Anti-Aging Expert: This Reverses Gray Hair & This Myth Is Costing You Your Health!

0:00 - This is incontrovertible evidence that growing hair is reversible and it can be pretty fast. - Wow. - And there's more. So we all walk around with our biological history encoded in your hair. Like for example, if you have marijuana six months ago, it's gonna be in your hair. - I just got a haircut. Joking. So my research lab had the idea that if we could find what was happening in this person's life when this young hair become old, then we could understand the mechanism of the aging process. So what is the secret to anti-aging? It's the proper allocation of energy. What's the simplest way you can explain that to me? So, first, energy is real. And it's the difference between feeling like you can change the world or feeling completely drained. And a lot of people live on that end of the spectrum. And it's because there's a finite energy budget with a hierarchy of energy needs in the

0:48 body. For example, we did an experiment because we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, to ruminate about yesterday. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by 60%. So it needs to steal energy from some of the things that keep you young. So it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And the third piece is this: energy is from your mitochondria. And there's about 5,000 trillion mitochondria in your body. And so they made our bodies possible, and they can change how we feel. Well, I read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. Yes, we are really in service of the mitochondria. They allow us to be alive. Okay, I've got so many questions for you based on what people wanted to know. Like how patients with ME, chronic fatigue or long COVID

1:37 safely rehabilitate their mitochondria? What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy? If red light therapy impacts mitochondria, and is there anything I can do to have more energy available? But before that, I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by understanding energy resistance. We think there's increased energy resistance in cancer than Alzheimer's. Like fundamentally diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So is there anything I can do? There is. So you can start by This is super interesting to me. My team gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So, a favour to ask all of you. Please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button, if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what

2:24 we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us, really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. Dr. Martin Pickard, what is it that you believe, know, or understand that most people out there don't believe, know, or understand? We

3:13 are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. And that sounds a little woo if you don't have context. And that's, I think, something that we're just starting to have the right scientific framework to understand, to understand ourselves from first principles as energetic processes. In a nutshell, what is it that people are looking for when they listen to this subject of energy. Yeah. I think people want to understand what is energy and how can I have more energy? I can relate to that because sometimes, you know, if I look through my life, sometimes I wake up and I feel amazing. And I really have, in my view, done the same thing. But then sometimes I wake up

4:02 and I don't feel amazing. And it feels kind of like roulette, like this sort of opaque mystery of how do I wake up with more days in a row and feel amazing, like I can take on the world? And then there's also some friends that I have who are suffering with different things, whether it's chronic illness or long COVID or whatever, who repeatedly wake up and feel low energy for years at a time. That's a really tough place to be. When you wake up repeatedly and you don't feel like you have the capacity, the energy to be in the world, that's a really tough place to be. And who are you and why... did you commit your life to this subject? I'm a regular guy with lived experiences who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things

4:49 that have made me feel like life is really special and precious. And then I became a scientist. And as I learned the tools of science, I started to see and I discovered mitochondria. I thought this is an approach to start to bridge what's true about the human experience that we know from first experience empirically. And we know to be real, not because, you know, some white coat wearing doctor or scientist either said, yes, energy is real. It's in your mitochondria. We know it to be real from first experience, right? Because we feel it. And then what science is telling us about how things work in our bodies, right? And about health and disease and where diseases come from. So I had these questions. So I became a scientist to bridge those domains of existence, the science and the experience. So I've

5:37 led a research group at Columbia University for 10 years and founded an institute to really build the systems and technologies to help people grow, heal, and transform. You have a PhD in mitochondria. Yep. My PhD was in mitochondrial biology of aging. I mean, there's an image here in front of me. Some people will just be listening, so we'll try and explain it for them. But there's an image here of a video. I'll play the video on screen now. And it kind of looks like a... It looks a little bit like an alien. But I read that this video... was quite formative for you. What is that video and why was that formative moment in your career? I took this video in England, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, with my Geordie friends, the medical school there. I was a

6:27 graduate student and went there for kind of an exchange. And this is the first time I saw mitochondria moving. I saw like the inner life of our cells. And when I saw this, something struck me as like, oh my God. I'm able to see this, right? And to see living mitochondria because of the mitochondria inside of me. it's the energy that's flowing through my mitochondria in my eye right that's allowing me to perceive to see this mitochondria made multicellular life possible they made our bodies possible and and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living so when i saw this like this is mitochondria looking at mitochondria and then i was starting to understand that mitochondria do more than just transforming energy. What they're known for is they take the food you eat and then

