Creatine, Sleep Trackers, and AI Doctors | Bryan Johnson Podcast

We went out to a restaurant. The team was. Was all together. I just so rarely do this. I was just shocked at watching how the food arrived at various tables across the restaurant. I mean, it was just. I was beside myself, I guess, like, knowing what I've learned about food and toxins and the way that food is passed through restaurant systems. The team was kind of like, Brian. Yeah. Like, hey, welcome to, like, normal society. This is kind of what people do. And it's like, so we've built this system that's just so far outside of that. It was very shocking to me. It almost felt like I was traveling back in time and viewing, like, early 21st century and like, this is crazy. Watching a movie or something today. Everyone, welcome to the. What is this? The Don't Die podcast.

Yeah, that sounds great.

Yeah, there we go. So Don't Die podcast. We. We believe we are the first generation who won't die, and we are trying to practice that philosophy, and we're trying to bring it to you as well, so you and your family and your friends can also do it. So with me, Kate Tolo is my co. Founder of Don't Die, and Mike Mallon, who is my doctor. I mean, Kate and I talk like 150 times a day. Mike and I talk five or six times a day. And we're always chipping away at the. Everything we can do to improve protocols. So we're gonna go through the various things we're working on on a weekly basis. Also, we'll fill some of your questions in time as we create this dialogue. Kate, is that your real background?

It is.

You guys.

You guys are killing me on the background.

Are those vines?

Yeah, they're fake. Oh, no. What does that say about me? It's falsely alive or it's just convenient.

Yeah. When we put a whole bunch of plants in the Colonel office, we wanted to make it like a forest or an arboretum, but still, it's a gorgeous environment. It just took us some time to find the natural stable state for nature to coexist with the mechanical world.

Yeah. The ecosystem.

Yeah. It's amazing how much of a difference some plants will make, which you can obviously tell based on my background. Background.

Do you have plants in the house?

I do. Yeah. In the other room. Not here. I need to move them.

Do you. Do you maintain them?

Sort of. Not very well.

Does somebody in the family have the responsibility of taking care of the plants?

Yeah, I would say my wife does a much better job of taking care of the plants than I do. I. I wait until they wilt. And then I water them. She proactively waters them.

Signs of, like, leaving life.

Maybe that's like, because you were formerly an ER doctor, you're basically waiting for the plants to show up and be like, I'm in urgent need of some care.

Yeah. Unless you're dying, don't talk to me.

Right. And you just triage the plants. Which one needs attention?

If you're dying at a certain rate, like if, if death is imminent, I'll talk to you.

That sounds about right. That's, I, I, I like to think that I've, I've changed, hopefully.

I was going to say a little.

Bit more, a little bit more future focused these days.

I mean, entirely. No, you spend, I mean, basically all of your time on, on the frontiers of how to slow down speed of aging and reverse aging damage, pretty much.

Which is super fun. It's a way different experience than emergency medicine, that's for sure.

What is, what is that like, emotionally and intellectually to, like, if you just contrast a day in the ER with like a day in our life together.

Oh, wow. It couldn't be any more different, to be honest. You know, I mean, like, emergency medicine is just like banging your head against the wall all day long in the sense that, you know, you've got all of these issues in front of you that are secondary to a culture that doesn't value health. Right. And it's the, the side effect of that is people get super sick and then at the very end of life or at the end of their disease process, they come into the emergency department and they present to you like, hey, fix me. And you're, you're stuck with all of these problems that are all that, you know, ingrained in culture. And now my day to day is thinking, so future focused, like years down the road in terms of optimizing health rather than trying to reverse these terrible trends or focusing on health like your health or someone else's health 20 years from now. And yeah, it couldn't be any more different, which is, I think, why I enjoy it so much. The ER was tough. It was tough on me.

What do you think percentage of people that end up in the er? How much of it could have been prevented?

Oh, at least 90 plus percent. I mean, eventually, most of that disease would eventually happen, but for emergency medicine, maybe 90 is a little aggressive, maybe 80%, because a lot of it is acute, like trauma. You're driving down the road, you get a car wreck or you get appendicitis, you get gallbladder issues. Those are hard to prevent, right? Infections are hard to prevent. But the majority of what you see in medicine in general is chronic disease. Chronic disease is the most prominent issue in medicine these days. And so much of chronic disease is preventable. So quite a bit.

