Anti-aging expert Dr. Martin Picard explains how energy, mitochondria, and stress govern health, aging, and disease
Steven Bartlett interviews Dr. Martin Picard, a mitochondrial biologist and professor at Columbia University, on The Diary of a CEO.
Summary
Dr. Martin Picard argues that the human body is best understood not as a physical machine but as an energetic process — and that virtually all major diseases, from diabetes to Alzheimer's to cancer, can be explained through the lens of "energy resistance," a concept describing how efficiently energy flows through the body's mitochondria. He presents research from his Columbia lab showing that grey hair is reversible, that stress hormones increase cellular energy expenditure by 60%, and that a protein called GDF-15 — released during mental and physical stress — travels to the brainstem and triggers sickness-like behaviour including loss of motivation and fatigue. He also discusses the emerging field of metabolic psychiatry, which frames mental illness as an energetic disorder of the brain, and shares clinical observations that ketogenic diets have been life-changing for some treatment-resistant psychiatric patients. Dr. Picard uses Maslow's hierarchy of needs as an analogy for how the body allocates its finite energy budget under stress, prioritising survival functions over maintenance and longevity. The conversation closes with Dr. Picard sharing a personal account of experiencing a miscarriage with his fiancée, and the lesson in slowing down that it taught him.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
What it means to be energy: the foundational framework
Steven Bartlett: Dr. Martin Picard, what is it that you believe, know, or understand that most people out there don't believe, know, or understand?
Dr. Martin Picard: We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. And that sounds a little woo if you don't have context. But I think it's something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to understand — to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes.
Steven Bartlett: In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think people want to understand what energy is and how they can have more of it. I can relate to that because sometimes, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing, and I feel like I've done the same thing as always. But then sometimes I wake up and I don't feel amazing. It feels kind of like roulette — this opaque mystery of how do I wake up with more days in a row feeling amazing, like I can take on the world? And then there are also some friends 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 at a time. That's a really tough place to be. When you wake up repeatedly and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world, that's a really tough place to be.
Steven Bartlett: Who are you, and why did you commit your life to this subject?
Dr. Martin Picard: I'm a regular guy with lived experiences who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons, and who's gone through wonderful things that have made me feel like life is really special and precious. And then I became a scientist. As I learned the tools of science, 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 some white-coat-wearing doctor or scientist said so. We know it to be real from first experience because we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, about health and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. I became a scientist to bridge those domains of existence — the science and the experience. I've led a research group at Columbia University for ten years and founded an institute to really build the systems and technologies to help people grow, heal, and transform.
Steven Bartlett: You have a PhD in mitochondria?
Dr. Martin Picard: My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging.
The moment that changed everything: seeing mitochondria move
Steven Bartlett: There's an image here in front of me — some people will just be listening, so we'll try and explain it for them. It's a video, and it kind of looks a little bit like an alien. I read that this video was quite formative for you. What is that video and why was it a formative moment in your career?
Dr. Martin Picard: I took this video in England, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, with my Geordie friends at the medical school there. I was a graduate student and went there for a kind of exchange. This is the first time I saw mitochondria moving. I saw the inner life of our cells. And when I saw this, something struck me — oh my God, I'm able to see this. And to see living mitochondria because of the mitochondria inside of me. It's the energy that's flowing through my mitochondria in my eye that's allowing me to perceive, to see this. Mitochondria made multicellular life possible. They made our bodies possible. And we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to propagate and keep on living. So when I saw this — this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria — I was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transform energy.
What they're known for is they take the food you eat and they take the oxygen that you breathe in, and 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 through photosynthesis — what your mitochondria do is they unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one, and then they flow them like an electrical circuit. That happens in 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 other. That circuit is closed in the mitochondria. So the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe, and then it becomes water. It's that vital flow of energy — electrons flowing towards oxygen — that allows us to be alive. And as mitochondria do this, they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat. The reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria, as they transform and flow electrons like a little energetic circuit, release heat. So the source of heat that makes us warm — you shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth — you're feeling the warmth from their mitochondria.
Steven Bartlett: Is there a mitochondrion in every single cell in my body?
Dr. Martin Picard: There's on average a thousand mitochondria per cell.
Steven Bartlett: Per cell? There's a thousand? So how many is there in my body?
Dr. Martin Picard: About 5,000 trillion.
Steven Bartlett: Who should care about the mitochondria and why?
Dr. Martin Picard: Anyone who cares about their energy — about having enough energy to do what they really care about. We all care about different things. We're all gifted and talented for different things. Everyone has this unique, authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out, and the only way for a person to flourish, is through energy. If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead. And if the energy doesn't flow efficiently and smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard. You're not at your best. You feel tired. And you feel like maybe it's not worth it. When you're sick and your immune system is draining all of your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic. It's hard to be a good person. It's hard to be a good dad. It's hard to want to do good for the world if you're struggling with energy.
The three foundations of how energy works in the body
Steven Bartlett: So many of us think that how we feel just is what it is and that we can do nothing about it. We breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. Where do we need to start to understand? Because the outcome I want from this conversation is to live my life with more energy to do the things I want to do. Why does one have to start?
Dr. Martin Picard: 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. This expression of you now that I'm getting to experience — this expression is an expression of the flow of energy. If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain, you wouldn't be. You'd be a cadaver. The difference between a dead body and a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person who cares is the flow of energy.
You get so indoctrinated in this worldview that the only thing that's real is the physical stuff — the genes you got from your parents, the physical body. What you can't see with your eyes, not real. That's a reframe that's a bigger-picture mindset shift that scientists struggle with. So number one: you are the energy that flows and transforms through this body.
Number two is there's a fixed energy budget. All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with. If you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to 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. Then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, and the system starts to overheat. So inflammation is this overheating. There's too much energy in the system. Or the cells are burning too much energy and they need to tell other cells that — and those signals we call inflammation cytokines. So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with.
The third one is: life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to grow, to learn, to transform, to change your views, you need to go through some resistance. You need energy to go through some resistance. If energy just flows and there's zero resistance, then there's no possible transformation. So if life was always easy and you never faced any challenge, any stress in your life, then you would just remain as is. And it would be very boring. From first principles physics, we know this to be true at a number of levels. The sun — this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky — shoots energy as photons. Light is a form of energy. As long as light just travels in outer space, a photon will remain a photon. Light energy will remain light energy until that light energy hits a green leaf. The green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. It offers resistance. So when light energy faces resistance, now it can be converted. That's the basis of making food. That's how nature makes food. It crystallises energy from sunlight into molecules. Plants crystallise light energy into carbohydrates. And then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that we eat. We need resistance for energy to transform into something meaningful.
Steven Bartlett: So what has mitochondria got to do with all of this?
Dr. Martin Picard: Mitochondria are basically little resistors. And they are what allows the flow of energy through the system. There's about a thousand of these in each of your cells, and there's about five trillion cells in your body that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. These little wings you can see in the image are called cristae. And the cristae is where the food you eat ends up and where the oxygen you breathe ends up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There are little electrical circuits here. As the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged like little batteries. So effectively, a mitochondrion has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and food consumption, and then that gets transformed into a little charged battery. Once the battery is charged, the mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP — adenosine triphosphate — which is the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract, a muscle cell wants to contract in the gym, it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria, says, "I need ATP." And then the mitochondria gets to work and flows electrons, consumes some food, burns some oxygen. That's why you get out of breath. When you get out of breath, it's because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more.
What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP. They use their energised state to produce signals, to receive information and then to produce signals.
Steven Bartlett: Oh, so they're talking to each other?
Dr. Martin Picard: They're talking to each other. And what are they saying? It's a whole collective. They're talking to each other, monitoring what's happening not only inside the cell but outside the cell. On the surface of mitochondria, all along, there are little receptors for all sorts of signals that tell this mitochondrion: is there enough energy? Are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for something dangerous? So mitochondria are like a little distributed brain — the intracellular brain.
Steven Bartlett: Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria?
Dr. Martin Picard: They are, yeah. About 1.5 billion years ago, there were two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen to transform energy. The other type could not — it was anaerobic. And the anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and had a few more genes. It could only ferment its food, kind of spitting out lactate, like yeast does. What happened is the big one either engulfed the small one, or maybe the small one kind of infiltrated and colonised the big one. The story goes that this basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. And with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity.
The version I favour, based on the evidence we have, is that when mitochondria came in and there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So maybe the coming of mitochondria into this big cell made the big cell social. Because before this event, most of the evidence says that cells were asocial — little bacteria foraging for themselves, operating from a very selfish perspective, just trying to replicate, just trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it gave those cells a different view on life. They were like, "We could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, and I become a cell that moves?" So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle. And together, those two cells can do a lot more. Fast forward a couple of billion years and here we are — bodies with organs, the liver feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, the brain computes and plans. Division of labour. And it started with the mitochondria.
Energy resistance and disease: diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's
Steven Bartlett: You've said that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. Give me a disease that's linked to energy resistance.
Dr. Martin Picard: The clearest is what we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Diabetes affects millions in the world. Fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. If the resistance is too high because you have too much energy pushed onto the system — too much sugar, too much glucose — or if the mitochondria are impaired and they can't flow energy, then the energy is kind of stuck. It faces greater constraints. It's like water flowing nice and smooth and then there's a dam. If the dam has zero openings, the water accumulates and then there's high pressure. And then at some point, the water accumulates and ends up flooding the landscape and damaging things. If you open floodgates on the dam, you can use that energy to make electricity — you use the movement of the water to transform it into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do. And if you move and you're physically active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, into speed, into movement, into lifting.
Steven Bartlett: Is this linked to cancer at all?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think there's a very good chance. If you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer — there's like a ten-item flywheel of core features of cancer — all of those features have some relationship, some very direct, with increased energy resistance. If energy can't flow smoothly and a cell is burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria, which is what cancer cells do — cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral 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. The Warburg effect is when a cell, in the presence of oxygen — if it wanted, it could use oxygen, flow electrons through mitochondria and transform energy and live a nice social life, like every cell in this social collective does in the body — what cancer cells do is 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 that just cares about itself. The antisocial cell.
Then the tumour will try to make more blood vessels around it. It's called angiogenesis. So it's like the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says, "Bring me more oxygen."
Steven Bartlett: So it's a sort of alien that all of a sudden decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism, that it's going to be selfish and demand more and more resources for itself. And it multiplies itself with equally selfish little aliens. And then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources — that's why blood vessels surround a cancer?
Dr. Martin Picard: Yeah. It's the cancer calling for more energy. Energy resistance is the product of two things: how much energy is being demanded — how much power is being deployed in the tumour, for example — and then how much energy can flow through the system. That's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. If there's a lot of demand, a lot of activity happening like in a cancer cell, but there's not enough flow to support that activity, then that increases resistance.
Steven Bartlett: Is there any understanding as to how those kinds of cancers are caused? What causes that moment — the Warburg effect?
Dr. Martin Picard: The cancer community used to think that the main driver for cancer was genetic mutations. But there's an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism, changes in the way electrons flow through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria, can actually drive the instance of a new cancer cell. And then when a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its mitochondria, it goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself. And it tries not to die.
