How I Became The World's Healthiest Human

So today we're talking about biomarkers. We're going to go through Brian's general full biomarker overview, which is going to be awesome because the amount of detail and layers that we put out there is insane. And then we're also going to cover your sperm health, Brian, which, you know, that's exciting topic that, you know, we talk about. We'll see how that goes.

So that's exciting.

I was thinking about my role in that conversation and being like, huh, how am I going to contribute to this conversation? But we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll poke around.

I mean, all right, I mean, basically, but right, like these are all this, these are what people do. Like, men are assessing women for genetic fitness. Women are assessing men for genetic fitness. Like, we have these algorithms running all the time and whether or not we can pinpoint the exact data. We're running these algorithms all the time. Like who we are are with who we work with. Like, so, yeah, I would say, like, that's absolutely just part of the natural state. We're just actually giving numbers to what we're doing.

And you mean unconsciously too, right? Like unconsciously evaluating for fitness.

Yeah, right. And we don't talk about it ironically, even though it's probably one of the things that we run more frequently. Um, so it's funny, I, like I said, I started, I brought it up and then I immediately started blushing. Like that's how little we talk about these topics, which is so silly because it's, it is a direct indicator of overall health.

I mean, that's interesting you would blush, Kate, because like, we've trenches talking about like literally everything for years. So was it just that we'd be on a podcast talking about it? So it's like a public conversation about it?

Yeah, yeah, I, there's some, I guess, like deep seated taboo around sperm, sexual health. Like, even if I can act one way and be like, oh, it's like no big deal or whatever, like there's still just entrenched societal thing around. Like, we don't talk about these topics in public.

Mike, what's your. Even though we do, do you feel something similar or do you feel different?

I plan on blushing as well.

It will look really nice with your clothes.

Yeah, it's gonna match. It's gonna match my shirt. My face is gonna match my shirt by the time we're done with this conversation for sure. Yeah, it's awkward, right? I mean, like, um, men rarely talk about other men's sperm. When was the last Time you talk about, about someone else's sperm.

Brian, you know, honestly, I would love to. Like, it's like a missed opportunity. I've been like, yes, where's everyone at? Like, why can't. Why can you measure your biomarkers? So I can have, you know, I can ask you some questions. Like, I. What. Why? I feel zero social hindrance to talk about these things. Like, if, you know, if someone wants to talk about nighttime boners, I'm like, hi, how are you doing? Like, how are you doing? And if you're not, let's talk about how you can do better.

Oh, my God.

I mean, I want, you know, I want people, I want them to thrive and have like phenomenal nighttime tuna tumescence. And if they're not, help them solve the problems.

Did you have to unlearn this coming from Mormon culture?

Definitely. Where everything has to be so tightly controlled and if you walk over the line, you trigger all these social repercussions of like, status loss. So, yeah, I mean, just feels so liberating that I don't have any filter now. It's all there. And honestly, it's. I, I think I feel that way because it's genuinely in people's best interest to learn about this there. It's, it's entirely about trying to help the person out and like, these taboos keep people from achieving better self.

Definitely.

I wonder if people are going to feel awkward listening to this.

I don't think so. That's the weird thing. It's like when you're on your own and you're listening to other people, it's like you're not, it's not vulnerable for them. Yeah, right.

We shall see.

Yeah, that's right. Let us know in the comments how you feel right now. Uncomfortable or comfortable. So the TLDR here is that Brian, you put out tweet and essentially asperm health as a species has declined half in the last 50 years, which is crazy. This is like a generational change that's happening. Right. And then amongst that, it's. You've still been able to maintain insane sperm quality metrics. And so that says, like, even though our society is changing, you can still achieve ideal sperm health during that time. So can you, Mike or Brian. I don't know what would be more comfortable. Talk us through, like, what metrics you guys were looking at and what results you got.

Yeah. Mike, do you want to do the overview on this?

I think you should do it. It's your sperm thing.

He doesn't want to blush okay.

We have been trying to measure everything about my body and we've tried to be extremely rigorous and meticulous. And we realized a few months ago that we have not been measuring sperm as robustly as we would have liked. So I have, I think two, maybe three measurements for the past three years that I did with sperm. But what we really wanted was a much higher frequency because we wanted to see what impact various therapies and protocols would have on sperm. Because I think the big value blueprint is like, when you do a given thing, how do biomarkers change? Right? So if you, if you do sauna, for example, does it lower sperm quality or does it improve it? If you increase exercise capacity, does it, you know, have a certain effect on whatever biomarker? So we had this question about sperm. So we said, all right, we're going to get a robust data set. So over a 90 day period of time, we did, let's see, six measurements and we, we got my, my sperm baseline with six different samples.