7:16 they take the oxygen that you breathe in and then those two things, the food, the oxygen, converge inside the mitochondria and then something really special happens. The electrons that are stuck on food that were stuck together in a green leaf somewhere, photosynthesis, what your mitochondria do is they kind of unpack this and they rip off the electrons one by one and then they flow them like an electrical circuit. And that happens in like the 5,000 trillion mitochondria that are in your body. And then when the electrons flow, they need to flow towards something, just like an electrical circuit. Electrons flow from one pole of the battery to the negative, to the other pole of the battery. And that circuit is closed in the mitochondria. So the electrons from the food you eat flow towards oxygen that you breathe, and then it becomes water. And it's

8:03 that... vital flow of energy electrons flowing towards oxygen that allows us to be alive and mitochondria do this and then as they do this they transform energy from food biochemistry into electricity and into signals and into heat and the reason the body is warm is because the mitochondria as they transform and flow electrons like a little energetic circuit they release heat and So the source of heat, right, that makes us warm, you shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling the warmth from their mitochondria. So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body? There's on average a thousand mitochondria per cell. Per cell? There's a thousand? So how many is there in my body? About 5,000 trillion. Who should care about the mitochondria and why should

8:50 they care about it? Anyone who cares about their energy. about having enough energy to do what they really care about. We all care about different things. We're all gifted and talented for different things. Everyone has this unique, authentic self that wants to come out. The only way for this to come out and the only way for a person to flourish is through energy. If there's no energy flowing through your body, you're dead. And if the energy doesn't flow efficiently and smoothly through you as an organism, then life feels hard. You're not at your best. You feel tired. And you feel like maybe it's not worth it. When you're sick and your immune system is draining all of your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic. And it's hard to be

9:37 a good person. And it's hard to be a good dad. And it's hard to want to do good for the world if you're struggling with energy. Do you know what it is? So many of us think that that just is what it is and that we can do nothing about that. You know, we breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. There's this certain, I think, feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much. Where do we need to start to understand? Because the outcome I want from this conversation is I want to live my life with more energy to do the things that I want to do. And I imagine the people that are listening also feel the same way. So why does one have to start? I'd like to understand the basics and then move to the actionable stuff, like things I can do so that I live my life full of energy. Yeah. So there are three things that are really foundational

10:26 to how energy works in in the human body. One is that you are the energy that's flowing through this body. I am the energy that's flowing through my body. Yes. So I'm not my body. You're not your body. Okay. I'm the energy flowing through it. You, Stephen, this expression now that I'm getting to experience, thank you, this expression is an expression of the flow of energy. If there was no energy flowing through your body, through your heart, through your brain, like you wouldn't be, right? You'd be a cadaver. And we'd say, Stephen is gone. A dead body. Yeah, you'd be a dead body. The difference between a dead body, a cadaver, and a living, thinking, feeling, conscious person who cares is the flow of energy. Okay. You get so indoctrinated in this worldview that the only thing that's real is the physical stuff. and the

11:15 genes that you got from your parents and the physical body, that's the real stuff. What you can't see with your eyes, not real. That's a reframe that's kind of a bigger picture mindset shift that we need to, and scientists struggle with. So number one is you are the energy that flows and transforms through this body. Number two is there's a fixed energy budget. All of us have a fairly fixed energy budget to deal with. And for example, if you want to have more energy to do more podcasts, to write more articles, to be more creative, the solution is not eating more. because there's this fixed energy budget. And if you overload the system, you

12:00 feed it too much food, especially too much sugar, it's really hard on the system. And then the system, like an electrical system, you jack up the voltage, right? And then the system starts to overheat. So inflammation is this overheating. There's too much energy in the system. Or the cells are burning too much energy and they need to kind of tell other cells that's... and those signals we call inflammation cytokines. So there's a fixed energy budget that you have to deal with. And over time, the organism does a lot of finessing and adapting to kind of try to preserve this energy budget. And that's somewhat linked to stress, I guess, which is, I read your work and it talks about how stress was basically just like an overconsumption of energy. It's requiring loads and loads and loads of energy. Okay, we'll talk about that too then because I think stress is a really important one. What's the third? The third one