When I hurt my hand years ago, I was holding that 5 gallon glass container and it shattered a water jug and it shattered in my hands and it just lacerated my, both my hands. It severed the tendon on my left finger, my pointer finger. So I was trying to assess the damage and my hand was just filleted and I tried to close my hands and this finger wouldn't go down. I'm like, oh boy, this is a bad situation. And so when I went into the er, the nurse looked at me, she's like, oh yeah, we see like one of these situations a day. It's typically from the scooters or people. People come in, yeah. And she's like, just like. It's just like clockwork. And so now every time I see someone on the scooter rolling around, I'm like, please stop what you're doing right now, don't do this. And you know, she was saying like the day before they had this 17 year old girl, beautiful girl, and she just destroyed her face with this terrible scooter accident. So when I went in there, I was going to say on the er, I looked up in real time what the ER procedure was for the conditions of an injury like my hand and it laid it out in something like a 19 step process. So when you're in the ER, how much are you following on routine steps and how much are you following? Are you basically making the call?

Oh, that's a good question. There is a lot of routine in medicine. In traditional medicine there are standards of practice that is very much routine. So the art of medicine comes in the diagnosis. It's putting the person in the right seat for them to go on their Disney ride. Right. So there's lots of different Disney rides that are preplanned, that are pre organized and it's putting them on the appropriate seat. So once you make the diagnosis, so much of care is standard, so very much the majority of it. The challenge, not for a laceration of the hand, like your case is, that case Brian is like, that's easy. Like you, I can close my eyes and take you through that journey, no problem. The challenge is when someone presents with a very vague complaint that could be a thousand different things and trying to figure out which one of those things it is.

So that like I Have a headache.

Or something, or belly pain.

Yeah, yeah.

Or I feel weak and dizzy. Like these things can be produced by thousands of different ailments. And trying to figure out which ailment it is is the challenge.

Mike, I don't want to just, like, spend this time interviewing you, but I feel like people shop in the er. Yeah, great, let's go there. I feel like people like, what is the secret sauce? You show up in the er. How do you get shit done? Because I feel like most people show up in the er and if you've never done it before, it's a war zone. It's, you know, especially in America. Right. It's like, what are the.

What's the protocol you're saying is different than Australia?

I. Well, you know, it's been 10 years since I've lived in Australia, but Australia has a. I would say a better. Better medical system than America.

And you're saying specifically in the er.

My experience has been, yes, the ER here, it's bad. You show up and it's. It's like people are dying, you know, and they're not getting seen. That's how it feels. I don't know if that's actually true, but it's definitely. It feels really disastrous in there.

It is chaos. Yeah. And depending on which ER you go to, there's a variety of chaos, but it's generally chaos everywhere. I will say I haven't worked in Australia, but I did spend some time working in New Zealand in the emergency department there. And it was extremely different, mostly with the degree of providers, physician and nurses to patient ratio. It was much different. Whereas, you know, in. In the States, on a regular shift, doctors are seeing, you know, like 30 patients a day, whereas, you know, in New Zealand you'd see maybe 10. So, you know, 3x 3x the level of effort over the same timeframe. So it's just. It's chaos. There's, you know, you're not as much putting out fires as you are just trying to stop the speed of the burn. And then there are some fires where obviously you have to. Those fires require all of your attention. The severe traumas, the sick patients, people coming in, cardiac arrest, those are the ones that require all the focus. And then the people with the chronic illnesses that you're not really going to do much with, you just try to make sure they're not dying and then you send them off to go back and see their regular physician. So it's. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to describe, but it is it is chaos for sure.

So like Mike, if a loved one showed up in the er, what would you recommend to them? I just have this. My mom, my mom just had an eye issue and shut up in the er and it's like, what do you do? How do you advocate for yourself in the system when the system has its own procedures? Or what would you give a recommendation.

To people I like? My ER friends are going to kill me.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. We need them behind the scenes.

Yeah. I would tell them to, honestly I would, I would throw your complaints into an LLM and ask it what should be happening and then make sure that that happens for yourself. If I'm being totally honest, like this.

Feels like we should like blur Mike's face and be like, we just referenced a, an anonymous source who's an ER doctor at some prestigious university. You know, center doctors always talk about.