Steven Bartlett: Explain that part to me, because I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death.
Dr. Martin Picard: The best way to think about this is as a social collective. Every cell in this organism cares about the same thing, which is preserving the life and the health of the whole being. Every cell in this body is in a social contract with every other cell. A cancer cell basically gets out of this agreement and says, "No, I'm going to fare for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can, and I'm going to make more of myself." And it goes into bacterial mode. That happens sometimes because of mutations, and it seems like there are other causes. For example, hyperglycaemia — high blood glucose. Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer.
Steven Bartlett: Why is that?
Dr. Martin Picard: I don't think there are good explanations out there based on the molecular framework of disease and the genetic mutation perspective. If you look at cancer from an energetic perspective, it's likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure. There's more electrons being pushed onto those cells or those mitochondria. And when you push too much energy on a system that doesn't need energy, it's like you're trying to shove a lot of water through a very small pipe. Something goes wrong. Something can break. So the resistance — if you push a lot of energy into a very small container or into a channel that can't support that — what happens physically is an increase in the resistance to the flow. And then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself. That's what insulin resistance is in diabetes. Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism. There's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, and so that causes this excess energy coming in. The cell says, "Too much." And it damages the mitochondria — this excess resistance — because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress.
Steven Bartlett: I was thinking about smoking and how smoking is carcinogenic. Through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be cancer-causing?
Dr. Martin Picard: It's clear that in cigarette smoke there are carcinogens — molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. There's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking. But for all of the other cancers, there's much less of a clear connection between exposure and cancer. The cancers that affect and kill most people — we don't really know why they come when they come. And it's clear that there's a long history. The science behind connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and high blood glucose and diabetes, especially — which causes very high spikes in blood glucose — those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance. It makes that computation: how much energy is flowing now? How much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there's an imbalance, that causes damage.
Rather than being innocent bystanders, mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumour reprograms them to stop acting like the body's protective energy factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising frontier in developing new cancer therapies.
A normal cell's behaviour is driven by the mitochondria. Mitochondria are in the driver's seat. They can basically call the shots: is the cell to live and divide? Is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell? Or if it's a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell? Or is it to die? And cells have to make these decisions all the time. Cell suicide, for the greater good, is something that happens all the time in our bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of most cancer cells. 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," because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well. But what cancer cells can do is ditch their mitochondria and then start to use them for their own growth. And by ditching their mitochondria, they basically immunise themselves against the death that mitochondria could trigger. So mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death, and cancer somehow is able to get away from that.
Steven Bartlett: It's weird to think about because the things that cause cancer, or that have a correlation to cancer, are things like having too much sugar. High blood glucose levels 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.
Dr. Martin Picard: And what the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this. In a simple electrical circuit, if you jacked up the voltage and the system is too weak to take it, then resistance goes through the roof, the transistors start to melt, and the system gets damaged. The same thing happens in the body if you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons — a very direct parallel with the electrical circuit. There are electrons stuck on these little glucose molecules. If you ingest this, it increases the voltage in the body. And then if the mitochondria can't keep up, because they're not flowing energy because you're sedentary, you're not moving, then that increases the resistance. And the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, from the food to your mitochondria, that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you're an electron trying to go through the metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and a mitochondrion, but at every point in this cascade you face resistance, there's more chance that that electron jets out and becomes oxidative stress.
Grey hair, stress, and the reversibility of aging
Steven Bartlett: What's going on with aging? I've got two images in front of me — two different colours of hair. Let's pretend for the sake of this explanation that this is someone's hair that's gone grey because of stress, and this is what she used to look like in terms of the colour of her hair. What I found really interesting is you're saying you can actually reverse grey hair without dyeing it. And if so, what does that tell us about what grey hair is, but more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between?
Dr. Martin Picard: What we discovered is that hair greying is reversible. And that was surprising because what most people learn is that when you age, it's this linear progressive decline and there's nothing you can do about it. But it turns out that if you look on most people's heads, you can see hairs that have two colours. If you take a hair like this, the tip here was inside the body a long time ago. This is almost like if you looked at tree rings — if you take a tree and cut it in cross section, you see the rings, and you can say, "Oh, this ring was 30 years ago, and this ring is today." You can use that to map the history of what happened in the environment of the tree. You can do the same thing with hair. We all walk around with biological history crystallised in our hair. That's why if you want to know if someone had a drug a month ago or six months ago or two years ago, depending on how long the hair is, you can use the hair and all along it would be the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in the hair here, but not here. If you had marijuana six months ago, it's going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around with that physical trace in your body.
The idea was: if we could find hairs on someone's head where the tip was dark and then when you look closer to the body it becomes white — and you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old, it lost colour — hair greying is a classic hallmark of aging. Then we thought, you would know that something was happening in this hair follicle, in this person's body, that made this young hair become old. And then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process.
Through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags over the mail. We were looking for two-coloured hairs — a single hair that has two colours. And we found hairs — head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs — that showed the signature. The hair was dark and then it became white, or the hair was white and it became dark again. So we had physical evidence from multiple people that showed white hairs can go back to being dark. And this contradicted the idea that aging is this linear progressive process that we're 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. In those days I would go on annual cycling training camps — a week where all you do is bike, eat, and sleep. Energy started to move very differently in my body during that time period. And then when we looked at the hair and analysed the molecular composition — you can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, it's all the same genome, every hair has the same genetic material, same food, same physical activity, same everything — why some hairs go like this or like that was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, how life can go from being young to old or old back to young.
What we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. In the white hair, I thought there's going to be less colour, obviously, but also probably less mitochondria. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria. There was an upregulation. The body, the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old, wasn't letting go of things. It was doing more.
Steven Bartlett: So that means during that period of time, you were more stressed and using more energy?
Dr. Martin Picard: When cells become old, instead of just dying, they struggle. When a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly, or for some reason they accumulate damage and become old, the cell struggles to make more mitochondria. And it tries to compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. So on that hair that was grey — it had more mitochondria because it was struggling. And why was it struggling? It looks like stress hormones can make a cell struggle. Cortisol.
If you're a cell, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple — you don't have the senses that we enjoy, but you do nevertheless sense the environment — if cortisol comes and you get the signal, it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous. You should be preparing to fight or to flight. 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? How much energy does it cost to ruminate about yesterday — the thing you didn't do, or the mistake you made at work, or that conversation that went sideways with your partner? Two students in the lab, Gabriel and Natalia, did that experiment. You put cells in a dish, you give them the equivalent of cortisol. How much energy is it going to cost for these cells to prepare? There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol does signal that there might be something dangerous outside. That's like when you're sitting down and you get an email — "I might lose my job" — and then you have this whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost? In cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure — the cost of life — by 60%.
Steven Bartlett: So when I'm stressed, I'm using 60% more energy, theoretically?
Dr. Martin Picard: In cells in a dish. The beauty about bodies and with the mind and this complex organism is they're buffering systems. So I don't think your energy expenditure increases by 60% if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat.
Steven Bartlett: What is that graph there?
Dr. Martin Picard: So there are two graphs here. The top one is the colour of the hair — of a single hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. What we see here is this hair was dark and then it became white for two centimetres, and then boom, completely regained colour. Actually, it was darker here than it used to be, and then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received in the mail as we were starting to collect two-coloured hairs. And when we saw this, we had found from a few different people white hairs that had regained colour. We'd never seen a hair like this — that's dark, white, and then dark. I remember holding this hair. I was like, "Oh my God." This is incontrovertible evidence that greying of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty fast. This transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week. This white hair, completely white, regained colour in just about a week.
So then we developed an instrument — a simple sheet where on the Y axis, the vertical, is most stressful thing that ever happened to you to no stress at all, ten and zero. And then the X axis, the horizontal, was time. On the far right is now, and then we labelled all the months. Then we asked people to put a dot on the graph for the most stressful time in the past year. And then the least stressful part. And then put other meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots along this last year, then connect the dots. The red graph is her dots connected. And it correlates perfectly to her hair going grey.
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 she broke up with her boyfriend. And she went grey. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. She said these were the most stressful two months of her life.
Steven Bartlett: There's a killer question here, which is: if that remains chronic, does that hair follicle go grey forever? If I go through a stressful period for two to three weeks and my hair goes a bit grey, as long as I get out of that stressful period as quickly as possible, does that hair then return to dark?
Dr. Martin Picard: It seems like — and we ran some fancy mathematical models to understand why this would be possible — if you have a full head of grey hair and you're 70 years old, you're not going to regain your colour. So there seems to be a window of opportunity. What the mathematical model suggested is that a hair slowly accumulates damage, becomes more and more energetically inefficient, there's more and more energy resistance, and then there's a barrier. When the hair hits that threshold, now it loses colour — it's done. But then if something changes in the body — you go on vacation, or you start to do intermittent fasting, and there's more energy available — now it can be reversed, because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go grey again. And if the hair turned grey ten years ago and you go back up, you're too far away from the threshold to regain colour. So there's a window of opportunity where, for something as binary as hair colour — it's black or it's white — you can reverse grey hair.
Steven Bartlett: I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it made me think — if I go through my life with a more resilient mind, and you get that bad email and you go, "Fuck it, I guess," and I get the bad email and I'm stressed — 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?
Dr. Martin Picard: 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. For your heart to beat a little faster, if you mount a response to that email, you're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your shoulder — that's burning energy. Now your brain is going into rumination mode, and this thing makes you think about your childhood and the anxiety, and then you start to sweat. Everything costs energy. So the chain of events is: I get the email. It's a very bad email. It says, "You're fired, Steven." 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 chemicals like cortisol, which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy, which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. Is that the sequence of events?
Steven Bartlett: I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point.
Dr. Martin Picard: That's the right way to think about it. Don't open the laptop. Or get a little bit better with bad news. Or learn to be less reactive. Or learn to feel and be aware of that reaction, because the key solution to cutting that sequence of events that ends up draining you is to become aware of it. So you can interrupt this. And people who study contemplative practices and meditation and mindfulness approaches — I think many of them think this is the key. The awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. If you feel into your bodily responses, you become free to choose: do I mount a response? Is that needed now or not?
There are different types of stress. There's the acute stress, which is just you get the email, you feel a little bit of a spike, but five minutes later you're fine. And then there's the more chronic type of stress where you're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many, many days in a row, many weeks in a row.
Steven Bartlett: 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.
Dr. Martin Picard: And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body. If it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained.
How exercise creates mitochondria and why recovery matters
Steven Bartlett: How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I'm really struggling with understanding it.
Dr. Martin Picard: Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your muscle. Your muscles are contracting, so there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance. The energy is trying to flow through the muscle and you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard — you're running, you're sprinting, you're doing interval training — now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. And so that imbalance of demand to flow capacity — the demand divided by flow capacity — is resistance. So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your sprint, but you don't have a lot of mitochondria, it's going to feel terrible. The resistance creeps up, your muscle becomes really hot, and then eventually there's inflammation and it burns and it's uncomfortable.
