Personal Lessons from Loss

I've had many leading experts on this show, including Matthew Walker, and they've all said the same thing about sleep. They've said it's the biggest positive investment you can make in your own performance. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're consistently tired, poor decision making will follow and eventually cause other things to fail in your life. So if you're looking to optimize your recovery, you should start looking at what you're sleeping on Our sponsor, Helix, makes high quality mattresses tailored to your body. It doesn't matter if you run hot, sleep on your side, or need something firm. Helix has a mattress for you. And I asked them recently to send one to a member of my team, and Juan received it. And we travel a lot. So when he's home, quality sleep really matters. And he told me he's getting the best sleep of his life. and the data backs it up with eighty two percent of people in a Helix study saying they saw an increase in their deep sleep. And with a one hundred and twenty night trial, you've got four months to prove it to yourself. You can get twenty seven percent off at helixleep. com slash diary. That's helixleep d. com slash diary. This is incontrovertible evidence that grain of hair is reversible and it can be pretty fastow And there's more. So we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like for example, if you have marijuana six months ago, it's going be in your hair I' get hcku So my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person's life, would this young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process. So what is the secret to anti aging It's the proper allocation of energy ex what's the simplest way you can explain that to me? So first, energy is real and it's the difference between feeling like you can change the world or feeling completely drained A lot of people live on that end of the spectrum. And it's because there's a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. For example, we did an experiment because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future to ruminate about yesterday. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by sixty percent, right? So it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep young So it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And the third piece is this energy is in your mitochondria. And there's about five thousand trillion mitochondria in your body. And so they made our bodies possible and they can change how you feel I read that studies on brains of dead people found that those with greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. Yes. We are really in service of the mitochondria. They allow us to be alive. Okay, I've got so many questions for you based on what people wanted to know. likeike how patients with MMI, chronic fatigue or long COVID safely rehabilitate their mitochondria What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy If reed light therapy impacts mitochondria, and is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance think there's increased energy resistance and cancer in Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So is there anything I can do? There is. So we can start by I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, The most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. but also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you listing to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much Martin Pickard What is it that you believe know or understand that most people there. They't believe know or understand We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing for the body And And that sounds a little woo if you don't have context And that's something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to understand to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes. In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they Listen to this subject of energy I think people want to understand What is energy? and how can I have more energy I can relate to that because sometimes, you know, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing And I really have, in my view, done the same thing But then sometimes I wake up and I don't feel amazing. And it feels kind of like roulete like this sort paqu mystery of how do I wake up on with more days in a row and feel Amazing. likeike I can take on the world And then there's also some friends that I have who are suffering with different things, whether it's chronic illness or long COVID or whatever, who repeatedly wake up and feel low energy for years, you know, at a time It's a really tough to be When you wake up repeatedly and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world, it's a really tough place to be And who are you? and why Did you commit your life to this subject I'm a regular guy who with you lived experiences, who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious. And then I became a scientist. and as I learned the tools of science, I started to see and I discovered mitochondria. I thought this is an approach to start to bridge What's true about the human experience that we know from first experience empirically. And we know it to be real not because you know some white coat wearing doctor or scientist you just said, yes, energy is real. it's in your might a contjure it. We know it to be real from first experience Because we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, and about health and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. So I became a scientist bridge those domains of existence the science and the experience. So I've led a research group at Columbia University for ten years and founded an institute to really build the systems and technologies to help people grow, heal and transform. You have a PhD in mitochondria? Y. My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging I mean, there's an image here in front of me. someome people will just be 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 And it kind of looks like a looks a little bit like an alien But I read that this video was quite formative for you. What is that video? and why was that formative moment in your career I took this video in England, a newew castle upon Tne in the north of England with my Gordity, friends A the medical school there I was a graduate student and went there for kind of an exchange. and this is the first time I saw mitochondria moving I saw like the inner life of ourselves And when I saw this, somethingomet struck me as like, o my God I'm able to see this. Right? And to see living mitochondria because of The mighta con you're inside me It's the energy that's flowing through my mitochondria in my eye R? That's allowing me to perceive to see this Mitochondriia made multicellular life possible. They made our bodies possible, and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living So when I saw this like, this is myochondria, I looking at myochondria And then I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transforming energy. What they're known for is they take the food you eat And then they take the oxygen that you breathe in. And then those two things, the food, the oxygen, that converge inside the mitochondria. And then something really special happens. The electrons that are stuck on food that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere, photosynthesis. What your mitochondjura do is they kind of unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one, and then they flow them like little electrical circuit And that happens in like the five thousand trillion mitochondry that are in your body And then when the electrons flow, they need to flat toward something, just like in an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from one pole of the battery to theative to the other pole of the battery. And that circuit close in the mitoc Cchure So the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe and then it becomes water And and it's that vital flow of energy, electrons flowing towards oxygen. allows us to be alive. And mitochondria do this. and then as they do this, they transform energy from food, biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat. And the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria, as they transform and flow electrons, like a little energetic circuit, they release heat So the source of heat, right that makes us warm, you shake some's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling their warm from their might ofchry So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body There's On average, a thousand mitochondria per cell P c, thousand like. So how many is there in my body About five thousand trillion. Who should care about the mitochondria and why should they care about it? Anyone who cares about their energy? right? about having enough energy to do what they really care about We all care about different things. We're all gifted and talented for different things Everyone has this, you know, unique authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out And the only way for a person to flourish is through energy If there's no energy flowing through your body or death R? And if the energy doesn't flow efficiently, right and smoothly through you as an organism. Th life feels hard, like you're not at your best. You feel tired and you feel like You know, maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're sick and your immune system is like draining all of your energy It's really hard to be optimistic And it's hard to be a good person And it's hard to be a good dad And it's hard to want to do good for the world if you're struggling with energy You what it is. so many of us think that That just is what it is, and that we can do nothing about that You know, we breathe in, we eat food and then how we feel is kind of roulette There's this certain, I think, feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much Where do we need to start to understand? Because the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So where does one have to start? I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff, like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy. Yeah. So there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works in the human body. One is that you are the energy that's flowing through this body. I am the energy that's flowing through my body. Yes. So I'm not my body. You're not your body. Okay. I'm the energy flowing through it. You, Stephen This expression now that I'm getting to experience. Thank you This expression is an expression of the flow of energy If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain You wouldn't be Right? You'd be a caver And we'd say Stehen is gone. Yeah A dead body. Yeah, you'd be a dead body. The difference between a dead body, a candaver and a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person, who cares is the flow of energy Okay. You get so indoctrinated in this worldview that the only thing that's real is the physical stuff and You know, theuclear the genes that you got from your parents and the body, the physical body and that's the real stuff. What you can't see with your eyes, not real right? That's a reframe that's kind of a bigger picture mindset shift that we need to and scientists struggle with. So number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms Uh through this body. Number two is There's a fixed energy budget Right? All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with and And for example, if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to you know, be more creative The solution is not eating more because there's this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it's really hard on the system And then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, right? And then the system starts to overheat. U So inflammation is this that's overheating. There's too much energy in the system. and O the cells are burning too much energy and they need to kind of. tell other cells that's those signals we call inflammation, cytokines So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with. And over time the organism does a lot of finesing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget. And that's somewhat linked to stress, I guess, which is I read your work and it talked about how stress was basically just like an over consonsumption of energies. It's requiring loads and loads and loads of energy.. OkayK, we'll talk about that too then because I think stress is a really important one. What's the third? The third one is Life is resistance In order to be alive, in order to grow, to learn, to transform, right, change your views, you need resistance to go through some resistance. You need energy to go through some resistance If energy just flows and there's no zero resistance There's no possible transformation if life was always easy and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life, then It would just remain as is. right? And it would be very boring Fr first principles physics, like we know this to be true, know at a number of levels, but for example, the sun, this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky shoots energy, right? as photons So light is a form of energy. And as long as light You know, just goes and Photons travels in outer space Photon will remain photon Light energy will remain light energy Pill Light energy hits a green leaf Right And the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it offers a constraint. It offers resistance So when light energy faces resistance, now it can be converted. That's the basis of making food That's how nature makes food. It crystallizes energy from sunlight into molecules. Life, you know, plants crystallize light energy into carbohydrates And then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat We need resistance for energy to transform into something meaningful. So what has the mitochondria got to do with all of this? Mitochondria are basically a little resistors Right? And they are what allows the flow of energy through the system Have you got a picture of? Okay, here we go. Yeah. Okay, so this is a An image of a mitochondria I might have conry un. Oh N is a singular. mitochondria is plural.. So this is a mitochondriion and there's about a thousand of these in each of your cells Okay, And there's about five trillion cells in your body that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here these little wings, these are called Christi. And the Kristy is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen you breathe end up as well So this is where the electrons are flowing. There's like little electrical circuits here And as the electrons are flowing, M a country become charged like little batteries So effectively a mitoc conion like this, has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and food consumption. and then that gets transformed into a little charge battery And once the battery is charged, the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP adenosine triphosphate, which is kind of the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract, right? A muscle cell wants to contract in the gym, it needs ATP So it calls upon the mitochondria says, I need ATP and then the mitochondria gets to work and then flows electrons consumes her food burn some oxygen that's why you get out of breath So when you get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen. What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP. Okay. They use their their energized state produce signals. to receive information and then to produce signals. Oh so they're talking to each other. They're talking to each other. What are they saying? It's a whole collective and they're talking to each other, kind of monitoring what's happening not only inside the cell, but outside the cell On the surface of mitochondia all along there are little receptors for all sorts of signals that tells this mitocchondion, Is there enough energy? Isn't there are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for, you know, something dangerous? Uh so mitochondria like like a little distributed brain Right, so they're like the intracellular brain Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria? They were. Yeah they did What is that story? Beause I think someone said that to me people before on the show that our miter country are actually bacteria at that from prehistoric times or something. So the story is about one point five billion years ago that there was Two different types of bacteria One type was able to use oxygen transform energy, right? So it could fuel on oxygen and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anaerobic anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a few more genes And it could only ferment its food and kind of fermenting the food, spitting out, you know, like lactate or like yeast does and What happened is the big one either engulfed the small one or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized the big one. And the story goes that This basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell One perspective and then with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity The version I favor based on the evidence we have is that when mitochondria came in and then there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. Maybe the coming of mitochondria into this big cell madeade the big cell social Because before this event, most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria foraging for themselves And, you know, kind of operating from a very selfish perspective, just trying to replicate, you know, trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it like gave those cells a different view on life. and then they're like, wh, we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right? And I become a cell that moves, right? So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle And then then together those two cells can do a lot more, right? And fast forward a couple of billion years and here we are. Here we are, yeah And that led to bodies with organs. know, the liver feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, The brain kind of computes and plans So that's division of labor. And it started with the Mer country You talked about energy resistance. I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance C mean a disease that's linked to energy resistance The clearest is what we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Diabetes affects millions in the world Fundamentally diabetes is a disease of energy resistance So if the resistance is too high because because you have U Too much energy pushed underto the system. Sugar, T much sugar, glucose. Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria or impaired, right? And they can't flow energy Then the the energy is kind of stuck. It faces Ger constraints. It wants to go in that direction, but then there's a barrier and then another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing, right nice and and and smooth and there's like a damn Right? And if the dam has zero openings, right? Th the water accumulates and then there's high pressure. and then at some point the water accumulates and ends up flooding the landscape and then damaging things So it's a bit like the same thing if Now you open floodgates on the dam Th then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example, you use the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do And if you move and you're physically active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, right then speed, into movement, right into lifting. Is this linked to Csor all So guess. It sounds I mean, I don't know much about cancer, but cells dividing out of control seemingly randomly. Yeah. I think there's a very good chance if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer, There's like a ten item flywheel of these are the core features of cancer. All of those features have some relationship, some very direct with increased energy resistance So if energy can't flow smoothly and a cell is burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria, which is what cancer cells do. Cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral you know, cell that didn't have mitochondria. It was anaerobic. It was pitting out And we don't really know why cells do this. It's called the Warburg effect And the Wbg effect is when a cell in the presence of oxygen, right? If it wanted could use oxygen, flow electrons who mitochondria and transform energy and live a nice social life like every cell in this social colloective does in the body What cancer cells do is they say, I'm not going to use my mitochry. Even if there's oxygen, even if my mitochondria can respire you And by doing this It seems like cancer cells revert back to this ancestral So, right? that that just cares about itself. antiso social cell. Yeah, then the organism and the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it It's called Ngiogenesis So it's like the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. bring me more oxygen. So It's kind of like there's this sort of 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 selfish and demand more and more resources for itself And it multiplies this self with equally selfish little aliens And then the body responds by Listening to it and giving it more resources, is that what you're saying? Why do the blood vessels surround a cancer? Yeah, it's the cancer calling for, you know more energy. Okay So energy resistance is the product of two things is how much energy is being demanded Like how much power is being deployed in the tumor, for example, or in the working muscle. And then how much energies can flow through the system That's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system So if there's a lot of demand, R A lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but there's not Enough flow. to support that activity then that increases resistance So is there any understanding as to how thoseose kind of cancces Like what courseus is that moment where, you know, you talked about the Wahlberg effect es that The cancer community used to thing that The main driver for cancer was genetic mutations But there's an emerging perspective. Changes in metabolism, changes in the way electrons flow through through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria can actually drive the instance of a new cancer cell And then when a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its mitochondria. It goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself. And it tries not to die. Explain that part to me because I was reading about how cancer cells try to evade death Yeah, the best way to think about this, I think, is as a social collective Right every cell in this organism cares about the same thing, which is preserving the life and the health of the whole being. right? So every cell in this body is in a social contract with every other cell A cancer cell basically gets out of this agreement and says, no, no, I'm going to fare for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can and I'm going to make more of myself and it goes into, know bacterial mode That happens sometimes because of mutations and it seems like there are other causes it this like, for example, hyperglycemia. What's that? High blood glucose. Right? Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that I don't think there are good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of of disease and, you know, the genetic mutation perspective Um, If you look at cancer from an energetic perspective, and it's I think likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure, right? There's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells to those mitochondria And when you push too much energy on a system that doesn't need energy, it's like you're trying to shove you know a lot of water through a very small pipe. Something goes wrong. Yeah, somethingomet goes wrong. Something can break U So the resistance is if you push a lot of energy into a very small, you know container or into a channel that can support that. then what happens kind of physically is an increase in the resistance to the flow And then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself That's what insulin resistance is and diabetes Right Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism too much glucose being onto the cell. R? And so that causes this excess, you know, energy coming in. the cells says,, you know, too much and it damages a mitochondria, this excess resistance because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. I was thinking about smoking And how smoking also is carcogenic, it's cancer causing. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be Hance are casing Yeah It's clear that in cigarette smoke, there're carcinogens. They're molecules that can damage the genome and cosmutations there's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking. But for all of the other cancers, there's much less of a clear connection between exposure and cancer Right The cancerers that affect and kill Most people Uh, we don't really know you know why they come, when they come And it's clear that there's kind of a long history. And The science behind you know, connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and High blood glucose and diabetes, especially which causes very high know excursion, have very high spikes in blood glucose, those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says Biology processes energy in terms of resistance and it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now? and then how much How much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to And if there's an imbalance then that causes damage Rather than being innocent bystanders, mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor reprograms them to stop acting like the body's protective energy factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising frontier in developing new cancer therapies It hijacks the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells A normal cell is driven it's behavior it's driven by the mitochondia It's like mitochondria are in the driver's se Right, mitochondria can basically call the shots. is the cell to live and divide Right? or is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell or if it's a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell or is it to die And cells have to make these decisions all the time. and cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective, and then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours. Let's get rid of it, right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well But what cancer cells can do is say, okay, they ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth. And by ditching their mitochondria, they basically immunize themselves against the death that mitochondria could trigger So might have gone to have a veto on cell life or death and cancer somehow is able to kind of get away from that And it's weir to think about, because, yeah, the things that are cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like You know As you said, M having too much of this stuff here much sug. white stuff. Yes. H blood glucose levels, etcer are linked to cancer. And one would wonder why Eating sugar in excess is going to increase my probability of cancer But obviously it points to the fact that It must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of malfunction somewhere.. What the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with Excess energy The body has to deal with this. and in a simple electrical system, circuit if you jacked up you know, the voltage and the system is too weak to take this, then resistance goes through the roof, the transistors start to melt and then the system you know, gets gets damaged. The same thing happens, you know, in the body. If you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons R, Ver direct parallel with the electrical circuit. There are electrons stuck here on these low glucose molecules. If you ingest this, now it increases the voltage in the body. And then if the mitochondria can't keep up and because they're not flowing energy because you're sedentary, you're not moving Um then that increases the resistance And then they might die or malfunction worse Things get damaged, right The clear connection here is too much energy, increased energy resistance. So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right from the food to your mitochondria. then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you're an electron and you're trying to go through the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and a mitochondion, but then at every point in this cascade, you face resistance, there is more chance that that electron kind of jets out and And that becomes oxive stress. Well, then what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me I may have two different cololors of hair Now let's just pretend for argument's sake and for the sake of this explanation that this is someone's hair that's gone grreay. because of stress And this is what she used to look like or he used to look like in terms of the color of the hair What I found really interesting because it kind of speaks to Lots of things that are going on in the body is you're saying you can actually reverse Gay hair Without dying it. And if so what does that tell us about what gray hair is, but more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria and everything in between Yeah what we discovered is that hair gang is reversible And that was surprising because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age, it's kind of this linear progressive decline and there's kind of nothing you can do about it. But it turns out that if you look on most people's head Um You can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were white and then all the hairs are dark. And if you take a hair like this tip here, right was inside the body longong time ago. This is almost like if you look at tree rings If you take a tree and you cut it then cross section, you see like the rings And then you can say, ooh, this ring was thirty years ago, right? And this ring is today So you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of the tree You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in this hair And that's why if you want to know if someone had a drug, for example, a month ago or six months ago or two years ago, depending how long the hair is, you can actually use the hair and all along would be you know, the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in the hair, you know, here but not here. So if you have marijuana, Six months ago, it's gonna to be in your hair and you're going to walk around with that trace, that physical trace in your body. I got hck I. And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head was H Dark, right. And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white, right? you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young. and then boom, it became old Right? It It lost color. Hair growing is a classic hallmark of aging. then we thought then you would know something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person's body, right? that made this young hair become old And then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process. So this became kind of an interesting scenario. And through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziplg bags, know over the mail. And we were looking for two colored hairs, a single hair that has two colors, kind of like this And we found hairs that you know, head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark And then it became white or the hair was white And he became dark again. So we had physical evidence from like Multiple people that showed white hairs can go back to being dark And this contradicted this idea that You know aging is this linear progressive process that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up plananting five hairs that had this pattern And when we looked at when the reversal happened We found that the reversal happened when I went on vacation And I would go back in those days on annual cycling training camps So I would go for a week where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep energy started to move very differently in my body during that time And then when we looked at The hair and we analyze the composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, It's all the same genome. right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs go like this or like that was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity likeike how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. And what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal And in the white here I thought there's going be less color, right? obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria. And there was an up regulation the body the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old. wasn't kind of letting go of things, it was doing more So That means during that period of time You were more stressed and using more energy. When cells become old, inststead of just dying, right? they struggle And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly, or for some reason, they accumulate damage you become old, the cell struggles to make more mitochondria and it tries to kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process So on that hair what you looked at, that was gray Let's call it It had more mitochondria because it was struggling And why was it struggling? It looks like stress hormones can you know make a cell struggle, for example. Cortisone Cortol, yes, if you're a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple. You don't have, you know the senses that you know we enjoy, but you do nevertheless us, you know sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal It means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous, right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to fight or there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolve to interpret cortisol in that way So we did an experiment in the dish, we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future Or how much energy is it cost to ruminate about yesterday? the thing you didn't do or the mistake you made at work or that conversation that went sideways, you know with your partner, how much energy is that cost to be thinking about this, to be, you know engaging your stress system be releasing in cortisol So students and aow, Gabrielle and Natalia did that experiment. We put cells in a dish you give them the equivalent of cortisol. How much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol a signaled that there might be something dangerous outside R? That's like, when you're sitting down, you get an email, you like, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract. And then you have this whole stress response. yourour heart starts to beat faster How much energy does that cost? So in cells in the dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure at the cost of life by sixty percent So when I'm stressed, I'm using sixty percent more energy theoretically. I don't know about you, but sells in addish. Okay. So the beauty about bodies and you know with the mind and you know this complex organism, they're buffering systems, right? So I don't think your energy expenditure increased by sixty percent if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat. What is that graph there So there are two graphs here. The top one is color of the hair. of a single hair from a young Asian woman who is part of the study. And what we see here, this is called a hair pigmentation pattern. the HPP that we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively, bring science to hair graying and reversal And so what you see here is this hair was dark And then it became white two centimeters and then boom. completely regained color. Actually regain, it was darker here than it used to be And then stay dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received in the mail as we were starting to collect two colored hairs And then when when we saw this, we had found from a few different people White hair that had regained color, we'd never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark R So I remember holding this hair I was like, o my God. This is in the same hair. this is incontrovertible evidence that grain of hair is reversible It can be pretty pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week And so this white hair completely white regained color in just about a week So then we developed an instrument, which was a simple sheet on the Y axis, the vertical is most stressful thing that ever happened to you. No stress at all ten and zero. And then the x ax is the horizontal was time. time Yes. On the far right is now Right? This is now, this is a year ago And then we labeled all the months And then we ask people then we ask this lady a dot on the graph that was the most stressful time in the past year. But anyone can do the exercise past your most stressful time. Okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot, right in March, number ten And then least stressful part zero and then put other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots you know along this last year, then connect the dots, right? The're red graph is her dots connected correlates perfectly to her hair going grreay. correct And what happened through her life? She said she finished her PhD thesis and She was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies. And then broke up with her boyfriend Oh damn it I went gray broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. She said these were the most stressful two months of my life There's a k of question here which is If that remains chronic Does that hair follicule go gray forever? If I go through a stressful period for two to three weeks and my hair goes a bit gray. As long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible Does that hair then return to black or dark Do you see what I'm saying? It seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible. But we know it know very well. If you have a full head of gray hair and you're seventy years old, you're not going to regain your color. Yeah. So there seems to what the model, the mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity R whereere a hair slowly accumulates damage, becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient. so there's more and more energy resistance. And then there's a barrier. And then when the hair hits that threshold, now it loses color. It's done. Yeah. But then if something changes in the body You go on vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair. Now it can be reversed, right? Because you can go back up Ganzap threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray again. And then if you're way way down, like this hair turned gray ten years ago and you go back up, you're too far away from threshold to regain color Okay. So it'sggest some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for something as binary as hair color. It's black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where where you can reverse hair. Yes I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think because you added a layer of nuance there which is about the mind Like if I go through my life with a more resilient mind And you get that bad email and you go And I get the baddy when I go fuck, he goes. Yeah Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those twenty four hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there's less cortisol. Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct So it's not the stress that burns us down It's the response to stress And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to be a little faster, if you mount a response to that email ? you're burn energy in your heart And then you're tensing you know your shoulder. That's burning energy. Now your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and and then the anxiety and then you start to sweat, like everything cost energy. So the chain of events is I get the email. It's a very bad email. says, you're fired, Stephen from the Diververs here, we found a different host.. I look at the email. That goes into my psychology, my mind I then have a story I tell myself about what b email means for me, my future, my children, whatever which then causes a physiological response of like less like cortisol. which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm Tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day is that sequence of events? I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point. Yes. Yes. That's right way to think about it. Don't open the laptop. Or like get a little bit better with bad news. Yeah. Or yeah, learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to feel and you know sit with Be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it become aware of it So you can kind of interrupt this and people who study contemplative practices and meditation and you know, mindfulness approaches I think many of them think this is kind of the key, right? The awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception So if you feel into your bodily' responses, you become free of do I mount a response? Is that needed now or not There's different types of stress, right? There's like the acute stress, which is just You get the email, you feel a little bit of a spike, but five minutes later, you're fine And then there's the more chronic type of stress where You wakeaking up every day with the same feeling of dress deep inside you for many, many days in a row, many weeks in a row.. I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful but it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body? And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained. How do I think about this resistance thing? 'cause I'm really struggling with like understanding it Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise. Yeah When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance. in your muscle You mus also contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance So the energy is trying to flow through the muscle. and then there's you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training Now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. And so that imbalance of demand to flow capacity Now the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance. Okay. So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your sprint, but you don't have a lot of mitochondria, right? it's going to feel terrible And then because the resistance creeps up, And then your muscle becomes really hot. and then eventually there's inflammation and then it burns and then it's uncomfortable. But then So that's like an acute bout of energy resistance. What happens with exercisees Once you recover, The benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise they happen after during the recovery So if you recover, now you the muscles are relaxing and you're resting, eventually you go, you know for you go to sleep. It's during the decrease in resistance, now the cell says Next time this happens, I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it R So I need I'm going to make more of my a country that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right to T train for a marathon You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles And that's the system feeling the rise in resistance. like I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy. and then adapting for this for the next time and said next time I'm going to be ready. let's make more mitochondria So that's probably what Where the benefits of exercise come from This sp and why stress is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run, makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. then you can go through life with less resistance. Coming back to this gray hair thing So if we consider gray hair, my hair going gray to be the last domino that fell the symptom. Then what is the first domino? And can you walk me through the sequence of events? becausecause one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events, I can also understand how to then reverse it. You had to kind of take I've got a couple of gray hairs now. And I actually anecdotally do think weirdly, and now you've said this that I have like Grey hair flower ups. where I'll go I'll, you know, go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something. and I' look in the miror andm like, what, I have twelve now? big generous there's one like twenty five. I have twenty five now. In terms of those domines, the symptom is grreay hair. What is the first domina that falls? And what is the sequence of events that leads to the grreay hair in the follleicule So there's a finite energy budget. and then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business, right? You have this budget, Do I put more energy here? Do I put more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here, right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young Right So there's There's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way You know, Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? Yeah. So Maslow's insight was , I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just I was Aute stress response. Yeah, I just got caght was off l. sorry Maslow's herarchy of needs. So there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that works similarly to Maslow's hierarchy needs. Maslow said for a human being to be fully realized, first, you need to have safety and food and shelter secured, right? Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people R loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. And then once you have this covered, now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, what do you call self actualization and kind of becoming your best self flourishing. So he saw this very much as a This is this needs to be covered and when If things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid write your meditation practice or long term type like I'm going to be a better person. No, like I need to make sure we can Put food on the table. Next week, right Um So this hierarchy of human needs, I think, aligns with hierarchy of energy needs in the body And as far as importance of hair color goes Pret low on the hierarchy As the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to be less efficient R? The mitochondria working a little, you know, less efficiently and And then there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy. and there's more of worries about you know professional obligations and all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there. We call them growth, maintenance, and repair. These are like the anti aging processes in the body and those need energy, but they're not as important as you know, facing the stressure that you think is life threatening now So if there's a lion chasing me, My body is going to commit all the energy I have to getting away from this lion and it might say, listen, Stehven We're not going to repair the skin next to your eyes, you're going to get a couple more wrinkles and we're not going to make we're not going ate energy to making sure your follcules in your hair produce black pigment or whatever. So I would then look aged, I would look old, older But that's because all of my energy's been going to something else which my body considered to be a high priority,. Which also brings me to, I guess The famous What we always talk about with presidents because presidents go into office often with dark hair and they come out with grreay hair And usually one does not age that quickly in eight years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic. And two years later, they have grreay hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged ten years. So you're telling me actually that the real secret to anti aging, if there was one Is this is the proper allocation of energy So if you don't waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things which is kind of a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti aging Can I also pour more energy in the top? Like can I just if I 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 hair follicles being black or gray? Yeah The thing is it doesn't look like we have the flexibility. L If you want to have more energy and you want to age moreore slowly eating more is not going to give you more energy. So is there anything I can do to have more energy available you can become more efficient. I can become more efficient, but I can't put more in. now How does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress, okay, I'm gonna live a less stressed life It seems like there's a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising Okay, right? Because when you exercise again, you're increasing energy resistance, uncomfortable, potentially you're damaging things, right because you're you're inccreasing what we call dissipative losses, right? oxive stress and all sorts of things happen during the Yeah during the exercise, but then when you recover Now the budody's like Next time this happens, I'm going to be ready. and The process of getting ready to go through a high resistance you gym session is that you make more mitochondria. Right? Y muscles get bigger and stronger and your heart becomes more efficient and your arteries, you know become more become softer and you develop, you know the confidence that you can do this well. And then it becomes rewarding. You know, it becomes enjoyable. So all of these things, now that you're off the gym session, right? You spent an hour in the gym 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 ready If there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to get ready for this is to become more efficient having more mitochondia by having a more fluid and kind of flexible cardiovascular system and by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation. All of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost of doing the activity And then there's more energy available for annti aging, growth, maintenance and repair, vitality So I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise. but you feel like you have more And you don't actually have more The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smootly through this thing. It's more efficient, I've got more mitochondria. Yeah. Okay What else What about food? and I've got I've got coffee here, I've got Senate cool here, I've got the sugar What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body? Yeah. G question. Alcohol. What we know about alcohol is that As we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology Right? So if you put Something in the body that shouldn't be there, effectively a toxin, like ethanol which is what's in there. It's going cost energy to get rid of it. So there are detoxification systems in your liver primarily that takes alcohol, breaks down the molecule and then you can pee it out, Or you metabolize it for energy even So there's a bunch of energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like shit Because what happens is you waste energy degrading the alcohol. Right? And even though it's a net plus, you're putting calories in the machine in the body , but what ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it. So there's a cool study where they brought people in, they gave them a bunch of alcohol. They're, you know, effectively drunk. and then they measured how much energy are they burning? And you can do those kind of studies. We've done those studies in the lab In a small room, you put a human being and then you just measure how much energy does it cost for them to stay alive R? And you ask them to not do too much in this smaller room, they're just sitting down and reading a book And then then you can ask them, okay, now drink this alcohol. And then you measure. you look, you minute by minute, they drink the alcohol and then you start to see, oh, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside under the hood, the body iss like burning energy to get rid of the alcohol. And other toxins probably work the same way. you know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating The reason why those things might be bad for her health may be because they steal energy away from, you know, a growing body, for example There's good data in South America, children who are exposed to more pathogens, right? There's no sanitation. They walk barefoot, they eat stuff, you know, that's not cleaned and they have more pathogens in their gut, right? there's more virus, bacteria and parasites. the cost energy to fight those things off That's why you feel like shit when you're burning when you're fighting a flu, for example R Your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa you know, virus like COVID or you know, any, you know, seasonal flu virus, The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it And then that the immune system steals energy away from the brain from your mind. and then you feel like, o, everything is so difficult. You just want to be in bed. covers you feel cold, which is strategy to basically save energy. So all of what's called sickness behavior R All of those features of your behavior, you become aocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving All of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies stressors. alcohol parasites all kind of have this increase the cost of living. and then becausecause there's a cap on your energy budget, then energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. And if you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of, I guess, like energetic distraction is the way I'd think about it. That's a cool way to think about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it like if my body has an army of ten soldiers And usually those ten soldiers are like at work doing the things that I need to do to survive and grow and flourish And then when I have one of these, I don't know, some sort of toxic substance comes into my body You're basically saying that Four of those soldiers have to be reassigned to go deal with this invader And so now I only have six that are focused on everything I need to flourish, which is why I probably feel shit sometimes. Yeah exactly And what if there's only six working on My You know fundamental requirements to flourish then Some of those things are going to have to give way and I might end up with grreay hair and I might end up with wrinkles or Maybe my brain won't function the same. Maybe a disease. Yeah. know my immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. Yeah. Imune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example And the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, right? clearing out proteins that you don't need, repairing DNA that's gotten damaged are making you mitochondria, all of these processes happen like every day. everyvery day you go to a little phase of getting rid of the things that don't work too well to make more of the things that work well, like mitochondria, quality control, it's called Right So there's this quality control cycle, old mitochony that don't work too well anymore, they get degraded called my Tffigy autophagy is self eating. mitophagy is self eating of the mitochondria A cell, for example is hungry pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, oh shit. I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share. And then I'll have just the best functioning mitochondria. And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia weirdly because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's dementia, but I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques. And you know you often hear that there's lots of things we consume or do that increase our probability of getting Alzheimer's and dementia. So is that at all