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

25:56And 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, something goes wrong. Something can break. 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 in diabetes, right? Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism.

26:32There's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, right? And so that causes this excess, you know, energy coming in. The cell says, oh, you know, too much. And it damages the mitochondria, this excess resistance because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. I was thinking about smoking and how smoking also is carcinogenic. It's cancer-causing. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be cancer-causing? It's clear that in cigarette smoke, there are carcinogens. There are molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations.

27:10There'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. The cancers that affect and kill most people, we don't really know why they come, when they come. And it's clear that there's kind of a long history. And the science behind connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and high blood glucose and diabetes, especially, which causes very high excursion, very high spikes in blood glucose, those things are damaging to ourselves. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance.

27:57And it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now? And then 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.

28:37So a normal cell is driven, its behavior, it's driven by the mitochondria. It's like mitochondria are in the driver's seat, 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, right? And cells have to make these decisions all the time. And cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective.

29:17And 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 mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death and cancer somehow is able to kind of get away from that. And it's weird to think about because, yeah, the things that cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like, you know, as you said, like having too much of this stuff here.

29:55Too much sugar. The white stuff, yes. High blood glucose levels, etc. 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. Yeah. And 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.

30:36The transistors start to melt and then the system, you know, gets damaged. The same thing happens, you know, in the body. If you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons, right? Very direct parallel with the electrical circuit. There are electrons stuck here on these little 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, then that increases the resistance. And they might die or malfunction. Correct. or things get damaged, right?

31:14The 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 in a mitochondrion, but then at every point in this cascade, you face resistance, there's more chance that that electron kind of jets out. And that becomes oxidative stress. Well, then what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me, and they have two different colors of hair.

31:51Now, let's just pretend, for argument's sake and for the sake of this explanation, that this is someone's hair that's gone gray because of stress. And this is what she used to look like, or he used to look like, in terms of the color of their hair. what i found really interesting because it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on going on in the body is you're saying you can actually reverse gray hair without dyeing 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 uh what we discovered is that hair graying is reversible.

32:33And 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, you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were white and then all the hairs are dark. And if you take a hair like this, the tip here, right, was inside the body long time ago. This is almost like if you looked at tree rings, right? You take a tree and you cut it in cross section, you see like the rings and then you can see, ooh, this ring was 30 years ago, right?

33:13And 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, like 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 going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around with that trace, that physical trace in your body.

33:53And he's got a haircut. And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head, that the tip was dark, right? And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white, right? And you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young. And then boom, it became old, right? It 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.

34:32And through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags, you 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 it 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 aging is this linear progressive process that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility.

35:12I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up finding 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 analyzed 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.

35:50It'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 are like this or like that was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. And what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair, I thought there's going to 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 upregulation of the body, the hair follicle, where the hair was becoming old, wasn't kind of letting go of things.

36:32It was doing more. So that means during that period of time, you were more stressed and using more energy? When cells become old, instead of just dying, right, they struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly, or for some reason they accumulate damage and 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 cortisol cortisol 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 we enjoy but you do never let 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 You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight.

37:39There's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolved 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 does 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 with your partner. How much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be engaging your stress system, to be releasing cortisol? So two students in a lab, Gabriel and Natalia, did that experiment. You put cells in a dish, you give them the equivalent of cortisol.

38:15How much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare? There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol does a signal that there might be something dangerous outside. That's like when you're sitting down, you get an email, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract. And then you have this whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost? So in cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure, the cost of life by 60%. So when I'm stressed, I'm using 60 % more energy theoretically.

38:54I don't know about you, but cells in a dish. so they're the beauty about like bodies and you know with the mind and you know this complex organism they're buffering systems right so you might i don't think your energy expenditure increased by 60 percent if you're stressed out but it increases somewhat what is that graph there so there are two graphs here uh the top one is the color of the hair of a single hair from a young asian woman who is part of this study and what we see here this is called the hair pigmentation pattern, the HPP, that we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively, bring science to hair graying and reversal.

39:33And so what you see here is this hair was dark, and then it became white for two centimeters, and then boom, completely regained color. Actually, it was darker here than it used to be, right? And then stayed 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 we saw this, we had found from a few different people, white hairs that had regained color. We'd never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark, right? So I remember holding this hair. I was like, oh my God, this is in the same hair. This is incontrovertible evidence that graying of hair is reversible and it can be pretty, pretty fast.

40:19Like 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. 10 and zero. And then the X axis, the horizontal was 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 asked people and we asked this lady, put a dot on the graph that was the most stressful time in the past year. But anyone can do the exercise, past year, most stressful time.

41:02Okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot, right? And March, number 10. And then least stressful part, zero. And then put other meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots along this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected. And it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. Correct. And what happened to her life, she said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies and then broke up with her boyfriend. Oh, damn. And her hair went gray. Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend.

41:42She 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 killer question here, which is, if that remains chronic, does that hair follicle go gray forever? Yeah. i.e. 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 yeah do you see what i'm saying yes it seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible but we know it you know very well if you have a full head of gray hair and you're 70 years old, you're not going to regain your color.

42:28So there seems to, what the model, the mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity, right? Where a hair slowly accumulates damage, becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient, right? 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, right you go on a 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 against that 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 10 years ago and you go back up you're too far away from threshold to regain color okay so it suggests some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for something as binary as hair color.

43:20It's black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where... Where you can reverse gray 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 bad email, I go, fuck it, I guess. Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24 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.

43:53So it's not the stress that burns us down. It's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to beat a little faster, if you mount a response to that email, you're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your shoulder. That's burning energy. Now your brain is going into rumination mode and then this thing. And then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the anxiety and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy so the chain of events is i get the email it's a very bad email says you're fired steven from the we found a different host yeah um i look at the email that goes into my psychology my mind i then have a story i tell myself about what that email means for me my future my children whatever which then causes a physiological response of like chemicals like cortisol yeah um which goes into my cells my mitochondria which then have to work a little bit harder use more energy which is ultimately then going to mean that i'm more tired because i have a finite amount of energy per day is that 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 the right way to think about it don't in the laptop or like get a little bit better with bad news yeah or you know learn to be less reactive right or learn to to feel and and um you know sit with be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it yeah become aware of it yeah right so you can kind of interrupt this and People who study contemplative practices and meditation and mindfulness approaches, I think many of them think this is kind of the key.

45:46The 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're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many, many days in a row, many weeks in a row. 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.

46:22Yeah. 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? Because I'm really struggling with like understanding it. Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise. Yeah. Right. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance. So the energy is trying to flow through the muscle.

46:55And 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. 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.

