The longest happiness study ever run points to one clear answer: close relationships are one of the strongest predictors of health, happiness and longevity. … Read More
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Our latest thinking on real-time health
GLP-1s are a breakthrough. But weight is the wrong scoreboard.
GLP-1s can transform metabolic health, but weight alone is a crude measure. Track body composition, lean mass, DEXA and strength to protect long-term health. … Read More
VO2max Is a Medical Meme. Here’s What Actually Predicts How Long You’ll Live.
I spent the last two years obsessing over strength. Deadlifts, carries, progressive overload. The numbers went up. My conditioning quietly collapsed. Then I did Hyrox. Reader, I suffered. Not the glorious, character-building kind. The “my lungs are staging a coup … Read More
Chocolate vs Abs: No Solutions, Only Tradeoffs
I often get asked what I think of Bryan Johnson’s daily regimen. The question boils down to: “Should I do it? Would it be good for me?” First, there is no biological free lunch. Every intervention has a price. As … Read More
You Can’t Accidentally Hit Your Protein Target
In health, we often get lost in the weeds — chasing fancy superfoods, buying detox teas, and swapping precious minutes for distractions that don’t move the needle. That $20 organic smoothie? It’s fluff. Your liver doesn’t need help detoxing. Here’s … Read More
Why We Need to Move On from Biohacking
Biohacking is so 2012. Being the optimal you is all about understanding the six pillars of health. Three key takeaways Biohacking, wellness, and wellbeing are poorly defined terms marketers use to obscure selling products. Personalisation, iterative testing, and individual evidence … Read More
What’s at the End of Your Rainbow?
Money is the best life game ever created. It has rules but no referee. It is both an objective artefact and an ephemeral belief. Money reveals who you are; it amplifies you. But money’s chief trick is to mess up … Read More
What Do You Want to Want?
I was having a thoughtful beer with a friend over the weekend, and we were both lamenting life’s shifting goalposts and ever-accelerating time. We both acknowledged that we would have never dreamt of being where we are today, yet we … Read More
Check Yourself: What You Need to Know About Toxins
We interact with over 700,000 compounds daily, some of which are toxic and cause harm with prolonged exposure. Yet most people have no idea what’s building up inside their bodies. Mould Exposure: A Silent Threat Mould thrives in humid climates … Read More
The Quiet Transformation in Healthcare
Health doesn’t shout, it whispers. Underneath this whisper, we are witnessing the transformation of health happening in real time. Healthcare used to be something you visited, then it was on you, soon it will be in you, and eventually everywhere, … Read More
Three Mental Models to Cut Through Wellness Noise
I’m often asked to weigh in on the latest health and longevity protocols. There are three critical mental models you should master to cut through the noise. The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle Brandolini’s Law: the amount of energy needed to refute … Read More
The Heart Outside the Body, the Brain in the Cloud
There’s a line I’ve always loved about parenting: having children is deciding to let your heart walk around outside your body. It is beautiful because it is terrifying. Parenting externalises the heart. AI externalises something else. For the first time, … Read More
The AI Mirage: Why Healthcare Can’t Run Before It Crawls
I recently reviewed a clinic’s plan to deploy AI decision support. It hit every word on the AI bingo card: LLM this, agent that, RAG the other… A critical piece was missing: they had no concept of data infrastructure. The … Read More
The 7 Types of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Can’t Save You
When people find out what I do, they often ask: “What’s the one thing I should do to improve my health?” The conversation always drifts toward sleep. This is progress. But here’s the missed opportunity: people still confuse sleep with … Read More
Slow Is Steady, Steady Is Fast
In a world that equates speed with success, what if slowing down is the key to going faster? Speed races you; pace raises you. Formula 1 teaches us that maintaining speed through the corners, not the straight lines, helps you … Read More
We Are Only Ever Truly Human When We Play
As the geyser of 2025 tactical advice erupts, I challenge you: What game are you really playing? Life whispers three profound philosophies: pura vida, carpe diem, and hakuna matata — celebrating pure moments, seizing days, and releasing unnecessary worries. We’re … Read More
Performance Health: Your Minimum Effective Dose
If you are regularly catapulted into cynicism by preventive health content but know more about your bank account than your health account, this post is for you. We know less about our health than we should One of the biggest … Read More
The IRS of Existence: Why Life’s Taxes Are Non-Negotiable
I woke up to a work-related fire drill this morning. It was not the garden variety style, but something that initially seemed serious. Luckily, it wasn’t. But it got me thinking: I have been paying a lot of anxiety tax … Read More
Exhaling Fat: An Unexpected Fitness reality check
When you lose weight, where does the fat go? If you’re thinking, “I sweat it out,” you’re only 20% correct. The real answer might surprise you: you exhale it. Here’s how it works: when your body metabolises fat, triglycerides … Read More
Why stress is not your enemy
At some point, an expert in a position of authority has probably told you to avoid “stress” as it’s “bad” for you. This is terrible advice. Leaving aside the fact that most of us can’t control our chaotic minds and … Read More
A Personal Health Experience with Health Chatbots
AI helped a very close family member with a complex gastrointestinal chronic condition that doctors in three countries could not resolve. Not because of a novel diagnosis or some hidden insight, but because it reduced cognitive load, provided accessible, detailed … Read More
How to ruin your sleep in 10 easy steps: A masterclass in exhaustion
Witnessing Bryan Johnson‘s very entertaining sleep intervention on Balaji this weekend got me thinking: How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? My work in the longevity field has shown a few patterns worth illuminating. … Read More
The Morning Routine Trap: How Not to Ruin Your Day Before Coffee
1. The Minimum Effective Dose (AKA: Don’t Be a Morning Martyr) As Oliver Burkeman brilliantly points out, we transform potentially helpful habits into “toxic preconditions” – rigid requirements that become obstacles rather than tools. Your 9-step morning protocol isn’t inspiring; … Read More
Ageing, the realist’s guide
As I explore preventive health and longevity research, I encounter all sorts of wild claims about reversing or even stopping aging—Dracula style. And while that’s entertaining, let’s be real. We can’t banish aging, but we can age more like cathedrals … Read More
Preparing your medical practice for AI: a practical guide
First things first: Health is, and will remain a human-driven domain. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase:“AI will not replace doctors, but it will replace doctors who don’t use AI.” We shall see. In the here and now, most health-related matters … Read More
The hidden cost of health measurement
I’ve noticed a recurring pattern among health optimisers in my social circles. It goes like this: “I was having a great time, but I left early to protect my sleep score streak.” Or, “I took the kids for an acai … Read More
Hidden Invaders: How to Protect Your Family from Microplastics
In Singapore, we carry water bottles everywhere, and kids are encouraged to hydrate regularly. Metal bottles bend and are expensive (I dare not think how many my kids have lost), and glass is fragile. So, we eventually default to plastic, … Read More
Microplastics: It’s Not a Credit Card, It’s a Spoon
I first heard about microplastics in 2019 when a study (now debunked) found that, on average, people could be ingesting approximately 5 grams of plastic weekly. To sum up, the actual amount is significantly less, possibly taking thousands of years … Read More
Don’t Compare Your Outsides to the Insides of Others
I’m not sure what I’ve done to alert the feed gods, but they keep pelting me with content like: “here’s how I set up 55 AI agents to work overnight so I can sip coffee and levitate above labour.” Naturally, … Read More
How to Expand Time: Escape the Time Warp
Ever feel like time is accelerating as you get older? You’re not alone. Our brains have a fascinating way of warping the passage of time, often leaving us disoriented. The quip “By 21, you’ve lived half your life—perceptually” highlights how … Read More
The happiness of pursuit
Introduction Ask any human what they want, and they’ll answer “to be happy”. Happiness classes are among the most popular courses at Yale, Harvard and Berkeley (though at Stanford, it’s “Touchy Feely, aka “Interpersonal dynamics”). However, if we dig deeper … Read More
How Generative AI Will Change Your Health Journey
As a company that has developed and offers an autonomous intelligence conversation entity (Kali), I have received quite a few questions on the future of generative AI in healthcare. This is a pivotal topic, and it is worth reflecting on … Read More
The Counterintuitive Science of Balance: How Your Body Fools You All the Time
Your body is lying to you right now. That “refreshing” cold shower? It’s warming your core. The relaxing sauna session? It’s dropping your internal temperature. And that $5 alkaline water you’re sipping? It’s doing absolutely nothing your tap water couldn’t … Read More
Are Your Friends Dragging You Down? The ‘Lowest Common Denominator’ Effect
We often add when we should subtract. As I reach the age where new “old friends” are rare, I’ve been obsessing over who gets my precious time. Think about it: We’ll refuse to give $20 but hand out irreplaceable hours … Read More
How will you use your four thousand weeks?
No word is more important to our daily existence than “time”. Yet we dance with it without making contact, understand it poorly, use it unwisely and often suffer under false assumptions that prevent us from making the best of our short stint on this blue planet. This article deals with common misconceptions about time and offers several models for getting more life into our years … Read More
The Question Economy: Why LLMs Should Be Curiosity Miners, Not Answer Vending Machines
We’re already swimming in Slop. What if, instead of answer factories, we built curiosity amplifiers? We obsess over which model gives the best answers in the race for AI supremacy. But what if that’s the wrong metric altogether? We benchmark … Read More
Is your ladder leaning against the right wall? Six mental models for success
Defining success – craft, don’t mimic A key component of finding meaning in life is our personal development, or what we call at Kalibra the “Grow” pillar of health. The path to finding our growth rhythm is riddled with pitfalls, … Read More
Beyond Plastic: Why Your ‘Clean’ Home Might Not Be (And What To Do About It)
Your response to my last post about microplastics was overwhelming. The most common question? “What else can we do to protect our spaces?” One thing I changed my mind about after some research was linked to the tyre-induced microplastic pollution … Read More
Beyond Biomarkers: The Four Blind Spots in Modern Longevity Medicine
On the eve of the Founders Forum’s longevity conference in Singapore, I’m reflecting on what’s working in our field and what still needs to be solved. While we celebrate biological clocks and diagnostics, four critical tensions must be addressed: Techne … Read More
Why We’ve Been Thinking About Aging All Wrong
Longevity and anti-ageing are often treated as the same. At first glance, that makes sense—science tells us that physical capabilities and mental sharpness decline with age. But that’s only part of the story. Ageing gets a bad rap as we’re … Read More
The Jarvis Principle: Reclaiming Your Attention from the AI Swamp
We are what we pay attention to. Paradoxically, we are experiencing a wealth of information paired with a poverty of attention, also known as overwhelm. The bullshit asymmetry principle proves a harsh reality: creating noise is exponentially easier than filtering … Read More
Overcoming Inertia: The Power of Activation Energy
The difference between success and stagnation often comes down to activation energy. But what exactly is it, and how can we harness it to transform our health, habits, and business ventures? Activation energy is that initial spark—the surge of effort … Read More
Embracing the Flop: How to Turn Failure into Forward Momentum
New Year’s resolution gloss wears off in late January, revealing that I have yet again been fooled into believing in calendrical transformation. Disillusioned with my future self’s disappointing discipline, I wonder what I could have done differently, eventually abandoning hope … Read More
How your data is handled
This article describes how Kalibra handles your personal data, including technical details for healthcare professionals and adminsitrators. We recognise that safeguarding your personal data is of the utmost importance, and our platform has been designed with this in mind from … Read More
Beyond Biohacking: Unveiling the Six Pillars of Optimal Health
Biohacking, wellness, and wellbeing are poorly defined terms that marketers often use to obscure selling a product, more often than not a supplement, device or a generic protocol. … Read More
How to filter out the wellness clickbait and find your 80/20
We all have a sacred ritual that we won’t reveal much. I like to call it IDA – an International Day of Ambition. It’s usually a Monday, double-powered if it’s the first Monday of the month, and quadrupled if it’s the first day of something arbitrary – year, quarter, Lent, etc. … Read More
Improving healthspan: your survival guide
Our founder Ivan Vatchkov recently presented a framework for improving healthspan at the National University of Singapore Centre for healthy longevity. We introduced a framework for how to tie longevity to specific actions, and how to think about incorporating healthspan improvement in our daily life. … Read More
Where our thinking is different
There are a few things that we do differently here at Kalibra. First and foremost, we recognise that we have a lot in common in how our body works, and that is, in fact possible to make universal recommendations about health. However, we also recognise … Read More
The 6 health pillars for our total wellbeing
Health is wealth, and almost all of us would agree that we put our health first – always and without fail. However, even for those who follow through on this commitment, what underpins it is a relatively unstructured and mass trend-led process … Read More
Why we should start with blood testing
At Kalibra, we believe in objective data and hard science as the basis for real-time health. And without a doubt, the starting point for a conversation about that has to be with the current state and functioning of the main systems that have to effectively work together for peak … Read More
Is it possible to make universal recommendations about health?
Focus these days tends to be on individuality. Especially in this age of genetic testing. The fact is, however, that ahead of individual differences, we are all human. Not only that, but as far as we know today, with the latest studies of mitochondrial gene evolution and transmission … Read More
