Can This Man Live Forever? | The Big Interview | WIRED

True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined, in the future, you will die.

False.

Tell me more.

Death has always been inevitable. And so we have made all these preparations. Like we talk about immortality, professional achievement, we talk about a life after death. And so there are, there are the ways that we've dealt with it up to this point. And now we have this real possibility of extending our lifespans to some unknown horizon. So that's extension. But we also have the ability to begin moving our self to computational systems. So currently, in a very crude form, I have a Brian AI that has digested everything I've ever said, all my.

Do you do currently have this?

I do.

Okay, yeah.

And so as the technology gets better and it gets trained on more of my thoughts, it's only going to improve. I think all of us are in a time and place where we will be immortal to some degree. Now, whether it's in this body, whether it's in some kind of computational arrangement, whether it's both or a combination of both, I think we've reached that point as a civilization.

And the reason I ask that, I mean, maybe it's obvious, but I'm trying to sort of understand from what premise you are beginning. Right, because you talk a lot about living a healthier life, extending the human lifespan. What I was curious about is sort of how far you see that possibly going and sort of whether you accept the notion for yourself that at some point you, Brian, your biological material, right, Everything that makes you, you will be buried, will be cremated, there will be a will, there will be an estate plan, right. That all of those things that go into the way we plan for death, like are those things that you contemplate and that you plan for or not? Do you have a will?

I do, yeah. Good. I do. I have a will. And I've made all the practical decisions on if I'm in a comatose state, what are my instructions. So I have gone through all those preparations. The future is always present. It's just a question if you can see it or not. And I think this moment is probably the biggest test of trying to piece together what is really happening with the speed at which AI is improving and what does that mean for how it's going to change everything we understand about reality. And many people are poking at this like trying to make their predictions and organize the world to the best they can. And I'm basically saying that we are headed towards this event horizon where AI is now improving At a certain speed, in a few years time, we probably can't see past that point. We don't know what happens. And as technology gets better and better, the most prized asset is going to be existence. That immortality, as we thought about it before, through accomplishment or through offspring or any other, or the afterlife will be devalued relative to existing. And that's my fundamental bet on the future, is that's where we're headed.

Let me ask you this. If there was a world where, let's say in five years you could upload Brian into an AI, right? An AI. Brian is pretty much as good as Brian. Brian does Brian. Brian, eat the cheeseburger?

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, does some of this. Does sort of this. You know, it is from everything I can tell, it is every waking minute of your life and it is every sleeping minute of your life sort of committed to this one singular goal. Right. That is your entire existence.

Yeah.

Have you contemplated whether or not that would change?

Yeah, I mean. Okay, so let's think about your question in a different way. I could say about people today that most people spend every waking moment pursuing wealth. The time they're not spending pursuing wealth, they're pursuing some sort of status or prestige, you know, socially signaling to their community, their tribe of some power or something to that effect. Now I could certainly say that and say that's a malaise that has everybody locked in to a singular game that is consuming all of their resources and all their attention. And what I'm saying is I'm devoting every second of my existence to existence. When you die, inevitably that's when how it has been, it makes sense to pursue power and status. That makes sense when you give birth to super intelligence. And now you can start extending lifespans to some unknown horizon. 200 years, a thousand years, 10,000 years, we don't know, millions of years. We don't know when that happens, the entire game of humanity shifts from that singular focus on wealth, accumulation and status and prestige to existence now embedded in existence. We may still play games of power, prestige, status, et cetera, but it will be conditioned that existence itself is the highest virtue. That's the shift that's starting to happen right now.

So let me pivot over then to the conversation about your existence. So you've talked at length. You talk a great deal. You are very much out there in the public, ey, talking about A day in the life of Brian. Yeah, walk us through A day in the life. Right now I know that the protocol changes that you're adapting it, modifying it. What does it look like today? Take us through a typical day for you.