47:37But then, so that's like an acute bout of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is once you recover, the benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise, they happen after, during the recovery. So if you recover, now the muscles are relaxing and you're resting. Eventually you go to sleep. 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, right? So I'm gonna make more mitochondria. So that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right?

48:16To training 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 so next time I'm gonna be ready, let's make more mitochondria. So that's probably where the benefits of exercise come from. This spike 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.

48:54Then 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, so like the symptom, then what is the first domino? And can you walk me through the sequence of events? Because one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events, I can also understand how to then reverse it. how to kind of take i've got a couple of gray hairs now and i actually anecdotally do think weirdly now you've said this that i have like gray hair flare-ups where i'll go i'll you know go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and i'll look in the room like what i have 12 now i'm being generous there there's more like 25 i have i have 25 now in terms of those dominoes the symptom is gray hair yeah what is the first domino that that falls and what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicle so there's a finite energy budget And then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business, right?

49:52You 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 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... Oh my God, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just... Acute stress response. Yeah, I just got, yeah, cortisol fled. Sorry, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

50:29Yeah. So there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that works similarly to Maslow's hierarchy of 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, loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, 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 you call self-actualization, and kind of becoming your best self, flourishing.

51:09So he saw this very much as this needs to be covered. And when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid, right? Your meditation practice or the 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? So this hierarchy of human needs, I think, aligns with hierarchy of energy needs and the body. And as far as the importance of hair color goes, it's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to be less efficient, right?

51:52Their mitochondria are working a little less efficiently and then there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy. and there's more 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 stressor 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, Stephen, we're not going to repair the skin next to your eyes.

52:35You're going to get a couple more wrinkles and we're not going to make your, we're not going to commit energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever. So I would then look aged. I would look old, older. But that's because all of my energy has been going to something else, which my body considers to be a high priority. Right. 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 gray hair. And usually one does not age that quickly in eight years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers.

53:07They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic. And two years later, they have gray hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged 10 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.

53:28So 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 pull 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 that flexibility. Like if you want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, eating more is not going to give you more energy.

54:06So 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. No. Hmm. And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress. Okay, I'm going to live a less stressed life. Yeah. 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 increasing what we call dissipative losses, right? Oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the exercise.

54:46But then when you recover, now the body's like, next time this happens, I'm going to be ready. And the process of getting ready to go through a high resistance gym session is that you make more mitochondria, right? Your muscles get bigger and stronger and your heart becomes more efficient and your arteries become softer. And you develop the confidence that you can do this well. And then it becomes rewarding. It becomes enjoyable. So all of these things, now that you're off the gym session, right? You spend 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.

55:28If there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to get ready for this is to become more efficient. So by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid and kind of flexible cardiovascular system, and by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation, right? All of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energy at cost of doing the activity. And then there's more energy available for anti-aging growth, maintenance and repair, vitality. So I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise, but you feel like you have more. And you don't actually have more.

56:03The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smoothly through this thing. It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria. Yeah. Okay. What else? What about food? I've got coffee here, I've got some alcohol here, I've got the sugar.

56:25What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body? Yeah, great 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 to 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, right? Or 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.

57:05If 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 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, right?

57:42And you ask them to not do too much. in this smaller room. They're just sitting down and reading a book. And then you can ask them, okay, now drink this alcohol. And then you measure, you look, you know, minute by minute, they drink the alcohol and then you start to see, ooh, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside, under the hood, the body's like burning energy 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 our health, maybe because they steal energy away from a growing body, for example.

58:16There's good data in South America. Children who are exposed to more pathogens, there's no sanitation. They walk barefoot. They eat stuff that's not cleaned. They have more pathogens in their gut. There's more virus, bacteria, and parasites. It costs energy to fight those things off. That's why you feel like shit when you're fighting a flu, for example. Your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa, virus like COVID or any seasonal flu virus. The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then the immune system steals energy away from the brain, from your mind.

59:00And then you feel like, oh, everything is so difficult. You just want to be in bed, overcovers. You feel cold, which is strategy to basically save energy. So all of what's called sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. It's like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies. Stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increased the cost of living. And then because there's a cap on your energy budget, then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else.

59:37and if you're in those states for long periods of time you're in a chronic state of um i guess like energetic distraction is the way i think about it that's that's a cool way to think about it i was thinking about it i was thinking about it like if you my body has an army of 10 soldiers and usually those 10 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 um and what if if there's only six working on my you know fundamental requirements to flourish then some of those things are gonna have to give way and i might end up with gray hair and i might end up with wrinkles or maybe my brain won't function the same, maybe a disease.

1:00:36My immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. Yeah, immune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. And the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, clearing out proteins that you don't need, repairing DNA that's gotten damaged, making you mitochondria. All of these processes happen every day. Every 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. So there's this quality control cycle. All the mitochondria that don't work too well anymore, they get degraded.

1:01:12It's called mitophagy. Autophagy is self-eating. Mitophagy is self-eating of the mitochondria. So when a cell, for example, is hungry, if you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, oh shit, I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share. And then I'll have just a best functioning mitochondria. And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia, weirdly, because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's and dementia.

1:01:48But 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, amyloid 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 and what most people believe because it came from, you know, white coat wearing scientists and university professors.

1:02:23That is not the truth. And what is more true is, and let me just say why it's not the truth. You can have people in their 60s, in their 70s, in their 80s, zero protein deposits in the brain. We can image this now pretty well with neuroimaging. You can have people zero protein deposit in the brain and they have full-blown Alzheimer's and dementia. And you have the other extreme, people with loads of amyloid plaques and tau tangles completely normal cognition. So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis, this amyloid, you know, protein aggregates in the brain as a driver of dementia and neurodegeneration is not correct.

1:03:08What we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy demand in their 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, right? Like with the gray hair. Yeah, exactly. And then over time, those brain regions become hypometabolic and then that's when you start to have symptoms.

1:03:45What does that mean? That's when people start to have memory issues. You said hypometabolic. Hypometabolic, yes. This is hypermetabolic 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 100 units of energy for the brain. Let's say this brain region, 100 units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. If there's a problem with the mitochondria, or if there's a problem with the cell communicating, with the synapses, right? Cells talk to each other through these things called synapses.

1:04:21If there's a problem now, that part of the brain is gonna need to do more work to compensate. And then we know something happens with neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's is inflammation, neuroinflammation. That basically means there are some cells in the brain that are trying to heal the brain. And part of that healing process is kind of a stress response. locally. And then that stress response leads to the secretion of a load of proteins we call cytokines. And then it's basically those cells saying something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. So you have those cells that get activated.

1:04:57They secrete those proteins to say, please help. We need to reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish normal, healthy balance. But that process of reestablishing, of healing costs energy. Just like when you're post-exercise, your muscle invests energy to become stronger. So in that kind of 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 hypometabolic. So they burn less energy. So if you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer's, there are these regions that burn less energy.

