YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Martin Picard

lines on the record: 185
first: 2026-07-02
most recent: 2026-07-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In order to have an idea and to be conscious of that idea, you need to burn energy. So the brain kind of burning less energy in later stages kind of reflect this lack of function. It's difficult to remember old memories. It's remembered, it's difficult to make associations. It becomes difficult to plan in the future and to regulate your emotions and a lot of people with dementia end up having kind of mood issues and become really depressed”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leads to the secretion of a little proteins we call cytokines. And then it's basically those cells saying something's wrong. We need to fix this. So that costs energy. So you have those cells that get activated, the secrete those proteins to say, please help. We need to re-establish homeostasis. We need to re-establish normal healthy balance. But that process of re-establishing of healing costs energy. Just like when you post exercise your muscle invests energy to become stronger. So in that kind of early phase hyper metabolism is when you spend more energy hyper function, some people have called it. And then eventually it seems like those brain regions get tired out and then they become hypo metabolic. So they burn less energy. If you look at the brain of someone with Alzheimer's, there are these regions that are that burn less energy. And energy is so central to everything, including cognition.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hypometabolic. Yes, this is hyper metabolic is kind of this energy distraction you were talking about. Like there's more energy being burned here. Normal metabolic is, you know, you use 100 units of energy for the brain and this made. Let's say this brain region, 100 units of energy is what this brain region needs to just sustain normal healthy functions. If there's a problem with the mitochondria or if there's a problem with the cell communicating, with the synapses, right? Cells talk to each other through these things called synapses. 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 is inflammation. Neuroinflammation. That basically means there are some cells in the brain that are trying to heal the brain. And part of that healing process is kind of a stress response locally. And then that stress response.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And then over time, those brain regions become hypometabolic. And then that's when you start to have symptoms.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So those extremes really tell us this hypothesis, this amyloidenoprotein aggregates in the brain as a driver of dementia and neurodegeneration is not correct. What we know happens energetically in the brain is that initially in the early stages of Alzheimer's, there's kind of an increase in energy demand in their specific brain regions that tend to be more affected in some people, not all people tend to have those protein deposits. Those regions start to burn more energy. This is early phase, right? And then at this point, probably this is the brain trying to cope. It's like something's not working great, but it's working harder”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been long believed that the plaque, right, that you've heard about MLOED plaques and tau tangles and there's kind of this idea that the brain accumulates proteins and it's those proteins that cause Alzheimer's. I think that's what most people have heard and what most people believe because it came from whitecoat wearing scientists and university professors. That is not the truth. And what is more true, and let me just say why it's not the truth, you can have people in their 60s, in their 70s, in their 80s, zero protein deposits in the brain. We can image this now pretty well with neuroimaging. You can have people zero protein deposit in the brain, and they have full-blown Alzheimer's and dementia. And you have the other extreme people with loads of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, completely normal cognition.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immune system won't be there clearing the cancer cells, for example. And the repair processes that happen all the time in the brain, right? Clearing out proteins that you don't need, repairing that DNA that's gotten damaged, making you mitochondria, all of these processes happen every day. Every day you go to a little phase of getting rid of the things that don't work too well to make more of the things that work well, like mitochondria, quality control it's called, right? So there's this quality control cycle, old mitochondria that don't work too well anymore, they get degraded. It's called mitophagy. Autophagy is self-eating. Mitophagy is self-eating of the mitochondria. So when a cell, for example, is hungry, if you pull energy away from the cell, the cell goes into a mode like, oh shit, I might run out of energy. I need to be really...”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why you feel like shit when you're fighting a flu, for example, your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa, virus, like COVID or any seasonal flu virus. The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then the immune system steals energy away from the brain, from your mind. And then you feel like, oh, everything is so difficult. You just want to be in bed over covers. You feel cold, which is strategy to basically save energy. So all of what's called sickness behavior, right? All of those features of your behavior, you become asocial, right? Your skin is more sensitive, so you avoid moving. It's like all of those features can be understood as energy conservation strategies, stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increase, the cost of living. And then because there's a cap on your energy.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pathogens, right? There's no sanitation. They walk barefoot. They eat stuff that's not clean. They have more pathogens in their gut, right? There's more virus, bacteria, and parasites. It costs energy to fight those things off.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gave them a bunch of alcohol. They're effectively drunk. And then they measured, how much energy are they burning? And you can do those kind of studies. We've done those studies in the lab in a small room. You put a human being, and then you just measure how much energy does it cost for them to stay alive, right? And you ask them to not do too much in this smaller room, they're just sitting down reading a book. And then you can ask them, okay, now drink this alcohol. And then you measure. You look, you're minute by minute. They drink the alcohol and then you start to see, ooh, it climbs up. So the alcohol, even though you feel relaxed, inside under the hood, the body's like burning energy to get rid of the alcohol. And other toxins probably work the same way, you know, pesticides or kind of the things we eat that we shouldn't be eating. The reason why those things might be bad for health, maybe because they steal energy away from a growing body, for example. There's good data in South America. Children who are exposed to more.