The 2026 Immortality Protocol - Bryan Johnson (4K)

Sorry to report I have a new boner record. 3 hours, 49 minutes. The Fellowship of the Ring is 3 hours, 48 minutes. Is that a good thing?

I mean, I guess. From whose perspective?

Pick. Yeah, your perspective. Is it good for you?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's substantially better than an elite 18 year old.

What would an elite boner. 18 year old be?

Around 2 hours and 45 minutes. Ish.

What refers to elite? Like vasodilation?

Like, yeah, like take an 18 year old in peak condition.

Okay.

And let's say what would their nighttime erections be? They probably hover somewhere around like high two, nearly three hours. That'd be elite level. And so it just crushes that level. So. Yeah, I mean, from a, like a pure biological capacity. Yeah, it's pretty. It's pretty good. Okay.

What were you doing with it? 3 hours, 49 minutes.

So this is, it's kind of like, it's news to people as I've been sharing this, that, I mean, people, Men are generally familiar with the idea that when you are 12, 13, 14, you start having boners and they happen a lot, you know, like in class. You don't even ask for it.

Gust of wind.

Yeah. Literally anything. And you can't do anything about it. Like, do you mean, do you remember, like I would walk in between classes. Classes. And it's like, you got a bone.

Where's it going to go?

Where's it going to go?

Tuck it into the waistband, fold it, pull it up.

Exactly. Put a little book cover in front of it. But like, you can't control it, you can't really stop it. And then as you age, those things just naturally go down. So people kind of forget about it as a phenomena. But men and women have arousal cycles every night. Three to five erections every night. Men get erect, women have their clitoris engorged. And so it's this natural process. The body says, like, I want to keep my sexual function alive and vibrant and it pulses it every night. And so it depends upon your quality of sleep, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your physiological health and your hormone health. And so if those things are not in place, it doesn't happen. And so if someone's bragging about four hours of sleep at night and like, they feel fine, they're doing great, they have no boners. And so this might have survived with.

The sleep, but your erection wasn't there.

This is why I started talking about these things. We were like measuring a whole bunch of stuff. But I was really right now, sleep deprivation is high Status, Right. If you can basically flex and say, I only sleep four hours a night. I'm amazing. I work 18 hours a day. People like, oh, my God, what an amazing person. We admire you so much. And so it has this really weird high status. So this frame of the boners makes sleep deprivation low status. Right. It's like, sure, you can brag about that thing, but also you. Your body has shut down its sexual function and you can no longer get boners. And so it's really like, that was one angle. The other one is like, the erections really are a. One of the most representative biomarkers of overall health, that you can have big muscles and you can have great skin, but if your boners are not there, then you know it's not. Your body's not in good shape.

He's saying that nighttime erections are like the weathervane or the canary in the coal mine. That's an aggregate of a ton of other shit that's going on.

Exactly.

Right. Yeah.

It basically is a representative. Representative marker, and you can't do anything about it. Like, you can't. You can't go to the gym and, like, work out your boners, right? Like, you can't pump iron. You go to sleep. It either happens or it doesn't. You have no control over it. So it's this really great marker.

What you mean is you have no control over making it happen at the time, but you do have control over your health, which is going to be indicative of whether or not that does happen in future. Because you could go to the gym and do a ton of Zone 2, which I imagine improves cardiovascular health, and then might get some more boners.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. But otherwise, when you lay down and you close your eyes, it's just like you say a prayer. It's like, I hope they happen.

You can think of Lord of Rings all of you want, but it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

I mean, like, the company that does this, that makes this device, they've got a 20,000 nights data set. And my scores just like, trounce everybody in the dataset.

Okay.

And so we've worked very hard.

Is that the thing you're most proud of?

You know, it really is. I know. It's like a. In our society, people hear that and they blush. Like, oh, my God, that's so, you know, like, why are you talking about that? But like, it's like a biological function. Everybody has them. Like, we as a species, our primary biological objective is to reproduce it's like it's on point with what our DNA is meant to do. And it also is like the most counterculture thing you can be doing because we have this culture that has high status relative to sleep deprivation and having a shitty lifestyle. Drinking a lot, doing addictive things, nicotine vaping. So it really is like counter to all those things. Trying to say those are actually low status. This is high status. Let's try to change the moral narrative on what do you aspire to and what really is a flex.

Great point. It's a weird trades like that. I think most people understand if you're smoking particularly cigarettes, if you're drinking very regularly, if you are overweight. These are. There are visual markers right now that also suggests you're probably going to be pretty fucked down the line. Yeah. Sleep deprivation is one of these weird inversions of that where you're rewarded for the sleep deprivation in the moment and the costs are pushed further down the line. I guess it would be like birth rate decline. Like you don't see it because the population can be getting bigger even while the birth rate is getting smaller because people live longer. And then this thing drops off a cliff. Or climate change. You can continue to do it and continue to do it and continue to do it until you reach some point where you can no longer handle it.

It's like going bankrupt gradually and then subtly suddenly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're right to call out the fact that there's this sort of pedestalization of it. I think about especially watching you, who is now the tip of the spear of sort of. You're the canonical example in basically no time at all. You know, it would have been back in the day like a Ben Greenfield and then it would have been a Tier or a Huberman. And I guess these guys all have their own pockets. Right? Your like hard longevity now moving into culture with like limited balance on. I'm just doing what it takes to be as healthy as possible.

Yeah.

Anyway, everyone's got their own little pockets. You've become the canonical example. What I've seen is this sort of the spiral is getting tighter and tighter and tighter of movement. Counter movement, counter, counter movement, counter, counter, counter.

Yeah.

So we don't know that sleep's important. Matthew Walker comes out and says, should watch how much you sleep. That was the first time I ever learned about it. Right. And I think we'd be right to say he was close to this sort of front modern push of that. Then that lasts for a good while and we get back to, well, you know, like the hustle and grind culture can come back in and take over and then you get back to, no, this is really, really, really fucking important. And it'll improve your performance right now and now we've already gone back to like the next iteration of the hustle and grind culture, which is much more of a pushback against over optimization. So there was. This is important.

Fuck off.