1:05:37And 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. you become really depressed. Is this why they call it type 3 diabetes? Because I've just heard that phrase quite a lot recently.

1:06:16Yeah. So my hunch is that Alzheimer's and dementia, more generally, is a disorder of energy. And specifically, it's a disorder of increased energy resistance. So there's type 3 diabetes comes from the fact that when the brain gets sick, right, and symptoms of dementia start to appear, like loss of memory and mood and depression and that constellation of symptoms. When you look in the brain, it's burning less energy. But it's also harder for glucose to get inside the brain. 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 and be processed and be used.

1:07:04And why might that be? Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system. Oh, okay. If you load up the system all the time with 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 lamp that eventually is going to catch fire. We are a slow burning fire, right? Like the inside of our cells, you have the electrons flowing. And when there are sparks flying, it damages the mitochondria. It damages this, damages that. And that increases, that's what aging is.

1:07:40Aging, the most basic mechanism of aging, including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's, is the accumulation of little damage, little mutations, little defects, little imperfections. And as the imperfections accumulate, the system becomes less efficient. Insulin resistance basically in diabetes refers to the fact that muscles, but also the brain has the capacity to say, I can't anymore. Like glucose, too much for me, too much resistance. too much 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 the electrons, you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin.

1:08:23So 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, like glucose is way high. 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 are starting to be at capacity in terms of how much energy they can resist and flow, then they shut down the valves, right?

1:09:05So the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant. And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells, but then blood glucose starts to increase. So the next step in this cascade is, well, if there's too much energy in circulation, too much sugar, too much fat, what can we do with this? And that's where fat stores, you know, adiposity comes in. So obesity is a protection mechanism against excess energy resistance. One way to think about this hypothesis that dementia, Alzheimer's, is linked to an overflow of glucose, let's say, is to look at other civilizations or, I don't know, tribes, the Hadza tribe in Africa who don't have a lot of glucose.

1:09:52Do they still get Alzheimer's and 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, physical inactivity, right? If you don't move, energy doesn't flow through your mitochondria. So it just stacks up, accumulates. And the things that protects the brain, protects you against Alzheimer's and dementia, or things that let energy flow.

1:10:27Physical activity, not eating too much, especially not eating too much sugar. And then ketones, there's new data now showing that ketones can 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 the sociality of mitochondria in the organism.

1:11:07The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat fat, right, avocados 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 mitochondria in the brain. So you have mitochondria in the liver talking and feeding mitochondria in the brain and And the 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.

1:11:45That path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter. I just want to make sure on that point that I don't misunderstand. Because, you know, it could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's. But actually you're saying, you're not saying that. 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. 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.

1:12:19I've had, you know, 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-1 drugs are so powerful because they address the 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 or rural agrarian populations like the Yoruba, they find that Alzheimer's and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare.

1:13:07Which again means that it points to Western diets. Western diet, Western... Lifestyles. Behavior. These people move all the time 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 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 that causes damage because of this excess energy pressure and then the system overheats.

1:13:53It's going to be fat. skinny fat yeah and that stores it around your livers exactly 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 like the increased fat and I think the reason why obesity in general we say 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 and the system can't flow it Like the mitochondria can't keep up. So to protect themselves, they store that and store that away.

1:14:30And then you become obese. If you're going to take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound for pound fighter of all time. The guy they call Johnny Bones Jones. John is a co-owner of our show sponsor, Ketone IQ, alongside myself. And when you hear why, it probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he's training or fighting, he needs high quality, steady, laser-like focus without the crash and ketones give him exactly that and unlike caffeine ketones don't stimulate your brain they fuel it so your brain actually loves ketones because it runs on them much more efficiently than anything else and right now ketone iq is giving away one of a kind pair signed mma gloves from john jones himself and the upcoming gold medal wrestler he's coaching called gable stevenson they are very very rare and if you want your shot at winning them go to ketone.com slash steven20 to win no purchase necessary terms and conditions apply and you'll also get 30 % off your first subscription order exclusive ketone iq merch and of course you're shot at these signed gloves you guys know that i only drink one type of coffee these days and it's called comitia if you don't know the brand they flash freeze coffee at the perfect moment to lock in all of the amazing flavor they've done something incredible they've got all around the world and they found the most delicious coffees from all of these places and they've created a world mug competition box that you can buy so if you want to try coffee from Honduras or Panama or England or the USA or Italy or France you can then order that particular coffee on subscription to come to your house no machines necessary not only are they our sponsor and a company I have invested in it is the only coffee I drink now actually this morning when I came to work I put a comtier under these red oils, which is another one of my favorites from France.

1:16:18So if you want to try your own Contia, they've reserved a certain amount for Diary of Aseo listeners. Just go to contia.com slash D-O-A-C. And you can get$20 off if you use the code D-O-A-C at checkout. So on this point of food then, fasting, autophagy, all these words that I've heard, if you were giving me advice on everything you know about how to create a body that is very, very efficient in how I deal with the energy that I have, 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.

1:16:57I think about how am I feeling? And do I need more food, right? Am I like depleted or 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, pressure on my brain, on my mitochondria. So I think about it from the perspective of my mitochondria. What do my mitochondria need? And in general, it's much harder to 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 is typically innocuous for most people because 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 make ketones make ketones yeah yeah most people have enough energy on board right in the form of fat some glycogen in your muscles and your liver to live at least a month.

1:18:07I mean, I'm a big, big fan of survival documentaries. And one of the most remarkable things you see in survival documentaries, I'm even thinking about some that I've watched, is people can survive for seemingly months without eating anything. They can't survive long without water, but they can survive for months without eating anything because their body will start to kind of go into its reserves and break down muscle and all these other things. Yeah, the record, the world record for not eating is over 300 days. Wow. Irishman. And he lost, I forget the exact numbers, 250 pounds, 300 pounds. What does this say about hunger?

1:18:46And 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 eat not because we're hungry. I think a lot of us have learned to eat to serve some other need. And eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know, as gambling and kind of connecting 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.

1:19:27Like if you feel sad, you feel like bored, hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the salt, especially if you had salty, sugary things around. It's a rewarding thing that will get you out of other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat. That's a good 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. like eating for example a very severe kind of window would be 2 p.m to 6 p.m right so you eat for four hours and you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that that tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating and my dad you know still thinks to this day he's 69 now that breakfast 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.

1:20:25I don't think it's true for most people. And especially if you're in your 60s, 70s, 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 functioning mitochondria. And then there's more friction 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. 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, they just say, I'm gonna 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.

1:21:09They 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.