12:48 is Life is resistance. In order to be alive, in order to grow, to learn, to transform, right, change your views, you need resistance to go through some resistance. You need energy to go through some resistance, right? If energy just flows and there's no zero resistance, then there's no possible transformation. so if life was always easy and you never faced any challenge any stress in your life then you would just remain as is right and it would be very boring and from first principles physics like we know this to be true you know at a number of levels but for example the sun this beautiful nuclear reactor in the sky shoots energy, right, as photons. So light is a

13:36 form of energy. And as long as light, you know, just goes and photons travels in outer space, photon will remain photon. Light energy will remain light energy until that light energy hits a green leaf, right? And the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it offers a constraint, right? It offers resistance. So when light energy faces resistance, now it can be converted. And that's the basis of making food. That's how nature makes food. It crystallizes energy from sunlight into molecules. Life, you know, plants crystallize light energy into carbohydrates. And then those are transformed into the different kinds of food that

14:22 we eat. We need resistance for energy to transform into something meaningful. So what has mitochondria got to do with all of this? Mitochondria are basically little resistors, right? And they are what allows the flow of energy through the system. Have you got a picture of... Okay, here we go. Okay, so this is a... An image of a mitochondria? A mitochondrion. O-N is a singular, and mitochondria is plural. So this is a mitochondrion, and there's about a thousand of these in each of your cells. And there's about five trillion cells in your body that have a nucleus and that have these beautiful mitochondria. And what you see here, these little wings, these are called cristae. And the cristae is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen you

15:07 breathe end up as well. So this is where the electrons are flowing. There's like little electrical circuits here. And as the electrons are flowing, the mitochondria become charged like little batteries. So effectively, a mitochondrion like this has all of these sites of oxygen consumption and food consumption, and then that gets transformed into a little charged battery. And once the battery is charged, The mitochondria can use that charge to make ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is kind of the cellular energy currency. If a cell wants to contract, right, a muscle cell wants to contract in the gym, it needs ATP. So it calls upon the mitochondria, says, I need ATP. And then the mitochondria gets to work and then flows electrons, consumes some food, burns some oxygen. That's why you get out of breath. So when you get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using

15:57 the oxygen and calling for more oxygen. What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP. They use their energized state to produce signals. to receive information and then to produce signals. Oh, so they're talking to each other? They're talking to each other. And what are they saying? It's a whole collective, and they're talking to each other, kind of monitoring what's happening, not only inside the cell, but outside the cell. So on the surface of mitochondria, all along, there are little receptors for all sorts of signals that... tells this mitochondrion, is there enough energy? Are we running out of energy? Is there a stress hormone here? Should we be getting ready for something dangerous? So mitochondria are like a little distributed brain, right? So they're like the intracellular brain, Am I right in thinking that they used to be bacteria?

16:46 They are, yeah, they did. What is that story? Because I think someone said that to me before on the show, that our mitochondria are actually bacteria from prehistoric times or something. So the story is, about 1.5 billion years ago, that there was two different types of bacteria. One type was able to use oxygen to transform energy, right? So it could fuel a lot of oxygen and other food substrates. The other type could not. It was anaerobic. And the anaerobic bacterium was probably a little bigger and it had like a few more genes. And it could only ferment its food and kind of fermenting the food, spitting out, you know, like lactate or like yeast does. And what happened is the big one either engulfed the small one, right? Or maybe

17:31 the small one kind of infiltrated, colonized the big one. And the story goes that this basically gave a whole bunch more energy to the big cell. That's one perspective. And then with more energy, what can you do? You can evolve more complexity. The version I favor, based on the evidence we have, is that when mitochondria came in, and then there was this new structure, this symbiotic relationship, mitochondria basically gave the ability of the cell to perceive the environment in a different way and to compute information in a different way. So maybe the coming of mitochondria into this big cell made the big cell social. Because before this event, most of the evidence says that cells were asocial. They were little bacteria foraging for themselves and kind of operating from a

18:20 very selfish perspective, just trying to replicate, just trying to survive. When mitochondria came in, it gave those cells a different view on life. And they were like, ooh, we could work together. How about you become a cell that gets energy, right? And I become a cell that moves, right? So then you're the gut and I'm going to be the muscle. And then together, those two cells can do a lot more, right? And fast forward a couple billion years and here we are. Here we are, yeah. And that led to, you know, bodies with organs, you know, the liver feeds the rest of the body, the heart keeps things flowing, the brain kind of computes and plans. So that's division of labor. And it started with the mitochondria. You talked about energy resistance. I've heard you say that most diseases or disorders can be explained by