No, it's not hustle and grind. You will perform better if you do sleep well. And also you should consider your sleep, which is an elevated version of the first one. Fuck off. You're over optimizing. We can just do it ourselves. Do you know what I mean? It's like this ping pong that, it gets tighter and tighter and tighter.

Yeah. And it's like also, I mean, I'm waging memetic warfare, right? And so like this is the classical thing that has always been done throughout history is you take a given moral value in society, if you don't like that, that thing has power, you invert it, right? So this is like Christianity would say the meek inherit the earth, right? So this is like a counter to the rich and powerful have the ability to push everyone around and do as they please. And so you can't really combat that. So if you can't compete on strength, you compete on virtue. So you invert that, right? And so this has been done through religions, it's been done through all kinds of cultural norms. And so this is, I'm trying to basically do the same thing to death culture. And so death culture is, you know, we, power, wealth and status are the primary objectives of our society. We will do anything for power, wealth and status, including killing ourselves and killing yourself for power. Wealth and status is actually a virtue, right? Like you're, you're a hero, you're on the hero's journey if you do this thing. And so to combat that, you have to take that which is high status and make it low status. And so the way you punch away at that is you, you do the, the thing where it's like if you get four hours of sleep a night, you have no boners, right? If you don't have a boner, are you a man? Right? And the same thing is true for, for women, you know, like same cycle. Then you can also say, you know, if you're not well rested, if you don't have good nourishment, if you're not exercising, you have functional IQ 10 to.

12 points lower, near full standard deviation.

So it's actually making you dumb. Right? And like what, what do people care about more in that high status place than their intellect? Right. Their ability to actually maybe only after.

That would be their erections.

Yeah, exactly. I mean like there's, it's so primal. It's like how smart am I and like how sexually formidable am I as a person? Right. Like that's who we are as these animals. And so I'm trying to take those high status things, bump them down to low status and invert the arc. Otherwise when you make these like.

Good.

Natured, like sleep because it's good for you, no one gives a. You have to hit the heart of power because unless you pick to speak to power wolves and Status directly, nobody's going to change anything because they're locked in on the goal they've been taught to pursue, which is like, I care about my status and the tribe, I don't want to be ostracized. I want a high status, I want high respect, I want high power as much as I can get.

Which is it? Talk to me about power, wealth and status. Is there a hierarchy to you? Is there one which is more seductive than the rest? Is there a sequence that people seem to move through on their evolution to wipe themselves, rid themselves of the slime?

Yeah, I mean you can just jump in between groups and just see it so cleanly. Like for example, I spent some time in D.C. recently. They're not after wealth. I mean you can get wealthy being in dc, but that's not the primary objective. You're really after connections and power and status from that community. Whereas in Silicon Valley it's really about wealth creation.

Right.

Like that's like the ultimate objective. And so different communities have different levers. I'm impartial to whatever they are. Like ultimately people are trying to, people playing this game are trying to superimpose their view on the world. Right. They're trying to muscle in and reorganize the world to somehow be trained by their mental models of existence. And whether that's done through a product or their philosophy or their presence or their personality, but everyone's trying to wrestle their mimetic essence onto the world.

What do you make of the Harvard Longevity Study? I'm sure that you've become familiar with this, the world's longest running study on adult life and happiness. And it does have some sort of longevity life span, health span predictions in there. Given that that's been going already for such a long time and has had a huge data set. Right. I think it's like 80,000, maybe even more.

Yeah.

What's your perspective on that, given what you're interested in?

I mean, there's probably some truisms on, like humans respond favorably to having robust relationships. Like, that's true long ago, it's true now. Humans respond favorably to exercise. There's a lot of truisms. Like, we know this shit's really the case. But I think it's like, what may be interesting about this is that is a good retrospective study. I'm not sure all of it's going to carry over into the future. So in the coming years, if we figure out some of these new therapies to rejuvenate ourselves in ways we couldn't before, it may be an entirely different environment in which we look at long lived species. And it may be less about those things and more about other things. Now, this is not to say that relationships are going away. It's not to say the fundamentals of being active are going away. But I do think we're at a moment in time where if you have that study going on and we were talking in the 1960s, we'd be like, yep, good data, let's carry on. But being in 2025, where AI is now starting to make novel discoveries, I think the landscape is going to be very different.

What are the specific differences that are going to have the most lever behind them?

I mean, there's an open question, like, what is AI in our lives? Like, is AI a relationship or not? Do we have human relationships? Like, what are the contours of those things? What do longevity therapies do for us if we start playing around with gene therapies? What does that also? I mean, for example, you look at ozempic like these GLP1s, you put a, you take a shot, it alters your experience with hunger. Like it changes a fundamental part of being human. And so if we have the ability to change something so like fundamental to our essence, it and we get really good at drug design, like, what else are we gonna change? So I'm talking about this on like a 10, 15, 20 year timescale. This is not like next two or three years, but still like we are in this open frontier where there may maybe some things that continue as universalisms, that just as a biological species, they're true also. It's like a radical change. And I'm more interested in like what is gonna be different than what has been.

Mm, yeah. Morgan Housel's book, Same as Ever, is an interesting one that people try to predict the future, but what is easier is to work out the stuff that's not going to change moving forward because the future is as yet undetermined. But working out what from the past can be predictive. It's quite nice. There is this sense, right? Everybody's had this sense that our generation, we are the one. It's the inflection point, it's the precipice. It's right now. It's always right now. Because it always does feel like that.

Right.

If you look at a hockey curve, that graph at each point, it was the highest, most rapidly ascending, biggest, quickest moving point ever. And then you just pull it along a little bit and then it zooms out and you go, oh, that was nothing. But now. Now. And then you zoom out and you go. And you go, but now.

Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. Like, we. I've read. I just finished 1929, about the stock market crash, also Tripping on Utopia and. And also History of Western Thought. I finished those three books last week. And, like, the theme that comes through is that humans replay the same actual play every generation. It's the same cast of characters, it's the same archetypes, it's the same arguments, and they just roll through different ideological spaces, but it's the same dynamics. And so we experience this moment, like you're saying, like, we think it's novel and unique and we imagine where it's something that's pivotal, but really, like, it's just the same thing. It's really very humbling because then it goes back to, like, how much of your lived experience is NPC and how much of it is truly novel. And I have to concede, probably 99% of my lived experience as NPC, I probably have one shot at a novel thought, or it just. It's just the state of play. And it's very hard to get outside of that. But once you realize that it's some way, it's somehow relieving that that's the case, but also challenging. Cause you have to figure out, like, how do I pull myself out and try to find moments of sobriety to see what this moment is.

Yeah. Again, speaking of the Christian piece, the Meek, the sort of humility. You're less special than you think you are. It's grounding in that way. I don't think British people need more of that. Maybe Americans do. We're already going.

God, I love the Brits. I love how. I love how ornery they are and brutally honest and acrimonious and I find sanguine. I Do I find those personality traits to be so charming?

Well, I think everybody misses what they don't have. Right. Americans would probably quite like a little bit more piss taking and being brought back down to earth. And British people want a little bit more enthusiasm and encouragement.

Yeah.

And that's why I came over here. Oh, my God. It's like being, you know, taking a drink and not knowing I was thirsty. I was so nourished by this. And then for you it's. I've always wanted someone to tell me I'm a prick. Like, you know, finally these people will say it to me straight. Yeah. I'm interested, you know, sort of relating to the Harvard longevity thing. From the outside, a lot of what you're focused on seems to be kind of the raw physiological. But there's a huge emotional piece to longevity, regardless of how much AI is going to change things.

Yeah.

And some of that will manifest in like sympathetic stress, chronic stress, blood pressure, sleep, blah, blah, blah. More than that as well is what is your moment to moment experience of life like too. So I'm interested in how you are thinking about the emotional and spiritual piece of longevity and health when you've got all of this focus on the physical piece. So are you, Are you. And how are you looking at those two elements? Do you even conceive of them within your map framework?

Yeah, I mean, first, I don't really feel emotions, so no joking. I mean, people that. So the. That's a very common perspective. What people don't realize is that the entirety of my endeavor is, is about AI and how we as a human race survive this moment, like full stop. That is the only reason I'm doing this.

Was it like that when you first started?

Yes.

Really? So you saw the writing on the wall with regards to AI before normies.

Like me did in 2016. I gave this talk and I was like, look, if we look at this graph, very clear, it's up and to the right and it's big.

What was the graph?

AI.

Right.

Whatever it is, it's going to be big. And so I didn't care to get into the prediction game of what it. When it's going to arrive and what it's going to be and all that. Just that this is a moment and I was trying to poke around, like, given this, it really does feel like this is like very much like a feel, intuition. It feels big and it feels consequential and it feels like we probably want to be sober to get this thing right. And so what I've been trying to do more than anything is to say we need a new moral philosophy that enables us to survive this moment. That basically the philosophy we have now that drives everything is one built on death. We are inherently a die species. We seek death for the glory of immortality through our various games. And the new moral philosophy I'm trying to create is don't die. That is like when you give birth to superintelligence, existence itself is the highest virtue. And so the back to this book of the history of western thought. Plato, Aristotle, medieval Christianity, medieval times, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern day scientific era, like big chunks of time for these big ideologies. We're due for a brand new moral philosophy and it will be induced by AI. And so the opening is right now. And it's not just like some small tweak, it's a really big opening. And that's what I'm really angling for. And so health is a vector to basically talk about it, to say like here's how you understand philosophy through these very practical actions. But that's really what I'm trying to do. And so above all it's a Health is a language to communicate a new moral philosophy on what we do as a species in this moment before we continue.

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Does that mean. Yeah, it means that we are going to struggle to keep up and it's going to be so unnerving to us that things might get chaotic and psychotic and it might just like have the bottom drop out. Like for example, when I was reading this book, 1929, about the stock market crash, the. The focus was financial gain, you know, invest in the stock market, get credit to invest more, like lever yourself up. And then when that burst, it created all kinds of destruction in the economy. And we took us a long time to recover from that. I think the equivalent right now would be hope that you have hope for the future, right? Like you have imaginations of what you want to be, become what you want to achieve. Everyone has that. And as society progresses, when AI starts doing various things, it's not that they're bad, it's just that change happens and that creates uncertainty for humans. Like, what am I going to do? Who am I? What's my identity? How do I feel secure? All these basic questions. If we can't answer those as fast as people feel insecure about it, then you kind of teeter on the psychosis where like, can you keep your shit together? And so people focus a lot on AI. Like is AI a threat? Should we posit like all these different questions? There's an equal and opposite concern of what happens to human society when all this change is happening so quickly and we can't respond fast enough. Like, is is humanity? Is, is the Bottom falling out. The real risk of, you know, then humans do human stuff, right?

Like we, what's the bottom falling out in this scenario?

It's the sturdiness of law and order, of hope that I, I, my, my son, you know, my 20 year old son, he can go to school, he can get a degree, he can get a job, he can make money, he can find his own apartment, he can get married, you know, if he wants to have kids. Like the natural life progression, if he can't quite see that structure anymore, who is he? Or you take like my dad, who's like now his early 70s, he's on the other side, he's in the legal profession. The tools are getting so good. Like he just can't hang. Like it's hard for him to hang and he's like, what do I do? Like I'm now out of the game and I don't feel any worse. Like I don't have any identities. He's really, really struggling. And so you take any person at any stage in their life, you've got really serious existential challenges now. This is not guaranteed. It's just as like a thought experiment of like what could happen. And so what don't die could be is like this, this sturdiness beneath us to say it's okay. Like our identities are not tied up in our profession, they're not tied up on our status in the community. It's like actually tied up by this, this virtue of existence that we're going to fight this new game as a species that don't die. And so it's trying to create sturdiness of identity, sturdiness of community, sturdiness of like, we've got this, we have a purpose, we have a mission, we're here for a reason.