1:21:51But as people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs, those heavy, greasy breakfasts started causing widespread ingestion. Ingestion? Enter Harvey Kellogg's. Yes, that Kellogg's. He ran a famous health sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain-based diet would cure ingestion and improve overall health. He co-invented cornflakes. And he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy, cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day. And your dad bought it hook, line, and sinker. I mean, a lot of people did. Everybody did. And I did until recently, until I started to feel into this.

1:22:34I would have this big bowl of cereals. That's how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low energy. this, 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. 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.

1:23:10And I want to not overeat. I don't want to undereat, but I don't want to overeat. If you're undereat, you're going 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. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. And just maybe to close the loop on that example, like when you're sick and you're fighting an infection. Yeah. I had a beautiful opportunity to understand, not just understand, to experience this one day. It was New Year's Eve, 31st in the evening.

1:23:45And I started to feel like a little scratchy throat. I'm like, oh, I think 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? Like something was coming up. I felt terrible. I had started to have like full-blown flu symptoms. Went home early. like 9 p.m. And then I went to bed. It was a horrible night. I felt, 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 know, go up so that it could fight the high fever, stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus.

1:24:25So it's usually a good thing. And then 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 division partitioning of energy in the body. I was like, I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system is in full-blown defense mode. And it's not like I was like, I could feel my heart. I'm wearing this aura. My heart rate was like 110 at rest instead of being like 60, you know, normally. So there's all of this energy flowing through. It's like, wow, like my metabolic rate objectively is higher.

1:25:03We know this is true from good studies on that. When you're fighting something, you burn more energy. Yet I'm feeling completely drained. 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, sucking away my energy 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 like but I couldn't muster the strength it's like what the fuck 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 start to think about work and about you know the lab and about you know family things it's like whoa it's 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 or when you're really stressed yeah or just anything that's all consuming like that exactly that's like maslow's pyramid right the top is squished and you're like survival.

1:26:20And you're like, where did I go? Where's, yeah, I remember. So I was still me, right? I was still Martin, but I felt completely different. The quality of my mind, the quality of my intention was like 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 just what it felt like when I was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffuse energy. Like the light, for example, right?

1:26:59There's 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. And 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 the 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 diffused, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all over the place.

1:27:34And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go, right? How far can my mind go? Caring about things. The diffused energy doesn't go very far. But the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb. 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. Cash, 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.

1:28:14So even if you're growing from like 1 million to 6 million to 12 million to 25 million or whatever, as we did, you still have a cash flow problem. And there would be times when we're nearing the end of the month and months in a row, and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team. They always got paid. They never knew. We always figured it out. But what I'd notice is in those moments of really, really high stress, sometimes, not always, but there were periods where I lost motivation. and what i meant by that is i literally as a 23 24 year old like ceo of all these hundreds of people some of them all double my age i basically hide at home and what i mean by hide at home is like i didn't have the i lost purpose for this fucking business like i i'd wake up for it might last a week or two weeks and i just didn't have the purpose the quote motivation as they call it to like go out and be a leader and now as you say i could always 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 and i think that's really important because you know that we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching the show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation and as a founder and as a ceo it's you feel so guilty that you the the source of motivation and inspiration leadership for this group of people you could lose it but now i understand what it was now i understand that i was like an a chronic well uh yeah a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment yeah the other thing actually made me think about as well when you said about this diffusion of energy you actually made me think about businesses and okrs and goals yeah it made me think about if you take 10 10 people in a startup and they're all really really focused on the same goal they are way more successful but sometimes you don't have a clear goal and you're all pointing in different directions yes so there's incoherence there's incoherence like yes yes but you need to be a laser and this is why okrs are so important because you can put all the energy at the problem yes this is traction yes towards a particular goal this is what purpose does purpose focuses energy and i think the reason purpose is so powerful right and why you need to have that right to to feel it i 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 find you out and then you're in bed again.

1:30:35Yeah, exactly. But when you somehow find yourself in a place where you feel like those things, you know, that are in your life are meaningful, right? And that the path you're on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffused like a light bulb and boom, it brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right? Where it's like you have all 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.

1:31:18And 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. Because there's this coherence, not just energetic coherence that allows you to do more with less energy, but also this core answer 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 he was.

1:31:52But here's why. There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early 90s of signal-to-noise ratio, what was so brilliant about jobs that I tell every CEO now, and I don't care if you're an S &P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business, his vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year, just the next 18 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.

1:32:35Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So the signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80-20. 80 signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2.30 in the morning and expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts. It was all email. he was right he was right and the only other person that i've seen that has a higher ratio than that is elon musk he has no noise he does not deal with noise he is 100 signal 24 seconds you know every cycle i mean the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute 60 minutes of every hour the 18 hours he's awake it's all signal and look what 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 is is listening to some doom scrolling on you know some social media app that just takes your mind or maybe playing your guitar but very few people on earth and if you go back in history you're going to find out that the geniuses of their time were close to 100 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 else.

1:33:56No, the goals you set for the way that you were awake, if you're going to be awake 18 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 80 % of your time based on that, you're extraordinarily successful. You are absolutely, and you're Steve Jobs or you're an Elon Musk or you're somebody. If you even talk to Bezos, I don't know him personally, but I've heard in many interviews like I knew.

1:34:32I've met Elon just a few times. I spent a lot of time with Jobs. But they say the same thing. Bezos will not make a decision after one o 'clock in the afternoon because he felt that the noise was too high. The signal for him was in the morning hours. This is a crucial aspect of success that I now understand to be the ability of it defines an entrepreneur a man or woman that understands the signal noise ratio that focuses on that they'll be successful the ones that can't that get down to a 50 50 signal noise they'll 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.

1:35:18He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80 % signal. He wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these interviews with Johnny Ives. I'll actually also play the Johnny Ives interview because I send this around to everybody. So I'm going to play it where Johnny Ives talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was. This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people 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.

1:35:58And 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 a 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 said no to this and no to that and he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway.

1:36:48So 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 to Johnny Ives, on a weekly basis, tell me what you've said no to. And Johnny said, I'd had these sacrificial things. But he knew, he goes, Steve's definition of focus was saying no to things with every bone in your body and every fiber of your being you thought were good ideas. But you say no to them because we're focused on this other thing.

1:37:27This 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 90 % of your energy to something or your focus to something, it gets 90%. But when you give 100%, it's like it gets 150%.

1:38:03There's something in giving your entire being of focus to something. Maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is. That means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically, drastically increases. Solving hard problems is hard. But these great, great founders, they solve them because they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing. Yes. I think the reason this is is because of a physical principle about energy, which is called resonance. right if you walk through life with such clarity of mind right like this is what the truth is this is where we're going right and and you live and you breathe that you become like a resonator you hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your actions and your 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 know look at people with it comes out in every facet of you, right?