That's an acute bout of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is: once you recover, the benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise. They happen after, during the recovery. If you recover, the muscles are relaxing and you're resting. Eventually you go to sleep. During the decrease in the resistance, now the cell says, "Next time this happens, I better be ready. This was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it. So next time, I'm going to make more mitochondria." That's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato to training for a marathon. You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the rise in resistance, not having the capacity to flow that much energy, and then adapting for next time. That's probably where the benefits of exercise come from — this spike in resistance, and why stress is not a bad thing intrinsically. If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process, it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run make you more efficient, decrease your resistance. Then you can go through life with less resistance.
The sequence from stress to grey hair: Maslow's hierarchy of energy
Steven Bartlett: Coming back to this grey hair thing. If we consider grey hair — my hair going grey — to be the last domino that fell, the symptom, then what is the first domino? And can you walk me through the sequence of events? Because one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events, I can also understand how to reverse it. I've got a couple of grey hairs now. And I actually anecdotally do think, weirdly, now you've said this, that I have grey hair flare-ups — where I'll go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something, and I'll look at them and be like, "What? I have 25 now?" In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is grey hair. What is the first domino that falls?
Dr. Martin Picard: So there's a finite energy budget. And then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business. You have this budget — do I put more energy here? Do I put more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here. So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young. There's a kind of hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritised the same way. Do you know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs?
Maslow's insight was that for a human being to be fully realised, first you need to have safety and food and shelter secured. Once you have this and you feel it's covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people, loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, becoming really good at something. And then once you have this covered, now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, self-actualisation, becoming your best self, flourishing. He saw this very much as: this needs to be covered first. And when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid. Your meditation practice, the long-term type of "I'm going to be a better person" — no, like, I need to make sure we can put food on the table next week.
So this hierarchy of human needs, I think, aligns with the hierarchy of energy needs in the body. And as far as the importance of hair colour goes, it's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and you have more and more cells that start to be less efficient, their mitochondria are working a little less efficiently, and there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy, and there's more worries about professional obligations — all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from what we call growth, maintenance, and repair. These are the anti-aging processes in the body, and those need energy, but they're not as important as facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening now. So if there's a lion chasing me, my body is going to commit all the energy I have to getting away from this lion. And it might say, "Listen, Steven, 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 commit energy to making sure your follicles produce black pigment." So I would look aged, older, but that's because all of my energy has been going to something else that my body considered to be a high priority.
Steven Bartlett: Which also brings me to the famous thing we always talk about with presidents, because presidents go into office often with dark hair and they come out with grey hair. And usually one does not age that quickly in eight years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic. And two years later, they have grey hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged ten years. So you're telling me actually that the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is the proper allocation of energy. 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, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti-aging.
Can I also pull more energy in at the top? Like, if I get more energy, does that mean there's less likelihood that we're going to run out of energy when it comes to my hair follicles?
Dr. Martin Picard: It doesn't look like we have that flexibility. If you want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, eating more is not going to give you more energy.
Steven Bartlett: So is there anything I can do to have more energy available?
Dr. Martin Picard: You can become more efficient. And how does one become more efficient? There are a few things we know make an organism more efficient. One is exercising. When you exercise, you're increasing energy resistance — uncomfortable, potentially damaging things, because you're increasing what we call dissipative losses, oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the exercise. But then when you recover, the body's like, "Next time this happens, I'm going to be ready." And the process of getting ready to go through a high-resistance gym session is that you make more mitochondria. Your muscles get bigger and stronger, your heart becomes more efficient, your arteries become softer, and you develop the confidence that you can do this well. Then it becomes rewarding, it becomes enjoyable.
So all of these things — now that you're off the gym session, you spend an hour in the gym telling the body, "This is what we're going to do in the future." And then the body's like, "Okay, I'm going to get ready." If there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to get ready for this is to become more efficient. By having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid and flexible cardiovascular system, by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation — all of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energy cost of doing the activity. And then there's more energy available for anti-aging, growth, maintenance, and repair. I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise but you feel like you have more. You don't actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy flowing more smoothly through this thing. It's more efficient. You've got more mitochondria.
What you consume: alcohol, food, and the energy cost of toxins
Steven Bartlett: What about food? I've got coffee here. I've got some alcohol here. I've got some sugar. What I consume — how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body?
Dr. Martin Picard: Alcohol — what we know about alcohol is that nothing is free in biology. If you put something in the body that shouldn't be there, effectively a toxin like ethanol, it's going to cost energy to get rid of it. There are detoxification systems in your liver primarily that take alcohol, break down the molecule, and then you can pee it out or metabolise it for energy even. So there's a bunch of energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like shit because you waste energy degrading the alcohol. Even though it's a net plus in terms of calories, what ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it.
There's a cool study where they brought people in, gave them a bunch of alcohol — they're effectively drunk — and then measured how much energy they were burning. You can do those kinds of studies. 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. You ask them to not do too much — they're just sitting down and reading a book. And then you ask them to drink this alcohol. And then you look, minute by minute, they drink the alcohol and you start to see it climb up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside, under the hood, the body's burning energy to get rid of the alcohol.
Other toxins probably work the same way — pesticides, the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating. The reason why those things might be bad for our health may be because they steal energy away from a growing body. There's good data in South America — children who are exposed to more pathogens, where there's no sanitation, they walk barefoot, they eat stuff that's not clean — they have more pathogens in their gut, more viruses, bacteria, and parasites. It costs energy to fight those things off. That's why you feel like shit when you're fighting a flu. Your immune system goes into overdrive to kill the virus and get rid of it. And then the immune system steals energy away from the brain, from your mind. And then you feel like everything is so difficult. You just want to be in bed, under covers, you feel cold — which is a strategy to basically save energy. So all of what's called sickness behaviour — you become asocial, your skin is more sensitive so you avoid moving — all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies.
Stressors, alcohol, parasites — all have this increased cost of living. And then because there's a cap on your energy budget, that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. If you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of energetic distraction.
Steven Bartlett: I was thinking about it like: my body has an army of ten soldiers. And usually those ten soldiers are at work doing the things I need to do to survive and grow and flourish. And then when some sort of toxic substance comes into my body, you're basically saying that four of those soldiers have to be reassigned to go deal with this invader. And so now I only have six that are focused on everything I need to flourish, which is why I probably feel shit sometimes.
Dr. Martin Picard: Exactly. And if there's only six working on your fundamental requirements to flourish, then some of those things are going to have to give way. You might end up with grey hair, you might end up with wrinkles, maybe your brain won't function the same, maybe your immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. The immune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. And the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain — clearing out proteins that you don't need, repairing DNA that's gotten damaged, making new mitochondria — all of these processes happen 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.
Old mitochondria that don't work too well anymore get degraded. It's called mitophagy. Autophagy is self-eating. Mitophagy is self-eating of the mitochondria. When a cell is hungry, if you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, "I might run out of energy. I need to be really efficient here. Let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share." And then when food comes back on board, the cell makes more of the better ones.
Alzheimer's, dementia, and the brain's energy crisis
Steven Bartlett: It made me think of Alzheimer's and dementia, because I know that something clearly goes wrong in the body that produces these plaques. And you often hear that there are lots of things we consume or do that increase our probability of getting Alzheimer's and dementia. Is that at all linked to the same sort of energy destruction?
Dr. Martin Picard: It's been long believed that amyloid plaques and tau tangles — the idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's — is what most people have heard and what most people believe because it came from white-coat-wearing scientists and university professors. That is not the truth. What is more true — and let me just say why it's not the truth — you can have people in their 60s, 70s, 80s with zero protein deposits in the brain. We can image this now pretty well with neural imaging. You can have people with 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 and completely normal cognition. So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis — that amyloid protein aggregates in the brain as a driver of dementia and neurodegeneration — is not correct.
What we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially, in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's an increase in energy demand in specific brain regions that tend to be more affected. Those regions start to burn more energy. This is early phase. And probably this is the brain trying to cope. Something's not working great, but it's working harder. And then over time, those brain regions become hypometabolic. And that's when you start to have symptoms — memory issues, mood issues.
Hypometabolic means the brain region is burning less energy than normal. If there's a problem with the mitochondria, if there's a problem with the cell communicating with the synapses — cells talk to each other through things called synapses — if there's a problem, now that part of the brain is going to need to do more work to compensate. And then we know something happens with neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's — neuroinflammation. That basically means there are some cells in the brain that are trying to heal the brain. And part of that healing process is a stress response locally. And then that stress response leads to the secretion of little proteins we call cytokines. It's basically those cells saying something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. You have those cells that get activated, they secrete those proteins to say, "Please help. We need to reestablish homeostasis." But that process of healing costs energy. Just like when you're post-exercise, your muscle invests energy to become stronger.
So in that 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 become hypometabolic, so they burn less energy. If you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer's, there are these regions that burn less energy. And energy is so central to everything, including cognition. In order to have an idea and to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy. So the brain burning less energy in later stages reflects this lack of function. It becomes difficult to remember old memories, difficult to make associations, difficult to plan for the future and to regulate emotions. And a lot of people with dementia end up having mood issues. They become really depressed.
Steven Bartlett: Is this why they call it type 3 diabetes? Because I've heard that phrase quite a lot recently.
Dr. Martin Picard: So my hunch is that Alzheimer's and dementia more generally is a disorder of energy, and specifically a disorder of increased energy resistance. Type 3 diabetes comes from the fact that when the brain gets sick and symptoms of dementia start to appear — loss of memory, mood, depression, 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. There's a loss of efficiency, an increased resistance, a decrease in conductance for energy, for glucose, to get inside the brain and be processed and used.
And why might that be? Because you're pushing too much glucose on the system. If you load up the system all the time with glucose, with sugar, and the blood glycaemia is high — you have diabetes perhaps — this is all the time like pressure pushing energy onto a system that's really delicate. We are a slow-burning fire. Inside our cells you have the electrons flowing, and when there are sparks flying, it damages the mitochondria, it damages this, damages that. And that increases — that's what aging is. Aging, the most basic mechanism of aging including brain aging that leads to Alzheimer's, is the accumulation of little damage, little mutations, little defects, little imperfections. 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 have the capacity to say, "I can't anymore. Too much glucose, too much for me, too much resistance, too much damage." So if you're a muscle cell and you want to protect yourself against this excess energy pressure from the glucose, from the electrons, you can become insensitive or resistant to insulin. You take the receptors that are sitting on top of the surface of the cell and you pull those out. So then the cell no longer is sensitive to insulin. And then the body's like, "Whoa, glucose is way high." A normal healthy body releases insulin, floods the blood, insulin goes to the surface of your muscles and says, "Take in the glucose because there's too much glucose in the blood. We're going to damage the brain. We're going to damage the eyes. We're going to damage the nerves. So muscle, please take in the glucose." But when the muscle is overwhelmed and the mitochondria are starting to be at capacity in terms of how much energy they can flow, then they shut down the valves. The muscle cells become insulin resistant and then glucose intolerant. And that protects the mitochondria in the muscle cells, but then blood glucose starts to increase.