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great question. Alcohol. What we know about alcohol is that, as we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology. So if you put something in the body that shouldn't be there, effectively a toxin, like ethanol, which is what's in there, it's going to cost energy to get rid of it. So there are detoxification systems in your liver primarily that takes alcohol, breaks down the molecule, and then you can pee it out, right? Or metabolize it for energy even. So there's a bunch of energy in ethanol, but when you take alcohol, it doesn't give you more energy. If anything, the next day you feel like shit. Because what happens is you waste energy degrading the alcohol, right? And even though it's a net plus, you're putting calories in the machine and the body. But what ends up happening is you burn energy getting rid of it. So there's a cool study where they brought people in.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You spent an hour in the gym telling the body this is what we're going to do in the future. And then the body's like, okay, I'm going to get ready. If there's a fixed energy budget, the only way really to get ready for this is to become more efficient. So by having more mitochondria, by having a more fluid and kind of flexible cardiovascular system, and by putting in place all of these changes, decreasing inflammation, right? All of these things make more energy available. It decreases the energetic cost of doing the activity. And then there's more energy available for anti-aging growth, maintenance, and repair vitality. So I suspect that's why you burn more energy when you exercise, but you feel like you have more. And you don't actually have more. The feeling that you have more energy is simply energy is flowing more smoothly through this thing.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During the exercise, but then when you recover, now the body's like, next time this happens, I'm going to be ready. And the process of getting ready to go through a high resistance gym session is that you make more mitochondria, right? Your muscles get bigger and stronger and your heart becomes more efficient and your arteries become softer and you develop the confidence that you can do this well. And then it becomes rewarding. It becomes enjoyable. So all of these things, now that you're off the gym session,”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems like there's a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising. Because when you exercise again, you're increasing energy resistance, uncomfortable, potentially you're damaging things, right? Because you're increasing what we call dissipative losses, oxidative stress and all sorts of things happen during the”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The proper allocation of energy. So, if you don't waste energy stressing out about the future and the past, and you can spend more time in the moment not being overly reactive to things, which is kind of a lifelong effort, then more of that precious energy can go towards anti-aging.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I need to make sure we can put food on the table next week, right? So this hierarchy of human needs, I think, aligns with hierarchy of energy needs in the body. And as far as the importance of hair color goes, it's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to be less efficient, right? They're mitochondria working a little less efficiently and then there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy and there's More worries about professional obligations, and all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there. We call them growth, maintenance, and repair. These are like the anti-aging processes in the body. And those need energy, but they're not as important as facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening now.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that works similarly to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow said for a human being to be fully realized, first, you need to have safety and food and shelter secured, right? Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people, right? Loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like become really good at something. And then once you have this covered, now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality, what do you call self-actualization and kind of becoming your best self-flourishing? So he saw this very much as this needs to be covered. And when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life, the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid. Your meditation practice or long-term type, like I'm going to be a better person.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the follicle. So there's a finite energy budget. And then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places, like a business, right? You have this budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here, right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young, right? So there's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. You know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs?”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sedentary couch potato, right? To training for a marathon. You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the rise in resistance. Like, I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy. And then Adapting for this for the next time. And the next time I'm going to be ready, let's make more mitochondria. So that's probably where the benefits of exercise come from this spike and why stress is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with less resistance.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your sprint, but you don't have a lot of mitochondria, right? It's going to feel terrible. And then because the resistance creeps up and then your muscle becomes really hot and then eventually there's inflammation and then it burns and then it's uncomfortable. But then so that's an acute bout of energy resistance. What happens with exercises once you recover the benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise they happen after during the recovery. So if you recover, now the muscles are relaxing and you're resting. Eventually you go for sleep. During the decrease in resistance, now the cell says next time this happens, I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it. So I need, I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that's what happens if you go from being a”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance. So the energy is trying to flow through the muscle, and then there's, you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria, and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training. Now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. So that imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now, the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body? And if it flows with not enough resistance,”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you can kind of interrupt this. And people who study contemplative practices and meditation and mindfulness approaches, I think many of them think this is kind of the key. The awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. So if you feel into your bodily's responses, you become free of do I mount a response. Is that needed now or not?”