1:39:03So you become the emblematic leader, I guess, for that thing that you're 100 % into. What this does is that it's picked up by other people, right? Maybe this gets 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 somehow becoming coherent and, you know, aligned. 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 music, like a symphony, right?

1:39:44Like when it sounds, when it's on tune, then people that want to come on board, like they feel this and then it gets amplified. It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often cited 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 Tribble in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs' uncanny, almost hypnotic ability to convince everyone around him to believe practically anything.

1:40:25And people who work closely with Jobs described 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. That's an energetic quality. And 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 thing happened and somehow, you know, he was able to mobilize this donor and, you know, fundraising is like easier than it should be.

1:41:02And so like all of these things snowball because you hold that, you know, that vibe, you hold that energy and 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 Hertzfield 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.

1:41:39And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Jobs' charisma, 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 something like this happen is you need to feel that there's something compelling. Like you need to feel something's important. And again, that's not a rational thing. Like 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 that's where ideas start to come.

1:42:21You 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, prime minister, best salesperson, well, best philanthropist, 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 i now approach you know other human beings and you know my 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 some challenges that come with this but he's this beautiful little energy pattern, right?

1:43:13He's this energy flowing through this little child's body. But my role as a parent is to provide just 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 know, anytime, then like that's not good for development. Kids need to feel, you know, some boundaries. And so those are like resistance, right? Little constraints. But if every minute, like me putting constraint, no, you can't do this, no, you can't do that, then it damages the system. It traumatizes the system. It's not going to grow in an interaction.

1:43:46Yeah, 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. Like there's a challenge. There needs to be a challenge for the team to meet, right? Challenge is like a barrier. It's like a little resistor. Of course, there are challenges. You're like, it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult, then everyone's bored. It's like, yeah, we're going to do the same thing as we did last year. And then next year, we should do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year.

1:44:15And then we need to double the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you'd have to work through. I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. Like, what's the next challenge? Why go down deep in the ocean to discover new creatures? Why go in the Amazon trying to discover new species of little bugs? Why go into space? Like this is all curiosity driven. It's like the mind wanting to have something to hit against. Because if there's nothing to hit against, if there's no resistance, then there's no purpose. I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy.

1:44:50You 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 unworthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically 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, right? And not just with food physically, but to nurture his curiosity and his transformation.

1:45:26Linked 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 a therapist and neuropsychologist 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?

1:46:01And 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 experienced before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died, right? So then you have how the person felt, right? Before, how much purpose they experienced. And then you look at the mitochondria after they die.

1:46:36Where? In the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So that little part of the brain that's involved in active reasoning and executive function. And the mitochondria in the people who felt more purpose had a 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 purposeful.

1:47:10Yeah, 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 the mitochondria in the brain? Right? Can the experience of stress change the mitochondria in the brain? A hundred percent. That happens. Now you can say, okay, now let's change the mitochondria in the brain. You can like open up the brain, inject a little something that either boost the mitochondria or inhibit and activate the mitochondria, increase or decrease resistance.

1:47:46And 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, 100%. So 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, then what? What will I notice as the next symptom? Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that kind of starts to pop up.

1:48:20You feel drained. you don't feel you have enough energy. Burnout? Probably feels like burnout. And you start to lose enthusiasm for the future. You 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, 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.

1:49:06Yeah, that'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, right, what does that do energetically to the body? And there's this protein marker in the blood that reflects energy friction, energy resistance, right? If the mitochondria can't flow energy smoothly, this protein gets made. And then it's in kind of a blood biomarker. It's elevated in cancer, where we think there's increased energy resistance. It's elevated in Alzheimer's, where we think there's increased energy resistance in the brain.

1:49:48It's elevated in diabetes, where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It's elevated in all sorts of pathologies, hypertension and heart disease. And it's a marker that the organism energetically is not doing well. It's not efficient, right? It'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, okay, just relax. Everything's fine. You're doing great. And then they sit down, they relax for 30 minutes. Cortisol goes down. The heart rate goes down. Blood pressure goes down.

1:50:20And then her lovely study coordinator, Catherine, walked into the room and then looked at the participants and said, now you're going to be judged. You're going to have to deliver a speech. And here's a situation. You were in a shopping mall. You were, you know, you grabbed this scarf. You put it on just to try. But then the security guard caught you. And then they were accusing you of shot lifting. So now you're in court. You need to defend yourselves in front of the judge. and you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard. Should we do this job? And then we tell them, you have two minutes to prepare your three minute defense in front of the judge.

1:50:56Most 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 man who stands six feet in front of them, looks at them straight in the 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.

1:51:30And 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 body? Yeah, so that protein is called GDF15. Yeah. Growth differentiation factor 15. The name doesn't matter. But that energetic stress marker, you're asking the right question. What does it do? And what does it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain.

1:52:03Yeah. And that protein can be made by any organ in the body except one, the brain. What is it doing? It's very useful to know where's a receptor, right? 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? Only in one organ in the body.

1:52:28Is it in here? It's right in here. Yeah, so in the brainstem. The brainstem is where kind of the basic survival systems of the body are. and there's a region in the brainstem called the area postrema. Doesn'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 brainstem 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.

1:53:02Okay. Something in the body is not right. There's something running out of energy and then the brain makes two decisions. Very similar to when you're sick. That protein, GDF15, is called a cytokine. It's the same thing that immune cells produce when they'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. Can't go to the gym. Yes. Doesn't feel worth it. We know this specifically from animal studies. If you inject animals with GDF15, they hunch in a ball and they don't do anything.

1:53:39They go into this sickness behavior. That's number one. Number two, the brain says something's running out of energy. First, let's conserve energy, number one. But two, let's mobilize energy, right? Let's put glucose into the blood. Let's put fat into the blood because there might be cells out there that are running out of energy and we need to rescue them. Are you going to get belly fat? Visceral fat, yeah. Yeah, you're going 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.

1:54:18And 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 a 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. Some people have very high levels, some people have very low levels. And then you wait 14 years. This is actually a study from the UK called the UK Biobank. So if you measure the protein, energetic stress cytokine, and you ask what happens to people with high GDF 15 versus people with low GDF 15, it turns out people with high GDF 15 are more likely to develop mental illness, bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia.

1:55:03People with high GDF 15 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension. People with high GDF15 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. High energy stress, high energy resistance in the body based on this marker is called a prognostic indicator. It's an indicator that something bad might happen. And people with A high GDF-15 also, they don't like to take the stairs. They don't like to walk for pleasure.

1:55:40They don't like to go out to the gym. They don't like to go out with friends. They don't like to exercise. Correct. Yeah, because if you're getting the signal, like when you're sick, right? If GDF-15 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-15 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. Taking the time to feel.