So the next step in this cascade is: if there's too much energy in circulation, too much sugar, too much fat, what can we do with this? And that's where fat stores, adiposity, comes in. Obesity is a protection mechanism against excess energy resistance.
Steven Bartlett: One way to think about this hypothesis that dementia and Alzheimer's is linked to an overflow of glucose is to look at other civilisations or tribes — the Hadza tribe in Africa, who don't have a lot of glucose. Do they still get Alzheimer's and dementia?
Dr. Martin Picard: I don't know the literature on this, but it's clear that if we look at what makes you more likely to have Alzheimer's, what makes you less likely to have Alzheimer's — all the things that make you more likely contribute to increasing this energy resistance. Too much sugar in the blood, diabetes, physical inactivity — if you don't move, energy doesn't flow through your mitochondria, it just stacks up and accumulates. And the things that protect the brain, protect you against Alzheimer's and dementia, are things that let energy flow. Physical activity, not eating too much, especially not eating too much sugar. And then ketones — there's new data now showing that ketones can enter the brain and be metabolised more easily and can even improve cognition.
The ketogenic diet — which I know you've tried — many people report more energy on the ketogenic diet. It's not because you eat more calories. It's because those electrons that are stuck on ketones, instead of being stuck on glucose, can flow more easily. And those ketones are made by mitochondria in your liver. This is a really beautiful story of the sociality of mitochondria in the organism. The liver mitochondria is where ketones are made. If you eat fat — avocados and oil and meat and butter — those fat molecules go in the liver and then the mitochondria in the liver take those fat molecules, 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, than for glucose. The ketone path is much shorter.
Steven Bartlett: I just want to make sure I don't misunderstand — it could have sounded like you're saying that too much energy might cause Alzheimer's. But you're not saying that, because I think of ketones as energy and I'm shooting ketones all the time. I don't want to flood my brain with energy so that it malfunctions and gets Alzheimer's.
Dr. Martin Picard: It's really hard to overwhelm the brain with ketones. If you eat fat, it's very easy to feel like you're full, you've had a good enough meal. If you bring sugar into the picture and you mix sugar and fat, now things taste so good and there's an extra reward. And a lot of people eat for different reasons, not just because they're hungry. That's because it's so rewarding to eat something fatty and sugary, especially the sugar part. Then you lose regulation. And that's why I think the GLP-1 drugs are so powerful — because they address the problem where it starts. How much food are you putting into the system?
Steven Bartlett: I did look at the stats there on the tribes in Africa. It says when researchers study indigenous groups such as the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania or rural agrarian populations like the Yoruba, they find that Alzheimer's and vascular dementia are exceptionally rare. Which again points to Western diets and Western behaviour.
Dr. Martin Picard: These people move all the time. And they don't eat too much. Most of them don't need to rely on their fat capacitor. They don't have excess energy to just store away. And for some people there's congenital leanness — you're born lean and you can't put on fat. If you eat too much, the high sugar or high fat just accumulates in the blood. And then it gets lodged in ectopic ways — in the muscle, in the liver, in the brain. And that causes damage because of this excess energy pressure and then the system overheats.
Steven Bartlett: Skinny fat.
Dr. Martin Picard: Skinny fat, yeah. And that stores it around your liver and stuff. The visceral fat is linked to increased inflammation and it's linked to a bunch of diseases. But this is just a symptom. The increased fat — and I think the reason why we say obesity is bad — is because obesity reflects a deeper state, a more important state, which is this increased energy resistance. There's too much energy in the system and the system can't flow it. The mitochondria can't keep up. So to protect themselves, they store that away, and then you become obese.
Eating windows, fasting, and the myth of breakfast
Steven Bartlett: On this point of food — 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?
Dr. Martin Picard: Develop that awareness of what your body needs. When I think about how I eat, I don't think about my weight or my body. I think about how am I feeling, and do I need more food? Am I depleted? Or am I tired and exhausted because there's too much food on board and my organism is struggling to keep up with this excess friction or excess energy pressure on my brain, on my mitochondria? So I think about it from the perspective of what do my mitochondria need?
In general, it's much harder to deplete the mitochondria — not eating too much. If you're thinking about whether to snack, generally eating too much has clear consequences. It increases the resistance or the friction in your mitochondria. Not eating enough is typically innocuous for most people. Because we have stores of glycogen and glucose in our body and our muscles anyway. If we were running low, our body can go get some fat, metabolise it, make ketones. Most people have enough energy on board, in the form of fat and some glycogen in their muscles and liver, to live at least a month.
The world record for not eating is over 300 days. An Irishman. And he lost, I forget the exact numbers, 250 to 300 pounds.
Steven Bartlett: What does this say about hunger? And also, what does it say about this society we live in where some people have like five meals a day?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think a lot of us eat not because we're hungry. I think a lot of us have learned to eat to subserve some other need. Eating is quite rewarding. It taps into the same systems as gambling and connecting with other human beings. Some people eat emotionally — when they're stressed out, they eat more. So I think hunger is something to be sceptical of, because there are many pathways that people converge on hunger. If you feel sad or bored, hunger will kind of get you out of boredom, especially if you have salty, sugary things around — it's a rewarding thing that will get you out of other uncomfortable sensations. I think most of us overeat. That's a good general assumption to make — you're probably overeating.
It's harder to overeat if you restrict your eating window. That works really well for some people. A very severe kind of window would be 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. — so you eat for four hours, and you put this around dinner time so you can be social with your partner or something like that. That tends to work well for a lot of people who have been in the habit of overeating.
And my dad still thinks to this day — he's 69 now — that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's what he learned when he was a kid. I don't think it's true for most people. Especially if you're in your 60s, 70s — metabolism changes. And if you're always eating, the body never goes into this state of "I must be efficient." And then if you go into that state, you accumulate poorly functioning mitochondria. And then there's more friction in your whole body. There's more inflammation, which is a signal of that energy friction or resistance. And then you don't feel as good, you don't feel you have as much energy.
So many people who go from eating three meals a day, plus or minus snacks, to intermittent fasting — just eating whatever they want, however much they want, but just in those four or six hours — most of those people have a lot more energy. They experience 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 of energy, or the transformation of energy.
Steven Bartlett: I was just reading that this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day came from an advertising campaign designed to sell cereal and bacon. Before the Industrial Revolution, breakfast wasn't a heavily scrutinised 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 labour. But as people moved into cities and took sedentary office jobs, those heavy, greasy breakfasts started causing widespread indigestion. Enter Harvey Kellogg. 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 corn flakes, and he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day.
Dr. Martin Picard: And a lot of people bought it hook, line and sinker. I did until recently, until I started to feel into this. I would have this big bowl of cereals — that's how I grew up as well — and then I would feel this low energy. And I think now I understand why, because I was overloading my system with way too much rapidly available sugary energy that I didn't need. And then the body needs to find a way to handle this. Either you get fat, which I can't do. So then it goes kind of to my brain and then makes me feel lousy.
Steven Bartlett: So on this point, just to close off on this diet question — if I want to feel really, really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window, and I probably want to eat just what I need. I don't want to undereat, but I don't want to overeat. If I undereat, I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today.
Dr. Martin Picard: Correct. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. And just maybe to close the loop on that example — when you're sick and you're fighting an infection. I had a beautiful opportunity to understand — not just understand, to experience this one day. It was New Year's Eve, the 31st in the evening. And I started to feel a little scratchy throat. I'm like, "Oh, I think I'm getting sick." So I go to the evening dinner. I didn't cough or anything. I don't think I was contagious, but I could feel something was coming up. I felt terrible. I was starting to have full-blown flu symptoms, went home early at like 9 p.m. And then I went to bed. It was a horrible night where I was in pain. I had a massive fever. I took a warm bath to help my fever go up so that it could fight — the high fever stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So it's usually a good thing.
And then the next day I was out and I was so depressed. I was like, "I should write about this. I'm writing a book on energy and energy constraints and the division and partitioning of energy in the body. I should write about this. This is so interesting." My immune system was in full-blown defence mode. I was wearing my Oura ring. My heart rate was like 110 at rest instead of being like 60 normally. So there's all of this energy flowing through. My metabolic rate objectively is higher — we know this from good studies. When you're fighting something, you burn more energy. Yet I'm feeling completely drained. It's not the amount of energy that's flowing through that makes you feel more energetic. My immune system in that moment was draining all my energy away from my mind, from my brain. And I remember thinking it wouldn't take a whole lot of energy if I just propped myself on the bed and started to write what I'm experiencing in the moment. But I couldn't muster the strength. It's like, what the fuck? Why would I care? I couldn't care. And this is the stuff I care about on a daily basis. But in that state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn't care about this.
And then I started to think about work and about the lab and about family things. It's like, my whole life feels so different. I don't care about anything. I'm just trying to survive. That's so interesting because I can relate so much. When you're really sick, or when you're really stressed, or just anything that's all-consuming like that — that's like Maslow's pyramid. The top is squished and you're in survival mode. And you're like, where did I go? I was still me, still Martin, but I felt completely different. The quality of my mind, the quality of my intention was completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn't care about anything else.
That episode went on for like two days or so. Day number three, I was able to take my computer and start to feel again the purpose. But it was so interesting what it felt like when I was able to write about it and really feel into it. It felt like I was diffused energy. Light, for example, is a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and an incandescent light bulb — an old-style filament light bulb — is not the amount of energy. It's the way the energy is patterned. In a laser, you have every photon in phase with one another. There's a coherence to it. And it's the coherence that gives the laser its power. It's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy in an incandescent light bulb — now it's diffused. Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all different directions. And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go, how far can my mind go caring about things — the diffused energy doesn't go very far. But the laser can go super far. So my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb.
Purpose, focus, and the physics of coherent energy
Steven Bartlett: 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. Making sure we had enough money coming in from our clients to pay our staff was always a problem. When a business is growing quickly, it's usually spending more today than it's receiving. Even if you're growing from one million to six million to twelve million to twenty-five million, as we did, you still have a cash flow problem. And there'll be times when you're nearing the end of the month, months in a row, and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team. They always got paid — they never knew, we always figured it out. But what I'd notice is in those moments of really, really high stress, sometimes — not always, but there were periods — where I lost motivation. What I meant by that is I literally, as a 23, 24-year-old CEO of all these hundreds of people, some of them double my age, I basically hid at home. I didn't have the purpose, the motivation to go out and be a leader. And now as you say, I could see — it's because I was stressed. And it would last until the cash flow issue would resolve, and then my motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this, zoomed back into focus.
And I think that's really important because we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching the show and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation. As a founder and as a CEO, you feel so guilty that you — the source of motivation and inspiration and leadership for this group of people — could lose it. But now I understand what it was. I was at a chronic energy deficit in that moment.
The other thing that made me think, when you said about this diffusion of energy, is businesses and OKRs and goals. If you take ten people in a startup and they're all really, really focused on the same goal, they are way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal and you're all pointing in different directions. There's incoherence. It's like a different light bulb. But you need to be a laser. And this is why OKRs are so important — because you can point all the energy at the problem.