If the mission of being alive is simply mortality, does that not drop down much of the complexity that people find beauty in? It's like simply being alive. Like there's two parts to this that I see in my mind. One is one which is very whole. It's about enoughness, it's about being okay as you are. Um, but that's not how humans are wired. You know, this. Yeah, like power, status, money. Like we are going to try. And even if it's just I play pickleball on a week weekend with my friends, I want to become better at pickleball next week. If I'm not better at pickleball, there is this sense of lack that comes through. Yeah. But on one side there is sort of enoughness. But when you get down to a more sort of raw, objective ledger. Like your job is to be alive tomorrow. Yeah, it's like fucking hell. Really?

Yeah.

Like maybe if we were in a time of war or there was a lot of pressure or there's a pandemic, like, oh, that'll imbue me because I'm. There's resistance. But like, really, like the, the peak of my contribution is to not expire by tomorrow permanently, until, you know, it does happen. Do you understand what I mean? How inspiring is that?

As a vision versus, I mean, so to make a parallel example, think of capitalism as an objective function. So you say making money is your goal, right? When you wake up, that's what you do. And now you see the entire world is engaged in that goal in some capacity. Everyone don't die is a similar game where you say, our goal as a species is to end death. Not just for ourselves, for us collectively and the planet. And so you're basically taking on the biggest challenge you could ever take on in this part of the universe. You're trying to solve for entropy. Like, let's just like list out a few things we could work on. Like, how would you go about building a global biological immune system? So let's say we say a pandemic like Covid is not good for us. Like, we don't want those anymore. We don't want the plague. We don't want somebody in a lab, you know, cooking up smallpox again. Great. So how could we build out a global biological immune system where we have sensors around the world where it automatically detects any kind of pathogen that is threatening to our life? That's a pretty cool scientific project. Now let's say we care about the oceans and the ocean health and the coral reef is burning up right now. That's bad for an environment. How do we stop that from happening and rebuild coral reef? And so you just start like ticking down the projects of how could you as a species solve for entropy? Like, solve for death? The list is endless. Like, it's like you have more to do than you ever could in capitalism. It's a bigger game than capitalism.

Can you flex it in the same way?

Sure. I mean, you have the same rules, right? Like, anyone who does something has high status in the community. Like, if I'm sol, if I'm making a contribution, like, for example, I started to. Again, my entire game is to make death related things that are high status, make them low status. Right? That's my whole thing. And so in this case, you could start scoring Companies that do something that actually kill you. Right. So that could be scrolling endless scroll, inducing you to endless scroll. It could be alcohol, it could be vaping, it could be porn, it could be toxins, like all those things. Companies that introduce that into the world, you would quantify it and they would get a die score. Any fast food company represents death, Right. They are actively introducing molecules into people's body that induce death versus more healthy ingredients. So like that's an example where you start assigning a quantitative measure on what an entity, individual or company is doing into society.

Like a carbon offset, but for longevity.

Exactly. But defined at this really granular fashion. And you, you tie because right now, if you make money and you dirty the world, doesn't matter. Right. If you, if you make money and you poison people, doesn't matter. In fact, you're kind of a hero. So like to tie social status with your actual effect on life or death for the species.

What have been the biggest changes in your approach or beliefs about health and longevity over the last few years? We, we, you came on the show maybe three years ago and then we got to hang out in Roatan a couple of years ago. But lots of research, lots of experimentation, self experimentation. What have been the biggest pivots?

Yeah, I'd say one is do less. Most things in health and wellness and longevity don't work. And so people spend a lot of time doing stuff. And I would say save your time and money and don't do a lot of stuff. Do a few number, do a few things. And then two is the biggest yield is typically doing behavioral change. So like if a person has, everybody has their thing. Let's say somebody's thing is like they, they love Skittles and they just, you know, can't help themselves to have a bag late at night, then that's the biggest longevity therapy for that person is to stop eating the bag of Skittles. And so what a person will typically do is like if they have that, if they're locked in on that battle, they will, to compensate for that, they'll go to a gym, they'll go get red light therapy, they'll do a cold plunge, they'll do all this stuff that isn't the thing. But yeah, it's basically to compensate for the fact that they feel so powerless to stop the skittles thing that they'll rather do those. So most people are doing that compensation even though those things are good. They're not the higher yield thing. The higher yield thing is to stop the bad Behavior. But that's the thing that most people feel very hard. And what they don't realize in doing that is like the reason why that's hard is because they're not sleeping. Not sleeping well just destroys your willpower. And they're not sleeping well because five other preceding things are the case. So I try to help people understand, like here's a five step process to nail your sleep. When you nail your sleep, your willpower boosts. When your willpower boosts, you can tackle skittles. That's your therapy.

Okay, so it's sleep numero uno by far. Okay, give me after all of the experimentation, what's the 30,000 foot view on how to get perfect sleep?

You, you want to lower your resting heart rate before bed. It's the highest value biomarker you can track on a daily basis. So you'll find that everything that increases your heart rate before bed, besides sex, is bad for you. And everything that lowers your heart rate before bed is good for you. And so for example, food, timing of food is really important. So if your bedtime's at 10pm, you want to have your final meal of the day at 6pm so four hours, I personally do like 10 to 12 hours because I really like that digestion time. It lowers my heart rate to like 39 to 40 beats per minute. So food four hours before, 60 minutes before bed. Screens off. So that's very hard because we're all addicted to our phones. But hard cut phones off because you want to avoid scrolling, texting, working and that's very arousing for the body. Red light, amber light in the house. So whites, blue lights are really bad for melatonin release. You want to have a, like a 60 minute wind down. So when screens are off, you want to use that 60 minutes to just calm yourself down. So this is very hard because people have, we've created these habits where we're glued to our phones and if we're not on our phones, we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so it creates this panic. So the 60 minute time window before bed is really precious in that you, you just need to kind of be with yourself now. You can hang out with a friend, a family member, you can go for a walk, you can do breathwork, meditation, a hobby, like puzzle, journal, like whatever. But you just need to learn how to be with yourself without stimulation and that will naturally allow you to calm yourself down. I do this process where I talk to myself. So like I talk to my various Brian's. So Like Sleep Brian comes on duty at 7:30pm Cause my bedtime's at 8:30pm and then all the Brian's line up and they want to talk to me.

How many are there?

Oh man, there's like probably a dozen, like probably loud.

