Life Beyond Blueprint - EP 30 Bryan Johnson

I am. I'm breaking my rule because lots of people want to talk about your penis.

No, they don't.

I'm starting with the penis, but I think I'm starting with it in a different way. Well, I feel like you need no introduction. We're here with Brian Johnson. Um, if anyone is, especially my audience and then anyone on the internet, you know, I suspect has, has heard of you.

You created this problem.

No, no. Well, you, we, we teamed up, but you, you did the, you did by far the lion's share.

Everyone, if you, if you have too much Brian Johnson in your life, Ashlee Vance is to blame. I'm sorry.

I, I'm okay with that. Uh, but I, that's kind of where I thought we'd get into a little bit on the show today because I feel like you've— I don't say this in like a horrible way. I mean, it's the interviewer's thing, but I feel like you've done the same interview 1,000 times because everybody always comes in and they're like, what's Tokai? Oh my God, you want to reverse your age? What are you, a freak? And then it goes on the sort of similar trajectory. And then we've had this— we've had probably the most unique relationship, I think, of all the reporters who've written on you. So I thought that's kind of where we'd hang out today. I think some of it, if I'm getting anywhere too touchy, let me know. Um, just cuz I know your family and like I've been where you grew up and we—

Ashlee, you and I have gone everywhere. I'd say it's all on, like, don't, don't hesitate.

Okay.

Let's do it all.

All right. Well, we'll jump in. Um, I am, I'm breaking my rule because lots of people wanna talk about your penis and I—

No, they don't.

I, I'm start— I'm starting with the penis, but I think I'm starting with it in a different way. Um, which is, you know, okay, so we made a— I mean, you were the star of this film, Don't Die, that I made with the director Chris Smith, who's amazing, and obviously you and Kate Tolo, who's here, your team. But there's a moment in this movie, right, where you talk about, right before I wrote this one big story about you, I was doing some fact-checking, and one of the fact-checking items was this erection monitoring device. And then I remember, you know, you were, uh, you were like, are you gonna put that in the story? I was like, yeah, of course I'm gonna put that in the story. That's, I'm not even sure that's like the most outrageous thing in the story. And, and, you know, you'd always been pretty open, but I feel like there was this, I could sense there was a little trepidation. You, you'd been doing this Blueprint program. Um, and, and this was like the first time you'd really sort of like just let all your cards on the table about everything you did. And so I, I could sense there was like a little, um, I don't think it was like— I don't know, I would be in the same position. It's like, I just told this reporter all this stuff. God knows what comes out on the other end. And, and in the movie, we talk about this a little bit. I don't know that we got in— I don't think the movie gets into the penis of it all. I think it was more just that the story was coming out. But okay, so here's my question is—

I can't wait. I can't wait to hear the question.

So you, you had this trepidation about me mentioning this, this erection monitoring device. And then the next day it was like, You, you kind of saw how people reacted to it. And then I was, I was actually blown away, which was that you, you embraced this. And now I, I don't know, it's what, like 3, 2 or 3 years since then?

Yeah.

And people bring it up all the time, but you also post about all these different things you do. So what, what flipped in your, how did you, how did you make that flip so quickly that, that, um, I'm gonna go from being a little nervous about it was, I was like, I was just in shock that you just, Right away you, you 180'd it. Yeah.

Yeah. What a, what an interesting perspective to hear you tell this. It takes me back because I've become so normalized to this now. But you're right, when we first started talking, I, I was so nervous for our interview. I mean, when you came to the house, right, my, my face— that now the photo people use of me to dunk on me when I'm blown up like a marshmallow.

Your face was swollen from a procedure.

Yeah, that was my face when you showed up. So I was we were doing wacky things and we were trying to push the boundaries. And I didn't at that moment have intuition on what I could say or couldn't say. And I had social circles in tech and in other places in my life, and I knew I'd get penalized if I talked about certain things in certain ways. And there was a question, would it be so bad that I would be canceled or that I would be discredited or that— I didn't know the cost. Of talking about a given thing. So I think when we were going through this, I was trying to model out in my mind what happens when.

Yeah.

And is it something that I can't recover from or, you know, so I just had no intuitions whatsoever. And then I started when this went viral because of your piece, it allowed me to start really putting sensors out in the world. Like, how does the world feel? What gets people excited? What makes them, you know, curl up? And so the thing on the erections, is when I tell somebody sleep is important.

Yeah.

And of all the benefits, they roll their eyes. And when I say, when you don't sleep, your dick is broken, they listen.

Oh, tell me more.

So it's really, it's, it's when the person connects that something breaks their dick, that's when they listen. And then once they listen to that they listen to the second and third and fourth thing, but in their minds they have this belief that it doesn't really matter and they can still push through. And it's like sleep is a luxury. But yeah, I really figured out that that was an entry point that would allow the conversation to happen and emerge in a way that you just can't any other way.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'd spent months, well, kind of like years following you, but for that particular story, we'd talk for a long time and I wrote like a 5,000-word story, and then I think the New York Post the next day was just like, millionaire monitors erection in like, uh, you know, whatever they write, like a 500-word.

The New York Post, they just, they just, um, whatever you write, they mine off of.

Yeah. Brief pod pause for some very big news. Core Memory and Brex have teamed up. Brex is going to be the official premier sponsor for the podcast moving forward and for our video series on YouTube. We couldn't be happier. They provide the financial backbone for tons of very innovative, forward-thinking companies, the type of companies that we tend to write about and profile on our shows. And we are running Core Memory on Brex ourselves, so this partnership makes all the sense in the world. Um, go to brex.com/corememory to learn more. And thank you to Brex for believing in our show and our company and helping making all this stuff possible. Before all of this happened, I was coming down to interview you. You were running Kernel, which is making this, um, brain-computing interface devices. And, and that was kind of where I was interested at the moment. And, and I was working on a payments story and you had obviously started and sold Braintree, which was a payments company that PayPal ended up buying. And so I was like, I got to talk to this Brian Johnson guy. He's in all this kind of stuff that I'm into. I don't think you know this, but on my way there, you know, one of— I, I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I think it was like one of your PR people at the time was like, look, you know, he's just he's like a little sensitive about some stuff like Wired had done this story. They talked about like his shirt being like having holes in it or something like that. And, and just and so I was like, oh God, okay. You know, and then I don't know, we had this great conversation and you were always very open about everything. But so same sort of thing was, do you feel like you've gone on like you're so open about everything you do? And I know some of it's like in the cause of trying to get people interested in what you're doing. But I also feel like you Must have— most people in their 40s, I do not think, have a big personality shift where they go from being what was presented to me as like a very sensitive guy to being so open and upfront about all this stuff. I mean, do you feel like you do this because it helps the cause or you've just flipped some switch?

