"Lies confuse. The evil are 'the people of the lie,' deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception."

M. Scott Peck, M.D. (1983). _People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil_, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, p.66

The biggest effect of food comes from its deuterium content. More deuterium makes more inflammation. The deuterium content varies depending upon where the food was grown. Rainwater in the periphery of the continent has much higher deuterium levels

Dr. Jack Kruse: "Most people are on the allopathic or functional medicine train when they talk about GMOs. That's not the biggest effect of food as far as it goes for me. The biggest effect in food for me happens to be the water content, and I'm much more interested in where the water comes from, and where the fruit comes from based on the season that you're in. So I told my members, for example, if you're wise you'll never eat any organic food from the state of Florida or from the state of California. And the reason for that it turns out that those are two states where most of our food in the United States that's grown and considered organic is harvested. If you know anything about the way rainwater and the deuterium content works in a continent, it turns out that anything on the periphery of the continent has much higher deuterium levels. That means that it makes much larger amounts of inflammation in your body. So that means functionally from a quantum perspective that an avocado in California is not equivalent to an avocado that's, say, grown in Mexico City."

Dr. Jack Kruse with Justin Stellman @ 33:28–34:48 (posted 2018-08-07) https://youtu.be/kSek0e4RCwI&t=2008

We rely upon the gradual changes in sunlight's color temperature throughout the day to coordinate biochemical activity in our body. Sunrise is 1600 Kelvin. A phone is 5700 Kelvin. Our brain is not used to jumping from 1600 to 5700 Kelvin when we look at our phone. Circadian mismatch

Dr. Jack Kruse: "When you begin to understand that cells are functionally a quantum living system that is a playground for photons, you begin to understand how sunlight can easily control the 100,000 biochemicals that are active within us for every second. That's the way it's controlled: it's controlled by light frequencies. The key is, and this is where people make their biggest mistake, the most important time for humans (and in fact I would say all animals) is when the sun rises and sun sets, but the sunrise for modern humans is one of those things.

"I've done other podcast here recently but haven't gone live yet, but one of the questions they asked me is, 'What is the single biggest health metric that you would advise people to do?' And the number one thing I've told them is to make sure that every day that you're alive from this point forward make sure you see the sunrise. The reason for that is your brain needs to see when that 1600 Kelvin signal light, that's predominantly blue and red light, rises every morning. That's functionally what tells your optical lattice clock in your eye and your brain what time it is. […] That's how your brain knows when to release every hormone in your body, whether it's in your gut, your pituitary, or anything else. If you don't give your brain this signal, and immediately go and open your phone and start checking your emails, you just jump from 1600 Kelvin to 5700 Kelvin in no timespan at all. That's not something your brain is used to dealing with, and this is one of the big problems that we have.

"Now the flip side of it is something else you said. If somebody happens to be living in California and never sees the sunrise but goes out at 10:00 to 12:00, that means that they're setting themselves up potentially for a bad skin cancer effect. Why? Because it turns out that your skin and your eyes need to photo adapt over a period of time to slowly absorb the light frequencies from 1600 Kelvin to 5700 Kelvin. If you happen to only go out when it's 5000 Kelvin or 6000 Kelvin, like midday, your skin is gonna get really red, really quick, because you have not had any time to build up your solar callus.

"This is one of the big problems that we have in medicine. We go out and tell everybody, 'Well, the sun is uniformly bad.' No. How we use the sun is uniformly bad, because we've been told by both functional medicine doctors and allopathic doctors incorrect facts about how actually the sun works. Because now modern society is built around itself and its own needs, and not the needs of nature, we have put ourselves squarely in the gun barrel of circadian mismatches, which is one of the big problems. I mean the light that humans now live under is artificial blue light. We are not optimized to live and work under that type of light 24/7, yet we've been doing that since 1874, and nobody realizes it's the single biggest non-native EMF risk."

