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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard
02:40:37
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- [00:00]
Steven Bartlett
I've had many leading experts on this show, including Matthew Walker, and they've all said the same thing about sleep. They've said it's the biggest positive investment you can make in your own performance. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're consistently tired, poor decision making will follow and eventually cause other things to fail in your life. So if you're looking to optimize your recovery, you should start looking at what you're sleeping on. Our sponsor, Helix makes high quality mattresses tailored to your body. It doesn't matter if you run hot, sleep on your side or need something firm. Helium Helix has a mattress for you, and I asked them recently to send one to a member of my team and Juan received it and we travel a lot. So when he's home, quality sleep really matters. And he told me he's getting the best sleep of his life. And the data backs it up. With 82% of people in a Helix study saying they saw an increase in their deep sleep. And with a 120 night trial, you've got four months to prove it to yourself. You can get 27% off@helixsleep.com diary that's helixsleep.com diary then this is incontrovertible evidence
- [01:02]
Dr. Martin Picard
that graying of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty fast.
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Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Wow.
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Dr. Martin Picard
And there's more. So we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like, for example, if you have marijuana six months ago, it's going to be in your hair.
- [01:14]
Steven Bartlett
I need to get a haircut. Joking.
- [01:18]
Dr. Martin Picard
So my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person's life when this young hair become old, and we could understand the mechanism of the aging process.
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Steven Bartlett
So what is the secret to anti aging?
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Dr. Martin Picard
It's the proper allocation of energy.
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Steven Bartlett
Can you, can you. What's the simplest way you can explain that to me?
- [01:35]
Dr. Martin Picard
So, first, energy is real. And it's the difference between feeling like you can change the world or feeling completely drained. And a lot of people live on that end of the spectrum. And it's because there's a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. For example, we did an experiment because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday? And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expense by 60%. Right. So it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep you young. So it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And the third piece is this energy is in your mitochondria. And there's about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your body. And so they made our bodies possible and they can change how you feel.
- [02:18]
Steven Bartlett
Well, I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria.
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Dr. Martin Picard
Yes, we are really in service of the mitochondria the allow us to be alive.
- [02:30]
Steven Bartlett
Okay, I've got so many questions for you based on what people wanted to know, like how patients with me chronic fatigue or long Covid safely rehabilitate their mitochondria, what I consume. How does that impact the efficiency of the energy if red light therapy impacts mitochondria? And is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance.
- [02:54]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, we think there's increased energy resistance in cancer than Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance.
- [03:02]
Steven Bartlett
So is there anything I can do?
- [03:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
There is. So we can start by.
- [03:08]
Steven Bartlett
Guys, I've got a favor to ask. Before this episode begins, the algorithm, if you follow, a show will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Doctor Martin Picard. What is it that you believe, know or understand that most people out there don't believe, know or understand?
- [03:56]
Dr. Martin Picard
We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. And that sounds a little woo if you don't have context. And that's, I think, something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to understand, to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes.
- [04:17]
Steven Bartlett
In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy?
- [04:24]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, I think people want to understand what is energy and how can I have more energy.
- [04:31]
Steven Bartlett
I can relate to that because sometimes, you know, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing and I really have, in my view, done the same thing. But then sometimes I wake up And I don't feel amazing. And it feels kind of like roulette, like this sort of opaque mystery of how do I wake up with more days in a row and feel amazing, like I can take on the world? And then there's also some friends that I have who are suffering with different things, whether it's chronic illness or long Covid or whatever, who repeatedly wake up and feel low energy for years, you know, at a time, that's a really
- [05:06]
Dr. Martin Picard
tough place to be. When you wake up repeatedly and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world, that's a really tough place to be.
- [05:16]
Steven Bartlett
And who are you and why did you commit your life to this subject?
- [05:21]
Dr. Martin Picard
I'm a regular guy who, with, you know, lived experiences, who, who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious. And then I became a scientist. And as I learned the tools of science, I started to see and I discovered mitochondria. I thought this is an approach to start to bridge what's true about the human experience that we know from first experience empirically and we know to be real. Not because, you know, some white coat wearing doctor or scientist, you know, said, yes, energy is real, it's in your mitochondria. We know it to be real from first experience, right? Because we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, right? And about health and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. So I became a scientist to bridge those domains of existence, the science and the experience. So I've led a research group at Columbia University for 10 years and founded an institute to really build the systems and technologies to help people grow, heal and transform.
- [06:32]
Steven Bartlett
You have a PhD in Mitochondria?
- [06:35]
Dr. Martin Picard
My PhD was in Mitochondrial biology of aging.
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Steven Bartlett
I mean, there's an image here in front of me. Some people will just be listening, so we'll try and explain it for them. But there's an image here of a video. I'll play the video on screen now. And it kind of looks like a. Looks a little bit like an alien. But I read that this video was quite formative for you. What is that video and why was that formative moment in your career?
- [06:59]
Dr. Martin Picard
I took this video in England, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, with my Geordie friends, the medical school there. I was a graduate student and went there for kind of an exchange. And this is the first time I saw mitochondria moving, I saw, like, the inner life of our cells. And when I saw this, something struck me as like, oh, my God, I'm able to see this, right? And to see living mitochondria. Because of the mitochondria inside of me, it's the energy that's flowing through my mitochondria in my eye, right, that's allowing me to perceive, to see this. Mitochondria made multicellular life possible. They made our bodies possible. And we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living. So when I saw this, like, this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria, and then I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transforming energy. What they're known for is they take the food you eat, and then they take the oxygen that you breathe in. And then those two things, the food, the oxygen, converge inside the mitochondria. And then something really special happens. The electrons that are stuck on food, that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere, photosynthesis, what your mitochondria do is they kind of unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one, and then they flow them like an electrical circuit. And that happens in, like, the 5,000 trillion mitochondria that are in your body. And then when the electrons flow, they need to flow towards something, just like in an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from one pole of the battery to the other pole of the battery, and that circuit is closed in the mitochondria. So the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe, and then it becomes water. And it's that vital flow of energy, electrons flowing towards oxygen, that allows us to be alive. And mitochondria do this. And then as they do this, they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat. And the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria, as they transform and flow electrons, like a little energetic circuit, they release heat. So the source of heat, right, that makes us warm. You shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling the warmth from their mitochondria.
- [09:14]
Steven Bartlett
So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body?
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Dr. Martin Picard
There is, on average, 1,000 mitochondria per cell.
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Steven Bartlett
Per cell. There's thousand. So how many is there in my body?
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Dr. Martin Picard
About 5000 trillion.
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Steven Bartlett
Who should care about the mitochondria? And why should they care about it?
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Dr. Martin Picard
Anyone who cares about their energy, right, about having Enough energy to do what they really care about. We all care about different things. We're all gifted and talented for different things. Everyone has this unique, authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out and the only way for a person to flourish is through energy. If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead.
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Steven Bartlett
Right.
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Dr. Martin Picard
And if the energy doesn't flow efficiently. Right. And smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard, like you're not at your best. You feel tired, and you feel like maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're sick and your immune system is, like, draining all of your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic. And it's hard to be a good person, and it's hard to be a good dad. And it's hard to wanna do good for the world if you're struggling with energy.
- [10:26]
Steven Bartlett
Do you know what it is? So many of us think that that just is what it is and that we can do nothing about that. You know, we breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette.
- [10:38]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Yep.
- [10:39]
Steven Bartlett
There's this certain, I think, feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much. Where do we need to start to understand? Because the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So where does one have to start? I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff, like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy.
- [11:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. So there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works in the human body. One is that you are the energy that's flowing through this body.
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Steven Bartlett
I am the energy that's flowing through my body?
- [11:15]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes.
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Steven Bartlett
So I'm not my body.
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Dr. Martin Picard
You're not your body.
- [11:17]
Steven Bartlett
Okay. I'm the energy flowing through it.
- [11:19]
Dr. Martin Picard
You, Steven, this expression. Now that I'm getting to experience. Thank you. This expression is an expression of the flow of energy. If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain, like, you wouldn't be.
- [11:35]
Steven Bartlett
Right.
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Dr. Martin Picard
You'd be a cadaver. And we'd say, stephen is gone.
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Steven Bartlett
A dead body.
- [11:39]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, you'd be a dead body. The difference between a dead body, a cadaver, and a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person. Who cares is the flow of energy.
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Steven Bartlett
Okay.
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Dr. Martin Picard
You get so indoctrinated in this worldview that the only thing that's real, is the physical stuff. And, you know, the genes that you got from your parents and the body, the physical body, and that's the real stuff. What you can't see with your eyes, not real, right. I think that's a reframe, that's kind of a bigger picture mindset shift that we need to and scientists struggle with. So number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms through this body. Number two is there's a fixed energy budget, right? All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with. And for example, if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to, you know, be more creative, the solution is not eating more because there's this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it's really hard on the system. And then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, right? And then the system starts to overheat. So inflammation is this overheating. There's too much energy in the system, or the cells are burning too much energy and they need to kind of tell other cells. That's those signals we call inflammation, cytokines. So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with. And over time, the organism does a lot of finessing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget.