It may be helpful to have the backdrop that what I do is I'm saying that existence is the highest virtue. And if you accept that premise, then I say on a given day, I want to identify every single thing that could kill me or make me die. And then I want to identify every single thing that could help me make me live.

Okay.

And so let's just say I live in California and the life expectancy is around 79 years. So if I behave like a typical human, I probably have a life expectancy to 79 years of age. Now if I identify things that could potentially shorten that, like smoking, drinking, breathing bad air, drinking toxic water, you're not getting exercise, et cetera. If I think of good things that could extend my life even further to, you know, currently the cap is like 120. I could say, well, I'm going to eat healthy foods and exercise. And so my daily protocol is basically trying to identify at a molecular level every single thing that either extends or shortens life.

So I mean, I'm laughing because your daily protocol, I will be honest, it's much more elaborate than eating well and exercise with just eating well and exercising. Like, you'd have a pretty chill time.

Yeah.

You're not necessarily having like the chillest time. Yeah, Tell us a little bit about that.

Okay, cool. So I, my every day begins the night before.

Okay.

So I have, I have built my entire existence around sleep.

I mean, I like that, love to sleep.

Yeah. Do you, how well do you sleep?

Well, we're going to get to that. Tell me how many hours a night you sleep.

8 hours and 34 minutes is my 12 month average. My sleep profile is that of a early 20 something. I, I've worked very hard at this. So it's eight hours and 34 minutes. I get over four hours of restorative sleep. That's deep sleep and REM where the body cleans itself and repairs and rebuilds. I'm up less than one time per night. On average, I go to bed within two to three minutes of my head hitting the pillow. And I have 94% sleep efficiency. So once I lay down and my stress score during the night, typically most people's sleep signal is like a rocky chart of a stock market, you know, and mine is just flat. Like my consciousness is at peace. And so those are the stats you want to see for a perfect night's sleep. But to do that, you can't Just show up and just say I'm going to put my head on the pillow and fall asleep. You kind of have to build your whole life system around that. So my day begins the night before when I go to sleep and then I wake up around 4:30 or 5. And then I'll do for the next four hours. I will have a series of measurements and therapies. I get out of bed, I try to within one minute of awaking.

Within one minute?

Yeah. I try to avoid the 10 more minutes or pull the phone up and start scrolling. Get up. I will get light in my eyes within a few minutes of waking. So I wake up before the sun. So it's 10,000 lux light in my eye for a few minutes. I'll take my inner ear temperature. I measure my temperature every single day. One thing we've noticed is as I've done this for the past four years, my body temperature has dropped almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit, a massive drop. So now it's around 94 degrees Fahrenheit each morning. That's down from 98.7. So there's good evidence that species with a lower basal temperature live longer. I will then put some a serum on my hair, my scalp, rub my scalp with a silicone scrubber for hair growth. I'll take a quick shower and then I'll come downstairs. I have a morning drink. I will eat something, I'll work out for an hour. I'll do red light therapy. I'll then do a hyperbaric oxygen therapy, then some sauna, then I'll rinse off and then I'm ready for work.

Okay. So that is quite a regimen. And then. And you stop eating at around noon. Around noon, yeah.

And then like also in the morning I'll typically do like a few tests. Like today I did three tests.

There's so much to this protocol. There's, there's sort of so much data that you've accumulated really quickly like rapid fire. Not to put you on the spot, but I am. Ask me a couple really quick questions about myself and then tell me how am I doing in the Brian Johnson universe.

Great.

Go.

What is your resting heart rate?

48 beats per minute.

That's fantastic.

Thank you.

What is your most recent inflammation? Your body inflammation. Blood test result, your HR hscrp.

Brian, I have no idea.

What is your blood glucose level?

A good one.

Okay. Okay, good. How many continuous push ups can you do?

Probably like 10.

Okay. If you stood on one foot and closed your eye, how long could you stay standing?

A minute.

A minute?

Yes, a minute.

That's very good.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, good.

Try me.

Okay.

Not right now.