And. Can I just jump in here? If you're listening at home, so you're a male and you're listening at home, it's highly likely that you've fallen into this category of where you've experienced some sort of sperm decline in this cohort because it is such a wide reaching situation that across the last 50 years it's declined so much. So the. We'll go through what Brian has done to increase his sperm count as well across time. And same thing for women as well. We'll be looking into female reproductive health. I've had some markers measured which we can share as well in another podcast. Okay, so Brian, let's look at your actual data because we love to go off of measurement. So population level has declined by half the average current typical amount of swimmers. So the amount of sperm, the amount of sperm in a sperm sample for a 45 year old male, which you are, is 80 million. And yours is 165 million. So substantially more motility, which is movement. Is that right, Mike?

Yep, that's right. It's how much the, the sperm's moving.

Okay, great. The typical for that age group is 35%. Yours is 43%. So again, above average. And the morphology, which is like the amount of like fucked upness of the sperm. Is that right?

That's the medical term.

Yeah. Okay, great, I got it. That's so typical. Is, is it less than 5%, is that right, Mike? I, I never know how to read those lines. So much less than 5%. And yours is 8%. Does that mean you're above average in morphology, Brian?

That's right, yeah.

So the overall you have more amount of swimmers that are not fcked up but because you've got so much, the percentage is higher. Is that. Am I?

Yeah, basically I have more swimmers. Yeah. More are moving property and less are fucked up. Yeah, I think that's a good summary.

So I love this actually because this is probably how people read these tweets, like most people obviously we've got a lot of people who are really deep in the science community and they're like, Kate, this is like basic sperm health stuff. But as a newbie here, that's how I'd read that. Cool. So you're like anywhere between. You're like double average ish and then around four times minimum for WHO standards.

Yeah. If we biologically age. Biologically age. This I think it's. I have the sperm health of a early 20 year old. Early 20 something.

Cool. Did you have historical information on this?

Sadly no. My first sample was in 2022, but I don't have it from 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Have you seen any changes across time in your sperm quality?

We don't really have good enough measurements. So looking back through the measurements, we did five consecutive measurements starting on January and then finished up in April. So we have a good run now to have. So the data was actually pretty consistent. But no, sadly we don't have enough data to make relationships with other therapies, which is what we're trying to do now. Now that we're doing this systematically. Like you know, we, we mentioned we just started sauna and so now we get to see the real time impact of sauna on sperm. Whether you either you cool the testicles during sauna or whether you let them heat up. So now we're finally in the groove. So I guess like I wish we could go back in time and measure this much more robustly because it'd be cool to see the effects of like caloric restriction and nutritional changes. Like all the therapies we've done, we just haven't had it. So yeah, we're correcting for that now and getting the data.

Yeah, it's so funny how like typically it to really be able to see the effect you want like to know what your baseline is. So it's sad we didn't get that. I've definitely heard before that car seat warmers will affect sperm quality and so what Brian's referring to here is we are going on a sauna protocol. His Balls are naturally going to get heated up in the sauna, and so it'll be really interesting to see if there's an effect from that. We're going to do ice protection as much as possible to avoid it, but it'll be almost like retroactively seeing how much your sperm is impacted by things external to your rigorous lifestyle now.

Yeah. And on the sperm health protocol, we're doing icing for the first two weeks. I'm wearing an ice diaper. Not really, but like kind of a.

Mike, are you blushing?

No, that was just laughing. Aggressive laughing.

I'm doing like testicular. Testicular cooling.

Yeah.

Test. Testicular chilling blue balls. Yeah, we'll do that for. Yeah, we'll do. We'll do that blue ball protocol for two weeks, and then we'll go off two weeks and then we'll make measurements and see what happens.

To make sure you share your testicular cooling protocol with everyone, I need to.

You know, currently I'm just. I've pieced this thing together with various cooling pads or cooling things I have at the house, but I need to, like, really legit, like, solve it through some kind of systematic process. But Mike. Okay, so. All right, so my sperm health is really good. Like, it's this. So this is really relevant because sperm health does not sit in isolation. It is a product of the whole body. So if your body's not doing well in other areas, your sperm health is not gonna be doing well. It's like your, your hormones can't be off and sperm's doing great. Like, it really is like a composite marker of how you're doing across your entire body. So the fact that I'm basically like 20 year old ish on sperm health does represent that holistically with my other markers. It makes sense. If we go to my biomarkers, this is like a. Evidence that things are working really well. Is that fair?

It reminds me of bone marrow, bone mineral density that we talked about on the last podcast, basically as a metric of or a proxy to overall health. And when you think about it, it sort of makes sense. Like, we can even break down the. So, like, number of sperm. Right. Has to do directly been related with cardiovascular disease risk. Right. And has to do with, you know, total hormone burden. You know, what's your. Your follicle stimulating hormone and your luteinizing hormone, your testosterone. How are your hormones increasing sperm production? And then motility is directly related to how well your mitochondria function. So the better the mitochondria function, the more mobile the Sperm are. And then one of the other metrics we're looking at with your sperm testing is actually DNA fragmentation, and that's directly related to inflammation and to reactive oxygen species. Uh, so we're actually getting these little windows into different aspects of your health just by looking at sperm function and, and total count. It's pretty cool.