- [13:15]
Steven Bartlett
And that's somewhat linked to stress, I guess, which is I read your work and it talked about how stress was basically just like an over consumption of energies. It's requiring loads and loads and loads of energy. Okay, we'll talk about that too then, because I think stress is a really important one. What's the third?
- [13:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
The third one is life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to grow, to learn, to transform, right? Change your views. You need resistance to go through some resistance. You need energy to go through some resistance. If energy just flows and there's no zero resistance, then there's no possible transformation. So if life was always easy and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life, then you would just remain as is, right? And it would be very boring. And from first principles physics, like, we know this to be true, you know, at a number of levels. But for example, the sun, this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky, shoots energy right? As photons. So light is a form of energy. And as long as light, you know, just goes and photons travels in outer space, photon will remain photon, light energy will remain light energy until that light energy hits a green leaf, right? And the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it's. It offers a constraint, right? It offers resistance. So when light energy faces resistance now, it can be converted. And that's the basis of making food. That's how nature makes food. It crystallizes energy from sunlight into molecules. Life, you know, plants crystallize light energy into carbohydrates, and then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat. We need resistance for energy to transform into something meaningful.
- [15:07]
Steven Bartlett
So what has mitochondria got to do with all of this?
- [15:09]
Dr. Martin Picard
Mitochondria are basically little resistors, right? And they are what allows the flow of energy through the system.
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Steven Bartlett
Have you got a picture of. Okay, here we go.
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Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [15:18]
Steven Bartlett
Okay. So this is an image of a mitochondria, a mitochondrion.
- [15:23]
Dr. Martin Picard
O n is a singular. Mitochondria is plural. So this is a mitochondrion, and there's about a thousand of these in each of your cells, okay? And there's about 5 trillion cells in your body that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here, these little wings, these are called cristae. And the cristi is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen you breathe end up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There's like little electrical circuits here. And as the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged, like little batteries. So effectively, a mitochondrion like this has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and food consumption, and then that gets transformed into a little charged battery. And once the battery is charged, the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP. Adenosine triphosphate, which is kind of the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract, right? A muscle cell wants to contract in the gym, it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria, says, I need ATP. And then the mitochondria gets to work, and then flows electrons, consume some food, burn some oxygen. That's why you get out of breath. So when you get out of breath, it's because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen. What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot making ATP, okay? They use their energized state to produce signals, to receive information, and then to produce signals.
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Steven Bartlett
Oh, so they're talking to each other.
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Dr. Martin Picard
They're talking to each other.
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Steven Bartlett
And what are they saying?
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Dr. Martin Picard
It's a whole collective, and they're talking to each Other kind of monitoring what's happening not only inside the cell, but outside the cell. So on the surface of mitochondria, all along, there are little receptors for all sorts of signals that tells this mitochondrion, is there enough energy? Are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for, you know, something dangerous? So mitochondria are like, like a little distributed brain, right? So they're like the intracellular brain.
- [17:24]
Steven Bartlett
Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria?
- [17:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
They are, yeah. They did, yeah.
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Steven Bartlett
What, what is that story? Because I think someone said that to me before on the show, that our mitochondria are actually bacteria that from prehistoric times or something.
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Dr. Martin Picard
So the story is about 1.5 billion years ago that there was two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen to transform energy, right? So it could fuel on oxygen and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anaerobic. And the anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger, and it had like a few more genes and it could only ferment its food and kind of fermenting the food, spitting out like lactate or like yeast does. And what happened is the big one either engulfed the small one, right. Or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized the big one. And the story goes that this basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. That's one perspective. And then with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity. The version I favor, based on the evidence we have, is that when mitochondria came in and then there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So maybe the coming of mitochondria into this big cell made the big cell social. Because before this event, most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria foraging for themselves and kind of operating from a very selfish perspective, just trying to replicate, trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it gave those cells a different view on life. And they're like, woo, we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right. And I become a cell that moves, right? So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle. And then together those two cells can do a lot more, right?
- [19:25]
Steven Bartlett
And fast forward a couple billion years, and here we are.
- [19:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
Here we are.
- [19:29]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah.
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Dr. Martin Picard
And that led to, you know, bodies with organs you know, the liver feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, the brain kind of computes and plans. So that's division of labor. And it started with the mitochondria.
- [19:44]
Steven Bartlett
You talked about energy resistance. I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Give me a disease that's linked to energy resistance.
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Dr. Martin Picard
The clearest is what we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Right. Diabetes affects millions in the world. Fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So if the resistance is too high because. Because you have too much energy pushed onto the system.
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Steven Bartlett
Sugar. Too much sugar. Glucose.
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Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria or impaired.
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Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Right.
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Dr. Martin Picard
And they can't flow energy, then the energy is kind of stuck. It faces greater constraints. It wants to go in that direction. But then there's a barrier, and then another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing nice and smooth and then there's a dam. And if the dam has zero openings, then the water accumulates and then there's high pressure, and then at some point the water accumulates and ends up flooding the landscape and then damaging things. So it's a bit like the same thing. If now you open floodgates on the dam and then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example, you use the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do. And if you move and you're physically active now, the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, into speed, and to movement. Right. Into lifting.
- [21:16]
Steven Bartlett
Is this linked to cancer at all? Because it sounds, I mean, I don't know much about cancer, but cells dividing out of control, seemingly randomly. Yeah.
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Dr. Martin Picard
I think that there's a very good chance if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer, there's like a 10 item flywheel of these are the core features of cancer. All of those features have some relationship, some very direct width, increase energy resistance. Right. So if energy can't flow smoothly and a cell is, you know, burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria, which is what cancer cells do. Cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral, you know, cell that didn't have mitochondria. It was anaerobic, it was spitting out lactate. And we don't really know why cells do this. It's called the Warburg effect. And the Warburg effect is when a cell in the presence of Oxygen. Right. If it wanted to, it could use oxygen, flow electrons through mitochondria and transform energy and live a nice social life, like every cell in this social collective does in the body. What cancer cells do is they say, I'm not going to use my mitochondria, even if there's oxygen, even if my mitochondria can respire. And by doing this, it seems like cancer cells revert back to this ancestral cell. Right. That just cares about itself.
- [22:42]
Steven Bartlett
The antisocial cell.
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Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yeah.
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Dr. Martin Picard
Then the organism and the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. It's called angiogenesis. So it's like the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says, bring me more oxygen.
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Steven Bartlett
So it's kind of like there's this sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism, and that it's going to be selfish and demand more and more resources for itself, and it multiplies itself with equally selfish little aliens, and then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources. Is that what you're saying? Why do the blood vessels surround the cancer?
- [23:17]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, it's like it's the cancer calling for, you know, more energy.
- [23:21]
Steven Bartlett
Okay.
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Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [23:23]
Dr. Martin Picard
So energy resistance is the product of two things. Is how much energy is being demanded. Right. Like, how much power is being deployed in the tumor, for example, or in the working muscle, and then how much energy can flow through the system. That's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. So if there's a lot of demand.
- [23:44]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Right.
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Dr. Martin Picard
A lot of power is being generated, or a lot of activity is happening, like in a cancer cell, but there's not enough flow to. To. To. To support that activity, then that increases resistance.
- [23:58]
Steven Bartlett
So is there any understanding as to how those kind of cancers are caused? Like what. What causes that moment where, you know, you talked about the wahlberg effect.
- [24:08]
Dr. Martin Picard
The cancer community used to think that the main driver for cancer was genetic mutations. But there's an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism, changes in the way electrons flow through this energetic circuitry, through the mitochondria, can actually drive the instance of a new cancer cell. And then when a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its mitochondria, it goes back to this selfish state, and then it makes
- [24:34]
Steven Bartlett
more of itself, and it tries not to die. Explain that part to me, because I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death.
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Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
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Dr. Martin Picard
The best way to think about this, I think, is as a social collective. Right. Every cell in this organism cares about the Same thing which is preserving the life and the health of the whole being. Right. So every cell in this body is in a social contract with every other cell.
- [24:59]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Right.
- [25:00]
Dr. Martin Picard
A cancer cell basically gets out of this agreement and says, no, no, I'm going to fare for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can and I'm going to make more of myself. And it goes into, you know, bacterial mode. That happens sometimes because of mutations. And it seems like there are other causes of this, like, for example, hyperglycemia.
- [25:22]
Steven Bartlett
What's that?
- [25:23]
Dr. Martin Picard
High blood glucose. Right. Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that? I don't think there are good explanations out there based on the molecular framework of disease and the genetic mutation perspective. If you look at cancer from an energetic perspective, and it's, I think, likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure.
- [25:51]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Right.