Dr. Jack Kruse with Justin Stellman @ 18:12–21:56 (posted 2018-08-07) https://youtu.be/kSek0e4RCwI&t=1092

Cancer is actually a freezing of mitosis because there is no UV light. That's exactly opposite what oncologic centralized medicine tells you. Almost all the microtubule chemotherapeutic drugs out now block things at mitosis. We're actually doing the exact wrong things in medicine

Dr. Jack Kruse: "In Australia they really block the UV light, which tells you kind of why they have some of the unusual autoimmune conditions, electrohypersensitivity, and the melanoma and skin cancer story that they have down there.

"When I saw that in human vitiligo in the early 21st century could be reversed that quick, it made me realized that what happened to those little mammals at the time of the KT event didn't take as long as we all think from an evolutionary biology standpoint. I'm not going to tell you I know exactly how long it took, but this experiment told me that these melanocytes respond to UV light way faster. And that's when I jump down the whole POMC rabbit hole, and when I found out that POMC, this gene, was amplified in mammals from the KT event, especially in their neurologic system, and especially in their immune system. All of a sudden human evolution began to make a lot of sense to me, began to really, really change the way I thought about everything. It changed also the way I felt about cancer because I was like, 'Look, right now metastasis in melanin has a really bad connotation, but it turns out it really doesn't, it's actually how melanoma or melanocytes work.'

"So when you get melanoma on your skin, it's because you have no melanin sheets inside, and the melanin sheets are going through their normal migratory pathways that you had as an embryo, going back to the skin dermatome they're at, and they're looking for the UV light stimulus so that they can undergo mitosis, and then regain their position in the cell cycle.

"It turns out cancer is actually a freezing of mitosis because there is no UV light, and that's exactly opposite what oncologic centralized medicine tells you now. Why? Because almost all the microtubule chemotherapeutic drugs that are out there now block things at mitosis. We're actually doing the exact wrong things in medicine.

"In fact I released a blog this morning which is what stimulated that Twitter feed. It's called Quantum Engineering #62, and it has a very provocative title 'Have We Totally Shit the Bed on Our Ideas Around Cancer.' The blog shouldn't be new information to anybody who's been following me, but it's a continuation of the implications that I brought to the Huberman podcast. Why? Because I don't think I've really talked about all the implications of that Huberman podcast. [...] The ideas that I presented really interested people. Why? Because they had never heard these ideas before, and then when you think about them from a teologic sense, from an evolutionary sense, you begin to put things together, and you realize you're never going to have this idea unless you fundamentally understand how light and light frequencies interacts with matter, and how magnetism controls free radical signaling, and then how water actually deciphers electromagnetic codes to act as a battery. It's an electromagnetic capacitor for sunlight."

Dr. Jack Kruse with Sam Al-Qattan @ 23:47–27:22 (posted 2023-12-02) https://youtu.be/1r4EPDUcKKc&t=1427

Vitiligo is the body stealing melanin from the exterior to the interior, which happens because they're missing melanin sheets inside their body, due to not getting enough sun. Reversing vitiligo with infrared A & UV light

Sam Al-Qattan: "Do you mind telling me a little bit more about the story of you curing a person's vitiligo using UV light?"

Dr. Jack Kruse: "Yeah, […] I realized the power of melanin for human biology, specifically in the mammalian clade, and how that story went back to the Cambrian explosion, but was really amplified at the the KT event when the age of mammals began. We basically took our melanin from exterior to interior, that's really where that story gained a lot of traction.

"So I realized that interruption of UV light causes a massive problem with POMC biology, which is related to melanin, because POMC creates α-MSH. So I thought to myself, 'Could this be the reason why people who have vitiligo have this huge issue, that they're not in the sun enough, and they're missing melanin sheets inside their body? Could they be stealing their melanin from exterior to interior, because with a lack of UV light we have a problem with mitosis?' See, this is completely opposite what centralized medicine believes. They believe that mitosis has to be defective in order for you to get cancer. It turns out melanocytes actually move with UV light, that's actually what drives their biology, and the reason for that POMC is the only gene in mammals that is highly stimulatory to UV light. That one fact alone should get you to question everything that you've been told from an opthalmologist or a dermatologist, but it hasn't for most people. […]

