The Mitochondria Doctor: This Reverses Gray Hair, Makes You Feel Young Again & Fixes Disease! transcript

This is incontrovertible evidence that graying of hair is reversible and [music] it can be pre-fast. >> Wow. >> And there's more. So, we all walk around with our biological [music] history encoded in your hair. Like, for example, if you have marijuana 6 months ago, it's going to be in your hair. >> He's got a haircut. >> [laughter] >> So, my [music] research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person's life when this [music] young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process. >> So, what is the secret to anti-aging? >> It's the proper allocation [music] of energy. >> Can you can you How What's the simplest way you can explain that to me? >> So, first, [music] energy is real and it's the difference between feeling like you can change the world or feeling completely drained. >> [music] >> 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 [music] worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure [music] by 16%. Right? So, it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep you young. >> So, it's not the stress [music] that burns us down.

It's the response to stress. And the third piece is this, energy is in your mitochondria. And there's [music] about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your body. And so, they made our bodies possible and they can change how you feel. >> Well, I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with greatest sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. >> Yes. We are really in service of the mitochondria.

They allow us to be alive. >> And yeah, 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? Does red light therapy impact mitochondria? [music] And is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. >> Yeah.

We think there's increased [music] energy resistance in cancer, and then Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. >> So, is there anything I can do? >> There is. So, you can start by >> This is super interesting to me. My team gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly.

So, favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of this show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple, free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it.

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Martin Picard, what is it that you believe, know, or understand that most people out there don't believe, know, or understand? >> We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. >> Mhm. >> And and that sounds a little woo. >> You don't have context. And And that's I think something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to to understand, to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes. >> In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy? >> Yeah.

I think that people want to understand what is energy, and how can I have more energy? >> I can relate to that because sometimes, you know, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing. 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 ruler, like this sort of sort of opaque mystery of how do I wake up on 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. >> Yeah. >> That's a really tough place to be when you wake up repeatedly and and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world. It's it's a really tough place to be. >> And and who are you and why did you commit your life to this subject? >> I'm a regular guy who with, you know, lived experiences who who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious.

And then I became a a scientist and as 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 and it's in your mitochondria." We know it to be real from first experience.

Right? Because we we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, right? And about health and and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. So I became a scientist to bridge those domains of of existence. The the science and the experience. Um 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 to help people grow, heal, and and and transform. >> You have a PhD in mitochondria. >> Yep.

My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging. >> I mean, there's a 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 I I read that this video was quite formative for you. What is that video, and why was that a formative moment in your career? >> 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." >> Mhm. >> 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 and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living. So, when I saw this, it's like, "This is mitochondria looking at mitochondria." >> Mhm. >> 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, right? Photosynthesis. What your mitochondria do is they they kind of unpack this, and they rip off the electrons one by one, and then they flow them like an electrical circuit. And that happens in the 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 an electrical circuit, electrons flow from one pole of the battery to the negative to to the other pole of the battery. Uh and that circuit is closed in the mitochondria. So that the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe, and then it becomes water. And and it's that vital flow of energy, electrons flowing towards oxygen, that allows us to be alive. And uh mitochondria do this, and then as they do this, they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat.

And the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria, as they transform and flow electrons like a little energetic circuit, they release heat. So the the source of heat, right, that makes us warm, you shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling the warmth from their mitochondria. >> So is there a mitochondrion every single cell in my body? >> There's on average 1,000 mitochondria per cell. >> Per cell, there's a thousand mitochondria.

So how many is there in my body? >> About 5,000 trillion. >> Who should care about the mitochondria and why should they care about it? >> Anyone who cares about their energy. Right? About having enough energy to do what they really care about. Uh >> [clears throat] >> we all care about different things. We're we're all gifted and talented for different things. Uh everyone has this, you know, unique authentic self that wants to come out.

The only way for this to come out, and the only way for a person to flourish, is through energy. >> [clears throat] >> If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead. Right? And if the energy doesn't flow efficiently, right, and smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard. Like you you're not at your best. You feel tired. Uh and and you feel like you know, maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're sick and your immune system is like draining all all your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic and it's hard to be a good person and it's hard to be a good dad.

And it's hard to want to do good for the world if you're struggling with energy. >> 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 we breathe in, we eat food and then how we feel is kind of roulette. >> Yeah. >> There's this certain, I think, feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much. >> Mhm. >> Where do we need to start to understand?

Cuz the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So, where does one have to start? I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff, like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy. >> Yeah. So, there there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works in the human body.

One is that you are the energy that's flowing through this body. >> I am the energy that's flowing through my body. >> Yes. >> So, I'm not my body. >> You're not your body. >> Okay, I'm the energy flowing through it. >> You, Stephen, >> Yeah. >> this expression now that I'm getting to experience, thank you. >> [laughter] >> 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, right?

You'd be a cadaver and we'd say that Stephen is gone, you know. >> body. >> 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. >> Okay. >> You you get so indoctrinated in this worldview that the only thing that's real is the physical stuff. And you know, the nucle- the the genes that you that you got from your parents and the body the physical body and that's the real stuff.

What you can't see with your eyes, not real. >> Mhm. >> Right? I think that's a reframe that's kind of a a bigger picture mindset shift that we need to and and scientists struggle with. So, number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms uh through this body. Number two is there's a fixed energy budget. Right? All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with. And and for example, if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to uh you know, be more creative, the solution is not eating more.

Because there's this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it's really hard on the system. And then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, right? And then the system starts to overheat. Uh so, inflammation is this this overheating. There's too much energy in the system. And uh or the cells are are burning too much energy, and they need to kind of tell other cells that's and those signals we call inflammation cytokines. >> Mhm. >> So, there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with.

And over time, the organism does a lot of of uh finessing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget. >> And that's somewhat linked to stress, I guess, which is from I read your work and it talked about how stress was basically just like an overconsumption of energy. It's It's requiring loads and loads and loads of energy. >> Yeah. >> Okay, we'll talk about that, too, then, cuz I think stress is a really important one.