Okay. What is the length of your telomeres? I don't know. Okay. What are your omega levels?

I don't know.

Okay, these are very involved claypins. What is your speed of aging?

Well, according to the skin test I took earlier, Brian, it was 1.9.

Yeah.

So tell me speed of. Okay, so I didn't learn very much. I think what I learned is that there's a lot more to this than do you drink, do you smoke, do you exercise, do you sleep enough? That's what I thought you were going to ask me. I do not know the length of my telomeres. Yeah, but apparently that's something someone can find out.

Yeah. So the reason I ask you those questions, because I can pose a question like, how's your sleep?

Yeah.

And you can give me a generic answer like I sleep great or I feel great. But if you look at the actual data of your telomere length, it. It tells me the story of your overall health. The same with your blood glucose levels, the same with your speed of aging. These are readouts of your biology that just say, this is me in raw form. There's no storytelling, there's no subjective assessment. It's just the data.

You were in a Netflix documentary earlier this year. You talked a lot sort of about your history in that documentary, right. You were a successful entrepreneur. You felt like you weren't living your healthiest life. You parted ways with Mormonism. You were Mormon for a very, very long time. You got divorced. Right. You went through all of these seismic life changes. And a lot of people make major changes to their lives, right. They hit a wall with stress or in a marriage or with their religion. Right. Exceedingly few people, very, very, very, very, very few people go as far as you have. What is it that pushed you past the point that the vast majority of people would go.

I'm really motivated by having read various biographies of history and people throughout time and place. In their moment, they were able to identify the most far ranging ambition identifiable. You couldn't have sequenced the genome in the year 1800. The technology wasn't present. You could have had that ambition in the early 90s and someone did. And they actually sequenced the genome. And so in any given time point, a new emergent possibility is present. Then there's two questions that arise. One is, what is it? And two is, will somebody do it? And in the year 2021 was the first time in Human history where a person could say, we are the first generation who won't die and not be ridiculed. It just became possible. And I saw that and I thought, this is a moment like this when it comes together where you see it and you can do something about it. And so I wanted to try to capture what this moment is.

Hmm. Now, if you talk to people who know me, if you asked my husband, right, poor guy, they would say that I'm a very controlled person, right? Like I, I wake up at the same time every day, I do the same exercise, I tend to eat a lot of very similar foods. Like, there's a lot of routine and structure to my life. I will say when I read about you, when I watch, you know, videos about you, when I hear about the way you live, I, as a very controlled person, am astounded at how controlled your life is. Have you always been that way? When you think back 20 years ago, 30 years ago, six years ago, was control always something that was a defining characteristic?

I suppose it's the difference between being called a germaphobe and being germ aware and how people label your methodical building of life systems as control. And I would reframe it and say, you're actually a really smart engineer, that you realize that the metabolic cost of you having to make these decisions every single day, spur of the moment, is so expensive to you that you are wise and said, you know what, it's not worth it. I'm just going to systematize this so that my brain can then be allocated towards other higher level thinking. So I would applaud your systems and say, like, you actually are very clever in the way you've structured your life. And so I kind of view it the same way that why would I fight these daily, miscellaneous, ultimately irrelevant decisions on a moment to moment basis when they can just be automated? And I'd rather spend my scarce brain capacity thinking of higher level things about the future of the human race, for example, than I would like, what am I going to have for breakfast? And so I think historically, I've very much thought like an engineer my entire life. You take a given system, you dissect its parts, you reassemble it into some kind of constructive and positive manner. But I'd say, like, what I do now is definitely beyond what I did before. But what I'm trying to demonstrate is Brian Johnson in 2025 is a normal dude in 2030. It's just like our app in five years, in five years that the apparatus around us that things will just be automated. Health will be so much more automated than we have, than we are now, that the weirdness of who I am or what I am will be forgotten. People will remember in that context, but when they look at me, they'll be like, oh, yeah, like he just was ahead of the time.