"So realize that mammals, if you understand this link to UV light, POMC, that mammals actually created metastasis but they did it normally, meaning they used it to move melanin from outside to inside their bodies. As they moved melanin inside their body that allowed them to build complexity. […] Light works on the photoelectric effect, meaning that light excites electrons to a higher state, and the more light you absorb in the system the more complex you can get. Well, that story mimics what's happened in the Cambrian explosion, and all the way through to the KT event. Then when we get to the mammals, realize that the mammals that are progenitors were small little things under the ground because they had to stay away from the T-Rex. But when the asteroid took out the T-Rex, what happened? The mammals came out from underneath the ground where they used to have to hibernate six to eight months a year, and all of a sudden these little furry creatures that filled with hair and melanin started to get UV light. Then the UV light induced changes in their biology, and then they became able to walk on the tectonic plates, and then innovate themselves. It turns out the innovation in mammals over the last 65 million years has been greater than when mammals first started. […] We got silly talking monkeys really fast, within 65 million years. So when you think about just the physics or the thermodynamics of 245 versus 65, there was no humanoid creatures for first 245 million years, so you got to ask yourself a question: why is that?

"And it turns out we kept amplifying the wideband semiconductor melanin in our interiors, and we stole them from the exterior. So why did this idea lead me back to vitiligo? It's like well, I need to find a black person with vitiligo and see if I can somehow steal some of their melanin from inside to put it back on their outside by utilizing infrared A and UV light. If my thesis is correct that mammals innovated metastasis, and it's normal in melanocytes, this change should happen relatively fast. Why? Because I told you the story about the asteroid and how it interrupted photosynthesis. There's no way that mammals could have survived longer than probably a year without light, because we know that photosynthesis controls the entire food web. So I thought to myself there's got to be a mechanism behind this that tells us this didn't last a hundred years, it didn't last a thousand years, it was short, so my analogy was vitiligo! Let's see if I can repopulate melanocytes on a silly talking monkey's face, and I was able to do that in short several weeks when I got to them to do certain things. Now I didn't realize by doing this that I could worsen some of their metabolic issues that were present, and it turned out that I did. That actually was added fuel to the fire. I'd love to tell you that I had thought about that initially; no, I thought about it after the person came back and said, 'Since I'm using these two lights my diabetes is getting worse.' I thought about it, and I was like, 'OK, now I think I understand even better that when you steal the melanin from inside you actually can make metabolism worse, so the key is we need a chronic stimulus on the outside of UV light.'"

Dr. Jack Kruse with Sam Al-Qattan @ 16:33–23:37 (posted 2023-12-02) https://youtu.be/1r4EPDUcKKc&t=993

We hear using light. There is a huge melanin sheet inside the human cochlea. Wireless earphones diminishes the melanin in your cochlea & in your brainstem. Tinnitus is actually a problem with the afferent loop as it's related to light

Sam Al-Qattan: "What do you mean specifically when you say in that podcast that we hear light and turn it into sound. How does that work?"

Dr. Jack Kruse: "Just what I said. You actually use light. See, people forget that the way things work in biology there's afferent and efferent loops in neurologic systems. Well it turns out the afferent loop is actually the electromagnetism that is impacting on melanin. The way ENT doctors learn about this, they think it's just the sound wave that comes through the tympanic membrane, that works through the ossicles, that creates a fluid wave in the endolymphatic sac. That's actually not true, and this is part of the reason why they're impotent to figure out what tinnitus functionally is.

"Tinnitus is actually a problem with the afferent loop as it's related to light. So the things [wireless earbuds] you have in your ear right now, that's the perfect cause of tinnitus. Why? Because you're using a wireless device, and those two devices connect through your brain. They're not going this way [traces an arc over the top of his head]; they're going right through your brain, right through your cochlea, and what does that do? It diminishes the melanin sheets that are present, not only in your cochlea, but also in your brainstem, in the deep portions of your brain where the radiation goes through."

Sam Al-Qattan: "OK, when you say melanin sheet, you don't mean myelin sheets, right? I'm confusing the two."

Dr. Jack Kruse: "No, melanin. Melanin is a sheet. That's what is present inside the cochlea, which is what you specifically asked about. There's a huge melanin sheet inside the human cochlea."