linked to the same sort of like energy distraction? It's been long believed that the plaque, right that you've heard about No Ameloid plaques and tau tangles and there's kind of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's I think that's what most people have heard, what most people believe because it came from you know, white coat wearing scientists University professors That is not the truth And what is more true is Let me just say why it's not the truth You can have people in their sixties in their seventies and their eighties, zero protein deposits in the brain We can image this now pretty well with neuro imaging You can have people zero protein deposited in the brain and they have full blown Alzheimer's and dementia You have the other extreme with loads of Avaloid plaques and tau tangles completely normal cognition So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis, this amyloid, protein aggregates in the brain as a driver of dementia and neuroegeneration is not correct What we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy demand there are specific brain regions that tend to be more affected in some people, not all people tend to have those protein deposits. Those regions start to burn more energy This is early phase, right? And then at this point, probably this is the brain trying to cope Right? It's like something's not working great, but it's working harder. ight like with the grrey hat? Yeah, exactly. And then over time, those brain regions become highp metabolic and then that's when you start to have symptoms. What does that mean That's when people start to have memory issues and hyper metabolic. Hypo metabolic. yes, this is hyper metabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about. Like there's more energy being burned here normal metabolic is You know, you use one hundred units of energy for the brain and this let's say this brain region. A hundred units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. If there's a problem with the mitochondria, there's a problem with, you know, the cell communicating with the synapses, right? cells talk to each other through these things called synapses. If there's a problem now, That part of the brain is going to need to do more work compompensate And then we know something happens with neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's is inflammation. Nuro inflammation That basically means there are some cells in the brain that are trying to heal the brain And partart of that healing process is kind of a stress response locally. And then that stress response leads to the secretion of a little proteins we call called cytokines And then it's basically those cells saying something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that cost energy you have those cells that get activated, they secrete those proteins to say, please help, you know, we need to reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish normal, healthy balance, but that process of reestablishing of healing energy. Just like when you're post exercise, yourre muscle invest energy to become stronger So in that early phase, hyper metabolism is when you spend more energy, hyper function, some people have called it. and then eventually It seems like those brain regions get tired out and then they become hypo metabolic, so they burn l energy So if you look in the brain of someone with Alzheimer' There' these regions that are that burn less energy. And energy is so central to everything, including cognition Right in order to have an idea. And to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy So the brain kind of Burning less energy in later stages kind of reflects this lack of function, you know, it's difficult to remember you know, old memories, it's remembered, it's difficult to make associations. It becomes difficult to plan in the future and to regulate your emotions. And you know, a lot of people with dementia end up having kind of mood issues, they become really depressed. is this why they call it type three diabetes I've just heard that phrase quite a lot recently. Yeah. So My hunch is that Alzheimer's and Demmentia more generally is a disorder of energy. and Specifically, it's a disorder of know increased energy resistance. So there's type three diabetes comes from the fact that When the brain gets Sick. Right? And symptoms of dementia start to appear, like loss of memory and mood and depression constolation of symptoms when you look in the brain, it's burning less energy, but it's also harder for glucose to get inside the brain It's less efficient. So there's yes, a loss of efficiency, but an increased resistance, right? or a decrease in conductance for energy for glucose, for example, to get inside the brain to be processed and be used. And why might that be pushing too much glucose on the system Oh, okay. If you load up the system all the time with with glucose. with sugar and the blood and glycemia is high You have diabetes perhaps. this is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto the system that's like really delicate. And it's not like jacking the voltage on your lamb that eventually, you know is going to catch fire We are a slow burning fire R? Like the inside of our cells, you have the electrons flowing And when there' spark's flying, it damages the mitochondria. It damages this, damages that. And that increases that's what aging is. aging the most basic mechanism of aging includluding brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's is the accumulation of a little damage, little mutations, little defects, little imperfections And as the imperfections accumulate, the system becomes less efficient. Insulin resistance basically and diabetes refers to the fact that muscles, but also the brain can has the capacity to say I can't anymore. Like gllucose too much for me, too much resistance, too much you know damage that I'm exposed to. So if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess Energy pressure, right from the glucose from from the electrons uh, you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin. So then you take the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the cell You pull those out. Right? So then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin So then the body's like, whoa, glucose is way high. What a normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the surface of your muscles and then says, take in the glucose because there's too much glucose in the blood. 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 in the glucose. But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria is starting to be know at capacity in terms of how much energy they can resist and flow, then they shut down the valves, right? So the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells. But then gl blood glucose starts to increase. So the next step in this cascade is Well, if there's too much energy and circulation, too much sugar, too much fat. what can we do with this? And that's where fat stores, you know, a deposity comes in. So obesity is protection mechanism against excess energy resistance one way to think about this hypothesis that Demmentia, Alzheimer's, is linked to an overflow of Blue coast, let's say is to look at other civilizations or Um I don't know, tribes the hadads a tribe in Africa who don't have a lot of glucose. do they still get Alzheimer's in dementia I don't know the literature on this, but it's clear that people who if we look at What? makes you more likely to have Alzheimer's, what makes you less likely to have Alzheimer's? All the things that make you more likely to have Alzheimer's contribute to increasing this energy resistance, right? Too much sugar in the blood Diabetes phhysical inactivity R? If you don't move, energy doesn't flow through your mitochondria. So it just stacks up, accumulates. and the things that protects brain protect you against Alzheimer's and dementia, or things that let energy flow physical activity, not eating too much especially not eating too much sugar And then ketones, there's new data now showing that ketones can you know, enter the brain and be metabolized more easily and can even kind of improve cognition. And the ketogenic diet, which I know you've tried, many people report more energy on the ketogenic diet It's not because you eat more calories. It's because those electrons that are stuck on ketones instead of being stuck on glucose can flow more easily and those ketones are made by mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of this the sociality of mitochondria in the organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made If you eat fat, right avocadoos and oil and meat and butter and those fat molecules and go in the liver. and then the mitochondria in the liver take those fat, transform them into ketones, and then put the ketones into the blood. The kidneys also do a little bit of this. And then the ketones go to the brain and then they feed the mitochondriia in the brain So you have mitochondiaion in the liver king and feeding mitochondria in the brain path for a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria is much shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors, if you want to think about it, energetically, than for glucose. That path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter. I just want to make sure you're on that point that I don't misunderstand because you know it sound it could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's, but actually you're saying you're not saying. because I think of ketones as energy. and I'm shot in, you know ketones all the time.. I don't want to flood my brain with energy so that you know, malfunctions gets Alzheimer's It' for some reason, it's really hard to overwhelm the brain with ketones with ketones or overwhelm the body if you eat fat. Like it's very easy to feel like I'm full. I've had a good enough meal. If you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat, now things like taste so good and there's an extra reward. And a lot of people eat for different reasons, not just because they're hungry. because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary especially the sugar part, then you lose regulation And that's why I think the GLP one drugs are so powerful because they address a problem where it starts. Like how much food are you putting into the system? Yeah I did look at the stats there on the tribes in Africa and it says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza Hunter Gatherer tribe in Tanzania He Lie Agrarian populations like the Euruba They find that Alzheimer's and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare. which again means that it points to Western diets. Western diet, Western lifestyles. behavior. know, Th people move all the time U and they don't eat too much Most of them don't need to kind of rely on their fat capacitor They don't have excess energy to just store away. And for some people, there's congenital leanness, right? Like you're born lean and you're like you can't put on fat. If you eat too much The high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood and then it gets lodged in ectopic ways. So it gets lodged in the muscle or in the liver or in the brain. And then it causes damage because of you know this like excess energy pressure and then the system overheats skiny fat. Skinny fat, yeah. That stores it around your li' and. Exactly. What what's that called that fat inside you? Visceral. Visceral fat. And the visceral fat is linked to increased inflammation and it's linked to a bunch of diseases. but this is just a symptom. likeike the increased fat. and I think the reason why obesity In general, is it, obesity is bad is because obesity reflects a deeper state, a more important state. which is this increased energy resistance Like there's too much energy in the system The system can't flow it, like the mitochondria can't keep up. themselves Store that and store it that away and then then you become obese If you're going to take tips from anyone on how to stay focused in high energy, let it be from the greatest pound for pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Johnny Bones Jones John is a coer of our show' sponsor Ketone and IQ alongside myself. And when you hear why, it probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he's training or fighting, he needs high quality, steady, laser like focus without the crash. And ketones give him exactly that. 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Just go to Cer. com slash D o AC and you can get twenty dollars off if you use the code DOAC at check out So on this point of food then, fasting, autophagy, all these words that I've heard, if you are giving me advice on everything you know about how to create a body that is very, very efficient in how I deal with the energy that I have What advice would you give me as it relates to eating develop that awareness of what your body needs. So when I think about how I eat, I don't think about, you know my weight or my body. I think about How am I feeling? And do I need more food R? Am I like depleted O Am I tired and exhausted because there's too much food on board and my organism is like struggling to keep up with this excess like friction or excess, you know, energy pressure on my brain on my mitochondria. So I think about it from the perspective of my Mitochondria. What do my mitochondriia need? In general It's much harder to you know, deplete the mitochondria, like not eating too much So if you're thinking about okay, there's this food there, do I snack? Do I not snack Generally eating too much, there are clear consequences to this. like it increases the resistance or the friction in your mitochondria. Not eating enough tyypically innocurous for most people. Be we have stores, don't we have glycogen and we have stores of glucose in our body and our muscles anyway. So if we were running low, then our body can go get some fat, metabolize it. Exactly, makeake ketones. Make ketones. Yeah. Yeah, most people have enough energy on board, right? in the form of fat, some glycogen in their muscles and your liver to live at least a month I mean, I'm a big, big fan of survival documentaries. And one of the most remarkable things you see in survival documentaries, and even thinking about some that I've watched is people can survive for seememingly months without eating anything. They can't survive long without water. But they can survive for months without eating anything becausecause their body will start to kind of go into its reserves and break down muscle and all these other things Yeah, the record is The world record for not eating is over three hundred days Wow. Irishman Um And he lost, I forget the exact numbers. two hundred and fifty pounds, three hundred pounds. What does this say about hunger And also what does it say about this society we live in where we have some people have like five meals Some people basically just eat from morning till night, you know? Yeah. I think a lot of us because we're hungry. I think a lot of us have learned to eat to subserve some other need And eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know as gambling and ing with other human beings. so We know some people eat emotionally, right? And when they're stressed out they eat more and So I think hunger is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge on hunger. Like if you feel sad, you feel like bored, hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the salt because especially if you had salty, sugary things around It's a rewarding thing that will get you out of uncomfortable other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us oveat. That's general assumption to make, you're probably overeating. I think I probably am. It's harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window Right? And that works really well for some people Um, like eating, for example, very severe kind of window will be two PM to six PM Right So you each for four hours And you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that That tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating U And my dad, you know, still thinks to this day, he's sixty nine now that brereakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's what he learned 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 especially if you're in your sixties, seventies, right metabolism changes. And if you're always eating, the body never goes into this state of I must be efficient. And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient, you accumulate poorly functional mitochondria. and then there's more friction, you know in your whole body, there's more inflammation. which is a signal of that energy friction or resistance. And then you don't feel as 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 snacks, to like intermittent fasting. D just say, I'm going to eat whatever I want however much I want, but just in those four hours or six hours, most of those people have a lot more energy. They experience, right that they have more energy. It's not because there's more energy in their body. If anything, they're putting fewer calories in the body, but the way energy flows now, it flows more efficiently And we don't perceive the amount of energy, we perceive the flow energy or the transformation of energy. And I was just reading there that it says that this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day came from an advertising campaign That was designed to sell cereal and bacon Before the Industrial Revolution, breakfast wasn't a heavily scrutinized meal People often just ate whatever was left over from the night before, or they ate a quick heavy meal before going out to do physical farm labor As people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs Those heavy greasy breakfasts started causing widespread in Japan ingestion ingestion, enter Carvey Kellogs Yes, that Kellogs He ran a famous health sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain based diet would cure ingestion and improve overall health. He co invented cornfakes And he and other cereial pioneers pushed the narrative that are healthy Cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day. And your dad bought it hook like I thinker.. I mean a lot of people did. Everybody did. And I did until recently, until I 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 feel like this low this Um, You know, low energy. and I think now I understand why because I was overloading my system with way too much kind of rapidly available sugary energy that I didn't need h and then The body needs to find a way to handle this. either you get fat, which I can't do. So then it goes kind of to my brain and then makes me feel lousy. So on this point then, just to close off on this diet question. If I want to feel really, really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window and I probably want to eat Just what I need. And I want tona not oveat. Yeah. I don't want to undervereat, but I don't want to oververeat. If you're under eat, you're gonna to pick it up tomorrow I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway so I'll be fine tomorrow. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today, correct Food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows Um And just maybe to close the loop on that example Like when you're sick and you'reighting an infection I had a beautiful opportunity to understand, not just understand to experience this one day. It was New Year's Eve U thirty first in the evening and I start to feel like little scratchy thros. I'm like, o Th I'm getting sick So I go to, you know the evening dinner. I didn't cough or anything. I don't think I was contagious, but I just could feel, right? something was was coming up. felt terrible. I was had I started to have like full blown flu symptoms, went home early like nine PM And then I went to bed. it was a horrible night where I failt even I was in pain and then I had like massive fever. I took a bath, a warm bath to help my fever kind of you go up so that I could fight the high fever, stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So it's usually a good thing Um And then it is next day I was out and I was so depressed And I was like I should write about this. I'm writing a book on energy and energy constraints and like the vision, partitioning of energy and the body. It's like, I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system isn't full blown defefense mode and It's not like I was I could feel my heart, I'm wearing this aura. My heart rate was like one hundred and ten at rest instead of being like sixty, you know normally So there's all of this energy flowing through. it's like, wow, my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We know this is true from good studies on that that when you're fighting something, you burn more energy Yet I'm feeling completely drained Right So it's not like the amount of energy that's flowing through that I should feel more energetic. My immune system in that moment was draining all my energy Dani is sucking away my energy from you know, from my from my mind, from my brain, perhaps and I remember thinking It wouldn't be a whole lot of energy if I just pulled my laptop, like prop myself on the bed and then start to write what I'm experiencing in the moment, right? But I couldn't muster this trank ex 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 state, of my energy being disrupted. I couldn't care about this. And then I started to think about work and about, you know the lab and about Uh, you know, family things is like, Whoa, my whole life feels so different. I don't care about anything. Yeah, I don't care about anything. I just I'm just trying to fucking survive. That's so interesting because I can relate so much. Yeah, I mean everyone has been through like a difficult like when you're really sick. O when you're really stressed? Yeah. or just anything that's all consuming like that. Exactly. that's like Maslow'syrid, right? The top is squished and you're like survival. And like where did I go? Where Yeah, I remember that. So I was still me, right? I was still Martin. I felt completely different. The quality of my mind, the quality of of my intention was completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn't care about anything else. So that episode went on for like two days or so day number three, I was able to take my computer and like start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting that justust what it felt like when I was able to write about and really feel into it, it felt like I was diffuse energy Like the light, for example, right is a form of energy. you can have a laser And the difference between a laser and an incandescent light bulb, like an old style filament light bulb, is not the amount of energy is the way the energy is patterned In a laser, you have every photon that are kind of in phase with one another And then there's a coherence to it, right? And it's the coherence that gives a laser its power It's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy if you put in an incandescent light bulb, now it's the same energy, but it's the fuse, right? Every photon is doing its own thing, they're all going all over the place. And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go How far can my mind go caring about things. The diffuseed energy doesn't go very far. but the laser can go super far So my mind had become like views incandescent light bulb I The two things came to mind when you said that The first is In my previous company, because we were a startup fast growing, we had cash flow issues. Hh. Making sure we had enough money coming in from our clients, whatever to pay our staff was always a problem for anyone that doesn't know when a business is growing quickly, it's usually spending more today than it's receiving in. So even if you're growing from like one million to six million to twelve million to twenty five million, whatever, as we did you still have a cash flow problem And there would be times when we' nearing the end of the month and months in a row I had the same cash flow stress, I couldn't pay the team They always got paid, they never knowew we always figured out what I'd notice is in those moments of really, really high stress sometometimes, not always, but there were periods where I lost motivation. And what I meant by that is I literally, as a twenty three, twenty four year old like CEO of all these hundreds of people, some of them double my age I basically hide at home And what I mean by hide at home is like I didn't have I lost purpose for this fucking business. Like I'd wake up for it might last a week or two weeks and I just didn't have the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it, to like go out and be a leader. 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 resolve My motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this Zoomed back into focus out And I think that's really important because know we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching this show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation. And as a founder and as a CEOs you feel so guilty that you The source of motivation and inspiration and leadership for this group of people, you could lose it. But now I understand what it was. Now I understand that I was like a chronic well Yeah, a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. Yeah The other thing actually made me think about as well When you said about this diffusion of energy, you actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals It made me think about if you take ten people in a startup and they're all really, really focused on the same goal, they're way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal. And you're all pointing in a different directions. Y. So there's incoherence. There's incoherence. L Yes.es. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OKL is so important because you can point all the energy at the problem. Yes. This is traction Yes towards a particular gol. This is what this does Purpose focuses energy And I think the reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right to feel it. I want to say like you have purpose. It kind of becomes this must find my purpose. you know, must like I'm on a spiritual journey to fure you out and then're emed, exxactly. But when you I' lot somehow Find yourself in a place where you feel those things know that are in your life are meaningful, right? And that the path you're on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffused like a light bulb and boom. brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right? whereere it's like you have all of these meetings. And it doesn't feel as difficult as it would if you were going kind of all over the place Focus, I think, brings our energy into a coherent state And then it feels like coherence, right? It feels like I know what I'm doing this. then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing There's this coherence Not just energetic coherence that allows you to do more with less energy, but also this coherence of mind, right? and maybe of spirit if we want to go there. I'm going to ask the team to play a clip. It's a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about this idea of signal and noise. And he's referencing his experiences with Steve Jobs, who he used to work with, and also Elon Musk Look how wildly successful Here's why concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in early signal to noise ratio was so brilliant about jobs that I tell every CEO now. and I don't care if youre an S aP five hundred CEO or you're just starting a business His vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next eighteen hours notot your vision for the business next week or next month or next year just the next eighteen hours you're awake You're going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was eighty twenty eighty signal Penty noise And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at two thirty in the morning, expect me to get back to him becausecause back then we didn't have texts, it was all email He was right. He was right And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that Eon Musk He has noise. He does not deal with noise. He is one hundred percent signal twenty four seconds every cycle. I mean, the guy is just sixty seconds of every minute sixixty minutes of every hour. The eighteen hours he's awake, it's all signal. he's achieved. Now that's very awkward for him socially because Noise is dealing with your family sometimes or noise is saying hi to a friend or noise is listening to some doom scrolling on you know some social media app that just takes your mind or maybe playing your guitar very few people on Eth and if you go back in history, you're going to find out that the geniuses of their time We're close one hundred percent signal And so I can really sort of summarize this for my audience, signal is the most urgent thing you should be focused on right now and noise is basically everything. No, the goals you set for that you are awake. If you're going to be awake eighteen hours. And you've determined that there's three things you have to get done You're going to get those done No matter what it takes, you're going to get those done. And you're not going to let anything distract you from the three to five things If you're a CEO And you achieve that and you can get those done. with eighty percent of your time based on that. You're extraordinarily successful. You are absolutely and you're Steve Jobs, or you're an Elon Musk or you're somebody, you if you even talk to Bezos I don't know him personally, but I've heard many interviews Like I knew, you know, I've met Elon just a few times. I spent a lot of time with jobs They say the same thing Bezos will not make decision after one o'clock in the afternoon because he felt that the noise was too high The signal for him was in the morning hours this is a crucial aspect of success. that I now understand to be the ability of defines an entrepreneur A man or woman that understands a signal noise ratio that focuses on that They'll be successful The ones that can't that get down to a fifty, fifty signal noise still fail. It's that simple In that clip He's basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be eighty percent signal. He wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these intervs Johny Iivves I' actually also play Johny Iivves interview because I send thisound to everybody so I'm going to play it where Johnny Iice talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was This sounds reallyally simplistic, but it still shocks me will actually practice this and it's a struggle to practice. But is this issue of focus Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life And And the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you decide on Monday, you know what, I'm going to be focused. It is every minute a why are we talking about this? This is what we're working on. You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say because I think he was concerned that I wasn't He would say How many things have you said no to And I would Honestly, I would have these sacrificial things because I mean I wanted to be very honest about it. And so I say, Oh I said no to this and no to that. But he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway So there was no real sacrifice. What focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea And you wake up thinking about it But you say no to it because you're focusing on something else And Steve Jobs would walk in and say Johnny Ives on a weekly basis Tell me what you've said no to. And Johnny said I' had be sacrificial things, but he knew. he goes, Steve's definition of focus was're saying no to things with every bone in your body and every fiber of your being you thought were good ideas, but you say no to them because we're focused on this other thing. This extreme level of focus on the most important thing. and this is a pattern that I've seen in these exceptional entrepreneurs. They have such high signal and they're very good at dealing with distraction in this regard. And it kind of again, it made me think about what you're saying about, like focusing your energy on a particular thing like a laser means that your ability to solve that thing becomes like drastically different I've come to learn in life that if you give ninety percent of your energy to something or you're focused to something, it gets ninety percent. But when you give a hundred percent, it's like it gets one hundred and fifty percent There's something in giving your entire being of focus to something. Maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is That means The probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically, drastically increases Solving hard problems is hard Great, great founders, they solve them because they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing I think the reason this is is because of a physical principle about energy just call a resonident. If you walk through life with such clarity of mind right? that This is what the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And you live and you breathe that. You become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your actions and your emails, it comes out in the way you speak and then it comes out in the things you turn attention to, right? It turns out in your tone of voice in the care that you, you look at people with. It comes out in every facet of you, right? So you become the emblematic leader, I guess for that thing that you're one hundred percent into. What this does is that it's picked up by other people Mbe this gets to like vibes. You have that vibe. you have like the founder's vibe, right? or like the entrepreneur's vibe. I think this is real. and this is the energy that's flowing through your mitochondria is somehow becoming coherent and you know, a lant and it feels meaningful, it feels purposeful. and then you live like that. and then other people around you that resonate with it Right? Like people are drawn to a pure signal Like if you have that specific signal, it's like a a music like a symphony R Like when it sounds When it's on tune People that want to come on board like they feel this and then it gets amplified It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being of inside as a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with his energy And what you've just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field. probably heard this term. The reality distortion field, they called it his RDF was a term coined by Apple software engineer Bud Trible in nineteen eighty one to describe Steve Jobs uncanny almost hypnotic ability to convince everyone around him to believe practically anything. And people who work closely with jobs describe the RDF, the reality distortion field as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding willpower and sheer persistence in a certain direction which pulled you with him. It's an energetic quality In physics, if you have something that has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance And then it looks spooky. It looks like, whoa, this thing, you know, synchronicity or this you this thing happened and somehow, you know, they were was able to mobilize this this donor and you know, fundraising is like easier than it should be. And so like all of these things snowball because you hold that you know, and that That vibe. you hold that energy. It amplifies I mean, exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs. and he said that it would cause two things. It would be like he was casting spells on you, but he was also bending time in physics. They said Apple engineer Andy Hurtszfield recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take six months, he would look you in the eye and say, you can do it in two weeks Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in two weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Job's Chrisma saying I was like a minor wizard because he was casting spells And I would see people mesmerized so much so that I was so jealous Gates noted that even when jobs was lying or wrong He had everybody completely hooked What's clear to make like something like this happen is You need to Um feel that there's something compelling. L you need to feel something's important. And again, that's not a rational thing. L You need to feel it in yourself And then you need to kind of bring that energy into focus and bring attention to it, right? And then then that's where ideas start to come. You build a structure around it to sustain that flow. You said at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves. And if I think about the fact that Every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people Like that is true. Like For me to become the president, prrime Minister, best sales personon, the world best philanchpist, what I need to do, if I am energy, is convince other energy to change its shape. I think that's what amazing people do. They're able to, you know see something, hold that vision so strongly and then mobilize others, right? And then new things become possible. I think that's what great leaders do And I now approach, you know, other human beings. and, you know, my son like my six year old son, Noah I see him as Yes, a little boy and yes, a lot of energy and yes, you know, some challenges that come with this, but