How much they hate it when their patients google their problems and then come to them with, with questions about their Google problems. But like that is such a, an active form of advocacy for yourself and it. And it's honestly so important in our system because our system is so broken. So if you're not asking the questions, you're just, you're going to be placed on that easy path and it's going to be the easy path for the physician, for the, for the nurse, for everyone in the system because they're getting destroyed. They're getting like absolutely murdered on a day to day basis. Chances are good that they're burnout. And if you're not advocating for yourself, you put yourself in a challenging situation.

Yeah. And I feel like that stigma around googling things is valid because we have this like cognitive bias toward catastrophe. And so when we research something and it has the possibility of cancer, we like go down that path as opposed to. I feel like chatgpt when I've interacted with it from a health care like position, it actually gives me really reasonable advice. It's like, well if you want to, it's probably these things in the really rare cases, these things. It's much more of a. Feels more informed than obviously just Googling something.

Yeah. I think the challenge is it's going to give you good advice based on how good you are giving it information. Right. So the quality of which, like if you're giving it like, I feel like, because I know the right questions to ask, If I give ChatGPT all of the symptoms that somebody is presenting with and all of the positive negatives and all those things, it's going to give Me great responses. I don't know if that's true for someone who doesn't understand physiology or medicine quite as well. Are you going to get as quality of responses? I can't say that that's true or not, but we do know that, you know, ChatGPT, for example, has performed better than physicians now on standardized tests. So in situations where things are quote unquote standard, we would expect it to do well. Life is rarely standard, but yeah, yeah, interesting world.

Yeah. What I ended up doing with my mum was I had her on the phone and I had Chachi Pati up and I said, like, treat me like a patient and do an intake with me, like here, ask me my symptoms. And I just went back and forth and so on the phone with her, I was just asking probably 100 questions and eventually it came back with like, here's what I would do, here are the exams I would do. And then she went off on her way on her Disneyland ride.

And Kate, did you get resolution to that?

Yeah. So she didn't get seen in the ER by an ophthalmologist and so she went then to an optometrist and got exams and yeah, ChatGPT essentially correctly diagnosed that it was some sort of inflammation of the eye scratching of the cornea. She's now on, I think, steroid drop eye drops to resolve it. So. Yeah. All right, so we have a topic of the week. I don't know if you guys got to check out the study. It was essentially suggesting that creatine might not be as beneficial as what we thought it might be. So let me, let me read you a little summary. So this study found that taking 5 grams of creatine daily, which is the standard dose, did not lead to more muscle gain than training without it. Over 12 weeks, both groups with and without creatine gained the same amount of lean muscle, 2 kg. And any early weight gain from creatine likely came from water retention and not real muscle. So what does this mean for the gym bros out there that have been taking creatine for 10 years?

I think it's a broader group of people than gym bros taking creatine. I think creatine is one of the most commonly taken supplements across society.

Maybe the most.

Yeah, maybe.

Wow.

I mean, it's not just for muscle but for cognitive benefits. It has a very broad appeal.

Yeah. And this study was just looking at muscle, I believe, right?

Yeah.

It was only measuring that.

Yeah. So.

So what do you guys think?

It's interesting. What, what I'll tell You is, I think the most interesting about this study is they, they actually tested the washing period, which is what they call it. So if you're familiar with creatine, like the, the classic gym style, like Jim Bro style, to use it is to do this like 20 grams ramp up for like five or seven days. Right. And during that timeframe you, you basically like saturate the muscles with creatine. And why that's important is because when you, when you increase creatine in your body, you increase the amount of fluid in your body as well. So what this study tried to do was account for that by measuring the lean muscle mass or the lean body mass at zero days and then seven days in. And they call that the wash in period. Right, because there's a change in those people who are on creatine because they're holding on to fluid. Right. And then after that is when they started their study and then they did a 12 week study where everybody did the same training plan and then one group did take creatine and one group did not take creatine. Um, so what's interesting is like they accounted for the extra water weight that you take on when you start creatine. Um, and the difference that that amounted to at least for this study as compared to other studies that have looked at muscle mass is they found no change in the creatine group as opposed to prior studies that found change. But the, the, the theory is they found change because they didn't include this wash in period, basically. Um, so that's, that's interesting in my mind. Um, a couple of caveats. They did a seven day washing period when it really takes longer than that. Like if you're not going to, if you're not going to do the 20 grams a day and you only do 5 grams a day, which is what this study did. It really takes three to four weeks to saturate the muscles. So they didn't really do a long enough wash in period in my opinion. Um, and then the other thing I'll say is that like the data that creatine actually increases muscle mass was never actually that good. Like there was always like the, the prior studies that we have are like very small changes in muscle mass. The data that's good for creatine is actually the things that Brian was mentioning, the longevity aspect, stuff like the, you know, cognitive function, the bone, muscle mass, metabolic health, that's the stuff. To me, honestly, that's really interest. And then from a performance standpoint, speed and power, those are the things that change, and those are mostly in already well trained athletes, not these untrained athletes that the study was in. So what did we learn from this study? We learned that people who are not particularly trained, who do a 12 week exercise program that was a valid exercise program, are not going to have significant differences in muscle mass whether they take creatine or don't take creatine. But we didn't learn anything about their cognitive function, we didn't learn anything about their recovery, we didn't learn anything about their power or strength output.