Dr. Martin Picard: This is what purpose does. Purpose focuses energy. And I think the reason purpose is so powerful — and why you need to have it, to feel it — is that when you somehow find yourself in a place where the things in your life are meaningful, and the path you're on is purposeful, what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffused like a light bulb and boom, it brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance. You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month where you have all of these meetings and it doesn't feel as difficult as it would if you were going all over the place. Focus brings our energy into a coherent state. And then it feels like coherence — I know what I'm doing. It becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing. Because there's this coherence — not just energetic coherence that allows you to do more with less energy, but also this coherence of mind, and maybe of spirit, if we want to go there.
Steven Bartlett: I'm going to ask the team to play a clip. It's a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about this idea of signal and noise. He's referencing his experiences with Steve Jobs, who he used to work with, and also Elon Musk.
Kevin O'Leary: "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 — signal-to-noise ratio. What was so brilliant about Jobs, that I tell every CEO now — and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business — his vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours you're awake. You're going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal-to-noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80/20. 80 signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning expecting me to get back to him — because back then we didn't have texts, it was all email.
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. Every cycle, every 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. So I can really summarise this for my audience: signal is the most urgent thing you should be focused on right now, and noise is basically everything else. The goals you set for the way that you were awake — if you're going to be awake 18 hours, and you've determined that there are 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, you're extraordinarily successful."
Steven Bartlett: In that clip, he's basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80% signal. He wakes up in the morning and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these interviews with Jony Ive. I'll actually also play the Jony Ive interview because I send this round to everybody.
Jony Ive: "This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this. And it's a struggle to practice. But is this issue a focus? Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life. And the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you decide on Monday, 'You know what? I'm going to be focused.' It is a every-minute, 'Why are we talking about this? This is what we're working on.' You can achieve so much when you truly focus.
And one of the things that Steve would say — because I think he was concerned that I wasn't — he would say, 'How many things have you said no to?' And I would, honestly, I would have these sacrificial things, because I wanted to be very honest about it, and so I'd say, 'Oh, I said no to this, and no to that.' But he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. So there was no real sacrifice. What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else. There's something in giving your entire being a focus to something — maybe it's in the context switching or whatever it is — that means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically, drastically increases. Solving hard problems is hard. But these great, great founders, they solve them because they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing."
Dr. Martin Picard: I think the reason this is so is because of a physical principle about energy which is called resonance. If you walk through life with such clarity of mind — this is what the truth is, this is where we're going — and you live and you breathe that, you become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern and it comes out not just in your actions and your emails. It comes out in the way you speak, and then it comes out in the things you turn attention to. It comes out in your tone of voice, in the care that you look at people with. It comes out in every facet of you. So you become the emblematic leader for that thing that you're 100% into. What this does is it's picked up by other people. Maybe this gets called vibes. You have that vibe — the founder's vibe, the entrepreneur's vibe. I think this is real. And this is the energy that's flowing through mitochondria somehow becoming coherent and aligned. It feels meaningful. It feels purposeful. And then you live like that, and other people around you that resonate with it — people are drawn to a pure signal. If you have that specific signal, it's like music, like a symphony. When it sounds on tune, then people that want to come on board feel this, and then it gets amplified.
Steven Bartlett: It's so funny because we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often cited as a prime example of someone who is really intensely focused with his energy. And what you've just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field. 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 as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding willpower, and sheer persistence in a certain direction which pulled you with him.
Dr. Martin Picard: That's an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the source resonator is strong enough, people will come into resonance. And then it looks spooky. It looks like, whoa, this synchronicity — somehow he was able to mobilise this donor, and fundraising is easier than it should be. And so all of these things snowball because you hold that vibe, you hold that energy, and it amplifies.
Steven Bartlett: I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs. He said that it would cause two things — it would be like he was casting spells on you, but he was also bending time in physics. Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take six months, he would look you in the eye and say, "You can do it in two weeks." Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in two weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Jobs' charisma, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he was casting spells and I would see people mesmerised, so much so that I was so jealous." Gates noted that even when Jobs was lying or wrong, he had everybody completely hooked.
Dr. Martin Picard: What's clear to make something like this happen is you need to feel that there's something compelling. You need to feel something's important. And again, that's not a rational thing. You need to feel it in yourself. And then you need to bring that energy into focus and bring attention to it. And that's where ideas start to come. You build a structure around it to sustain that flow.
Steven Bartlett: You said at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves. And if I think about the fact that every barrier or obstacle we have in the world is actually other people — like that is true — for me to become the president, prime minister, best salesperson, best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy to change its shape. I think that's what amazing people do. They're able to see something, hold that vision so strongly, and then mobilise others. And then new things become possible.
Dr. Martin Picard: I think that's what great leaders do. And I now approach other human beings — and my son, my six-year-old son Noah — I see him as, yes, a little boy, and yes, a lot of energy, and yes, some challenges that come with this, but he's this beautiful little energy pattern. He's this energy flowing through this little child's body. My role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance. The right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint — do whatever you want, have whatever you want, anytime — that's not good for development. Kids need to feel some boundaries. Those are like resistance, little constraints. But if every minute I'm putting constraint — "No, you can't do this, no, you can't do that" — then it damages the system. It traumatises the system.
So the art really of parenting, and I think the art of leadership, is providing the right structure so that the energy has some constraints. There's a challenge. There needs to be a challenge for the team to meet. Challenge is like a barrier, a little resistor. Of course there are challenges — it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult, then everyone's bored. If it's like, "Yeah, we're going to do the same thing as we did last year," that's not the same kind of energy as "We need to double this year." This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you'd have to work through.
I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. 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? This is all curiosity-driven. It's like the mind wanting to have something to hit against. Because if there's nothing to hit against, if there's no resistance, then there's no purpose.
Steven Bartlett: I was thinking about worthwhile goals as actually being magnets for energy. You think about going to the moon — the moon pulled energy towards it. So we flung ourselves to the moon. And actually, if you bring that down into your own life as a leader of a company, you go: if I set a worthwhile goal, I'm going to pull people, energy, towards it. And if I have an unworthwhile goal, energy won't be attracted. So maybe a worthwhile goal is actually philosophically a magnet for energy.
Dr. Martin Picard: I think so. And people are energetic processes. So my six-year-old son is this beautiful movement of energy. My goal is to nurture it — not just with food and physically, but to nurture his curiosity and his transformation.
Purpose, mitochondria, and the science of meaning
Steven Bartlett: Linked to this, I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria.
Dr. Martin Picard: This is a beautiful study and it was run in Chicago. Every year people would come to the hospital and fill out questionnaires and meet with a therapist and neuropsychologist, and they would ask them questions and test their memory and their cognition. And 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. And some people are more optimistic, happy, and purposeful than others. But there's always kind of fluctuations. No matter how lucky you are, life always ends up being challenging in some ways.
So we asked: how people felt, how much purpose people experienced before they died — is that related to the mitochondria in their brain? And the only way you can ask this question is to look at the brain after the person died. So then you have how the person felt before, how much purpose they experienced. And then you look at the mitochondria after they die. Where? In the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — that little part of the brain involved in active reasoning and executive function. And the mitochondria in the people who felt more purpose had a greater energy transformation capacity. The resistance was lower. This could mean that if you feel more life purpose, the mitochondria in your brain can flow energy more easily. Or it could mean the inverse — that having mitochondria in your brain that can flow energy more easily just changes how you see life. Makes you feel more purposeful.
Steven Bartlett: Or it could mean that purpose itself is creating more efficient mitochondria.
Dr. Martin Picard: Exactly. People have done studies in animals — and we've done some of those studies — where you can basically change the state of mind of a mouse by stressing it out chronically. And then you make it feel defeated, like it has a really stressful life. And you ask: does this change the mitochondria in the brain? Can the experience of stress change the mitochondria in the brain? 100%. That happens. Now you can say, okay, now let's change the mitochondria in the brain. You can open up the brain, inject a little something that either boosts the mitochondria or inhibits and inactivates them, increases or decreases resistance. And then you ask: does this change how the animal appears to feel, how the animals behave in terms of anxiety or social interactions with other animals, sociality or dominance? 100%. So the best science shows it goes both ways. How you feel can change mitochondria, and the mitochondria can change how you feel.
And so, theorising here — if I don't have purpose in my life, it's going to change the mitochondria. And then if my mitochondria becomes more inefficient, what will I notice as the next symptom?
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, probably fatigue is the first thing that starts to pop up. You feel drained, you don't feel you have enough energy. Burnout?
Dr. Martin Picard: Probably feels like burnout. And you start to lose enthusiasm for the future, you become more pessimistic. There's a constellation of things we call depression or burnout, or we put labels on these things, but really every person starts to experience life as less enjoyable, less purposeful, less meaningful, regardless of the diagnostic title we put on it.
Steven Bartlett: Which is interesting because I've interviewed a few people that are experts on the subject of depression and also addiction. One of the things I remember Johan Hari saying to me — he wrote a book called Lost Connections — is that in some cultures, the cure they apply for depressive symptoms is giving someone purpose in their life.
Dr. Martin Picard: That's so powerful. My hunch is that most of what we call depression is a loss of coherence. And when we're isolated — we did a study recently to look at the energetics of mental stress, when you feel like you're being pulled aside and judged. What does that do energetically to the body? And there's this protein marker in the blood that reflects energy friction, energy resistance. If the mitochondria can't flow energy smoothly, this protein gets made and then it's in the blood as a biomarker. It's elevated in cancer, where we think there's increased energy resistance. It's elevated in Alzheimer's, where we think there's increased energy resistance in the brain. It's elevated in diabetes, where there's increased energy resistance with the insulin resistance. It's elevated in all sorts of pathologies — hypertension and heart disease. And it's a marker that the organism energetically is not doing well. It's not efficient.
We did this study where you bring people in, we put an intravenous line so we can measure the blood markers, and then we tell them, "Just relax, everything's fine, you're doing great." And they sit down, they relax for 30 minutes. Cortisol goes down, heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down. And then our lovely study coordinator Catherine walked into the room and looked at the participants: "Now you're going to be judged. You're going to have to deliver a speech. Here's the situation: you were in a shopping mall, you grabbed this scarf just to try it on, but then the security guard caught you and they're accusing you of shoplifting. So now you're in court. You need to defend yourself in front of the judge. And you need to tell the judge what should happen to the security guard. Should we do this job?" And then we tell them they have two minutes to prepare their three-minute defence in front of the judge.
Most people start to feel the anxiety. And then we monitor heart rate at the same time and blood pressure, and then we draw blood. So you can see everyone's physiology — the energetic cost of stress. You see this on the monitor on the other side in the control room. And then we put a camera in front of them that video records them, and then we have a white-coat-wearing old white man who stands six feet in front of them, looks at them straight in the eyes, they start talking. And they have to look into the camera and they do their defence, and they know someone's looking at them. And what we saw was that this energy stress marker goes up just with mental stress. You're not doing exercise. You're not doing anything strenuous. You're just going through this phase of "What's going to happen to me, to my ego, to my sense of self?"
Steven Bartlett: So what's the downstream consequence of this stress chemical being in your body?
