Anti-Aging Expert: This Reverses Gray Hair & Boosts Your Energy!

This is incontrovertible evidence that growing of 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 going to be in your hair. He's got a haircut. I'm 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. Can you, can you, 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 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. Okay. And we found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure by 60%, right? 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 in 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 you feel. Well, I've read that studies on brains of dead people have found that those with a greater sense of purpose have more efficient mitochondria. Yes, we are really in service of the mitochondria. They allow us to be alive. Becky, 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 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. Yeah, we think there's increased energy resistance in cancer, in 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... Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Dr. Martin Pickard, what is it that you believe, know, or understand that most people out there don't believe, know, or understand? We are energy. We literally are the energy that's flowing through the body. Mm-hmm. 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 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, you know, at a time. Yeah. 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. It'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 who with, you know, lived experiences, who's gone through some tough things that have taught me lessons and have gone through wonderful things 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. Yeah. 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, you know, said, yes, energy is real. It's in your mind. 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 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. Yeah, 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, 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 a formative moment in your career? I took this video in England, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, with my majority friends at the medical school there. I was a 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 ourselves. 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 we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and keep on living. So when I saw this, it's 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 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 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 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. So the source of heat, right, that makes us warm, you shake someone's hand, you feel their warmth, you're feeling the warmth of their mitochondria. So is there a mitochondria in every single cell in my body? There's, on average, 1,000 mitochondria per cell. Per cell? Yes. 1,000. So how many is there in my body? About 5,000 trillion. Who should care about the mitochondria and why should they care about it? Anyone who cares about their energy. Okay. 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. Like you're not at your best, you feel tired. And you feel like maybe it's not worth it. You know, when you're sick and your immune system is like draining all of your energy, it's really hard to be optimistic. And it's hard to be 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. Yeah. You know, we breathe in, we eat food, and then how we feel is kind of roulette. Yeah. There's this certain, I think, feeling a lot of us have that we can't really control that much. Mm-hmm. 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. So there are three things that are really foundational to how energy works 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, Steven. Yeah. 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. Yeah. and the genes that you got from your parents and the body, the physical body, and that's the real stuff. What you can't see with your eyes, not real, right? 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 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. Those signals we call inflammation cytokines. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. Okay, we'll talk about that too then because I think stress is a really important one. What's the third? The third one 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 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 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. And the green leaf basically breaks or stops the photon in its path. So it offers a constraint. 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 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. Yeah. Okay, so this is an image of a mitochondria? A mitochondria, 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. Okay. 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 Christi. And the Christi is where the food you eat end up and where the oxygen you 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 and says, I need ATP. And then the mitochondria gets to work and then flows through, electrons consume some food, burn some oxygen. That's why you get out of breath, right? So when you get out of breath is because the mitochondria are using the oxygen and calling for more oxygen. What we've been discovering is that mitochondria do a lot more than just making ATP. Okay. 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? 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 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...