It's like a Bonnie Blue meetup. Okay, yeah.

So the first one's Ambitious Brian. Ambitious Brian is by far the loudest, right. He's always like, he shows up and he's like, do more. I got a banger idea, brand new idea, it's fucking amazing. And Sleep Brian says, I love you, Ambitious Brian. Right? Doing us a real solid, like doing great out there. Also we're in sleep mode. So I'm going to write down your idea and tomorrow we'll talk about this. And the next one is Anxious Brian. He's like doing all the checks. Like today, did you make any big errors? Did you like, you know, do anything, upset anyone, do anything stupid, anything, say anything you regret? And so like doing that internal reconciliation of like, do you have good self awareness? And they all just line up. But if you don't talk to them, then when your head hits a pillow, they show up and they're like, we're here and we want to talk about our stuff. And then you go to bed. Finally you wake up at 2am and they're like, we're back. And so you've gotta have some kind of reconciliation process to calm those voices. So like those are the big ones, like food, light, wind down routine, screens off that. Yeah, like, and then caffeine. So you want to have your final caffeine around noon each day. So it has a six hour half life. Those are the real big ones. So but what you want is like for a man you want to be like 50 ish heart rate. Same with the same with the female. If you're in that zone, you're doing pretty well. If you can bump down a bit more and once you get that nighttime routine knocked down, then you can start exercising very well. If you sleep really well, your willpower skyrockets. If you sleep poorly, it knocks your prefrontal cortex offline. You can't really have much willpower. So that's number one.

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Yeah, people try to. They come with that argument. That's great. Like, the body loves routine. Now, it does not mean that you have to always be in a routine, but the body is built for routine. So for example, if Your bedtime is 10pm, your circadian rhythm is locked in to 10pm and your body expects sleep to happen at 10pm this is what jet lag is. Yes, exactly. And so like you have a garbage truck that rolls through your body at around 10:30pm and it's there to pick up all the trash.

What is that?

It's your, your basically your cleansing system of like your, your glymphatic system is cleaning all the trash from your body. And if you're not asleep at 10:30pm and in your deep sleep mode, it's going to not come. So you've got trash buildup like New York. You've got the trash bags all over the place. And so people think, if I'm not in bed by 10, I'm going to go to bed at 1. That's okay, I'll sleep in tomorrow morning. Make up. It doesn't work that way. And so the body has very specific rhythms that it wants to be on. And so when you lock in, it's good. And so when someone makes the argument, like, I'm going to give my body some hormetic stress, right? I'm like, push it to one and then it move back. The body hates it. Like, inconsistent sleep is as bad as little sleep.

I was going to say, do you. When it comes to prioritization, is duration more important than regularity or are they.

Equal regularity by far is the best one. Yeah.

More than duration.

Oh, so I'm sorry, you said duration. I don't know, I'm not sure on that one.

It's kind of like picking your favorite child.

Yeah, yeah. Because you kind of need both. Yeah. Like the, the lesson here is because these are bad habits people have. You need to be on time, you can't make it up, you can't skip during the week and then make it up on the weekend. It doesn't work that way. So you miss a garbage truck every day, it doesn't come back. Like, sure, maybe in the weekend. But then you're so, you're so off on your circadian rhythm that like now is the garbage truck even in service?

Okay, so I understand what you mean with regards to the timing, but the 60 minute window, what if you don't get it? What if this, you're out at dinner, you're doing something with friends, you're hanging out, you don't get to. You're around some bright light. I've got a great story from a friend when he was in his hyper, hyper optimizer zone, which everybody goes through, where it's like the stress of trying to be perfect kills you more quickly than your imperfections do. And he had this 60 minute wind down routine, which was blue light blockers on and the mouth tape and the nose strip and the magnesium biglycinate and everything else. And he'd been sort of winding down for 60 minutes and his girlfriend at the time had been downstairs and he was brushing his teeth in the dark so that he wouldn't have any light on. And she just comes like tinkering in, hits the light in the bathroom, the lights come on, he's like, ah, he's blinded. He hasn't looked at light for an hour, goes to bed and he's raging. He's like, ah, it's my entire routine been messed up. And I laid there sort of staring at the ceiling, doesn't sleep, and she drops off within five minutes. Having just come in from like, you know, scrolling TikTok or whatever. The example is about the fragility of reliance on that and the fear that without it, what does that create? Oh, I mean, how am I gonna be able to write my book today? I didn't get my, you know, like, as you said, like, what were the stupid things that I said today? That's anxious, Brian. But another type of anxiety is, oh, I didn't get my routine done, therefore I can't sleep, which becomes self Fulfilling sleep's one of the very few things that trying harder at it makes it worse.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, people can find their happy balance. I think if you look at the various archetypes of people, some people love that kind of regimen. They love to be regimented. They like structure, they like process, procedure, order. And that's just their personality type. Other people like the girlfriend in the story, she's not. And so the, I think the thing here is for people to recognize their kind of archetype of where they naturally gravitate to where they feel good about themselves. If you're not naturally orderly and structured, like, don't be that.

Right.

If you're.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's just like find your jam. But understand there are principles at play which you can't just override. Right.

Regardless of whether you like structure or don't like. If you have a three hour swing between bedtimes across a week. Yeah, yeah. Your body doesn't work in that way. Okay.

What are.

What other things that people focus on for sleep that don't move the needle?

I, I really, I guess I take 300mcgs of magnesium of melatonin, just like so a third of a gram microgram milligram.

Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very lightly.

People fucking way, way, way overcook.

Like 1 milligram, 5 milligrams.

Like there's 30 and 50 milligrams.

Yeah, exactly. I do a very tiny dose of melatonin. It's to offset the calcification that happens in my pineal gland. Like as you age, your pineal gland calcifies, you produce less melatonin. So like a little offset teeny bit.

So in 10 years time, maybe you'll take 500 microns.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's a very small touch. Otherwise I don't take anything for sleep. And so I'd so much rather build habits. And this is the same thing like Americans, just like we are, we take more antidepressants than any country in the world.

Quick fix.

We love pills like we love pills to solve fundamental problems and habits.

A gummy or a powder.