1:56:12Meditation. Meditation. My bloody fiancé was right. What we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF-15 increases throughout the day, right? So the purpose of sleep then might be to reduce energy resistance. Like what we were talking about earlier, it's not about having, like finding this one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It's about this movement of increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance and increasing resistance and 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, like keeping away from these sort of extreme stresses, eating way too much, starving oneself, oxidative stress.

1:56:54None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. If we just look back in time of how we used to live 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 a pretty simple playbook for how to live a good life and to not be so bloody stressed out all the time. I think part of it is, yes, living a life that is more aligned with the way we evolved, right? Which is connecting to other human beings and not eating too much. And I think that's one piece. But that's like, everyone knows this.

1:57:29Yeah. 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, 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 their best version of themselves, so they can flourish. So you know what's interesting?

1:58:02Before 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 10 % of time, was the audience asking about supplements. And the question that they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle interventions, but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like methylene blue, urethylene A and NAD plus boosters.

1:58:36In your opinion, what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut? Are they a band-aid? Are they useful? I think there are shortcuts to some states. I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there's a magic pill to solve a complex issue, to solve the way that you're feeling, it becomes like, 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. So in some cases, I don't really know how methylene blue does everything it's supposed to be doing.

1:59:15Biologically, methylene blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that methylene blue kind of 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 it takes 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 NAD, 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.

1:59:54Yeah. And most people are not deficient of NAD 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 pill form? Like how do people take NAD plus? Because I know there was some like drips one time that some guy gave me. Yes, I think there'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 your cells very well. You can inject, infuse IV intravenously NAD plus directly and then that gets to your cells better.

2:00:32That'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 urolithin A? Urolithin A 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.

2:01:10And there's kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded if you're fasting or if you're pushing the system like during exercise. What urolithin A seems to do is to kind of accelerate this process, right? So it accelerates the degradation of the bad mitochondria, the mitophagy, 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 urolithin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years, transitioning from a compelling animal data study to highly rigorous placebo-controlled human clinical trials.

2:01:48And overwhelmingly, the human research confirms that urolithin A targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation. With one study in 2022 in the JAMA Network Open Study Journal, where they took adults aged 65 to 90 and gave one of them placebo, one of the groups placebo, and the other urolithin A for four months. And at the end of that, they found that the group that were given urolithin A showed statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial inefficiency. I should be on urolithin A then. Everyone should. Do you take any of that?

2:02:24Don'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. 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 coenzyme Q, CoQ10. There was a lot of hype about all sorts of things, anti-inflammatory, berries. Antioxidants was a big thing 10, 20 years ago. Turned out not to be so useful. Actually impairs normal adaptation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants.

2:03:00So urolithin A feels like the next fad. Maybe it's real. I think the science is fairly compelling, but 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? Like, 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.

2:03:37We think about diseases. We study, you know, when things go wrong and we try to understand the molecular, you 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 continuously. Heal, you know, repair the DNA that's damaged. Repair the mitochondria that are getting old. You get rid of them, you make new ones. Like preserving the wholeness of the system. To heal means to become whole again. is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature to heal because if you think about me and you sat in here now we're sat in a like a dark bunker basically with no sunlight and listen most of us live in such a dark bunker with very little sunlight so we then have to take vitamin d oh 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 even but if i I'm not going to get vitamin D and then that's going to cause problems.

2:04:30Yes. So we're not 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 and you see nature. If you're in a hospital, for example, people 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, that sounds and looks like what you evolved to be around?

2:05:07So we don't really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps calm the body and somehow improve recovery.

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2:06:24Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria? Interestingly, red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices, helmets, hairbrush, band. I think I've got one here actually. I think this is a red light. Therapy hairbrush. Therapy hairbrush. Yeah. Someone was just telling me their dad is part of a study now. he puts a helmet with red light every day because he has pre-dementia. By doing this, the idea is light is energy. Energy is not a thing, but it's the potential for change. It's the capacity to change something. Red light like this, especially the red, the infrared that you don't see with your eye, can penetrate tissue.

2:07:08It 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 in biology that resonates with it, right? That can offer the right amount of resistance, right? To the photons of red light photons hit, and then there's transformation of energy. That receptor, the antenna, the cellular antenna for red light seems to be mitochondria. So there's something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then boom, they meet with oxygen to become metabolic water.

2:07:44that is called cytochrome c oxidase i'm gonna try and say this in layman'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 uh that might also offset you know the natural order that your body has 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 you know energetically dancing with each other where you have the mitochondria to transform energy and then you know genes are expressed and then this other cell is doing this this cell is doing this and there's this beautiful balance and when the system is out of balance now there are signals like inflammation right signals of this imbalance at an energetic level.

2:08:44And then that turns into molecular level. And then the system tries to come back into balance. Right. And wow, I never realized this, that too much red light can be bad for you. I don't know if there are studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but there's like phototoxicity is a thing. And there you can buy a whole bed of like really intense light. And I think if you stay too long in those, that's probably not good. There's a a very compelling study that was published last year on blood glucose regulation. And I know you've talked about blood glucose on other episodes. How much glucose in the blood is really important because it causes this energy resistance, energy friction in all of your cells, especially the brain, perhaps.

2:09:27So when you eat a bunch of sugar or you eat a meal with carbohydrates, blood glucose typically spikes. If you get stressed out, just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging, and so on. So what the body does in the normal healthy organism is able to regulate blood glucose. So if you eat a big meal, there's enough insulin that's released, and then the glucose can come into cells, into the muscles, into the fat, and then you preserve what's called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose.

2:10:00It turns out if you shine a red light on the back of people as they ingest a big bunch of glucose, the spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured mitochondrial metabolism through the mouth. You can measure oxygen coming in and CO2 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.

2:10:39And 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 ourselves, you know, light or electromagnetic fields, other human beings that are, you know, you energetic process is affecting my metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically, metabolically.

2:11:16I 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 is, I'll be honest, there's been a couple of times where I just put that thing on and maybe read a book for a long time, like an hour or two. Did you ever feel adverse effects from this? I never felt adverse effects. However, looking at some of the studies, it seems to suggest that red light therapy follows a bell curve model.

2:11:51They found in this one particular study I was reading about in 2009, 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, this particular study also showed that when the dose is pushed too high, the light creates massive amounts of reactive oxidative species. And this excess oxidative stress overwhelms the cell's antideoxid defenses, completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and inducing cellular apoptosis, cell death, instead of healing. Yeah. This bell-shaped relationship is something we see in many domains of biology and physiology.

2:12:36Same as like workout, exercising. Like most people know if you do a workout, that's like half an hour, an hour, two hours. If you're an athlete and you're like really well conditioned, it's fine. And then you recover for 23 hours after your one hour workout. And that's great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the idea, the impression that you have more energy, which is really energy flowing more efficiently. But if you work out for eight hours, 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.