19:09 understanding energy resistance. Give me a disease that's linked to energy resistance. The clearest is what we call insulin resistance or diabetes. Diabetes affects millions in the world. Fundamentally, diabetes is a disease of energy resistance. So if the resistance is too high, because you have too much energy pushed onto the system. Sugar, too much sugar, glucose. Yeah, exactly. Or if the mitochondria are impaired, right? right, and they can't flow energy, then the energy is kind of stuck. It faces greater constraints. It wants to go in that direction, but then there's a barrier and then another barrier, another barrier. It's like water flowing, nice and smooth,

19:56 and then there's a dam. And if the dam has zero openings, then the water accumulates and then there's high pressure. And then at some point, the water accumulates and ends up flooding the landscape and then damaging things. So it's a bit like the same thing. If now you open floodgates on the dam, right, then you can use that energy to make electricity, for example. You use the movement of the water to transform this into electricity. That's basically what the mitochondria do. And if you move and you're physically active, now the flow of energy through the mitochondria can transform into work, right? Into speed, into movement, right? Into lifting. Is this linked to cancer at all? Because it sounds, I mean, I don't know much about cancer, but... cells dividing

20:43 out of control seemingly randomly. Yeah, I think that there's a very good chance if you look at the biology of cancer and what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer, there's like a a 10 item flywheel of these are the core features of cancer. All of those features have some relationship, some very direct with increased energy resistance. So if energy can't flow smoothly and a cell is burning too much energy and it doesn't flow energy through the mitochondria, which is what cancer cells do, cancer cells ditch their mitochondria and they revert back to this ancestral cell that didn't have mitochondria. It was anaerobic. It was spitting out lactate. And we don't really know why cells do this. It's called the Warburg effect. And the Warburg effect is when a cell in

21:32 the presence of oxygen, right? If it wanted, it could use oxygen, flow electrons through mitochondria and transform energy and live a nice life. social life, like every cell in this social collective does in the body. What cancer cells do is they say, I'm not going to use my mitochondria, even if there's oxygen, even if my mitochondria can respire. And by doing this, it seems like cancer cells revert back to this ancestral cell, right? That just cares about itself. The antisocial cell. Yeah. Then the organism will, and the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. It's called angiogenesis. So it's like the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says, "Bring me more oxygen." So it's kind of like there's this sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism

22:21 and that it's going to be selfish and demand more and more resources for itself. And it multiplies itself with equally selfish little aliens Yeah. And then the body responds by listening to it and giving it more resources. Is that what you're saying? Why do the blood vessels surround a cancer? Yeah. It's like, it's the cancer calling for, you know, more energy. Okay. Yeah. So energy resistance is the product of two things. It's how much energy is being demanded. How much power is being deployed in the tumor, for example, or in the working muscle. And then how much energy can flow through the system. That's like the equivalent of current in an electrical system. So if there's a lot of demand, right? A lot of power is being generated or a

23:07 lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell, but there's not enough flow to support that activity, then that increases resistance. So is there any understanding as to how those kinds of cancers are caused? Like what, what causes that moment where, you know, you talked about the Wahlberg effect, what causes that? The cancer community used to think that the main driver for cancer was genetic mutations, but there's an emerging perspective that changes in metabolism changes in the way electrons flow through, through this energetic circuitry through the mitochondria can actually drive the, uh, instance of a new cancer cell. And then when a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its mitochondria, it goes back to this selfish state and then it makes more of itself. And it

23:53 tries not to die. Explain that part to me, because I was reading about how cancer cells try and evade death. - Yeah. - The best way to think about this, I think, is as a social collective, right? Every cell in this organism cares about the same thing, which is preserving the life and the health of the whole being, right? So every cell in this body is in a social contract with every other cell, right? A cancer cell basically, gets out of this agreement and says, "No, no, I'm going to fare for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can, and I'm going to make more of myself." And it goes into bacterial mode. That happens sometimes because of mutations, and it seems like there are other causes