- [25:52]
Dr. Martin Picard
There's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells or to those mitochondria. And when you push too much energy on a system that doesn't need energy, it's like you're trying to shove a lot of water through a very small pipe.
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Steven Bartlett
Something goes wrong.
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Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, something goes wrong. Something can break. So the resistance is. If you push a lot of energy into a very small 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. Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism. There's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell. And so that causes this excess energy coming in. The cell says too much and it damages the mitochondria, this excess resistance, because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress.
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Steven Bartlett
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?
- [27:01]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, it's clear that in cigarette smoke there are carcinogens. There are molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. There's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking. But for all of the other cancers, there's much less of a clear connection between exposure and cancer. 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, you know, excursion, very high spikes in blood Glucose. Those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance. And it makes that kind of computation how much energy is flowing now and then how much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there's an imbalance, then that causes damage.
- [28:11]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [28:38]
Dr. Martin Picard
So 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.
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Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Right.
- [29:12]
Dr. Martin Picard
As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective, and then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours. Let's get rid of it. Right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time, that works well. But what cancer cells can do is say, okay, I'm. 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.
- [29:46]
Steven Bartlett
And it's weird to think about because, yeah, the things that are cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like, you know, as you said, like having too much of this stuff here, too much sugar, the white stuff.
- [29:57]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yes.
- [29:58]
Steven Bartlett
High blood glucose levels, et cetera, 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.
- [30:13]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, the transistors start to melt, and then the system, you know, gets. Gets damaged. The same thing happens, you know, in the body if you overload the system with too much energy. Too many electrons. 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. The clear connection here is too much energy, increased energy resistance. So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right from the food to your mitochondria, then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you're an electron and you're trying to go through the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and a mitochondrion, but then at every point in this cascade, you face resistance. There is more chance that that electron kind of jets out and that becomes oxidative stress.
- [31:44]
Steven Bartlett
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. Now, let's just pretend, for argument's sake and for the sake of this explanation, that this is someone's hair that's gone 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 the hair, what I found really interesting. Cause it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on in the body, is you're saying you can actually reverse gray hair without dying it. And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is, but more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between?
- [32:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. What we discovered is that hair graying is reversible. And that was surprising, because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age, it's kind of this linear, progressive decline. And there's kind of nothing you can do about it. But it turns out that if you look on most people's head, you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was Dyed, and all of the hairs were white, and then all the hairs are dark. And if you take a hair like this, the tip here 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 say, ooh, this ring was 30 years ago, right? And this ring is today. So you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a drug, for example, 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 and the hair, you know, here, but not here. So if you. 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.
- [33:53]
Steven Bartlett
I just got a haircut. I'm joking.
- [33:56]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. And 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, you know, aging is this linear, progressive process that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility. I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up 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, it's all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs 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 gonna be less color, right? Obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria, and there was an upregulation of the body. The hair follicle where the hair was becoming old wasn't kind of letting go of things. It was doing more.
- [36:34]
Steven Bartlett
So that means during that period of time, you were more stressed and using more energy.
- [36:41]
Dr. Martin Picard
When cells become older instead of just dying, right. They struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA, or the mitochondria not working properly or for some reason, they accumulate damage, you become old, the cell struggles to make more mitochondria, and it tries to kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process.
- [37:04]
Steven Bartlett
So on that hair, what you looked at that was gray, let's call, had more mitochondria because it was struggling. And why was it struggling?
- [37:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
It looks like stress hormones can make a cell struggle.
- [37:17]
Steven Bartlett
For example, cortisol.
- [37:19]
Dr. Martin Picard
Cortisol, yes. If you're a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple. You don't have the senses that we enjoy, but you do nevertheless sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal, it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous, Right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight or there'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, Right. 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, you know, with your partner. How much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be, you know, 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. How much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare? There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol is a signal that there might be something dangerous outside. Right? That's like when you're sitting down, you get an email. You're like, 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%.
- [38:51]
Steven Bartlett
So when I'm stressed, I'm using 60% more energy, theoretically.
- [38:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
I don't know about you, but cell's in a dish, okay? So there's 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 increases by 60% if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat.
- [39:11]
Steven Bartlett
What is that graph there?
- [39:13]
Dr. Martin Picard
So there are two graphs here. 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 a hair pigmentation pattern. The HPP that we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively bring science to hair graying and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark, and then it became white for 2 centimeters, and then, boom, completely regained color. Actually regained. 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 fast. Like, this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week, right? 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 0. 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 that anyone can do the exercise. Past year, most stressful time. Okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot right in March, number 10. And then least stressful, part zero. And then put other, like, meaningful things that happen that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along this last year, then connect the dots. Right. The red graph is her dots connected,
- [41:22]
Steven Bartlett
and it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray.
- [41:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [41:38]
Steven Bartlett
Oh, damn. And her hair went gray.
- [41:40]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yeah.
- [41:41]
Dr. Martin Picard
Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. She said these were the most troubled, stressful two months of my life.
- [41:51]
Steven Bartlett
There's a killer question here, which is, if that remains chronic, does that hair follicle go gray forever?
- [41:59]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [42:00]
Steven Bartlett
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?
- [42:12]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [42:13]
Steven Bartlett
Do you see what I'm saying here?
- [42:14]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yes.
- [42:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
It seems like 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.
- [42:29]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah.
- [42:29]
Dr. Martin Picard
So 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. The hair hits that threshold, now it loses color.
- [42:48]
Steven Bartlett
It's done.
- [42:49]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, but then if something changes in the body, right, you go on vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting, and then there's more energy available for your dark Hair. Now, it can be reversed. Right. Because you can go back up 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.
- [43:13]
Steven Bartlett
Okay.
- [43:13]
Dr. Martin Picard
So it suggests some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for something as binary as hair color. It's black or it's white. Right. So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where.
- [43:25]
Steven Bartlett
Where you can reverse gray hair.
- [43:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes.
- [43:27]
Steven Bartlett
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. Who cares? 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?
- [43:50]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. So it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to beat a little faster, if you mount a response to that email, Right. 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 then the anxiety, and then you start to sweat, like, everything costs energy.
- [44:23]
Steven Bartlett
So the chain of events is. I get the email. It's a very bad email. Says, you're fired. Stephen, from the Diary of Seal, we found a different host. I look at the email that goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story, I tell myself, about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever, which then causes a physiological response of, like, chemicals like cortisol, which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy, which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. Is that sequence of events. I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point.
- [45:08]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes. Yes, that's right. Way to think about it.
- [45:10]
Steven Bartlett
Don't open the laptop or, like, get a little bit better with bad news.
- [45:15]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [45:16]
Dr. Martin Picard
Or, you know, learn to be less reactive. Right. Or learn to Feel and you know, sit with, be aware of that reaction. Because the key solution to kind of, to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it.
- [45:33]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah, become aware of it. Yeah.
- [45:34]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Right.
- [45:35]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, right. The awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. So if you feel into your bodily's responses, you become free of, do I mount a response? Is that needed now or not?
- [45:58]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [46:23]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body? And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained.
- [46:34]
Steven Bartlett
How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I'm really struggling with like understanding it.
- [46:39]
Dr. Martin Picard
Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise.
- [46:42]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah, right.
- [46:43]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. And then there's, you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, right. You're doing interval training. Now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. So that imbalance of demand to flow capacity, now the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance.
- [47:19]
Steven Bartlett
Okay?
- [47:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your, your, your sprint, but you, 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, you know, becomes really hot and then eventually there's inflammation and then it burns and, and then it's uncomfortable. But then, so that's 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.
- [48:09]
Steven Bartlett
Right.
- [48:10]
Dr. Martin Picard
So I need next, I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that, that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato. Right. To training for a marathon. You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the, the rise in resistance. Like, I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy and then adapting for this for the next time. And that next time I'm going to be ready. Let's make more mitochondria. So that's probably where the benefits of exercise come from. This spike in. Why stress is not a bad thing intrinsically. Right. If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with less resistance.
- [48:59]
Steven Bartlett
Coming back to this gray hair thing. So if we consider gray hair, my hair going grey to be the last domino that fell. So like the symptom.
- [49:08]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yep.
- [49:09]
Steven Bartlett
Then what is, what are the, 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 grey hair flare ups where I'll go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and I'll look in the mirror, like, what, I have 12 now. I'm being generous there. There's more like 25. I have 25. Now in terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that falls and what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicle?
- [49:46]
Dr. Martin Picard
So there's a finite energy budget. And then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business. Right. You have this budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here. Right. So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young. Right. So there's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. Do you know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs?
- [50:15]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah.
- [50:15]
Dr. Martin Picard
So Maslow's insight was, oh my God,
- [50:18]
Steven Bartlett
I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just
- [50:25]
Dr. Martin Picard
acute stress response.