Sam Al-Qattan: "That's really interesting that you say that, because three years ago I woke up one day with a headache, and I had chronic fatigue, and I had this condition, and tinnitus, my ears were ringing, and it never went away, ever. So I wonder if that really has something to do with the non-native EMFs, like you're saying. From what I know, Dr. Max Gulhane told me that the way it affects mitochondria, or mitochondrial function, is that it affects the amount of calcium that gets regulated in and out."

Dr. Jack Kruse: "EMF, it affects calcium efflux, and that affects the free radical signal that's generated. But melanin is more proximal to that system. Melanin actually creates electrons for mitochondria to use. In fact, any place you see melanin sheets inside the human body you'll almost always find that they're adjacent to the outer mitochondrial membrane. Why is that? Because they're generating free electrons from electromagnetic signals that are generated inside of cells, meaning endogenous electromagnetic signals that are coming from mitochondrial metabolism. That's what we call biophotons."

Dr. Jack Kruse with Sam Al-Qattan @ 03:07–06:06 (posted 2023-12-02) https://youtu.be/1r4EPDUcKKc&t=187

There can be no transformation without resistance. We face resistance & we feel like we're going nowhere, but this is when we grow the most. Our existence boils down to energy resistance. You want resistance in your life, but you want the right amount of resistance. Life is always difficult

Martin Picard, PhD: "There can be no transformation without resistance."

[…]

"If the ERP is real, and at this point I'd say I'm like 90%+ convinced that this is real, our existence boils down to energy resistance, then that should apply across scales. It should apply at the level of mitochondria, which we know is true. I described some experiments earlier that can overload cells mitochondria with electrons, with or without the ability to flow, and you see consequences of this. We know what happens in patients with mitochondrial disease. They're important ground truths, observations, and experiments that we've done.

"But this principle, I think, should scale at other levels of experiences, including at the level of subjective experiences, and at the level of the mind, like Nirosha alluded to. So the states like psychiatric disorders, and"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Even basic social interactions."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Yeah. And our ability to interact, the kind of things we gravitate towards, how we make decisions, the way we generate ideas, and the pursuit of human knowledge. Humans might have created science to create resistance."

"If the mind is never exposed to resistance, and I think you, Nick, are just amazing at this. You find the best questions, and you're always looking for what's the thing that we really need to understand. And in a way this is this is what scientists do. We create resistance, we create new questions, and questions and scientific problems are like obstacles for the mind to chew on, something for the mind to, kind of,"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "resist"

Martin Picard, PhD: "resist. Yeah."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "And also personal development. I mean we can go on about about this."

Martin Picard, PhD: "It applies pretty broadly, I expect. Something I'm writing about in the book _Energy_, expressions of energy, these kind of energetic principles, and how that applies across different levels in our biology and our inner body, but then also in the mind, and then in the way we interact with each other as energetic systems and relationships, and then how we interact with the world. They're big questions that I have the sense the energy resistance principle helps to address."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Or at least bring up more questions to address."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Oh yeah, more resistance. Resistance is good. My final summary is you want resistance in your life, but you want the right amount of resistance."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "The right amount. Yeah."

"You cannot grow. . . resistance, suffering, when you go through shit. . . life is always difficult for anyone. When you go through difficult things, this feels hard, like this feels resistance. These are the hardest parts of our lives is when we struggle, we face resistance, and we feel like we're going nowhere. But then these are always the periods where we grow the most, and I suspect that's because our energy is literally flowing through something really resistive, and then transformation can only happen out of this.

"If your life was always easy, and nobody's life is like this, then we wouldn't have opportunities to grow. Challenges, problems that come our way and that feel salient are the greatest opportunities for growth, probably because they offer resistance to that which we are, the energetic field we are."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 21:10–21:13 & 02:04:34–02:07:57 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=1270

The best biomarker of mitochondrial disease is GDF15. Most organs, except one, seem to make GDF15. Only the brain has the GFRAL receptor for GDF15. Upon detecting GDF15 the brain both conserves energy & mobilizes energetic substrates to feed those cells that are in trouble

Martin Picard, PhD: "[There are some] small proteins that convey information called cytokines. Those proteins are made and then they're secreted outside the cell. There are different cytokines that mean different things. The cytokine that seems to be the most specific and sensitive to reductive stress, and therefore to energy resistance, is this protein called GDF15, growth differentiation factor 15. […] GDF15 across the board, across multiple studies, was the number one protein that increased exponentially with age. So old people have much higher levels of GDF15 in their blood than younger people."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "So higher GDF15 indicates that there's energy resistance problems, correct?"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Correct."

