficult thing
02:30:24
you ever overcame and how did it make you the person you are today? So, I just felt my energy change.
02:30:39
>> I saw it change. >> I felt like this sinking feeling about a year ago. Um, my fiance and I
02:30:48
were expecting a baby and we were about 3 months into the pregnancy and it was great. We were
02:30:58
excited. Um we were calling this new life new life and we talked you know affectionately about it and we said like
02:31:06
you know when new life comes this and we both have a child and um and she was in Canada she came back
02:31:14
and then uh and that evening in in bed she had this like crazy pain that started and
02:31:23
uh and we were about super scared. there was a bit of bleeding and then and then
02:31:27
the contraction started to come really fast. Not supposed to happen at 3 months. Um and then I was like, "Oh,
02:31:34
maybe this is just like a bump in the road and and you know, things are going to be fine."
02:31:39
Um so we ended up having a miscarriage and na didn't want to go to the hospital. So we did this at home and it
02:31:49
was terrible. It was really, really sad, really, you know, gut-wrenching. So, we were were both devastated when,
02:31:57
you know, New Life us and and then I had this moment of like, why me? Like, why the this has happened to
02:32:05
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 partner, good
02:32:14
um, you know, leader. I try to Yeah. Why is this happening to me? So, this was like this victim, you know, mentality,
02:32:21
mindset. And I've learned through my 40 or so years that I think a a useful stance to take in life is to assume that
02:32:31
there's something to learn from everything you go through. >> I don't know this for sure. It's not a a
02:32:37
scientific fact. It's more of a of an experience turned into kind of a way of of living, more of a belief.
02:32:46
So I was like, but how could there be something to learn from something so terrible?
02:32:50
Um, and I had to sit with this and two days later after the baby had gone and N Rosha and I had sat in the shower and
02:33:00
cried and the smell was horrible and just it would death like death was around us around me and I felt angry and
02:33:08
I felt sad. Um, and I just sat down and wrote I I just and that's my way now of letting
02:33:16
things flow. Different people have different ways and and I was writing about my experience and why now and and
02:33:25
I asked what is there to learn from this and a very clear answer came up slowing
02:33:32
down and that hit really hard because throughout my whole life I've moved pretty quickly through life. I had a
02:33:44
very short, you know, PhD. Then I became a professor very quickly and uh and grew
02:33:51
a team and um and like moving fast is kind of something that's like a personality trait that I I do. And uh
02:33:59
and I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that it would not have been possible
02:34:03
otherwise. But at other times I think it's hurt me. And it's like this drive, this inner drive like things must happen
02:34:11
now, must move fast. I think has hurt other people around and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader
02:34:17
because I then maybe I lacked sensit sensitivity to other people who don't move at my pace. Uh so slowing down
02:34:26
really kind of um hit home. Things were like clear. It was like looking at a canvas and
02:34:34
there was more contrast. >> Like the things that really mattered were like sharper, right? and all of
02:34:40
this other like these obligations and these things that I had said yes to or like you know the contrast was so
02:34:48
much sharper. Um and this lesson I I took this as a lesson slowing down I think has allowed me to be a better
02:34:57
listener to be a better you know more compassionate father and uh scientist uh I think it's changed me and I don't
02:35:07
know that I would have learned that lesson in another way we are the this energetic
02:35:15
process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences and the people we meet like I'll never be the same after today from
02:35:22
having sat with you at this table and you opening the door not just to scientific inquiry but to human
02:35:29
experience yeah the we we change all the time we transform and what shapes us is those
02:35:38
kind of energetic interactions and um yeah everything we go through >> well I'll never be the same either for
02:35:48
for I think all the best reasons. I'm you know I have to say that I'm I'm >> I'm I'm hesitating my words here because
02:35:55
of the gratitude that you've taken from the wisdom that it's given you. But I'm terribly sorry that that hap you had to
02:36:02
go through that. I can only I just can't imagine. It's one of my honestly it's like one of my like worst nightmares
02:36:06
especially at the season of life I'm in when me and my partner and my fiance are
02:36:09
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
02:36:14
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
02:36:20
really it's really difficult to hear. Um >> it happens to about 20 million people a
02:36:25
year. >> Most people don't talk about it either, do they? Cuz >> people don't talk about it.
02:36:28
>> Yeah. Cuz it's shrouded in mixed emotions and >> Yeah, I can understand that.
02:36:33
>> Y >> but I am better off for having this conversation with you. And I think you
02:36:39
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
02:36:43
learned so much. which has actually kind of like completely rechanged how I think
02:36:46
about life itself, which is a weird thing. >> And I hope I can just sit in this moment
02:36:49
a little bit and think about how I am energy and how >> how that's determining everything um
02:36:55
around me and others and and it's um it's really really wonderful. I think what you know what
02:37:01
you're doing people might think of you as like a mitochondrial scientist, but actually it's much more deeper and much
02:37:06
more philosophical than that. When we think about what energy is to us, it's it is everything. M and that's really
02:37:11
the lens that you've given me today is you've completely changed my mind on like how I think about life which is
02:37:15
such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast. I don't say this like I don't kiss people people's asses like this
02:37:19
like I genuinely my mind is like hell. >> It's also changed how I think about business which is really weird and
02:37:24
unexpected. Um, >> business is is an extension of of us of, you know, energetic >> like everything is what I've learned
02:37:33
today >> quite literally. >> And it's also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, aim my energy.
02:37:41
Um, so Dr. Martin Picard, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your generosity
02:37:46
and your wisdom. It's not very often that I have conversations that actually like instantly cause the shift in me,
02:37:51
but this is one of them today. If people want to learn more about you and the work you're doing, where do we channel
02:37:58
that energy, >> where do they go? >> The best place for people to go is a website martinpicard.energy.
02:38:04
>> Okay. >> And then from this website, you'll see information about the book. You'll see
02:38:09
information about the research core energetic principles that cover what we've covered today. There are little
02:38:15
animations and there's information about the institute. >> Okay. Thank you so much.
02:38:19
>> Thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what
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