Dr. Martin Picard: That protein is called GDF-15 — growth differentiation factor 15. The name doesn't matter. But that energetic stress marker — you're asking the right question. What does it do and what does it matter? It turns out this protein goes to the brain. And that protein can be made by any organ in the body except one — the brain. Where's the receptor for this protein? Only in one organ in the body. It's right in the brainstem. The brainstem is where the basic survival systems of the body are. And there's a region in the brainstem called the area postrema — it's known as the vomiting and nausea centre for the brain.
Steven Bartlett: Wait, so if something happens, I'm extremely stressed, the world is judging me — this protein goes into my blood and then it goes up into my brainstem and it docks in there. And then what happens?
Dr. Martin Picard: It turns out the brain interprets this as: there's something running out of energy. Something in the body is not right. There's something running out of energy. And then the brain makes two decisions, very similar to when you're sick. That protein, GDF-15, is called a cytokine. It's the same thing that immune cells produce when they're activated during an infection. So your body thinks you're sick. And then it does two things. One: save energy, conserve energy. So you lose motivation. Feel depressed. Can't go to the gym. Doesn't feel worth it. We know this specifically from animal studies. If you inject animals with GDF-15, they hunch in a ball and they don't do anything. They go into this sickness behaviour.
Number two: the brain says something's running out of energy. First, let's conserve energy. But two, let's mobilise energy. Let's put glucose into the blood. Let's put fat into the blood, because there might be cells out there that are running out of energy and we need to rescue them.
Steven Bartlett: Are you going to get belly fat?
Dr. Martin Picard: Visceral fat, yeah. When stress hormones are up and you're increasing blood glucose, increasing blood lipids, if the rest of the body doesn't need it — which is what kind of happens during a stress response like this — that fat gets lodged where it shouldn't. Called ectopic fat. And that's what belly fat is.
Steven Bartlett: Okay, so let's go a bit further. This is happening. If this is chronic, I guess it's going to lead at some point to disease.
Dr. Martin Picard: What the best studies show on this is when you have a high level of this energetic stress marker, this protein — studies were done where you take the blood, you measure this protein, some people have very high levels, some people have very low levels, and then you wait 14 years. This is actually a study from the UK called the UK Biobank. If you measure the protein, the energetic stress cytokine, and you ask what happens to people with high GDF-15 versus people with low GDF-15 — turns out people with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop mental illness, bipolar disease, depression, schizophrenia. People with high GDF-15 are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, hypertension. People with high GDF-15 are more likely to be dead.
At this point, we don't know if it makes a difference whether it's from mental stress, if it's from physical stress, if it's from an organ struggling that's sick and trying to heal itself. High energy stress, high energy resistance in the body, based on this marker, is called a prognostic indicator. It's an indicator that something bad might happen. And people with high GDF-15 also — they don't like to take the stairs. They don't like to walk for pleasure. They don't like to go out to the gym. They don't like to go out with friends. They don't like to exercise. Because if you're getting the signal — like when you're sick — if GDF-15 is made somewhere in your body, it goes to your brain, you're getting the signal you're running out of energy.
Steven Bartlett: So I guess the question everyone's asking as they're listening to this now is: how do I prevent GDF-15, this stress cytokine thing that goes and docks in my brain, from floating around in my blood so often?
Dr. Martin Picard: Good question. Taking the time to feel. Meditation. What we know is there's some initial evidence that GDF-15 increases throughout the day. So the purpose of sleep then might be to reduce energy resistance. It's not about finding one optimal level of resistance and sticking there. It's about this movement of increasing resistance and then decreasing resistance — this movement of life. And I guess all the other things we talked about earlier as it relates to lifestyle factors — keeping away from extreme stresses, eating way too much, starving oneself, oxidative stress. None of the solutions here are rocket science. If we just look back in time at how we used to live a little bit more human — out in nature with people, with friends, off screens, eating stuff that grows in the ground or has legs and runs — a lot of that is a pretty simple playbook for how to live a good life and to not be so stressed out all the time.
Steven Bartlett: I think part of it is, yes, living a life that is more aligned with the way we evolved — connecting to other human beings and not eating too much. But everyone knows this. Why aren't we doing it?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think part of the reason is because we have this misconception of ourselves as a molecular machine. If I'm like a car, then I'm just going to put more fuel in and I should feel better. And then you do it, you eat more, and then you don't feel better. And that's, I think, extremely disempowering. People want to be empowered and people want to have knowledge, but they want to know what to do so they can be their best version of themselves. So they can flourish.
Supplements: methylene blue, NAD+, and urolithin A
Steven Bartlett: So it's interesting — before you arrived, I did something I've never done before. I went through all of the interviews you've done and I looked at all the comments because I wanted to understand the people that have listened to you frequently. What is it they feel like they would love to ask you or what they haven't gotten from other interviews? One of the most popular comments was the audience asking about supplements. The question they had is that they know you personally lean on lifestyle interventions, but the biohacking community is very interested in compounds like methylene blue, urolithin A, and NAD+ boosters. In your opinion, what does the clinical data or clinical consensus actually say about these supplements? Are they a shortcut? Are they a band-aid? Are they useful?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think there are shortcuts to some states. I lean away from them because I think once we start to think that there's a magic pill to solve a complex issue, to solve the way that you're feeling, you don't need to bring awareness to what you are. But can I do both? I think so. In some cases, I don't really know how methylene blue does everything it's supposed to be doing. But biologically, methylene blue seems to be able to give electrons to the mitochondria. So maybe there's something there that methylene blue can kind of relieve energy resistance in the mitochondria.
NAD+ is probably the best supported intervention to reduce inflammation. Also, it's an electron carrier. So it takes electrons from food and then gives them to the electron transport chain so the mitochondria can flow those electrons with low resistance. So if you're depleted of NAD, that's going to cause increased resistance for electrons to flow through this metabolic circuit. So NAD+ seems to calm things down a little bit in terms of energy processing. Most people are not deficient of NAD+, so giving more to the system might not help, but for reasons I don't really understand, it seems like it helps some people and makes people feel more energetic.
Steven Bartlett: Is that in pill form? How do people take NAD+?
Dr. Martin Picard: There are oral supplements that are precursors to NAD. If you eat NAD directly, the bioavailability — it doesn't get into your cells very well. You can infuse NAD+ intravenously, and then that gets to your cells better. That's not an approved or recommended medical intervention, but I've seen people with mitochondrial disease saying that it helps them, and normal healthy people as well who feel more energy.
Steven Bartlett: What about urolithin A?
Dr. Martin Picard: Urolithin A is a new compound that seems to stimulate the degradation of bad mitochondria. We talked about autophagy, mitophagy earlier. A cell that has a thousand mitochondria — there are always some that are getting a little old and eventually they're degraded, especially if you fast. If the cell is a little starved, it's going to degrade the ones that are least functional. And there's a whole selection process that happens inside the cell to know which mitochondria are bad, which ones are good. The bad mitochondria get targeted and then they get degraded if you're fasting or if you're pushing the system like during exercise. What urolithin A seems to do is to accelerate this process — accelerate the degradation of the bad mitochondria, the mitophagy, so that the cell has to make more of the good ones.
Steven Bartlett: I'm looking at some of the studies here and it says the clinical evidence for urolithin A has rapidly expanded over the last few years, transitioning from compelling animal data to highly rigorous placebo-controlled human clinical trials. And overwhelmingly, the human research confirms that urolithin A targets mitochondrial dysfunction and systemic inflammation, with one study in 2022 in the JAMA Network Open Study Journal, where they took adults aged 65 to 90 and gave one group placebo and the other urolithin A for four months. At the end of that, they found that the group given urolithin A showed statistically significant improvements in muscle endurance and a reduction in biomarkers of mitochondrial inefficiency. I should be on urolithin A then. Everyone should. Do you take any of that?
Dr. Martin Picard: I don't. I'm sceptical of this. There's always a new supplement that does amazing things, especially if it cures mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria have dozens of functions. And so the term "mitochondrial dysfunction" is a little misleading. There was a lot of hype about NAD. There was a lot of hype about coenzyme Q, CoQ10. There was a lot of hype about all sorts of things — anti-inflammatory berries and antioxidants was a big thing ten, twenty years ago. Turned out not to be so useful. Actually impairs normal adaptation and signalling if you eat too many antioxidants. So urolithin A feels like the next fad. Maybe it's real. I think the science is fairly compelling, but I trust the wisdom of my body and my mitochondria more than I trust the pharma company that's trying to make and sell this.
Steven Bartlett: And what does that mean in practical terms, trusting the wisdom of your body?
Dr. Martin Picard: It means recognising that I am the energy that's flowing through this thing. And this thing is nature. We are a piece of nature. Something that's true across the animal kingdom and the living kingdom is things heal. And we don't think about this in biomedicine. We think about diseases, we study when things go wrong, and we try to understand the molecular features of diseases. There's not really a science of the healing process. But the basis of health is clear. You need to heal continuously. Heal, repair the DNA that's damaged. Repair the mitochondria that are getting old. You get rid of them, you make new ones. Preserving the wholeness of the system. To heal means to become whole again.
Steven Bartlett: Is that contingent on me being in a natural environment for my nature to heal? Because if you think about me and you sat in here now, we're sat in like a dark bunker, basically, with no sunlight. And most of us live in such a dark bunker with very little sunlight. So we then have to take vitamin D. So because we live outside of our true nature, I'm wondering if actually we do need to take some supplements because we're not going to heal.
Dr. Martin Picard: We are going to heal. But if you sit in here all day, you're not going to get vitamin D, and then that's going to cause problems. So we're not in the optimal environment. I think there's good research showing if you put a plant in a hospital room, patients recover faster. There have been studies looking at windows with natural light — if you're in a hospital and you see nature, people recover better. And there's good data on nature exposure. Is it more oxygen if you're in a forest? Is it the phytochemicals, the things produced by the plants? Is it just seeing green, seeing something that sounds and looks like what you evolved to be around? We don't really know what it is. But we know exposure to nature kind of helps calm the body and somehow improve recovery.
Red light therapy and mitochondrial metabolism
Steven Bartlett: One type of help people also wanted to know about from you, which was even more discussed, was about red light therapy. Red light therapy as a support for your mitochondria?
Dr. Martin Picard: Interestingly, red light therapy is a pretty big thing now. There are hundreds of different devices — helmets, a hairbrush, bands. Someone was just telling me their dad is part of a study now. He puts a helmet with red light on every day because he has pre-dementia. By doing this, the idea is — light is energy. Energy is not a thing, but it's the potential for change. It's the capacity to change something. Red light, especially the infrared that you don't see with your eye, can penetrate tissue. It can go through your hair, through your skull, and then into your brain. And then there, it seems to do something and change metabolism.
How is it doing this? The best hypothesis we have is that for light to do something in biology, there needs to be something in biology that resonates with it — that can offer the right amount of resistance, so that when the photons hit, there's transformation of energy. That receptor, the antenna, the cellular antenna for red light, seems to be mitochondria. There's something in the mitochondria where the electrons flow and then they meet with oxygen to become metabolic water. That is called cytochrome C oxidase.