Martin Picard, PhD: "So that was for aging. Now we look at aging from an energy resistance lens. I think it makes a lot of things make sense. […] In the world of pregnancy also the protein that spikes the highest during pregnancy is GDF15, and we've seen in some women over 10,000-fold increase in GDF15."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Before we get to some of that stuff, if everything's working properly, what happens at the end of this? So I'm a cell, I've got electron flow issues, I'm increasing my NADH / NAD ratio. I'm eventually communicating that to the nucleus of my cell, and I'm making more cytokines, like GDF15. I'm secreting those to tell other cells, I've got an issue. How is the issue resolved?"

Martin Picard, PhD: "Ah, that's a great question."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Those are the mechanisms that we kind of talked about about alleviating or"

Martin Picard, PhD: "relieving"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "relieving that energy"

Martin Picard, PhD: "resistance."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Yeah. Increasing flux or reducing the energy potential. So there's different knobs within the energy resistance worlds that you can modulate. And I think why this is so pervasive on a system scale is that local cell-level changes in energy resistance can manifest at a systems level, and then you can see changes on a systems, like breathing, like you can change your respiratory rate which will affect at a cellular level. . ."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "OK, so maybe the cells are saying I have an electron flow issue. I need more oxygen."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Yes."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Correct. And so like the whole system, typically with cytokines you're kind of looking at a singular landscape of information exchange, you're looking at cell to cell,"

Martin Picard, PhD: "cell to brain"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Cell to brain. But with energy resistance it's a whole systems physiology of communication that comes on."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Yeah. So as far as we know the increase in breathing, the increase in heart rate that you experience when you start running, right, with exercise, or with the cell, like a mitochondrial disease, it's very clear there's an electron resistance, energy resistance issue in the mitochondria, right, which again is a really special opportunity to ask, 'How does this manifest at different levels of biology and physiology and psychology?' And what we see in these patients the best biomarker of mitochondrial disease is GDF15. So if you want to know if someone has mitochondrial disease or not, you take a blood sample. What do you measure? GDF15 is what offers the highest sensitivity and specificity. It's quite remarkable.

"And then Nirosha kind of highlighted the broad principle, right? A cell experiences high energy resistance. It wants to relieve that, right? How does this work? So there's a number of things that happens: increase heart rate, increase breathing to relieve, to diffuse energy resistance. Probably that happens, not driven by GDF15, as far as we know. What we think GDF15 does, and there's nice animal studies that have shown this, and then some human correlational evidence, it suggests that GDF15 goes from your cell as a little cytokine, enters the blood, then goes everywhere in the body. There's a concentration of the receptor for GDF15 in one very specific part of the body.

"Interestingly, every cell in the body seems to be able to make GDF15, and we've done an analysis of gene expression by RNA sequencing across 50 different pieces of the human body, 50 different organs, and those are postmortem samples that were analyzed for gene expression signatures. What you find is most tissues in the body can make some amount of GDF15 except the one organ that doesn't seem to make GDF15 under normal conditions. Can you guess which one?

"The brain. And then you ask, 'OK, every organ in the body seems to be able to make the signal, GDF15, that cytokine, where's the receptor?' Right? Which organ in the body expresses the GDF15 receptor? It's called GFRAL. And there's only one organ in the body that expresses a receptor. Can you guess which one?"

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "The brain."

Martin Picard, PhD: "The BRAIN!"

