Understanding the Behaviour of Mitochondria Martin Picard #565

Bulletproof Radio.

A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that it turns out that it's not just your mom who passes along mitochondrial DNA. If you read my book Headstrong, about mitochondria and how to turn on your brain, you. You learned what we all commonly believe, that mitochondria comes from mom. Well, in some cases, you might have your dad's mitochondria. They're just not that common. So leave it to dads to break the rules in textbooks. It turns out fathers in three unrelated families have been documented to pass their mitochondria, those tiny little things we like to call energy factories found in cells, onto their children. And if you're familiar with lots of the stuff I talk about, mitochondria do a lot more than make energy. They're actually the frontline environmental sensors. And as you're going to hear about in today's interview, they do more than that when it comes to interacting with your brain. But scientists have long thought that kids just always got mitochondria exclusively from mothers, because mitochondria and sperm get destroyed during the fertilization of the egg. This happened because a mitochondrial disease researcher said, wait, how is this possible that we could have paternal DNA in a woman? And after they did a bunch of work on this stuff, they figured out that that women's cells had some mitochondrial from mom and some from her dad. And they looked at the woman's brother who also had that thing, and they said, this can't be. So they asked a bunch of other researchers and they found 17 people in the three families who had 24 to 76% of the mitochondria from their fathers. And the net net of all this for you is that if you wanted to blame everything on your mother, you can't anymore until you've done your mitochondrial DNA testing. All right. On that news, speaking of blaming things on your mother, you should check out Game Changers, my new book, if you haven't already. It just passed 105 star reviews on Amazon, hit the USA Today bestseller list, and people on social media are really Talking about those 46 laws for people who want to perform better. Some of which are mitochondrial laws, but many of which have to do with how you think, your stress, and how you respond to the way you're raised. Basically, it's the rule book based on what hundreds of game changers have done, how they prioritize things so that you can prioritize what you work on first in the right way. And what you're going to learn in today's interview is awesome because you're going to find out that your mitochondria have a much heavier role to play in a lot of the things that you think are about the thoughts in your head, the voice in your head. My supposition has always been that the mitochondria are the evil little puppet masters behind your ego. And I think we're getting a little bit closer to saying maybe that theory is true. We'll find out in today's interview, which is going to be amazing. It's going to be amazing because I'm a mitochondrial nerd. You might call me a mitochondriac. We had teachers like that at the Bulletproof conference a few years ago. And today's expert who's on the show is a guy I've actually wanted to interview for a long time because he's written some papers that I read on pubmed that got me really, really excited. And, yeah, you don't hear that a lot from people who aren't total nerds, but his name is Martin Picard. I already asked him. He's no relation to Jean Luc. And he's an assistant professor of behavioral medicine in psychiatry and neurology at Columbia University. And for the last 10 years, he's been studying mitochondria and worked with leading experts. I mean, the godfathers of mitochondria, godmothers do you call them anyway, of mitochondrial research. And in 2015 at Columbia, he established the mitochondrial signaling laboratory. And they're figuring out how mind body interactions work, including these unusual novel principles that underlie your mitochondrial response to stress, how you maintain your health, and how subtle mitochondrial defects can affect your cells and even your aging. If you want to know exactly what's going on inside that biology of yours so that you can have better control of it, you better be paying attention to mitochondria. And here's a guy who's paid more attention to those little bastards than anyone else I know. Martin, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's really a pleasure to be here.

All right, I got to ask you. Has anyone ever called mitochondria little bastards in your experience before?

No, I don't think so. I think that's the first time I hear that.

All right, I want to know, Martin, how the heck did you get so interested in mitochondria, of all the things you. You could have done?

I was an undergrad student in physiology and at McGill University in Montreal. And I really was hoping to understand, you know, why is it that some people just stay healthy for a very long time and some other people just tend to get sick all the time? And. And I knew, I guess, maybe from personal experience, and my mom is a nurse, it seemed to matter how people felt, and that would influence their health and some physiological functions. We all have experience about feeling not so good and then being more vulnerable to getting a cold. And there's actually really good research on that.

So when you feel stressed or anxious, you're more likely to get sick.

Correct.

Okay, good deal. And you wanted to figure out what the heck is going on there, why?

