ZOE Science & Nutrition - Do you want to die? How Bryan Johnson plans to cheat death

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Could optimizing your sleep significantly extend your lifespan? In this episode, we dive deep into the science of longevity with Bryan Johnson, the entrepreneur spending millions to reverse aging, and Professor Tim Spector, one of the world’s top 100 most-cited scientists and an expert in nutrition and the microbiome. Bryan has dedicated his life—and his body—to testing cutting-edge health interventions to slow down aging. His meticulous approach to sleep, diet, and exercise has sparked global debate. But how much of it is backed by science? Tim Spector joins the conversation to separate fact from fiction, revealing what actually works when it comes to sleep, longevity, and optimizing health. 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member at zoe.com - 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+ Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 No.1 anti aging hack 02:05 Quickfire questions 04:01 Bryan’s longevity protocol 06:20 Biological age markers 08:16 How to measure aging 13:40 Can AI help stop aging? 18:50 What science can we trust? 21:40 Bryan’s self-experiments 25:40 The most surprising sleep discovery 31:20 The McDonald’s diet 34:10 How to self experiment 37:15 Transfusing his son’s blood 39:50 Fecal transplants 41:26 Is Bryan’s daily diet healthy? 46:30 Truth about vitamin supplements 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Mentioned in today's episode Reviewing the cardiovascular and other health effects of olive oil: Limitations and future directions of current supplement formulations, 2023, published in Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases  Mortality Associated with Short Sleep Duration: The Evidence, The Possible Mechanisms, and The Future, 2011, published in Sleep Medicine Reviews  Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration: A prospective cohort study, 2024, published in Sleep https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad253/7280269 Objectively Assessed Cardiorespiratory Fitness and All-Cause Mortality Risk, 2022, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Here on the ZOE Podcast, we show you how to make the best health choices every single day. But let's be real, consistency is hard. You might eat the odd pizza, fail to go to the gym, or stay out dancing and get a bad night's sleep. You're human, so that's okay. But have you ever dreamed of what would happen if you followed the perfect lifestyle? Every moment of the day meticulously designed to achieve peak health.

No slip-ups, no off days and definitely no processed pizza. Do you think you could avoid illness, halt aging or even cheat death? Well Brian Johnson is putting this to the test. He's been spending two million dollars every year in the relentless pursuit of perfect health. Brian and his team of 30 doctors have one goal, don't let Brian die. So is it working? Joining me to find out is Tim Spector.

Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, a professor of epidemiology and my scientific co-founder at ZOE. By the end of this episode, you'll know the most valuable health insights that money can buy and learn practical ways to integrate them into your lifestyle. And if you listen to this podcast a lot, you probably know all too well that if you type a nutrition question into YouTube, you'll get dozens of conflicting answers. Forget all that.

We all deserve science-led food recommendations, which is why our scientists created Zoe's personalized nutrition program. Zoe runs the world's largest nutrition science study. When you become a Zoe member, we send you an at-home test kit that measures a number of biomarkers, which we then analyze and combine with our world-leading science, all to guide you towards better health for life. A few weeks later, you get a personalised nutrition programme that helps you eat for your body.

No more guessing, no more YouTube rabbit holes, no more relying on half-baked advice from that well-intentioned friend. Instead, choose science. Visit zoe.com to get your at-home test kit and personalized nutrition program. And did we mention that your test kit includes the most advanced home gut health tests in the world? Okay, let's get on with the podcast. Here's Brian Johnson and Professor Tim Spector. Brian, thank you for joining me today. Glad to be here. and Professor Tim Spector. Brian, thank you for joining me today. Glad to be here.

It's a pleasure. And Tim, thanks for being here as well. Yeah, it's gonna be great. So Brian, we have a tradition here at Zoey where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. We're very strict rules. You can say yes or no,

or if you have to, a one sentence answer. You willing to give it a go? Yes, let's do it. All right. Did you spend $2 million a year to slow your speed of aging? Yes. Do you think you can halt aging? Yes.

Do you hope to prevent your own death? Yes. Have you discovered steps to slow aging that anyone can adopt? Yes. Tim, I'm 49 years old. If I have the right lifestyle, could my body's biological age be a lot younger than that?

Definitely. Can the right diet slow down aging? Absolutely. And Brian, you can have a whole sentence for this. What's the most common misconception about aging? That you can do something about it. Life choices can make a meaningful difference in the way and the speed at which someone ages.

I think that's amazing. And I think those answers are like really striking. And so I'm very excited to sort of go through this through the podcast. I'd also say that this is the first episode we've ever recorded in a guest's house. And it feels very appropriate given today's focus because instead of diving into like a specific nutrition or science topic, we're basically talking about the science of you, Briar, today. You know, your lifestyle, your routines, the choices you make, you know, right here under this roof and especially in this kitchen because you're

conducting a scientific experiment on yourself, aren't you? I am. And then you're sharing it with the world. You basically say that the choices you've been following put you in the top 1% for a whole variety of health markers from muscle mass to inflammation, and you've now slowed your rate of aging to be, I think, better than 99% to 20-year-olds? That's right. So I'd like to start by talking about sort of how you got here. So can I start with what is Project Blueprint and why did you start it? Every generation going back hundreds in thousands of years they pose questions about what is possible and you know in the 1960s it was you know can we

go to the moon or in early 2000s late 1990s early 2000, it was, can we go to the moon? Or in early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s, it was, can we sequence the human genome? And so humans posed these big questions. Can we do a given thing? And I wondered if the relevant question for our time and place was, will we be the first generation to not die? I love the question. How does Project Blueprint fit into that? We wanted to approach this question scientifically.

And so I hired 30 medical professionals and we went through this process where we evaluated all the scientific literature on health span, lifespan. We tried to grade the evidence that we could identify that, you know, do we think, for example, a given therapy, let's say it slows down the speed of aging or reverses aging damage to a certain degree, do we believe the evidence? And then we stack ranked all the evidence and said,

okay, we have our list and let's just start with number one and let's do that therapy or that measurement. And so we had a firm principle that we would do everything based upon measurement and scientific evidence. And so I became the most measured person in human history. There's more data on my body than anyone before me. And we've just gone through this process of measurement application of the science and again and again. And I think it's possible that I have the, they have the best comprehensive health markers of anybody in the world. Take 50 different markers from my sleep quality to my inflammation levels to uric acid to muscle to

fat to take any marker. We're going to share this actually in the next coming days, but it's really a contemplation of what does health look like and comprehensively from how you sleep to what your microbiome looks like to your biological age, your methylation patterns. So we really have tried to just do this by the data and numbers and with as little storytelling as possible. And Brian, when you say the best possible markers, do you mean the best possible markers for someone of your age or are you saying that like're better than my 16-year-old son? In every biological age marker, there's typically an ideal age. For example, in grip strength, as you grow older, you increase in grip strength capacity.