Yeah. Habits are the strongest ones. So like that's why I focus on just build your sturdy habits in the archetype you are. That's the tried and true thing that delivers the best. Now if you want to try to amplify with whatever you take, cool. But generally speaking, it's really about habits.

Okay, Give me your formula for behavior change. Behavior change is so important. Let's assume someone's Taken the first red pill, which is sleep. And I now have access to the amount of willpower that I'm supposed to have as opposed to however much is diminished by my shit sleep from the night before. Yeah, I've arrived. Look at. Behold my litany of shitty habits.

Exactly.

Like a guy in a side alley going, would you care to peruse my wares of shitty habits? Someone has a shitty habit. Maybe it's the Skittles, maybe it's whatever. Pick whichever you think is a good one. Talk me through your James clear approach to the Brian Johnson's James clear attachment.

Okay, so actually I'll show you mine, but I wonder if this resonates or not with people, but I had this issue where at 7pm I would overeat every night.

Yeah. Evening eating for me is the only time. And no one ever overeats in a breakfast. Oh, yeah, it was 9am And I gorged myself on Snickers.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Like maybe like in a weekend brunch where you order, you know, pancakes, you're like, oh my God, it's a one off.

Yeah, that was a bad idea. I don't want to do that again.

Yeah, I feel awful. Yeah. So like, your willpower goes down all day. It makes sense. Like 7pm like, you have stress, you're worn down, like, you just want to like, whatever. So that was my issue. I overate at 7pm and so I did it every day for years. And every night was the same battle. Right? Like, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it and do it. And then like, you know, my, the top button of my pants, I can't be buttoned up and I'm like, fucking hate myself. Like, this is so tight. I'm so uncomfortable. So I tried so many things to stop that and I couldn't. And so the one thing that I did is one day I just kind of said in jest, evening, Brian, you're fired. Like you Brian, who Occupy me from 5pm to 7 to 10pm you're an unreliable thing, like every day. Yeah, steward, you basically come up with these rationalizations, like, tonight's the last night. Tomorrow morning we're going to exercise really hard. It's one bite. Whatever your specific entry point is, you always convince me to do it.

You're a slippery motherfucker.

Exactly. And you basically make Morning Brian miserable. You make dad Brian less good. Less good dad, like ambitious Brian is hurting because of you. And so I said, you're fired. And so that means from 5pm to 10pm you do not have authority to eat food no matter what. Like, I don't care what's happening. You cannot eat food because you're so shifty. And so I just made that rule. And so I gave him a name. I wrote down his arguments. And so he would come into my mind and be like, hey, I'm here. And I'm like, hey, evening, Brian. Like, how you doing, man?

Fuck you. Yeah.

And like, oh, you're going to use the we're going to work out hard tomorrow morning argument. Or like tonight's last night. Like, I see you and I know what that is. And I've done this a hundred times. I've never in my entire life felt satisfied with myself after doing this, ever. I've never felt proud of myself. I've never felt good.

Yeah, you're selling yourself a lie about how you're going to feel after doing this.

Exactly. And so, yeah, that was just. It was just a rule. And so like, guess the rule is something like none is better than some that we do like to rationalize that. Oh, just like every once in a while is fine. Moderation is a principle of life. I want to play by. We have all these very clever catchphrases to justify our inability to actually do what we want. And so, yeah, that was a really clean hook for me.

That's cool. And the reason that I like it is because of this most recent iteration of the over optimizing. Can we not just fucking like, how lame. How like, you know, the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections. Moderation, man. And there is a kernel of truth in it. And this is why, like a slower, more gentle approach to I see you. I think there's something there that. I see you. I think there's something. There is. Hey, man. Your focus on these habits is a kind of fragility and it is destroying the enjoyment of life by obsessing over how you live it. Right, So I get the angle on that. The problem is that nobody scrutinizes the just live by vibes, man approach with the same, like, level of resolution. Because by design, they're living by fucking vibe, so nothing's being tracked.

Yeah, yeah, but you've.

I've never even thought of it before, but you've fucking nailed it. Which is the I just live by moderation dude is not living by moderation. It's living by extremis. Yeah, like, you end up the moderation you put. I always use this example because I Like biscuits, cookies. I like biscuits. If you tell me, pack of Oreos. There's one outside. You can eat none of them or you can eat all of them. I'm like, done.

Exactly. Right.

But you can eat two of them.

Exactly.

Fucking Superman.

Yeah.

No, I can't eat two of them. Yeah. No, Give me a start. Maybe, I don't know, maybe some people aren't like this. Yeah, I'm, I'm a eat all of them or eat none of them kind of guy.

Yeah.

So you're what, on the surface, like, first order looks like the very bureaucratic, dictatorial Nazi policy. Like, how can you do this to yourself? Like, ah, you're not balancing life. Like, it would be much better if you just allowed yourself to treat. Like every so often it's okay, show me how every so often. Your every so often is.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not that every so often. It's actually most of the time, you know, I just like, I'm a bit more flexible with my sleep. You know, sometimes I let myself sleep in, sometimes I give myself. I go to bed a little bit later. Like, it's like, okay, just look at when you're going to bed. It just keeps on shifting later and later. And there is no trend over time. It's just. What? And sometimes it's getting wider.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think I've never thought of it before, but the. Everything in moderation is not done in moderation.

Exactly.

Right. Yeah.

So this is like again, memetic moral philosophy of warfare. So the person who's arguing for moderation is attempting to take a, a drive towards health and make that low status and make their moderation high status. So this, if you, if you really, if you look at the world through this lens, you realize everybody at all times is trying to take their position and they're like assessing the battlefield and they're saying, anything that makes me feel low status, I'm going to invert and make that high status thing low status and my thing high status because I inherently want to feel superior to people at all times. That is like literally everything that's happening at any moment in society ever. It's just like humans want to feel superior in high status.

Okay. Do you know the inner citadel idea by Isaiah Berlin?

I don't.

Allow me to teach you. I think this may be useful to you. Isaiah Berlin says, when the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire. You must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The different way to look at it is if your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg. And if you can't, then you cut off the leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued.