I was getting ready for this interview. I was reading, sort of reading up on you. And in 2023, I was leading the newsroom at Vice, and we actually published a story on you. And you talked in that story about your body image from decades ago. You talked about how hard it was at that time to control yourself around food at night. Right. You talked about how you now often go to bed hungry, that you have learned to find joy in that and in reading that. And just in very good faith, I'm being very transparent with you here. If I stripped your name out of that, and I just looked at a bulleted list of those comments, you know, that sounds a lot like me 20 years ago with a very serious eating disorder. I mean, there was a period in my life where I was very sick and I was very controlled and everything that went into my mouth. Right. And it wasn't about the number on the scale. It wasn't about how I looked. It was about being able to systematize and control my environment. And, you know, I am not a doctor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I think if you were to ask some doctors and psychiatrists, and I'm sure this. This criticism has been leveled before, these comments have been made before, they would say, well, that sounds like disordered behavior. That sounds like an eating disorder.

Yeah.

Does that resonate with you? I mean, how do you respond to that? And I think particularly when we're talking not just about you, but. But about you as a public figure advocating for a certain approach to health. Do you have concerns about sort of what you are advocating for and sort of what you are doing and how that might be adopted by sort of the population writ large?

Yeah. Most people I know in America have an eating disorder. I rarely meet somebody who doesn't find themselves, late in the evening, powerless to stop themselves from eating the ice cream or the cookies or the chips or, you know, whatever else they find in the pantry. That is probably the most universal experience shared among Americans in this moment. And it probably has to do a combination of. It's culturally acceptable. Our foods were scientifically, methodically built to be addictive. You just pull up an app and it, like, delivers to your house, real time, whatever you want. So I would Say it's really more of a widespread societal problem that we have an addiction problem with food, our phones and our entertainment, our scrolling, it's everywhere. And so certainly I don't know if my addiction is more excessive than other people's addictions or if it just weighted more towards food versus the phone. But I'd say I'm probably pretty average on a population level addiction scale.

So you had sort of taken that, I guess what used to manifest in one way, which is sort of like an inability to control what you were eating when you were eating it. And you have adopted a new way of approaching it, which is saying, I eat these things at these times and I sort of eliminate the variables. I take the choice out of it. And that is how I am going to manage this part of my health.

Yeah, exactly. And I guess more broadly it's kind of a cultural commentary where I'm saying the most powerful forces in all of society, corporations are pointing their power at getting you to be addicted to their thing, whether it's scrolling their app, whether it's eating their food, whether it's watching their show, all their science, all their technology, all their intelligence is pointed at you and trying to get you to be addicted. And what I was saying is when you are addicted to anything, it reduces your freedom and your agency. They ultimately have you in a bind. I don't want to be addicted to anything. I want to have agency and freedom over my existence as much as possible. And so that's what I'm trying to build. And so I realized that people on the outside looking in, they do take that approach and say, he's working through his childhood trauma, he's working through a food addiction. I'm open to all those explanations. Like, I would be the first person to be self deprecating and be like, this guy's got issues, unquestionably also in my interactions with others. It is a very common phenomena that humans struggle in modern society. And I'm trying to offer an antidote that I didn't have anybody, not a single person in my life advocating for me, that I take care of my health. Nobody. It was work harder. Like, I'm so proud of you for achieving this. Like, didn't matter if I was ragged or depressed or overweight. Like, the direction went elsewhere except for Brian. Can I be a positive influence in your life and encourage you to go to bed on time and get some exercise? So I'm really trying to play that role in society where I'm saying, look, this is a mess. We are all a mess. And can we be honest about the situation? Even those who are accusing me of being addicted and having a food eating disorder or whatever the problem, they themselves are equally shackled with addictions.

You're addicted to longevity.

Yeah. There's probably no way of actually getting over addiction other than controlling where your addiction is pointed.