Then you hit a certain age, you decline in grip capacity. That is true for a lot of things. That's your cardiovascular fitness. It peaks at age 18 and then declines from there. And so we've tried to identify the peak health level of every category of every marker, and we try to peg that. So we say, what is peak cardiovascular fitness

for an 18 year old? And then how do I achieve that? So for example, my cardiovascular fitness is equal to top 1.5% of 18 year olds as measured by VO2 max. We completed a test today looking at oxygenation of muscles and so that's also a marker of age. So my oxygenation of my muscle is the top 5% of 18 year olds, elite swimmers.

So we try to find peak levels and then peg my markers to that as best we can. If I understand rightly, you are saying that, yes, you are better than my 16 year old son, basically on all of these markers. Yes. I mean, if you basically said, I could, conventional wisdom would say a 47 year old could never be as healthy as a 16 year old. Now in certain regards, that's probably true, right? They have the anatomy of a 16-year-old,

they have anatomy of a 47-year-old, and there's just some things our technologies can't do today. However, if you compare the 16-year-old and me on these markers, inflammation, sleep quality, cardiovascular ability, bone marrow density down the line, it's possible my health markers are in fact better than the 16-year-olds. That's amazing. Now, you mentioned already something about sort of pace of aging. the line, it's possible my health markers are in fact better than these 16 year olds. That's amazing.

Now you mentioned already something about sort of pace of aging. It sort of came up a little bit at the beginning, these questions about like, can you halt aging? And you said, yes, you hope to be able to halt aging and prevent your own death. How do you measure aging? And so what does it mean when you say you want to halt it? Yeah, we are measuring the biological age of my organs through a few different modalities, actually a ton of modalities, but you can take the heart, for example, you can measure the biological age of the heart anatomically to say what kind of cells are in there,

what does it look like? You can also measure from a functional perspective, you know, what is your resting heart rate? What is your max heart rate? And so we try to look at every single organ according to the anatomy and every organ according to the function and then also the biological processes. And this speed of aging you're talking about is DNA methylation. So our body expresses certain patterns in terms of the way it expresses these methylation patterns and they're called epigenetic clocks. And so the science began emergent a few years ago We thought it was very promising and so we started measuring my epigenetic age every week for the past few years

so I'm the most methylated measured person in the world and we've tried to titrate what things increase speed of aging and which things slow speed of aging and I think it was actually interesting. There was a paper published last week with Yale and it was a 16 epigenetic clocks trying to find macro patterns of like what increased speed of aging, what things decreased speed of aging. And so in doing this, I started with my speed of aging just over one, which is faster than normal and now my speed of aging is 0.64. And to make this fun, I created an Olympic sport.

I created the RejuvenationOlympics.com. And I said, all right, everybody in the world, we're going to play a fun game. Test your speed of aging using these DNA methylation clocks and see who gets the lowest score. And so it's been a really fun thing because in health and wellness, people like to flex their health. You know, they like to signal to others like my testosterone level is this, or I do a cold plunge this, or I do sauna, like people like to really share what they're doing.

And oftentimes it's storytelling more than data. And I wanted to say, can we find one marker that's just fun to compete on that everybody can do easily? And it's like a nice comparison point. So that's been a lot of fun to get people excited that you can actually quantifiably measure the body. I think that's quite funny. I agree that I quite like to talk about

the really healthy food I have, but I don't like to talk about the entire bar of chocolate that I eat on the couch at 10.30 PM. So here you're saying there's like one number that you can't escape from. Has anyone beaten your number? Yes, I'm currently number, I think five or six in the world. And so what's been fun about this is when I started this,

I said like, my goal is not to be number one. I mean, I'd love to be number one, but my goal is to help others beat me. So I'm going to share everything I do. And then if you can take what I do and improve upon it, that's better than just share with everyone else. And so I met some person the other day that's, I think, number two or number three. He's a biochemist. And I said, what are you doing? He said, nothing. I do absolutely nothing for my health. And I said, amazing. And he said, I think I have a hypothesis

on like what genetic profile I have, which leads me to basically have this as a genetic disposition. So that's what I think the positive benefit here is that when this data is shared and the community is involved, people can then start saying, here's me, here's what I do. And then everyone learns much faster.

So that was a cool thing of like, you've got me doing a whole bunch of stuff, him who does nothing, but yet he's still beating me just by a point. I used to have the same thing with my gut health. Within when we started in the company, I was sort of number one, and then we started making it public,

and I kept dropping down the rankings as other people said, hey, I'm above you, Tim. But yeah, it is great to get people involved in these things and you realize as you expand it, you can't be number one for very long. I actually had dinner with one of my friends a little while ago who had just completed the ZOE test, and he measured his microbiome as part of this,

and he showed me his results. And I was like, I felt it was so unfair. He had like 48 of the 50 good bugs. He hadn't, he just started, he hadn't done anything to change his diet. I've been struggling through years, like slowly picking this up. So there can be something quite frustrating I think about, I can imagine the person beating you who's done nothing, he might be like, but I'm working so hard. But I love the idea of the shared information. Sort of want to come back to another one

of those first questions, because you were saying that you thought you could halt aging completely, which I guess means you go from 0.64 to like a rate of aging of zero. Yeah. Is that really possible? Yeah, so I think the most sober answer to this question

is we do not know right now how to achieve that. I don't think it's possible with current technology and current science to actually are rest aging. So what I really am excited about is I think that if you evaluate the speed at which artificial intelligence is advancing, it's possible that we will achieve decades, if not a century, worth of progress in the coming years. When we have more intelligence to help us do the research and the discovery, that we will experience a renaissance. And so what I'm really trying to do is I'm trying to say from like the broadest perspective,

if you imagine being present in the 25th century, so a few hundred years into the future, and they're looking back at us right now, just like we look back at the 15th century and we say like, of course that thing happened and then it flourished and that dimension was made and it's so obvious it could have been done. I think the 25th century would say about this moment, they would say, oh, of course that's when humans figured out that they were transitioning from death being inevitable to extending their lifespans to some unknown horizon. Not that we had solved immortality, but that we had acquired the basic technological and medical ability to say there's legitimate reasons to have hope that we

may be in a new era of being human. And that doesn't just mean that you're going to make it to be a hundred and be healthy. You're like imagining you could be 200 or 300 or a thousand or something like that. Exactly. Two things. One is I don't think anyone can say anything intelligent about the human race even one year from now. I think that's how fast things are changing. I think our ability to guess is increasingly having a lower probability.

And then number two is there's never been a reason to have more excitement. That we really are becoming a new thing. And so yeah, this is not about me thinking that can be 80, 120, 140. I think we would artificially limit our imagination. I think it's proper to say we don't know how long and how well we can live with no constraint. And Brian, just listening to all of this, do you see yourself as a role model or a test subject? And I'm sort of thinking you were describing

like going to the moon before, and I'm thinking about all of those crazy test pilots who go on like really dangerous things to go to the moon. And in the end, we just get on planes a lot. We've never had to take that same risk. So are you, should we end up all living like you, or are you sort of like showing us the future, but hopefully there'll be an easier way for the rest of us?

Yeah, I think about it from a historical perspective, where if you look back to history, we exist in a few large ideological systems. So I'd say if you go back to like Confucius, where he said, you know, the societal structures about this familiar relationship where it's very common in the Eastern world. And then Buddha said, hey, there's, you know, like the ego death and the fourfold path and reincarnation. He introduced this philosophy. And then Muhammad said, submit to God. Jesus said,

I am the son of God. Adam Smith said, there's this invisible hand and markets and capitalism. America said, we the people. Karl Marx said, it's class warfare. So like over time, these ideologies have emerged to address new technological and social abilities. And I think right now is the first time in about 2000 years where a new ideology could emerge the species. And so I don't view this as something just trying to be fit. I don't see this as something trying to live forever. It really is.

I think we are in a moment where there is this opening to reimagine existence wholesale from the perspective of when death is inevitable, we do things a certain way. When we can stand our lifespans, it's very different. And that's where I do this Don't Die framework where Don't Die I'm proposing is the new ideology for us as a species, politically, economically, morally, socially, ethically, spiritually, religiously. That just like democracy changed the way we run government, Don't Die is the new operating system of humanity across everything we do.

That is definitely a bigger conversation than we've ever had on the Zoe podcast before. So I'm a bit blown away by that. I'm going to have to think about it. On this pathway, and when you were figuring this out, how did you decide which scientific studies will be implemented into Blueprint? I'd say it's both a science and an art Tim, as you probably would say that it's. But a guesswork. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure.

I think if you maybe asked five scientists for approaches to how to choose the best evidence, you probably would find some commonalities, you know, like, but I would also guess you'd probably find a lot of disagreement in terms of how to decide. Say probably much more than art. There's a science, but we did our best. Yeah. We, of course, we've tried to go try to use gold standard studies for best with possible and things like that.

We prefer animal models over human models over animal models, et cetera. But once you get to lower gradients, it's just harder, more discernments required. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March, 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help us live longer and healthier lives. We've spoken to leading scientists around the world doing amazing research. And across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry.

At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life. And you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash free guide, or click the link in the show notes and do let me know what you think of it. Okay, back to the show. I actually would love to bring Tim in here because I mean a lot of listeners to the show, Brian are Zoe members, which means they've done this at home test and they've got this

app which has given them all this advice to understand like what's best for them. And Tim, you and the other scientists at ZOE constantly spend a lot of time trying to understand based upon our own research, but a lot of external studies, right? What is the best science to use? How do you think about like, because people often use this word, I looked at the scientific literature and it tells me what to do. How did you do that? Yeah, well, the bar is slightly different to Brian because Brian is trying to say, everything that might possibly work, let's give it a go.

In a way, what we're trying to do for our Zoe members is distill the science and give some practical tips to people that we are pretty sure are going to work rather than, hey, it's got a one in a hundred chance. So definitely we take the gold standard, which is the randomized controlled trial with whatever it is, whether it's a lifestyle intervention versus something else, or it's a vitamin or a pill or against a dummy. And that's generally what we've done. And that's what we believe in at Zoey and even our own products we use in that way. And Tim, why don't you just wait a mouse study? Why doesn't that tell you what we should do?

Because mouse and humans are quite different. They have very short lifespans, two to three years compared to us. And the way the studies are done, they're often flawed. They're often highly inbred genetic mice that aren't resembling normal people out in the wild population, so it may not be generalizable. Often a lot of the research, you can do 10 experiments that only report on the one that works. There's often an inherent bias in a lot of these studies. A lot of people are very skeptical. They're quite useful to give you a new idea and then go and test it to humans.

But on their own, a bit like test tube studies, you can get cells of the body and you add chemicals to it and you can see, oh, this has a big effect or it doesn't. But it's not real life because that test tube isn't in the complexity of the human body and understanding it all. So that's why there's a whole gradient of evidence between all these that makes it really hard and that's why, in a way, Brian had such a hard time with these 30 experts trying to study how do we rank these things in order. And particularly in this whole area of aging and longevity, there's a lack of

a really good randomized studies. Yeah. So I think I've got a picture now, both of what you're trying to do, Brian, which is pretty amazing. The fact there's quite a lot of limitations, it sounds like, on the science that can just tell you what you should do and there's these different areas and it looks like you're nodding away and saying that. So I understand a big part of your approach is basically to be your own test subject and

to sort of track and measure your own health over time because at the end of the day you care about your own outcome and you can start to sort of push forward the science by doing these studies on yourself. Yes. So I'd love maybe just to understand a bit more about that and maybe starting with like, I know you mentioned before like 50 measurements and everything, but I don't know whether it's possible to collapse that down to like what are the most important measurements for you as you think about your overall health and that you track?

Yeah, if you start on the things that most people agree upon, I think you could start and say, okay, being obese is not a good idea. That generally speaking is not recommended, that it doesn't lead to good health outcomes. You could also say, you know, having a poor cardiovascular ability is also not a good idea. It doesn't lead to good outcomes. And so we've taken what would be some of the most sturdy measurements, you know, in health and wellness. We've said, okay, these markers, these health markers indicate optimal health. And we see that across the body. So we've taken those as the sturdy markers. And then we've taken the evidence and said, okay, now we can play with the scientific evidence.

But really what we care about are the markers. We care about what my cardiovascular ability is. We care about my speed of aging is. We care about using MRI, what it says for my brain age or the size of my hippocampus, my gray matter, my white matter. And so we've tried to say, what does an 18-year-old body look like and how does it function? And can my body look like and function like an 18-year-old in all these different aspects? Do you check your immune system, like your inflammation levels and things like that? Because I think that's quite an important one in aging, isn't it?

We do, yeah. So we track high sensitivity, CRP, for example. Yeah, we look at ILS. So we look at a bunch of factors, yes. You've got all of these markers and it sounds like they're not the same ones as when I just go and see my physician, but I didn't recognize a lot of the things you're talking about. So they're pretty different from when I just go and see my doctor and he's like, your LDL is high.

That's right. So there's, you know, typically doctors have like the most common access they have is a blood draw. So they're looking at it's the typical panel of cholesterol markers, triglycerides, red blood cell count, white blood cell count, et cetera. And you know, things they're not looking at, for example, your sleep data. And so we know there's sleep patterns, for example, where as you age, it gets increasingly hard to get restful sleep. And it manifests, for example, where it takes a longer time

to fall asleep. You're up more times the night than you would before. You get less deep sleep, less REM sleep, overall less restorative sleep. And that has negative effects on the body. And so you can actually age profile and say, what is an optimal sleep pattern for a late teen or the 20s person? And that's sort of the metrics we use for that. So yes, like the doctor looks at basic things, but nowhere even approaching the comprehensive set of markers across lifestyle and other things like that, yeah.

And so if you think about the bloods and sleep, is there any other like big area that I think probably our listeners wouldn't even think about that you're, you're measuring? Let me give you maybe an unexpected one. Nighttime tumescence, uh, nighttime erections. I was not expecting you to say that. So first on this show, let's, uh, let's follow it in. So this was an accidental marker where we were doing a therapy, electromagnetic

stimulation to rebuild. So we were trying to optimize. I was getting up to go to the bathroom one time per night in my sleep and getting up to go to the bathroom is disruptive for you. You're waking up and you have to go back to sleep. It's just better to go back to sleep. It's just better to sleep the entire night. And so we were trying to get me to zero wake events. And so to do that, I was trying to build bladder strength. The hypothesis was if I had a stronger bladder control,

then I would be able to not get up from the other bathroom. And that was also, we were reducing the amount of fluids I was drinking after four, so we were trying this two-prong approach. And in doing this, I sat on this, I have this device in the clinic upstairs, and it was stimulating my muscles for my bladder. And it had this weird side effect where every time I woke up, I was experiencing a nighttime erection. And so I asked my team, like, why is this happening? And we started then looking at the research literature and we discovered that nighttime tumescence is a significant marker of health. An average 18 year old has on average just over two and a half hours of nighttime erections.

And it's a significant marker of cardiovascular, physiological and sexual health. And that as you age, it goes down. So like an average 70 year old would be down to less than 50 minutes per night. And if you're getting four to six hours of sleep a night, they go away entirely. And people who are not having nighttime erections are 70% more likely to die of prematurity. And so it's a topic that is comical where you hear the word, it's like, that's funny because it's kind

of sexual and kind of weird, but also it's a pattern that repeats in males and females. So both genders, and it happens primarily in your REM sleep, the majority of it does. And so in that marker, yeah, my nighttime erections are three hours and eight minutes. So the length of the Titanic, which is better than an average 18-year-old significantly. So in that marker, my body,

so this is not something where like I'm running on a race, I'm just going to sleep and my body is having these natural physiological cycles that are better than the average 18 year old. And so like things like that, of course, you wouldn't even know this marker exists. There's no way a doctor would measure it. I was actually going to ask, because you talked about measurement and that everything is measured. So have you got some sort of, like are you wearing special equipment now when you go to bed in order to measure this?

Yeah, you can use a little cube. It's about a centimeter cubed. It has a little strap. You just put it on the base of the penis and you think it would be uncomfortable. It's actually just fine. You put it on, you forget about it, and then you go to sleep and it measures the engorgement of the penis. So it measures the engorgement size and also the duration so a typical night the average male will have between three and five erection episodes with different strength and different durations and so there's parameters on what is an ideal strength and duration. And do you have patches on all over your bits of your body then when you go to sleep? Is it quite complicated to get in your pajamas?

No. So I have a bed that measures my sleep patterns and then I have a wearable on my wrist. And then occasionally, I don't do the erections every night. I just do it like once a month or so. Yeah. So pretty minimal. Okay. Yeah.

I was starting to get this vision of you sort of wired up in a hundred ways every time you go to sleep, but that's not right. Pretty minimal. Okay. Yep. Yeah. I was starting to get this vision of you sort of wired up in a hundred ways every time you go to sleep, but that's, that's not right. But I, you know, I did, uh, I did have, I have the best recorded sleep score in history, so I have eight months of perfect sleep using a wearable, uh, something that many people who've had wearables for years, they haven't done in one night. So I wanted to do, uh, I wanted to show that you can achieve high quality sleep, you know, if you actually put your mind to it and create systems. But yeah, I

think anyone's even gotten close to being that. I'd love to come, I guess, to what is having the most significant impact on those markers. So you're talking about all these different ways in which you're measuring your health, you know, and then I think you're into like, okay, so what can I change in order to improve? And that's my takeaway. And like, what are the most significant things that you can do to really make a difference to aging? Okay.

Yes. I would say four things. And these are all things that everybody can do with really minimal budget. So one is sleep, two is exercise, three is a good diet, and then four is to try to drop the bad habits. Those are really the power laws. So sleep, exercise, nutrition, and dropping the bad habits. That's it.

And bad habits, I'm guessing this is like smoking and drinking too much and things like that, that you sort of know are bad habits. Exactly, we all kind of know, yep. Before we start to move into all of this, Tim, you know, like you're one of the world's top 100 scientists, like very, very credible in the traditional science. When you talked about, you know, traditional science, you do these big randomized control trials with, you know, hundreds of people under very strong

conditions, you're sitting there, you know, listening to Brian with almost exact opposite, right? Like he's conducting his experiments on himself. Have you ever done this? I confess I have actually. So although I've been studying my twins for 30 years, 15,000 of them who are probably the best studied research subjects in the world, there were some things you can't do on those twins.

And a lot of them is things like diet. There is no way ethically to do some of these experiments. When I had my mini stroke back in 2011, I wanted to test myself in various ways, change my diet and I've been doing a lot of experiments. So going vegan for six weeks was one of them measuring my blood pressure when I tried to restrict salt and Finding no difference interestingly as many people also have done then Went on the French cheese diet to see if

really a high fat with virtually zero carbs for three days how I would feel. I wanted to do multiple experiments rather than I couldn't imagine myself only eating cheese for the rest of my life. It turned out that my microbes didn't change in that time in the way I'd hoped them to. Then I got more into feeling the gut microbiome and fermentation and actually was going to do another experiment about McDonald's and was going to eat 10 days only at McDonald's and see what the effect on my gut microbes.

And luckily another volunteer who liked McDonald's was hard up for cash and also happened to be my son, Stepford, did the experiment for me and ended up losing about 25% of his gut microbes in that 10 days. Can I share, I think that's a brilliant thing that I wanted to ask about because I think one question I think a lot of listeners will have listened to this is, is it safe to experiment on my health? And you just gave

an example where it sounds like the outcome wasn't good. So how should people, you know, if you were going to advise anyone listening to this, thinking about experimenting with their health, but wanting to do it safely, what would you be saying, Tim? I think it's reasonable to explore, particularly, you say, sleep, exercise, and food. If you do it for short periods of time and you're not going to overdo it, it's probably reasonably safe if you don't have any other medical conditions and you're fairly young and healthy. For example, the McDonald's diet, 10 days was too long.

We didn't know that at the time that actually you could really sort of harm your gut microbes in a way that you hadn't thought about it. Whereas just doing it for a 48 hours would probably be fine. You'd probably recover. I think everything I believe in now is about self experimentation because everyone is different and learning what sleep is good for you, how much exercise is good for you, what the right diets, you know, what are personalized to you, or you should be on a high fat or a high carb diet.

These all require some self experimentation, you know, if you don't have access to things like Zoe program. But I think I would do it for short periods of time. You know, the danger is if you overdo it and in areas we don't fully understand. And I think the gut microbiome was one, certainly when we did this 10 years ago, we didn't understand quite how harmful some of these practices could be.

But I think we should really, yeah, everyone should be encouraged to some extent to do self-experimentation. Do you agree with that? Yeah. I mean, life is an experiment. So whether someone is actively opting into experiment, they are experimenting every second of every day. So when you decide to go to bed, you're doing an experiment. When you choose something from the menu,

you're experimenting. Like every decision you make is an experiment. So the question is whether you have data just to inform you of the results of your experiment. So the question is whether you have data just to inform you of the results of your experiment. But what I think is really cool is that we've learned that just with food if you just record how you feel a few hours after eating it in a notebook or something you can get a pretty good idea of where that food does agree with you or not and these are things we never thought of before because we always assumed we were all the same. We will respond to exercise, food and sleep the same way. But, you know, the experiments Brian's doing, you know, very methodical, very technical, but I think everyone can just make

a mental note to think about how they feel. How does it make them feel? And I think if more people did that, you know, we'd be headed in a much better direction. Yes. that, you know, we'd be headed in a much better direction. Yes. Hi, I have a small favour to ask. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions. And watching this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoey to keep up the really hard work of creating new episodes each week.

So right now, if you could share a link to the show with one friend who would benefit from today's information, it would mean a great deal to me. Thank you. I'm just thinking about the way that you've said that in a way everybody's life is an experiment. You clearly have a lot of support infrastructure here, right? So you're not randomly guessing at what you want to do. How might someone who's thinking about what you're doing,

like apply it to themselves without the financial resources and everything you're able to bring to bear and wanting to make sure that they're not gonna hurt themselves, they're more likely to benefit than not? Yeah, there's a bunch of really easy starting points. So for example, in our evaluation of scientific literature, we couldn't find any evidence to suggest that McDonald's should be part of one's daily diet.

I think that it seems pretty safe to say. We didn't find any evidence that, you know, a bedtime that varies by four or five hours a night is a good idea. We didn't find any evidence to suggest that no exercise is a good idea. And so when you start from the negative perspective of like, what can we discern from that perspective, you can narrow down a lot of the option space. And then you get on the other side,

most people spend their majority of their time in these highly technical conversations of like, is fresh salmon better than farm salmon? And like, you know, these comparative things, fine, that you can have that conversation. But on the other side, there's a bunch of easy decisions you can make that have very powerful effects in your life. And that's where I would start for most people is it's the big life habits which are the most powerful things they're the hardest but they also deliver the best results. So I'm going to want to turn to that in a minute but there is one question that I have to ask, we had a lot of listeners ask us about it because some of your experiments have gained a lot of

notoriety and I've been told that in one of those you try to slow your aging by transfusing the blood of your, I think, 17-year-old son into your own body. Are you still doing this? Yeah. So the way that happened is my father is 71 years old. He called me one day in a panic and he said, I just had this traumatic event where I was writing a thing for work. I stepped away from my desk, I returned, and I saw that what I had written was a jumbled

mess. That I was experiencing cognitive decline in real time and I couldn't see it. He said, that surprised me because I thought that if I was experiencing cognitive decline, I would be aware of it. Like, oh, I'm now more forgetful or I can't remember someone's name, but this was happening outside of physical awareness. And he said, I'm panicking. If I lose can't remember someone's name, but this was happening outside of his awareness And he said I'm panicking if I lose my mind I lose my existence And so he said what can I do and that day my team and I had a call on

Plasma exchange and we had seen that the the evidence that things people were using it for or for cognitive decline There were several studies going on for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and we were saying okay. That's interesting Do we think we can bridge this therapy to anti-aging? Well, this slowed down my speed of aging. And we were saying like, we don't really know, right? It's like the evidence is not clear. There's no direct path, like, but we're open. And so I said, dad, we were just talking about this therapy

that people were using for cognitive decline. If you're interested, I'd be happy to give you a leader of my plasma. And my son overheard this conversation. He said, I'm in. And I said, okay, guys, like, we will do a family plasma exchange activity. So Talmud, you give me your leader of plasma, dad, I'll give you a leader of plasma. We'll do it. And so it kind of like this, you know, smile on our face, like, what the hell, we might as well because, you know because there's millions of transfusions that happen daily.

It's very safe. It's been happening for decades. It's not a very risky therapy. And so fortunately, we are all blood types the same. So that happened. So yeah, we did the therapy. And so interestingly, from my son to me, I experienced no change in my biomarkers. So it's not to say something positive didn't happen.

We just didn't, we couldn't detect it through any of our measurements. And then number two is my father, his speed of aging according to methylation patterns lowered by 25 years equivalent. And it stayed that way for six months. And he had a remarkable comeback in his cognitive abilities over that duration of time. His co-workers were saying, what is going on? So it was interesting, no effects for me, but my father, it was pretty meaningful. And so it was actually pretty similar to what the animal models showed in terms

of the old and the young rat doing the exchange. You didn't drive fecal transplants because there've been animal studies showing that from young to old, they can reverse the aging there. Is that the next for the family? Or have you mentioned that to your son? We have been trying to do that. Okay. We have.

Yep. And so in fact, there's a UK company we've been talking to. We've been trying to take my microbiome and make it into a supplement. And so kind of the joke, but also kind of serious, but yeah, it's in the US. The mouse date is quite similar to the plasma one. Agreed. Yeah, so it's definitely been on our list. But in the US, it's a regulated one, so we couldn't do a supplement. It'd have to be Rx'd. And doing that because it's a drug.

Yeah, or we have to leave the country and... Exactly. But yeah, like we think it's interesting, and I definitely would be down to try it. Do you know someone who wants to know about cutting edge tips from an anti-aging pioneer? Why not share this episode with them right now? Help them learn science-backed approaches to live more healthy years. I'm sure they'll thank you. I'd love to move us on into sort of actionable advice.

And this is Zoe,io Science and Nutrition. I'd love to really focus on nutrition. Could you talk us through your daily food routine and I guess also why? So I eat 2,250 calories a day. I'm vegan, although I chose to be vegan for ethical reasons. I think we want to be what we want AI to become. And I think we want AI to treat we want AI to become. I think we want AI to treat us like we treat other forms of intelligence. So I'm vegan and my diet consists of the

following foods. So in the morning, I'll have what I call super veggie, which is broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, hemp seed, garlic, and ginger. And then I'll put some extra virgin olive oil on it, 15 ml. And then I'll have the extra virgin olive oil on it, a 15 ml. And then I'll have the next dish, which is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, pomegranate juice, and berries, black, blue, and raspberry strawberries. And then I'll have a final bill of the day, which varies every day according to vegetables, legumes, berries, nuts, seeds. And I'll have three tablespoons or 45 ml a day of extra virgin olive oil.

That's my primary intake of those, those general categories of foods. Um, I do also, I do pea and hemp protein. So I do 110 grams a day of protein. 110 grams. You're adding a lot of protein as a supplement there to that food. Yeah. So I do collagen, so collagen peptides are the only thing I do that are non-vegan. So I do 20 grams a day of collagen protein, 40 grams a day of PN hemp, and then the

remainder is for legumes and other sources. And you're taking vitamins on top of that? Do you? Yeah. I take about 40 pills a day. They're what we think the evidence says are the best. Like we do calcium, alpha-keter, glutorate, tarine, lysine. We do Nr. evidence says are the best, like we do calcium, alpha-keter, glutorate, tarine, lysine, we do NR.

So yeah, so basically what we try to scour the evidence to say what things cannot be achieved in dietary intake and how do we supplement those? So you look at what you're eating and you say, what might we be missing from those foods? Exactly. And you supplement with these ones. Yeah. So we try to, we try to create as um, as perfect of a diet as possible.

Or we say every calorie has to fight for its life. Nothing makes its way into my body. That is a nice to have, or that is cool or just tastes good. It has to have a robust evidence that is, it is a food type that has robust effects inside the body. We think that there's no diet that can satisfy the body's needs, especially if you want to be on the edge of anti-aging. And so we try to supplement all the things you can't get through diet or in proper amounts.

And then we measure everything to say, are these levels on point or do we need to adjust something? And do you have super amounts of them? Because I mean, that's a lot of people, you know, like these vitamin C infusions and things like that, thinking that more is always better. Do you, do you believe that? Yeah. I mean, most things in the evidence show it's a U-shaped curve. And so you want to nail the exact amount and not anymore.

That's why we measure everything so extensively is we want to peg the absolute correct number and not move from it. And so how many additional like vitamins and different supplements are you putting on top of that like food based diet that you were describing? It's about 40. 40 every day. Yeah. So your pill cupboard is the size of like my room.

Uh, yeah, yeah. Like I was at a hundred, but we've, we've condensed it quite a bit. And that was just the evidence for those ones was really weaker? Because the worry about all taking 100 was they might interact with each other, and so they might be negating them. Yes, and so we've been very open about this where we were impartial. So if something's not working, we just remove it immediately. So I've been taking the longevity molecule, rapamycin, for the past five years. And I think rapamycin probably had the most agreement in the entire field as a good thing. And I was on it for five years.

And we had done extensive measurement of rapamycin. So I would take it, and we'd measure my blood levels two hours post, 24, 72, 48, 72. So we'd look at all my levels of C-max and tail curves. But then back in September, we decided to discontinue our optimizing because it was messing with my lipids, with my blood glucose, and my resting heart rate and giving me small tissue infections. And so the idea was we knew there were trade-offs, but we didn't know, we thought maybe it's worth it.

But we just said we don't think it's worth it. And we stopped it. And then it was funny, a month later, that paper came out and yelled showing that rapamycin on two of the 16 clocks, or I think more maybe, had accelerated the speed of aging. And so it's just like a good lesson to always be agile and to be very humble. So we are very, very humble. We think we probably don't know most things, but the power is to measure it continually. So we caught this one, but still, like it's

definitely not a case where it's really dangerous to be overconfident. So Tim, I'm really curious as I'm listening to this, like your view, right? You know, one of the world's experts on nutrition and you've been looking a lot in your background about sort of how this ties into longevity. Are there any areas as you listen to that that you would either suggest Brian should be exploring or things where you're saying, well, actually a bit like this example you were giving where like that's a super drug and then five years later you're like, oh my God, it's causing me all of these, like it's damaging me.

I've got to stop. What would you be saying? As I was exploring, you know, I believe that some of these vitamins, if you take too much of them, they're going to have negative effects on your body. And many people around the world are just going crazy and taking as much of it as you can. And that's, that's the whole nutrient vitamin businesses is selling you those. So I'd be concerned that for example, you might be taking too much calcium, because too much calcium causes heart disease. But it sounds like you've already thought of a lot of those angles. And it's good to see that having started rapamycin realized that some of these things are actually harmful to individuals. So there

might be some people that benefit, but other people not. It's very personalized. And Tim, you're often pretty skeptical, I think, about sort of vitamins and these other sorts of ultra-processed chemicals rather than getting this through whole food. What would you? I would be looking to see these supplements that Abraham was taking couldn't be got from other foods or increasing the diversity of other foods he was taking because that's the natural way that we've evolved to use these substances. So I have a general disquiet about taking some of these nutrients in the chemical form rather than in the pure form.

And why is that? That's because we think the body might react differently to them. A bit like the example with calcium I gave you, if you have calcium as a chemical, it's in a large amount, it goes in a big amount in the body, it may not be absorbed the same way and therefore ends up being deposited in different bits of the body than if you took it in spring water or something where it would be much more evenly distributed in the way that our bodies evolved to do that. As a general principle, we're still very unclear about how these vitamins actually work and

there may be just as many negative effects as there are positive ones. I'd be looking to say, can you diversify even more? At Zoey, we really believe in plant diversity as being one of the key elements to having the most different species of microbe, which then gives you the natural chemicals, the natural vitamins. You know, I'd love to discuss this further. And what about Brian's diet in terms of the food that he was describing? What were your thoughts about that?

Um, that seems a healthy diet. I would get bored with it. diet in terms of the food that he was describing. What were your thoughts about that? That seems a healthy diet. I would get bored with it. I think humans do like a bit of diversity and get pleasure from it. I always get pleasure from varying my diet, trying to get different things on my plate. That would be my one element that has it taken some of the pleasure out of eating. Because some of the pleasure out of eating could well be one of these key human factors that makes us want to live longer, you know, rather shorter. So I'd be very interested in whether you really enjoy your food. I love it. I've never loved my food more. I absolutely love it.

I, it's both that and I feel liberated, uh, from needing to decide what to eat. You know, that, that whole process of going to a restaurant, looking at a menu and parsing through and not knowing where the food's coming from, or do you eat the croissant or do you have the, the small bit of ice cream? I just feel liberated to not deal with that emotional wear and tear. And you're like my objective is to be the first model of human that doesn't die. And so I'm trying to be I did this exercise a couple years ago where I did this thought experiment where I said so like when you came here today you probably put my

address in your phone and you probably followed the navigation took you here You probably didn't study the streets. You probably didn't look at the traffic patterns It was entirely algorithmic because you trusted their data acquisition was much better in the navigation and I wondered the same was true I thought can I basically have a navigation algorithm for my diet? Can we take all my measurements? can we plug it into a system? Can we look at scientific evidence and just run the algorithm and the algorithm tells me what to eat? And can I just remove my mind from the entire process? And that's what we've tried to do.

And so I really am trying to approach this from a, I know that the normal way that humans do this is you navigate the world and you're making spontaneous decisions on what you eat, when and where and have this variety of experience. Totally understand that. And I'm saying that probably what's going to happen is algorithms are going to do all the work for us. That we'll have more data about our bodies, it'll be fed into a system, it will just have this closed loop system.

It may feel like we're making choice, but ultimately it's going to be much better at managing our health than we will be. And so I'm trying to be an early prototype of like, this is what it's going to be to be human. I know we're running out of time. I'd like to finish with one final question, if that's all right. Cause I think that both, you know, what you're doing with Blueprint and Zoe, they're both trying to shape the future of health.

And I was just curious if I'd almost have like one sentence from each of you, what do you think the personal health practices are going to look like in 30 years time? I think personalization is gonna be everything. So we're just seeing the dawn of home testing, home blood draws, like just doing like the Zoe kit at home now was sort of unthinkable 10 years ago.

And I think we're gonna have smart toilets. I'm a big fan that a lot of your body's health can be told from what's going on inside your gut and your gut microbes and the chemicals they're producing. So I think we'll all be having super smart toilets that will tell us what the chemicals of our microbes are producing and what we should be eating during the next week to balance that out and what our risks of diseases, etc. are. So I think a combination of blood urine and stool testing at your home is going to be a regular feature and we'll be titrating things accordingly in the homes like this that have all the gadgets, certainly.

Brian? I think it would be like what's happened in the stock market where it used to be the case that an investor would read up on a company, read all their reports, study the industry, and decide on that stock. And now a substantial amount of trading in the market is these high frequency trading systems where these algorithms are ingesting gigantic amounts of data. They're seeing patterns that humans cannot and they're executing transactions at the millisecond scale faster than any human can make a decision and beyond the knowledge of

any human. And I think these patterns will be very thorough through humans as well that our health will be managed like a high-frequency trading system. That right now we think about these things very like we're a stock picker for our body. Like we say, this food is good in my body. It's just like picking a stock. Whereas we're much more granular about the molecular structure of a given thing. And the data will be acquired from our body. It will go into an algorithm and it will start trading on our behalf at the molecular level. And so I think the majority of our health decisions will be gone.

We won't even think about it and it will just be part of systems. And I think that's like, so that's like six years from now. I think it's entirely reasonable to have early prototypes by then. Amazing. And if I could, I'll leave your viewers with a five, a suggestion of five habits for sleep. Go for it. To make this very actionable.

So I, I, my authority on this is I achieve the best sleep score in human history, eight months of perfect sleep. So here's five things that everybody can do. One is to reframe your identity that you are a professional sleeper. Right now our cultural relationship with sleep is we sleep when it's convenient, when we're finished with our show, when we're done with the outing, we sleep at odd hours. So you are a professional sleeper and take it as seriously as you do your profession. Number two is have your final meal of the day at least two hours before bedtime.

I have my final meal of the day nine hours before my bedtime. And I tested a few hundred different experiments at different times, different foods to experiment with this. And I find that when I do that, my resting heart rate goes down by about 20%. So right now is about 44 when I go to bed and that gives me a perfect night's sleep. So eat earlier and lighter and experiment to find the right

time for you. Three is consistency. So when I was going to bed, when I was doing this experiment, I was in bed at the same time, plus or minus one minute. And it was remarkable how powerful my body was in putting itself to sleep. If you give the body rhythm and consistency, it will be a superpower for you. Four is light. So try to turn down blues in the house, turn off screens, you know, an hour or so before bed. If you can, have an amber light or red lights, the best.

So light is very important. And then five is a wind down routine. And so this is really important. So at 8.30, I go to bed. At 7.30, I begin my nighttime wind down routine. And so this is, important. So at 8.30, I go to bed. 7.30, I begin my nighttime wind down routine. And so this is, I do a self-talk where 7.30 arrives. And then the moment I start nighttime mode, I'll have a thought like, hey, Brian,

I have a new idea for a new thing I can do. Or like, hey, Brian, you said something today that probably offended the person. They probably hate you. And you were not worried about it. So I can say, thank you, ambitious Brian, for reminding me that this is a good idea, we appreciate you, you're doing good work in life.

Or thank you, Anxious Brian, for identifying that we really messed up in that conversation and said that rude thing. I promise I'll take care of this tomorrow. See, I'm going to write this thing down right now. But you're doing this because you're trying to calm your nervous system to say, we are now in the sleep mode, we're going to calm ourselves down, and we're going to sleep. Otherwise, if you don't and you take this energy into the bed, when your head hits the pillow, you then ruminate on all these thoughts.

Good, bad, and ugly. And then you wake up. Same thing, you can't go back to the egg and now you're ruminating on these thoughts. And so the wind down routine is probably the most powerful because you're really setting yourself up for a great night's sleep. But to do that, you have to take it seriously, which is back to your identity. So do those five things and I think it will change your life more than anything in the entire world. And when you sleep well, you're going to want to exercise.

And when you exercise, you want to eat well. And it's a really positive virtuous loop. I absolutely love that. I also think that I definitely have a competitive Jonathan and an anxious Jonathan. So I love this idea of trying to put them to bed before I go to sleep in the way. So I'm definitely going to take that away. I am curious what you do with, uh, like a five year old child or a spouse who doesn't necessarily want to follow all of your rules.

Have you got a solution for that? Two, two suggestions. One is, um, to have a family meeting and to identify that you are a family that prioritizes sleep. So I have three children and if you make it a family priority, like we go to bed at this time, we have dinners at certain times, nobody gets up from their bed at nighttime. Nobody ever wakes up anyone as a rule, for example, then you can establish sleep hygiene as a family. And number two, for your child and your spouse, create a star chart and give them a one star review

when they deviate from family culture. So if your five-year-old wakes you up at night, give them a one star review. Put it on the wall, one star. Nobody likes one star reviews. And that includes your partner as well. So if your partner wakes you up at night or is going to bed later than expected, give them a one star review. Well, I think that's a good point. Nobody likes one-star reviews. And that includes your partner as well. So if your partner wakes you up at night

or, you know, is going to bed later than expected, give them a one-star review. Well, you run your family in a tough way. I feel like if I gave any one-star reviews at home, I'd be out of my ear outside the front door. But I'll run that by Justine and see how she feels. When you're well, when people are well-rested, we are more cheerful, we are more agreeable,

we are more fun, we are more pleasant. We are more agreeable. We are more fun. We are more pleasant. And when we are tired, we are grumpy. We are argumentative. We are short. So everybody in the family has an interest in having high quality sleep. I think that's completely logical. And like many things that you're talking about, like bad habits, right?

So much of our life is built to make that hard, right? You think about, you know, the phone is designed to make sure you can't put it down, right? The TV on Netflix is designed to automatically show you the next episode. The food that we're surrounded by is this ultra-processed food that clever scientists have built to make you want to eat more. So this is hard, isn't it? You will rise to the level of your habits, not your goals. So these are all about building life systems. It's not about decision making.

It's about systems that allow you to live your best life. And does that mean that because it's sort of a regular habit, you don't need to think about it so much. And therefore you're more resistant to the outside. Do you eat this? Do you eat this bad thing or not? It's already decided for you. Do you go to bed, you're bedtime? Yes or no?

Do you, so once you have to pre-decide all these things, so you don't have to grapple with them in the moment. And it just frees up. A lot of people will say, that sounds so boring, so it takes away my choice. But if you don't, you end up losing the majority of those decisions and you end up living a life that is lesser than what you want. Now you can rationalize it and say it's like whatever, but generally speaking, I personally

have don't have anyone in my life who complains to me that they feel too good. That they've never said, you know what, god damn it, I just feel great and it just sucks. Like it is generally a feeling that we really appreciate feeling great. And so these things are in our best interest. We really do want them and it's so easy to slip into the rationalization, but we all want to be our best self. I have to say that if I think about that, just simply as saying like locking yourself into good things, I absolutely buy that. I don't have that much willpower. So for example, I book three sessions a week with my trainer because because the trainer is there, I will exercise. Exactly.

If I don't have the trainer, I'll be like, well, I'll do some more work. So it doesn't happen. And similarly in the food, honestly, people tease me about like the food in the house. So basically I tried to make sure there isn't any bad, we don't like to say bad food at ZOE, but let's say food that scores really badly for me and that I really like and I would eat lots of. I tried to make sure it's not in the house because then I'll just eat something else and it's not, I'm nothing like as controlled as you.

There is like dark chocolate in the house and fruit and all that sort of it. But the point is, you know, if I compare that with what I would have had in the house 10 years ago, it was transformed just because basically I'm sort of taking away my own willpower. Exactly. So you're sort of saying, take that to the next level with sleep and almost try and make your family co-conspirators. So will your wife give you a one star review or are you so controlled that's not even relevant?

Yeah, yeah. My son and I, we definitely have family systems and we adhere to them. And when we don't, we hold each other accountable. So I definitely am in a family environment. We all agree on systems. That's fascinating. Thank you both. I'd like to do a quick summary if that's all right.

I mean, I'd start by saying that actually Tim and Brian agree a lot more than I expected at the beginning of this show. And in some sense, right there at the end, you're talking about like the future is personalized health based on lots of data. It's really interesting actually how much that converges because I think the starting point is very different. Like Brian, you're basically saying you want to be the first human to not die. That sounds like, to me, it's like this crazy out there idea.

I know that that is not where Tim wants to go, but it's really interesting how much this converges. You talked about the fact that basically you are fitter than a 16-year-old because of everything you're doing, which is amazing. And every decision you make is an experiment, but that's true for everyone on Earth. So it's just for you, it's explicit. For everyone else, they're not thinking about it. And so if we think about you as almost

forging this path, it can make it a lot easier for everybody else. That everything you're doing is based upon your best ability to analyze the best science. And in a sense, you're trying to go after the same thing that Tim would talk about. It's like, I want to avoid all the issues that come with obesity. I want to have everything that's like a really strong cardiovascular system. But then I can measure a lot more stuff than you can, you know, most doctors will do because I'm putting a lot of money against it. And these most advanced people.

And so you don't just take bloods, you know, you track your erections, right? Like that's definitely a next level. Tim, we have definitely not put that in a very care. You then said like a lot of what you have to do actually is quite clear. Like when you come down to it, it's not so fancy anymore. Sleep was your number one, exercise, good diet, drop the bad habits. So it's actually very similar to lots of the other podcasts

we talk about. I think the thing that really strikes me is the level of control that you apply to your life. So very few people can have that level of self-control and it means that you're carrying this out to this optimized level. And then finally, I think, interesting when we look through to diet, the diet is quite similar to a lot of the things that we talk about with Zoe. It's like, you know, you're vegan, it's plant-centric,

there's a lot of extra virgin olive oil, you know, all these nuts and berries. You are then adding a lot of vitamins. And I think that I can see that that's the one area maybe where Tim is more skeptical. And I think you're also willing to take risk, right? When you're talking about, you know, some of these drugs that you take that then turn out to be negative. And I think Tim is always, you know,

saying, for example, with the vitamins and calcium that this could be harmful. But fundamentally you're like this test pilot. That's how I'm now thinking of you. You're like shooting off in these dangerous rockets, could make it to the moon, but you're willing to take some, that's how I'm now thinking of you, you're like shooting off in these dangerous rockets, could make it to the moon, but you're willing to take some risks that it might flame out, and we get to watch and learn everything, which in many ways I think is a very generous contribution to the rest of us, so thank you.

You're welcome. Now, if you listen to the show regularly, you already believe that changing how you eat can transform your health, but you can only do so much with general advice from a weekly podcast. If you want to feel much better now and be on the path to live many more healthy years, you need something more. And that's why more than a hundred thousand members trust Zoe each day to help them make the smartest food choices. Combining our world-leading science with your Zoe test results, Zoe is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe membership starts with at-home testing

to understand your unique body. Then Zoe's app is your health coach using weekly check-ins and daily guidance to help you shift your food choices to steadily improve your health. I rely on Zoe's advice every day, and truly it has transformed how I feel. Will you give Zoe a try? The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe membership could do for you. Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast, where as a podcast listener, you'll get 10% off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolff. Zoe's Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willen.

The Zoe's Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.