Yes. So as I was a physiology student, I thought, you know, surely I'm going to learn about these things. You know, psycho neuroendocrinology, you know, how the psychological factors affect the hormones and affect the body. And as I was a student, the fashion at this time, at that time was, you know, cellular physiology. So I learned all about the molecules and about different parts of the cells and genes, and there was nothing about the psycho part of it, you know, the psychology. Psychology. So I thought that was a little disappointing. And then towards the end of my degree, I was looking for ways to learn about these things. And then I studied integrative medicine, and then eventually landed on this professor in graduate school who was a mitochondrial expert. She had just been recruited to McGill University. Her name is Tanya Taivasala, and she studied mitochondrial disease. And then she said, oh, why don't you come, you know, work with me? And I was always attracted to mitochondria because, you know, you heard about them as the powerhouse of the cell, and I kind of felt like there might be more to it and it'd be a useful track to follow. So I was, you know, attracted to mitochondria initially, kind of with kind of a visceral feeling. And then there was this opportunity to work with an expert.

Wait, wait. Don't visceral feelings come from mitochondria?

They might. They might. I don't think we know that for sure, but they might. Yes.

Well, I'm going to argue that we do know that for sure, just based on reductive logic, because, well, where do the electrons that drive the feelings come from? They're produced by mitochondria, right?

Correct.

So if. If you go down to the electric, the electron itself, those visceral feelings had to come from a mitochondria.

Yes. I mean, that's. That's going deep very quickly. But indeed, you know, you could argue the reason we are alive and the reason we breathe is because of energy flow in the body, right?

Yes.

If you think about the fundamental difference between a living organism, a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person, and a cadaver, a dead body is the main difference is the flow of information. You know, the molecular components of the body are exactly the same. But in the living, thinking, feeling, conscious person, these are, these molecules are animated by the flow of energy. And a big part of that is, you know, going through mitochondria. And if you want to convince yourself how important the flow of energy is to consciousness, you just, you know, block your, you know, the carotid arteries and your neck, that goes to the brain. Then if you interrupt oxygen flow to mitochondria in the brain within, I don't know, 15 seconds, 10, 15 seconds, then you're out, consciousness is gone. So I think that tells us. It's kind of a loose argument, but it tells us something very profound, I think, about the link between energy, consciousness and our experiences and how we experience the world.

What makes sense now is you mentioned that you'd studied integrative medicine or functional medicine as a part of your path. And a lot of times when people are doing more university focused research and they haven't studied some of the holistic side of things, you're not going to have the view that you do because you did a paper with Dr. Epel, who's been on the show, Elissa Epel. We talked about stress and telomere lengthening, one of the things that makes you old. So you've done work on aging and you're doing work on these feelings and emotions and how they come together and looking at it from a single root cause, which is unusual in my experience with academia, you tend to focus on kind of one stack. And so to say I'm looking at this, but you're looking at one cause that may be filtering out into many different things. Did you grow up with weird parents or something that made you multidisciplinary like that?

I think my mom was definitely inclined to, to think outside the biomedical box.

Okay.

Having training as a nurse and having, you know, direct personal experience with, with patients, and so maybe that was part of it. I tend to, you know, credit my mom for, for a lot of things and maybe, maybe that's one of it.

Including your mitochondria.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sorry. Just for people listening, I'm going to keep making mother mitochondrial jokes all episode long and you're just gonna have to deal with. Okay, keep going.

What Was the question again?

Yeah, I was just wondering, why do you have this lab? And you're looking at aging, you're looking at stress, you're looking at emotions, and you're looking at mitochondria. And this is out of the norm for the last, well, I'm going to call it 200 years of academia. Until you go back to the natural scientists, natural philosophers before that, where they had spiritual and emotion and a very, very bad chemistry all mixed together, but it's been separated out for at least 100 years. And here you are talking about emotions and subcellular components in the same sentence. You talk about aging, which hasn't been done before. And that's actually, dare I say, game changing. And I don't know what made you the guy to do that.

I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. But I think what we've become really good at as a scientific community and maybe as a population is reductionism. And we've developed all sorts of disciplines and all sorts of scientific tools and machines in the lab which basically aim to break down very complex things into very small pieces that we can understand and grasp and make ourselves believe that we understand how they work. So that's the beauty of reductionism. We can take really complex things and then think, yes, this is how it works. This little piece A leads to piece B, and then that leads to C, and then that leads to D, and then somehow that's part of this bigger, complex experience. So I think we're really good at reductionism, and it has served us really well. If you look at the engineering feats that are happening now, and we can go to space and we can make electric cars, and we're maybe on the verge of becoming a lot more sustainable as a society. Those are all, I think, products. And all of the medical advances and treatments that are available, they're products in large part of our reductionist approach to science.

