Brave New World

For Episode Four, Evgeny is joined by human biologist, longevity science monolith and founder of The Ultimate Human, Gary Brecka. Together, they explore why so many people feel stuck at a “six out of ten,” what Gary believes to be the cause of fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep, soreness, low mood, and why poor exercise recovery is often driven by nutrient deficiencies.

Gary shares his unconventional background as a mortality expert in life insurance, where he used massive datasets to predict lifespan with extreme accuracy. In the conversation, he challenges modern medicine’s tendency to label many chronic conditions as “familial” or “idiopathic” and details how to treat the most common gene mutation in the world, which is also Gary's bêtes noire: MHTF.

We’d like to thank The Ultimate Human for providing the video clips featured in this episode.

This episode was produced by Message Heard and The Standard.

Producer: Florence de Schlichting
Production Coordinator: James Cox
Production Manager: Kirsty McLean
Video Editor: Nani Wenani

The Standard team:
Joe Bromley
Will Rogers-Coltman

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Episode Three of Brave New World, Evgeny is joined by Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP. Together, they explore recovery, sleep, and the idea that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Ahmed explains how overtraining as a Harvard athlete led him to build his own wearable, identifying a major gap in health diagnostics at the time: measuring recovery, not just performance.

He explains what WHOOP tracks - sleep quality, strain, heart rate variability (HRV), recovery, and stress; dives into why seven hours in bed can still mean poor sleep; and why consistency of bedtime and wake time often matters more than raw hours.

Evgeny and Ahmed get practical on health trends, address the criticism that wearables culture a state of analysis paralysis and how to use metrics as a tool, not a verdict.

This episode was produced by Message Heard and The Standard.

Producer: Florence de Schlichting
Production Coordinator: James Cox
Production Manager: Kirsty McLean
Video Editor: Nani Wenani

The Standard team:

Joe Bromley
Will Rogers-Coltman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Evgeny sits down with Professor Tim Spector and Dr Federica Amati - two of the leading scientific voices behind personalised nutrition company ZOE - to rethink everything we’ve been told about food.

From the myth of “good” and “bad” fats to calorie-counting obsessions, Tim and Federica uncover why so much of our nutritional advice is outdated, over-simplified - and in some cases, actively harmful. They unpack how ultra-processed foods and constant snacking damage our gut, why breakfast is not magically the most important meal of the day, and how time-restricted eating might be the key to optimising your daily health.

At the core of their discussion is a simple idea: eat for your gut microbes.

This episode was produced by Message Heard and The Standard.

Producer: Florence de Schlichting
Production Coordinator: James Cox
Production Manager: Kirsty McLean
Video Editor: Nani Wenani

The Standard team:
Joe Bromley
Will Rogers-Coltman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the first episode of Season 4 of Brave New World.

This time, Evgeny is joined by Steven Bartlett to talk about mindset, ambition and the future. He shares how he manages “a million tabs” without burning out, why self-empathy boosts performance, and how a humiliating paddle match taught him a breakthrough lesson on failure.

He opens up about growing up in poverty and shame, the influence of his mum, and why the biggest entrepreneurial lesson he learned was simply: have an idea, then do it.

Steven unpacks the thinking behind his book Just F**ing Do It, the neuroscience of hard things, his obsession with 1% gains, and why his company has a “Head of Failure.”

The conversation expands to happiness, arrival fallacy, AI, humanoid robots, the future of work, the creator economy, and why he’d homeschool his future kids to double down on uniquely human skills.

This episode was produced by Message Heard and The London Standard.

Producer: Florence de Schlichting
Production Coordinator: James Cox
Production Manager: Kirsty McLean
Video Editor: Nani Wenani

The Standard team:

Joe Bromley
Will Rogers-Coltman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today’s episode, Evgeny Lebedev talks about the remarkable potential of ketamine with Dr John Krystal, Professor of neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine.

Their discussion delves into the world of neurology, what ketamine actually does to our brain and the importance of glutamate receptors in treating depression. Ketamine may have gotten bad press after Friends actor Matthew Perry died of an overdose while receiving treatment with the drug, but for Dr Krystal, it is a critically overlooked solution to the epidemic of mental illness.

Also in this episode:
Ketamine’s complicated history starting in the 1950s
The real reason depression leads to suicide
Why ketamine is effective at dealing with trauma
The detailed procedure of ketamine therapy
The importance of ketamine’s “narrow window” dosage
Ketamine’s reputation and why it needs to change
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.