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "OK, so it's a brain-body communication."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Exactly. It's like the prototypical brain-body communication access. The signal is made in the periphery, and the receptor is centrally located in the brain stem, specifically the area postrema. There are really nice mouse studies that have been done to ask what happens if I inject GDF15 in the brain stem, or peripherally then it goes to the brain and then there's nice optogenetic studies where people you know encoded this optogenetic light sensitive channel of rhodopsin, typically in the neurons in the brain stem that have this receptor. And what you find and then you ask, 'What happens to the mouse?' I activate this GFRAL signaling axis, I stimulate the neurons that are sensitive to GDF15 in the brain stem. What happens to the mouse? There are two things that seem to happen in parallel that then brings us to relieving the energy resistance in those cells that were crying out for help, spitting out GDF15. One thing is energy conservation. So if you stimulate those receptors in the brain stem, the animal is going into a state called torpor. So their body temperature drops. Maybe that says something about what this means for relieving energy resistance. The sympathetic nervous system gets activated, right, so they secrete norepinephrine, like adrenaline and noradrenaline, which goes to the liver to stimulate glucose production release from the the liver. So that feeds those cells that are energetically starved, right? Maybe they're out of energy substrates.

"So GDF15 stimulation on the brain stem drives energy conservation. The mice stop moving and they look like they're really sick. And then the second thing is the activation of those energy mobilization systems, like you increase blood glucose through the hepatic stimulation and you increase lipolysis, you break down fat in the fat stores, and the adipose tissue. Then the blood lipids increase, the blood glucose increase, which are really like the food substrates that the cells need to relieve their energy resistance, perhaps. So by conserving energy, right, by acting like you're sick and that might be why the the whole purpose of sickness behavior. If your immune system kicks in, increasing energy resistance in your body, what you do?"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "You stop."

Martin Picard, PhD: "You stop moving."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "You stop producing more heat."

Martin Picard, PhD: "You go lie down, and you and you chill out. So that would be adaptive and a way of reducing energy resistance."

"So GDF15 then, to come back to the original point, a cell is experiencing higher energy resistance, NADH / NAD ratio signals to the nucleus, nucleus says let's tell the rest of the body. You secrete GDF15, goes to the brain, the brain says, 'Shit. Something in the body is running really high resistance. Let's address this in two ways: conserving energy, and mobilizing energetic substrates to feed those cells that might be in trouble.' So there's a dual action it seems like GDF15 serves or mobilizes this energy conservation and energy mobilization which is like the perfect recipe for relieving cells of of excessive resistance."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 01:23:42–01:32:03 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=5022

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "How do you define health and healing from an energy resistance principle perspective?"

Martin Picard, PhD: [looks to Nirosha] "What do you think?"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Yeah, I think health […] to me is a dynamic distribution of energy resistance, where if there's a physiological states that is producing some sort of maladaptive state, that energy resistance will go up, and that's tuned to the rest of the body, and then the body kind of compensates for that. I think that from a physics point of view, from a biohysics point of view, health is a dynamic flux of resistance, and that this Goldilocks zone that we talk about is basically what we're trying to achieve with our health."

Martin Picard, PhD: "So would you say health is the optimization?"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "It's the optimization of resistance, right? From a circuitry point of view, we're trying to minimize the use of dissipative heat and maximize energy being transformed in a productive way, and that's basically our state of health that we're trying to achieve. And disease, if you kind of try to flip that coin, disease is the redirection of resistance into one aspect, that's redirect of the energy into an unproductive use."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Yeah. So, instead of merely thinking about health as just the absence of disease, we can think of it in terms of energy resistance. You have two people that are completely not diseased, one of them could be healthier than the other, and that could be defined in terms of energy resistance being optimal, and we don't need to be quantitatively precise with this. There's some middle Goldilocks zone that's best here. You don't want it too high, you don't want it too low, and that's true even if you don't have cancer or some clear disease."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Yeah."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "And it's relative to its own system. So looking at a circuitry of a MacBook versus the circuitry of another computer, the nuts and bolts are the same, but the efficiency in which the energy is being transformed, and the functionality of each of those resistors is going to tell you how that computer is going to perform. Same idea with our own selves, like myself today versus tomorrow, circuitry is the same, but how that energy is flowing and resisted will kind of set a baseline of what my health should be. And it might be different for you, [Martin], and for you, [Nick]."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 01:32:05–01:34:30 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=5525

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Is the flow of electrons from food hydrocarbons to oxygen, is that the élan vital of life?"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD & Martin Picard, PhD: [laughs]

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Yeah, possibly. I think that's the bridge to bringing in some of the physical concepts, right? Like some of the physical laws if we're trying to reunderstand, reimagine biology. I think that could be that bridge to do that."