Yeah, it was an article written by MIT on Antonio Antonio Regalado.

Yeah. Okay.

So I gave a talk at a conference about Kernel and BCIs and merging our brains with AI of how pairing these technologies might be helpful for our evolution. And he wrote this article. He gave, you know, 2 or 3 sentences to the ideas and then just bashed me. Okay. Well, you know, how, how my—

Antonio does that sometimes.

How my hair looked. Yeah. I, I had a whole— I had a shirt that I'd purchased. I was trying to evolve my appearance and my dress. I had a sweater on, so I was really trying to experiment. How do you find a new way of being? And he did this critique, and I was so sensitive. I was like, my feelings were hurt. And I guess that's a really good reminder. I haven't thought about that for years now, whereas now I mean, I love it. Like if someone were to try to take me down on that kind of front, it'd just be wonderful. So yeah, it's been a pretty radical transformation if I'm making the juxtaposition, the contrast between how I felt in that moment of that being that sensitive and now. But I guess like, you know, I guess this kind of makes sense when I talk to my other friends who are creators and get a lot of social commentary. There is an incredible sensitivity to commentary. And in fact, I'm in this large group with like 100 of the world's biggest creators. And the topic came up about how people feel about negative comments and people were listing out all of their strategies, like, here's what I do and my team only does this and that. And I was like, wait, am I the only one here who absolutely loves the negativity? Like, I just get so much joy out of it. But yeah, so interesting. You, you really— I appreciate this a lot, actually. Like, this is really good contrast. I've forgotten about this.

I've thought about this a lot. So, but you may— I mean, From where I was sitting, this must have been a conscious decision, but, but for you, maybe it was different. I mean, maybe you were just rolling with what was happening.

I think so.

Yeah. Okay. Um, so when we first met, it was in your office in Venice and, and you were doing Colonel, and then I was there to talk to you about Payments of the Brain stuff, and then you're like, oh, Also, I do all this stuff with my body. I'm going to Colorado to like snort some stem cells. And I also like, you know, have these toads in Mexico and a shaman. Would you like with, you know, I think you just mentioned it. And then moments after the interview ended, I think I was texting anyone, you, you know, I'm like, oh, I would like to see what it's like to snort stem cells and to sample a toad in Mexico. And like in those days, I mean, you were still on this health journey because you'd been going through all this, these mental, mental health issues. And, and it— but that felt like it was like kind of the beginning of doing this experimentation. And then you were also doing— you're open about this. So I feel like you talk like ketamine and these things, the I've always been curious. We've only like barely talked about this, so I've always been curious. You were pretty into the toads. I have two questions. How does a wealthy person acquire a toad shaman? What is the process to find that person?

Yeah, I mean, so what I was doing is basically the first, the stem cell thing is basically PRP intranasally. So it was this experimental treatment. That was being used for traumatic brain injury.

So platelet-rich plasma.

Exactly. So you draw the blood out, you spin it up, you pull out the growth factors out of the plasma. And so then intranasal injection. So it was like we did this therapy trying to— this is early on. This wouldn't have passed my blueprint standards. This is me before having a team.

Yeah.

Doing things on my own.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. It was wild too.

It was wild.

I mean, I sat with Brian. He had all this blood drawn out of him. I told him, I'm like queasy with blood. And we were— we came into this clinic early in the morning. You draw this blood. You're like just unfazed at all. And then they went in some back room and they're like, now we're going to centrifuge it and turn it into stem cells. And there was some sort of like magic from some Spanish lab that had sent them this technique. And while we waited, you and I went and we got our veins lasered with different wavelengths of light. And then Then the doctor put you down on this table and like, it's kind of like a normal table you would find in a medical office except the— Yeah, the, the head end tilted down really far so they could get in there. And then the syringe was this, this incredibly long, you know, like a proboscis, you know, and then, yeah, then you did it. You just snorted that right off.

You know, kudos to you for saying yes. You just— you went along with me and I did not give the blood.

I did do the lasers and everything. Okay. And so, so that doesn't— you stopped doing that because— so it doesn't pass the test because it's not clinically proven out.

Yeah, I would say there— I haven't gone back and looked at the evidence, but I would say there's probably not enough evidence that it would pass our, our checks of like, is it worth doing?

Okay.

Is it worth any risk? Now it's PRP. So it wasn't like I was putting someone else's stem cells in my body. But still, I think that we have a much more rigorous process now. So that was my earliest of days of what can you do and what is worth doing? And it's actually a really hard process of developing intuitions. What is worth doing?

And then the toad, I mean, this is well known, has these DMT-like, what is it called? It's the buffalo.

Yeah, 5-MeO-DMT from the Sonoran toad.

Sonoran toad. And you're supposed to lick it?

You can smoke it.

You can smoke it. So they take the secretion and they crystallize it, or they dehydrate the secretion, I guess. And then you smoke it.

Yeah.

And I mean, people can watch videos on the internet. This looks intense. And you've talked about it before as this like life-altering experience.

Yeah.

So why did you stop doing things like that? Because you were pretty into it and you say it's like one of your most profound. I think you've said it's your most profound moment.

Unquestionably. It's tattooed on my body. Right. It's the only tattoo I have.

Yeah. So why did you pull away from that? It was just those few times where— okay, for— no, wait. First you have to tell me how you found your Shaman.

I was—

without getting somebody arrested.

Yeah, exactly. I was posing this question How big is consciousness?

Yeah, so you want to go find out?

Yeah, so I mean, I, I know what it feels like to fall in love and to feel sad and to feel envy and to feel joy and to feel accomplishment and to feel shame. So I have this mapping of various emotional states that I can experience. I know what it feels like to be sleep deprived and well slept, and then I wanted to say, okay, now I understand this play space, but what else? And when you drink alcohol, you can say that's some kind of different state. And then marijuana offers a different state. And so I was just trying to create a general map because I was asking the question in the context of Kernel, if you can in fact pair the brain with AI, what could AI do with you in terms of exploring consciousness. And then if you had an additional layer of molecular manipulation, if you could take certain substances in addition to those things, what really could you explore? Because we have these ambitions as a species. We say we want to create ASI, or we want to go to Mars. Or I thought, why is it the case that we don't equally want to try to expand or explore our consciousness with as much excitement as anything in existence. Because what else do we have except for our consciousness? It's kind of like the gold mine of our very existence. And so I was asking that question, and 5-MeO gave me the most expansive map. I never— so if before I did it, if I would have sat in a room by myself for 100 years trying to imagine what that state would be like, I could never have even approximately got close. It's just so mind-bendingly different than my conscious state in any normal condition. So it was, it was the neat, it was the most expansive, coolest experience of my entire life.