2:13:17If you know how to listen to it. Yeah. And that's easier said than done. Yes. If you can live in alignment. There's a lot of noise out there. There is. For the same reason you closed 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 our energy. And maybe we could do a little exercise if you're interested. Sure. Yeah. So we'll do a little exercise. You can close your eyes if you want. Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. Yeah. And we'll use the breath. So you can start by just feeling your body.

2:13:49You can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair. And then we'll take a little breath in. And then breath out. And then all the way down. And then hold your breath with empty lungs. and then hold air for as long as you can and just pay attention to the sensations that are emerging in your body whether it's in your belly in your chest in your neck in your head

2:14:25and the longer you wait the more intense those sensations are

2:14:34you can hold for as long as you want and when you can't just take a deep breath deep breath what does that feel like it felt i felt lots of vibrations it's kind of like waves i felt like kind of like waves going across my body but i it was almost like i could feel the energy moving through my body it's kind of how it felt i suddenly was very apparent clear of my heartbeat i could feel everything in a way that i can't typically feel everything yeah any kind of negative feeling or any sensation that was uncomfortable i mean near the end when i couldn't when i hadn't breathed in a while it was a bit uncomfortable yeah what did that feel like like like i was starving for oxygen like i was starving for air yeah you know running out of air and like drowning is one of the most horrible like aversive experience that i think we evolved to dislike, right?

2:15:27So what was happening there in our bodies as we were doing this is oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously, right? Every millisecond, mitochondria consume oxygen. And now you're not bringing oxygen through your breath. And then they produce CO2, carbon dioxide, right? So mitochondria are burning the oxygen a little bit by a little bit, and then they're producing carbon dioxide, CO2. And we evolved to feel those signals very, very sensitively. So that's the pressure that I felt. Yeah. Well, I think that, yes. So the subjective experience, right? What you described there is an experience of energy starting to stall.

2:16:04Because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electron's like, where do I go? And then there's like 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 400 pounds, like pressure on his chest. Terrible 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.

2:16:42Oh, so the mitochondria are like panicking. Yeah. So panicking is kind of a, we're imposing now an experience onto a biological process. but you have the electrons are flowing through mitochondria all the time. They're flowing onto oxygen, right? From food to oxygen. And they're just nice, freely floating. That feels great. Or it feels like just normal life. And then all of a sudden there's no more oxygen. So the electron, oh, I have nowhere to go. That feels terrible. The electrons can't flow. So they start to backflow. That is what causes oxidative stress. That's why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack, right?

2:17:16Because the electrons can't flow 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 right running out of oxygen 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.

2:18:01You'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 has just been jacked up to very high levels. This feels like anxiety. And people 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 called metabolic psychiatry, where people understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain.

2:18:42and what I think is happening in those kind of chronic state of ill being, where people don't feel themselves, they don't feel well, the hypervigilance, 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 of McLean and Harvard. And then lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness. and this marker, GDF-15, 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.

2:19:19Purpose and we've covered that ground. Yeah, life changes, you know, changing your life circumstances, that's really hard to do. Exercising seems to help a lot of people, but a lot of people don't feel they have the capacity to exercise. And ketones seem to be life-saving for some people. Going on a ketogenic diet, and I've met now dozens of individuals whose lives were crushed by, you know, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder. And they were treatment resistant, right? Meaning like the pharmacotherapy, the drugs that they were given were not helping. In some cases, we're making things worse with difficult side effects.

2:19:58And then they changed their diet, cutting all sugars. And they went on a ketogenic diet, medical ketogenic therapy. and then they started to monitor ketones. And many people reported, you know, that this was life-changing. Like first, the first thing that many people notice is they have more energy. The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone. We don't know why. And the same way that we're all different, we all respond differently to even medications, right? That are supposed to work the same for everyone. We have a science of averages. Like the science that we use to get knowledge, to inform our lives is almost entirely a science of averages.

2:20:40Meaning like all of the studies we do, like the highest gold standard studies, we consider it to be RCTs, randomized controlled trials. These RCTs, if you run an RCT, what you do is you take, let's say a thousand people, then you randomize half, 500 into this group, normal diet, and then 500 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 you assess and then you compare the groups right you lump 500 human beings together and you say what's the average depression or anxiety symptoms in this in these 500 people then you average these people together and then you group them and then you compare means and i guess the other important point here is gender which is so many of these studies were skewed towards men in many cases and that doesn't apply to women a lot of the time.

2:21:31And this is part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health is because we're just now discovering that, you know, once upon a time, scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything just applied but actually were entirely different. And so this averages thing, you also need to think about the nuances of like who gender, where they're from, their biology, their DNA. You just said that you 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, maybe we'd come to a conclusion based on me and hit me and the other person who's like me but that wouldn't apply to you.

2:22:03Yeah and that's really problematic like all of the health recommendations that 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 and they don't have symptoms And then some people don't respond. These are called non-responders. And then some people get worse. The most 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, ME, CFS.

2:22:46I'm not sure what that is. And fibromyalgia. For patients with ME, CFS, and you'll have to explain to me what that is, or long COVID, the standard advice given is to exercise for mitochondrial health but for them it often triggers severe crashes what is happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken and how can these individuals safely rehabilitate their mitochondria without causing further damage yeah that's a really tough problem and 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.

2:23:24Yeah. In the US, there's an estimated like three to five million people who have either myalgic encephalitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, ME-CFS, or, you know, long COVID version of this. In the UK, it's somewhere between like two and three million, I think. And then worldwide, there's 20, 24 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 low energy, feeling low energy. Yeah. Feeling low energy is an experience, right? So it's, you go to your doctor and say, I feel so tired.

2:24:03And 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 ME, CFS, you know, chronic fatigue, long COVID, these 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, you know, patients to deal with.

2:24:40First, 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 as 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, increased 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, right? We talked earlier about how the marker of energetic stress, GDF-15 can go to the brain and make you feel sick, right?

2:25:16Or make you feel nauseous or 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 or the year before. And it showed that there is a deficiency in energy transformation in the mitochondria, the muscle. They took muscle biopsies, a little piece of muscle from the quad, from the thigh. And then they looked at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people, chronic fatigue syndrome, flow energy. And what they found is the capacity is much lower.

2:25:50If the mitochondria can't flux energy properly, you should feel like you don't have the capacity to push, right? To exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have your 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 was asking me, what do you work on? And what do you do? And so I tell her, we work on mitochondria and psychobiology, mitochondrial psychobiology, how the mind and the body relate, you know, energetically. And she said, well, I have an interesting story for you.