Yeah, no doubt that works. And anyone who says reductionism isn't useful is not paying attention.

Correct.

But it. But it does take something out. That's what reduction is.

Yes, exactly.

But you're adding something back in which is unusual.

Yes, Well, I think what my lab focuses on and what I see, you know, I think everyone in this world can make a contribution in some way. I hope that what maybe our lab's contribution can be is to integrate things back together. So we still use the tools of reductionism to understand different parts of the mitochondria and, you know, how they use the food that we eat. The oxygen we breathe in and, you know, transform that into energy and then generate specific signals. But we try to see this in the context of the whole person. So that's what we try to do. And I think having trained in integrative medicine, you know, might have helped. And I was. During my undergrad, I was also part of a systems biology training program, of course, computational systems biology, integrative mathematical approaches. And then at the same time, I was part of a training program in psychosocial oncology to try to understand the psychological and the social aspects of cancer. So I guess all of these things together, it's like when you're raised in sensitive periods of development, things can have a big influence. And maybe all of these things had an influence and now have convinced me that really where things are at is in integration. So we try to integrate the subcellular organelle, mitochondria being organelle level, with cellular level, and then the whole person and then the person within the environment. In its context, I think it's really a movement towards integration that's the driving force.

You're one of the leading voices, you and Alyssa and Doug Wallace, another major researcher, who I think you studied with. These are people. If you're listening to the show, you've probably never heard of any of these people, unless we have a good number of academic researchers and medical professionals who listen to the show who might have heard of them. But these are the people who are breaking beliefs left and right where we just didn't understand how important this one part of the cell was. In my own life, having weighed 300 pounds, having had what we'll say, having had no ability to measure my mitochondrial function when I was 16, when I had arthritis in my knees and all this obesity and all other than just to look and say, well, that guy's mitochondrial seems to be making an awful lot of inflammation, which means they're not making an awful lot of energy. That's called muffin top, in case you're wondering. But that whole thing. So I looked that way, and I could even draw causation from environmental toxins that lower mitochondrial function and things like that. But I don't have data because no one had data back then. However, everything that I've ever done that made me kick more ass at everything I do, basically makes my mitochondria either stronger or more efficient. And that's the body of work most of biohacking is around, making those little bastards happier and faster, which makes you happier and faster. And that's why, in my model of the world. There's a very clear line between mitochondria and the way you show up for your kids or your next meeting. And that's why I'm so excited, both for this interview and just to share on Bulletproof Radio. This is the stuff that changes your life fastest. I'll get off my soapbox and ask you an actual question, Dave.

Actually, you mentioned Doug Wallace, and I'd like to take a moment to just say how important Doug was for the field in my development, but mainly for the field. I remember when I was a grad student and I was starting to learn about mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA because it's the other part of the cell, other than the nucleus, to have its own DNA. And we can talk about evolution and where mitochondria come from and how they made us complex multicellular life possible for a long time. But Doug was really a pioneer in first identifying the maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA. And you kind of address something at the onset that contradicts this, but for.

The most part, he's still right. The fact that there's a few corner cases. No, they come from your mom. Let's just be really clear. And Doug figured that out.

Yes. And he did so many. So much for the. For the field. And I remember as a grad student, I was reading this. You know, I was on PubMed looking for articles that were relevant to what I was doing. And then I see this paper from Doug Wallace. It was mitochondria as qi qi chi this, you know, Eastern. He's right. Yeah. Traditional Chinese medicine concept. I was like, wow, yes. You know, this is it. I need to do my postdoctoral training with this person. So that's actually what made me write an email to Doug Wallace and say, can I. Can I train with you? And, yeah, he's a visionary.

How have you changed your life in the last 10 years? Because you know more than the average human by orders of magnitude, about mitochondria. So given that you know more than I do, do you wake up every morning and, like, do a mitochondrial meditation? Do you drink a mitochondrial soup? I mean, like, what has changed for you, given what you know? Because I know for you, you have what you can publish in academia because, you know, but I want to know you're going to lay the odds for yourself. I don't know what you're doing that you haven't published. That's for you.

