Robert Fried

Doing great.

You won an Oscar.

You have run a movie studio.

You have this incredible career in Hollywood.

And you've since pivoted, despite all of your many successes, to running one of the preeminent science platforms in the world regarding NAD.

So I want to learn more about that pivot.

I want to learn about all things NAD.

And I want to learn about NR, nicotinamide riboside.

So let's just start high level.

Do you see, well, what is NAD and what are its implications in terms of health and disease?

NAD is very exciting.

It stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

It's a coenzyme that's found in all living cells, plant and animal, and is vital to all key metabolic processes within that cell.

We make energy inside the cell.

It's not made outside the cell.

There are these organelles called mitochondria, which take oxygen from air that we breathe and nutrients from food that we eat, and they put it through something that we've called the Krebs cycle.

And the yield of that process is something called ATP, these molecules that are filled with energy that transfer throughout the cell.

NAD is at every step along the way in that conversion process of taking oxygen and nutrients and converting it into ATP.

We have studies that show that when you elevate NAD with NR, you not only have an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis, you have more mitochondria, but you have a higher yield per mitochondria.

It actually creates actual energy without creating more calories.