Martin Picard, PhD: "So I'd say, 'Perhaps.' We could ask, 'Is this flow of electrons, is that qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine, or is that prana in Ayurvedic tradition?' I think it might be, or it might be closely related. Those are very different concepts. The reason why qi is dismissed as woo woo in biomedicine is because it's not molecular, and we"

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "I don't think we have the tools to measure that temporal scale of of energy."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Temporal or dimension. Conceptually it's a very different beast, and we don't have tools, or we don't have concepts with the lens of materialism or physicalism. We assume the physical molecular layer of existence, that which you can see under a microscope, run on a gel or in a sequencer, this is the true layer of reality, and then whatever happens in other realms doesn't matter. Like we can't perceive this, so it's probably not important.

"This is an assumption. This is a cultural assumption. Maybe it was a hypothesis like 60, 70 years ago. That hypothesis has turned into dogma."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 01:58:09–01:59:47 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=7089

The mitochondria's electron transport chain could instead be called the electron resistance chain. The magic which enabled multicellular life is there's just the right amount of resistance to extract and transform a little bit of energy as the electrons flow

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "The mitochondria are little cells inside of our cells, and they've got two membranes. The inner membrane is like a little wire through which these electrons are flowing from food to oxygen, and the way it flows, and that it flows, that's how energy is getting made."

Martin Picard, PhD: "That's how energy is getting transformed."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Transformed. Yes."

Martin Picard, PhD: "You get electrical energy of the electrons flowing, and then through each step in the electron transport chain, which is this a sequence of big protein complexes in the inner membrane of the mitochondria, which are like little folds, and they're so gorgeous.

"So as the electrons are flowing through this, they're facing little steps of resistance in the electron transport chain, could be called maybe the electron resistance chain. But this is finely tuned by evolution so that there's just the right amount of resistance for the electrons as they flow, a little bit of energy is extracted, is transformed, and then that is used to pump a proton across the membrane.

"So then you're using electrical energy, it gets transformed into this electrochemical gradient, and it's that step of transformation which I think is really the magic of life, and maybe why mitochondria enabled complex multicellular life, right, because then you go from chemical electrical energy, which comes from chemical energy, the food you ate, and then you transform this into this electrochemical charge, which is like a little voltage, which so malleable. Like the degrees of freedom, once you have stored electricity, the degrees of freedom is immense, much more than if you go from like biochemical energy. So that ability to transform biochemical energy into an electrical charge like a voltage potential, then you can power everything, the same way that electricity powers everything in our lives, from computer, phone, light, stove, washer. So we know electricity is versatile. The brain uses that as an energetic modality to integrate information."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 22:14–24:19 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=1334

Insulin resistance is a defense mechanism where the cells say there is too much electron pressure. The energy resistance principle approach to type 2 diabetes management is twofold: (1) increase flux by moving, (2) fasting. Fasting is probably the most underrated & the most underused intervention in medicine

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "[…] What is insulin resistance in your view from an energy resistance perspective, and how do you think about it?"

Martin Picard, PhD: "[…] Look at this energetically. What's happening? Why is the cell trying to block itself from being able to sense insulin? And then when insulin is stimulated, and the signaling axis is properly mobilized, you get glucose transporter that go to the cell membrane, and then the cell can take in glucose. That's the main point of insulin signaling.

"The second interpretation you have that cells are trying to, this is an adaptation, and that adaptation likely is an anti-energy resistance defense mechanism. So insulin resistance is likely a defense mechanism where the cell says there's too much electron pressure. I'm being fed too many electrons, too much glucose, relative to what I can sustain with my mitochondria, and relative to the flux that is being demanded of me. Right? If a cell doesn't burn energy, like we said earlier, ATP is very high. The ATP synthase doesn't turn, the membrane potential is really high. The electrons have nowhere to flow. There's too much resistance. So that resistance propagates like it would in an electrical circuit, and then propagates upwards. Then the resistance manifests at the level of the cell's surface, the plasma membrane, by removing the transporters for glucose, which effectively increases resistance.