This will bridge awesome. You know, really well to our next topic, which we're not gonna go there yet. But like, we've been trying to help everyone understand that your body's organs and biological systems work in tandem. And that when you think about health and wellness, it's not going to be sufficient to focus on one thing. You need to think about a whole body health protocol and then your markers will represent that. And so if my total bone mineral density is the top 99.8 percentile of all people, and also sperm health is 20 something years of age, then like really great markers that my whole body, from inflammation to hormones to everything's working really, really well. Otherwise those markers are not gonna be the case. So, yeah, I think it's really cool to see on, on sperm health, Mike. What so people can get tested. And I think the test, we have several companies offer this test and it's like 2 or $300 and these companies even will even freeze your sperm for you. If you want to save it for ivf, you can get it tested for a fairly low cost. And then, Mike, what can people do for their sperm healthy? If global population averages have dropped by over 50% since 1973, what can people be doing proactively? Because I guess like my, I'm showing that you can be 47 years old and live in the modern world and have better levels than 1973 and you know, 20 plus years younger than my chronological age. So we're doing it. What can others do to think about and care for their sperm health?

Well, I think one way to think about it is historically, what has changed since the 1970s that could account for the reduction in sperm health? And I think there's a few things that are worth talking about. So toxins would be one of them. Phalates, bpa, pfas, things like that are causing toxicity which have these anti androgenic, so anti hormonal effects where they actually decrease your, your hormones. Um, and they also cause inflammation, oxidative stress, which is gonna reduce the production and the quality of the sperm. Um, also diet has changed quite a bit. There's much greater obesity and insulin resistance causing inflammation. That inflammation then leads to basically a reduction in sperm production. So the testicles just produce less sperm because of the increased inflammation. Interesting. Like I kind of wonder if laptops have something to do with it. Like you know, you see people sitting with laptops in their laps all the time. Like it's literally in the word laptop. And they get hot. Right. And that increases heat which could very well be reducing sperm production. And then like other basic things like you know, I think our society now sleeps less. People watch TV later, they get less total sleep than they used to. Smoking alcohol still at relatively high levels, causing more toxic production, extra reactive oxygen species. So like society is set up to kill your sperm and you have to subvert that, you have to somehow stop that and prevent the destruction of them. And the ways to do that are ironically the things that we talk about on most of these podcasts. Right. It's like that metabolic health, regular exercise and appropriate diet and sleeping consistently and reducing your stress, not keeping your laptop in your lap, maybe having a protocol for using the sauna, keeping your testicles cooler. All those things are going to have massive impacts in sperm health, sperm production.

I, I've heard not wearing tight underwear. Is that actually a thing or is that.

Yeah, so that's, that'll, that will actually warm up your testicles a little bit. Yeah. So like it keeps em closer to the body so they are not inside the body for a reason. Right. They actually, they gotta breathe. So you gotta let em breathe if you want em to work. Um, it does actually, does actually matter.

Um, I mean blush worthy question Brian, but what kind of underwear do you wear?

I wear boxers. I wear cotton boxers.

There's a loose. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. So I don't have a lot of comparison data of the data I do have. Ali just sent me these calculations. So from 2023 to 2025 concentration increased by 147%. Multile sperm count increased by 32.5% and then sperm with normal morphology increased by 233%. So whatever we are doing in that two year timeframe, significant improvement. So I guess this is life with bone marrow density and sperm that you, you can meaningfully change your biomarkers. If you get a test result back and you feel a bit discouraged, don't feel too discouraged, like you can definitely bounce back. I mean I, I'm a great example. Like I absolutely destroyed my health. I mean I was in a really bad spot after you know, a couple 20 years of being an entrepreneur. So do not be discouraged by bad results. You can bounce back the Body can bounce back, do the things that Mike was talking about.

One interesting thing about looking at sperm too, just like bone marrow density or any of these other outcome metrics, is that we're getting a longer look at your health. Right. So the temporal relationship is much. Is much broader as opposed to, like, you know, we can measure a lot of these things by just checking serum levels, which we do, like crp, looking at inflammation or glutathione levels to try to get a sense of reactive oxygen species. But that is like a single time point that can change over a matter of hours. Whereas it's when we look at sperm or. Or bone mineral density, we're looking at a much longer time point of months to really like sometimes even years of your overall health. So it gives us such a longer tale to look at to understand how you're living your life on a regular basis.