he's this beautiful little energy pattern He's this energy flowing through this little child's body. but My role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance, right? The right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint, I say do whatever you want, have whatever you want, you anyt time, then that's not good for development. Kids need to feel you know some boundaries. And so those are like resistance, right? littleittle constraints If every minute, like me putting constraint, no, you can't do this, no you can do that, then it damages the system. It traumatizes the system.irect. Exactly. So the art really of parenting, and I think the art of leadership is providing the right structure, right so that the energy has some constraints. there's a challenge. there need to be a challenge for the team to meet, right? Challenge is like barrier. It's like a little resistor. Of course, there's challenges like it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult then every everyone's bored. Like like yeah we're to do the same as we did last year And then next year do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to double you the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you have to work through. I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. What's the next challenge? Why go down deep in the ocean to discover new creatures? Why go in the Amazon trying to discover new species of little bugs? Why go into space? Itsike this is all curiosity driven. It's like the mind wanting to have something to hit against Because if there's nothing to hit against, if there's no resistance, then It's There's no purpose I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You think about going to the moon, the moon pulled energy towards it, so we found ourselves to the moon. And actually if you bring that down into your own life as like a leader of a company, you go. Okay, if I set a worthwhile goal I'm going to pull people, energy towards it. And if I have an unwth worthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So maybe a worthwile goal is actually Philosoph, a magnet. For energy. Yeah. I think so. And people are energetic processes So my six year old son is this beautiful movement of energy. My goal is to nurture it notot just with food physically, but to nurture his curiosity and his transformation Link to this I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. This is a beautiful study and It was run in Chicago. Every year people would come to the hospital and then fill out questionnaires and meet with the therapist and neur psychologist, and they would ask them questions and test their memory and their cognition. And then every year they would report How much purpose they felt like they had. how much sense of connection with other human beings or with something greater than themselves, how optimistic they were about the future, right? And some people are like more optimistic, happy and purposeful than others, but there's always kind of fluctuations, right? Like we go through fluctuations. We go through life no matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being challenging in some ways. So we asked How people felt, how much purpose people experienence before they died? Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died Right So then you have how the person felt before how much purpose they experience. And then you look at the mitochondria After he die where in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So that little part of the brain that's involved in you know active reasoning and executive function. And the mitochondria and the people who felt more purpose had greater energy transformation capacity What does that mean in simple terms? The resistance was lower. This could mean that if you feel more life purpose, the mitochondria in your brain can flow energy more easily Or it could mean the inverse of that. Well, it could mean that having mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily just changes how you see life. makes you feel more purpose. Yeah, exactly. Or it could mean that purpose itself is creating more efficient mitochondria. Exactly. People have done studies in animals and we've done some of those studies where you can basically change the state of mind of a mouse by like stressing it out chronically and then you make it feel defeated and like a really stressful life. And you ask, does this change your might have conj in the brain? Can the experience of stress change mind acc of the mraine, one hundred percent. that happens. Now you can say, okay, now let's change your mind to conj in the brain. You can like open up the brain, inject a little something that either boost the mitochondria, inhibit, inactivate the mitochondria, inc or decrease resistance And then you ask, does this change how the animal appears to feel? How the animals behave in terms of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance hundred percent. The best science shows it goes both ways. So how you feel can change mitochondria, the mitochondria can change probably how you feel. And so and again, we're theorizing here. If I don't have purpose in my life, it's going to change the mitochondria. And then if my mitochondria becomes more inefficient, thenen what What will I notice as the next symptom? Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that kind of starts to pop up. You feel drained, you don't feel you have, enough energy Burn out It probably feels like burnout and you start to lose enthusiasm you for the future become more pessimistic. So there's kind of a constellation of things we call depression or burnout or we put labels on these things, but really every person starts to experience life as less enjoyable, less purposeful less meaningful. Um regardless of the diagnostic title we put on it. Which is interesting because I've interviewed a few people that are experts on the subject of depression and also addiction, frankly. And one of the things that I remember Johan Hari saying to me, who wrote a book called Lost Connections is that in some cultures, the cure that they apply for depressive symptoms is giving someone purpose in their life. It's so powerful My hunch is that Most of what we call depression is a loss of coherence And when we're isolated, We did a study recently to look at the energetics of mental stress When you feel like you're being pulled aside and judged and What does that do energetically to the body And there's this protein marker in the blood reflects energy friction, energy resistance, right? If the mitochondria can flow energy Smoothly, this protein gets made And then it's in kind of a blood biomarker elevated in cancer. We think there's increased energy resistance. It's elevated in Alzheimer's where we think there's increased energy resistance in the brain. It's elevated in diabetes, where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It's elevated in all sorts of pathologies, hypertension and the heart disease, and it's a marker that The organism energetically is not doing well. It's not efficient ? That's almost a marker of inefficiency. We did this study where you bring people in, we put an intravenous line so we can measure the blood markers And then we tell them, o, just relax. everythingverything's fine. you're doing great. And then they sit down, they relax for thirty minutes, cortisol goes down, heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down And then her lovely study coordinator, Katherine walked into the room done ensive, now you're going be judg You're going to have to deliver a speech Here's a situation. You were in a shopping mall were you know, you grabbed this scf if you put it on just to try, but then the security guard caught you and then they' accusing you of shoplifting. So now you're in court. you need to defend yourself in front of the judge and you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard. should l this job And then then we tell them, you have two minutes to prepare your three minute deffence in front of the judge Most people start to feel the anxiety and then we monitor heart rate at the same time and blood pressure and then we draw blood. and so you can see everyone's physiology wasting energy Right? The energetic cost of stress You see this on the monitor on the other side, you know in the control room. and then we put a camera in front of them that mocks, you know, video records them. And then we have a white coat wearing old white men who stands six feet in front of them, looks at them straighty eyes, they start talking and then they have to look into the camera and they do their defense and they know someone's looking at them. And what we saw was that this energy stress marker goes up just with mental stress. You're not doing exercise, you're not doing anything strenuous. You're just going through this phase of what's going to happen to me, to my ego to my sense of self. So what's the downstream consequence of this thing, this stress chemical being in your Yeah, So that protein is called GDF fifteen Yeah Gth differentiation factor fifteen. The name doesn't matter, but that energetic stress marker You're asking the right question. What did it do? Wh does it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain Yeah. and that protein can be made by any organ in the body, except one What is it doing? It's very useful to know where's a receptor Because you need to have for signaling and biology to happen, you need a signal and you need a receptor, a sensor, right? Where's a receptor for this protein, do you think? On in one organ in the body Is in here? It's right in here. Yeah. so in the brain system the brain stem is where kind of the the Basic survival Systems of the body are, and there's a region in the brain system called the area postrema Does't matter? It's known as the vomiting and nausea center for the brain. Wait, so if something happens, I'm extremely stressed, the world is judging me. This protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brain stem and it docks in there. Correct. And then what happens? And then it turns out, the brain interpret this as There's something running out of energy There's something running out of energy, okay? Something in the body is not right. There's something running out of energy and then the brain makes two decisions. veryery similar to when you're sick.. Protein GDF fifteen is called a cytokine. It's the same thing that immune cells produce when're activated during an infection. Okay. so your body thinks you're sick. Yes and then what and then does two things. Save energy, conserve energy. So you lose motivation. Yes Lose motivation, feel depressed, feel depressed. Cant go to the gym, yes. Do doesnn't feel worth it. We know this specifically from animal studies. if you inject animals with GeF, they hunch in a ball and they don't do anything they go into this sickness behavior. That's number one. numberumber two The brain says, something's running out of energy. first, let's conserve energy. Number one. But two, let's mobilize energy R Let's put glucose into the blood. Let's put fat into the blood, because there might be cells out there that are you running out of energy and we need to rescue them.re you going get Belly fat. Visceral fat. Yeah. Yeah, you're gonna to get belly fat from this. Yeah When stress hormones are up, right? and you're increasing blood glucose, increasing blood lipids, if the rest of the body doesn't need it, which is what kind of happens during a stress response like this, that fat gets lodged where it shouldn't called ectopic fat. and that's what belly fat is Okay, so let's go a bit further. This is happening If this is chronic I guess it's going to lead at some point to disease What the best studies show on this is when you have high level of this energetic stress marker, this protein, You're more likely if you follow people, studies were done where you take the blood, you measure this protein. someome people have very high levels, some people have very low levels. And then you wait fourteen years. This is actually a study from the UK called the UK Biobank. So if you measure the protein energetic stress hydokine and you ask what happens to people with high GDF fifteen versus people with low GDF fifteen It turns out people with a hydrgia fifteen are more likely to develop mental illness Bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia People with hydra fifteen are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension. People with hygephetine are more likely to be dead At this point, we don't know if it makes a difference, if it's from mental stress, if it's from physical stress, if it's from an organ struggling, right that's sick and trying to heal itself I energy stress, high energy resistance in the body based on this marker. is prognostic indicator. It's an indicator that Something bad might happen And people with high GDF fifteen also They don't like to take the stairs. They don't like to walk for pleasure. They don't like to go out to the gym. They don't like to go out at friends They don't like to exercise well Crect. Yeah. because it If you're getting the signal, like when you're sick, right? If GF fifteen is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain, you're getting the signal You're running out of energy So I guess the question everyone's asking as they're listening to this now is How do I prevent GDF fifteen or whatever it's called this stress cytokine thing that goes and docks in my brain. How do I prevent it from floating around in my blood so often Good question Time to feel. meditation. Meditation, My bloody filer is right. What we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF fifteen increases throughout the day Right So the purpose of sleep thenen might be to reduce energy resistance ike what we were talking about earlier, it's not about having finding this one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It's about this movement of increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance. And increasing resistance, decreasing resistance. It's kind of this movement of life. And I guess all the other things we talked about earlier as it relates to lifestyle factors keepeping away from these sort of extreme stresses, eating way too much starving oneself, oxidative stress. None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? or anything If we just look back in time of how we used to live you know a little bit more human out in nature with people with friends, off screens. eating stuff that grows in the ground or has legs and runs. A lot of that is pretty like a pretty simple playbook for like how to Live a goodood life. Yeah and to not be so bloodly stressed out all the time Part of it is Yes, living a life that is more aligned with the way we evolved. R, which is connecting to other human beings and N not eating too much in I think that's one piece and But that's like everyone knows this. Yeah. Why aren't we doing it And I think Part of the reason is because we have this kind of misconception of ourselves as a molecular machine, right? And it's like need to maintain your car If I'm like 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 it and then you eat more and then you don't feel better And that's, I think, extremely disempowering. People want to be empowered. And people want to have knowledge, but they want to know what to do so they can be the best version of themselves, so they can flourish. You know, what's interesting. Be before you arrived, I did something I've never done before. I went through all of the interviews you've done And I looked at all the comments Because I wanted to understand the people that have listened to you frequently. what is it they feel like they would love to ask you or what they haven't gotten from other interviews? One of the most popular comments, which was seen roughly ten percent of time. wasas the audience asking about supplements. And the question that they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle interventions, but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like Methyelene Blue. Urethylene A and NAD plus boosters In your opinion, what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut Bandaid are the useful I think there are shortcuts to to some Dates I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there's a magic pill to solve complex issue to solve the way that you're feeling. becomes like the oh, there's a magic pill for this. And then you don't need to bring awareness to what you are. But can I do both? I think so. In some cases I don't really know how metylinge blue does everything it's supposed to be doing. Biologically, methylene blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that methylene blue can kind of relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria NAD plus. is probably the best supported intervention to reduce inflammation Also, it's an electron carrier So I take electrons from food and then gives them to the electron transport chain. so the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance So if you're depleted of an AD That's going to cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through this metabolic circuit. So NAD plus seems to calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing Yeah Most people are not deficient of ND plus, so giving more to the system might not help, but for reasons I don't really understand, it seems like it helps some people. and it makes people feel more energetic. Is that in pil for? Like how do people take ND plus? Because I know there was some like drips one time that some guy gave me. Yes, I think's oral supplements that are precursors to NAD. If you eat NAD directly, it doesn't the bioavailability it's called, it doesn't get into you your cells very well. You can inject infuse IV intraveneously and AD plus directly and then that gets to your cells better That's not an approved or kind of recommended medical intervention. but I've seen people with mitochondrial disease You know, saying that it helps them and normal, healthy people as well who feel more energy. What about this Eururalithin A U relatin is a new compound that seems to stimulate the degradation of bad mitochondria So we talked about autophagy, mitophagy earlier. So a cell that has a thousand mitochondria There are always some that are getting a little old and then eventually they're degraded, especially if you fast, right? If the cell is a little starved, it's going to degrade the ones that are least functional And there's kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded if you're fasting or if you're pushing the system likeuring exercise What yourin A seems to do is to kind of accelerate this process. Right? So it accelerates the degradation of the