Okay, so when it's muscle mass specifically, it's still an unknown how it affects it, but there's plenty of potential upside elsewhere. Sounds like.

Yeah, and potentially like longer term you might see something. 12 weeks isn't a long time. You know, 12 weeks for training and is, is not much. So if you took more highly trained people that are performing at a higher level and you studied them with 5 grams of creatine or not, you might actually see a difference, especially if you watch them for a longer time period. 12 weeks is just not that long to perform a study.

Yeah, I always struggle with these things because so as someone who is really on the, the lighter side of science, it feels like every week a new study comes out that debunks what was previously known. And I, and it kind of paralyzes the average person because like I take creatine every day. Should I stop? Should I keep going? What does this mean? Headlines take it out of proportion. So yeah, what, what for those who are taking creatine or are not, what would you say? What would you recommend?

I wouldn't change a thing about your creatine intake based on the study, to be honest with you. I mean, creatine has, as Brian was mentioning earlier, like more data backing it than I think, almost any other supplement that we're aware of. And the data is overwhelmingly positive. There are certainly some studies that have shown no change, no benefit, but not studies that show harm. And there's a lot of studies that have shown benefit and not just one area, but multiple, multiple areas of life. So personally, like I read the study and it doesn't change a thing for me in terms of how often I'm going to suggest that people take creatine or take it myself. And this is a challenge. Like we live in a society where the negative is much more interested than the positive. So people like to publish headlines about common things that are accepted, that are no longer accurate. And whether you can actually believe those headlines or not is TBD until you get down into the research and really look at it.

Mike, how, how does someone know how much creatine to take a day? So some people, like for example in our longevity mix it's 2.5 grams a day. And then many people do much higher doses. Especially when you're trying, when you're trying to increase muscle mass, people will, you know, doing very intense resistance training, pro protocols. But how much should someone take and how can they measure the efficacy of the dosing protocol?

Hard to measure the efficacy of the dosing protocol but we do know, we know a lot about creatine supplementation and the different doses. And like if I were to just to give you a specific number for general overall health, I would probably actually do it weight based and I would say something like 0.1 grams per kilogram per day. So that means if you're 70 kilograms, which is the size of an, an average mal male, generally that would be about 7 grams a day. So what like, probably just like saying five or something like that is not really accurate because you know, women may not need quite as much because they're smaller. If you're larger, have larger lean muscle mass, you might need more. And it also depends a little bit on like what you're getting in your diet already. So if you're eating a standard American diet that's generally overall healthy, you're probably getting 1 to 2 grams a day already. So if you're getting that, you might only need 2.5 additional grams a day. But if you're a vegan, for example, and you don't get, you get very little red meat, then you're probably getting less creatine. And in that case you probably need a higher dose of daily creatine in order to saturate your muscles. Cuz the goal here is to saturate your muscles at least for performance benefit. So I would say if you had to, if I had to throw a number out there, I would say 5 grams a day seems adequate for the average sized human, um, given what the normal diet generally includes. And that's gonna get you to saturation, you don't need to do the, the loading phase where you're taking 20 grams a day. You can just start at five and just do it consistently and then over three to four weeks you'll, you'll get the load, the load will happen naturally on its own. Now if you're looking to take creatine for other reasons like cognitive performance, like for example, if you are trying to offset poor sleep, there's Some decent data to suggest that you improve cognitive performance, especially in high metabolic demand, like brain trauma or poor sleep, or if there's mild cognitive impairment, like if you're early dementia. Those studies, though, look at more like 10 to 20 grams of creatine a day. So much higher doses. And the. There is actually, there was one study that looked at total, like, what is the max dose of creatine you could take? And we have studied up to 30 grams a day in people for up to five years with no significant downsides. So as far as we can tell, you take extra creatine, you pee it out, out. It's not a big deal. Um, so it's not. It doesn't appear that, like, there is too high of a dose, as far as we can. As far as we can tell.