That's cool. So compounded gains that, like, the things you have to do, they accumulate. And this is true with, with. But yeah, bone mineral density is like you. Your skeleton rebuilds itself every 10 years. And so it really is like, people obviously feel like immediate gains if they stop eating sugar or they start sleeping well over the course of a few days. But this, that's one of the things I didn't have intuitions on is like, when you start actually really getting into health and systematizing these habits, like, how much they actually compound, which is actually maybe a good bridge to the biomarkers, which is like the. I'm so proud of what we've accomplished. And I guess they really do represent, like, years of devotion to this even coming from a really bad spot. When I first got into the game, I guess the world of longevity, the first thing that was abundantly obvious was that everybody disagreed with everyone about everything. There was no such thing as, like, listening to a podcast or reading a book or asking some expert, what do you do? Because each person had both a narrow focus and then they also had their own unique opinions about what to do. And so I was confronted with this problem of not being a longevity expert myself. What do you do? How could you possibly get in to play this game? And so it just seemed that was when I was building kernel, the brain interface, and I thought, how obvious is this? You just measure, like, you basically just out measure everything and you follow the data. It's actually like such a clean solution. And so we just got to work. We did every single measurement we could find that would give us any kind of insight in terms of the biological age of various Things like, we did the obvious things like blood draws and we did MRIs, but we did things like nerve sensitivity. I did a full on professional hearing grades test. Of course, like eyes, we looked at, did eye measurements, looking at my optical nerves and fibers. I mean we did. So we did a whole bunch of physical fitness tests like follicles under the.

Skin, what's happening to the hair under the microscope, we did like 3D imaging of your face to see changes across time.

So the gum thing, what we did though is so the measure, the way to measure oral health is two of the other variables you're looking at is attachment loss. And what's the other one? Attachment loss and a pocket depth. And so you're basically looking at the gums, tightness around the tooth. And so the two things, One is as a child, I think I had so much sugar in my diet that that must not have been good for my oral health.

You can say it was definitely not.

It was not a good situation for my house.

Not definitely not yet.

And then two is in my years of chronic depression and babies and all that kind of stuff, I started grinding at night, having bruxism and I didn't take any corrective measures because I didn't know how to do it. Like I didn't actually get proper advice. I now have that somnodent device. But that those years of me grinding at night really wore down my teeth, which then exasperates attachment loss and pocket depth. So the gums start to peel away from the teeth. So I found this dentist and we're like, okay, let's biologically age my mouth, my gum. So we did, we measured all the pocket depths and all the attachment loss. We got scores across the board from either one to a four. You want to be basically be two or less. And so then we started. I think I even had maybe one or two that were fives maybe it was like there were a few really bad spots. And then we said how could you basically correct for attachment loss and pocket depth? And so we did two things. So we used this product called endogain, which is with these growth factors taken from pigs. And so we did PRPs, we drew my blood, we spun it up, we got the plasma, we concentrated the growth factors, we re injected the plasma with the endogaine, those two products, because the endogaine is used in dentistry for the healing post surgeries. So we paired those two and then we used a super glue that is specifically built for the mouth. So we super glued my gums to my teeth. And that worked. It took all of my four millimeter pockets and moved them all to four. Now I did something like three of these therapies and it was like, they're not fun. It's definitely a lot of work. But it basically, I forget what the exact data was, but it moved my oral health back like 15 to 20 years back to like a teenage health level with attachment loss and pocket depth around two. And so yeah, that was a really effective therapy. But yeah, that was a big tangent. But this is like to say we have been in a many directions many years. And I took my oral health from highly questionable to where my, my dentist said, like, you legit have better gum health than the teenagers I see. Like, I cannot get your gums to bleed no matter how hard I try. So that was really cool. So, and then we also did a bunch of measurements like plaque index, because that also was a biological age marker. But yeah, anyway, so like back to the biomarkers. This is what we were trying to do is we are trying to follow data everywhere. And over the course of doing this, I became, I think, the most measured person in human history. There's no human ever to exist that has more biological age measurements done than me. And that data gave us this treasure trove of insight of what to do and how to do it. Then we started working with the science to say, how do we now optimize these markers? A lot of people in the beginning, we're so confused by what we're up to. Like, what is this guy even doing? This is so weird. Like, I don't understand it. And we're like, actually we're measuring biological age because like intuitively, if you take an a 90 year old and a 2 year old and you put them adjacent to each other, you know, which one's 90 and which one's 2. There's no confusion. If you put a 35 and a 34 year old next to each other, it's not clear who's who. Like that's, that's based on eyesight. Yeah, based on eyesight, exactly. So I'm saying that intuitively you understand that organs have a structural and a functional element of biological age. You can actually look at a heart and say based upon its function and based upon its cellular structure, cellular anatomical reading, what is the biological age? And so yeah, we did this over the entire body. And so, yeah, last month we posted 60 plus of my biomarkers and we have many, many more. But we chose these 60 because they rank among the highest as being predictive for all cause mortality. And we made the case that I have the best biomarkers of anybody in the world, not just a 47 year old, but literally better than anyone in the world. And you know, like, I haven't known exactly how to think about that. Like, how accurate is that? Is it the case that if you actually were to sample everybody, that by default you'd find people with better markers? I'm honestly not convinced. Like, I legitimately think it, it could be the case that out of 8 billion people I have the best comprehensive biomarkers in the world at age 47. I think it really is possible. But the, the point is here is not to be number one. The point here is to say we have created rankings in society, to say there's the fastest person in the world, there's the richest person in the world. We've never had a ranking of who is the healthiest person in the world or who has the best biomarkers in the world. It's never been something that's been quantifiable. It's always been like this esoteric subjective assessment. And so this is a new game. And so what's cool about this is there's a new way to acquire status and power in society is to have quantified benchmarks. And we started a new game. I think it's a lot of fun. So yeah, let me. That's the premise behind this. So yeah, Kate, well, I just want.