Steven Bartlett: I'm going to try and say this in layman's terms. If I take red light and I put it on my skin, the red light is going into the mitochondria of my cell and it's helping the mitochondria to become more efficient. That's the idea. So I should wake up every day and do red light then?
Dr. Martin Picard: If you're deficient in that way, that might be good. That might also offset the natural order that your body has created.
Steven Bartlett: You think it might be harmful?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think that in general — that's why I kind of veer away from supplements — the organism is this beautiful dynamic equilibrium of everything energetically dancing with each other. You have the mitochondria transforming energy, genes are expressed, this cell is doing this, that cell is doing that, and there's this beautiful balance. And when the system is out of balance, now there are signals like inflammation, signals of this imbalance at an energetic level, and then that turns into molecular level, and then the system tries to come back into balance.
Steven Bartlett: I never realised that too much red light can be bad for you.
Dr. Martin Picard: I don't know if there are studies that show too much red light is bad for you, but phototoxicity is a thing. You can buy a whole bed of really intense light, and I think if you stay too long in those, that's probably not good.
There's a very compelling study that was published last year on blood glucose regulation. When you eat a bunch of sugar or a meal with carbohydrates, blood glucose typically spikes. If you get stressed out, just psychological stress will increase blood glucose. So those glucose spikes can increase energy resistance and then start to cause damage, accelerate aging and so on. So what the body does in the normal healthy organism is regulate blood glucose. If you eat a big meal, there's enough insulin released, and then the glucose can go into cells, into the muscles and into the fat. And then you preserve normal blood glucose.
It turns out if you shine a red light on the back of people as they ingest a big bunch of glucose, the spike in glucose is not as high. And what they did in that study that was interesting is they measured mitochondrial metabolism through the mouth — you can measure oxygen coming in and CO2 coming out, which is coming from mitochondria. So you can measure the energy metabolism, which is really the mitochondrial metabolism, as people are doing this. And what they found is that people who had red light on their back had their metabolism actually a little higher. So the electrons, the flow of energy, was increased with the red light. And they think that might be why the glucose didn't spike as much — because the electrons that came into the blood were able to flow through the mitochondria.
So this points to some regulation of energy inside the mitochondria that I don't fully understand, but I think there's something promising here. And it certainly supports the idea that energy modalities outside of ourselves — light, electromagnetic fields, other human beings who are energetic processes — are affecting my metabolism all the time. We respond to each other energetically, metabolically. I think it supports that idea that you're in an energetic process and you're influenced by other forms of energy, even if you don't see it.
Steven Bartlett: I'm really stunned by this idea that there is such a thing as getting too much red light and that that can have harm for your cells. Looking at some of the studies, it seems to suggest that red light therapy follows a bell curve model. They found in one particular study from 2009 that low to moderate doses of light perfectly stimulate the mitochondria to produce ATP and a healthy small burst of reactive oxygen species to trigger cellular repair. However, this particular study also showed that when the doses push too high, the light creates massive amounts of reactive oxidative species, and this excess oxidative stress overwhelms the cells' antioxidant defences, completely shutting down mitochondrial respiration and inducing cellular apoptosis — cell death — instead of healing.
Dr. Martin Picard: This bell-shaped relationship is something we see in many domains of biology and physiology. Same as with exercise. Most people know if you do a workout that's half an hour, an hour, two hours — if you're an athlete and you're really well conditioned, it's fine. And then you recover for 23 hours after your one-hour workout. That's great. It actually makes you more efficient. It gives you the impression that you have more energy, which is really energy flowing more efficiently. But if you work out for eight hours, that's not good. So too much, you crash. Not enough, you're not at your optimal. Where is the optimal state? Biology and the whole mind-body unit has worked out through evolution and through your life and development to find this sweet spot. If you know how to listen to it.
A breathing exercise: feeling energy resistance in real time
Steven Bartlett: There's a lot of noise out there. For the same reason you closed your eyes earlier when I asked you to feel inside — this is a good analogy for what it means to listen to our energy. Maybe we could do a little exercise if you're interested.
Dr. Martin Picard: Sure. So we'll do a little exercise. You can close your eyes if you want. Everyone at home also close your eyes unless you are driving. And we'll use the breath. So you can start by just feeling your body. You can feel gravity pulling your body down into the chair. And then we'll take a little breath in and then breath out and then all the way down and hold your breath with empty lungs and hold there for as long as you can. And just pay attention to the sensations that are emerging in your body, whether it's in your belly and your chest and your neck and your head. And the longer you wait, the more intense those sensations are. You can hold for as long as you want, and when you can't, just take a deep breath.
Deep breath. What does that feel like?
Steven Bartlett: I felt lots of vibrations, like waves going across my body. But it was almost like I could feel the energy moving through my body. It's kind of how it felt. I suddenly was very clearly aware of my heartbeat. I could feel everything in a way that I can't typically feel everything. Near the end when I hadn't breathed in a while, it was a bit uncomfortable.
Dr. Martin Picard: What did that feel like?
Steven Bartlett: Like I was starving for oxygen, like I was starving for air. Running out of air. Like drowning.
Dr. Martin Picard: Running out of air and like drowning is one of the most horrible, aversive experiences that I think we evolved to dislike. So what was happening there in our bodies as we were doing this is oxygen is being consumed by mitochondria continuously. Every millisecond, mitochondria consume oxygen. And now you're not bringing oxygen through your breath. And then they produce CO2, carbon dioxide. So mitochondria are burning the oxygen little by little and then they're producing carbon dioxide. And we evolved to feel those signals very, very sensitively. So that's the pressure that you felt.
The subjective experience, what you described there, is an experience of energy starting to stall. Because if there's no oxygen in your mitochondria, the electrons are like, "Where do I go?" And then there's an extreme level of resistance. The most extreme case of energy resistance that most people will be familiar with is a heart attack. My dad had a heart attack a few years ago and he woke up during the night with this terrible contraction, like a pressure in the chest. He said it was like 400 pounds of pressure on his chest, terrible pain, worst pain he's ever had. What's happening — where is that pain coming from? The source of that pain really is blood flow can no longer bring oxygen to mitochondria in the heart.
Steven Bartlett: So the mitochondria are like panicking.
Dr. Martin Picard: Panicking is kind of imposing an experience onto a biological process, but you have the electrons flowing through mitochondria all the time, flowing onto oxygen, from food to oxygen, nice and freely flowing. That feels great. Or it feels like just normal life. And then all of a sudden there's no more oxygen. So the electrons have nowhere to go. That feels terrible. The electrons can't flow, so they start to backflow. That is what causes oxidative stress. That's why the heart gets damaged during a heart attack — because the electrons can't flow to oxygen because of this little clot. And for some reason that we don't really understand, this feels extremely aversive.
So what you experienced there by holding your breath — and anyone who's listening to this can try on their own, hold your breath for as long as possible — it feels horrible. And now imagine living your life with just five or ten percent of this horrible feeling. Like you wake up in the morning and you have this trace of running out of energy, running out of oxygen. I think that's what some mental illnesses feel like. And there's very interesting data showing that if you inject people with a signal of energetic stress — lactate — you can trigger a panic attack. You're not messing with the brain there. You're not doing something to neurochemistry. What you're doing is injecting the human body with a signal that the mitochondria can't keep up with energy flow. You're tricking the body into thinking that energy resistance has just been jacked up to very high levels. This feels like anxiety. And people with traumatic memories, like post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD — the simple injection of an energetic stress signal of lactate in the blood can reawaken traumatic memories.
So there's this emerging notion in psychiatry called metabolic psychiatry, where people understand mental illnesses as energetic disorders of the brain. And what I think is happening in those chronic states of ill-being — where people don't feel themselves, they don't feel well, the hypervigilance, the anxiety — it's quite likely at this point that part of that is driven by energy not flowing properly. And then the body just lives in high energy resistance all the time. And there's data directly measuring energy resistance in the brain from a group of McLean and Harvard researchers. Lactate tends to be elevated in people with mental illness. And this marker, GDF-15, also is elevated in mental illness.
And so the cure, or the thing to ease that, is all the lifestyle factors that we talked about. Purpose, and we've covered that ground. Life changes, changing your life circumstances — that's really hard to do. Exercising seems to help a lot of people, but a lot of people don't feel they have the capacity to exercise. And ketones seem to be life-saving for some people. Going on a ketogenic diet — I've met now dozens of individuals whose lives were crushed by schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and they were treatment-resistant, meaning the pharmacotherapy, the drugs that they were given, were not helping. In some cases, were making things worse with difficult side effects. And then they changed their diet, cutting all sugars, and they went on a ketogenic diet — medical ketogenic therapy — and then they started to monitor ketones. And many people reported that this was life-changing. The first thing that many people notice is they have more energy.
The ketogenic diet does not work for everyone. We don't know why. And the same way that we're all different, we all respond differently to even medications that are supposed to work the same for everyone. We have a science of averages. The science that we use to get knowledge, to inform our lives, is almost entirely a science of averages. All of the studies we do — the highest gold standard studies, we consider to be RCTs, randomised controlled trials. These RCTs — if you run an RCT, what you do is you take, let's say, a thousand people, then you randomise half into this group, normal diet, and then 500 into ketogenic diet. And then you say, "Great, now let's look at their depressive symptoms or their anxiety symptoms." And then you have them on the diet for two months, and after you assess and then you compare the groups. You lump 500 human beings together and you say, "What's the average depression or anxiety symptoms in these 500 people?" Then you average these people together and you compare means.
And I guess the other important point here is gender — so many of these studies were skewed towards men in many cases, and that doesn't apply to women a lot of the time. And this is part of the reason we've had so many conversations on this show about women's health — because we're just now discovering that once upon a time, scientists would treat women like little men and assume that everything just applied. But actually we're entirely different. So this averages thing — you also need to think about the nuances of gender, where they're from, their biology, their DNA. If we were doing an average of three people, maybe we'd come to a conclusion based on me and the other person who's like me, but that wouldn't apply to you. And that's really problematic. All of the health recommendations that we have, and the way drugs get approved, and the way we determine whether a drug is useful or not for disease X or Y, is by comparing groups.
ME/CFS, long COVID, and the broken energy budget
Steven Bartlett: The most commented thing across the videos you featured on — the most passionate, the most urgent thing, according to the people watching your work — was about long COVID, ME/CFS, and fibromyalgia. For patients with ME/CFS — and you'll have to explain to me what that is — or long COVID, the standard advice given is to exercise for mitochondrial health. But for them, it often triggers severe crashes. What is happening at the cellular level when the energy budget is broken? And how can these individuals safely rehabilitate their mitochondria without causing further damage?
Dr. Martin Picard: That's a really tough problem. In the US, there's an estimated three to five million people who have either myalgic encephalitis, chronic fatigue syndrome — ME/CFS — or long COVID version of this. In the UK, it's somewhere between two and three million, I think. And then worldwide, there are 20 to 24 million people with these syndromes.
Steven Bartlett: What are the symptoms for someone that hasn't experienced it?
