It's a pleasure. And Tim, thanks for being here as well.
Yeah, it's going to be great.
So, Bryan, we have a tradition here at Zoe 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?
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?
Can the right diet slow down aging?
And Bryan, 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.
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, Bryan, today. You know, your lifestyle, your routines, the choices you make right here under this roof and especially in this kitchen because you're conducting a scientific experiment on yourself, aren't you?
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% of 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?
You know, every generation going back hundreds and 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 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 best comprehensive health markers of anybody in the world. You know, I 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 like 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 tried to just do this by the data and numbers and with as little storytelling as possible.
And Bryan, 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 they're better than, you know, my 16-year-old son?
So, in every biological age marker, there's typically a ideal age. So, for example, like in grip strength, as you grow older, you increase in grip strength capacity. Then, you hit a certain age, you decline in grip capacity. And 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 in 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 right, 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 because a 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? That they have the anatomy of a 16-year-old. I 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 mineral density down 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've been measuring the biological age of my organs through a few different modalities. Actually a ton of modalities, but you can like 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 16 epigenetic clocks trying to find macro patterns of like what increase speed of aging, what things decrease speed of aging. And so in doing this, yeah, I've 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 Rejuvenation Olympics.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 can get 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 levels this or I do 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 p.m. 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 you know 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 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 just want to say thank you first and foremost for being part of this community. The team here at Zoe Science and Nutrition has very big dreams for this show and that's thanks to you. When you watch and subscribe and leave comments and submit your questions, we reach more people and that empowers us on our mission to improve the health of millions. And we've got huge plans to grow this show even more this year. If there's one thing you could do to help us do that, it's just to hit the subscribe button. It means the world to us. Okay, back to the show.
I actually had dinner with one of my friends a little while ago who had just completed the Zoe test kit 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 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. You're 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. 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 arrest 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 invention was made and it was 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 100 and be healthy. You're like imagining you could be 200 or 300 or a thousand or something like that.
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 I 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 Bryan, 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're describing like going to the moon before and I'm thinking about all like those crazy test pilots. We go on like really dangerous things to go to the moon and in the end we just get on planes a lot. We never had to take that same risk. So 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 through history there 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 the ego death and the four-fold 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 2,000 years where a new ideology could emerge for 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 re-imagine existence wholesale from the perspective of when death is inevitable. We do things a certain way. When we extend our lifespans, it's very very different. 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 it. 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, you probably would say that it's a bit of guesswork.
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, but I would also guess you'd probably find a lot of disagreement in terms of how to do it. So, I'd say probably much more an art than is a science, but you know, we did our best. Yeah, we of course try to use gold standard studies for best possible and things like that. We prefer human models over animal models, etc. But once you get to lower gradients, it's just harder. More discernment is required.
Actually would love to bring Tim in here because I mean a lot of listeners to the show, Bryan, 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 where 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 Bryan because Bryan's trying to say everything that might possibly work. Let's give it a go. And 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 you know hey it's got a one in a 100 chance. So definitely we take the gold standard which is the randomized control trial 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 Zoe and you know even our own products we use in that way.
And Tim why don't you just weight a mouse study like why doesn't that tell you what we should do?
Because a number of reasons. 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. And often a lot of the research you can do 10 experiments and only report on the one that works. So there's often an inherent bias in a lot of these studies. So a lot of people are very skeptical. They're quite useful to give you a new idea and then go and test it in humans. But on their own, bit like test tube studies, you can add 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 Bryan had such a hard time with these 30 experts trying to say 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, Bryan, 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 there. 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.
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 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 and 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 this the scientific evidence but really what we care about are the markers. We care about what my cardiovascular ability is. We care what my speed of aging is. We care about using MRI what it says for my brain age for 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 IL-6. 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. Like 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. And so there's, you know, typically doctors have like the most common access they have is a blood draw. So they're looking at the typical panel of cholesterol markers, triglycerides, red blood cell count, white blood cell count, etc. 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 early 20s person and that's 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 measuring?
Let me give you maybe an unexpected one. Nighttime tumescence. Nighttime erections.
I was not expecting you to say that. It's the first on this show.
Yeah. 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, right? You're waking up and you have 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 and go to the bathroom. And that was also I was reducing the amount of fluids I was drinking after four. So we're trying this two-prong approach. And in doing this, I sat on 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 prematurely. And so it's a topic that is comical where you hear the word it's like that's funny because it's like 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 3 hours and 8 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 or 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 of 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 used to do it like once a month or so. Yeah. So, pretty minimal.
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.
But I, you know, I did have I have the best recorded sleep score in history. So, I have eight months of perfect sleep using a wearable. Something that many people who have had wearables for years, they haven't done in one night. So, 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 yet 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.