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Right, way to think about it. Don't open the laptop or like get a little Yeah, or learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to feel and sit with, be aware of that reaction. Because the key solution to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. So it's not the stress that burns us down. It's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. And for your heart to be a little faster, if you mount a response to that email, right, you're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your shoulder. That's burning energy. Now your brain is going into rumination mode and then this thing and then it makes you think about your childhood and this and then the anxiety and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then if something changes in the body, you go on a vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair, now it can be reversed, right? Because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray again. And then if you're way, way down, like this hair turned gray 10 years ago and you go back up, you're too far away from threshold to regain color. So it suggested some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for something as binary as hair color. It's black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems like, and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen now for this hair, and then be reversible, but we know it very well. If you have a full head of gray hair and you're 70 years old, you're not going to regain your color. There seems to be what the model, the mathematical model suggested, is that there's a window of opportunity where a hair slowly accumulates damage, becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient. So there's more and more energy resistance. And then there's a barrier. And then when the hair hits that threshold, now it loses color.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. She said these were the most stressful two months of my life.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happened to her life, she said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies and then broke up with her boyfriend.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most stressful thing that ever happened to you, no stress at all. 10 and zero. And then the x axis, the horizontal was. Time. Yes. On the far right is now, right? This is now. This is a year ago. And then we labeled all the months. And then we ask people and we ask this lady, put a dot on the graph. That was the most stressful time in the past year. But anyone can do the exercise past year, most stressful time Okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot, right, and March number 10. And then least stressful part, zero. And then put other meaningful things that happen that we're challenging. So people put dots along the this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For two centimeters, and then boom, completely regain color. Actually, it regained, it was darker here than it used to be, right? And then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received in the mail as we were starting to collect two colored hairs. And then when we saw this, we had found from a few different people white hairs that had regained color. We'd never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark, right? So I remember holding this hair. I was like, oh my God, this is in the same hair. This was incontrovertible evidence that grain of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty, pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week. And so this white hair, completely white, regained color in just about a week. So then we developed an instrument which was a simple sheet on the y-axis, the vertical is.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are two graphs here. The top one is the color of the hair, of a single hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here, this is called a hair pigmentation pattern, the HPP that we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively, bring science to hair graying and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark, and then it became white.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know about you, but sells in a dish. So the beauty about like... Bodies and with the mind and this complex organism, they're buffering systems, right? So I don't think your energy expenditure increases by 60% if you're stressed out, but it increases somewhat.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure at the cost of life by 60%.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing you didn't do or the mistake you made at work, or that conversation that went sideways with your partner, how much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be engaging your stress system, to be releasing cortisol? So two students and a lot, Gabriel and Natalia did that experiment. You put cells in a dish, you give them the equivalent of cortisol, how much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare, there's nothing damaging. To the cortisol itself, but the cortisol is a signal that there might be something dangerous outside, right? That's like when you're sitting down, you get an email, you're like, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract. And then you have this whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost?”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It looks like stress hormones can make a cell struggle, for example. Cortisol, yes, if you're a cell, right? And your perspective on the world is pretty simple. You don't have the senses that we enjoy. But you do nevertheless sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal, it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous. You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight or there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolve to interpret cortisol in that way. So we did an experiment in the dish we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future or how much energy does it cost to ruminate about yesterday.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When cells become old, instead of just dying, right, they struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly, or for some reason they accumulate damage, you become old, the cell struggles to make more mitochondria. And it tries to kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, same physical activity, same everything, why some hairs are like this or like that was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. And what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair, I thought there's going to be less color, right, obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria. And there was an upregulation.