Aging science has gotten much better at describing who appears to be aging faster or slower. What medicine still lacks is a reliable feedback loop: a way to tell whether something we do is actually changing the biology that drives age-related disease.

Dr. Nir Barzilai argues that solving that measurement problem could turn geroscience from an interesting field of research into something doctors can actually use: measure where you are, intervene, measure again, and learn what works.

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What We Cover:

• What centenarians reveal about living longer and spending less time sick
• Why changing one hallmark of aging can affect several others
• How TAME was designed to test metformin as an anti-aging drug and to convince the FDA to treat aging itself as an endpoint—and why it failed to get off the ground
• Why metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, GLP-1 agonists, and some osteoporosis drugs are being studied as potential gerotherapeutics, or anti-aging drugs
• How FAST is searching existing clinical trials for biomarkers that change when an intervention affects aging biology
• Whether aging needs continuous monitoring or can be meaningfully tracked a few times a year

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Nir Barzilai is the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair in Aging Research and a professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he directs the Institute for Geroscience.

📍What Dr. Nil Barzilai & Mike Haney discussed:

• 05:10 - Aging is a condition, not just a label
• 05:59 - Why aging is what drives disease
• 08:19 - Should we call aging a disease?
• 10:20 - Why the species may have a ceiling around 115
• 14:34 - Why changing one hallmark of aging changes the others
• 23:08 - Metformin was anti-aging before it was a diabetes drug
• 31:55 - Centenarians live longer and spend less time sick
• 40:12 - How TAME tried to make aging an FDA endpoint
• 48:17 - Metformin, SGLT2s, GLP-1s, and osteoporosis drugs as gerotherapeutics
• 52:26 - FAST: finding biomarkers that actually change with treatment
• 56:49 - Whether aging needs continuous monitoring, or a few checks a year
• 1:01:16 - Where behavior still fits once we have anti-aging drugs

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Hallmarks of Aging: An Expanding Universe (Cell, 2023) Paper
• Compression of Morbidity Is Observed Across Cohorts with Exceptional Longevity (JAGS, 2016) Paper
• Metformin as a Tool to Target Aging (Cell Metabolism, 2016) Paper
• Geroscience-Guided Repurposing of FDA-Approved Drugs to Target Aging (Aging Cell, 2022) Paper
• Biomarkers of Aging for the Identification and Evaluation of Longevity Interventions (Cell, 2023) Paper
• FAST: Finding Aging Biomarkers by Searching Existing Trials FAST Initiative
• ARPA-H PROSPR / FAST award ARPA-H FAST project

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/HbeGjwCw6vk

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Nil Barzilai on X: https://x.com/NirBarzilaiMD

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Medical AI is already getting good at doing things doctors do. Dr. Ziad Obermeyer thinks the bigger opportunity is using AI to discover things medicine doesn’t yet know.

His work shows both sides of that future: algorithms can amplify bad assumptions when trained on the wrong targets, but they can also uncover signals in medical data that humans miss. Obermeyer argues that as more health data is collected outside the hospital, AI could turn it into a continuous picture of health rather than a series of isolated snapshots.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

What We Cover:

• Why AI should learn from patients and outcomes, not just doctors
• How an ECG model found hidden risk of sudden cardiac death
• Why medical data access is still a major bottleneck
• How more measurement could actually mean fewer unnecessary tests
• Why healthcare may be entering a “mainframe to PC” transition

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Ziad Obermeyer is an emergency medicine physician and an Associate Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He also co-founded Dandelion Health and the non-profit Nightingale Open Science.

📍What Dr. Ziad Obermeyer & Mike Haney discussed:

• 02:43 Why better data is fundamental to medical AI
• 05:54 The problem: There’s no variable called “get sick”
• 09:27 Algorithms optimize exactly what you tell them to
• 23:03 Why teaching AI to copy doctors limits what it can discover
• 26:28 How AI could create a new science of medicine
• 28:40 Could AI predict sudden cardiac death before it happens?
• 34:14 Can an algorithm teach us what it sees?
• 36:50 Medicine’s biggest AI bottleneck: access to data
• 49:00 Healthcare’s “mainframe to PC” transition
• 55:08 Why more measurement could actually mean fewer tests
• 58:46 Why medical AI is aiming too low
• 1:02:13 What the next generation of wearables needs to measure

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations (Science, 2019)https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2342
• An Algorithmic Approach to Reducing Unexplained Pain Disparities in Underserved Populations (Nature Medicine, 2021)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01192-7
• An ECG Biomarker for Sudden Cardiac Death Discovered with Deep Learning (Nature, 2026)https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10674-6
• Predicting the Future — Big Data, Machine Learning, and Clinical Medicine (NEJM, 2016)https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1606181
• Nightingale Open Sciencehttps://www.nightingalescience.org/
• Dandelion Healthhttps://dandelionhealth.ai/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/WDo-iL6O5nU

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📲 Connect:

Connect with Dr. Ziad Obermeyer on https://ziadobermeyer.com/

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Why do we crave some foods the more often we eat them? Are we addicted?

Dr. Dana Small’s research suggests that food craving reaches far beyond taste or willpower, and that “addiction” isn’t a helpful descriptor. Every time we eat, unconscious signals from the body teach the brain which foods deliver useful nutrients, and train us to want more of those. In other words, we don’t eat crave foods because they taste good; foods taste good because our body craves them.

Understanding that means we can rethink overeating. It’s not a matter of addiction or self-control; it’s our body behaving the way nature intended it to, but in the setting of foods not found in the wild, like those high in both fat and carbohydrates. But we may also be able to train our brain away from these cravings.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

What We Cover

• Taste vs. flavor, pleasure, motivation, and food reward
• How gut nutrient signals teach the brain which foods to seek
• Why fat + carbs produce an unusually strong reward response
• What eight weeks of high-fat, high-sugar snacks did to the brain
• How GLP-1s may cut food wanting while preserving pleasure

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Dana Small is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Metabolism and the Brain and a professor at McGill University, with appointments in Neurology and Neurosurgery and Medicine. She directs the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, and her research examines how sensory, metabolic, and neural signals interact to shape food reward, eating behavior, and metabolic health.

📍What Dr. Dana Small & Mike Haney discussed:

• 02:44 - Is food actually addictive?
• 05:02 - Taste and flavor are different senses
• 08:21 - Why “hedonic” vs. “homeostatic” eating is misleading
• 10:42 - The reward from sugar begins after you swallow it
• 22:32 - The “high road” and “low road” of food reward
• 27:41 - How scientists teach the brain to associate a flavor with calories
• 38:30 - Why combining fat and carbohydrates produces more reward
• 47:34 - How beliefs about food can change physiological responses
• 50:02 - Eight weeks of snacks changes how the brain responds to food
• 57:51 - What this science means for people trying to eat differently
• 1:03:50 - How GLP-1 drugs may change food wanting
• 1:07:30 - Can GLP-1s help retrain eating behavior for the long term?

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Habitual Daily Intake of a Sweet and Fatty Snack Modulates Reward Processing in Humans (Cell Metabolism, 2023)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36958330/
• Supra-Additive Effects of Combining Fat and Carbohydrate on Food Reward (Cell Metabolism, 2018)https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(18)30325-5
• Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward (Current Biology, 2017)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28803868/
• Rethinking Food Reward (Annual Review of Psychology, 2020)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31561741/
• In Defense of Pleasure: We Need to Rethink Food Reward and Obesity (PLOS Biology, 2025)https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003497
• Mind Over Milkshakes: Mindsets, Not Just Nutrients, Determine Ghrelin Response (Health Psychology, 2011)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21574706/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/lXlCqNqjgHY

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Twenty-five years ago, sequencing the human genome seemed poised to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Dr. Euan Ashley helped turn that promise into an actual clinical experiment, leading one of the first efforts to interpret an entire human genome in the context of a real patient’s health. The challenge quickly became apparent: medicine could suddenly generate billions of data points about one person, but making sense of them was painfully slow.

That history feels newly relevant. Ashley recently gave an AI system his own 15-year-old genome data and watched it reproduce most of an analysis that had originally required months of work by a team, in about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, genomics is being joined by wearables, multi-omics, and other technologies capable of tracking far more of our biology over time.

In this episode of NextLevel, we use the genome revolution as a case study for what happens when our ability to measure the body advances faster than our ability to interpret and use the information. The next leap in personalized medicine may depend less on collecting another mountain of data than on building the tools, reference datasets, and healthcare systems capable of turning that information into decisions.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Euan Ashley is Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University and the Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor of Genomics and Precision Health, with appointments in medicine, genetics, and biomedical data science. He’s also the author of The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them.

📍What Dr. Euan Ashley & Mike Haney discussed:

• 03:33 What happened to the promise of personalized medicine?
• 06:33 The first clinical interpretation of a human genome
• 11:26 AI interprets in 30 minutes what once took months
• 21:25 Why genomics still needs better, more diverse reference data
• 27:41 Building a molecular map of exercise with MoTrPAC
• 32:01 Exercise changed nearly every organ researchers measured
• 39:05 Why your personal baseline can matter more than a "normal" range
• 42:46 How wearables opened a new era of longitudinal health data
• 47:48 The biggest barrier to continuous, personalized healthcare
• 51:39 What medical AI needs to become genuinely useful
• 57:05 How AI can ace medical benchmarks for the wrong reasons
• 58:20 The heart measurement Ashley considers a medical "holy grail"

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Clinical Assessment Incorporating a Personal Genome, The Lancet, 2010. Landmark integrated clinical analysis of a complete human genome.
• Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC), NIH Common Fund. Large-scale project mapping how exercise changes tissues and organs. 
• MoTrPAC: Human Studies Design and Protocol, Journal of Applied Physiology, 2024. Human study of molecular responses to endurance and resistance training.
• The Mitochondrial Multi-Omic Response to Exercise Training Across Rat Tissues, Cell Metabolism, 2024. MoTrPAC study on molecular changes across organs after exercise.
• Harmonizing Standards and Resources for the Medical Genome, Nature, 2026. Ashley et al. on genomic reference standards and clinical-grade sequencing.
  

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/bD2YVGdwviE

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Is intermittent fasting biohacker wellness hype or legit health intervention? Some studies show real benefits, others find nothing, and the occasional headline calls it bad for your heart.

Dr. Courtney Peterson has spent nearly two decades running some of the field's most tightly controlled feeding trials, and her data points to a clear pattern: there is a real effect to a restricted eating window, but when you eat may matter as much as how long you fast. Her studies found that eating in a short window early in the day lowers blood pressure and improves insulin sensitivity, even without weight loss. A physicist by training, she brings that same rigor to a field built mostly on people's own food diaries.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Courtney Peterson is an Associate Professor of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She holds a PhD in physics from Harvard and leads clinical trials on intermittent fasting, meal timing, and circadian rhythms.

📍What Dr. Courtney Peterson & Mike Haney discussed:

• 0:00 Introduction
• 02:39 The three types of intermittent fasting
• 05:29 The 2012 mouse study that started the field
• 11:24 Why fasting works through appetite, not extra calories
• 13:48 Her six-hour study: lower blood pressure, no weight loss
• 25:34 Why results depend on who's being studied
• 28:45 The shift worker whose health got worse
• 36:45 Her theory: timing over fasting length
• 43:08 Heart attacks, blood pressure, and the body's clock
• 45:55 The camping trip that reset people's body clocks
• 58:11 Early findings from her unpublished aging study
• 1:08:16 Should you eat ice cream for breakfast?

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet (Hatori et al., 2012) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019
• Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Insulin Sensitivity, Blood Pressure, and Oxidative Stress Even without Weight Loss in Men with Prediabetes (Sutton et al., 2018) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2018.04.010
• Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves 24-Hour Glucose Levels and Affects Markers of the Circadian Clock, Aging, and Autophagy in Humans (Jamshed et al., 2019) — https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11061234
• Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss (Liu et al., 2022) — https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2114833

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/dKauIgX3IH4

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

What if we could measure the human body the way engineers monitor a jet engine?

For nearly two decades, Stanford geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder has been trying exactly that. By continuously tracking everything he could possibly track in his body—genome sequencing, metabolites, wearable data, whole-body imaging—he has turned himself (and ~100 study subjects) into one of the world's largest experiments in continuous health measurement.

The point wasn’t mindless biohacking. It was to answer a question: Are there clinically useful signals in all that data?

This conversation suggests the answer is yes. Snyder’s experience and that of dozens of his study subjects offer some of the first real evidence that continuous measurement intelligently analyzed can reveal that you’re getting sick before you have symptoms, help find solutions to medical conditions that work for your unique biology, and help you refocus on prevention of disease rather than management.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Michael Snyder is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Genetics and director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine, where he previously chaired the Department of Genetics for 15 years.

📍What Dr. Michael Snyder & Mike Haney discussed:

• 03:10 Why Dr. Snyder started measuring healthy people instead of waiting for disease
• 09:18 Living in the future: tracking his own biology for nearly two decades
• 15:02 Why "normal" isn't enough: the importance of personal baselines
• 22:48 Discovering his own genetically unique form of type 2 diabetes
• 32:06 How wearables detected illness before symptoms appeared
• 39:18 Whole-body MRIs, incidental findings, and why change over time matters
• 46:55 Why everyone has abnormalities, but not everyone has disease
• 55:41 The promise of metabolomics, proteomics, and continuous biological sensing
• 1:06:52 Why AI is essential for interpreting thousands of health signals

1:15:34 What continuous measurement could mean for preventive medicine

1:23:10 The next decade of personalized health and what's still missing

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Personal Omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Molecular and Medical Phenotypes (Chen et al., Cell, 2012)
  https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(12)00965-3
• Longitudinal Multi-omics Profiling Reveals Dynamic Personal Health Status (Price et al., Nature Biotechnology, 2017)
  https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3695
• The Integrative Personal Omics Profile (iPOP): A Decade of Progress in Precision Health (Snyder lab review)
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-021-00409-3
• Wearable Sensor Data and Self-reported Symptoms for COVID-19 Detection (Mishra et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2020)
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6
• All of Us Research Program
  https://allofus.nih.gov/
• Connect with Dr Michael Snyder: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab.html

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/eUEYmLC1CcE

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

For decades, we've been told that eating less fat is one of the healthiest things we can do. That advice reshaped the foods we buy, the way we think about weight loss, and even how parents feed their children.

But what if we misunderstood fat in the first place?

In this episode, nutrition researcher Dr. Arne Astrup traces how the war on fat began, why many of its core assumptions haven't held up under decades of research, and what we've learned instead. Rather than asking whether fat is "good" or "bad," he argues that the more useful questions are: What foods actually keep us healthy? Why do some people gain weight more easily than others? And what happens when we reduce nutrition to single nutrients instead of whole foods?

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Arne Astrup is a physician, nutrition researcher, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen whose research focuses on obesity, appetite regulation, dietary fats, and cardiometabolic health. He previously chaired the Danish Nutrition Council and helped lead Denmark's landmark ban on industrial trans fats.

📍What Dr. Arne Astrup & Mike Haney discussed:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:03 How fear of fat became public health policy
• 07:40 Did low-fat advice help create today's processed foods?
• 10:20 Denmark's trans fat ban and one lesson nutrition got right
• 14:00 "I was wrong." Why dietary fat isn't the main driver of obesity
• 18:45 Why your body fat isn't simply the fat you eat
• 27:00 Why fat can help you eat fewer calories
• 32:00 Are nuts actually easy to overeat?
• 36:00 Cheese, yogurt, and why whole foods don't behave like nutrients
• 41:00 Why insulin resistance changes carbohydrate tolerance
• 55:00 The LDL debate: what saturated fat actually changes
• 1:01:00 Why it's time to stop talking about "saturated fat" as a single thing

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index for Weight-Loss Maintenance (DIOGENES Trial): Landmark randomized trial led by Dr. Astrup examining protein, glycemic index, and long-term weight maintenance. New England Journal of Medicine
• Weight Loss Maintenance in Overweight Subjects on Ad Libitum Diets with High or Low Protein Content and Glycemic Index: The DIOGENES Trial (12-Month Results). One-year follow-up of the DIOGENES study. International Journal of Obesity
• Dietary Saturated Fats and Health: Are the U.S. Guidelines Evidence-Based? (Astrup et al., 2021): Consensus review arguing that current saturated fat recommendations should place greater emphasis on whole foods and dietary patterns than saturated fat alone. Nutrients (2021)
• Walter Willett's research on industrial trans fats and cardiovascular disease: Early epidemiologic work that helped establish the harms of industrial trans fats and ultimately informed policy changes worldwide. PubMed search for Walter Willett trans fat publications
• World Health Organization: REPLACE Trans Fat Initiative: Background on the global effort to eliminate industrially produced trans fats from the food supply. World Health Organization REPLACE Initiative

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/ajqg7LdM0PM

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Almost everything your doctor knows about you comes from a snapshot: a blood pressure reading, an annual lab, a handful of numbers meant to represent a constantly changing human body.

That's beginning to change. New sensors promise far more continuous health data, and AI may finally give us the ability to interpret it. But medicine has been through a data revolution before, and almost none of what people initially promised actually happened.

In the first episode of NextLevel, Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and one of medicine's leading thinkers on technological change, to ask what healthcare's messy transition from paper to electronic records can teach us about the AI era.

Wachter explains why digitizing medicine didn't transform care on its own, why your doctor is already overwhelmed by data, and why simply sending them continuous feeds from your watch, ring, or future sensors would make the problem worse.

The missing piece is an intelligence layer: a system capable of deciding what matters, helping patients act when they can, and pulling clinicians in when they're actually needed.

They also explore how AI is changing the balance of knowledge between doctors and patients, the danger of trusting systems that are usually right, what healthcare can learn from airplane cockpits, and why collecting more health data may be much easier than figuring out what any of it means.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Robert M. Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s also the author of six books, including the 2015 bestseller The Digital Doctor, which examined medicine's transition from paper to electronic health records, and 2026’s A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, his examination of generative AI's arrival in medicine.

📍What Dr.Robert Watcher & Mike Haney discussed:

• 0:00 — Dr. Wachter and medicine's technological revolutions
• 7:00 — How healthcare finally went digital
• 12:40 — Why digitizing healthcare didn't fix it
• 19:00 — AI is fixing problems computers created
• 29:40 — Does AI know more medicine than your doctor?
• 33:00 — The hidden danger of trusting computers
• 42:30 — What healthcare can learn from airplane cockpits
• 56:15 — Why medicine has to move beyond the office visit
• 58:20 — Healthcare's missing intelligence layer
• 1:04:20 — Why more health data isn't enough

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Dr. Robert Wachter, UCSF Department of Medicine: https://medicine.ucsf.edu/people/robert-wachter
• A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-giant-leap-how-ai-is-transforming-healthcare-and-what-that-means-for-our-future-robert-wachter/e6a7ecb6556f9f02
• The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-digital-doctor-hope-hype-and-harm-at-the-dawn-of-medicine-s-computer-age-robert-wachter/9187727
• Pattern Recognition, Dr. Wachter's newsletter on AI and healthcare: https://robertwachter.substack.com/
• Dr. Robert Wachter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wachter-3102b963/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/762DTOa7uTY

Find us on YouTube: ⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.

Healthcare is entering a new era.

AI is improving faster than our ability to measure the human body, while a new generation of sensors promises to change that. Together, they’ll reshape how we understand health, disease, and medicine itself.

NextLevel is our new series inside the podcast where we try to make sense of that future through conversations with the people building it.

Our first episode, featuring Dr. Bob Wachter, arrives this week.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

You probably spend more time thinking about protein than friendships.

According to today's guest, you’ve got it backward.

In this episode of A Whole New Level, Mike Haney sits down with Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, one of the world's leading researchers on social connection and health. She explains how data now unequivocally show that social isolation drives early mortality. And why simply not feeling lonely doesn't necessarily mean you're getting enough social connection, as well as why even weak connections matter a lot to a healthy social life.

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🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and one of the world's leading researchers on social connection and health. Her landmark meta-analyses involving millions of participants established social isolation and loneliness as independent risk factors for chronic disease and early mortality.

📍What Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad & Mike Haney discussed:

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:18 — How Dr. Holt-Lunstad began studying social connection and health
• 3:00 — Why relationships belong alongside diet, exercise, and sleep
• 4:10 — Social isolation vs. loneliness vs. living alone
• 11:45 — How researchers measure social connection and health outcomes
• 16:20 — The biological pathways linking isolation to disease
• 27:30 — How scientists study social connection without randomized trials
• 33:00 — Family, friends, weak ties, and what kinds of relationships matter|
• 37:00 — AI companions, loneliness, and whether technology can replace human connection
• 46:15 — Is there a minimum effective dose of friendship?
• 58:10 — Why Americans are participating in fewer clubs and community groups
• 1:03:20 — Why objective isolation predicts health better than loneliness
• 1:10:40 — Making friends as adults and overcoming the friction of connection

🔗 Helpful Links:

Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad

• BYU Faculty Profile: https://psychology.byu.edu/directory/julianne-holt-lunstad
• Social Connection in America Survey: https://www.socialconnectionguidelines.org/
• U.S. Surgeon General Advisory on Social Connection: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Key Research

• Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010): https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
• Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015): https://perspectives.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201500160
• Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023): https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
• Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam): https://bowlingalone.com/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/g6D2CIpB2n4
Find us on YouTube: https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.