Answering Personal Questions For 29 Minutes | My Netflix FAQ

Why are you so obsessed with your penis?

Hey, friends, today we're going to hang out and answer all of your questions, including things that you don't know and maybe things that you shouldn't know. Let's get into it.

How much time do you spend on your health each day?

Probably six hours a day. And the remainder of time is work, family.

What is your stance on alcohol?

I don't think anybody should drink it. I think it's a. A norm that slipped into our culture that we now just do it without thinking. But it's poison and it's just bad for us. And there's many other ways to positively deal with relaxing ourselves or feeling social lubrication. I don't think we should be drinking it.

It's a good replacement for alcohol.

I mean, it's this idea that in order to have fun or in order to have a nice social time, you need to lube up with alcohol or something like that. And I'm just past it. I don't need to do those things anymore. So I'd say that it really is a crutch we've created as a society where we hand off our emotional needs to this thing, and it's just very damaging.

And you feel similarly about caffeine?

The caffeine is fine, people. Yeah, there's no problem with caffeine. Coffee is great. People just have different metabolic responses to caffeine. Some people do very well, some people do not. I'm someone who gets put on a roller coaster. So by day three, I'm addicted. And now I drink coffee not because I love it. I drink coffee because I'm trying to feel normal. And so I'd much rather feel normal and steady than I would be on a roller coaster of emotions. And that's why I don't drink caffeine.

What are you reading right now?

I'm always in the middle of five books. I'll tell you. So I'm reading Skin in the Game by Taleb, High Output Management by Andy Grove, Radicals by Sal Alinsky, the Starfish and the Spider, about a revolution, Cascades, the war that wasn't Stalin's War, and two books about microplastics.

Brian, that's like 15 books.

I really enjoy dipping in and out of various books. I just finished Stalin, which was really engaging.

How much time do you spend on social media?

Depends on the day. Probably a daily average of maybe two to three hours a day.

Is that really you responding to my comments?

Yes, yes. Yeah, I do. I. I am a very. I'm Very. I'm very engaged on social media. I mean, like, social media is. It's complicated. It's. It's really nice. It's a really nice medium for communication. It also feels like slavery where you're compelled to be. If you're not on. You're missing out on important social connections and business connections. You're just not part of the conversation. So it almost feels like a necessity, like a requirement to be involved in society. And in that regard, I really dislike it because I think the trappings of it are creating a very negative emotional. It's a very negative thing, I think, for a lot of people, including me. And so I definitely have a very mixed emotion about it. I think in some ways I might be happier if there was no social media. And in many ways, I'm very sad that there is social media now. That's weird that I see that because, you know, we. This project gained notoriety through social media. So the success we've had has been because of it. But still, it's very complicated, and I think it wears us down, all of us. And so I think we. We ultimately, I think the ideal spot is to get somewhere where we collectively do not feel like it's a necessity. It's some sort of nice to have, but I think we all feel trapped by it.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever done for health?

How do I even score that? Well, I mean, I took a liter of my son's plasma and gave a liter of my plasma to my dad. I did focus shockwave on my penis. I did injections of botox into my penis. I extensively measured my how fast I can pee to measure urinary strength. My anus is extensively measured. That's just a short list.

What's the craziest reaction you've ever had to a health protocol?

My face blew up so badly, I was not recognizable from injecting fat into my face. I was trying to revolumize my face. And because I don't have enough fat on my body, I got a donor's fat, and when I injected it, I blew up. Couldn't even see it for a few days.

What's your relationship like with Talmadge now?

I think Talmadge views me as his future self, and I view Talmadge as my former self. And I think we're both just talking to ourself when we're engaged in our conversations.

What do your family and friends think about what you're doing?

My mother bravely defends me from. She lives in a very small community in Utah that is very conservative. And it's like world news gets there, you know, like, months after it happens. Like, they're just so insulated. I remember when I grew up there, like, we were just separate from the world. It was this little community. Very few things changed. So she's very insulated from the world, and what we're doing is unconventional, to say the least. And so I think many of her friends have different opinions of me, and she bravely stands up for me, and I appreciate that very much from my mother. My father is beaming with pride, and he is all in. I think it's. I really appreciate his love and support, and, you know, like, I guess like everyone else, I never really know because I've learned this is like the. It's very hard to know someone's true thoughts. Like, what people tell you is what they're trying to address in that relationship with you, but understanding what they truly think is different. So I think the most honest answer is, I don't know what most people think of this endeavor.