24:43 of this. For example, hyperglycemia. What's that? High blood glucose. Diabetes is a major risk factor for developing cancer. Why is that? I don't think there are good explanations out there based on the molecular framework of disease and the genetic mutation perspective. If you look at cancer from an energetic perspective, it's, I think, likely that the increase in blood glucose increases the pressure, right? There's more electrons that are being pushed onto those cells or to 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, you know, a lot of water through a very small pipe. So, Something goes wrong. Yeah, something goes wrong. Something can break. So the resistance is

25:29 if you push a lot of energy into a very small container or into a channel that can support that, then the... 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, oh, you know, too much. And it damages the mitochondria, this excess resistance. because there's too much heat produced, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress. I was thinking about smoking and how smoking also is carcinogenic, it's cancer-causing. And through the lens of the mitochondria, how could something like smoking be...

26:19 - Cancer-causing. - Yeah. 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. And 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

27:04 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. Rather than being innocent bystanders, mitochondria are hijacked by cancer. The tumor reprograms them to stop acting like the body's protective energy factories and starts using them as a manufacturing plant to build more cancer cells. Because of this, targeting mitochondrial metabolism has become a major promising

27:50 frontier in developing new cancer therapies. It hijacks the mitochondria and uses them to produce more cancer cells. So a normal cell is driven, its behavior, it's driven by the mitochondria. It's like mitochondria are in the driver's seat, right? Mitochondria can basically call the shots. Is the cell to live and divide, right? 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, right? 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 our 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

28:37 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 death, and cancer somehow is able to kind of get away from that. And it's weird to think about because the things that cause cancer or that have a correlation to cancer are things like, as you said, having too much of this stuff here, too much sugar. The white stuff, yes. High blood glucose levels, etc. are linked to cancer. And one would wonder why eating sugar in

29:22 excess is going to increase my probability of cancer. But obviously it points to the fact that it must be doing something to my energy systems which are causing some kind of malfunction somewhere. Yeah. And what the energy resistance principle allows us to understand is why that is and what's really happening. If you overload your body with excess energy, the body has to deal with this 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 you know it gets gets damaged the same thing happens you know in the body if you overload the system with too much energy too many electrons very direct parallel with the electrical circuit. There are electrons stuck here on these little

30:12 glucose molecules. If you ingest this, now it increases the voltage in the body. And then if the mitochondria can't keep up, and because they're not flowing energy, because you're sedentary, you're not moving, then that increases the resistance. And they might die or malfunction. 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 metabolic pathways looking for oxygen and a mitochondrion, but then at every point in this cascade you face resistance, there's

30:57 more chance that that electron kind of jets out and then becomes oxidative stress. Well, then what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me, and they have... two different colours of hair. Now let's just pretend for argument's sake and for the sake of this explanation that this is someone's hair that's gone grey because of stress. And this is what she used to look like or he used to look like in terms of the colour of their hair. What I found really interesting because it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on in the body is you're saying you can actually reverse grey hair without dying it? And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is, but more

31:45 broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between? Yeah. What we discovered is that hair graying 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 long time ago. This is almost like if you looked at tree rings, right? If you take a tree and you cut it in cross section, you see like the rings. and then you can say, "Oh, this ring was

32:32 30 years ago, and this ring is today." So you can use that to 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, you know, the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in the hair, you know, 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. I just got a haircut. I'm joking. And the idea

33:17 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 graying 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

34:03 this. And we found hairs that, you know, head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark and then it became white or the hair was white and it became dark again. So we had physical evidence from 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

34:49 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 period. 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? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs go like this or like that was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, 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

35:39 mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria. And there was an upregulation The body, the hair follicle, where the hair was becoming old, wasn't kind of letting go of things. It was doing more. So that means during that period of time, you were more stressed and using more energy? 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 and 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. So on that hair, what you looked at, that was gray, let's call

36:27 it. It had more mitochondria because it was struggling And why was it struggling? It looks like stress hormones can make a cell struggle, for example. Cortisol. 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, right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight, or there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolved to interpret cortisol in that way. So we did an experiment in the dish. We wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future? right? Or how much energy is it cost to ruminate about yesterday? The thing you didn't do or the mistake you made

37:17 at work or that conversation that went sideways, you know, with your partner? How much energy is that cost to be thinking about this to be, you know, engaging your stress system to be releasing cortisol? So to Two students in a lab, 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 does signal that there might be something dangerous outside. 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? So in cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really

38:04 well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure, the cost of life by 60%. So when I'm stressed, I'm using 60% more energy, theoretically. I don't know about you, but cells in a dish. So the beauty about 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. What is that graph there? 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 the hair pigmentation pattern, the HPP, that we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively, bring science to hair

38:51 graying and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark and then it became white. for two centimeters and then boom completely regained color actually regain it was darker here than it than it used to be right and then stayed dark afterwards so this is a hair that we received uh in the mail as we were starting to to collect uh two colored hairs um and then when we when we saw this we had found from a few different people White hairs that had regained color. We've 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 graying of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks.