Okay. You began taking creatine yourself just when you started Blueprint? No.

Yeah, I did. I took 5 milligrams and then I. Micrograms. Grams. What is it? Grams?

Yeah.

Um, and then I switched to the longevity mix, which has 2.5. And so then I take an extra half scoop of protein separately to get my five. But maybe. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a right amount for me then, because I think my. My weight is around 57.

Yeah. So, Mike, in summary, if. If someone is approximating 5 grams a day for an average intake, is there anything they're looking for in blood work that would help inform them about any. About whether or not that dose is appropriate for them, whether they go up or down?

Not particularly. You could look at your creatinine, which will be a little bit falsely elevated. So creatinine is a measure of kidney function, and that will elevate with creatine supplementation. I wouldn't necessarily use it to tell whether you're at adequate dosing or not, because I think that it could be confounded by other things like hydration or kidney function. But you will likely see an increase in your creatinine if you start taking creatine.

Okay. Your. Your creatine protocol is going to do what, based upon this study and this response?

Absolutely nothing. That's what I've learned. Keep pushing forward. Actually, I was thinking, I wish we had, like, a travel advisory equivalent for health, because these studies come out, they go viral, they influence society, but there's not. It's not contributing to some sort of, like, updated information platform. So it's like you have travel advisory. You know, here's what's happening in the country. Here's what you should know before you Travel to Japan, same thing for creatine. Like go onto the website. It's like, okay, this new study came out, shouldn't really impact because of these reasons. Here's what you should know, you know, wouldn't that be cool?

That's true. You're right because they do, they hit and then it somehow sits in the background noise of our conscious, our health consciousness. And it's like I thought I remember something. Like it didn't really help on muscle. And so like why are you doing it?

Right?

It gets, it becomes shorthand and then it somehow becomes truth.

Yep, yep. It's like the latest thing to come out too is like, it has this bias toward that too, which is because.

It'S new, it's assumed to be better. Right. When in reality this was a study in 60 people, which is like so tiny.

It's such a small study. Yeah. After decades of research. Right. Brian, how much do you take?

5. 5 grams.

Okay. Are you gonna continue?

Yeah, 2.5 in longevity.

Are you gonna increase it based on your body weight?

No, I'm 70. I'm 77 kilograms.

I'm experimenting with 10. And then I've been playing around with like, with travel, increasing it because I naturally like where I live, I basically have to get up at like 3 o' clock in the morning to get catch a flight. So I always get less sleep. So on travel days I'm experimenting with higher doses of like 20 grams to see if it makes me feel more cognitively fresh.

Have you noticed it makes a difference?

Not yet, but I've only, I've only tried that twice now, so we'll see.

Just like general body awareness of status of your body, making sure you're aware of basically like a level of familiarity. I know after doing my own health protocol for the past couple years, I'm intensely body aware. I can feel my heart rate at any second. I can tell you how fast I slow. My heart rate is beating at any second with pretty good accuracy. And we get so many treatments that I've carefully inspected every part of my body. I know what to look for, color, tone, function. So it's been actually really cool. And it creates a nice contrast for me of how unbody aware I was before. You know, you just like kind of get up and do your thing and if you have a headache or don't feel great, you just kind of like carry, push through. But yeah, that's been really great that you really can, you can create intuitively really good sensors of your body. They're just by Pairing up, measurement and that, that emotion to see, like, see, like you get to feel what the measurement shows you, and you create these really fine intuitions.