On the flip side, you've got a lot of vocal haters online. How does that make you feel?

I love my haters.

If you. If you could say something to your haters, what would it be?

Keep it up. You know, when you go away, things are not as fun, so. And, you know, like, your game's getting pretty weak, so get better. Like, I expect more from you.

In any part of this journey. Did that hate initially ever get under your skin?

Yeah, I think the. The aesthetic stuff got to me a little bit where, you know, I grew up in a little teeny town, and no one ever in my entire life thought about aesthetics. You, when you age, you just go bald, and you get fat, and you just get wrinkly, and no one cares. And that was like, small farm town where I grew up. And now I'm in this big metropolitan area where people are looks maxing at the. You know, in their teens, and they're doing cosmetic surgeries in their 20s, and they just spend their entire life. And not only did I not care about aesthetics growing up or wasn't even aware of them, was that, you know, when I started doing this, I was oblivious to the idea of aesthetics. Like, it just was not even on our radar. We were so focused on biomarkers. It's like, now looking back on footage from a couple years ago, I'm kind of like, why didn't anybody say something like, where's everybody at? I mean, I look pretty rough, and so I think there's, like, a lack of self awareness on my part of, like, I just had lost all bearings. And so I think the haters were correct in calling it out where they were confused, like, what does this mean? This guy's healthy. And so I think that was, like, legitimate criticism. And so I think it bothered me because I think what we're doing is correct by the science. And then when my aesthetics didn't match, stung because I thought in their eyes, it discredited the effort. And I didn't want. Just because I had less fat in my face, people would be like, this entire thing's a failure. And they would disregard everything else we had done for the entire body. And so I felt like it really lessened the value of what we're doing. So that bothered me because then, like, the legitimacy of this endeavor is called into question because I don't have the right amount of fat in my face.

You recently got veneers?

Yes.

Why?

As you age, your teeth don't. They don't. They're not as white as they are when you're young. And so I was. My teeth were like, my teeth are not as white as I wanted them to be. And then I would go to the dentist and I'd clean them. They become white, but then they'd quickly become darkened because I ate. I ate a lot of foods that darkened my teeth, like blueberries and other stuff. And so I was always fighting it. So when I smile, I would be unhappy with the whiteness of my teeth. And so it was always on my mind. We. We found a version. We found a way to approach this where we're doing no prep veneer. So typically when people get veneers, you have to shave down the tooth. And so we found a way to do this where we didn't do any teeth shaving. So I got to save all my teeth and get veneers. And so it's a. I guess, like, it's actually a. It's a response to this question on aesthetics. So I'm trying to say, like, okay, from the vantage point of the 25th century, like, I'm trying to say, like, in the biggest possible question in the galaxy, if we question, like, what is conscious life on this planet? And can we actually, you know, can we be the generation to not die? People would be like, but you don't have fat in your face. I'm like, wait a second. Like, we're talking about things on this galactic scale. Like, it's the biggest possible question. And they'd be like, but you don't have enough fat in your face. And I'd be like, oh, but guys, like, so it was like I bumped up against this thing where it's like we couldn't move the conversation forward because people couldn't process knowledge until certain things were in place. And I think my teeth is one of those things. Like my teeth were following the natural age related decline. They weren't as white as they were. When you're in your early 20s, you can't fix that on teeth. You can't do any rejuvenation therapy to do it. So veneers addresses it. And so now, like it's a very expected thing for someone to have veneers. It's not a big deal. But for like, it allows me to move forward on this journey of saying, can we truly be the first generation to not die? And somehow the veneers like, it passes. People's minds are like, okay, now I can have the conversation.

Why are you so obsessed with your penis?

You know, today I was the first investor in a company called Ginkgo Bioworks. They're doing some of the coolest technology in the entire world. Engineering, biology. Like you actually program biology to do like, instead of growing a tree, cutting the tree and then making it into a house, you just design the seed to grow into a house. Like, amazing stuff with biology. And so I posted on social media and I was like, this is why I made this investment and this is why this company's doing. And someone made in the comments, they said, just talk about boners. And I thought that is so true because ever since I sold my company, I was doing things on the cutting edge of genetics and synthetic biology and precision chemistry and nanotech brain interfaces. Nobody cares. Like you cannot get the message across to anyone in society. People care about, you know, sex, power, status. Like that's just what they care about. And so in blueprint we're trying to figure out, how do you make this relevant to people? Now nobody wants to talk about their thymus, they want to talk about boners. And so we meet people where they're at, talking about the things they understand and the same principles apply. And so talking about penis health explains is an entry point to explain all these bigger ideas.

This might be a little too personal, but how do you fulfill your sexual needs?

You know, I haven't really spoken about that publicly because some guy asked me if I'd bang his wife today. And I said, sure, Why did he. I mean on social media, I post, I posted about, I posted about something. And he just said, brian, can you beg my wife? I said sure things.

So he wants, maybe he wants to watch film, I don't know.

But I just, you know, like I'm just helping a brother out. So I legitimately trying to be trusted and I'm trying to do everything I can to be trusted. And dating is complicated and other people are complicated and I just got into a situation where my reputation was intertwined with someone else and my reputation got badly harmed from that other person. And so I just really hesitate to associate with anyone because of the reputational risk that so much damage can be done.

Are you really trying to live forever?

Living forever and living for tomorrow are identical concepts. I really want to live tomorrow. And when tomorrow arrives, I'm imagining I probably want to live tomorrow's tomorrow. I don't know when that ends, but I'm signed up for tomorrow.

What would you do if this current endeavor, blueprint Don't Die failed?

I would probably need a little bit of time to pick something else, but I'm sure I'd find it. I mean, I've been running this same thought process my entire life, which is like, if you think about this moment from the future a few hundred years into the future, what do they care about? What do they see this moment is for? And I would probably try to find a different approach to that same question. I just really enjoy the game of trying to figure that out. There's an alternative version where I have a farm in the middle of a forest and I grow my own food, I have horses and just do projects around the farm. That's probably one of those two versions. I'm either trying to change the course of intelligent existence of this part of the galaxy, or I'll be on a farm. Like one of those two, but nothing in between.

Alright, cool. Have you ever faced any major health scares?

As a teenager, I nearly killed myself maybe a dozen times. We were reckless and dangerous and rough and tumble. So near death experiences were a common experience for us. That was just our culture and norms. Since then I've chilled out quite a bit and don't do the same kinds of things. And then I had the scare with my internal jugular vein stenosis where we found out I had some kind of blood flow problems from my brain to my body. Then I almost died in an airplane twice. So these are like health scares? Death scares. But yeah, I guess I've had a few brushes with death throughout my life, like serious encounters.

Do you ever feel lonely?

Hmm. You know, I really do Feel very satisfied in my own mind. And that is a very big difference from when I was depressed. My mind was my enemy. I could never escape my mind. And now I genuinely enjoy being with myself. And that I think, in talking to others, I think that is rare. I think a lot of people, they do like the company of others, but I think they maybe like, like the company of others because it takes them off their own mind. But I genuinely enjoy spending time in my own mind.

Who are your role models?

People who saw the future in their time and place throughout history.

Who's an example?

Da Vinci. He saw the future in the way he painted and how he drew with optics, with the heart. Looking at biology and sculpture and mechanical design, he was able to transcend his time and place. And I admire these people because it's. The moment just captures you and to remove yourself and to bridge out of it is impossibly hard. And so some people throughout history have really had that skill set of seeing the world in a different light and giving birth to something entirely new.

Now you're one of them.

We'll see. I mean, that's the thing is that in any given moment, it's anyone's guess on who actually sees the future. Now over some time horizons, like over a few years or a decade or a few decades, some of that begins to materialize. But on the stuff we are working on, where we're trying to solve the riddle of existence for hundreds of years, I think it's tbd. I think the future is going to be very surprising and I think it's best we remain humble because if you become too hard coded in your thoughts, then you may lose your ability to find the right path.