To like try and digest that all out loud. I'm going to think, and correct me if I'm wrong. So you can take measurements across the entire human body and plot it on an age graph so pocket depth increases as you get older. And so you can look at gums and you can say, is this person, you know, younger or older generally than their chronological, chronological age, which is when they were born. You can do that across all the markers and you can use that as a goal post for does a therapy work or not? And so we took all the measurements we could possibly get of you, probably in the hundreds of thousands at this point. And we said, based on all that, here is a comprehensive view on this biological human's predicted age. And we said, let's start going to work on therapies that exist. And so that was like the first chapter. Then we got you to a place where we were able to, across all of those biomarkers, achieve optimal health. That doesn't mean that you're perfect in every kind of way. But the, the nuance here is that it is incredibly Difficult to hit across hundreds of markers. Such good ranges at the same time that you can operate in harmony with your body. So someone can have high cholesterol, but. But then have an amazing VO2 max score or have poor oral health or XYZ, be, you know, losing their hair or whatever the marker is. And so the difference here, and I think where a lot of people get caught up, is that if you look at your overall health, it is incredible. And that is incredibly hard to pull off. Yeah, people don't have those intuitions yet because there aren't that many people that have measured themselves except extensively. If you pull someone off the street and get a blood draw done on them, it's highly likely they're gonna have some good markers and some really bad markers. Probably more bad markers than good markers. But point is that they're probably going to have really high highs and low lows. What we've been able to do is create optimal across the board. It's such a hard concept to deliver in today's standard norm where most people aren't getting measured. Most people don't understand that you. You can't just apply one philosophy of health, like carnivorism, and expect that it's going to be able to treat all things. And so that's why we come back to measurement as actually almost like measurement is the intervention.

Let me take that one step further, Kate. So, like, what you said, totally correct. Like one major point. Taking subjectivity and creating objective data around what would otherwise just be a subjective assessment. Right? So, like, I feel better eating a stick of butter. Okay, show me the data. Like, are you actually better eating that stick of butter? Not to attack butter. Yeah, but it's also. Yeah, we sure.

Lots of butter. I take that back. I don't know how I feel about butter.

Whatever.

Everyone, like, people are gonna attack us because they love their butter, right? Like, everyone. Exactly what I thought. We all, we all process the comments like, I love my brother. Like, leave it alone.

Your butt on the buttock.

Butter, damn it.

Yeah, I know.

I was like, call me.

So like, but, but, but it's not just taking the subjective and creating objective data around it. It's also understanding the objective data that we consume from, like, you know, clinical medicine and these, these papers that are. That are published online about, like, you know, this one intervention works for 60% of people and it's actually understanding. Does it actually work for Brian. Objectivity to the point of an N equals one study where it's like, okay, so there is this data that Whatever. Rapamycin can potentially, you know, increase your life, increase your lifespan. Great. Does that work on everybody? Probably not. Does it work on Brian? So it's like taking the question, like, down to a. Like, a deeper level of understanding on a N equals one level. And also not just following a single marker for each one of these, like, areas of disease and longevity, but hitting them from multiple different directions. So not just following CRP, but following CRP and TNF Alpha and, you know, S100. Like, all of these additional markers that, like, you. You attack a problem for multiple different areas so that, like, disease and a lack of health has nowhere to hide. Like, you're gonna find it with one of these markers. That's the. Like, in essence. And in doing that, Brian has, I mean, I think, done something that. That really hasn't been done by just about anyone. I mean, I. So I've also cared for professional athletes, and Brian is more tested than them. Right. Like, these people that, like. Like, literally make millions of dollars a year because of their physical fitness, because of their health. And, like, the level of detail Brian has is, I think, unprecedented.

Yeah, it's so funny. It's like you almost can go to Brian as, like, if you want to go to a safe interventional route, do what Brian does. Because if you think about, like, someone touting some sort of therapy and they show one marker, but you don't get to see the trove of what happens. So, for example, like, you tried a form of Ozempic, Brian, because it has potential longevity benefits. And when you did that, your. Was it your blood glucose rose? What was it?

My wrestling? Resting heart rate. Yeah, nature. Resting heart rate increased and HRV decreased.

And so it's like, you could have easily done that. Felt great, been more energetic, been able to run more and get a better VO2 max, even that is, like, subjective measurement. I don't even want to go into the territory. A lot of people just do it, and they say, I feel great, and et cetera. But then if you're constantly measuring one intervention across hundreds of markers, you catch anywhere where it lets you down. So, like, everything you do is almost like, if you want to just like. Like, have safe health interventions, do what Brian does, because it's measured across so many things, red flags will come up.