What's the third? >> The third one is life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to to grow, to learn, uh to transform, right? Change your views. You need resistance to go through some resistance. >> Mhm. >> [clears throat] >> You need energy to go through some resistance. Right? If energy just flows and there's no zero resistance, then there's no possible transformation. So, if life was always easy >> Mhm. >> and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life, then you would just remain as is, right?

And and it would be very boring. And from first principles physics, like we know this to be true, you know, at a number of levels. But, for example, the sun, this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky, shoots energy, right? As photons. So, light is a form of energy. And as long as light, you know, just goes and and photons travels in outer space, photon will remain photon. Light energy will remain light energy until [clears throat] 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 trans- form into something meaningful. >> has the mitochondria got to do with all of this? >> Mitochondria are basically little resistors, right? And and they are what allows the flow of energy through the system. >> Have you got a picture of Okay, here we go. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so this is a an image of a mitochondria. A mitochondrion o n is a singular. Okay. >> is plural. Yeah. 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 uh that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria.

And what you see here, these little wings, these are called cristae. And the cristae 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 and food consumption and then that gets transformed into a little charge battery.

And once the battery is charged, the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is kind of the 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, it says, "I need ATP." And then the mitochondria gets to work and then flows electrons, consumes some food, burns some oxygen, that's why you get out of breath.

All right, 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 more than just making ATP. >> Okay. >> They use their their energized state to produce signals, to receive information and then to produce signals. >> Oh, so they're talking to each other. >> They're talking to each other. >> And what are they saying? >> They're they're it's a whole collective and 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? Is there 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. >> Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria? >> They are.

Yeah, they did Yeah. >> What what is that story? >> [laughter] >> Cuz I think someone said that to me before on the show that our mitochondria are actually bacteria that from prehistoric times or something. >> 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 along oxygen and and other food substrates.

The other type could not. It was anaerobic. And the anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a a few more genes, um and it could only ferment its food and kind of fermenting the food, spitting out, you know, like lactate or 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 uh 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 I favor, based on the evidence we have, is that when mitochondria came in and then they they there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So, maybe the the the coming of 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 for for themselves and you know, kind of operating from a very selfish uh perspective. Just trying to replicate, you know, just trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it like gave those cells a different view on life. And they're like, "Ooh, we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right?

And I become a cell that uh moves, right? So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle." And and then then together those two cells can do a lot more, right? >> And fast forward a couple billion years and here we are. >> Here we are, yeah. And and that led to, you know, bodies with organs, you know, the liver feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, the brain kind of computes and and plans.

Uh so that's division of labor. It's uh and it started with the mitochondria. >> You you talked about energy resistance. I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Give me a a disease that's linked to energy resistance. >> 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.

Uh so, if your resistance is too high >> Because >> Because you have um too much energy pushed onto the system. >> Sugar, too much sugar, glucose. >> Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria are impaired, right? They can't flow energy, then the the the the energy is kind of stuck. It faces greater constraints. Like it wants to go in that direction, but then there's a barrier and then another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing, right?

Nice and and and and and smooth, and then there's like a dam. Right? And if the dam has zero um openings, right? Then the the the water accumulates and then there's high pressure. And then at some point, the the water accumulates and ends up flooding the the landscape and then damaging things. So, it's a bit of like the same thing. If now you open floodgates on the dam, right? Then then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example.

You use the the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do. Uh and if you move and you're physically active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, right? Into speed, into uh movement, right? Into lifting. >> Is this linked to cancer at all? Because it sounds I mean, I don't know much about cancer, but cells dividing out of um control seemingly randomly >> Yeah.

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 a 10-item flywheel of these are the core features of of cancer. Uh all of those features have some relationship, some very direct, with increased energy resistance. Right? So, if energy can't flow smoothly and a cell uh is, you know, burning too much energy and it 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, it could use oxygen, flow electrons through mitochondria, and transform energy, and and live a nice social life, uh like every cell in in this social collective does in the body.

Uh what cancer cells do is they say, "I'm not 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 that just cares about itself. >> So, an antisocial cell. >> Yeah. Then the the the organism will in the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. Right, it's called angiogenesis.

So, it's like the the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says, "Bring me more oxygen." >> So, it's kind of like there's this sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism, and that it's going to be selfish, and demand more and more resources for itself. >> Mhm. >> And it multiplies itself Yeah. With equally selfish little aliens? >> Yeah. >> And then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources?

Is that what you're saying? >> Why do the blood vessels surround the cancer? >> Yeah, it's like it's the cancer calling for, you know, more energy. >> Okay. >> Yeah. 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 in the in the tumor, for example, or in the working muscle. Uh and then how much energy is can flow through the system.

It's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. So, if there's a lot of demand, right, a lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but there's not enough flow to to to to support that activity, then that increases resistance. >> 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 Warburg effect?

What causes that? >> The cancer community used to think that dominant driver for cancer was genetic mutations, but there's an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism, changes in the way electrons flow through through this energetic circuitry, through the mitochondria, can actually drive the instance of a of a new cancer cell. And then when it a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its its mitochondria, it goes back to this selfish state, and then it makes more of itself. >> And it tries not to die.

Explain that part to me cuz I was reading about how cancer cells try to evade death. >> Yeah, the best way to think about this, I think, is as a a social collective, right? Every cell in this organism cares about the same thing, which is pres- preserving the the life and and the health of the whole being, right? So, [clears throat] every cell in in this body is in a social contract with every other cell. Right? 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 it goes into, you know, bacterial mode." That happens sometimes because of mutations and it seems like there there other causes of this. Like, for example, hyperglycemia. >> What's that? >> High blood glucose. >> Mhm. >> Right? Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that? I don't think there there are good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of of disease and you know the the genetic mutation perspective.

If you look at cancer from an an energetic perspective and it's I think likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure, right? There's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells 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, you know, a lot of of water through a very small pipe. >> Something goes wrong. >> Yeah, something goes wrong.

Something something can break. So the the resistance is if you push a lot of energy into a very small, you know, container or into a a channel that can support that, then the the what happens kind of physically is an increase in in the resistance to the flow. And then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself. That's what insulin resistance is in diabetes, right? Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism.