Are you really happier now than you were before Blueprint?

Yes, unquestionably.

What's your favorite meal pre blueprint?

You know, I'm a sucker. I was a sucker for all the American stuff. Hamburger, fries, pizza, you know, certain snacks like Doritos or red licorice. Like the stuff I grew up on, you know, like you yesterday we were talking about after soccer practice, you know, you're rewarded with a McDonald's mill. And that's what you associate with happiness. It's a treat and it's fun and you go there and so yeah, my. I think I was entirely mapped to typical American fast food, junk food as my, my pleasure centers.

Do you have a go to restaurant that was a favorite?

No, we kind of had like in high school, Arby's had five for $5. You know, they had that horseradish sauce. And then the Taco Bell had their like big burritos. And then Wendy's and McDonald's. We just kind of had. That was our rotation.

What's the most recent movie or TV show you saw that you. That you liked?

South Park? I love South Park. I love their darkness, I love their humor. I love the plots. They are just ridiculously funny.

Are you working with any world leaders right now?

Yes, several world leaders have reached out.

Care to expound?

People in their circle have done soft feelers on what can be done, how to address problems. A member of the Supreme Court in the US Their staff reached out a couple weeks ago and wanted to address an urgent concern. It's like a routine thing. I think people do properly see that we are robustly engage in science. We have a very big aperture on what we're looking at. So I think in these moments, I think they're trying to find novel ways to think about problems.

Is there a version of yourself down the road where you would run for president?

I wouldn't rule it out. Yeah. I think it depends on the calculations always in my mind of where best to allocate my efforts for the best version of the 25th century. So I'm open to every path for that objective.

Yeah. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

The first is by Albert Camus, the French philosopher. And I love his intellect. And he explored the edges of existence from every philosophical point possible. And he came to a very simple conclusion that, you know, life is meaningless. And the only relevant question is whether you should commit suicide. Whether you commit suicide. And if you don't, then life is just play. And I love that conclusion. It is brutally honest with what we know about reality. So I love him for that. Second one is by Edward Merle where he said, those who are not confused by the situation don't really understand what is going on. And I think that really captures the way I understand reality is I don't think anyone understands what is really going on. The most interesting thing is not what you know, but what you don't know. And this is very much like growing up in a religious community. You're told to look into the light, like, look at the positive, find out, like, lean into like these. These things that God say wants to do. And you should blind yourself to the darkness. Like Satan is supposed to be darkness. And so you like half of reality you can't look at. It's like dark humor. Like, for example, like, I never would have been able to watch south park because it's crude and irreverent. And to me, they live on the dark side. And so I feel like I really missed out on half of reality for the majority of my life, not being able to look at certain things because they were labeled as bad. And so it wasn't the things that I was taught to know that were the most interesting. It was the things that I couldn't look at which were the most interesting. And so the question for me now is like, I know there's more things I can't see. What are they? And that to me is the most exciting.

Have you ever had any near death experiences?