I would agree with that. I want to ask you about your fame. You were sort of just talking about population wide health. And I think that one of the observations that I have made as a journalist in the last several months since President Trump was elected and inaugurated in late January is that to me, with notoriety, with fame, comes a degree of responsibility. Right. Responsibility for what you say, how you say it, when you speak up, when you choose not to. I want to ask you about Maha. I want to ask you about RFK Jr. When President Trump won the election, you congratulated him on social media, as did so many very high profile business leaders. You were photographed with RFK Jr. Maha as sort of the tagline in the photo. I'm really curious for your assessment at this point in time of RFK Jr and the Trump administration vis a vis American health. If I had to guess, and I'll let you answer the question in a minute, you know, I would suspect that there's a lot there that, that someone in your position would like. Right. The idea of, you know, stripping additives out of food. You know, we have also seen massive cuts at federal health agencies. We have seen already, you know, grants with regards to cutting edge, edge research, MRNA vaccines being a very early target. We've seen a lot of sort of the very promising sort of bleeding edge medical research that, that you have, have been able to adopt in your own life. You know, really on the chopping block in this administration. I would really appreciate your assessment of the Trump administration and RFK Jr. As it pertains to public health, which is, you know, in many ways the sort of premise of your entire operation here. Right. Which is really sort of educating the public about how to live a healthier life.

Yeah.

How do you rate the administration so far?

Yeah, I would mean RFK is certainly not a status quo person.

I think you can say that. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think I would say that the status quo in the US is not working. If you look at the data around the health of our citizenry, it's embarrassingly bad. We spend 1.8 times our peer countries in healthcare, $13,000 per person versus like 6,000 or so the other developed countries. So we spend more and we get Less. And so whether RFK is the solution or not, what we're doing is not working. I'm open to change. I'm open to a variety of possibilities. It's not to say that everything he's doing is correct, but I do support the idea that we definitely need to change because what we're doing now is not working.

Do you worry about medical research being delayed, right, by years or decades if it is curtailed right now?

Yeah, I'm not in these kinds of circumstances. I'm not apprehensive of change. Science always finds a way forward, and progress always finds a way forward. And so oftentimes, when one path is discontinued, everybody thinks it's an end of something, but actually that change produces a new path that people didn't anticipate. So, no, I support the creative destruction. I think it could have some positive outcomes. Clearly, there could be some drawbacks. When you break things like this, it goes both ways. It's not like a clean win or loss. But I'm generally in favor of new ideas or new approach. Because I think what would be cool is if we as a country said we want to be number one in the entire world for life expectancy. That is a very clear goal. And then once you back into it and you look at all the practical things that determine that. But that to me would be like a something we all can say. We agree, like living long, healthy lives and not, you know, long health spans would be an admirable goal for an entire country. So I would like more unification on this, that we actually have a big goal to work towards versus now. It's like trying to find the evildoers and knocking them out, which is fine, but also we don't really have a positive goal.

Who are the evildoers that we're knocking out?

I mean, for example, like, you see the red dye? A lot of the ingredients we have in this country are not used because they promote health. They're used because they create addiction or they're low cost. And so I think there's a lot of. There's an acceptance of selling death. And we just say, that's capitalism. What else are we going to do?

What is a life well lived for? Brian Johnson?

Not dying. People evaluate my life and they say, bro, so, so busy trying to not die, he ain't living.

They do say that.

And then next they say, I wish he would get hit by a bus. Like they. They're so upset.

Have not seen them say that. I believe it.

It's. It's like lol. Can't wait till he gets hit by a bus. But they're so upset for a variety of reasons, whether they can't make the change themselves, whether they feel like they've been wronged, whether they don't have the willpower. And I get it. I've been there. So I'm not blaming them. But they go through this response where they're having to reconcile that they are not the person they want to be and someone else is doing something they're not. And so they're going through some kind of reconciliation process. They go through the other five stages of grief. And so I understand why people have such a strong reaction to me. I get it. Like, I've been there before, and it's a very helpless feeling.

Brian, thank you for your time.

I'm really glad you came. Yeah, it's nice to be hanging out with you.

Sam.