That's right. Yep. I mean, that's it. That's. I mean, basically, that's the exact articulation of what we've been discussing. Yep. Is the medic and moral philosophy of warfare.

To feel superiority because nobody wants to feel inferior.

Yeah.

It's like you looked at Adlerian stuff much.

Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of that is driven by this. I can't be inferior.

Yeah.

This is why getting into a relationship with too much of a power imbalance, one person is significantly busier than the other. One person is significantly better looking the other. One person has significantly more attention than the other. The power imbalance is so great, unless the second person is happy to only ever sing harmony and never sing lead. And is there like in service and the service becomes their reward. If you have two people, you can't have two people singing lead.

Yeah.

Like one person has to sing harmony. Yeah. And if your lead singing and their lead singing and theirs is fucking way ahead or yours is way ahead, there's going to be tension. And I think about. I think about those bridges that you see during earthquakes and they sort of do this. They like flex like that. And I think about that kind of visual. It's this sort of flexing intention. It's not even necessarily a pulling apart. It's I'm going this way and you're going that way and.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Right.

Yeah. I mean, 100%. Like what. What is society? I mean, I guess like there's two macro games happening in society. Like in that tension is what is. What is high status. And then within that game of who is high status? Right. That's it. And then you've got everyone else playing to try to take the high status, make it low status. But like right now, the highest status game is wealth. Right. Capitalism. And this came from Adam Smith, a couple hundred. This is what I'm saying, like when you look at.

Is the highest status game, raw wealth. What about renowned popularity recognition because you look at, at somebody who already has lots of wealth and a lot of the time they continue to pursue status. I spoke about this with Naval and his. I think this is true. Be interested to get your perspective. Money is evolutionarily novel and yet it's a proxy for status and it gives you things that status can't. But we should have raw status for status's sake. Prestige, dominance, access, recognition. That should be more deeply rooted and therefore less easy to satiate than money. Yeah, because money is more novel.

Yeah.

And money is not direct access to the thing that you need. Right. Money without status can make you live, but. And status without money can make you fucking miserable and kind of on the street in a way. Yeah. But it seems like people who get lots of status rarely continue to pursue money, whereas people who get the fucking infinity money do always continue to pursue status. You see an asymmetry with your perspective on money and status.

Absolutely right. I mean, I think basically I think that's correct. I think money has more raw power just from a transactional just. Just raw power, like the ability to. To do things in the world, like to move the world money is in. So in this current context, now behind that. So again, like you remember two games, one is what is high status, and then two is who's winning within status. And so my comment on money is that that is within context of that is high status. But if you look at broader status of what is high status, Right. Like religion has played status. Right. Like you look at Christianity where Jesus is like, look guys, I've got a new status game for you and it's not what you're being told. Like I'm going to tell you a whole new rule set. And so any religion's done that. And so this is the game I'm trying to play. I'm trying to basically say, like right now, capitalism is status. If we said like this is the thing, and I'm trying to say this is the thing that might lead us to make a terrible error in judgment on what we do in this moment. And that the flip is existence itself is high status.

Interesting.

And never to the exchange of anything else. It never is. Never worth trading existence for anything else. Wealth, power or status. Existence itself is the highest virtue.

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Yeah.

There are physics within the system and one of the physics is one of the physical laws is status.

Yeah. So really the master game in society, the ultimate game, is determining what is status, like what is high status. And then of course you have billions and billions of humans will play within the game. They'll just be like, oh, this is the game and the function and the reward system, like I'm playing. They won't think about it. They won't realize that the game's been set up for them. They'll just play it.

That's interesting. Yeah. So rather than trying to convince people not to play the game, you just change what the game is pointing to.

Exactly. And they'll have the same fundamentals. They'll apply to the new game. So when you say existence is the highest virtue, that the same human behaviors that are stamped out throughout time, same archetypes, same play, same stuff every single time, just get the game right. And that's what I'm saying. Like this moment is so simple. Just get the objective function correct.

It's like some sort of judo throw that uses your opponent's momentum against them.

Yeah, exactly.

So to speak.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay, tell me about your sauna experiments. Yeah, I was watching those unfold with intrigue.

So we really. We discovered quite a few things that I shouldn't say discovered. Um, we found out a lot of quite, Quite a few things. So one is, for those who are new to sauna, dry sauna has the most evidence because you're trying to get your core body temperature up and so infrared does not get hot enough and wet sauna will basically burn you at the temperatures you need. So dry sauna is the right traditional dry sauna. Yep. 20 minutes a day at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. 83. Is that 83 Celsius? 93 Celsius. All right, 200 Fahrenheit. So three things we found. One is I was in LA during the LA wildfires when, like 20.

Yeah.

That if you go close to them. Yeah. So I was measuring my toxins in my body when. Before the fires happened and then after the fires happened. And I was absolutely baked in toxins. So I was in, like, the 99th percentile, as I'm sure other people in LA were too, of toxins. You could go down the list and be like, this chemical is used in PVC pipe for housing. This chemical is like a countertop. This chemical is. You can literally see the burned houses breathing in Teflon and whatever else down the list. You could look at the industrial solvent.

There's a Kia Sorento.

Exactly. So my body was full of all these houses and cars that were burnt and the sauna annihilated the toxins. It was remarkable. So that was cool. Two is, we have been trying to get my microplastics down because microplastics live in the body, in the brain. And we were measuring microplastics in my blood and also my semen. And so microplastics hang out in the testicles and that has all sorts of negative effects on testosterone, on fertility. You just don't want them hanging out there. So I have over a 90% reduction in my blood and my semen of microplastics. And that was a first in world demonstration of. No one had ever done that before.

Speaking of, the microplastics test is actually kind of hard to do.

Right, Exactly. Yeah, the test is hard. And no one had done semen before. No one had repaired blood and semen.

Yeah, yeah. Intro. Just hold. This is fascinating. But you know why kitchen detergents say 99 point kills 99.999% of bacteria?

Why?

It's not because they don't. They're unable to kill more bacteria. It's that the testing tolerance only goes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Then this kind of feels like too dissimilar of the same.

So one is, we showed that sauna is a really efficacious detox protocol. Number two is we showed, well, we think sauna was the reason why my microplastics went down so dramatically.