Yeah, I almost died in an airplane twice. So when I first got my license, we were flying out of Chicago. I had my entire family in the airplane. And there was a big Chicago summer storm. And the pilot, I was flying, but I had made a rule, I would never fly alone. We took off and we started flying down to the Bahamas and there was this big storm. And I said, hey, you know, we should probably go like 30 degrees north and skirt around this storm. And he said, no, look at the map. The storm's not there. We can just miss it. And I'm like, I don't think that's correct. We should probably be very safe. And so he led us right into the epicenter of that storm, the eye. And when you get into the inside of those storms, like, they are extremely violent. So we got in and the plane immediately began going up and down hundreds of feet at a moment, so violently I thought that the wings would just snap off. And in that moment, my son Talmadge began to laugh hysterically. I don't know why, but he just was laughing uncontrollably. Now this is in a moment where everything in the cockpit is flying around like exploding in the air. Our heads are slamming into the ceiling. I thought I was going to die. We all thought we were going to do die. The co pilot and I were just like white in the face. And so we, we turned off the end, we pulled the engine back and we slowly descended out of the storm. And we got out successfully, but, like, barely. We really should have died in that circumstance. And I credit Talmadge for having saved our lives. Like, his laughter calmed my co pilot and I. Like, we were so. We were so jarred by the violent movements that his laughter brought us back to sanity and we could bring back proper controls in the cockpit of how to get the plane stabilized. So Talmadge saved our lives. And then a second time, the Same pilot. I probably should have learned. We were flying from Texas, we were at south by Southwest, coming back to Chicago. And when you fly, you look at the weather forecast when you arrive. So like if you're leaving at 10am and you fly for three hours, you look at the window of time where you say what is the, the weather at, you know, 1:00am and so he looked at the, the, the arrival time of something like 2 to 4pm when our arrival time was like noon or something like that. And what was happening at noon was a tornado was what was coming through the Midwest. And so we're flying from Texas and like we have such fantastic tailwinds. We're like doing over 200 knots. Like this is great and amazing, but if we start approaching our airport, it started getting very turbulent. So same thing, like we started being jostled around in the cockpit, really choppy winds. And we get there and like the winds are like 45, gusting 65, which is just an insane. We're in a small prop based airplane. And so we go to our, our airport to land and we come in to land. You know, you always land at the wind coming at your nose. You have lift on the plane. And we came in and the winds were so strong we couldn't put the plane down. We just come in and it would just like leave us hovering because they were too strong. And so we couldn't land. And we had at that point 17 minutes of fuel left. And so we abort the landing. And we said like, what do we do now? Is we called in ATC and we're like, where's the next airport that has like a very wide Runway and has like a fire truck? Because we're anticipating like we may get turned and if we get turned, we might start on fire. Then we start on fire, like please put it out quite fast. And so we start calling ATC and they're like, there's really nothing around, like for 200 miles. Like you're just kind of in the middle of nowhere. And so we find another airport that has the biggest possible Runway and it has the best alignment with the winds. And we go in there and that was the moment where it was just this co pilot in me. And I'm thinking to myself, I should never have learned how to fly. Like I'm going to die now. I just made all this money like my life was gonna be reset. Like this new life, new thing, new opportunities and I squandered life on flying. So I thought I'm dead. Like I'm gonna be dead or I'm gonna. We're gonna crash. And I'll be so disfigured that just I'll be on up and not be functional. And so I'm thinking of my kids, and I'm thinking all this regret of, like, why did I ever do this? And so we're coming in and we're planning for, like, okay, so when we hit the ground, like, how do you, like, throw the door open? How do you eject when the plane starts on fire? Like, where do you, like. We're planning, making all these preparations, and we get over the Runway and the winds drop, and we just come in and make this smooth landing. Not a big deal. We're just shocked. Like, we can't make sense of it. We're in the middle of a tornado, and we roll up to the FBO and the winds and pick up, and, like, we get out and they're so strong, they blow us on the ground. Like, we fall over. And it was such a wild experience. We could not explain the situation. It made no sense. So we got a local hotel. We were going to fuel up and go home. We're like, let's call it a day. So we got fuel and we went to our hotel and we just stayed there. But I for sure thought I was going to die.

Do you fly now?

I don't. I sold my airplane during the pandemic, but after that experience, I said, I'm either going to stop flying or I'm going to buy a jet. So jets have the benefit of they're heavier, so they do better in winds. And they also have two engines and they're turbine instead of pistons. So they're just much more reliable. Like, most crashes happen in piston airplanes, and jets are safe, relatively speaking. So I bought a jet, and I still had the same rule. I always fly with a co pilot. And so I did that for a couple years, and I just didn't travel very much anymore. So sold the airplane. But, yeah, I really miss it. I really enjoy flying.

What's one thing you wish people knew about you?

I wish people knew how good of a dad I am. I'm an extraordinary dad. I work really, really hard to be a good dad. I did. I have my whole life. And I'm very proud of my efforts, even though, you know, like, it's resulted in, like, a fractured family situation. I care deeply about my children. I care deeply about being a good father, and I don't think people know that.