- [50:26]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah, yeah. Caught us offline. Sorry. Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
- [50:29]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [50:30]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, right? Loving relationships. Once you have this settled now, you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. And then once you have this covered now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, what do you call self actualization and kind of becoming your best self flourishing. So he saw this very much as 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 in 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. Their mitochondria working a little, you know, 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.
- [52:23]
Steven Bartlett
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, you'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 you're follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever. Exactly. So I would then look aged, I would look old, older. But that's because all of my energy's been going to something else which my body considered to be a high priority. Correct. 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. They 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
- [53:21]
Dr. Martin Picard
was one, is this is the proper allocation of energy. So if you don't waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things, which is kind of a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti aging.
- [53:46]
Steven Bartlett
Can I also pour more energy in the top? Like can I just. If I get more energy, does that mean that there's less likelihood that we're going to run out of energy when it comes to my hair follicles being black or gray?
- [53:57]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. The thing is, it doesn't look like we have the 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.
- [54:07]
Steven Bartlett
So is there anything I can do to have more energy available?
- [54:11]
Dr. Martin Picard
You can become more efficient, I can
- [54:13]
Steven Bartlett
become more efficient, but I can't put more in.
- [54:15]
Dr. Martin Picard
No.
- [54:17]
Steven Bartlett
And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress, okay, I'm going to live a less stressed life.
- [54:22]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. It seems like there's a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising.
- [54:28]
Steven Bartlett
Okay.
- [54:29]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, oxidative stress, and all sorts of things happen during the exercise. But 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, 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. If 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 energetic cost of doing the activity. And then there's more energy available for anti aging, growth maintenance and repair vitality. So I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise. But you feel like you have more and you don't actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smoothly through this thing.
- [56:09]
Steven Bartlett
It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria.
- [56:11]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [56:12]
Steven Bartlett
Okay. What, what else? What about food? And I've got, I've got coffee here, I've got some alcohol here, I've got the sugar. What I consume. How does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body?
- [56:31]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, great question. Alcohol. What we know about alcohol is that as we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology. 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. If anything, the next day you feel like shit because what happens is you waste energy degrading the alcohol, right? And even though it's a net plus, you're putting calories in the machine, in the body, but what ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it. So there's a cool study where they brought people in, they gave them a bunch of alcohol, they're 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? And you ask them to not do too much in this smaller room. They're just sitting down, reading a book. And then, 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 health may be because they steal energy away from a growing body. For example, there's good data in South America. Children who are exposed to more pathogens, right? There's no sanitation. They walk barefoot. They eat stuff that's not cleaned. And they have more pathogens in their gut, right? 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 burning when. When you're fighting a flu, for example, right? Your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa, you know, virus, like Covid, or, you know, any, you know, seasonal flu virus. The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then that the immune system steals energy away from the brain, from. From your mind. And 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 the. What's called sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. It's like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies. Stressors, alcohol parasites all kind of have this increase the cost of living. And then because there's a cap on your energy budget, then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else.
- [59:38]
Steven Bartlett
And if you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of, I guess, like, energetic distraction is the way I think about it.
- [59:46]
Dr. Martin Picard
That's a cool way to think about it.
- [59:47]
Steven Bartlett
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. And 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.
- [60:36]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [60:37]
Steven Bartlett
You know, my immune system won't be taken care of in the same way.
- [60:39]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, right, Clearing out proteins that you don't need repairing that DNA that's get gotten damaged are making you mitochondria. All of these processes happen like 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, right? So there's this quality control cycle. All the mitochondria that don't work too well anymore, they get degraded. It'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 the best functioning mitochondria. And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones.
- [61:41]
Steven Bartlett
It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia weirdly, because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's and dementia, but I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques. 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? Yes.
- [62:02]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 white coat wearing scientists and university professors. That 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. What we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy demand in the. There are specific brain regions that tend to be more affected. In some people, not all people tend to have those protein deposits. Those regions start to burn more energy. This is early phase, right. And then at this point, probably this is the brain trying to cope. Right. It's like something's not working great, but it's working harder.
- [63:37]
Steven Bartlett
Like with the gray hair.
- [63:38]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, exactly. And then over time, those brain regions become hypometabolic and then that's when you start to have symptoms.
- [63:46]
Steven Bartlett
What does that mean?
- [63:47]
Dr. Martin Picard
That's when people start to have memory issues and hypometabolic. Hypometabolic, yes. This is hyper metabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about. Like there's more energy being burned here. Normal metabolic is, you know, you use 100 units of energy for the brain and this, 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 there's a problem with, you know, the cell communicating with the synapses. Right. Cells talk to each other through these things called synapses. If there's a problem now, the, the, that part of the brain is going to 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 little proteins we call cytokines. And then it's basically those cells saying something's wrong, we need to fix this. So that costs energy. So you have those cells that get activated, they secrete those proteins to say, please help. You know, we need to re establish homeostasis, we need to re establish normal healthy balance. But that process of re establishing 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 are, that burn less energy. And energy is so central to everything, including cognition. Right. In order to have an idea and to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy. So the brain kind of burning less energy in later stages kind of reflects this lack of function. You know, the, the, it's difficult to remember, you know, old memories. It's. It's remembered. It's difficult to, to make associations. It becomes difficult to plan in the future and to regulate your emotions. And you know, a lot of people with dementia end up having kind of mood issues. They become really depressed and it.
- [66:11]
Steven Bartlett
Is this, is this why they call it type 3 diabetes? Because I've just heard that phrase quite a lot recently.
- [66:16]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [66:17]
Dr. Martin Picard
And so my hunch is that Alzheimer's and dementia more generally is a disorder of energy. And specifically it's a disorder of, you know, 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.
- [66:51]
Steven Bartlett
It's less efficient.
- [66:53]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [67:04]
Steven Bartlett
And why might that be?
- [67:06]
Dr. Martin Picard
Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system.
- [67:08]
Steven Bartlett
Oh, okay.
- [67:09]
Dr. Martin Picard
If you load up the system all the time with glucose with sugar in 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, the voltage on your lamp that eventually, you know, 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. Aging. The most basic mechanism of aging, including brain aging, that leads to Alzheimer's, is the accumulation of little damage, a little mutations, little defects, little imperfections. And as the imperfections accumulate, the system becomes less efficient. Insulin resistance, basically. And diabetes refers to the fact that muscles, but also the brain, has the capacity to say, I can't anymore. Like glucose. Too much for me. Too much resistance, too much, you know, damage that I'm exposed to. So if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess energy pressure, right, from the glucose, from the. From the electrons, you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin. So then you take the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the cell, you pull those out, right? So then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin. So then the body's like, whoa, like, glucose is way high. What? A normal, healthy body releases insulin and floods the blood. Insulin goes to the surface of your muscles and then says, take in the glucose. Because there's too much glucose in the blood. We're going to damage the brain, we're going to damage the eyes, we're going to damage the nerves. So, muscle, please take in the glucose. But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria is starting to be at capacity in terms of how much energy they can resist and flow, then they shut down the valves, right? So the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant. And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells. But then glucose, blood glucose starts to increase. So the next step in this cascade is, well, if there's too much energy and circulation, too much sugar, too much fat, what can we do with this? And that's where fat stores, you know, adiposity comes in. So obesity is a protection mechanism against excess energy resistance.
- [69:35]
Steven Bartlett
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, do they still get Alzheimer's and dementia?
- [69:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, physical 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 and the organism, the liver. Mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat fat, right, avocados and oil and meat and butter, and those fat molecules go in the liver, and then the mitochondria in the liver take those fat, transform them into ketones, and then put the ketones into the blood. The kidneys also do a little bit of this, and then the ketones go to the brain and then they feed the mitochondria in the brain. So you have mitochondria in the liver talking and feeding mitochondria in the brain. And the path for a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria is much shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors. If you want to think about it energetically than for glucose, that path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter.
- [71:50]
Steven Bartlett
I just want to make sure on that point that I don't misunderstand because, you know, it sounds. It could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's, but actually you're saying, you're not saying. Because I think of ketones as energy, and I'm shot in ketones all the time. I don't want to flood my brain with energy so that, you know, malfunctions, gets Alzheimer's.
- [72:09]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. It's very easy to feel like I'm full. I've had, you know, a good Enough meal. If you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat, now things like taste so good and there's like an extra reward. And a lot of people eat for different reasons, not just because they're hungry, that's because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary, especially the sugar part. Then you, you lose regulation. And that's why I think the GLP1 drugs are so powerful because they, they address their problem where it starts, like how much food are you putting into the system?
- [72:47]
Steven Bartlett
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. Which again means that it's points to
- [73:10]
Dr. Martin Picard
western diets, Western diet, western lifestyles, behavior. You know, 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, for some people there's congenital leanness. Right. Like you're born lean and you're going to eat like you can't put on fat if you eat too much. The high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood and then it gets lodged in ectopic ways. So it gets lodged in the muscle or in the liver or in the brain and then that causes damage because of this excess energy pressure and then the system overheats.