2:26:29I was like, okay, what's the story? I used to have chronic fatigue syndrome. So I perked up, I was like, what happened? She was visibly an energetic person. It didn't look like she had, you know, an issue with energy. So she said she was in her 20s and she had like, she was debilitated. She couldn't work. And, you know, she lived in this place and, you know, her life was 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.

2:27:04And 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 had had a human connection like this. So you're saying? I'm not saying. 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.

2:27:46And either they're diagnosed with a mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome or with kind of a 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 uh you know an infection or like a parasite and stuff like that yeah some people have like mold poisoning or whatever and they yeah yeah very 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 so what do we take from that you know story of a of a summer fling well i take from it hope yeah that 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.

2:28:36But 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, these people are diagnosed with the genetically defined mitochondrial disease. Their mitochondria can't flow energy properly. So every day they live probably with this kind of discomfort of 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. The people who do the best, like their mitochondria don't work the way they should, but they're able to find something that they love.

2:29:16They're able to, you know, find an expression for themselves. And they have supportive family, almost a universal theme for people to do well is they have a supportive, you know, environment. And cultivating this is so precious. And that brings us back maybe to social connections. you know, you, energetic process, me, energetic process. When we interact, you know, through sounds and, you know, physically shaking hands 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.

2:29:52I 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 zone two cardio or high intensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is there like an optimal type of training? Yeah. I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder means that your mitochondria are working harder. Okay. But you don't want to do it too long.

2:30:25If you're not trained, right? Like you're a regular guy. I'm not trained now. I run for like 20 minutes every other day. That's my routine. That's what I have enough time to do. And I feel like it moves energy through my body in the right way. But if I go and I try to run a marathon, I'm going to injure myself. You know, I'm going to hurt myself. So that would be too much for me. And so I think that comes back to the point of like feeling into your energy. We call this mitoception, right? Feeling into your mitochondria and what's sustainable. So I think there's an individualized, you know, stance that we need to take towards this.

2:31:02And the last question from the audience was, right now, mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible, reliable tests like ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function? Working on it. You're working on it. Yeah. So our team is working on it. and so we're building a platform, a technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria to mitosept, right? So you feel your energy through your mitochondria and then you can make better decisions like ketogenic diet. Is this helping you?

2:31:38Is this not helping you? This new relationship, is this sucking away your energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new direction in life. There's so much. I mean, all of the important decisions we make really, you know, we make what, how we feel. Like you wake up in the morning and either you 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 side, there's all of these decision points that we face and the power of discernment, right? And what we talked about, like with Steve Jobs, like this is the way and then, you know, you feel strong about this.

2:32:19discerning 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 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 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 and into our sensations and into the experiences we have.

2:32:57So that's the barometer that really guides us through life, like a GPS, an energetic GPS. Dr. Martin, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what is the most difficult thing you ever overcame and how did it make you the person you are today?

2:33:29I just felt my energy change. 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 it was great. We were excited. We were calling this new life, new life. And we talked affectionately about it. And we said, like, you know, when new life comes, this. And we both have a child and she was in Canada. She came back. And then in that evening in bed, she had this like crazy pain that started. and we were both super scared. There was a bit of bleeding and then the contraction started to come really fast, not supposed to happen at three months.

2:34:25And then I was like, oh, maybe this is just like a bump in the road and things are going to be fine. So we ended up having a miscarriage and Neurosha 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 like why the fuck this has happened to me like i'm i think i'm a good person i'm doing my best to bring good in the world i try to be a good partner good um you know leader i try to yeah why is this happening to me so this was like this victim you know mentality mindset and I've learned through my 40 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 so I was like but How could there be something to learn from something so terrible?

2:35:44And I had to sit with this. And two days later, after the baby had gone, and Nerocia and I had sat in the shower and cried, and the smell was horrible, and just death. Like, 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. Different people have different ways. And I was writing about my experience and why now. And I asked, what is there to learn from this? And a very clear answer came up. Slowing down.

2:36:30And that hit really hard because throughout my whole life, I have moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very short PhD. Then I became a professor very quickly and grew a team. And moving fast is kind of something that's like a personality trait that I do. And I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that would not have been possible otherwise. But at other times, I think it's hurt me. And it's like this drive, this inner drive of things must happen now, must move fast. I think it's hurt other people around and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader because then maybe I lacked sensitivity to other people who don't move at my pace.

2:37:16So slowing down really kind of hit home. Things were like clear. It was like looking at a canvas and there was more contrast. Like the things that really mattered were like sharper, right? And all of this other shit, like these obligations and these things that I had said yes to, or like, you know, the contrast was so much sharper. And this lesson, I took this as a lesson slowing down, I think has allowed me to be a better listener, to be a better, you know, more compassionate father and scientist. I think it's changed me. and I don't know that I would have learned that lesson in another way we are the this energetic process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences and the people we meet like I'll never be the same after today from having sat with you at this table and you opening the door not just to scientific inquiry but to human experience yeah we change all the time we transform and what shapes us is those kind of energetic interactions and um yeah everything we go through well i'll never be the same either for for i think all the best reasons i'm you know i have to say that i'm 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 that happened you had to go through that i can only i just can't imagine it's one of my honestly it's one of my like worst nightmares especially at the season of life i'm in when me and my partner and my fiance are trying to have a kid it's just like i think i think i'm thinking about those things now and how i would i'm like pre-empting how i would handle those kinds of things so to hear that it happened to you is just it's um it's really hot it's really difficult to hear um it happens to about 20 million people a year most people don't talk about it either do they people don't talk about it yeah because it's shrouded in mixed emotions and yeah i can understand that yeah but i am better off for having this conversation with you and i think you know i speak on behalf of my audience for sure this time when i say that i think my audience are as well i've learned so much it's actually 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 um around me and others and and it's um it's really really wonderful i think what you know what you're doing people might think of you as like a mitochondrial scientist but actually it's much more deeper much more philosophical than that when we think about what energy is to us it's it is everything and that's really the lens that you've given me today is you've completely changed my mind on like how i think about life which is such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast i don't say this like i don't kiss people up people's asses like this like i genuinely my mind is like fucking hell it's also changed how I think about business, which is really weird and unexpected.

2:40:19Business is an extension of us, of, you know, energetic. Like everything is. Everything is. This is what I've learned today. Quite literally. And it's also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, aim my energy. So Dr. Martin Pickard, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your generosity and your wisdom. It's not very often that I have conversations that actually like instantly cause this shift in me, but this is one of them today. So if people want to learn more about you and the work you're doing, where do we channel that energy? Where do they go? The best place for people to go is a website, martinpicard.energy.

2:40:57Okay. And then from this website, you'll see information about the book. You'll see information about the research, core energetic principles that cover what we've covered today. There are little animations and there's information about the Institute. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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