And then, and you just feel like you've felt that, been there, done that, and don't need to do it again.

Exactly, I got the map. I got what I went there for.

Okay, and we can't talk about the shaman. I'm getting the sense that's maybe sensitive.

Probably.

Okay. And then, okay, at this stage where I met you, for people who don't know, you know, you were, you were, your family and you were quite a devout member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. And then you'd, you'd had this moment where you'd gotten married quite young, you'd had a family, you'd built this multi, this billion-dollar business. And then, you know, you have this period where you, get divorced, break from the church, sell the company, move to Los Angeles, and, and you're going through these mental health struggles trying to fix that. How much, but like, you know, where was the line between, between dude got married so young, never even really got to date. You know, and now is like in LA with some money. Out of the church, out of the family. You know, where was the line between things like— and I don't know if all this falls in, but all this experimentation.

Yeah.

Sort of dude sowing his wild oats versus dude on a health quest.

Yeah. It's hard to know which one is which. I mean, it started in New York when I found the Brooklyn warehouse parties, the raves.

Yeah.

Where dancing begins at midnight or 1 and you dance until 6 or 7 in the morning. That's where it really started. That was the beginning of the entire journey.

So for people who don't know, I mean, you were quite devout to the church. I mean, so you had, I think we had talked about before, you'd maybe had like a couple sips of beer or something like that, but you didn't drink, you didn't smoke, you didn't do drugs. And I'm imagining at this New York part, that's the first time something like an MDMA finds its way into your body. Is that—

I mean, that 4 years after that was— it was a rebirth moment. Yeah. Where I was willing to shed all beliefs, all customs, all norms, and just say, I want to remake myself. And I really was eagerly trying to, uh, really trying to shed, right, everything that I was and try to become something entirely new.

I feel like that would be daunting to not have— some people have like a gradual— they always talk about pot as like a gateway drug. I mean, there is this like stepping stone. I feel like going from sober life to one day putting like an ecstasy pill in my mouth, I feel like that would be scary. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're Matrix. You're doing The Matrix. You take, you know, you're picking the pill, right? And a new, a new reality.

Yeah, maybe I should have more inhibition. Maybe that's the lesson here.

Did you think about it like that or you were just—

Not at all.

No, you were just going. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, there's a calculated risk on all these things. And I mean, it's when, see, I guess I was 34, 35 at that time. That's, it's getting to be pretty hard at that age to remake yourself.

Yeah.

And, but I so badly wanted it. And even now, like, I mean, in this moment, like, as I was coming here to talk to you today, I feel a similar urge right now that I've just completed a phase. And as of right now, I'm like, coming here, I think I need to rebuild myself again. It feels like this is done and I need something new is here. And I don't know what it is. It just, it feels like it happens inside of me and I get notified that it's done., and now I'm just waiting for the next thing. But for some reason, like just these past couple days, it's just like a phase finished. Let's go.

I had questions along those lines. Uh, maybe I'll go to them and then come back to some of this other stuff I was gonna ask since you, since you went there. I mean, I, I saw, again, I feel like you've had to do the same interview hundreds of times. Wired recently did an interview with you where there was not a lot of new ground broken. I was actually kind of let down by that interview. However, there was this news item that you're looking to, to sell Blueprint. You wanna get out of the Blue— you having to deal with the Blueprint business personally. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Which is so, so Kernel you stepped away from and, and other people are running that now. And it sounds like if I read the story right, and I've seen you talk about it, it sounds like you wanna do something similar with Blueprint. So Blueprint will live on, but somebody else will focus on the, the supplements and the meal plans and things like that.

Yeah, I think so. I, I'm at this fork where either I don't think it's, it's not worth my time. Even if I can make $1 billion in the next 3 years, it's not worth my time to work for the $1 billion. It's worth my time to do something on Don't Die.

Yeah.

No amount of money is worth it. And right now it's— when you're building any kind of company, it's a black hole. It consumes you.

You just—

you can't— you can't leave its force.

Yeah.

And right now I'm stuck in a black hole. And the, the motivation— so I guess part of me, people really depend upon the, you know, protocols we put out, the foods we make, the testing we make available, they really do depend upon it. So I feel a loyalty to them because I feel like we are in partnership on this journey. And so I either have to sell the company or I have to bring people in to run it, but there's no middle ground where I keep on running it. So we're actually very close right now to raising the money and bringing a management company in. If we do that, it's not done yet. If we do, then the goal would become try to build the world's most useful health company. So practically, if someone says, I want to be healthy, to, to help them in ways that no other company in the world can do it, but try to do it in a way where you handle 80% of their needs versus like one narrow thing, like drink this one thing or do this one test, like a comprehensive approach. So it'd be like an all-in effort to try to do that. But then, yeah, my goal is to allow my focus and attention to be on a different path. But the remake is— so I've been for the past couple years, I guess since 2022, I've tried to become the world's best rejuvenation athlete. And part of it is real, part of it's performance art. And because when someone says health If two people are talking about it, no one knows what the difference means between one person's health regimen and another person's health regimen. And I wanted to just make the basic point, you can measure health. And so, but I think I've done that. And we've— I might— right now I'm— I train 6 hours a day on my rejuvenation protocols and just, it's a full-time job. And that in addition to doctor's appointments and everything else. And so I've kind of pushed the boundaries on what's available for today's science. And so I think I might be done with this phase, pull back to an 80% optimization versus 99%, and then redirect my energies towards a new thing.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I still have questions along those lines. I do want to say for the record, and this is— this is no BS. This is not because you're sitting in the room.

I don't know.

People are just going to have to either accept that or not. There's people on the internet who have given you endless shit for, oh, this was all, this was all to sell stuff, supplements all along. All I can tell these people is that, you know, when I first wrote this story on you, I mean, you'd been doing Blueprint on your own for 18 months maybe. And, and, and I think it's fair to say it had not got the attention that you wanted it to. And you were doing this thing and then I wrote this story and it blew up and like the next day You know, everybody's hunting on Amazon to try to buy whatever you were doing. Everything sold out. And then everyone thinks you had this massive media operation. I mean, I was with you for months and years. It was you and this lovely woman, Kate Tolo. You know, you guys are doing all the social stuff. Anyway, there's especially this guy Andrew something. I don't know. There's a few people on the internet who are really hung up on this, but You know, at least from where I said, where I stood, there was no master plan. I mean, after my story went out, I had all these people asking me, how do you buy this stuff? How do you, I mean, it was like you sort of, you either had a choice of like you sell it or you have to personally answer, you know, a million emails. And, and it was not like you had all this stuff in the closet, you know, ready to, to sell everybody. Then you spent like the next, Yeah, year, year and a half, like having to go find all this stuff, package it, test it, everything. So anyway, I'm just putting that out there for the record. Yeah.