I definitely, you know, from this stuff we've discovered in the lab, and, you know, it makes a really big impression to Me to see mitochondria, yeah, because they're so beautiful and we do a lot of microscopy work. So you actually see them move about in the cell. You know, they, if you ask Google, what do mitochondria look like, you know, Google images, you get these pictures of bean shaped little things or peanut shaped or, you know, whatever you, your favorite shape is. But if you actually look in a living cell, they're so beautiful and they move around and they can actually fuse with one another. It's called mitochondrial fusion. And the long ones can actually fragment into small pieces. That's called mitochondrial fission. And seeing this and also just the inside of mitochondria on the electron microscope, this is just something I love. And it makes an impression on me and reminds me how, how beautiful biology is, but that, you know, these are important little creatures to nourish. And we're finding out how do we nourish them. And I think you know quite a bit about that. We know moving, being physically active is probably the best thing you can do for your mitochondria. And being inactive for a very long time is not so good. So I try to, I try to live by that and be active. Eating too much, it's probably the second worst thing you can do for your mitochondria. And if you have the choice to be hungry or to be overfed, you should aim on the hungrier side. A lot of studies have shown this.

So do you do intermittent fasting?

I have tried it, yes. And I don't do it as a regular thing, but I'm very mindful of not overeating because it saturates the mitochondria and for some reason it makes them fragment and probably not talk to each other so much.

It probably also matters what you're overeating. A bowl of french fries versus a bowl of salad is probably going to have a different effect on fragmentation, but no one knows yet.

We know a lot of sugar is probably the worst thing that affects the mitochondria.

How about alcohol? What does that do to mitochondria?

That's a great question. I don't know. Actually. There's some work being done by Yuri Hanjasky at Thomas Jefferson on this topic. It definitely affects them, but I don't.

Know in what way, because we know they can burn alcohol. In fact, they'll preferentially burn it to help get it out of the system as a fuel source right before they'll even burn sugar. But it doesn't mean it does good things to them when they Burn it. And we know the aldehyde spike and the rest of the body and the liver and in the gut is pretty bad for you. But I don't know the research either, so I'll have to follow up on that. Maybe that's another interview I could do.

Yeah.

All right, so sugar's bad. Okay, so for you, you don't overeat. You make sure you move. By the way, I also agree with you on the movement. And I've got The couple papers. 20 minutes a day of walking is kind of the minute I'm necessary. But I'm lazy, so I stand on a whole body vibration platform called the bulletproof vibe. Vibrates 30 times a second, which is a frequency that they know causes regeneration. These are for astronauts to recover. So if I stand that for five minutes, maybe 10, sometimes while I'm on the phone or something, I kind of like to look at when you're culturing cells and you have those little things that are keeping the cells moving, I'm just going to shake all my mitochondria a lot really fast and kind of get it done for the day. I have no idea if that actually works for mitochondria, but I feel better, I look better, and I have less muffin top when I'm done. All right, so movement, food. Okay, those two are obvious. What else are you doing?

Well, something we're beginning to find is that how you feel might influence your mitochondria. And that taps into this area that's developing called mitochondrial psychobiology that's connecting the psychological part of who we are. We do feel things, we do think about things that affect us, and then the biology, those biological molecular, cellular processes that are happening at the cellular level. What we don't know a lot about is how those two things are connected. And the hypothesis that we're exploring with some of our colleagues is that mitochondria is that interface between the psyche and the soma, the mind and the body. We've had some results, a paper that was published earlier in 2018, showing that how people feel a few days before you take blood to measure mitochondrial functional capacity or mitochondrial health, is actually correlated. So if people feel better, it looks like their mitochondria have a greater ability to make energy the day after. But if mitochondria better mitochondrial function doesn't predict how people feel in that study. So it actually is the first evidence that mood and psychological states might influence the mitochondria in that direction. Not that the other direction isn't happening, but that study showed quite convincingly that there might be a link from the mind to the mitochondria. So I try to do things that make me feel good. I try to focus on projects and hang out with people who. Who stimulate, who are stimulating. And I don't know if that really does something to my mitochondria, but it keeps me motivated and inspired and I think that's important.

It's funny in Game Changers, my last book, and yes, I'm plugging the book. If you haven't bought the book and you're listening to the show, come on, it's going to save you a lot of time to read the book. But one of the big three things that hundreds of people like you who've done really big work in their field that they do is what you just said. They find a way to be happy, which causes their performance to improve, rather than the other way around. It's, oh, I achieved, therefore I'm happy. I was happy, therefore I achieved. And achievement, as we've already established, well, it's driven by energy that has to come from somewhere. Eventually it comes from your mitochondria or maybe from sunlight, if you're a plant now.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the plant. You know, mitochondria do. Chemically, they do exactly the opposite as what. As what plants do. So, you know, plants take water and they take the CO2, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then they basically fixate the carbon and the hydrogen, and then they make sugar, they make starch, and in that process release oxygen. And what do mitochondria consume? Oxygen, oxygen and starch. And then what do they release as part of the Krebs cycle? This is like the series of biochemical reactions inside the mitochondria. They generate CO2 and they generate water.