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pubic hairs that showed the signature, the hair was dark, and then it became white, or the hair was white, and it became dark again. So we had physical evidence from like multiple people that showed white hairs can go back to being dark. And this contradicted this idea that aging is this linear progressive process that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility. I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up finding five hairs that had this pattern. And when we looked at when the reversal happened, we found that the reversal happened when I went on vacation. And I would go back in those days on annual cycling training camps. So I would go for a week where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep. Energy started to move very differently in my body during that time. And then when we looked at the hair and we analyzed the composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do, you can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment. It's all the same genome, right?”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head, that the tip was dark, right? And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white, right? And you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old, right? It lost color. Hair growing is a classic hallmark of aging. Then we thought, then you would know something, that something was happening in this hair follicle, in this person's body, right, that made this young hair become old. And then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process. So this became kind of an interesting scenario. And through doing this, we found people started to send us hair samples in Ziploc bags, you know, over the mail. And we were looking for two colored hairs, a single hair that has two colors kind of like this. And we found hairs that head hair, beard hair.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you take a tree and you cut it in cross section, you see the rings, and then you can say, ooh, this ring was 30 years ago, right? And this ring is today. So you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a drug, for example, like a month ago or six months ago or two years ago, depending how long the hair is, you can actually use the hair and all along would be the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in the hair here, but not here. So if you have marijuana six months ago, it's going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around with that trace, that physical trace in your body.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what we discovered is that Hare Grang is reversible. And that was surprising because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age, it's kind of this linear progressive decline and there's kind of nothing you can do about it. But it turns out that if you look on most people's head, you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were white and then all the hairs are dark. And if you take a hair like this, the tip here, right, was inside the body a long time ago. This is almost like if you look at tree rings.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, or things get damaged, right? The clear connection here is too much energy, increased energy resistance. So then the electrons that normally flow smoothly in your metabolism, right, from the food to your mitochondria. Then that whole circuit becomes more resistive. And if you're an electron and you're trying to go through the”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what de energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this. And in a simple electrical system circuit, if you jacked up, you know, the voltage and the system is too weak to take this, then resistance goes through the roof. The transistors start to melt, and then the system gets damaged. The same thing happens in the body. If you overload the system with too much energy, too many electrons, right? Very direct parallel with the electrical circuit. They're electrons stuck here on these low glucose molecules. If you ingest this, now it increases the voltage in the body.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a normal cell. Is driven its behavior. It's driven by the mitochondria. It's like mitochondria are in the driver's seat Mitochondria can basically call the shots. Is the cell to live and divide? Or is the cell to contract and remain this kind of cell? Or if it's a stem cell, is it to divide or remain a stem cell? Or is it to die? And cells have to make these decisions all the time. And cell suicide for the greater good is something that happens all the time in their bodies. And that's why and how we get rid of most cancer cells, right? As far as we understand, you have a cell that kind of defects from the social collective and then the organism has the wisdom to say, okay, this is no longer ours. Let's get rid of it, right? Because it could become cancer. And most of the time that works well. But what cancer cells can do is say, okay, they ditch their mitochondria and then they start to use them for their own growth. And by ditching their mitochondria, they basically immunize themselves against the death that mitochondria could trigger. So mitochondria have a veto on cell life or”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The science behind connecting metabolism and cancer shows that obesity and high blood glucose and diabetes especially, which causes very high excursion, very high spikes in blood glucose, those things are damaging to our cells. And what the energy resistance principle says is that biology processes energy in terms of resistance. And it makes that kind of computation. How much energy is flowing now and then how much energy demand and how much energy pressure am I exposed to? And if there's an imbalance, then that causes damage.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's clear that in cigarette smoke, there are carcinogens. There are molecules that can damage the genome and cause mutations. There's a strong link between lung cancer and smoking. But for all of the other cancers, there's much less of a clear connection between exposure and cancer. The cancers that affect and kill most people, we don't really know why they come, when they come. And it's clear that there's kind of a long history.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, something goes wrong, something can break. So the resistance is if you push a lot of energy into a very small container or into a channel that can support that, then what happens kind of physically is an increase in the resistance to the flow. And then that can lead to the cell trying to protect itself. That's what insulin resistance is in diabetes, right? Insulin resistance is a protection mechanism. There's too much glucose being pushed onto the cell, right? And so that causes this excess energy coming in. The cell says, you know, too much and it damages the mitochondria, this excess resistance because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High blood gl Right? Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that? I don't think they're a good explanations out there based on like the molecular framework of disease and the genetic mutation perspective. If you look at cancer from an energetic perspective, it's, I think, likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure, right? There's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells, onto 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.”
2026-07-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Why You’re Tired: How Stress Drains Your Cells - Dr. Martin Picard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT