Most replayed moment: What can we learn from the man who’s trying to live forever? | Bryan Johnson & Tim Spector

0:00Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're exploring one of the most ambitious self-experiments in human history. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson spent over$2 million in an attempt to slow or even stop the aging process. From diet and supplements to sleep and skin care, every part of his life is measured, analyzed, and optimized. So what does his daily routine actually look like? And what can the rest of us learn from him? I'm joined by Professor Tim Spector to dissect Brian's data-driven diet, discuss the future of personalized health, and hear Brian's top five tips for a better night's sleep.

0:50could you talk us through your daily food routine and i guess also why so i i eat 2250 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 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 next dish, which is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, pomegranate juice, and berries, black, blue, and raspberry, strawberries.

1:38and 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 general categories of foods. 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. I do 20 grams a day of collagen protein, 40 grams a day of pea and hemp, and then the remainder is for legumes and other sources.

2:17And 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-ketoglutarate, taurine, lysine. We do NRCS. So yeah, so basically 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 create as perfect of a diet as possible where we say every calorie has to fight for its life. Nothing makes its way into my body that is nice to have or that is cool or just tastes good.

3:00it has to have a robust evidence that 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 improper amounts. And then we measure everything to say, are these levels on point, or do we 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, are thinking that more is always better. Do you believe that?

3:32Yeah. 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 for i was at 100 but we've we've condensed it quite a bit and that was just the evidence for those ones was really weaker and then because i mean the worry about all taking like 100 was they might interact with each other yes and so they might be negating them yes yeah we've and so we've been very open about this where we were impartial so something's not working we just remove it immediately so i've been taking the the longevity draw a 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 rapamycin so i would take it and we'd measure my blood levels two hours post uh 24 72 you know 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 rapamycin because it was messing with my lipids with my blood glucose and my resting heart rate and giving me small tissue infections.

5:02And so the idea was we knew there were trade-offs, but we didn't know with like, 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 in Yale 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 able 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.

5:38So Tim, I'm really curious as I'm listening to this, like your view, right? You're 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.

6:15And many people around the world are just going crazy and taking as much of it as you can. And And that's the whole nutrient vitamin business 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.

6:58What would you... I would be looking to see these supplements that LeBron 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.

7:50So as a general principle, we're still very unclear about how these vitamins actually work and maybe just as many negative effects as there are positive ones. So I'd be looking to say, well, can you diversify even more? Because at Zoe, we really believe in plant diversity being one of the key elements to having the most different species of microbe, which then gives you the natural chemicals, the natural vitamins. I was just curious, if I 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 going to be everything.

8:29So we're just seeing the dawn of, you know, home testing, home blood draws, like, you know, just doing like the Zoe kit at home now was so unthinkable 10 years ago. And I think we're going to have smart toilets. 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 sort of titrating things accordingly in in in the homes you know like this that have all the gadgets certainly brian i think it will be like what's happened in the stock market where it used to be the case that an investor would read upon a company read all their reports, study the industry, and decide on that stock.

9:36And 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.

10:12It'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'll 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 it so that's like six years from now i think it's entirely reasonable that we'll have early prototypes by then amazing and if i could i'll leave your viewers with a five a suggestion on five habits for sleep go for it to make this very actionable so i i my authority on this is i achieved 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.

11:01We 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 Four, when I go to bed, and that gives me a perfect night's sleep. So eat earlier and lighter and experiment to try to find the right time for you.

11:32Three 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. 7.30, I begin my nighttime wind down routine.

12:07And so this is, I do a self-talk where, you know, 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.

12:33You see, I'm gonna 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 a sleep mode. We're gonna calm ourselves down and we're gonna 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 there because now you ruminate 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.

13:00But 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 gonna wanna exercise. And when you exercise, you wanna eat well. and it's this really positive virtuous loop. As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day.

13:37If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high-quality, hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives. Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life. Becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for.

14:15By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily 30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

14:41Yep.