- [73:54]
Steven Bartlett
Skinny fat.
- [73:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
Skinny fat, yeah.
- [73:56]
Steven Bartlett
And that stores it around your livers and stuff.
- [73:58]
Dr. Martin Picard
Exactly.
- [73:58]
Steven Bartlett
What's that called, that fat inside you?
- [73:59]
Dr. Martin Picard
Visceral.
- [74:00]
Steven Bartlett
Visceral fat.
- [74:01]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 and then, then then you become obese.
- [74:34]
Steven Bartlett
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- [76:51]
Dr. Martin Picard
Develop that awareness of what your body needs. So when I think about how I eat, I don't think about, you know, my weight or my body. I think about how am I feeling and do I need more food, 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, energy, pressure, and 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
- [77:46]
Steven Bartlett
most people because we have stores, don't we, of glycogen and we have stores of glucose in our body, in our muscles anyway. So if we were running low, then our body can go get some fat, metabolize it.
- [77:56]
Dr. Martin Picard
Exactly. Make ketones.
- [77:57]
Steven Bartlett
Make ketones, yeah.
- [77:58]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [78:08]
Steven Bartlett
I 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. And 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.
- [78:31]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, yeah. The record is. The world record for not eating is over 300 days.
- [78:36]
Steven Bartlett
Wow.
- [78:37]
Dr. Martin Picard
Irish man. And he lost. I Forget the exact numbers. £250, £300.
- [78:45]
Steven Bartlett
What does this say about hunger? And also what does it say about this society we live in where we have some people have, like, five meals, some people basically just eat from morning till night, you know?
- [78:53]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. I think a lot of us eat not because we're hungry. I think a lot of us have learned to eat, to subserve some other need. And eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems as gambling and kind of connecting with other human beings. So we know some people eat emotionally, right? When they're stressed out, they eat more. So I think hunger is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge on hunger. Like, if you feel sad, you feel, like, bored. Hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the salt, because of this, Especially if you had salty, sugary things around. It's a rewarding thing that will get you out of uncomfortable. Other Uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat. That's a good general assumption to make. You're probably overeating.
- [79:49]
Steven Bartlett
I think I probably am.
- [79:50]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 2pm to 6pm, 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. I 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, right? And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient, you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria. And then there's more friction, you know, in your whole body, there's more inflammation, which is a signal of that energy friction or resistance. And then you don't feel as good, right? You don't feel you have as much energy. So many people who go from eating three meals a day, plus or minus snacks, to like, intermittent fasting, they just say, I'm going to eat whatever I want, however much I want. But just in those four hours or six hours, most of those people have a lot more energy. They experience, right, that they have more energy. It's not because there's more energy in their body. If anything, they're putting fewer calories in the body. But the way energy flows now, it flows more efficiently. And we don't perceive the amount of energy. We perceive the flow energy or the transformation of energy.
- [81:26]
Steven Bartlett
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. But 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, and improve overall health. He co invented Corn Flakes 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?
- [82:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yep. I mean a lot of people did.
- [82:30]
Steven Bartlett
Everybody did.
- [82:30]
Dr. Martin Picard
And I did until recently. Until I started to like feel into this. I would have this big bowl of cereals. That's how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low, like 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.
- [82:59]
Steven Bartlett
So on this point, then just to close off on this diet question, if I want to feel really, really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window and I probably want to eat just what I need. And I want to not overeat. I don't want to undereat, but I don't want to overeat.
- [83:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
If you undereat, you're going to pick it up tomorrow.
- [83:16]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [83:23]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, when you're sick and you're fighting an infection.
- [83:36]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah.
- [83:36]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 and I started to feel like a little scratchy throat. I'm like, oh, I think I'm getting sick. So I go to 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 started to have full blown flu symptoms. Went home early at like 9pm and then I went to bed. It was 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. So it's a, it's 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 the division, partitioning of energy and 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 normally. So there's all of this flowing through is like, wow. Like, my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We 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. But I couldn't muster the strength. It's like, what the fuck? Why would I care? I couldn't care, right. And this is the stuff I care about on a daily basis. But in that state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn't care about this. And then I started to think about work and about, you know, the lab and about, you know, family things. I was like, whoa, my whole life feels so different.
- [86:01]
Steven Bartlett
I don't care about anything.
- [86:02]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, I don't care about anything. I just. I'm just trying to fucking survive.
- [86:05]
Steven Bartlett
That's so interesting because I can relate so much.
- [86:07]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Yeah.
- [86:07]
Dr. Martin Picard
I mean, everyone has been through like a difficult. Like when you're really sick or when you're really stressed. Yeah.
- [86:13]
Steven Bartlett
Or just anything that's all consuming like that.
- [86:16]
Dr. Martin Picard
Exactly. That's like Maslow's pyramid, right? The top is squished and you're like, survival.
- [86:21]
Steven Bartlett
And like, where did I go? Where's. Where's. Yeah, I remember.
- [86:24]
Dr. Martin Picard
So I was still me, right. I was still Martin, but I felt completely different. The quality of my. 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 start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting that just the what, what it felt like when I was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffused energy, like the light, for example, right, is a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and an incandescent light bulb, like an old style filament light bulb, is not the amount of energy is the way the energy is patterned. 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 a laser its power. It's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy if you put in an incandescent light bulb. Now it's the same energy, but it's diffuse, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all over the place. And then if you want to look at how far can these folders photons go, right, how far can my mind go caring about things? The diffuse energy doesn't go very far, but the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb.
- [87:53]
Steven Bartlett
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. So 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, 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 old, 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'd wake up for it, might last a week or two weeks. And I just didn't have the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it, to like go out and Be a leader. And now, as you say, I go, oh, it was because I was stressed. And it would last for when the cash flow issue would resolve. My motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this zoomed back into focus. And I think that's really important because, you know, we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching this show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation. And as a founder and as a CEO, you feel so guilty that you 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 at like a chronic. Well, yeah, a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. The other thing it actually made me think about as well when you said about this diffusion of energy. It actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals. It made me think about if you take 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.
- [90:02]
Dr. Martin Picard
So there's incoherence.
- [90:03]
Steven Bartlett
There's incoherence.
- [90:04]
Dr. Martin Picard
Like a dimming flight bulb. Yes.
- [90:06]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OKRs are so important, because you can point all the energy at the problem. This is traction towards a particular goal.
- [90:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 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 my purpose.
- [90:34]
Steven Bartlett
It stresses you out and then you're embedded.
- [90:35]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, exactly. But when you somehow find your 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. And then it feels like coherence, right? It feels like, I know what I'm doing this. Then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes, to just the right thing. Because there's this coherence, not just energetic coherence that allows you to do more with less energy, but also this coherence of mind. Right. And maybe of spirit. If we want to go there, I'm
- [91:38]
Steven Bartlett
gonna 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.
- [91:49]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Look how wildly successful he was. But 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. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this 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, 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% signaled 24 seconds 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. It's very awkward for him socially because noise is dealing with your family sometimes. Or noise is saying hi to a friend, or noise is listening to some doom scrolling on 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.
- [93:49]
Steven Bartlett
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, no.
- [93:57]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
The goals you set for that, you were awake. If you're gonna be awake 18 hours and you've determined that there's three things you have to get done, you're gonna get those done. No matter what it takes, you're gonna get those done. And you're not gonna let anything distract you from the three to five things. If you're a CEO and you achieve that 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. I'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 1:00 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.
- [95:11]
Steven Bartlett
In that clip, he's basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve jobs would be 80% signal, I. E. He wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these interviews with Jony Ives. I'll actually also play that Jony Ives, because I send this round to everybody. So I'm going to play it where Jonny Ayres talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was.
- [95:36]
Assistant or Additional Guest
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. And. And the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you just. 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, wanted to be very honest about it. And so I say, oh, I said no to this and no to that. And he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway, anyway, so there was no real sacrifice. What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.
- [97:06]
Steven Bartlett
And Steve Jobs would walk in and say to Jony 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, this extreme level of focus on the most important thing. And this is a pattern that I've seen in these exceptional entrepreneurs. They have such high signal and they're very good at dealing with distraction in this regard. And it kind of, again, it made me think about what you were saying about 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%. There's something in giving your entire being a focus to something, maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is, that means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically, drastically increases. 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.
- [98:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. With such clarity of mind, right? Like, this is what the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And you live and you breathe that. You become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in 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 look at people with. It comes out in Every facet of you, right? So you become the emblematic leader, I guess, for. 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 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? Like when it sounds, when it's on tune, then people that want to come on board, like, they feel this, and then it gets amplified.
- [99:52]
Steven Bartlett
It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being oft inside as a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with his energy. And what you've just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field. You've 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. And people who work closely with Jobs describe the rdf, the reality distortion field, as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding willpower, and sheer persistence in a certain direction, which pulled you with him.
- [100:39]
Dr. Martin Picard
That's an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that has a really strong energy, then it can and train other things. If the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance. And then it looks spooky, it looks like, whoa, this thing, you know, synchronicity or this, you know, 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. And so, like, all of these things snowball because you hold that. You know that. That vibe. You hold that energy and amplifies.
- [101:11]
Steven Bartlett
I mean, exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone I 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 Hertzfeld recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take six months, he would look, you in the eye and say, you can do it in two weeks. Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in two weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on 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.
- [102:00]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. You build a structure around it to sustain that flow.
- [102:24]
Steven Bartlett
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, world best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy, is convince other energy to change its shape.
- [102:44]
Dr. Martin Picard
I think that's what amazing people do. They're able to see something, hold that vision so strongly and then mobilize others, right? And then new things become possible. I think that's what great leaders do. And I now approach, you know, other human beings and you know, my son, like my six year old son Noah, I see him as, yes, a little boy and yes, a lot of energy and yes, you know, some, some challenges that come with this. But he's this beautiful little energy pattern, right? He's this energy flowing through this little child's body. But my role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance, right. The right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint as a 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.
- [103:45]
Steven Bartlett
You're going to grow in any direction.
- [103:47]
Dr. Martin Picard
Exactly. So the art really of parenting and I think the art of leadership is providing the right structure, right? So that the energy has some constraints. There's a challenge, there 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. If it's like, yeah, we're going to do the same thing as we did last year and then next year we do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year and then we need to double the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you have to work through. I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. 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.
- [104:46]
Steven Bartlett
I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You think about going to the moon, the moon pulled energy towards it, so we found ourselves to the moon. And actually if you bring that down into your own life as like a leader of a company, you go, okay, if I set a worthwhile goal, I'm gonna pull people energy towards it. And if I have an un worthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically a magnet for energy.
- [105:12]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, I think so. And people are energetic processes. So my 6 year old son is this beautiful movement of energy. My goal is to nurture it, right? And not just with food and physically, but to nurture his curiosity and his transformation.
- [105:27]
Steven Bartlett
Linked 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.
- [105:38]
Dr. Martin Picard
This is this beautiful study. 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? And some people are like more optimistic, happy and purposeful than others. But there's always kind of fluctuations, right? Like we go through fluctuations, we go through life. No matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being challenging in some ways. So we asked how people felt, how much purpose people experience before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died. Right. So then you have how the person felt right before, how much purpose they experienced. And then you look at the mitochondria after they die.
- [106:36]
Steven Bartlett
Where?
- [106:37]
Dr. Martin Picard
In. In the, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So that little part of the brain that's involved in, you know, active reasoning and executive function and the mitochondria. And the people who felt more purpose had a greater energy transformation capacity.
- [106:52]
Steven Bartlett
What does that mean?
- [106:52]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [107:01]
Steven Bartlett
Or it could mean the inverse of that.
- [107:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
Well, it could mean that having mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily just changes how you see
- [107:09]
Steven Bartlett
life, makes you feel more purposeful.
- [107:10]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, exactly.
- [107:11]
Steven Bartlett
Or it could mean that purpose itself is creating more efficient mitochondria.
- [107:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
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? 100%. 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 boosts the mitochondria or inhibit, inactivate the mitochondria, increase or decrease resistance. And then you ask, does this change how the animal appears to feel, how the animals behave in terms of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance? 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.
- [108:04]
Steven Bartlett
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?
- [108:17]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that kind of starts to pop up. You feel drained, you don't feel. You have, you know, enough energy burnout. Probably feels like burnout, and you start to lose enthusiasm for, you know, 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.
- [108:48]
Steven Bartlett
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 Johann 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.
- [109:07]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, 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 the 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. It's elevated in diabetes, where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It's elevated in all sorts of pathologies, hypertension and the heart disease. And it's a marker that the organism energetically is not doing well. There's. It's not efficient. 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. And then her lovely study coordinator, Katherine, walked into the room and then looked at the participant, 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. This scarf, you put it on just to try, but then the security guard caught you, and then they were accusing you of shotlifting. So now you're in court. You need to defend yourselves in Front of the. And you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard should you lose his job. And then we tell them, you have two minutes to prepare your three minute defense in front of the judge. Most people start to feel the anxiety. And then we monitor heart rate at the same time and blood pressure. And then we draw blood. And so you can see everyone's physiology wasting energy. Right? The energy at a cost of stress. You see this on the monitor on the other side in the control room. And then we put a camera in front of them that mocks, you know, video records them. And then we have a white coat wearing old white men who stands six feet in front of them, looks at them 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. And what we saw was that this energy stress marker goes up just with mental stress. You're not doing exercise, you're not doing anything strenuous, you're just going through this phase of what's going to happen to me, to my ego, to my sense of self.
- [111:46]
Steven Bartlett
So what's the downstream consequence of this thing, this stress chemical being in your body?
- [111:50]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. So that protein is called GDF15, 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 why does it matter? And it turns out this protein goes to the brain. 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, 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 the receptor for this protein, do you think? Only in one organ in the body.
- [112:29]
Steven Bartlett
Is it in here?
- [112:30]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 brain stem called the area postrema. Doesn't matter. It's known as the vomiting and nausea center for the brain.
- [112:47]
Steven Bartlett
Wait, so if something happens, I'm extremely stressed, the world is judging me. This protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brain stem and it docks in there.
- [112:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
Correct.
- [112:55]
Steven Bartlett
And then what happens?
- [112:56]
Dr. Martin Picard
And then turns out the brain interpret this as there's something running out of energy.
- [113:01]
Steven Bartlett
There's something running out of energy. Okay.
- [113:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [113:18]
Steven Bartlett
Okay, so your body thinks you're sick.
- [113:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes.
- [113:20]
Steven Bartlett
And then what?
- [113:21]
Dr. Martin Picard
And then does two things. Save energy, conserve energy.
- [113:25]
Steven Bartlett
So you lose motivation.
- [113:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes, lose motivation, Feel depressed. Feel depressed.
- [113:30]
Steven Bartlett
Can't go to the gym.
- [113:31]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes. Doesn't feel worth it. We know this specifically from animal studies. If you inject animals with GF acne, they hunch in a ball and they don't do anything. They go into this sickness behavior. That's number one. Number two, the brain says something's running out of energy. First, let's conserve energy, number one. But two, let's mobilize energy. Right? Let's put glucose into the blood, let's put fat into the blood. Because there might be cells out there that are, you know, running out of energy and we need to rescue them.
- [113:59]
Steven Bartlett
Are you going to get belly fat, visceral fat? Yeah. Yeah. You're going to get belly fat from this?
- [114:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. When stress hormones are up, right, and you're increasing blood glucose, increasing blood lipids, if the rest of the body doesn't need it, which is what kind of happens during a stress response like this. That fat gets lodged where it shouldn't, called ectopic fat. And that's what belly fat is.
- [114:20]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [114:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
What the best studies show on this is when you have high level of this energetic stress marker, this protein, you're more likely if you follow people. Studies were done where you take the blood, you measure this protein, 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. Turns out people with a high GDF 15 are more likely to develop mental illness, bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia. People with high GDF 15 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension. People with high GDF 15 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 high GDF 15 also, they don't like to take the stairs, they don't like to walk for pleasure, they don't like to go out to the gym, they don't like to go
- [115:42]
Steven Bartlett
out with friends, they don't like to exercise. Correct?
- [115:45]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. Because if you're getting the signal, like when you're sick, right, if GF15 is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain, you're getting the signal, you're running out of energy.
- [115:55]
Steven Bartlett
So I guess the question everyone's asking as they're listening to this now is how do I prevent GDF15 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?
- [116:10]
Dr. Martin Picard
Good question. Taking the time to feel. Meditation.
- [116:13]
Steven Bartlett
Meditation. My bloody fiance was right.
- [116:17]
Dr. Martin Picard
What we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF15 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. Decreasing resistance. It's kind of this movement of life.
- [116:44]
Steven Bartlett
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. None of the solutions here are rocket science, are they? Do you know what I mean? 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, like, how to live a good life and to not be so bloody stressed out all the time.
- [117:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. 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, and then you eat more and then you don't feel better. And that's, I think, extremely disempowering. People want to be empowered and people want to have knowledge, but they want to know what to do so they can be their best version of themselves, so they can flourish.
- [118:01]
Steven Bartlett
So you know what's interesting? Before you arrived, I did something I've never done before. I went through all of the interviews you've done, and I looked at all the comments because I wanted to understand the people that I've 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 boosters. In your opinion, what does the sort of clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut? Are they a band aid? Are they useful?
- [118:44]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 becomes like the, ooh, there's a magic pill for this. And then you don't need to bring awareness to what you are.
- [119:05]
Steven Bartlett
But can I do both? I think so.