Do you guys ever feel like, Kate, I don't know if you have had the same experience with body awareness since you started doing blueprint, but do you ever feel like there's a bad side of that as well? Like, so my wife and I were recently in Vegas and we were just like sort of looking around the casino and we weren't actually playing a casino. We were going to a show. I'm not a big casino guy, but we were going to a show and we were just, we had this conversation like, how are these people all upright? You know, like, everybody's drinking, everybody's smoking, everybody's eating like pizza and like corn dogs. And like, if I did that, I would literally be on the ground. I'd feel so bad. Like, it's like you, you, once you get healthy, you create this body awareness that now all of a sudden, like you, you. It's almost like you can't even allow yourself to mess up anymore. Right? But like, yet there are these humans who appear to be thriving. Like, they're walking around, they don't have chronic back pain. Like, they, they seem like they feel great when they're, they're just like putting, you know, trash into their bodies. It's sort of an interesting, it's an interesting situation that we put ourselves in, which obviously I wouldn't choose anything else, but. But it's unique.

Yeah, the body is incredibly adaptive. That's what that tells me is like we can push off big problems for a very long time and then they can come crashing down. It also reminds me, Brian, of the study at Colonel, where the inebriation study, where for a certain period of time your, your mind, your brain is able to make up for the deficit of cognitive function from alcohol until it can no longer. And that's how it feels like those people who are standing upright are making up for their body is working hard to make up for the deficit of health that is happening in that transaction. That's at least how is that.

Yeah, that study they did, they did no alcohol, see, like low, medium, and then high. And so what they found is that when someone is in the low medium state, you could behaviorally appear non intoxicated. Right. You could pass all the tests, but the brain scan showed that you were in fact impaired and the brain was just compensating for it. The brain pulled up and cured the deficit. But in the high intoxication scale that the brain could no longer have the compensation ability to do so. And so you saw impairment both in behavior and the scan. And so this cool. Like, that's why, of course, like, cognitive decline begins a long time before symptoms emerge. And you can, in fact, do early detection of cognitive decline because your brain has impairment. You just don't see it, like, in your daily life. Your body awareness doesn't capture the impairment. So that kind of granularity of measurements. That was cool to see that these brain scans can significantly improve your awareness of how your brain is doing just beyond your own perceptive behavior.

You're more drunk than you are aware. And so the analogy would be you're more deathly than you're aware in those moments in the casino.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, it reminds me. We went last night, we went out to a restaurant. The team was all together, and 25 of us or so went out to a restaurant. And I. I just so rarely do this, you know, And I was just shocked at watching how the. The food arrived at various tables across the restaurant. I mean, it was just. I was beside myself.

This is a health restaurant, too. This is one of the, like, known health restaurants in Venice in California.

And it's like, yeah, but I guess, like, knowing what I've learned about food and toxins and the way that food is passed through restaurant systems, I just. I mean, the team was kind of like, Brian. Yeah. Like, hey, welcome to, like, normal society. This is kind of what people do. And it's like, so. But yeah, I guess I really. We've built this system that's just so far outside of that that it was very shocking to me. It almost felt like I was traveling back in time and viewing, like, early 21st century. And, like, this is crazy. Watching a movie or something.

I got a question. How many years until we know whether or not Brian's. I know. We know that Brian's protocol is working in the moment, right? Like, his fitness and all this kind of stuff. But I imagine age is kind of like a cliff where you get to 70 or something like that, and things really start to deteriorate. Is there a point where when Brian hits that chronological age, we'll be like, this is for sure working?

That's a really good question. I think that point is different for just about everybody in terms of when you start falling off the cliff. That cliff is just at a different location for everyone, depending on their genetics and their lifestyle choices. I think what we're doing now, tracking Brian's biological age is probably the Best that we can do in terms of watching how fast is he continuing to age and how much are we, are we changing that. So both the, like the speed of aging and then his actual biological age, that's probably our best metric right now. And we're continuing to slow the speed of aging so down to like less than what, 0.5, which is pretty, pretty phenomenal. But you know, theoretically to at some point, to not die at some point we have to, we have to continue to slow that process. Right. So more still needs to happen in order to not have a cliff at some point in the future.

Okay. So on body awareness, what I loved seeing the other day was Andre Karpathy, AI, well known figure in AI, did his own N of one study at home, which it feels like everyone loves to shit on you, Brian for your N1. And it's so fun to see other people coming out and publishing their data and results. So I'm going to read you this. So over two months he tested four sleep trackers. So Aura, Whoop 8 Sleep and Apple. And what he found was Aura and Whoop were top tier. But what I was most interested in, I think this links back to the body awareness was he said, overall I say with absolute certainty that bas that Brian is basically right. And my sleep scores correlate strongly with the quality of work I'm able to do that day. When my sleep score is low, I lack agency, I lack courage, I lack creativity, I'm simply tired. When my sleep score is high, I can power through anything. On my best days, I can sit down and work through 14 hours and barely notice the passage of time. It's not subtle. The effects are not a function of a single day's sleep, but of the accumulated sleep depth across a duration of the last few days. So in other words, a single bad night's sleep is usually okay, but a few in a row is bad news and vice versa. Listen to Brian. I love that that's so accurate to how I've experienced sleep too. And that's like the weird thing is if you're constantly getting bad night's sleep, occasionally you can't detangle. What does it feel like to have this accumulative good night's sleep? So yeah, I just thought that was really cool.