So now I'm going to hopefully blow your mind, which might be hard to do. I referenced either one or two papers from some researchers in Mexico who proved pretty convincingly that if you eat enough chlorophyll, in other words, you're eating lots of green vegetables, that up to 5% of your energy requirements can be met by your mitochondria using sunshine, not food. And they actually have some lab measurements on this, and that's referenced in Head Strong. So I'm wondering if that old movie called Swamp Thing, maybe it was based on that corner case where, yes, a little bit is possible. Kind of like having some of your father's mitochondrial DNA. It doesn't really happen very often, but it's possible. I Think there's another little corner case for mitochondria like that. So I like the idea of being a breatharian and living off sunshine. I'm just not going to do that because I got other stuff to do. By the way, if you're listening and it works for you and you actually have done it with cameras and observation and you could show that it works, I would love to see your evidence because it'd be kind of cool to find a human who could do that. Maybe there's one in India somewhere who has some good evidence. But anyway, I'm getting off track here. So you've talked about how you feel. There's a supplement that I manufacture. It's called ketoprime and it's ketosuccinic acid. So it's the last step of the Krebs cycle before you reinitiate with coenzyme A, which is basically coming from carbs that you eat or from ketones. And when people take that, in two clinical studies, they showed that the compound in ketoprime, the active ingredient called that keto succinic acid, that it treats these symptoms or treats the emotional symptoms of pms. Now, this is an interesting thing where you're feeling crappy and angry. You take something that increases your mitochondria's ability to make energy from food by priming the pump of the Krebs cycle, and magically your emotional symptoms subside. So that would support your point that, well, maybe mitochondria are driving this happiness and maybe happiness is driving the mitochondria. I think there's something to that, because I'm the same way. I know if there's a stack of mitochondrial enhancers that I take, when I take them, I'm happier, and if I take them when I'm cranky, I get less cranky. What mitochondrial enhancers do you use?

I don't use any mitoenhancers.

You don't drink coffee? Come on.

I actually love the smell of coffee, but I can't do the taste, so I don't.

Oh, man. Well, if you put enough sugar in there. Oh, wait, that would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?

Yes, it does.

So, tea, I mean, you must use green tea or something.

Yeah, I drink tea.

There's your mitochondria enhancer. You got your polyphenols in there?

Yeah, that might very well.

All right, if I send you a stack of the mitochondrial enhancers that I use just to try them? I'm not asking you to endorse or ever Tell the world you did it. But just if you would try them, I'll send them to you because they might even fuel your research a little bit.

Wow.

You want me to send them your way? I will.

No, I don't think I would. I trust in the balance of the organism and its ability to do things. So I try not to put other foreign things in my body. Maybe that's my philosophy.

Got it.

Yeah. And there are, I think, situations where these things can be useful. And you're talking about the link between mitochondria and how you feel and mood. And there's good research that's coming out linking metabolism and mitochondrial metabolism and depression.

Interesting. So they're finding depressed people have lower mitochondrial function.

Yes. And there's a marker of mitochondrial function and specifically the ability of mitochondria to use lipids. So as we eat, we're not talking about the trans fats that are in fries, but the lipids are in pretty much everything that we eat. These are very healthy. Perhaps the healthiest kind of lipids are like the avocado or the olive oil and these kind of things. Mitochondria love these. And they're so good at eating lipids and burning lipids. There's probably the cleanest thing that the organism that the mitochondria, everywhere in the body, can burn. So what people have found, and a lot of that research is coming out of Bruce McEwen's lab at the Rockefeller University in New York City. They're finding that a specific marker, it's called L acetylcarnitine, and our lcar, is actually low in people with depression. And if you can study these kind of processes and animal models, and if you take animals, rats or mice that are depressed, they tend to have lower levels of this. And if you supplement them with L acetylcarnitine, then it actually relieves the depression and depressive symptoms. There are actually quite a few clinical trials now underway to look at this, which is kind of supplementing something that is naturally in the body and that is deficient in states of depression. And maybe that reflects something at the level of mitochondria, mitochondrial dysfunction and their inability to efficiently use lipids. And if you can restore this, maybe you can restore the ability of people to perceive the world in a positive way. So that connects mitochondria to how we see the world.