There's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, right? And so that causes this excess, you know, energy coming in. The cell says, "Whoa, you know, too much." And it damages the mitochondria, this excess resistance, because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. >> I was thinking about smoking and how smoking also is carcinogenic. It's cancer causing. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be cancer causing? >> Yeah.

It's clear that in cigarette smoke, there are carcinogens. They're molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. It there's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking, but for all of the other cancers, there's much less of a a clear connection between exposure and cancer. Right, the cancers that that affect and 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 uh the the science behind, you know, connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and uh high blood glucose and diabetes especially, which causes very high, you know, excursion I I have very high spikes in in blood glucose, those things are damaging to ourselves. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance. And it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now?

And then how much how much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there's an imbalance, then that uh causes damage. >> Rather than being innocent bystanders, mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor re-programs 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. >> Mhm. >> It hijacks the the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells.

Mhm. >> So, a normal cell uh 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. If is the cell to live and divide, right? Or is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell? Or if it's a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell? Uh or is it to die? Right? And cells have to make these decisions all the time.

And cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective, and then the organism has the wisdom to say, "Okay, this is no longer ours. Let's get rid of it." Right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well.

Uh but what cancer cells can do is say, "Okay, I'm They They ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth." Uh and by ditching their mitochondria, they basically immunize themselves against the death that mitochondria could could trigger. So, mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death, and cancer somehow is able to kind of get away from that. >> And it's it's 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. >> stuff, yes. >> High blood glucose levels, etc., are linked to cancer. And one would wonder why eating sugar in excess is going to increase my probability of cancer, but obviously it points to the fact that it must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of malfunction somewhere. >> Yeah. And what the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening.

If you overload your body with excess energy, your 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 is too weak to take this, then resistance goes through the roof, the transistors start to melt, and then the system, you know, it gets gets damaged. >> Mhm. >> The The same thing happens, you know, in the body. If you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons, right?

Very direct parallel with the electrical circuit. There electrons stuck here on these little glucose molecules. If you ingest this, now increases the voltage in the body. And then if the mitochondria can't keep up and because they're they're not flowing energy because you're sedentary, you're you're not moving, um then that increases the resistance. All right? And then >> And it might die or malfunction. >> Correct. Or things get damaged, right?

The The clear connection here is too much energy, increased energy resistance. So, then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right? From the food to your mitochondria, then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And then if you're an electron and you're trying to go through the the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen in a mitochondrion, but then at every [clears throat] at every point in this cascade you face resistance, there's more chance that that electron kind of jets out and and then becomes oxidative stress. >> Well, then what's 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. Um 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 cuz it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on going on in the body is you're saying you can actually reverse gray hair without dyeing it.

And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is, but more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between? >> Yeah. Uh what we discovered is that hair graying is reversible. And and that was surprising because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age it's kind of this linear progressive decline and and there's kind of nothing you can do about it. Uh but it turns out that if you look on most people's head, um you can see things like this.

This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were white and then all the hairs are are are dark. And if you take a hair like this, uh the tip here, right, was inside the body long time ago. This is almost like if you look 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 uh 30 years ago, right?" And this ring is today.

Uh so, you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a a drug, for example, like a month ago or 6 months ago or like 2 years ago, depending how long the hair is, you can actually use the hair and all along would be, you know, the chemical signature of what you took.

So you can find marijuana in in the hair, you know, here but not here. So if you if you have marijuana 6 months ago, it's going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around uh, with that trace, that physical trace in in your body. >> He's got hiccups. >> [laughter] >> And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head that the tip was uh, 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 It lost color. Hair graying is a a a classic hallmark of aging. Um, then we thought then you would know something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person's body, right? That made this young hair become old. And then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process.

So this became a kind of an interesting scenario. And through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags, you know, over the mail. Uh, and we were looking for two-colored hairs, a single hair that has two colors, kind of like this. Uh, and we found the hairs that uh, you know, head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark and then it became white or the hair was white and it became dark again. >> Mhm. >> 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 uh cycling uh training camps.

So, I would go for a week where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep. Uh energy started to move very differently in my body during that that time. Um and then when we looked at the hair and we analyzed the the composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, it's all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, uh same physical activity, same everything.

Why some hairs grow like this or like that uh was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. Uh and what we found was a the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair, I thought there's going to be less color, right? Obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria.

And there was an upregulation of the body that the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old wasn't kind of letting go of things. It was doing more. >> So, that means during that period of time, you were more stressed and using more energy? >> When cells become old, instead of just dying, right? They struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly or for some reason they accumulate damage and become old, the cell struggles to make more mitochondria.

And it it tries to kind of compensate. And then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. >> So, when that hair what you looked at that was gray, let's call it, um it had more mitochondria because it was struggling. And why was it struggling? >> It looks like the stress hormones can, you know, make a cell struggle, for example. >> Cortisol? >> Cortisol, yes. If you're a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple.

You don't have, you know, the senses that, you know, we we enjoy, but you do, nevertheless, you know, sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal, it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous. Right, you should be preparing for having to fight or to 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? >> Mhm. >> The thing you didn't do or the mistake you made at work or >> [laughter] >> 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 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 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, at the cost of life, by 60%. >> So, when I'm stressed, I'm using 60% more energy, theoretically. >> I don't know about you, but cells in a dish. >> [laughter] >> Okay. >> So, there the beauty about like bodies and, you know, with the mind and, you know, just complex organism.

They're buffering systems, right? So, you might Yeah, I don't think your energy expenditure increased by 60% if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat. >> What is that graph there? >> So, there two graphs here. The top one is the color of the hair of a single hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here, this is called a hair pigmentation pattern, the HPP that we we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively bring science to the to hair graying and and reversal.

And so, what you see here is this hair was dark and then it became white for 2 cm and then boom, completely regained color. Actually, it regained It was darker here than it than it used to be, right? And then stayed dark afterwards. So, this is a hair that we received in the mail as we were starting to to collect two-colored hairs. And then when we when we saw this, we had found from a few different people white hairs that had regained color.

We'd never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark, right? So, I remember holding this hair. I was like, "Oh my god." This is in the same hair. This is incontrovertible evidence that graying of hair is reversible and it can be pretty pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about 1 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 zero. And then the X axis, the horizontal, was time. Yes. On the far right is now, right? This is now, this is a year ago. And then we labeled all the months. And then we asked people and we asked this lady put a dot on the graph that was the most stressful time in the past year. Like 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, uh zero. And then put other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along the this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected. >> And it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. >> Correct. And what happened to her life, she said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine.

She was happy to be done with her studies and then broke up with her boyfriend. >> Oh, damn, and her hair went gray. >> Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. Uh she said these were the last the most stressful 2 months of my life. >> There's a killer question here, which is if that remains chronic, does that hair follicle go gray forever? >> Yeah. >> I if I go through a a stressful period for 2 to 3 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 to black or dark? >> Yeah. >> Do you see what I'm saying? >> Yes.

It seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible, but we know it, you know, very well. If you have a full head of gray hair and you're 70 years old, you're not going to regain your color. >> Yeah. >> 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. >> It's done. >> Yeah. But then if something changes in the body, right? You go on a vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair, now it can be reversed, right?

Because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray again. And then if you're way way down, like this hair turned gray 10 years ago and you go back up, you're too far away from threshold to regain color. >> Okay. >> So it suggests to some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for some something as binary as hair color. It's a black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where >> where you can reverse gray hair. >> Yes. >> I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think cuz you you added a layer of nuance there, which is about the mind. >> Mhm. >> Like if I go through my life um with a more resilient mind and you get that bad email and you go and I get the bad email and I go it, who cares? >> Yeah. >> Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24 hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there's less cortisol? >> Yeah.

Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. 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 >> [clears throat] >> you're tensing your you know, your your shoulder, that's burning energy. Now your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the anx- the anxiety and then you start to sweat.

Like everything costs energy. >> So the chain of events is I get the email. It's a very bad email. Says you're fired, Steven, from the BBC. We found a different host. >> Yeah. >> Um I look at the email. That goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever. Which then causes a physiological response of like chemicals like cortisol. >> Yeah. >> Um which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy. >> Mhm. >> Which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. >> Mhm. >> Is that Is that sequence of events I I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point. >> Yes.

Yes. >> That's it. Right, when you think about it. >> [laughter] >> Or I get a little bit better with bad news. >> Yeah, or you know, learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to to feel and and um, you know, sit with be aware of that reaction cuz the key solution to kind of to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it. >> Yeah, become aware of it. Yeah. >> All right? Uh, so you can kind of interrupt this and people who study contemplative practices and and meditation and you know, mindfulness approaches, I think many of them think this is kind of the key, right?

The the the awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. So if you feel into your your bodily responses, you become free of do I mount a response? Is that needed now or not? >> There's different types of stress, right? There's like the acute stress, which is just you get the email, you feel a little bit of a spike, but 5 minutes later you're fine. >> Yep. >> And then there's the more chronic type of stress where you're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many many days in a row, many weeks in a row. >> Yeah. >> Um, I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful, but it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. >> Yeah, and I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body?

And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive, but if there's too much resistance, then you you get drained. >> How do I think about this resistance thing cuz I'm really struggling with like understanding it? >> Maybe one good example to to frame this is exercise. >> Yeah. >> All right? When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting, so there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance.

So, the the energy is trying to flow through the muscle, and then there's you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training. Um now, the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. Right? So, that's an imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now, the the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity, is resistance. >> Okay. >> So, if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your your your sprint, uh but you you don't have a lot of mitochondria, right?

It's going to feel terrible. Uh and then because the resistance creeps up, and then your muscle, you know, becomes really hot, and then eventually there's inflammation, uh and then it burns, and then then it's uncomfortable. Uh but then So, that's like an acute bout of of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is once you recover, right? The benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise, they happen after, during the recovery.

So, if you recover, now you're you're the muscles are relaxing, and you're resting, eventually you go, you know, for you go to sleep. Uh it's the in during the decrease in the resistance, now the cell says, "Next time this happens, I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. It was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it. Right? So, I need 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. It said, "Next time I'm going to be ready. Let's make more mitochondria." So, that's probably what where the benefits of exercise come from. This the spiking and and why stress is is not a bad thing intrinsically, right?

If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process the the the it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with with less resistance. >> Coming back to this gray hair thing. So, if if we consider gray hair, my hair going gray, to be the last domino that fell. So, like the symptom. >> Yeah. >> Then what is what are the what what is the first domino? >> Mhm. >> 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. >> Yeah. >> How to kind of take I've got a couple of gray hairs now. And I actually anecdotally do think, weirdly now you've said this, that I have like gray hair flare-ups where I'll go I'll, you know, go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and I'll look in the mirror and be like, "What?

I have 12 now?" I'm being generous there. There's more like 25. [laughter] I have I have 25 now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that that falls? And what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicle? >> So, there's a finite energy budget. >> Mhm. >> 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? If do I put, you know, more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here, right? So, as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young. Right? So, there's there's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. You know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? >> Yeah. >> Yeah?

So, Maslow's insight was uh >> Oh my god, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just I just >> Acute stress response. >> Yeah, I just [laughter] got Yeah, caught off guard. Sorry. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. >> Yeah. So, there's there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that's works similarly to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow said, "Uh for a human being to be fully realized, first, you need to have safety and food and shelter secured, right?" Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people, right?

Loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. Uh and then once you have this covered, now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, what do you call self-actualization, and kind of becoming your best self, flourishing. Uh so, he saw this very much as a this is this needs to be covered uh and when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid, 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? Um so, this hierarchy of of human needs, I think, aligns with hierarchy of uh 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 uh be less efficient, right?

Their mitochondria are working a little, you know, less efficiently and uh and then there there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy, and uh there's more worries about, you know, professional obligations and all 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 in the body. And those need energy, but they're not as important as you know, facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening now. >> So, if there's a lion chasing me, my body's going to commit all the 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 your 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 considers to be a higher 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. >> Yeah. >> And they come out with gray hair.

And usually one does not age that quickly in 8 years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. >> Mhm. >> They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic. And uh 2 years later, they have have gray hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged 10 years. >> Yeah. >> So, you're telling me actually that the the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is this. >> Is the proper allocation of energy.

So, if you don't waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things, which uh is kind of a a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti-aging. >> Can I also pull more energy in the top? Like, can I just if I get more energy, does that mean that there's less likelihood that we're going to run out of energy when it comes to my hair follicles being black or gray? >> Yeah.

The thing is it doesn't look like we have that flexibility. Like, if you want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, uh eating more does is not going to give you more energy. >> So, is there anything I can do to have more energy available? >> Uh you you can become more efficient. >> I can become more efficient, but I can't put more in. >> No. >> Hm. And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress.

Okay, I'm going to live a less stressed life. >> Yeah. It seems like there's a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising. >> Okay. >> Right? Because when you exercise again, you're increasing energy resistance, uncomfortable, potentially you're damaging things, right? Because you're you're uh increasing what we call dissipated losses, right? Oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the 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 to go through a high resistance, you know, gym session is that you make more mitochondria, right?

Your muscles get bigger and stronger, and your heart becomes more efficient, and your arteries, you know, become more become softer, and you develop, you know, the the confidence that you can do this well. Um and then it becomes rewarding. You you know, it becomes enjoyable. So, all of these things, now that you're off the gym session, >> Mhm. [clears throat] >> right? You spent an hour in the gym telling the body, "This is what we're going to do in the future." And then the body's like, "Okay, I'm going to get ready." If there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to to get ready for this is to become more efficient.

So, by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid um and kind of flexible cardiovascular system, and uh by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation, right? All of these things make energy more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost of doing the activity, and then there's more energy available for anti-aging, growth, maintenance, and repair, vitality. So, I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise, but you feel like you have more.

And you don't actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy's flowing more smoothly through this thing. >> It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What what else? What about food? You know, I've I've uh 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? >> Yeah, great question.

Uh alcohol, what we know about alcohol is that as we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology, right? So, if you put something in the body that shouldn't be there, effectively a toxin like ethanol, which is what's in there, uh 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. Uh so, there's a bunch of of energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like because what happens is you 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, uh but uh 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 they're, you know, effectively effectively drunk, and then they measured how much energy are they burning.

And you can do those kind of studies, we've 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 the smaller room, they're just sitting down reading a book. Um and then then you can ask them, "Okay, now drink this alcohol." And then you measure, you look you're minute by minute, they drink the alcohol, and then you start to see, "Woo, it climbs up." So, the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside, under the hood, the body's like burning energy to get rid of the alcohol.

And other toxins probably work the same way, you know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating. The reason why those things might be bad for our health maybe because they they steal energy away from, you know, a growing body, for example. Uh there's good data in uh South America. Children who are exposed to more pathogens, right? There's no sanitation, they walk barefoot, they they eat stuff, you know, that's not clean, then um they have more pathogens uh in their gut, right?

There's there's more uh viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Uh it costs energy to fight those things off. That's why you feel like 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, over covers, you feel cold," which is strategy to basically save energy. So, all of the what's called sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become antisocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. Uh it's like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies. >> Stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increased the the cost of living.

Uh and then because there's a cap on your energy budget, uh then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. >> And if you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of um I guess like energetic distraction is the way I think about it. >> That's that's a cool way to think about it. >> I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it like if you you 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 I probably feel >> Mhm.

Sometimes. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Um And what if if there's only six working on my you know, fundamental requirements to flourish, then some of those things are going to have to give way, and I might end up with gray hair, and I might end up with wrinkles, or maybe my brain won't function the same. Maybe >> Yeah. >> disease >> Yeah. >> You know, my immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. >> Yeah. Immune system won't be there clearing the cancerous cells, for example.

Um and the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, right? Clearing out proteins that you don't need, uh repairing damage DNA that's get gotten damaged, or making new mitochondria. All of these processes happen like every day. Every day you go through a little phase of getting rid of the things that don't work too well to make more of the things that work well, like mitochondria. Quality control it's called.

Right? So, there's this quality control cycle. Old mitochondria that don't work too 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 is hungry, if you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, "Oh I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. So, let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share, uh and then I'll have just the best functioning mitochondria." And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones. >> It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia, weirdly, because I don't really know a huge amount about Alzheimer's and dementia, but I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques. >> Mhm. >> 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. >> Yeah. >> So, is that at all linked to the same sort of like energy distraction? >> Yes.

It's been long believed that the plaque, right, that you've heard about, amyloid plaques and tau tangles, and there's kind of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins, and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's. I think that's what most people have heard and what most people believe because it came from, you know, white coat-wearing scientists and university professors. Um that is not the truth. And what is more true is and and and let me just say why it's not the truth.

You can have people in their 60s and their 70s and their 80s, zero protein deposit 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.

Uh what we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially, in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy demand. And there there are specific brain regions that tend to be more affected in some people, not all not all people tend to have those protein deposits. Those regions start 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. >> Like like with the gray hair. >> Yeah, exactly. And then over time, the those brain regions become hypometabolic, and then that's when you start to have symptoms. >> What does that mean? >> That's that's when people start to have memory issues and >> You said hypometabolic. >> Hypometabolic, yes. This is hypermetabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about.

Like, there's more energy being burned here. Normal metabolic is, you know, you use 100 units of energy for the brain and this Let's say this brain region, 100 units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. Uh if there's a problem with the mitochondria or there's a problem with, you know, the cell communicating with the synapses, right? Cells talk to each other through these things called synapses.

Uh if there's a problem, now the the that part of the brain is going to need to do more work to compensate. Uh and then we know something happens with neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's is inflammation, neuroinflammation. That basically means there's 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 they secrete those proteins to say, "Please help, you know, there we need to reestablish homeostasis. We need to reestablish normal healthy balance." But that process of reestablishing, of healing, costs energy. Just like when you're post exercise, your muscle invest energy to to become stronger.

So, in that kind of early phase, hypermetabolism 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 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 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 remember 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 >> Is this is this what they call it type three diabetes? Cuz I've just heard that phrase quite a lot recently. >> Yeah. 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 three diabetes comes from the fact that when the brain gets sick, right? And symptoms of dementia start to appear like loss of memory and mood and depression and that constellation of symptoms when you look in the brain, it's burning less energy.

But, it's also harder for glucose to get inside the brain. >> It's less efficient. >> It's so there's yes, a loss of efficiency but an increased resistance, right? Or a decrease in conductance for energy for glucose for example, to get inside the brain to be processed and and be used. >> And why might that be? >> Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system. >> Oh, okay. >> If you load up the system all the time with with glucose, with sugar in the blood and glycemia is high, you have diabetes perhaps, this is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto this the system that's like really delicate and it's not like a 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's sparks flying, it damages the mitochondria. It damages this, damages that. And that increases that's what aging is. Aging the the most basic mechanism of aging including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's is the accumulation of little damage, little mutations, little defects, little imperfections. And as the imperfections accumulate, the system becomes less efficient.

Insulin resistance basically and diabetes refers to the fact that muscles, but also the brain can has the capacity to say, I I can't anymore. Like glucose, too much for me, too much resistance, too much you know, damage that I that I'm exposed to. So, if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess energy pressure, right? From the glucose, from the from the electrons, you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin.

So, then you you take the 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 do you A normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the surface of of your muscles and then says, 'Take in the glucose because there's too much glucose in the blood.

It's we're going to damage the brain, we're going to damage the eyes, we're going to damage the nerves. So, muscle, please take in the glucose.' But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria are starting to be at capacity in terms of how much energy they can resist and and and flow, then they shut down the valves, right? So, the muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant. And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells, but then gluco blood glucose starts to increase.

So, the next step in this cascade is well, if there's too much energy in circulation, too much sugar, too much fat, what what can we do with this? And that's where fat stores, you know, adiposity comes in. So, obesity is a protection mechanism against [clears throat] excess energy resistance. >> One way to think about this hypothesis that dementia, Alzheimer's, is linked to an overflow of glucose, let's say, is to look at other civilizations or um 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? >> I don't know the the literature on this, uh but it's clear that people who if you if we look at what makes you more likely to have Alzheimer's, uh what makes you less likely to have Alzheimer's, all the things that make you more likely to have Alzheimer's contribute to increasing 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 and the things that protects the brain, protects you against Alzheimer's and dementia, are things that let energy flow. Physical activity, uh not eating too much, especially not eating too much sugar, uh and and then ketones, there's new, you know, data now showing that ketones can uh you know, enter the brain and be metabolized more easily, and can even kind of improve cognition.

And the ketogenic diet, which I know you've tried, uh many people report more energy on the ketogenic diet. It's not because you eat more calories, it's because those uh electrons that are stuck on ketones, instead of being stuck on glucose, can flow more more easily. And the those ketones are made by mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of this the sociality of mitochondria in the organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made.

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

And the path for a ketone to go from blood to mitochondria is much shorter in terms of number of enzymes, number of resistors, if you want to think about it energetically, than for glucose. That path is very long. The ketone path is much shorter. >> I just want to make sure on that point that I don't misunderstand because, you know, it sound it could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's, but actually you're saying you're not saying cuz I think of ketones as energy and I I'm I'm shutting, you know, ketones all the time.

I don't want to flood my brain with energy so that, you know, it malfunctions, gets Alzheimer's. >> It's it For some reason, it's really hard to overwhelm the brain >> with ketones. >> And with 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. >> [laughter] >> That's because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary.

Uh especially the the sugar part, then you you lose regulation and that's why I think the GLP-1 drugs are are so powerful because they they address the problem where it starts. Like how much food are you putting into the system? >> Yeah. I did look at the stats there on the tribes in Africa and it says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania or rural agrarian populations like the Yoruba, they find that Alzheimer's and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare. >> Mhm. >> Which again means that it points to Western diets. >> Mhm. >> Western diet, Western >> lifestyles. >> Yeah, behavior.

Yeah, these people move all the time um and they don't eat too much. Um most of them don't need to kind of rely on their fat capacitor. They don't have excess energy to just store away. And for for some people, there's congenital leanness, right? Like you're you're born lean and you're going to like you can't put on fat. If you eat too much, the the high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood and then it it gets lodged in ectopic ways.

So, in the it gets lodged in the muscle or in the liver or in the brain um and and then that causes damage because of you know this like excess energy pressure and then the system overheats. >> It's skinny fat. >> Skinny fat, yeah. >> No, it stores it in your around your livers and stuff. What's What's that called? That fat inside you? >> Visceral. >> Visceral fat. >> Yeah. 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. With the which is this increased energy resistance. Like there's too much energy in the system and the system can't flow it. Like the mitochondria can't keep up. So, to protect themselves, they store that and store that away and and then then then you become obese. >> If you're going to take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Johnny "Bones" Jones.

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

I think about how am I feeling, and do I need more food, right? Am I like depleted, or uh am I tired and exhausted because there's too much food on board, and my organism is like struggling to keep up with this excess like friction, or excess, you know, energy pressure and on my brain, on my on my mitochondria. So, I think about it from the perspective of my mitochondria. Uh what do my mitochondria need? And in general, it's much harder to you know deplete the mitochondria, like not eating too much.

So, if you're thinking about that, okay, there's this food there. Do I snack? Do I not snack? Generally, eating too much there there clear consequences to this. Like it increases the resistance or the friction in in your mitochondria. Not eating enough is typically innocuous for most people. >> Because we we have stores, don't we? Of glycogen and we have stores of glucose in our body, in our muscles, so if we were running low, then our our body can go get some fat, metabolize it. >> Exactly.

Make ketones. >> Make ketones. >> Yeah. Yeah, the most people have enough energy on board, right? In the form of fat, some glycogen in your muscles and in your liver to live at least a month. >> I mean, I'm 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. >> Yeah. >> And they can't survive very long without water, yeah, but they can survive for months without eating anything.

Um because their body will start to kind of go into its reserves and break down muscle and all these other things. >> Yeah. Yeah, the record is world record for not eating is over 300 days. >> Wow. >> Irish man. Um and he lost I forget the exact numbers. 250 lbs, 300 lbs. >> What does this say about hunger? And also, what does it say about this society we live in where we have so many We have like five meals a Some people basically just eat from morning till night, you know? >> Yeah.