It really speaks to the value of measurement, right? Like, and the, the associations that we can start to create in our life once we start actually measuring things. And I think that goes beyond sleep as well. Like, you know, once you start measuring things, you start having this sense of your body, like Brian was talking about earlier. And without that objective measure, it's hard to understand what all those subjective signals mean. And once you can put those two things together, now you're creating the knowledge and the wisdom to make the right decisions for your own health.

Totally. I always say to people, just start measuring. Because as soon as you know your data every morning, even if you do no interventions, it starts to build that relationship of like, oh, I noticed this today. What's my data say? I noticed this today. And then once you've got that down pat, you can start doing interventions. But yeah, Brian made me think like, you should challenge Andre to beat your eight month sleep score.

The thing I absolutely loved this write up first. I mean, Andre is one of the most formidable intellects of our time. He's a founding member of OpenAI. He's a director of AI at Tesla's program for Autonomous Driving. He has been on the forefront of the AI revolution. And this is the contemplation that I had after selling Braintree. Venmo was we are at this incredibly interesting moment in this part of the galaxy of we're evolving into a new species. And so my observation was that the most important thing we could do would be improving our own intelligence to see this moment for what it is and act wisely, not foolishly, but have wisdom beyond our capacity. And so my effort was primarily, it was first around kernel, which is if we can measure the brain and reveal the invisible things that happen in the brain and then pair that with AI, that would give us a vector to begin improving our intelligence at speeds which we otherwise can't. And not just intelligence in terms of iq, but all dimensions of intelligence. What if you actually could pair your mind with AI as you're working on emotional development, or on correcting your blind spots, or in trying to have a more well rounded thought process, or not be sucked into these very narrow worldviews that get you in this travel mindset. So what I was really trying to do is say, we need to augment ourselves. And so what Andre is doing is Andre is building the future of intelligence in the form of AI. And in doing this study, he's actually building his own intelligence. And that's what he's saying is like, hey, I did this experiment with sleep, I see a substantial improvement in my intelligence along the realms of creativity, right. And the elements he talked about. So to me, that was like the best representation, it's the best outcome I could ever ask for, which is an architect of superintelligence. Is leaning into what we're saying is it makes sense on all dimensions to invest in your own intellect and trying to acquire abilities beyond your natural states by taking care of yourself. So, yeah, it was so fulfilling when, like, we. Man, we just take so much shit every day, all day. And so to have someone credible like him come out and say, you know what? Sleep works. It dramatically improves my life. You can measure it. You can actually create life systems for it. It's just like, man, what an absolute joy to read that. So I appreciate him doing that. I appreciate his kind words. It's just like, such a great moment, like, such a good reward for the efforts we do every day of, like, you guys, let's stop doing stupid stuff. Let's not eat junk food. Let's not drink alcohol. Let's not go to bed late. Let's prioritize sleep. Let's, like, you know, let's exercise. Let's measure ourselves. So, yeah, I was. I was really excited about that.

That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's a good place to wrap up. How do you feel? How do we do you guys?

Yeah, I mean, do you think people are actually going to enjoy this?

I don't know. Okay, well, if you're still listening, put in the comments below. Like, did this work? What do you wish we did differently?

Yeah, let us know.

I'm excited. I. I think it's a cool format to be able to talk about what's happening this week, but.

Yeah, so if you listen to the podcast and you enjoyed it, let us know. We had, like, I think six or seven more topics. We didn't even get to today that we had outlined that we had some stuff about some embryo selection technology that is. Is currently in market, and a bunch of this stuff. Mike, what were your take? How was today?

That was great. I had fun. That's how I measure the quality of a podcast, is whether it was fun or not. So it's a good time. Hopefully people enjoy it.

All right, thanks, you guys.

It.