Dr. Martin Picard: Chronic fatigue. Just always being sort of tired and low energy. You go to your doctor and say, "I feel so tired." And then you look in the blood work, everything's fine. But there's a disconnect between what we know how to measure biochemically and what the person is experiencing. We don't have a good understanding of the connection between the biology and the biochemistry in the blood and how people feel. So there's a disconnect here. And ME/CFS, chronic fatigue, long COVID — these people have been a little bit ostracised from the medical community because doctors are really stuck. They have these patients which are really difficult to deal with. First, they don't know what's wrong with them. And second, they don't have tools to help them get better. And then the classical thing is, "Well, exercise." But then many of these people, when they exercise, they actually get worse.
There are some studies that show increased inflammation — those signals of energy resistance, increased energy friction in the body — go up after exercise in a normal person. And in these people with chronic fatigue, it seems like they can skyrocket. And then that leads to this post-exertional malaise. We talked earlier about how the marker of energetic stress, GDF-15, can go to the brain and make you feel sick, or make you feel nauseous or tired. Other cytokines from the immune system, when you're sick, when you're fighting an infection, do the same thing.
The best study on mitochondria and chronic fatigue syndrome was published last year or the year before, and it showed that there is a deficiency in energy transformation in the mitochondria of the muscle. They took muscle biopsies — a little piece of muscle from the quad, from the thigh — and then they looked at how well can the mitochondria in the muscle of people with chronic fatigue syndrome flow energy. And what they found is the capacity is much lower. If the mitochondria can't flux energy properly, you should feel like you don't have the capacity to push, to exercise. So why is that? Why do those people have lower mitochondrial energy transformation capacity? We don't know.
I remember this family friend who came for dinner one night, and she was asking me what I work on. So I tell her we work on mitochondria and psychobiology — mitochondrial psychobiology, how the mind and the body relate energetically. And she said, "Well, I have an interesting story for you." I said, "Okay, what's the story?" She said, "I used to have chronic fatigue syndrome." So I perked up. She was visibly an energetic person. It didn't look like she had an issue with energy. So she said she was in her 20s and she was debilitated, she couldn't work, and her life was completely upside down because she didn't have energy to do anything — a common story. She was in bed multiple hours every day and struggling to go get groceries and everything was a drag about life. And then one summer, this guy from Hawaii — a friend of a friend — came over for the summer, just for a little trip, and they had an affair. She had a boyfriend. And this was a long time that she had had a human connection like this. What ended up happening is she said her chronic fatigue kind of lifted. And she didn't have to do anything. And then after that summer, she never had chronic fatigue again. And she reintegrated into normal life.
I don't know what the lesson is here. I don't know if there's a generalisable principle. But there are a lot of those stories where people end up in a really dark place in their life — and either they're diagnosed with a mental illness or with chronic fatigue syndrome or with some psychosomatic label or whatever — there's always kind of precipitating conditions. Sometimes it's in response to medical interventions like immunisation. Sometimes it's in response to an infection or a parasite. Very often there's a trigger. Sometimes a lingering condition and then sometimes an acute trigger, and the body's never able to fully recover.
Steven Bartlett: So what do we take from that story of a summer fling?
Dr. Martin Picard: I take from it hope. That even when the cards seem to be stacked against you and it feels like you might have to live with this thing for a long time, in many cases, miraculous things happen that defy the odds. And hope itself, I think, can keep us in an optimistic mindset. I've seen this in patients with mitochondrial diseases as well. These people are diagnosed with a genetically defined mitochondrial disease. Their mitochondria can't flow energy properly. So every day they live probably with this kind of discomfort of holding your breath for too long. And everything's difficult about life. Many of them lose hope. And when you see them losing hope, they start to go downhill physically. And many of them die very early.
The people who do the best — their mitochondria don't work the way they should, but they're able to find something that they love. They're able to find an expression for themselves. And they have supportive family — almost a universal theme for people who do well is they have a supportive environment. And cultivating this is so precious. And it brings us back maybe to social connections. You, energetic process. Me, energetic process. When we interact — through sounds and physically shaking hands, I feel your energy, I feel your excitement, you feel mine — and then we might vibe and resonate. And then maybe you find someone and you feel love for that person. I think love is the experience of resonance. And when you feel that with someone, it feels so special.
Optimal training for mitochondrial biogenesis
Steven Bartlett: On this point of exercise, which we talked about earlier — if someone wants to maximise mitochondrial biogenesis, what is the sweet spot for training? Is it strictly zone 2 cardio or high-intensity interval training or resistance training or something else? Is there an optimal type of training?
Dr. Martin Picard: I think the key principle here is anything that will make you breathe harder means that your mitochondria are working harder. But you don't want to do it too long if you're not trained. Like, I'm not trained now. I run for about 20 minutes every other day. That's my routine. That's what I have enough time to do. And I feel like it moves energy through my body in the right way. But if I go and try to run a marathon, I'm going to injure myself. So that would be too much for me. And so I think that comes back to the point of feeling into your energy — we call this mitoception, feeling into your mitochondria and what's sustainable. So I think there's an individualised stance that we need to take towards this.
Steven Bartlett: And the last question from the audience was: right now, mitochondrial health feels a bit invisible. Are there any accessible, reliable tests — like ATP blood tests or specific biomarkers — that a normal person can use to accurately measure their mitochondrial function?
Dr. Martin Picard: Working on it. So our team is working on it. We're building a platform, a technology platform that would allow people to tune into their mitochondria, to mitocept. So you feel your energy through your mitochondria, and then you can make better decisions. Ketogenic diet — is this helping you? Is this not helping you? This new relationship — is this sucking away your energy or is this giving you energy? This new job, this new direction in life. All of the important decisions we make, really we make with how we feel. You wake up in the morning and either you feel great and you can change things, or you wake up and you don't want to be here. That's an experience.
Before you get there, on the dark side, there's all of these decision points that we face, and the power of discernment. What we talked about with Steve Jobs — this is the way, and you feel strong about this. Discerning what's right for you, what's not right for you, what's the right direction, is it the right time or not — those are decisions we make with our guts. And there are many people who swear that this is the only way they make decisions. And if they make decisions rationally, that ends up biting them in the butt. Because I think this energetic system is the most sensitive instrument that we have to know whether the content of our lives is aligned with who we are as individuals. And that requires that we feel into this movement and into our sensations and into the experiences we have. So that's the barometer that really guides us through life, like a GPS — an energetic GPS.
Closing question: the most difficult thing you ever overcame
Steven Bartlett: Dr. Martin, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is: what is the most difficult thing you ever overcame and how did it make you the person you are today?
Dr. Martin Picard: I just felt my energy change. I saw it change. I felt like this sinking feeling. About a year ago, my fiancée and I were expecting a baby. We were about three months into the pregnancy and it was great. We were excited. We were calling this new life "new life." We talked affectionately about it. And she was in Canada, she came back. And that evening in bed, she had this crazy pain that started. And we were super scared. There was a bit of bleeding. And then the contractions started to come really fast — not supposed to happen at three months. And I was like, "Oh, maybe this is just a bump in the road and things are going to be fine." So we ended up having a miscarriage. And Nirosha didn't want to go to the hospital. So we did this at home. And it was terrible. It was really, really sad, really gut-wrenching. So we were both devastated when new life left us.
And then I had this moment of like, "Why me? Why the fuck has this happened to me? I think I'm a good person. I'm doing my best to bring good in the world. I try to be a good partner, a good leader. Why is this happening to me?" So this was like this victim mentality mindset. And I've learned through my 40 or so years that I think a useful stance to take in life is to assume that there's something to learn from everything you go through. I don't know this for sure. That's not a scientific fact. It's more of an experience turned into a way of living, more of a belief. So I was like, "But how could there be something to learn from something so terrible?"
And I had to sit with this. And two days later, after the baby had gone and Nirosha and I had sat in the shower and cried — and the smell was horrible, and just death, like death was around us — I felt angry and I felt sad. And I just sat down and wrote. And that's my way now of letting things flow. Different people have different ways. And I was writing about my experience and why now, and I asked: what is there to learn from this? And a very clear answer came up: slowing down.
And that hit really hard. Because throughout my whole life, I have moved pretty quickly through life. I had a very short PhD, then I became a professor very quickly and grew a team. And moving fast is kind of a personality trait that I have. And I think sometimes it's served me. It's allowed me to do some things that would not have been possible otherwise. But at other times, I think it's hurt me. And it's like this drive, this inner drive of "things must happen now, must move fast." I think it's hurt other people around me and has impaired my ability to be an effective leader, because then maybe I lack sensitivity to other people who don't move at my pace.
So slowing down really kind of hit home. Things were like clear. It was like looking at a canvas and there was more contrast. The things that really mattered were sharper. All of this other stuff — these obligations and these things that I had said yes to — the contrast was so much sharper. This lesson, I took this as a lesson. Slowing down, I think, has allowed me to be a better listener, to be a better, more compassionate father and scientist. I think it's changed me. And I don't know that I would have learned that lesson in another way.
We are this energetic process that's shaped by the sum of our experiences and the people we meet. I'll never be the same after today from having sat with you at this table and you opening the door, not just to scientific inquiry, but to human experience.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, we change all the time. We transform. And what shapes us is those kind of energetic interactions and everything we go through. Well, I'll never be the same either, for all the best reasons. I have to say that I'm hesitating my words here because of the gratitude — but I'm terribly sorry that you had to go through that. I can only imagine. It's honestly one of my worst nightmares, especially at the season of life I'm in when me and my fiancée are trying to have a kid. I'm pre-empting how I would handle those kinds of things. So to hear that it happened to you is really difficult to hear.
Dr. Martin Picard: It happens to about 20 million people a year. Most people don't talk about it. Because it's shrouded in mixed emotions.
Steven Bartlett: But I am better off for having this conversation with you. And I think I speak on behalf of my audience for sure this time when I say that I think my audience are as well. I've learned so much. It's actually completely rechanged how I think about life itself, which is a weird thing. And I hope I can just sit in this moment a little bit and think about how I am energy and how that's determining everything around me and others. It's really, really wonderful. I think what you're doing — people might think of you as like a mitochondrial scientist, but actually it's much more deeper and much more philosophical than that. When we think about what energy is to us, it is everything. And that's really the lens that you've given me today. You've completely changed my mind on how I think about life, which is such a wonderful thing to get from a podcast. It's also changed how I think about business, which is really weird and unexpected.
Dr. Martin Picard: Business is an extension of us. Everything is. This is what I've learned today.
Steven Bartlett: Quite literally. And it's also made me think a lot about how I preserve, conserve, and aim my energy. So Dr. Martin Picard, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your generosity and your wisdom. It's not very often that I have conversations that actually instantly cause a shift in me, but this is one of them today. If people want to learn more about you and the work you're doing, where do they go?
Dr. Martin Picard: The best place for people to go is the website martinpicard.energy. And from this website, you'll see information about the book, you'll see information about the research, core energetic principles that cover what we've covered today. There are little animations, and there's information about the Institute.
Steven Bartlett: Thank you so much.
Dr. Martin Picard: Thank you.