It's funny. Acetyl L carnitine or L acetylcarnitine, either way, different ways of saying the same thing is a very common and well known anti aging compound going back at least 30 years. We started supplementing that. People were looking to live longer before we knew what it was doing for mitochondria because you could see it was doing something good. But we didn't understand all the pathways we know now and now we're understanding, oh, it increases a cell's ability to burn fat, which is why maybe people who are going to be in ketosis intentionally, nutritionally, the way I talk about in the bulletproof diet, maybe going in and going out, you might want to make sure you have enough L carnitine, which comes from eating red meat or from supplementing. So having that steak might not be such a bad idea, at least if it's grass fed and doesn't contain antibiotics that also inhibit mitochondrial function. Let's go there for a minute. Mitochondria, ancient bacteria. Antibiotics kill bacteria. What's your take on mitochondria and antibiotics?

There's a lot of good data that antibiotics can damage mitochondria. So I think we've overused antibiotics in different ways. In medical practice we're really good at drugging a lot of things and sometimes maybe it's not necessary. So definitely mitochondria are sensitive, nimbly little organelles and they're clearly sensitive to antibiotics. So there's clearly a connection there.

One of the things that I went through as I was writing my book Headstrong about mitochondria in the brain was let's find a list of the things that are documented in medical or biological studies to inhibit mitochondrial function. And what would happen if we just did those less not in a void them with perfection and be afraid of them, but just if you have a choice, don't eat the trans fats that screw up your mitochondria, don't eat tons of sugar. But also things like antidepressants, a lot of antidepressants really wreck mitochondrial function. And so I'm saying if you were to build a lifestyle around supporting the mitochondria on the supposition that, well, they'll support you back, you should do that. Have you looked at antidepressants or any other pharmaceuticals that might have negative effects on mitochondria and thus unforeseen but predictable effects on mood or energy levels?

We haven't directly in our research, but other people have. And there's some people who believe that a lot of the side effects that antidepressants and other medication have could be because they're altering mitochondria in some way. And people have discovered that there are different receptors on the mitochondria, receptors for neurotransmitters like serotonin, and receptors for all sorts of different hormones on the mitochondria, including the cannabinoid receptor. That's a receptor for cannabinoids and thc. So we know they're sensitive to a lot of things. And there's very little known, relatively speaking, about the effects of drugs and medication on the mitochondria. So there's definitely a need to know more about that.

You talked about mitochondrial signaling, and as I was digging through the research, in a way different and nowhere near as in depth as you do, it looks like there's certainly chemical signaling between mitochondria. There's actual fusion, where they stick together and swap some stuff, and then fission that you talked about before. There's also potentially some. They're responsive to electromagnetic fields, and they're also responsive to light, and they generate light. Do you believe that mitochondria are using anything besides chemical signaling and fusion and fission to do quorum sensing or any of the other things that mitochondria do to work as this distributed network of a quadrill, nodes?

That's likely. I'm not aware of any good data. You know, the biochemical community in general tends to focus on the chemical stuff, you know, the stuff we can see or measure directly. You know, the biophotons are, you know, photons emitted from living things, living organisms.

Those are real, though, in that biophotons do exist.

I do believe they exist. Yes. They're really hard to see.

Yeah. But I've seen hardcore physicists detecting them with real equipment in real labs that aren't run by people wearing tinfoil hats. So I'm pretty sure they're real. But if you said, dave, there's absolute evidence those people are crack smokers, I would reconsider. You think it's likely?

All right, Yes, I think biophotons are definitely real. The research on it has been a little put to the side because people have a hard time, one, measuring them and two, fitting that into the traditional concept. You know, whatever. Whatever paradigm a scientist is raised in is a really powerful thing, just like the environment we're raised in as a child. And how and why mitochondria would generate light signals is a little hard to fit into the traditional paradigm. So that makes these kind of things hard to. To study and push forward. So there's not a lot of research about this compared to chemical signals that mitochondria generate. Same thing for electromagnetic fields. And there's pretty good data that electromagnetic fields generated from different sources, biological or non biological, can affect cells and probably mitochondria. But again, there's very little known about this, which means probably we should study this more, because that would be transformational.

Yeah, I've seen enough data in each of those that I know something's going on there, but I would be the first to say I don't know what. And my background is computer science, and I did a lot of work on cloud computing, like the very first cloud computing and early Internet stuff. I taught at the University of California, so I would consider myself well grounded in that network.