2. Your First Avatar | $100M Lost Chapters Audiobook

Hello and welcome to Zoe Reakha, 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 Brian Johnson has spent over $2 million in an attempt to slow or even stock the aging process. From diet and supplements to sleep and skincare, every part of his life is measured, analysed and optimised. So what does his daily routine actually look like? And what can the rest of us learn from it? I'm joined by Professor Tim Specter to dissect Brian's data-driven diet, discuss the future of personalized health, and he abriens top five tips for a better night's sleep. Did you talk us through your daily food routine? And I guess we'll say why? So I ate 2250 calories a day. I'm vegan, although I chose to be vegan for ethical reasons. I think we want to be, we want AI to become, and I think we want AI to treat us like we treat other forms of intelligence. So 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, a 15 ml. And then I'll have the next dish, which is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flax seed, 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, the gooms, berries, nut seeds. And I'll have three tablespoons, or 45 ml, day of extra virgin olive oil. So my primary intake of those general categories of foods, I do also, I do pee and hemp protein. So I do 110 grams a day of protein. 110 grams. You're adding a lot of protein as a supplement to that food. Yeah. So the 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 pee and hemp, and then the remainder is born legumes and other sources. And you take 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-cure gluturate, tarine, lysine, we do, and are, 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 be missing from those foods? Exactly. So we supplement with these ones. Yeah. So we try to create as perfect of a diet as possible, or we say every calorie has to fight for its life. Nothing makes it way into my body that is nice to have, or that it's cool, or just tastes good. It has to have 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. So we try to supplement all the things you can't get to diet or on proper 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, thinking that more is always better. Do you believe that? Yeah. I mean, most things in the evidence show us a u-shape 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 track number and not move from it. And so how many additional vitamins and different supplements are you putting on top of that like food base diet that you were describing to about 40? 40 every day. Yeah. So your pill cover is the size of like my room. Yeah. Yeah. I was at 100, but 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 second 100 was they might interact with each other. Yes. And so they might be negating them. Yes. Yeah. And so we've been very open about this where we were in part all. So something's out working, we just remove it immediately. So I've been taking the long Jeopardy draw molecule, rapamycin for the past five years. I think rapamycin probably had the most agreement on 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 rapamycin because it was messing with my lipids with my blood glucose and my resting heart rate and giving me a small tissue infections. And so the idea was we knew that we're 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 there was funny a month later that paper came out in yellow showing that rapamycin on two of the 16 clocks, 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, 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 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 the as you can. And that's, 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, Raph and my son realized that some of these things aren't actually harmful to individuals. So there might be some people that benefit, but other people are 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 the brand 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. But like the example with calcium, I give you, if you have calcium as a chemical, it's in a large amount, it goes in a bigger 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. So as a general principle, we're still very unclear about how these vitamins actually work in and maybe just as many negative effects as there are positive ones. So that I'd be looking to say, 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, have I almost had 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. So we're just seeing the dawn of home testing, home blood draws, like just doing the Zoe kid at home now, was just unthinkable 10 years ago. And I think we're going to 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. 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 to my trading 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 other reports, study the industry and decide on that stock. And now a substantial amount of trading on 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 middle second 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. But right now we think about these things very like we're a stock picker for our body. I could say this food is good in my body. It's just like picking a stock, whereas we're going much more granular about the molecular structure of a given thing and the data will be acquired from our body. It will go into now with them 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. And I think it's the entire reason we'll have already prototypes by then. Amazing. And if I could leave your viewers with a suggestion of five habits for sleep. Go for it. It makes this very actionable. So my authority on this is I achieve the best sleep for human history, a month of perfect sleep. And 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 the day at least two hours before bedtime. I have my final meal the day nine hours before my bedtime. And I tested a few hundred different experiments, 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 it right now is about 44 when I go to bed. And that gives me a perfect night sleep. So eat earlier and lighter and experiment trying 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. And 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 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, 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 route thing. I promise I'll take care of this tomorrow. You 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 you head his 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. You know, you're ruminating on these thoughts. And so the one 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 this really positive virtual sleep. I'll end this episode with something I think you'll like, a free Zoe gut health guide. If you're a regular listener, you know, just how important it is to take care of your gut. Your gut microbiome is gateway to better health, better sleep, energy and mood. The list just goes on. But many of us aren't sure how to best support our gut. I wasn't sure before doing Zoe, which is why we've developed an easy to follow gut health guide. It's completely free and offers five simple steps to improve your gut health. You'll get tips from Professor Tim Spector, Zoe's scientific co-founder and one of the world's most cited scientists, plus recipes and shopping lists straight to your inbox. We'll also send you ongoing gut health and nutrition insights, including how Zoe can help. To get your free Zoe gut health guide, head on over to Zoe.com/GutGuide. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time. [Music]