39:40 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 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. Anyone can do the exercise, past year, most stressful time, okay, maybe last March. And then you put a dot, right, in March, number 10.

40:26 And then least stressful part, zero. And then put other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected. And it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray. Correct. 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. Oh, damn. And I went gray. Yeah. 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. There's a killer question

41:13 here, which is if that remains chronic, does does that hair follicle go gray forever? If I go through a stressful period for two to three weeks and my hair goes a bit gray, as long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible, does that hair then return to black? or dark. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. It seems like, and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like 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. Yeah. So there seems to, what the model, the mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity. right where a hair slowly accumulates damage becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient or so there's more and more energy resistance and then

42:02 there's a barrier and then when the the hair hits that threshold now it loses color it's done yeah but then if something changes in the body right, you go on 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. Okay. So it suggests some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for some 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, where you can reverse gray hair. Yes. I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think, because

42:51 you added a layer of nuance there, which is about the mind. Like if I go through my life with a more resilient mind, and you get that bad email, and you go, and I get the bad email, I go, fuck it, I guess. Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24 hours, because my mitochondria are using less energy, because there's less cortisol? 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 beat 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 like rumination mode and then this thing, and then it makes you think about your childhood and this, and then the anxiety, and then you

43:39 start to sweat. Like everything costs energy. So the chain of events is I get the email. It's a very bad email. It says, "You're fired, Stephen, from the Diverviseer. We found a different host." I look at the email. That goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever, which then causes a physiological response of chemicals like cortisol. which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy, which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day. Is that sequence of events? I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to

44:27 intervene at some point. Yes. That's the right way to think about it. Don't open the laptop. Or get a little bit better with bad news. Yeah. Or learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to feel and 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. - Yeah, become aware of it, yeah. - 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, right? The awareness, the somatic awareness or interoception. So if you feel into your bodily responses, you become free of, do I mount a response? Is that needed now

45:15 or not? There's different types of stress, right? There's like the acute stress, which is just, you get the email, you feel a little bit of a spike, but five minutes later, you're fine. And then there's the more chronic type of stress where you're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many, many days in a row, many weeks in a row. I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful, but it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage. Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body? If it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained. How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I'm really struggling with understanding it Maybe one good example to frame this is exercise. When you start to exercise,

46:03 there's increased resistance in your muscle. 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 you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard, like you're running, you're sprinting, you're doing interval training. Now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking. And so that imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now the product of this, the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance. So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your sprint, but you don't have a lot of mitochondria, it's gonna feel terrible. And then because the resistance creeps up and then your muscle

46:51 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 exercise is 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 to sleep. During the decrease in the 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 next, I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato to training for a marathon. You can double the

47:39 amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the rise in resistance. 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 what where the benefits of exercise come from. This spike in, and why stress is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process, it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with less resistance. Coming back to this gray hair thing. So if we consider gray hair, my hair going gray, to be the last

48:25 domino that fell, so like the symptom, then what is the first domino? And can you walk me through the sequence of events? Because one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events, I can also understand how do them reverse it. I've got a couple of gray hairs now. And I actually anecdotally do think, weirdly, now you've said this, that I have gray hair flare-ups. where I'll go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something, and I'll look at them and be like, "What? I have 12 now?" I'm being generous there, there's more like 25. I have 25 now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that falls? And what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair and 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

49:13 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. Do you know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? Yeah. So Maslow's insight was Oh my god, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just... Acute stress response. Yeah, cortisol flood. Sorry. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. 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

50:02 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 becoming 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, right? Your meditation practice or the long-term type, like I'm going to be a better person. No, like I need to make sure we can put food on