I I think a lot of us eat not because we're hungry. I think a lot of us have learned to eat to to subserve some other need. And eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems, you know, as gambling and um kind of connecting with other human beings. So, we know some people eat emotionally, right? When when stressed out, they they they eat more, and so I [clears throat] think hunger is is something to be skeptical of because there are many pathways that I think kind of converge on hunger.

Like if you feel sad, you feel like bored, hunger will kind of get you out of boredom because of the salt, because of the 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 um a good general assumption to make. You're probably overeating. >> I think I probably am. >> Um it's harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window, right?

And is that works really well for some people. Um like eating, for example, a very severe kind of window would be 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Right, so you eat for 4 hours, and you kind of put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that. Uh that tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating. Um and my dad, you know, still thinks to to this day he's 69 now, um 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, right? Like the metabolism changes, and if you're always eating, you the body never goes into the state of I must be efficient, right? And then if you go into that state of I must be efficient, you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria, and then there's more friction, you know, in in your whole body, there's more inflammation, 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 4 hours or 6 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. >> I was just reading the other day 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. Um before the industrial revolution, breakfast wasn't a heavily scrutinized meal.

People often just ate whatever was left over from the night before or they ate a quick heavy meal before going out to do physical farm labor. But as people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs, those heavy greasy breakfasts started causing widespread indigestion. Indigestion? 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 indigestion and improve overall health.

He co-invented cornflakes and he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy, cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day and your dad bought it hook, line and sinker. >> Yep. I mean, I lied to you, but then >> Everybody did. >> And and I did until recently, until I started to like feel into this. I would have this big cereal bowl of cereals, that's how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low, like this um you know, low energy.

And I think now I understand why because I was overloading my system with way too much kind of rapidly available sugary energy that I didn't need. Uh and then the body needs to find a way to handle this. Either you get fat, which I can't do, so then it goes kind of to my brain and then makes me feel lousy. >> So, on this point then, just to close off on this diet question, if I want [clears throat] 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 under eat, but I don't want to over eat. >> If you under eat, you're going to pick it up tomorrow. >> I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway, so I'll be fine tomorrow. But, the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today. >> Correct. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. Um and just maybe to close the loop on that example, like when you're sick and you're fighting an infection >> Yeah. >> I had a a beautiful opportunity to understand not just under understand to experience this one day.

It was New Year's Eve uh 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 I go to, you know, the evening dinner. I didn't cough or anything. I didn't I don't think I was contagious, but I just could feel, right? Like something was was coming up. I felt terrible. I was I had a starting to have like full-blown flu symptoms. Went home early at like 10 9:00 p.m.

Um and then I went to bed. It was a horrible night. I felt even I was in pain, and then my I had like massive fever. I took a bath, a warm bath to help my fever kind of, you know, go up so that I could fight the high fever stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So, it's a it's it's usually a good thing. Um and then it is next day I was out, and I was so depressed, and I was like, I should write about this.

I'm writing a book on on energy >> [laughter] >> and energy constraints and like the the division partitioning of energy in in the body. I was like, I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system is in full-blown defense mode, and it's not like I I was like I could feel my heart. I'm wearing this aura. My heart rate was like 110 [snorts] at at rest instead of being like 60, you know, normally. So, there's all of this energy flowing through.

I was like, wow, like my metabolic rate objectively is higher." We know this is true from from, you know, good studies on that when you're fighting something you burn more energy. Uh yet I'm feeling completely drained. Right? So, it's not like the amount of energy that's flowing through that I should feel more energetic. The my immune system in that moment uh was draining all my energy. Draining is sucking away my energy from, you know, from my from my mind, from my brain, perhaps.

Um and I remember thinking it wouldn't be a whole lot of energy if I just pulled my laptop, like prop myself on the bed, and then start to write what I'm experiencing in the moment, right? Like the uh and but I couldn't muster the strength. It's like, what what the Like, why would I care? >> [laughter] >> I couldn't care, right? And this is what the stuff I care about on a daily basis, but in that state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn't care about this.

And then I start to think about the work and about, you know, the the lab and about uh you know, family things. It's like, "Woah, it's my whole life feels so different." >> I don't care about anything. >> Yeah, I don't care about anything. I just I'm just trying to survive. >> That's so interesting cuz I can relate so much. >> Yeah, I mean, everyone has been through like a difficult like you when you're really sick. >> Or when you're really stressed. >> Yeah. >> Or just anything that's all consuming like that. >> Exactly.

That's like Maslow's pyramid, right? The the top is squished and you're like, "Survival." >> And you're like, "Where where did I go?" >> Where is Where is >> [laughter] >> Yeah, I heard about that. >> I was still me, right? I was still Martin, but I I felt completely different. The quality of my of my mind, the quality of 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 2 days or so. Through Day number three, I was able to take my computer and like start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting that just the what what it felt like when I was able to write about it. >> [laughter] >> And really feel into it. It felt like I was diffuse energy. Like the light, for example, right? There's a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and a an incandescent light bulb, like an old-style filament light bulb, is not the amount of energy.

It's the 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. Uh it's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy, if you put in an incandescent light bulb, now it's the same energy, but it's diffuse, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all over the place.

And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go? Right? How far can my mind go? Caring about things. The diffuse energy doesn't go very far. Uh but the the laser can go super far. So, my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb. >> Uh I the two things came to mind when you said that. 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, um when a business is growing quickly, it's usually spending more today than it's receiving in. So, even if you're you're growing from like 1 million to 6 million to 12 million to 25 million, whatever, as we did, you're you still have a cash flow problem. And there'd be times when we're nearing the end of the month, and months in months in a row, and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team.

They They always got paid. They never knew. We always figured it out. 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 older, double my age, I'd basically hide at home. And what I mean by hide at home is like I didn't have the I lost purpose for this business.

Like I I'd wake up for it might last a week or two weeks and I just didn't have the purpose, the quote motivation as they call it to like go out and be a leader. And now as you say I could always because I was stressed and it would last for when the cash flow issue would resolve, my motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this zoomed back into focus. And I think that's really important cuz I you know, that we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching this show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation.