Yeah, A lot of the critique I get in the world, people will say, oh, that's just Brian. But Brian's. His. His markers are unique to him. That's not true. Like, you know, going to bed at the same time every night is useful. For every human, it's not like you've got a special genotype and it's like, nope, you are better off doing four hours different every night for alternating nights. Like, it's not like the body is very consistent across many humans. And so the majority of the things that we have discovered are population level discoveries, right? Going to bed at the same time every night, working to lower your resting heart rate before sleep, right? That includes, like when you do those things, you eat earlier and lighter, you lower your stress, you calm your body and mind, you don't get into fights before bed. Like, these are like things we all know. Like when we have heavy meals, it's hard to sleep. When we fight just before bed, it's hard to sleep. When you're really stressed, it's very hard to sleep. And then the same thing with certain foods, like dietary things.

So just that it's becoming obvious in this conversation. So people think about science from what's the N number? And for anyone listening at home who doesn't know that term, it's essentially the amount of participants in a study. And so the more participants, the more generally the scientific community views it as positive because you've got more data points to reference. It's like, that is a great way also. It's almost like we need another N of number, which is like on a person, how many measurements were you doing? So like, even in a study, if you have like n of, you know, thousand, but you've only measured one thing, we don't really know the impact of what that thing did on all these other things. So the beauty of what we've done is that we've taken N of large number scientific studies and applied it to n of 1, but done it with a measurement M of thousands. And so you're not just going in blind. I think that's the critique you get is like, you're just like, how do you know what's working? We have thousands of measurements on you and actually the pairing those two things is probably like the most optimal kind of form of science you could ideally do on an individual person. We also have been exploring, now that we've really tested all of the major population level studies and interventions, can we now we've got you at this optimal baseline, you've got a fantastic M baseline, measurement baseline. Can we now try to do more esoteric interventions that aren't on the scientific rigor for population level and actually now really be able to test it? Because we've got this trove of baseline.

Data, the second vector of attack we get is scientists are they level this criticism that what we're doing is not science. And what we're trying to convey here is that people have practical problems in life that they're trying to solve. Either they're trying to improve their fertility because they're trying to get pregnant, or they have some autoimmune disorder, or they don't feel great, or they have headaches and they can't quite understand where it's coming from. Now, in those situations, the best vector, of course, is to look at scientific evidence. And there's different tiers of scientific evidence and RCT being the best. Mike, actually, can you chime in? What is an RCT and what are the benefits of an RCT and what are the limitations of how people think about various degrees of scientific evidence?

A randomized controlled trial is the most important data we can collect for population based health. Right? W. So it's very important for medicine. It's. It's important for understanding how to take a therapy and understand whether it's going to work for the majority of people that you apply that therapy to.

Right?

But let's take an example of a randomized controlled trial. In a 100 people, there's some intervention, right? And in 55 of those people, that intervention has a positive outcome. And in 45 of those people it has a, a nil or a negative outcome. If the data work out, works out appropriately, you, the like highlight at the end of that study would be there is a positive outcome from this intervention, but you have to drill into that randomized control trial to understand that only 55% of the people actually had a positive income outcome. So when I take that and I apply that to a population, great. This intervention is more likely to have a positive outcome than a negative outcome. However, when I look at an individual basis, you're only 55% likely to have a positive outcome from that intervention. So like we, there's this, there's this misstep when we take population based care and apply it to a single person. If we're not measuring, if we're not objectively collecting data, we can inappropriately apply interventions that otherwise may not be having a good outcome in someone at 45% of the time, which is not zero. Right? So I think that's just a thing that people often miss. And I'm not trying to completely naysay randomized controlled trials. They're extremely important. We have to have them for society. We have to have them for, to understand how to apply interventions. But on a, on A personal level. It's more complex than that.

Thank God that actually, the interventions that we can all do that have the biggest impact are things that are accessible to everyone mostly and are within people's control, which is sleep, diet, and exercise. Like, I know it's hard to do, like, incredibly hard, but I'm grateful for that. That at least it's there and anyone can grab it.

Yeah, I wish there was just like a more clear direction. I mean, sleep is obvious, right? It's like, you need sleep. Okay, but. And exercise is also obvious, I guess you need exercise. Although maybe we can argue a little bit about which kind's best diet is where, like, oh, man, and the religions come out, right? Like, yeah, with their axes and their pitchforks and like, it's. It's just such a wild, wild west out there.

The hard part about food is that it's like we all have food addictions and disorders. And so it's really hard because we have to. We can't just go cold turkey from it. We have to engage with this food.

And.

And so we point people to the Don't Die food guide. Generally, you want to avoid sugars, fried foods, that kind of stuff. Um, have a look at that guide and. And you'll have a good place to start. Oftentimes it's about limiting the bad things. Whereas exercise and sleep, it's very much more of like a proactive. Like, go get these things, do this amount of exercise, get this amount of sleep. So it's hard.

Yeah. Again, last month, we posted online these 60 plus biomarkers, plus my actual. And also data from the past 12 months, including averages, and then my actual blood draw results from the lab. So this was a big data drop. So, yeah, I'll just go through a few. I'll grab some. Mike, Kate, you guys can grab a few. I'll start with speed of aging. This is an epigenetic marker. It looks. I like this because. So we actually went big on epigenetic measurement years ago. We saw the potential of this, and over the past couple years, the clinical evidence has accumulated. This is now one of the most clinically validated markers of aging. And this particular one we use, this pace is the most clinically validated pan tissue epigenetic test. And so we trust this marker. It has clinical validation. It. And I've lowered my speed of aging. My best three test average is 0.54. This is number one in the world. And my most recent best test was 0.48. So this means roughly I'm aging at half the speed of normal. So this is the lowest one in the world that is known of those who are competing with the speed of aging test. So that's cool. Um, my telomere length, this is the end capsule on the chromosomes. This is age equivalent to like a 10 to 15 year old. This is based upon a Data set of 15,000 samples from Spectra cell. And then the relative telomerase activity, this is like how much the telomeres rejuvenate is comparable to a 12 year old. So interesting. Like I'll do those top three as a starters. All right, Mike?

Yeah, I mean that's, so that's a good example of how you're using more than one metric to measure the same thing. So in this case we're measuring sort of an overall age and you're using multiple different metrics to do that. We do similar things like for example with inflammation. So you know, one of the, one of the metrics you monitor for inflammation is high sensitivity crp. And you've been undetectable with that for quite some time. Like multiple different tests now. And that's important because high sensitivity CRP is directly associated with mortality to the extent that like chronic elevated high sensitivity CRP is associated with like 150% increased risk of death. So this is one of like those most important biomarkers that I always think about when I'm evaluating somebody's overall health. But you also want to look at other markers that measure a similar thing. Like, for example TNF alpha or IL6. There's all these other markers that can also measure inflammation. So it's important to make sure that we're measuring from multiple different areas and not just putting all of our faith in one particular marker.

Yeah, Mike, can we pause on that? The, the, the HS crp. I mean I've been low over the years on that marker of inflammation, but I've never achieved a non detect. That's pretty insane. Can you comment on that?

Yeah. So it basically it just means that your level's so low the machine can't pick it up. So it, it comes back as a less than 0.3, which means like, who knows, maybe it's actually zero, maybe it's 0.1. But the machine itself is uncapable of, of measuring that low.

I think the detection limit is 0.15.

Oh, is it 1.5? Yeah, it's a little bit different between each lab, but yeah, that's, it's pretty low.

And then we covered last week that your bar mineral density is in the top 99.8%. Your cardiovascular fitness is in the top 85th percentile of 18 year olds. A fun one that people love to comment on is that your testosterone is incredibly high. Given that you're in a caloric restriction. You're not on trt, which is something we had to debunk because people essentially like, because the markers are so good that it's almost like hard to believe we haven't seen it. Especially in veganism. That's a hot topic in, in society right now.

Yeah, on that one. So I had one of the most outspoken carnivore advocates basically was calling me out online like trying to make me look a fool, like I was a liar. And I finally called them, was like hey, like what's up? And so I showed them my lab reports because they're basically his hypothesis was it is impossible for you to have high testosterone if you are plant based and caloric restricted. I've never seen it my entire life. It is impossible. And if you are the per, if you actually do, if this is actually true and you're not lying because he was, he was suggesting I was on testosterone replacement therapy to boost my testosterone levels. He said, you'll be the first person I've ever seen achieve this. Now to be clear, I'm plant based plus collagen peptides. So yeah, and so I showed him my markers real time for my lab report. I'm like, here's my lh, LH levels and my FS FSH levels. If those two are normal, it's evidence that my testosterone levels are in fact natural. And he was stunned like he had never seen it before. And so this is, people come at this with these preconceived notions of what can or cannot be achieved in the body, but there's no good reasons why. Uh, so yeah, so that was a good one.

Same thing on the heavy metals thing is like we, there's a heavy metals influencer who was essentially like there's no way, like I, I, I, this person like tries really hard to avoid heavy metals. And Brian called them up, they were like, there's no way you have lower heavy metals than I do. Showed the results on screen to them and they had, and Brian has lower heavy metal results than they did someone who actively works on a specific thing. So it's just like it's, it's honestly incredible that we're able to just show that it is possible. So even in covering these results, what, what have we covered? We've covered speed of aging. So DNA methylation. We've covered fertility, we've covered telomeres, which is really hot topic in longevity. We've covered bone health, cardiovascular fitness, inflammation. What else? Testosterone. So hormone health, sleep. And across the board, that's the thing to take away from this conversation is getting all of them not only optimal, but actually like top percentile performance is the hard thing. And that's just a handful of the markers too. Like we'll have to put on screen where you can get from. This is all on Twitter, everyone. If you want to go into the details, if you want to see the PDF export from the lab itself and like go in depth and analyze Brian's biomarkers. Like, please, we encourage it. We also, like, we say that Brian is the healthiest human out there. If someone else came out and posted as much data and proved that they had better buy markers, that would be such a win for the community. Please do it. Please go and get these things done.