50:49 the table next week, right? So this hierarchy of human needs, I think, aligns with hierarchy of 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 their mitochondria are working a little you know less efficiently and 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 things. processes in the body and those need energy, but they're not

51:37 as important as facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening now. So if there's a lion chasing me, my body is going to commit all the energy I have to getting away from this lion. And it might say, listen, Stephen, we're not going to repair the skin next to your eyes. You're going to get a couple more wrinkles and we're not going to make your, we're not going to commit energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever. So I would then look aged. I would look old, older, but that's because all of my energy has been going to something else, which my body considered to be a high priority. Correct. Which also brings me to, I guess, the famous, what we always talk about with presidents, because presidents go into office often with dark hair, and they come out with grey hair. And usually one does not age that quickly in eight years. We

52:24 see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day, they look very sprightly and energetic. And two years later, they have grey hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles, and they look like they've aged 10 years. So you're telling me actually that the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is this is 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. Can I also pull more energy in the top? Like, can I just, if I get more energy, does that mean that there's less likelihood that we're going to

53:13 run out of energy when it comes to my hair follicles being black or gray? Yeah. The thing is, it doesn't look like we have that flexibility. Like, if you want to have more energy and you want to age more slowly, eating more is not going to give you more energy. So is there anything I can do to have more energy available? You can become more efficient. I can become more efficient, but I can't put more in? No. And how does one become more efficient then? You know, you said about stress, okay, I'm going to live a less stressed life. Yeah. It seems like there's a few things that we know makes organism more efficient. One is exercising. Okay. Right? 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, right? Oxidative

54:00 stress and all sorts of things happen during the process. 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, You spend an hour in the gym telling the body, this is what we're gonna do in the future. And then the body's like, okay, I'm

54:47 gonna 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 energy 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 flowing more smoothly through this thing. It's more efficient. I've got more mitochondria. Yeah. Okay. What else? What about

55:34 food? And I've got... I've got coffee here. I've got some alcohol here. I've got the sugar. What I consume, how does that impact the efficiency of the energy flowing through my body? Yeah, great question. Alcohol, what we know about alcohol is that, as we talked about earlier, nothing is free in biology, right? 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

56:19 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, in 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, they 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? Then you ask them to not do too much. In the smaller room, they're just sitting down and reading a book. And then you can ask them, okay, now

57:08 drink this alcohol. And then you measure, you look, you know, 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 our health may be because they steal energy away from, you know, a growing body, for example. There's good data in South America, children who are exposed to more pathogens, right? There's no sanitation, they walk barefoot, they eat stuff that's not clean, then they have more pathogens in their gut, right? There's more virus, bacteria and parasites. It costs energy to fight those

57:56 things off. That's why you feel like shit when you're burning, when you're fighting a flu, for example, right? Your immune system, your immune cells are like, whoa, you know, virus like COVID or, you know, any, you know, seasonal flu virus. The immune system goes into overdrive to kill this virus and get rid of it. And then that 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, overcovers, 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

58:43 be understood as energy conservation strategies. Stressors, alcohol, parasites, all kind of have this increased cost of living. And then because there's a cap on your energy budget, then that energy needs to be coming from somewhere else. And if you're in those states for long periods of time, you're in a chronic state of, I guess, like energetic distraction is the way I think about it. That's a cool way to think about it. I was thinking about it like if you... My body has an army of 10 soldiers. And usually those 10 soldiers are like at work doing the things that I need to do to survive and grow and flourish. And then when I have one of these, I don't know, some sort of toxic substance comes into my body, you're basically saying that four of those soldiers have to be reassigned to go deal with

59:29 this invader. And so now I only have six that are focused on everything I need to flourish, which is why I probably feel shit sometimes. Yeah, exactly. And if there's only six working on my, you know, fundamental requirements to flourish, then some of those things are going to have to give way. And I might end up with gray hair and I might end up with wrinkles or... maybe my brain won't function the same, maybe a disease, my immune system won't be taken care of in the same way. Yeah, 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 DNA that's gotten damaged or making you mitochondria. All of

1:00:14 these processes happen like every day. Every day you go through a little phase of getting rid of the things that don't work too well to make more of the things that work well, like mitochondria, quality control it's called. 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 efficient here. So let's get rid of those mitochondria that aren't really contributing their share. And then I'll have just a best functioning mitochondria. And then when food comes back

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