And as a founder and as a CEO, it's you feel so guilty that you the the source of motivation and inspiration and leadership for this group of people, you could lose it. But now I understand what it was. Now I understand that I was at like an a chronic well, uh yeah, a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment. The other thing I actually made me think about as well when you you said about this diffusion of energy, it actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals.

It made me think about >> [laughter] >> if you take 10 10 people in a startup and they're all really really focused on the same goal, they're way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal and you're all pointing in different directions. >> So there's incoherence. >> There's incoherence. It's kind of like a disco light ball. Yeah, but you need to be a laser. And this is why OKRs are so important cuz you can point all the energy at the problem.

This is traction towards a particular goal. >> This is what purpose does. Purpose focuses energy. And I think the reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right? To to feel it. I 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 a spiritual journey to find my purpose. >> out and then you're in panic. >> Yeah, exactly. Uh but when you uh 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 diffuse like a a light bulb and boom, it [clears throat] brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right? Where it's like you have all all of these meetings and it doesn't feel as difficult 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 coherent, right? It feels like I know what I'm doing this. It's then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing cuz 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 then maybe of spirit if you want to go there. >> I'm I'm going to ask the team to play clip.

It's a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about this idea of signal and noise. And he's referencing his experiences with Steve Jobs who he used to work with and also Elon Musk. >> Look how wildly successful he was. 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 as 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 the signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80/20. 80 signal 20 noise.

And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts. It was all email. He was right. He was right. And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. He does not deal with noise. He is 100% signal 24 seconds of you know every cycle. I mean the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute 60 minutes of every hour the 18 hours he's awake it's all signal.

And look what he's achieved. >> 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, the goals you set for that the way that you are awake. If you're going to be awake 18 hours >> Yeah. >> and you have determined that there's three things you have to get done you're going to get those done. No matter what it takes you're going to get those done and you're not going to let anything distract you from the three to five things.

If you're a CEO and you achieve that and you can get those done with 80% of your time based on that you're extraordinarily successful. >> 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 he wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on.

And I watched these interviews with Johnny Ive. I'll actually also play the Johnny Ive's interview because I send this around to everybody. So I'm going to play it where Johnny Ive talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was. >> This sounds really simplistic but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this. Um and it's a struggle to practice but is is this issue of focus. Um Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life.

And um And the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you you decide on Monday, you know what I'm going to be focused. It is a every minute a why 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 um because I think he was concerned that I wasn't. Um he would say um how many things have you said no to?

And I would Honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things cuz I I mean I wanted to be very honest about it and so I'd say, "Oh, I've I said no to this and no to that." And um he but he he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. Um so there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else. >> There's something in giving your entire being of focus to something.

Maybe it's the context switching or whatever it is that means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically drastically increases. >> Mhm. >> Solving hard problems is hard. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. But these great great founders, they they solve them because they're so they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing. >> Mhm. >> Yes. >> I think the reason this is is because of a physical principle about energy, which is called a resonance, right?

If you walk through life with such clarity of mind right? Like this is what the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And and live and you breathe that. You become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in in your actions and your emails. It comes out in the way you speak and then comes out in the the things you turn attention to, right? It turns out in your tone of voice, in the care that you, you know, look at people with.

It comes out in every facet of you, right? So, you become the emblematic leader, I guess, 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 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. >> It's so funny cuz we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often cited as a prime example of someone who was really intensely focused with his with his 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. >> Mhm. >> Probably heard this term. Um 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 worked closely with Jobs described the RDF, the reality distortion field, as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding willpower, and sheer persistence in a certain direction which pulled you with him. >> Mhm. >> That's an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that's you has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance.

And then it looks spooky. It looks like, "Whoa, this thing, you know, synchronicity or this you know, this thing happened and somehow, you know, that he was able to mobilize this this donor and you know, fundraising is like easier than it should be." And so, they're like all of these things snowball because you hold that you know, that that vibe. You hold that energy and amplify it. >> I mean, exactly that. So, I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs.

Um, and he said that it would cause two things. It would be like he was casting spells on you, but he was also bending time and physics. >> [laughter] >> They said, "Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take 6 months, he would look you in the eye and say, 'You can do it in 2 weeks.' Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in 2 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. >> Mhm.

What's clear to make some like something like this happen is you need to um feel that there's something compelling. Like you need to feel something is important. And again, that's not a rational thing. Like you need to feel it in yourself. Um, and then you need to kind of bring that energy into focus and bring attention to it, right? And then then that's where ideas start to come. You build a structure around it to to sustain that flow. >> You said um at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves.

And if I think about the fact that every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people. Like that is true. Like for me to become the president, prime minister, best sales person, or best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy to change its shape. >> I think that's what amazing people do. Uh they're able to, you know, see something, hold that vision so strongly, and then mobilize others, right?

And then new things become uh possible. I think that's what great leaders do. And I I now approach, you know, other human beings and you know, my my son, like my 6-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 >> [laughter] >> that come with this, but he's this beautiful little energy pattern, right? He's just energy flowing through this little child's body.

But my role as a parent is 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, uh 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. >> be able to grow. >> Yeah, exactly. So, the 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. You like there's a challenge. There needs to be a challenge for the team to meet, right? Challenge is like a barrier. It's like a little resistor. Of course, there's challenges, you're like it's difficult to get there.

And if it's not difficult, then every 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 should do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to double the you know, 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. Cuz if there's nothing to hit against, if there's no resistance, then it's there's no purpose. >> I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy.

You think about going to the moon, the moon pulled energy towards it, so we found ourselves to the moon. And actually, if you bring that down into your own life as like a leader of a company, you go Okay, if I set a worthwhile goal, I'm going to pull people, energy, towards it. And if I have an unworth- worthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So, maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically a magnet for energy. >> Yeah, I think so.

And people are energetic processes. So, my 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 uh and his transformation. >> Let me get to this. I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mic- mitochondria? >> This is this beautiful study in it was run in Chicago.

Every year, people would come to the hospital and then fill out questionnaires and meet with a a therapist and 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 and and purposeful than than others, but there's always kind of fluctuations, right? Like we go through fluctuations. We go through life, no matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being challenging in in some ways. So, we asked how people felt, how much purpose people experienced before they died. Is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this