- [119:09]
Dr. Martin Picard
In some cases, I don't really know how methylene blue does everything it's supposed to be doing. Biologically, methylene blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that methylene blue can kind of relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria. NAD is probably the best supported intervention to reduce inflammation. Also, it's an electron carrier, so it take electrons from food and then gives them to the electron transport chain. So the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance. So if you're depleted of nad, that's going to cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through this metabolic circuit.
- [119:50]
Steven Bartlett
So NAD seems to calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing.
- [119:54]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. And most people are not deficient of nad, 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.
- [120:09]
Steven Bartlett
Is that in pill form? How do people take nad? Because I know there was some drips one time that some guy gave me.
- [120:14]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, you know, your cells very well. You can inject, infuse IV intravenously, NAD plus directly, and then that gets to your cells better. That's not a, 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.
- [120:45]
Steven Bartlett
What about this urolithin A?
- [120:47]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. And there's kind of a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. But the bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded. If you're fasting or if you're pushing the system like drink, exercise, what 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.
- [121:36]
Steven Bartlett
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. And 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?
- [122:24]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
I don't.
- [122:25]
Steven Bartlett
You don't take any supplements?
- [122:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
I don't I'm skeptical of this. You know, there's always kind of a new supplement that, that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions.
- [122:35]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah.
- [122:36]
Dr. Martin Picard
And so the term mitochondrial dysfunction is I think, a little misleading. Like there was a lot of hype about NAD, there was a lot of hype about Coenzyme CoQ10. There was a lot of hype about all sorts of things. Anti inflammatory berries and antioxidants was a big thing 10, 20 years ago, turns out not to be so useful. Actually impairs normal adaptation and signaling if you eat too many antioxidants. So Urulin 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.
- [123:15]
Steven Bartlett
And what does that mean in practical terms? Trusting the wisdom of your body? What does that mean for you?
- [123:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
It means recognizing that I am the energy that's flowing through this thing. And this thing is nature. Like we are a piece of nature. Something that's true across the animal kingdom and the living kingdom is things heal. And we don't think about this in biomedicine. We think about diseases we study, you 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.
- [124:01]
Steven Bartlett
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. 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.
- [124:27]
Dr. Martin Picard
We are going to heal even.
- [124:28]
Steven Bartlett
But if I sit in here all day, I'm not going to get vitamin D and then that's going to cause problems.
- [124:31]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes. So we're not in the optimal environment when you're in that kind of environment. So I think there, and there's good research showing if you put a plant In a hospital room, patients recover faster. There's been studies 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, by the plants? Like we don't really know what it is. Is it just seeing green, seeing something that hears, that sounds and looks like what you evolved to be around? So we don't really know, but we know exposure to nature kind of helps calm the body and somehow improve recovery. Whoa, what's that on your face?
- [125:20]
Steven Bartlett
This is my Bon Charge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now. They're a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day. I can sit here in the chair and wear it. Boost my collagen production, helps with fine line blemishes. My complexion gets better. And then people listen to the podcast because I, I look better. Professional grade equipment in such a small box. It's non invasive. And having sat here with so many of the world's leading houses, health professionals, there's various things that I repeatedly hear work and some things I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my guests on this show have confirmed works. It is really, really, really effective. And they offer fast free shipping worldwide with easy returns and exchanges. And you'll also get a one year warranty on all of their products and their HSA and FSA eligible, giving you tax free savings up to 40%. And you can get 20 off when you order through my link at point1@boncharge.com doac that's boncharge.com doac the deal applies sitewide. One type of help people also wanted to know about from you, which was even more discussed, was about red light therapy. Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria.
- [126:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
Interestingly, red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices. Helmets, a hairbrush band.
- [126:37]
Steven Bartlett
I think I've got one here actually. I think this is a red light therapy.
- [126:42]
Dr. Martin Picard
Hairbrush therapy.
- [126:43]
Steven Bartlett
Hair brush. Yeah.
- [126:45]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. It can go through your hair, through your skull, and then into your brain. And then there it seems to do something and change metabolism. So how is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that for light to do something in biology, there needs to be something in biology that resonates with it, right, that can offer the right amount of resistance, right, to the photons. The red light photons hit, and then there's transformation of energy. 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. That is called cytochrome C oxidase.
- [127:47]
Steven Bartlett
I'm going to 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.
- [128:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
That's the idea.
- [128:04]
Steven Bartlett
So I should wake up every day and do bloody red light then?
- [128:06]
Dr. Martin Picard
If you're deficient in that way, that might be good. That might also offset, you know, the natural order that your body has. Has created.
- [128:16]
Steven Bartlett
What do you mean by that? You think it might be.
- [128:18]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 that transform energy, and then, you know, genes are expressed, and then this other cell is doing this. This cell is doing this. And there is this beautiful balance. And when the system is out of balance now, there's signals like inflammation, right? Signals of this imbalance at an energetic level, and then that turns into molecular level, and then the system tries to come back, back into balance, right?
- [128:49]
Steven Bartlett
And, wow, I never realized this, that too much red light can be bad for you.
- [128:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 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, like, energy resistance, energy friction in all of your cells, especially the brain, perhaps. So when you eat a bunch of sugar or you eat a meal with carbohydrates, Blood glucose typically spikes. If you get stressed out, just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging and so on. So 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, and into the fat, and then you preserve, you know, what's called normal glycemia, normal blood glucose. It turns out if you shine a red light on the back 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. And they think that might be why the glucose didn't spike as much, because the electrons that came into the blood were able to flow through the mitochondria. So this points to some regulation of energy regulation inside the mitochondria that I don't fully understand. But I think there's something promising here. And it certainly surprises supports, you know, the idea that energy modalities outside of ourselves, you know, light or electromagnetic fields under human beings that are, you know, you, Energy. Energetic process is affecting my metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically, metabolically. I think it supports that idea that you're in an energetic process and you're influenced by other forms of energy, even if you don't see it.
- [131:24]
Steven Bartlett
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, you know, there's been a couple of times where I just put that thing on and maybe like, read a book for a long time, like an hour or two.
- [131:38]
Dr. Martin Picard
Did you ever feel adverse effects from this?
- [131:41]
Steven Bartlett
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. They 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 antidioxin defenses, completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and inducing cellular apoptosis. Cell death instead of healing.
- [132:28]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. This bell shaped relationship is something we see in many domains of biology and physiology. Same as like workout, exercising. Like most people know, if you do a workout that's like half an hour, an hour, two hours, if you're an athlete and you're like really well condition, it's fine. And then you recover for, you know, 23 hours after your one hour workout. And that's great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the idea, the impression you have more energy, which is really energy flowing more efficiently. But if you work out for eight hours. Yeah, that's not good. Right. So the too much you, you crash, not enough. You're not at your optimal. So there's where is the optimal state and biology. And the whole mind body unit has kind of worked out through evolution and through your life and development to find this sweet spot, if you know how
- [133:18]
Steven Bartlett
to listen to it. Yeah. And that's, that's easier said than done.
- [133:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yes. If you can live in alignment and
- [133:22]
Steven Bartlett
that there's a lot of noise out there.
- [133:24]
Dr. Martin Picard
There is, you know, for the same reason you close your eyes earlier when I ask 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. Yeah, so we'll do a little exercise. You can close your eyes if you want.
- [133:42]
Steven Bartlett
Everyone at home also close your eyes, unless you are driving.
- [133:44]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yeah.
- [133:45]
Dr. Martin Picard
And we'll use the breath. So you can start by just feeling your body. You can feel kind of gravity pulling your body down into the chair. Then we'll take a little breath in and then breath out and then all the way down and hold your breath with empty lungs and then hold there 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 and your neck and your head. And the longer you wait, the more intense those sensations.
- [134:29]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Are.
- [134:35]
Dr. Martin Picard
You can hold for as long as you want. And when you can't, just take a breath. Deep breath. What did that feel like?
- [134:44]
Steven Bartlett
I felt lots of vibrations. It was kind of like waves. I felt kind of like waves going across my body, but it was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body. That'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.
- [135:02]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. Any kind of negative feeling or any sensation that was uncomfortable.
- [135:08]
Steven Bartlett
I mean, near the end, when I hadn't breathed in a while, it was a bit uncomfortable.
- [135:12]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. What did that feel like?
- [135:14]
Steven Bartlett
Like I was starving for oxygen. Like I was starving for air. Yeah.
- [135:18]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. So 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 little bit by little bit, and then they're producing carbon dioxide, CO2. And we evolved to feel those signals very, very sensitively.
- [135:53]
Steven Bartlett
So that's the pressure that I felt.
- [135:55]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, Well, I think that. Yes. So the subjective experience, right, what you described there, is an experience of energy starting to stall, because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electron's like, where do I go? And then there's extreme level of resistance. Like, the most extreme case of energy resistance, I think, that most people will be familiar with, is like a heart attack. My dad had a heart attack a few years ago, and he woke up during the night with this terrible contraction, like a pressure in the chest. And he said it was like £400, 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.