That's the best thing that could happen is like if there's a formal competition, that would be the biggest win. All right, so let's talk now that we talked about the good ones, Mike, let's talk about the not so good ones. Where are, where do we think we are mediocre and where do we think we are struggling based upon the ones we posted?

Yeah, room for improvement.

Yeah. Glutathione was low. 105 micrograms per milliliter. Um, and that was because you had recently stopped taking nac. Um, you were basically messing around with cycling off to get the hormetic response of not taking that consistently, which I think is personally a great thing. We happened to test in the middle of that cycle off, actually the very beginning of it, which is why the glutathione level was, was lower. So that's one of them.

Do I remember that? We stopped doing the NAC because we were worried it may blunt some of the effects of hbot. So we stopped, we pieced those two together. Like we realized we were doing HBOT and nac. And then we realized the NAC may be blunting something, so we discontinued it and then we got this result back. Cause my 12 month average for Glutathione is 210. So wherever we want to be in the range. It's just this last test was our first lower level.

Correct. Yeah. And you use up glutathione with, with hbot and it actually the HBOT likely upregulates the production of glutathione. So not only did we Stop taking it. But you were also getting HBOT at the same time. So you're getting like a double whammy. Um, but makes sense given the, the mechanism. We may have overshot LDL a little bit.

It's too low.

Yeah, we may have overshot a little bit. And that's because we were basically had just started a new therapy. So you just started Repatha right before we did this last, most recent trial. You were on Zetia and repath at the same time, which got you pretty low. I mean really, you don't, you don't necessarily want to be below about 50 for APOB. That's what the studies have shown. Like is the floor for kind of like no cardiovascular disease progression. Um, so maybe a little bit too much on that. Back off a little bit.

So my AP. APOB is 52 on the latest draw. Are you happy with that?

52 is like solid for sure when it comes to cardiovascular disease. Certainly solid.

But yeah, the cool thing here is like we really have to search and it's not like a typical blood draw away. You can just clearly be like, oh yeah, we need to work on these things.

Yeah. The other thing that came back high was my vitamin D levels. So I've been hovering around like 40, 50 range for the past couple years, has been stubbornly there and no matter how much vitamin D I take, I just cannot move it. And so over the past 90 days it shot up to 134. So over a hundred is getting to be excessively high. We, we don't want to maintain 1:34. So we're, we're bringing that down now. But in trying to piece this together, we have a working hypothesis that HBOT so dramatically improved my microbiome that it could dramatically have improved my, my ability to absorb vitamin D and other nutrients. So that was cool. We'll see. I stopped taking, I was doing 5,000 units per day and we stopped taking that. But the, the rise of my vitamin D. Exactly. Is in the same time frame as HBOT therapy incrementally going up over the blood draws we did. So that would be cool to see if the microbiome improvements did in fact increase absorption. And then it takes a beat for vitamin D to come back down because the fat soluble. So it'll take a few months to get back down to normal ranges. That's a good summary, I think. Yeah. So like you guys, you can go out and check these out.

Yeah. You, you've also posted online all of the analysis and the areas for commentary. Essentially Internally for the team, where we've looked at a marker, hypothesized what's going on there, and add a comment. So if you want to get into the details, everything's online.

Yep.

Wrap you guys. That was a great podcast. Let us know again in the comments. Improvements for us to do.

Yeah. Yeah. I think also we could pursue another time, maybe get into more the details of, like, how we're thinking about certain markers, how we're playing with them. Like, we went over the biomarkers today, generally.

Yeah.

You know, how. How do you approach. If you're looking at a certain cholesterol marker, how do you think about it? How would you work on it? Because I think a lot of people would probably do a blood draw, get a result back, and say, what do I do now? And they can, of course, you know, do their own research, but might be helpful to talk about it.

You know, it'd be really cool to have someone submit their health markers. Like, we don't know anything about them.

Yeah.

Like, and we just look it over. Obviously, they would have to be okay disclosing their health markers, obviously HIPAA compliant and all that kind of stuff. But be really, really interesting to do an analysis.

Yeah.

So if you're interested in that, put a. Put a comment. So we know if this is something you'd like us to do, it'd be a really fun experiment.

Yeah. Also, I think we should do Roast my protocol.

We could do that along with the palm reading and the horoscopes.

People send in what you do for your health, and then we'll assess it.

Cool. All right, thanks, you guys.

Yeah.

See you next week.

Bye, guys.