People who say that, they, they don't know. It's fine. It's totally cool. They don't understand the economics of this business. If you understand it, you know I'm telling the truth.

Okay. Like, it's rough.

It's a shit business. Yeah, right. Like, you don't start money— you don't start in a supplements food business to make money. It's just, it's not there. So like, I, it genuinely was a, I was trying to solve my own problem and I was trying to be helpful to other people.

Yeah.

So it is, it was never ever about the money.

There's another funny thing, which is, is watching how all this has evolved, that there's been times when I thought like, you're gonna run outta steam, people are gonna get tired of this. Um, obviously there were a couple stories in Vanity Fair and the New York Times that they tried to, tried to end you. Um, yeah, I kind of thought this thing might blow up. Um, it's had like way more legs than maybe I anticipated going in. And then I do, I start to like, I feel like anyone who's running a business, anyone who's doing anything they care about, even if I'm trying to sell a documentary, I mean, you have to pitch it so many times. It's just part of the thing. You have to say the same thing over and over and over again for years. So I don't like fully pity you. In that is like lots of people have to do this if they're doing something they care about. But to this point that you're making about switching, um, you know, you've been pretty upfront that this is, this is a religion, it's a cult, these kinds of things. What usually ends up happening in a cult is like the— in order for it to be the best cult or the best religion, you have to be almost perfect and you have to be better than all the other types of people. It's very isolating. Um, it doesn't usually end well for the cult leader, because you end up in this like strange place, um, where you're, yeah, you're kind of like off on your own. Um, and you have to be a little more rare and, and, um, yeah, so I've, this is what I was wondering. I mean, are you, is this part of what you're talking about? Are you tired of, um, of having to go around like that? Or am I, when you talk about taking this shift, um, Am I going at this the wrong way? Like, you're still full in, don't die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, all in, don't die. And I guess your comment, man, it's really therapeutic to talk to you because I feel like you make such good observations that I've— I'm so far removed from myself that I don't remember these. But if I, if I now can look back, yeah, once I started in 2022, there's a natural process for somebody to that achieves notoriety in society. And there's this— inevitably you're going to get attacked from all kinds of forces in society. And most people do get buried in those moments. And whether they— whether it's too severe for them to bounce back or whether they themselves give up. But it does feel like that I've made it through the majority of the major first blows. 100% that come and I've survived them and now I'm I'm stable that now when people come at me, you know, they've given their best swings already. And it feels like— so it does personally feel— I feel very stable in my place in society that I don't feel like I'm going to get blindsided by this or that. And that I don't feel like even when The New York Times tried to take their big swing at me, whatever, it just didn't have an impact. So I guess I'm happy that I guess I didn't know that was coming my way. But now I haven't gone through that. Almost like when I made money for the first time, you know, where somebody would have pulled up and said, let me share with you 5 life principles that you'll need to know. The same thing would have been like, if you have any kind of notoriety or fame, here's what's going to happen to you and just expect it.

Do you have— I know I'm making you do it off the top of your head, but do you have 5 for somebody who goes through that experience?

I'll make them up right now. I don't have them written down. I'll just generally— is the number 1 is hate. Is that hate, um, really messes with people's minds because it undermines their idea of respect and status and, you know, their relationship with the world. And I know in being in these private chat groups with a bunch of people who are famous that they really are really bothered by it, the hate that they receive. Okay, exactly. And So one is, I think that it's not good enough to just even become neutralized with it. I think you really want to embrace it and find energy from it. For me, it's a power source. It's an energy source. And so I'd say first is you have to really reconcile like, what is that hate? What does it mean to you? How do you leverage it and turn it to power versus how do you hide from it? Because if you hide from it, it's going to make you a weak person. You're always going to be running their scripts in your mind versus your scripts of moving forward. And so you become owned by them. Then two, I'd say that, you know, when I made money at age 34, one of the lessons that I wish I would have learned, and this would apply to what I've learned now again, is when there's a power differential with money, everyone around you now wants that money and it just is like it doesn't matter even if their intentions are good. The money changes your relationship with the world, everybody around you, friends, family, loved ones, everybody. And so you just have to be aware that that's changed and that over time, even your best relationships may go sour because that is now a complication. Even with yourself, it changes. So that is amplified dramatically with fame. So now I have wealth and I have fame. And so it's a double whammy. And so it's almost amplified where I— it's become so challenging for me to be in social environments that the smallest of things get me in trouble. Like the things I make, like the comments I make, you know, that are trying to be like messing around, having fun, they blow back on me in some way. So it really is isolating. So you've— in that isolation, you need to find a tribe that you can be yourself, be calm, like be open. But I understand why wealth and power and fame put you in these clusters. It's just very, very hard. It's just— it honestly sucks, right? Because I don't want that to be the case. But even, yeah, being out and about now in the public, like I just can't go anywhere without being stopped dozens of times. And of course, every interaction I want to be kind. And I want to be thoughtful and I want to make eye contact and say, how are you? What's happening? And you're whatever. But it's just— it gets really complicated really fast.

Yeah.

So those would be two. It's just like, understand that complication to have a powerful relationship with hate, like, make it. But three is understand that fame is— I would rather have fame than wealth.

Okay. Since day one, the Core Memory podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley. Investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. So you're an influencer WhatsApp group or some kind of group?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, so this is the thing. I just— these, these private groups are where everything happens.

Yeah. Where, where, like, what do you mean everything? What is everything?

I mean, everything.

Like business deals, relationships, those kinds of things, or where, where you guys are, you're hashing out these more—

Everything.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Just texting away.

Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the best ones are where, where you're in a group where everyone's trusting of each other.

Yeah. Don't you guys freak? I mean, who's— you must be freaked out. Who's screenshotting?

Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. So some of my friends are really good curators of humans. Yeah. And there's just a certain level of trust over a certain duration of time and they bring in really great people. But otherwise, that's where the world— I remember when I was an intern for the Utah legislature when I was 21 years old, I was an intern for the Senate majority leader and I would listen to the radio going into work of what the public was discussing and what they were up in arms about and how they hated everything going on.. And then I would sit in a meeting with the governor, the House Majority Leader, and the Senate Majority Leader, and I'd hear them do business. And that world relative to what was being discussed in the press was— were two different worlds. And I thought, this is crazy. Like the world I thought I was living in is not the world that really runs the world. And so it just— most things happen behind the scenes.

All right. I have a question along those lines. So when I, when I, before Blueprint before Don't Die, I was covering you and Colonel, and then, and then we started dabbling with some of the health stuff you were doing. And then I would, I would get like grief from Bloomberg, like, oh, you're writing about Brian Johnson again. And, you know, it's like, this guy's crazy. And then, you know, it's so funny now because like everyone on earth is clamoring to write stories about you. And, and then you were in a different place where like you'd been trying to raise money for Colonel. Nobody in Silicon Valley would listen to you. You had made it as an entrepreneur, but you were somehow kind of other. You weren't in the— you had done it in Chicago. You were living in LA. You were not part of the Silicon Valley in-crowd. I know that always kind of bothered you on some level. I think my— you could put it in your own words. My sense was that they didn't take you seriously on some level. And then, and then now, you know, here you are in these groups. I remember You'd been at Blueprint and Don't Die for a while. I just remember you and I were both at one of these Masters of the Universe weekend retreats. And, um, I remember watching, there was a big dinner, everybody's in a tent, there's all these tables full of, uh, billionaires, scientists, celebrities, intellectuals. And I just, I remember you walking in and it was like everybody wanted to talk to you. And I was like, man, things have how far things have come. So, I mean, that must be like a— I don't know, it sounds like it's satisfying and not because all the other baggage that comes with it. But do you not like harbor a little resentment now that like all these people want you at the thing? They all want to talk to you and they didn't want to before. Or how do you process that?

I love Every second of it. Yeah, I'm so grateful. Like, I grew up not having a computer. I grew up only knowing blue-collar workers. I grew up in a religion that taught me to understand the world through storytelling, not through numbers. So I grew up disadvantaged in— I feel like I'm an engineer at heart, that I really would have taken to that path had it been presented to me early on. And in growing, I started multiple companies before I started Braintree, but in building Braintree, I wasn't a software engineer. I was a non-technical founder. And we built a really good business. We sold it, you know, we acquired Venmo. We had a good outcome. I then built Kernel. We were doing something very technical, but I've always had these real limitations in my own abilities that I don't know how to code. I didn't study mechanical engineering or physics in school.. And so I've had this really serious deficiency as an entrepreneur, and I, I've tried to figure out how I compensate for that deficiency. And it just so happened that, that Blueprint gave me a path to have enough value in the world where I could create value for others in areas that they may not have the same expertise. So I, I really admire people who build in technology, in the heart, in deep tech, biotech, software and hardware. And I've always wanted to build with them, which is one of the reasons why I started OS Fund and started investing in deep tech entrepreneurs doing synthetic biology and genomics, computational therapeutics. So yeah, I guess it's really allowed me to bridge into the worlds that I care about the most and to be involved in those activities. I just feel really fortunate. It's where I want to be. It's where I want to hang out. And so I'm grateful that I get to be invited to those things.

It's funny cuz it kind of went from, it went from weirdo.

Yeah.

To that, it was like a huge chunk of those people I know are like on Blueprint and, and, uh, you know, um, and then yeah, when you walked through, I could, it wasn't even, it wasn't like, oh, I wanna go talk to the weird guy. It was like, it was like, oh, Brian's here. Like, I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was fascinating to see from my, vantage point, how far things had changed. Yeah.

Yeah. People—

so you, when we were shooting Don't Die, the documentary, I mean, I got to go to Utah where you grew up. I don't know, you talk about it sometimes, but I don't think people fully realize. I mean, you know, your mother is this wonderful woman. There's a couple of things that really struck me. I mean, you grew up at what was the time, it was quite almost rural, um, the small town. We went to like your grandfather's kind of like farm and, and, um, and talked to like some kids that you grew up with. I mean, it would just sound like this, this very small, um, tight-knit community, very— I mean, it's, it's like lots of people in Silicon Valley sort of come from somewhere else and end up in this. But I've always thought your journey is insane because you're like man of the future living on the edge and, and where you grew up was quite opposite of that. And I don't know if people fully know, you know, your mother clearly, I mean, loves you obviously, and like deeply. But, you know, when you broke with the church, I mean, even now when I saw her a couple years ago, you know, she was still like, "It is still hard for me." And she broke into tears, you know, to like deal with what he's done, even though she was clearly so proud of you and loved you. And she was kind of like in tears. It was like this battle within herself. I don't think people fully— I didn't realize because I grew up in an atheist family. But when I went to visit where you grew up, I mean, it's just the whole town revolves around that. You and your dad told me, I mean, not only were you Mormon, but you used to want to be Joseph Smith, or you would dress up like— I mean, you were pretty into it.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we— yeah, you're right. I think actually you articulate my life better than I do. No, I'm serious. It's really hard to convey this of just how deep I was in that world and what a deficit that is when you bridge to the other worlds and you just have to rebuild all of your mental models. You have no skill sets that are transferable. It's a very hard place. Then I got married young and I had a bunch of kids. And when you're doing that, like, you don't have time to build skill sets.

Like, I don't think you ever went on a date.

No, really?

I mean, barely, right?

Yeah, barely. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's very, very fresh insights.

Yeah. Okay. But then, and I'm, I am, I think, trying to ask this question in a different way because lots of people will say, oh, okay, well, now you're building a religion. Aren't you just replacing your Mormonism, etc.? So people have asked you that before. Yeah. But I feel like I do have a little bit more of this insight that everything you do, you go, like, all in, you know. So even though my question sounds sort of the same, I think I'm coming at this from a slightly different place where, don't you just think you're replacing that whole of the thing that you used to be so committed to with something new. You know what I mean? Like, you seem to have a part of you that always needs to have something to be thrown all into.

Yeah. All right, I'll have a go at this. You tell me what you think. Okay. So one of the cool things that Mormonism does is it asks you to contemplate What do you do with existence? And I think all religions, they're actually posing the same question. And then if you grew up in an atheist household, I mean, what was your answer? What did your parents say? What was your answer? What do you do with existence?

When I was growing up, I think I hunted around for that a bit because I started reading all these religious texts. I never went to church. I had nothing. And I grew up in Texas and everybody was going to church on Sunday. And I just didn't know what that was about. So then, yeah, like any, uh, not like any teenager, but I, you know, I started reading all the philosophers. I started reading, um, Buddhism, Taoist text, every— I was, I was hunting for some kind of spiritual spirituality. I mean, I would say from my, what I was taught from my parents, what to do with existence, it was really just to live like kind of an honest, um, just an honest, um, productive life, I think. And that's what I was always taught. And I don't know that I leapt much farther than that. Yeah.

Yeah. So when I went through that process, so at 34, when I decided to transition from a previous world to a new world, I was asking that question, what do you do with existence? And I was trying to populate my mind with new possibilities. So that's when I went into deep tech. And spent all the time doing science. And that's why when I built Kernel to say, how do you pair the human brain with AI to explore conscious existence? And it took me, I mean, I sold Braintree really mostly because I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to one thing. I wanted to do something because doing many things is very hard. One thing is, yeah, I wanted to do that. And I thought it would take me 10 years to find that thing once I got free from doing that. And it was about right. I, I found Don't Die roughly 10 years after that. And throughout this entire process, I still have been asking that same question. I, you know, I find myself conscious. What do I do with my conscious existence? And to me, I find it to be the most beautiful question because there's an infinite number of things you can do. You can pursue wealth, you can write poetry, you can become a monk, you can become a fighter. You have all these infinite paths. And the difference right now is what I think is, I think all the options that humans have had up until this point have been conditioned upon death being inevitable. And when that comes into question, when we may know, like when we may be the first generation who won't die, I'm willing to accept that none of those explanations make sense anymore. None. That's the fundamental thing I'm trying to convey in everything I'm doing. That's where I want— that's where I feel like this transition for me is coming, where I've done this basic demonstration of this new philosophy. Now I need to go out and just build it with every single thing I have. That's what I feel internally is the move right now.

So I want to come back to that because I think it's important. Um, but okay, and maybe this matters or not, but this, this compulsion, this chasing, this, this I'm all in on this one thing. I mean, do you think that's a— I don't know if character flaw is the right word, or— yeah, I mean, it just— do you, do you think you're just always filling some void? And does that somehow take away from some of the authenticity of all this or something? Like, you are just compelled to do this. I don't know. I don't even know if it's a fair question. Do you kind of get where I'm—

I do. Yeah, I mean, I think the, the least qualified person to comment on my psychological state is me.

Okay.

You know, like, I don't know if I can offer any insight on myself. I mean, there's a touch times where where I'll have enough self-awareness that I'll say, man, I'm weird. Like, I'm really weird. But a lot of the times that escapes me. When I interact with somebody, I perceive it to be a normal interaction. We're conversing in normal things. I'm displaying normal human characteristics of laughter and intrigue. But then there are moments I catch myself where I say, no, I really am very eccentric. So I'm open to this idea that I just have this gap of lack of self-awareness, that I can't see myself in these contexts.

Because some of the— when we first started at Kernel, you were very into the idea, we're going to make this machine that is a truth machine. It's like we won't be able to lie to each other because we'll be able to read each other's minds. You were quite afraid of artificial intelligence, or at least the brand really at that moment in time that was most prevalent was, was the idea of companies like Facebook and Google. This algorithm that is just out to distract you and tempt you all the time. And I remember you wanting to fight against where AI was heading in the sense of, of it is going to outwit us and sort of suck our soul down. And then now it's, it's, I imagine you're still kind of probably against a lot of that, but It's flipped a little bit where you're almost aligned with AI to some degree because it is this powerful force of technology that you're pursuing at the same time as this powerful biotech. Is that fair? How is your— I feel like that's like roughly 2016 to now. So how has your— did I characterize that right? Has your view on AI changed, or this is all part and parcel of the same thing?

Yeah, you nailed it again. Yeah, so 2016 was when I first started writing about this and talking about it publicly, where I said AI is an existential threat, not because AI is inevitably going to become rogue, but because of the possibility of humans using AI for their means, uh, which are not aligned with humanity's best interests. And at that time, it was companies using the power of technology to get humans to be addicted to their technologies and lessen the quality of their health, which we've seen play out the past years. I think that, um, as far as many virtues that social media has offered, it's created catastrophic effects for our mental well-being, societal implications, like even when you look at data on how young kids are now. And so I still think the premise is correct. And I would say I'm neither optimistic or pessimistic about AI. It's just a thing. It seems to me it's inevitable. The race dynamics are way too intense to stop. So the idea that we're going to somehow not move forward with AI at a certain speed seems pretty impractical to me. And so this is what Don't Die is about. It's, it's making the observation: this is the most consequential moment in the history of our species, and none of us know where it's going, and it's probably worth deep, careful thought about how we step into the situation. That's the entire premise.

And I, I wrote a piece about this on our Substack. I don't know if I'm going to be that articulate on it as I try to express it here. And I don't want this to come off as me sort of, I guess, gushing about you in some way. So that, that's my preamble. You know, I think what people— I think what some people hear about Don't Die and you talk about it as a cult or religion, I think they are like kind of in my estimation, underestimating sort of this moment in some ways. So we had— the singularity has been this idea that has been floating around for many, many years, but really embraced by Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley tends to be, just to make a broad sweeping generalization, not a terribly religious place. It's full of engineers, tends to run along the atheist lines. And I always thought of the singularity, if we had a religion that that was kind of it. And it, and people wanted to kind of push us towards that. You could say Ray Kurzweil was maybe the kind of like a prophet of all that. I mean, he, he codified some of this in his books and, and would speak about this and was that kind of figure. I don't think he was like charismatic enough or kind of full, you know, is a bit of a mix. Anyway, he was like doing a bit of it, but not like fully. So, you know, I think you represent the first person to— I'm not— and this is not me over here saying, like, 'Oh, Totai is the perfect religion, everybody get on.' What I'm trying to articulate is I think you're the first person to start putting some kind of structure, some kind of thought system around this very weird moment in time. And like, I think when you say some stuff like that, people, yeah, I think they kind of misinterpret this a little bit, or I don't think they get how serious some of this is. So I think you're building like the first, you're taking the first stab at putting this intellectual wrapper around what I think is like we're living in the midst of science fiction becoming real and the world altering in in such dramatic ways that whatever belief systems we had before are not really up to the task. And so, so I take this all quite seriously. Yeah.

Yeah, man, Ashlee Vance, that is so articulate. And I appreciate you so much for articulating that. I really sincerely appreciate you.

You're much more articulate than I am. But I do, I do actually. I think, I think people It's weird because in some way you're not underestimated at all. You get tons of attention. People are very into what you're doing. And then I think there's probably some people that get all this, but then I think there's a large part of the world that still kind of views you through some sort of lens. And I guess what I'm saying is like whether people like you or not, or they think when they hear, oh, you want to reverse your age, they think, oh, this is just crazy, or this is just some rich dude running amok. It's kind of like, doesn't matter to me. I I think the intellectual frame that you're building is maybe what people should pay attention to.

Yeah. I mean, to add to yes and what you said, the primary hypothesis is that AI is going to progress at some speed. And in the coming years, I personally don't care whether people think ASI is going to happen in 2028 or 2035. Doesn't matter to me. It's all the same timeframe to me. As AI progresses, and it will create dislocations in society, people will lose their jobs, we will do things differently. The government may do things differently. We may trust the government more or less. Institutions are going to change. Society is going to change in ways which we can't comprehend. And when that happens, Humans are going to say, how do I feel safe and secure? How do I understand the world? And what is the fabric and the tapestry that keeps us glued together so we don't lose our shit in some kind of mayhem or chaos? And so what I'm betting on right now is that dislocation is coming and it's gonna come very hard and very fast. We currently have, we don't have a net. To capture it. And I don't think that capitalism itself, or democracy itself, or socialism itself, or even religions on their own, is sufficient to tie us together and say we can, we can, uh, successfully wrestle this moment, even when it's moving very fast. And so I think from right now's perspective, you could look at Don't Die and say, that's kind of weird, I don't really get it. But it's in the moment when the crises start happening of, you know, individual or collective where that opening is going to come. So I'm really just saying that it's coming, there's going to be dislocation, we need something to capture that.

And yeah, that's what I think people don't get. They hear you say don't die, and yes, okay, there is part of this. Yes, you're trying to rejuvenate your body and to live longer, but it's like, it's a mental, it's a flip in your head, right? Where it's, yeah, I just, I don't think people— I mean, it's a philosophy that's like acknowledging this sort of sci-fi future and making you kind of think about it, right? I mean, that's sort of the—

And it also gets at these, like, so actually, Ashlee Vance, I was thinking about this the other day. I don't think you've been to one of my Don't Die dinners.

I haven't, which is crazy. And you've invited— yes, this is terrible. It's terrible.

Yeah. This really comes through, but you need to sit in this for about 90 minutes. And with about 10 to 15 other people. So I shared these 5 thought experiments and then we rolled through them as a group. And in doing that process, you're able to harden your own perspectives by hearing other people's perspectives as you, as you collectively try to solve the puzzles. And I think when you land there on either side, but the challenge of course is you can't get everyone together for 90 minutes to go through these things. I started training people up to do this, but it's quite hard. But yeah, I would love to have you there because once you understand the nuances and you arrive at the end, you're like, honestly, this makes a lot of sense. It's practical. It's not woo. It's not— you have to make a big jump. It's just like very, very reasonable, very practical. But yeah, the— I wouldn't— so in this, like tying this back together, this transition I'm feeling right now is I really want to spend every single second every day building Don't Die because I think there's a possibility that by 2030, there could be a billion people in the world who self-identify with Don't Die. And maybe the identification is something like, I want to be hot, that's Don't Die. Whereas someone else maybe say, I believe this is the new ideology of our existence. Anywhere along that spectrum. But a lot of people say that's crazy and that's not possible. If you think about COVID though, for example, COVID did something to the world nobody thought was possible. Everybody's plans got put on hold. It didn't matter who you are. No matter how much power you had, your plans were put on hold. And then the world kind of bifurcated into a few simple opinions. Do you support lockdowns or not? Do you support masks or not? Do you support vaccines or not? And we kind of had like 6 different opinions in the entire world. And I think that AI may present a similar bifurcation where, you know, do you race or are you trying to do something safe? And I think people have tried to take these sides with the accelerationists and non. I don't think it's about speed. It's just about the methodical way we approach it. It's just doing things to the best of our ability to try to preserve our existence. And of course, you branch off into different complexities. But that's why I think this really can become the world's fastest growing ideology. It can happen in the next few years' time. And it can overcome the impossibilities that people imagine. And so I do think it's worth every single moment I have in my existence to go after this.

When you say you're making this shift, I mean, we talked about moving away from the business side, but then you said you've been thinking about this the last couple of days as well. I mean, is there a— have you— are you thinking through what this shift is or the shift is what you're outlining?

Yeah, it's what I'm outlining. So we've been trialing a few different approaches on Don't Die. For example, we did summits. We brought, you know, 1,500 people together. We spent a whole day together building physical community. We started Don't Die events around the world. We did a version where we were doing Don't Die Fam, where every week I actually built a Don't Die Fam in Los Angeles where we get together and we do these rituals. We would start by doing a shot of olive oil. It's like a ritual. And then we would go around in the circle and apologize to our bodies for something we did that hurt it. And then we would go around and share something that was, you know, on our minds for that week. So it was more like a combination of Alcoholics Anonymous or YPO or like some event where you get together, you bond emotionally, you are honest and open. It's all confidential. So we tried to play with formats like that. Like, can you spin up these intimate gatherings of high-touch, high-connectivity friendships, more than just a passing, you know, superficial thing. And so now I'm trying to figure out, do those things matter? So the next 4 years, does it even matter if we had 50 million people meet up on a weekly basis, or is that irrelevant relative to a small number of companies building the technology stack? So really the question is, where is the epicenter of power and how do you influence that? And I'm not sure how to do it. It may be the case that humans don't, individuals don't matter anymore. You can't acquire that power through individuals and it's more, you need to go to corporations and say, corporations, we need to create a way for companies to allocate capital towards don't die. Or maybe we need to start a sovereign fund and try to raise $1 trillion where that money is invested in Don't Die. So maybe we go after the allocation of money. So I'm trying to figure out where to put the effort because I don't want to miss because I could spend years building up 100 million people or 500 million people who meet up on a regular basis and it has no power that really matters. So the question is how to effectively realize power that would meaningfully influence the probability that we survive as a species and can move on into this new expanded possibilities as humans.

Okay, I wanna be mindful of your time 'cause I know you're running around today. I feel like you just presented a lot of stuff. I, because the biggest part of "Don't Die" that I, identified with, and I was trying to articulate before, is this creation of a sort of religion and ideology for our time that is different than what has come before. There are bits of it, as I understand it, I mean, I understand the wanting to kind of take some— okay, the world is kind of spinning out of control. So you're going to take control of your life and And, and you're going to try to, to kind of keep up with and adjust to this, this ever-changing world and embrace parts of it. All that stuff I get. I do. There are times when I'm like, oh, this all feels very solipsistic. You're just, you're kind of, you end up in this place where you're just thinking about yourself all the time. And, and, and just because you have 100 million, a billion people thinking about themselves together all the time, like, where does that sort of end up— I mean, it sounds like you're, you're thinking through putting these other layers and mechanics on this thing, if I'm interpreting.

Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. It's— I, I think even those that have the most bullish imaginations of AI positively or negatively, I still think we are all underestimating what's going to happen in the very near future, whether 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, whatever. I think we really have underestimated it.

Yeah, I heard you on the Louis Theroux podcast and he's like, tell me what the future is going to be like. You're like, I don't think anyone can do that. He's like, come on, tell me. Tell me what your cell phone's going to look like. I was like, I don't think you get Yeah, because I agree with you. I think even though we've written decades upon decades of science fiction with brilliant people who have proven themselves of being able to predict the future quite well, I mean, if— I'm still not fully convinced, partially convinced— if, you know, this AI thing— I see all— I'm sitting here with like, in AI land talking to all the world's best people. Yeah, I'm kind of with you. I don't think anybody— I'm like, if this is really what you guys are saying, then like, Nobody has any idea what this is gonna look like. 'Cause what you guys are talking about is like madness being unleashed on the world, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the thought experiment that really helps clarify this for me the most is I imagine being with Homo erectus a million years ago. And if I could have a dialogue with them and I could say, "I'm really interested in the future of the species. Tell me what the future holds." tell me why I can be excited about the world. They would deploy their mental models and say, you're going to forage over there and you're going to do this and that. They would not have mental models of quantum mechanics, of the iPhone, of smartphone, of the internet, of antibiotics. And I, my, almost like my singular insight that I want to try to put forward is we may be Homo erectus. And if that is the case, the single best move we can have as a species is to be humble. And right now we're at the apex of intelligence. It's very hard for us to be humble. We know everything. We want to prognosticate and model out and predict everything. And so don't die is really, is the most humble observation one can make about existence. We don't know. We just do not know what's going to come next. And the only thing we do know is I don't want to die right now. And so it's trying to be as sober and as clear-minded as humanly possible in this moment. Like, can I just quiet all the noise and just see this with funeral-like sobriety? Can I just really feel it, the most sober sense possible, what is happening in this moment?

So it's like this monastic almost, you just, it's just giving you this one, almost like a meditative, one thing to think about. To focus on.

Yeah.

Okay. All right. All right. I know you have to get somewhere, so I'm going to let you go. I am going to try— I've already texted you about this, but I have found this darkness retreat in Poland, which I want to get your take on. And I'm determined to get you to Poland.

This is 3 or 7 days of darkness?

So you have options. There's this gentleman who's built these— they're like hobbit holes. Quite fancy hobbit holes. Yeah, so I think he does like a week-long retreat, but you're not in the darkness the whole time. The first time you go, you sort of meet everybody, you have dinner, you go in for like an afternoon, you come out, you meditate. Then the next day, I think you do like a whole night all on your own. And then you do this 3-day stretch in the total darkness. And they bring food to your thing through these like, you know, slots. So no light ever gets in when they're bringing the food. But then, you know, there's people who've done this before. When I was there, there was a guy doing 49 days in total. We won't— I don't— I won't force you to do that. But I don't even know if I could do this. It was like I did like a 10-minute run and it was already— it was already a little stressful. Do you think you could do 3 days in the dark?

I mean, first, I'm drawn to it as an experiment. I would love to measure everything. What happens when?

Oh, right, right, right.

What a, what a, yeah, what a cool experiment. I mean, do they, what's their pitch? Is it like they're, they're advertising a meditative-like experience, a reset, or is it something else?

It's kind of like not meditative in some ways because you're meant to like really, you know, sometimes, well, there's different forms of meditation, but the guy who started it, um, he's this really cool kind of eccentric Polish dude. Um, he had done tons of meditation. He'd done, he's friends with Wim Hof. He'd done tons of breathwork, all this stuff. And then ended up settling on this where you're not even trying to clear your mind. It's just, you're not like fixating on anything. Sort of like when you meditate, even when you're trying to clear your mind, you're kind of, you're going through this process. This is more, you know, what you feel very quickly as anyone will know is like you've been separated from your device. Even if you have things to do, you can't do them. So it's like, it's sort of the absence of being able to have any effect on anything, you know?

It's almost like a deprivation tank, but for multiple days.

Right, right. And then, um, and then he's, he's made these rooms. They're so nice. They're like, it's all round, everything's rounded and you, so you can't hurt yourself while you're, while you're kind of lurching around trying to find the toilet or anything like that. And then they have these, uh, it's in this Polish countryside and they have sessions to talk you through things after. But yeah, so this, this dude, AJ, he, um, I guess he tried all these things and now he's, he says the darkness is the only way.

Yeah, that's, I wonder if, yeah, that's a new form of, uh, rejuvenation.

I started looking it up. So there are, I had not actually heard of this a lot, and then now there seem to be. I think it's a reaction to like our devices. Yeah, exactly. In the modern world. Yeah. So it's just like you are, you're hardcore unplugged.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's true. I think, I mean, most people I know, I don't know about you, most people I know are pretty miserable. They feel pretty trapped to their devices in constant work and never-ending messages and never-ending work. No time to relax. You can never take off. You're always a fear of missing out. It just, it's, it's so insanely escalated. That most everyone I know feels pretty wound up about the situation.

Everyone I know is working like 7 days a week.

Yes.

Like these, uh, whatever norms used to exist, this vague like 9-to-5 thing. It's like the second I wake up in the morning, I'm just getting notes from all over the world.

Yes.

You gotta focus on this, focus on that. And then, I mean, not breaking new ground here, you know, I was just at a wedding, um, sitting at the bar and it's like 5 strangers and everybody's just sitting on their phone and like, in the, you know, it wasn't that long ago people would be talking to each other. Yeah. You know, like anytime we're anywhere now, you're just, it's like, it's nicer just to be on your phone than to like engage with somebody. Um, because you know what you're gonna find on the other end. Yeah. I mean, this can't, again, this is why I think it's an interesting question.

If, if each one of us individually can, can spot where we are each an NPC and where we are original. From the moment you wake up, even in your dreams, how much are you basically just playing out the scripts society has told you to play?

Yeah.

And what you write, what you do, how you think, what you aspire to. And I guess almost like it's 34, I guess I feel like I, I'm going to that same spot again. I want to separate myself and shed the skin of all these things. Like, I don't care what games society is telling me to play, power, wealth, status. I think they're all gonna be washed away. And so the darkness retreat kind of sounds like almost like an original approach of how you reset yourself to give yourself even a small hope of having clarity of thought just for a moment.

That's the idea. All right, I have no idea how we're gonna film this since it's totally in the dark.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

But if you're up for it, we'll try.

We can put some infrared cameras in there so we wouldn't see the light.

That's what I was thinking. Yeah. And all right, well, we will. We're going to pursue this. We'll pursue this. Brian Johnson, thank you so much for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer. And John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex and A1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.