- [136:42]
Steven Bartlett
Oh, so the mitochondria are, like, panicking. Yeah.
- [136:45]
Dr. Martin Picard
So panicking is kind of a. We're imposing now an experience onto a biological process. But you have the electrons that 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.
- [137:05]
Steven Bartlett
Ugh.
- [137:05]
Dr. Martin Picard
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? Because 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, like 5%, 10% 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. You're not messing with the brain there. You're not like, you know, kind of doing something to neurochemistry. What you're doing is you're injecting the human body with a signal that the mitochondria can't keep up with energy flow. You're tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance 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, in metabolic psychiatry, where people understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain. And what I think is happening in those kind of chronic state of 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 at McLean and Harvard. And then lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness. And this marker, GDF15, also is elevated in mental illness.
- [139:15]
Steven Bartlett
And so the cure again, or the thing to ease that is all the lifestyle factors that we talked about, purpose, and we've covered that ground.
- [139:22]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 were making things worse with difficult side effects. And 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 that this was life changing. 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. Meaning, like all of the studies we do, like the highest gold standard studies we consider to be RCTs, randomized controlled trials, these RCTs, if you run 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 these 500 people? Then you average these people together and then you group them and then you compare means.
- [141:21]
Steven Bartlett
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. And this is part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health is because we're just now discovering that once upon a time, scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything just applied and actually were entirely different. And so correct. 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.
- [142:04]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, 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 are amazing responders and they're cured. They don't have symptoms, and then some people don't respond. These are called non responders. And then some people get worse.
- [142:31]
Steven Bartlett
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. I'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?
- [143:13]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, that's a really tough problem.
- [143:16]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [143:25]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. In the US there's an estimated like 3 to 5 million people who have either myalgic, encephalopic, encephalomitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, me, cfs, or, you know, long Covid version of this. In the UK, it's somewhere between like 2 and 3 million, I think. And then worldwide, there's 20, 24 million people have these syndromes. Right.
- [143:48]
Steven Bartlett
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.
- [143:57]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah. Feeling low energy is an experience. Right. So you go through your doctor, you say, I feel so tired. And then you look in the blood works, everything's fine. 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 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. First, they don't know what's wrong with them and second, they don't have tools to help them get better. And then the classical thing is, well, exercise. But then many of these people, when they exercise, they actually get worse. And there's some studies that show increased inflammation. So those signals of energy resistance increase energy friction in the body go up after exercise in a normal person. And these people with chronic fatigue, it seems like they can skyrocket and then that leads to this post exertional malaise, right? We talked earlier about how the marker of energetic stress, GDF15, can go to the brain and make you feel sick, right? Or make you feel, you know, nauseous or, you know, 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, little piece of muscle from the, from the quad, from the thigh. And then they looked the at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome flow energy. And what they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can't flux energy properly, you should feel like you don't have the capacity to push right to exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have lower mitochondrial energy transformation capacity? We don't know. There are so many stories and I've been curious and interested about this. And I remember this family friend who came for dinner one night and she, she was asking me, what do you work on 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. I said, okay, what's the story? I used to have chronic fatigue syndrome. So I perked. I was like, what happened? She was visibly an energetic person. She didn't, it didn't look like she had 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 would kind of, you know, completely upside down because she didn't have energy to do anything, which is, I think, a common story. And she was in bed, like multiple hours, you know, every day, and struggling to go get groceries, and everything was a drag about life. And then one summer, this guy from Hawaii, which was a friend of a friend, came over for the summer just for a little trip, and they had an affair. She had a boyfriend. And this was long time that she had had a human connection like this.
- [147:20]
Steven Bartlett
So you're saying.
- [147:21]
Dr. Martin Picard
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. And either they're diagnosed with the 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, you know, an infection or like a parasite and stuff like that.
- [148:10]
Steven Bartlett
Some people that have, like, mold poisoning or whatever, and they get.
- [148:13]
Dr. Martin Picard
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?
- [148:28]
Steven Bartlett
Well, I take from it hope.
- [148:30]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [148:31]
Steven Bartlett
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 that in many cases, miraculous things happen that defy the odds. And hope itself, I think, can keep us in an optimistic mindset.
- [148:45]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, you know, holding your breath for too long, and everything's difficult about life. Many of them lose hope, and. 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. They're able to, you know, find an expression for. 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. Through sounds and, you know, physically shaking hands. And I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine. And then. And we might vibe and resonate and then maybe you find someone and you feel love for that person. I think love is the experience of resonance. Right. And when you feel that with someone, it feels so special.
- [149:59]
Steven Bartlett
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 zoned to cardio or high intensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is there like an optimal type of training?
- [150:17]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah, I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder means that your mitochondria are working harder.
- [150:24]
Steven Bartlett
Okay. But you don't do it too long
- [150:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
if you're not trained. Right. Like you're 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.
- [151:03]
Steven Bartlett
And the last question from the audience was, right now, mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible, reliable tests, like ATP, blood tests, or specific biomarkers that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function?
- [151:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
Working on it.
- [151:21]
Steven Bartlett
You're working on it?
- [151:22]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
Yeah.
- [151:22]
Dr. Martin Picard
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 mitocept so you feel your energy through your mitochondria and then you can make better decisions like ketogenic diet. Is this helping you? Is this not helping 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, we make with 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. 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, discerning. What's right for you, what's not right for you, what's the right direction? Is it the right time or not? Those are decisions we make, you know, with our guts. And there are many people who swear that this is the only way they make decisions. And if they make decisions rationally, that ends up biting them in the butt. Because I think 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. So that's the barometer that really guides us through life, like a GPS. An energetic GPS.
- [153:05]
Steven Bartlett
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?
- [153:29]
Dr. Martin Picard
So I just felt my energy change.
- [153:32]
Steven Bartlett
I saw it change.
- [153:33]
Dr. Martin Picard
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, you know, affectionately about it, and we said, like, you know, when new life comes this. And we both have a child, and. And she was in Canada. She came back, and then. And that evening in. In bed, she had this, like, crazy pain that started, and. And we were both super scared. There was a bit of bleeding. And then. And then the contraction started to come really fast. Not supposed to happen at three months. And then I was like, oh, maybe this is just like a bump in the road, and, you know, things are going to be fine. So we ended up having a miscarriage, and Nerosha didn't want to go to the hospital, so we did this at home. And it was terrible. It was really, really sad. Really, you know, gut wrenching. So we were both devastated when, you know, new life left us. 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, 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 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? And I had to sit with this. And two days later, after the baby had gone and Hirosha and I had sat in the shower and cried, and the smell was horrible. And just. It was death. Like, death was around us, around me. And I felt angry and I felt
- [156:01]
Guest/Interviewer or Audience Member
sad,
- [156:03]
Dr. Martin Picard
and I just sat down and wrote. 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. And that hit really hard because throughout my whole life, I've moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very short, you know, PhD, and then I became a professor very quickly and. And grew a team and. And like, moving fast is kind of something that's like a personality trait that I do. And. And I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that 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, like, things must happen now, must move fast, I think has 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. So slowing down really kind of hit home. Things were, like, clear. It was like looking at a canvas and there was more contrast. 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 think 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 this energetic process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences and the people we meet. 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 everything we go through.
- [158:38]
Steven Bartlett
Well, I'll never be the same either, for I think, all the best reasons. I have to say that I'm hesitating my words here because of the gratitude that you've taken from the wisdom that it's given you. But I'm terribly sorry that you had to go through that. I can 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, preempting how I would handle those kinds of things. So to hear that it happened to you is just. It's. It's really hot. It's really difficult to hear.
- [159:15]
Dr. Martin Picard
It happens to about 20 million people a year.
- [159:18]
Steven Bartlett
Most people don't talk about it either. Do they talk about it? Yeah, because it's shrouded in mixed emotions and. Yeah, I can understand that.
- [159:26]
Dr. Martin Picard
Yeah.
- [159:28]
Steven Bartlett
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 re. Changed how I think about life itself, which is a weird thing. And I hope I can just sit in this moment a little bit and think about how I am energy and how. How that's determining everything around me and others, and. And it's. 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. 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.
- [160:20]
Dr. Martin Picard
Business is an extension of us, of, you know, energetic, like, everything is.
- [160:25]
Steven Bartlett
That's 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 Picard, 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 instantly cause this shift in me, but this is one of them today. If people want to learn more about you and the work you're doing, where do we channel that energy? Where do they go?
- [160:53]
Dr. Martin Picard
The best place for people to go is website MartinPicard Energy.
- [160:57]
Steven Bartlett
Okay?
- [160:58]
Dr. Martin Picard
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.
- [161:10]
Steven Bartlett
Okay, thank you so much.
- [161:12]
Dr. Martin Picard
Thank you.
- [161:30]
Assistant or Additional Guest
Sa.