bad mitochondria, the mitophigy so that the cell has to make more of the good ones. I'm looking at some of the studies here and it says the clinical evidence for alithin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years, transitioning from a compelling animal data Sty to highly rigorous placebo controlled human clinical trials. and overwhelmingly, the human research confirms that Urelithin A targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation with one study in twenty twenty two in the JAammA Network Open Study journal where they took adults aged sixty five to ninety and gave one of them placebo, one of the groups placebo and the other You'reith an A for four months. And at the end of that, they found The group that we were giing euralithin A showed statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial ineiciency I should be on Eurithanean Everyone should do you take any of that?'t You don't take any supplements? I don't I'm skeptical of this. you know, there's always kind of a new supplement that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions. Yeah. And so the term mitochondrial dysfunction is, I think, a little misleading. There was a lot of hype about NAD. There was a lot of hype about coenzymeQ co Q ten There was a lot of hype about all sorts of things, anti inflammatory, you know berries and And antioxidants was a big thing ten, twenty years ago. turnurns out not be so useful actually impairs normal ation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants So Eur than A feels like the next fad. Maybe it's real. I think the science is fairly compelling, but I'm I trust the wisdom of my body and my mitochondria more than I trust the pharma company that's trying to make and sell this. And what does that mean in practical terms, trusting the wisdom of your body? L what does that mean for you It means recognizing that I am the energy that's flowing through this thing and this thing is nature. Like we are a piece of nature, something that's true across the animal kingdom and the living kingdom is things heal And we don't think about this in biomedicine. We think about diseases. we study, you when things go wrong and we try to understand the molecular know features of diseases There's not really a science of the healing process But the basis of health, it's clear. you need to heal continontuously heal, you know, repair the DNA that's damaged, repair the mitochondria that are getting old. you get rid of them, you make new ones, like preserving the wholeness of the system. too heal means to become whole again Is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature to heal Because if you think about me and you sat here now, we're sat in like a dark bunker basically with no sunlight. And listen, most of us live in such a dark bunker with very little sunlight. So we then have to take vitamin So because we live outside of our true nature, I'm wondering if actually we do need to take some supplements because we're not going to heal. We are going to heal.ven But if I sit here all day, I'm not going to get vitin D, and then that's going to cause problems. Yes. So we're in the optimal environment. when you're in that kind of environment. so I think there's good research showing if you put a plant in a hospital room patients recover faster. There's been studies looking at like windows with natural light then you see nature. if you're in a hospital, for example, Pe recover better And there's good data on like nature exposure. Is it like more better oxygen, you know, a little tiny bit more oxygen if you're in a forest, Is it like the phytochemicals, the things that are produced by the plants, we don't really know what it is. Is it just seeing green, seeing something that hears its sounds and looks like what you evolved to be around? So we don't really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps calm the body and somehow improve recovery. Whoa, What's that on your face? This is my b chararge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now. They're a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for fifteen, twenty minutes a day, where I can sit here in the chair and wear it Boost my college in production, helps with fine line blemishes, my complexion gets better, and then people will people listen to podcast because I look better. Professional grade equipment in such a small box. It's non invasive. And having sat here with so many of the world's leading health professionals, there's various things that I repeatedly hear work and some things I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my guests on this show have confirmed It is really, really, really effective. And they offer fast free shipping worldwide with easy returns and exchanges, and you'll also get a one year warranty on all of their products. and they're HSA and FSA eligible, giving you tax free savings up to forty percent. And you can get twenty percent off when you order through my link at booncharge dot com slash doac Bondcharge dot com slash doac. The deal applies sitewide One type of help people also wanted to know about from you. which was even more discussed was about red light therapy Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria? Interestingly, red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices helmet, a hairbrush M I think I've got one here actually. I think this is this this is a red light Thpyirbrush therapy. Yeah. Someone was just telling me their dad is part of a study now. he puts a helmet with red lights, you know, every day because he has a pre dementia. By doing this, the idea is Light is energy. Yeah, right. Energy is not a thing, but it's the potential for change. It's the capacity change something. Red light like this, especially the red, the infrared that you don't see with your eye, can penetrate tissue. It can go through your hair, through your skull and then into your brain And then there, it seems to do something and change metabolism So how is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that For light to do something in biology, there needs to be something biology that resonates with it, right that can offer the right amount of resistance, right to the photons, the red light photons hit and then there's transformation. of energy receptor, the antenna, the cellatular antenna for red light seems to be mitochondria So there's something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then boom, they meet with oxygen become metabolic water, that is called cytochrome C oxidase I'm going to try and say this in laymen's terms. If I take red light and I put it on my skin, it doesn't even need to touch my skin. I can put it just close to my skin The red light is going into the mitochondria of my cell. And it's helping the mitochondria to become more efficient That's the idea. So I should wake up every day and do bloody red light then If you're deficient in that way, that might be good. That might also offset, you know, the natural order that your body has created. What do you mean by that? You think it might be I think that in general, that's why I kind of veer away from supplements because The organism is this beautiful, dynamic equilibrium of like everything energetically dancing with each other, where you have the mitochondria to transform energy and then genes are expressed and then this other cell is doing this, this cell is doing this. And there's this beautiful balance. And When the system is out of balance Now there's signals like inflammation, right? signals of this imbalance at an energetic level and then that turns into molecular level. And then the system tries to come back into balance, right? I never realized this Too much red light can be bad for you I don't know if there's studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but there's phototoxicity is a thing and you can buy a whole bed of like really intense light And I think if you stay too long in those, that's probably not good a very compelling study that was published last year M on bllood glucose regulation. And I know you've talked about blood glucose in other episodes How much glucose in the blood is really important because it causes this like energy resistance, energy friction in all of your cells, especially therain perhaps eat a bunch of sugar or eat a meal with carbohydrates, blood glucose typically spikes if you get stressed out, just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging, and so on So with the body does and the normal healthy organism is able to regulate blood glucose. So if you eat a big meal, there's amount enough insulin that's released and then the glucose is going come into cells and into the muscles and to the fat and then you preserve, you know what's called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose. It turns out if you shine a red light on the back peopleeople as they ingest a big bunch of glucose, the spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured mitochondrial metabolism. through the mouth. You can measure oxygen coming in. and CO two coming out which is coming from Mitochondria So you can measure the energy metabolism, which is really the mitochondrial metabolism as people are doing this. And what they found is that people who had red light on their back, their metabolism was actually a little higher. So the electrons, the flow of energy was increased with the red light And they think that might be why The glucose didn't spike as much because the electrons that came into the blood were able to flow through the mitochondria. So this points to some regulation of energy regulation inside the mitochondria that I don't fully understand, but I think there's something promising here. and it certainly supports you know, the idea that energy modalities outside of our cells, you know, light or electromagnetic fields are human beings that are, you know, you en energetic process is affecting my metabolism all the time. we respond to each other energetically, metabolically, I think it supports that idea that you're in an energetic process and you're influenced by other forms of energy, even if you don't see it I'm really stunned by this idea that there is such thing as getting too much red light and that that can have harm for your cells because there I'll be honest, there's been a couple of times where I just put that thing on and maybe you like read a book for a long time. like an hour or two. Did you ever feel verse effects from this I never felt in a verse. However, looking at some of the studies, it seems to suggest that Red lightight therapy follows a bell curve model They found in this one particular study I was reading about in two thousand nine That low to moderate doses of light perfectly stimulate the mitochondria to produce ATP and a healthy small burst of ROS reactive oxygen species to trigger cellular repair However A particular study also showed that when the dosse is pushed too high, the light creates massive amounts of oxidative species, and this excess oxidative stress overwhelms the cell's antidioxidant defenses completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and inducing cellular Posis, cell death instead of healing that this bell shaped relationship is something we see in many domains of biology and physiology. Same as like workout, exercising, like Most people know if you do a workout, that's like half an hour, an hour or two hours, if you're an athlete and you're like really well conditioned, it's fine. And then you recover for twenty three hours after your one hour workout. That's great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the impression that you have more energy, which is really energy flowing more efficiently But if you work out for eight hours. Yeah That's not good, right? So too much you crash not enough, you're not at your optimal. So there's where is the optimal state? And Biology and the whole mind body unit has kind of worked out through evolution and through your life and development to find this sweet spot. If you know how to listen to it. Yeah. and that's easier said than done. Yes. I I live in alignment. and there's a lot of noise out there. there is for the same reason you closeed your eyes earlier when I asked you to kind of feel inside. This is a good analogy for I think what it means to kind of listen to her energy And maybe we could do a little of exercise if you're interested. Yeah So we'll do a little exercise. It can close your eyes if you want Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. and we'll use the breath So you can start by Feeling your body, you can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair And then we'll take a little breath in O all the way down. and hold your breath empty lungs Hold there for as long as you can Pay attention the sensations that are emerging in your body whether it's in your belly and your chest and your neck and your head The longer you wait, the more intense those sensations are hold for as long as you want, then you can'ton deeep breath. What does that feel like I felt lots of vibrations. It like waves. I felt like kind of like waves. going across my body, but it was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body of hat fel I suddenly was very apparent clear of my heartbeat I could feel everything. in a way that I can't typically feel everything. any ot of a negative feeling or any sensation that was uncomfortable I mean, near the end, when when hadn't breathed in a world was a bit uncomfortable. Yeah. what did that feel like? Like like I was starving for oxyood, like I was starving for air Yeah you know, running out of air and like drowning is one of the most horrible aversive experience that I think we evolve to dislike. right? So what was happening there in our bodies as we were doing this is Oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously Every millisecond might a conja consume oxygen, and now you're not bringing oxygen through your breath And then they produce CO two, carbon dioxide, right? So mitochondria are burning the oxygen a little bit by a little bit, and then they're producing carbon dioxide, CO two. and we evolved feel those signals very very sensitively. So that's the pressure that I felt. Yeah. I think that yes. So the subjective experience, right What you describeed there is an experience of energy starting to stall because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electron is like whereere do I go? And then there's extreme level of resistance. Like the most extreme case of energy resistance, I think that most people will be familiar with is like a heart attack My dad had a heart attack. a few years ago And he woke up during the night with this terrible contraction, like a pressure in the chest. and he said it was like four hundred pounds, like pressure on his chest,errible pain, worst pain he's ever had What's happening? Like what is that pain? The source of that pain really is blood flow can no longer bring oxygen to mitochondria in the heart Oh, so that mighter like mananaging. Yeah d Panicking is kind of we're imposing now an experience onto a biological process, but you have the electrons they're flowing through mitochondria all the time. They're flowing onto oxygen, right? From food to oxygen and they're just nice, freely floating. That feels great. O it feels like just normal life. And then all of a sudden, there's no more oxygen So the electron,, I have nowhere to go feels terrible the electrons can't flow so they start to backflow. That is what causes oxyidant stress That's why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack R? Because the electrons can flowat to oxygen because of this little clot And for some reason that we don't really understand This feels extremely aversive. So what you experience there by holding your breath, and anyone who's listening to this can try on their own Hold your breath for as long as possible. It feels horrible. And now imagine living your life with just like five percent, ten percent of this horrible feeling Like you wake up in the morning and you have this like Trace of like running out of energy running out of oxyg M. I think that's what some mental illnesses feel like And there's very interesting data showing that if you inject people with a signal of energetic stress Lactate You can trigger a panic attack You're not messing with the brain there. You're not like You know kind of doing something to neurochemistry. What you're doing is you're injecting the human body with a signal that the mitochondria can't keep up with energy flow. You're tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance is just been jacked up to very high levels This feels like anxiety peopleeople with traumatic memories, like post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD The simple injection of an energetic stress signal of lactate in the blood can reawaken traumatic memories So there's this emerging notion in psychiatry and metabolic psychiatry where people understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain And what I think is happening in those kind of chronic state of of ill being where people don't feel themselves, they don't feel well. you know the hypervigilance and anxiety. It's quite likely at this point, I think that part of that is driven by energy not flowing properly. And then the body just lives in high energy resistance all the time. And there's data directly measuring energy resistance in the brain from a group at McLan in Harvard U And then black taate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness. and this marker, GDF fifteen also is elevated in mental illness. And so the cure again, or the thing to ease that is all the lifestyle factors that we talked about ose and we've covered that ground. Yeah lifeife changes, you know changing your life circumstances, that's really hard to do. Exercising seems to help a lot of people, but a lot of people don't feel they have the capacity to exercise and ketes seem to be L saving for some people, goingo on a ketogenic diet And I've met now dozens of individuals whose life were crushed by you know, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder And they were treatment resistant, right? Meaning like the pharmacicalotherraapy, the drugs that they were given were not helping, in some cases, were making things worse with difficult side effects and then they change your diet all sugars and they went on a ketogenic diet. medical ketogenetic therapy and then they started to monitor ketones And many people reported, you know This was life changing. L first the first thing many people notice is they have more energy. The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone donon't know why and same way that we're all different. We all respond differently to even medications, that are supposed