"There's this beautiful paper from 2009. The title was, 'Insulin Resistance is an Antioxidant Defense Mechanism.' That's in PNAS. They were saying the reactive oxygen species that mitochondria spit out when there's excess energy resistance. It didn't use those terms, but they did the same kind of experiments I mentioned earlier where you feed mitochondria lots of electrons but you don't let them respire, you don't let them produce ATP, spit out tons of reactive oxygen species, and then they showed how this then propagates to the plasma membrane, and then the cell becomes insulin resistant. The pathology of insulin resistance starts in the mitochondria, somewhere along where the flow of electrons is not high enough to support the pressure. So it's a pressure to flow issue, and the core driver of pathogenesis is the system is overloaded."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Right. The cell's saying, 'I can't handle all these electrons from all this glucose or whatever, so stop giving me so much.'"

Martin Picard, PhD: "Exactly. So the insulin resistance really is the manifestation of a deeper seated energy resistance."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "So then from a therapeutic standpoint, you'd want to focus your attention on fixing the mitochondrial problem rather than trying to. . ."

Martin Picard, PhD: "There's no mitochondrial problem."

Nirosha Murugan, PhD: "Like a selective pressure problem of the flow of electrons."

Nick Jikomes, PhD: "Yeah. The flow problem as opposed to trying to undo the insulin resistance."

Martin Picard, PhD: "Yeah. And I've heard you know a couple clinicians who were reflecting on the use of insulin therapy in diabetes, because the standard of care nowadays, which is from a molecular perspective and how you started that question, there's an issue at the cell surface like insulin signaling is not happening. Let's restore, let's fix this, right?

"And then one approach is to say the cells are insulin resistant to the effect of insulin, so let's give more insulin. Like that is the mindset that biomedicine is using to counter that problem. What this does at the cell level, you have the cell here, it says, 'Oh, the pressure of glucose, of electrons is so high. Let me protect myself.' And then the cell kind of finds some respite, probably in becoming insulin resistant. And then there's like 10× the amount of insulin that comes in and then it's overloaded. Then you start to damage your mitochondria.

"There's some notion in diabetes management that giving insulin is useful at decreasing blood glucose. So HB1C goes down, but now peripheral organs starts to suffer, and there might be more nerve damage like neuropathy, and more of the other damage in some tissues that are insulin sensitive because you're forcing glucose into cells effectively that are trying to protect themselves.

"So the energy resistance principle approach to disease management is twofold. Either you increase flux, right? How do you increase flux? You increase flux by moving. if you contract the muscles, that's going to increase the flux. You're going to breathe harder. So anything that kind of makes you breathe harder should be good to increase flux in the system.

"Or the other approach is to the decrease the numerator, the energy potential, and you do that by eating less sugar, the source, the energy that we know insulin resistance. I don't know what the percentage is, more than half of people with diabetes, pre-diabetes, it is reversible.

"Type 2 diabetes in many cases is completely reversible if you fast, and we know in normal healthy people you go through phases of more insulin resistance, and then insulin sensitive, and that's normal fluctuations with feed and fasting. If you fast for a day, or fast for two days, you become extremely insulin sensitive. Your tissues are like, 'OK, there's not too much pressure. Let me become receptive and sensitive to the influx of glucose.' I think fasting is probably the most underrated and the most underused therapy or intervention in medicine. So that's from first principles, ERP-based thinking, you can reduce the pressure by eating less, or eating less sugar, or you can increase flux by moving more. That's an ERP-like, first principles-informed strategy to addressing a medical issue in this case."

Martin Picard, PhD & Nirosha Murugan, PhD with Nick Jikomes, PhD @ 01:39:34–01:46:00 (posted 2025-10-29) https://youtu.be/GiwDfsIgziA&t=5974