to work the same for everyone We have a science of averages The science that we use to get knowledge to inform our lives is almost entirely a science of averages Meaning like all of the studies we do, like the highest gold standard studies, we consider to be RCTs, randomized controlled trials These RCTs, if you run RCT, what you do is you take, let's say a thousand people, then you randomize half five hundred into this group, normal diet, and then five hundred into ketogenic diet And then you say, great, now let's look at their depressive symptoms, right? or their anxiety symptoms. And then you have them on the diet for two months and then after USS. And then you compare the groups, right? You lump five hundred human beings together And you say, what's the average depression or anxiety symptoms in this these five hundred people? thenen you average these people together and then you group them, and then you compare means And I guess the other important point here is gender, which is so many of these studies wor skewed towards men in many cases and that doesn't apply to women a lot of the time. And this is part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health is because We're just now discovering that once upon a time, scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything just supplied actually were entirely different. And so This averages thing. you also need to think about the nuances of who ge, where they're from, their biology, their DNA. You just said that you get the skinny fat thing or the visceral fat, whatever. I don't get that But if we were doing an average of like three people, Yeah Maybe we'd come to a conclusion based on me and me and the other person who's like me, but that wouldn't apply to you. Yeah And that's really problematic. Like all of the health recommendations we have and the way drugs get approved And the way we determine whether a drug is useful or not for disease X or Y is by comparing groups. And whenever you peel the surface of a clinical study of an RCT, you find some people like are amazing responders and they're cured. they don't have symptoms. And then some people don't respond. These are called non responders. and then some people get worse. commented thing across the videos you featured on And the most passionate thing, the most urgent thing, according to the people that were watching your work that they wanted to ask you. was about long COVID MECFS, I'm not sure what that is and fibalgia For patients with MMI, CFS, and you have to explain to me what that is or long COVID, the standard advice given is to exercise for mitochondrial health. But for them it often triggers severe crashes What is happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken? And how can these individuals safely rehabilitate their mitochondria without causing further damage That's a really tough problem This was the most repeatedly the most liked, the most commented thing on your videos because these people are suffering and they're just not being given answers, I guess. Yeah. In the US, there's an estimated like three to five million people who have either myologgic encephalomitis. chronic fatue syndrome, MECFS or you know, long COVID version of this. U In the UK, it's somewhere between like two and three million, I think. And then worldwide, there's twenty, twenty four million people have these syndromes, right? What are the symptoms for someone that hasn't experienced it? What are the symptoms that they're experiencing chronic fatigue, Just always being sort of tired and energy. feeleeling low energy. Yeah. Feeling low energy is an experience, right? So it's you go to your luxury say I feel so tired and then you look in the blood works, everything's fine. But so there's a disconnect between what we know how to measure biochemically and then what the person is experiencing. We don't have a good understanding of the connection between the biology and the biochemistry in the blood and even process in the brain and how people feel So there's a disconnect here and MECFS, you know, chronic fatigue uh long COVID theseese people have been a little bit ostracized from the medical you know, community because doctors are really stuck. They have these patients, which are really difficult patients to deal with. First, they don't know what's wrong with them. And second, they don't have tools to help them get better And then the classical thing is well, exercise, but then many of these people, when they exercise, they actually get worse. And there's some studies that show increased inflammation. So those signals of energy resistance increase energy friction in the body go up after exercise in a normal person. and these people with chronic fatigue, it seems like they can skyrocket and then that leads to this post exertional malaise R We talked earlier about how marker of energetic stress, GDF fifteen can go to the brain and make you feel sick, right or make you feel you know nauseous or you tired. Other cytokines from the immune system when you're sick when you're fighting an infection, do the same thing. The best study on mitochondria and chronic fatigue syndrome was published last year the year before. and it showed that there is a deficiency. in energy transformation in the mitochondria muscle muscle biopsies, a little piece of muscle from from the quad, from the thigh. and then they looked at how well can the mitochondriia in muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome Fow energy And what they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can't flex energy properly, you should feel like you don't have the capacity to push Right to exercise So why is that? Why do those people have You lower mitochondrial energy transformation capacity, we don't know There's so many stories and I've been curious and interested about this, and I remember this family friend who came for dinner one night and she She was asking me, what do you work on? what do you do? And so I tell her we work on mitochondriia and psychoobiology, mitochondriialal, psycho biology, how the mind and the body relate you know, energetically And she said, Well, I have an interesting story for you I like, okay, it's the story that I used to have chric figue syndrome So I pered I was like, what happened? She was visibly an energetic person. She It didn't look like she had you know an issue with energy. So she said she was in her twenties and she had like, she was debilitated. She couldn't work and, you know, she lived in this place and, you know, her life would kind of You know completely upside down because she didn't have energy to do anything which is, I think a common story. and she was in bed like multiple hours, you know, every day and struggling to go get groceries and Everything was a drag about life. And then one summer, this guy from Hawaii, which was a friend of a friend, came over for the summer just for a little trip and they had an affair. She had a boyfriend and this was a long time that she that she had had, you know, a human connection like this. So you're saying I'm not say. what ended up happening is she said my chronic fatigue kind of lifted and I didn't have to do anything. And then after that summer, she never had chronic fatigue again. and she kind of reintegrated the normal life I don't know what the lesson is here. I don't know if there's a generalizable principle, but there's a lot of those stories where people end up in a really dark place in their life. and either they'reiagnosed with a mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome or with kind of somato you know, psychosomatic you know label or whatever that is. there's always kind of precipitating conditions. Sometimes it's in response to medical interventions like immunization, sometimes it's in response to you know, an infection or like a parasiteld and stuff like that. Yeah some people have like mold, poisoning or whatever and they get. Yeah. veryer often there's like a trigger. There's like sometimes a lingering kind of condition and then sometimes there's an acute trigger and the body's never able to fully recover What do we take from that? you know, story of of a summer fling. Well I take from it hope. Yeah you know, even when the cards seem to be stacked against you and it feels like you might have to live with this thing for a long time that in many cases miraculous things happen that defy the odds and hope itself, I think can keep us in an optimistic mindset. I've seen this in patients with mitochondrial diseases as well. You know Th these people are diagnosed with the genetically defined mitochondrial disease. The mitochondrial can' flow energy properly Every day they live probablyroably would this kind of discomfort of you holding your breath for too long and everything's difficult about life. Many of them lose hope. And when you see them losing hope, they start to go downhill physically and many of them die very early. peopleople who do the best, like their mitochondriura don't work the way they should they're able to find something that they love. They're able to find an expression for themselves and they're to have supportive family almost a universal theme for people to do well is they have supportive environment and Cultivating this is so precious and that brings us back maybe to social connections You know't, you? Eergetic process me, energetic process when we interact you know, through Um through sounds and, you know, physically shaking hands and And I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine. and then you know we might vibe and resonate. and then maybe you know you find someone and you feel love for that person. I think love is the experience of resonance Right And when you feel that with someone, it feels so special. Which goes back to the affair point Yeah, maybe On this point of exercise, which we talked about earlier, if someone wants to maximize mitochondrial biogenesis, what is the sweet spot for training? Is it strictly zoneed to cardio or high intensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is that like an optimal type of training I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder means that your might accc you are working harder. Okay, but you don't do it too long If you're not trained Right? Like you're regular guy, I'm not trained now. I run for like twenty minutes every other day. That's my know routine. That's what I have enough time to do and I feel like it moves energy through my body in the right way. If I go 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 for me. so I think that comes back to the point of like feeling into your energy. We call this mitoception, right? feeleling into your mitochondria and what's sustainable. So I think if there's an individualized you know stance that we need to take towards this And the last question from the audience was Right now, mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible reliable tests ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function. Working on it You're working on it. Yeah. So our team is working on it. And so we're building a platform technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria to mitoep Right? So you feel your energy through your mitochondria, and then you can make better decisions like ketogenic diet, is this helping you? Is this not helping? This new relationship, is this sucking away your energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new, you know, direction in life, there's so much. I mean, all of the important decisions we make really, you know, we make what we feel. Like you wake up in the morning and either feel great and you can change things or you wake up and you don't want to be here That's an experience. And before you get there, you know, on the dark sideid there's all of these decision point that we face and the power of discernment Right And what we talked about like with Steve Jobs, like this is the way to end And then you know you feel strong about this. discerning what's right for you, what's not right for you, what's the right direction, Is it the right time or not? Those are decisions we make, you know, with our guts. And there are many people who swear that this is the only way they make decisions. And if they make decisions rationally, that ends up biting them in the butt Because I think the this thing and this energetic system is the most sensitive instrument that we have to know whether The content of our lives is aligned with who we are as individuals. And that requires that we feel into this movement into our sensations and into Um, the experiences we have So that's the barometer that really guides us through life like a GPS and energetic GPS Dror Martin we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is what is the most difficult thing you ever overcame And how did it make you the person you are today I just felt my energy change Hm, I saw it change I felt like this sinking feeling About a year ago, My fiance and I were expecting a baby And we were about three months into the pregnancy and Great. We were excited. We were calling this new life new life. And we talked you know, affectionately about it and We said like, you know, when your life comes this and we both have a child And she was in Canada, she came back and then and that evening in in bed she had this like crazy pain that started and And we were about super scared. There was a bit of bleeding. and then And then the contraction started to come really fast, not supposed to happen three months m and then I was like, o, maybe this is just like a bump in the road and You know, things are going to be fine. U We ended up having a miscarriage and Nosha they didn't want to go to the hospital. so we did this at home And it was terrible. It was Really, really sad, really, you know, gut wrenching So we were both devastated when you know, new life left us and and then I had this moment of like, why me This has happened to me. like I'm I think I'm a good person I'm doing my best to bring good in the world I try to be a good partner, good you know, leader, I tryed to ye, why is this happening to me? So this was like this victim, you know mentality mindset. and I've learned through forty or so years that I think a useful stance to take in life is to assume that there's something to learn from everything you go through I don't know this for sure. It's not a scientific fact. It's more of a of an experience turned into kind of a way of living, more of a belief Okay but How could there be something to learn from something so terrible U And I had to sit with this and two days later, A the baby had gone and Nirosha and I had sat in the shower and cried. The smell was horrible and just it death. L death was around us around me and I felt angry and I felt sad And I just sat down and wrote. I just And that's my way now of letting things flow. differenterent people have different ways and I was writing about my experience and why now and And I ask, what is there to learn from this and a very clear answer came up Slowing down That hit really hard because My whole life, I've moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very short. PhD and then I became a professor very quickly and through a team and And like moving fast is kind of something that's like a personality trait that I do and And I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that It would not have been possible otherwise, but Other times, I think it's hurt me. Like this drive, this under driver, like things must happen now must move fast think I' heard other people around and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader because I than me maybe I lack sensitivity to other people who don't move at my pace God So slowing down really kind of Home Things were like clear. It was like looking at a canvas There was more contrast Like the things that really mattered were like sharper, right? And all of this other shit, like these obligations and these things that I had said yes to or like, you know, the contrast was so much sharper Um And this Lesson. I took this as a lesson slowing down I think has allowed me to be a better listener, to be a better You know, a more compassionate father and Uh scientist. I think it's changed me and I don't know that I would have learned that lesson. We are the this energetic process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences. And the people we meet, like I'll never be the same after today from having sat with you at the table and you opening the door not just to scientific inquiry, but to human experience change all the time we transform and what shapes us is those kind of energetic interactions and Well I'll never be the same either So I think all the best reasons, you know, I have to say that I'm I'm hesitating my words here because of the gratitude that you've taken from the wisdom that it's given you. but I'm terribly sorry that you had to go through that. I can I just can't imagine. it's one of my honestly, it's one of my worst nightmares, especially at the season of life I'm in with me and my partner and my fiance. I trying to have a kid. it's just like I think I'm thinking about those things now and how I would I'm like preempting how I would handle those kinds of things. So to hear that it happen to you is just it's It's really hot It's really difficult to hear It happens to about twenty million people a year Mbe people we don't talk about it yither today. Be we don't talk about it it's shrouded in mixed emotions Yeah, I can understand that. Yeah But I am better off for having this conversation with you. and I think know I speak on behalf of my audience for sure this time when I say that I think my audience are as well. I've learned so much. It's actually kind of like completely rechanged how I think about life itself, which is a weird thing. And I hope I can just sit in this moment a little bit and think about how I am energy and how how that's determining everything. around me and others and And it's really, really wonderful. I think you know, what you're doing, people might think of you as like a mitochondrial scientist, but actually it's much more deeper and much more philosophical than that when we think about what energy is to us. It is everything. And that's really the lens that you've given me today is you've completely changed my mind on how I think about life, which is such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast. I don't say this, I't k people people's assses like this. Like I genuinely, my mind is like fucking out It's also a changeed how I think about business, which is really weird and I had exxpected. So business is an extension of us of, you know, energetic Like everything is E what've learnt today. Quite literally And it's also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, aim my energy Um