Relatively controlled across everything else.

Exactly. It was very controlled. Like we didn't do any of the therapy in that timeframe that were meaningful. And then three is, I had really great changes, improvements in my vascular markers. So it actually improved. Even though I'm in really good health, it still had a measurable increase in my vascular markers. It increased my vegf. This is like you want VEGF in your body because it helps produce more capillaries and blood vessels. Like you want a higher level. It increased it by 400%, which was amazing. I had a dramatic drop of P tau, which is a, a protein in the brain that leads to Alzheimer's. So that dropped dramatically. We also, I did a test on looking at. When you're in that kind of environment, you want to put ice packs on your testicles because otherwise it annihilates your fertility markers. It'll take down your count, your morphology, all the above. And even men who say, like, I don't care, I'm not trying to have a baby. There's really negative feedback loops. So if you have smashed fertility markers, then it has negative effects on your health overall. So I did three weeks with ice, then I went two weeks without ice. In that two week window, I got smashed. So my fertility markers went down by 50%.

The prices that you pay to uncover this stuff for the rest of me immortals.

So I went back on ice and I've been back on ice for six weeks now and I got these results on my drive here. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I'm going to go by memory.

Yeah.

So it's the highest sperm count I've had ever. It's the highest motility count I've ever had. It's the highest morphology I've ever had. So, like they bounce. Not only do they bounce back, it's the highest I've ever been. And if you look at, these are like off the chart numbers, like 6 to 10 times the level of normal fertility.

So what do you think's going on there? Is that just straight vascular changes?

We're not sure. I.

What do you think's going on? Come on, ballpark the mechanism for me. Have a play around.

Yeah. I mean, I really need to deep dive into this more. Yeah, I, I don't know, it's. It's a really big jump. And I've been doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We've been doing the sauna. We haven't done really any other meaningful therapy that could boost it.

Okay, so let's go through the protocol for the Sauna. You said 200 degrees dry, 20 minutes.

Yeah, dry.

The traditional sauna ice pack on the balls.

Yeah.

Does time of day matter? Okay, does. What did you go for as a solution for ice pack on the balls?

Yeah. So you can buy these from Amazon. They're like 8 bucks BPA free, no toxins, reusable. So, yeah, they're blue. You get a pack of like, four, and then you want them on the balls in the sauna. So put on cotton underwear and then cotton shorts and then slide them underneath.

The shorts in between the two.

Exactly, yeah. And then, like, so just have two of them in there. But yeah, if you keep them chilled, like, we wonder whether the chilling actually has an improve. Like, we. We can't.

That could be so interesting. If it's got nothing to do with the sauna, should you put an ice back on your balls for 20 minutes?

We know sauna destroys, but we wonder, like, is. Is the icing? Because we saw.

Get out of the sauna, put the.

Ice back on your. Like, yeah, if you're. If you're working now. So we actually were going to do another experiment after this completed. I was gonna start icing the testicles during the day, like, just when I work, like, because we saw a, like a 30% jump in my fertility markers in the first three weeks of doing ice. And we were trying to figure out, like, why did, like, did the sauna increase it and then the ice just protect the protected. The increase or. So we're still trying to figure out what the cause is.

Collaboration of the two. Okay. What else have I got to ask? Are you taking any binders, like a charcoal, a cholestyramine, a nac flush type scenario? Something to capture the heavy metals that are coming out of you, right?

No.

So it was just two pairs of cotton shorts, an ice pack.

Yep. And a sauna, and, like a cotton towel. Wipe yourself off, you know, as you're sweating, jump in the shower.

Why? To wipe yourself off.

I'll just. If. If the. If the toxins are being excreted via sweat, just snag it when it's, like, hanging out your skin so it doesn't dry and.

Shower straight after. Yep, that's it. It's the entirety of the protocol.

Cool.

I'm gonna guess you were Doing that seven days.

Yeah. Every day, right? Yeah. And I do it after working out. So I go work out for an hour. I immediately jump into the sauna. And so I'm already really warmed up.

So it's imposed to spending the first seven minutes getting up to temperature. Also, there seems to be, from Rhonda Patrick, there seems to be some pretty good evidence about, well, you kind of extending the sessions benefits somewhat. So you're stacking a few things.

Exactly right.

But I do like the idea of that talking about behavior change earlier on. Stacking habits.

Yes.

It's very strong. It's like, look, if I'm going to train and I know that when I get home from training, my training session is an hour, but I'm actually going to book an hour and 40 in. And that gives me 10 minutes to get home. And then I'm going to get in the sauna for 20 minutes or wherever I'm going to go to. Maybe the sauna's in the gym or whatever. And then it's going to give me 10 minutes for my shower and then I'm done. And I've done both of these things and I've done them in the right order. I've done them like together. Yeah. In that format. Anything else on sauna?

Anything else? Initially, I did sauna in the morning. So in the first like two weeks, it absolutely wrecked my sleep. Like destroyed it.

And doing it in the morning, well.

I think just doing it period. Like, it's. It's a. Like 200 degrees is a lot. Like, it's really, really warm. I had never done sauna before, so I think it was just the adaptation time period. I'm fine now. But just like note that there's initially an adaptation time period. And then two is, I tried at night. Initially it wrecked my sleep. But then I tried it after I had the adaptation period and it boosted my sleep. So I found that there is some virtue in doing it before bed. So you just have to run the experiment. You have to see for you if it's going to improve sleep or not.

Yeah. That also means that you're going to have to be training later in the day, which is not always necessarily.

Yeah, exactly. If you pair those two things exactly. Because you don't want to exercise within four hours before bedtime.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Hbot, talk to me about that. I was messaging you. The day that I started my HBOT was the day that you put your video out and I'm in there and you were like, I can't remember what the fuck you replied with 20 and 5. 83% with natural, blah, blah, blah. Cause I'm in this big fucking metal dildo. And the guy that's there, Vance from beam hyperbarics in Austin. If anyone wants to go to a great hyperbarics place, it's fucking sick, you can book it by the hour. Vance is great. I'm like knocking on the little, this tiny little portal out of my submarine. And he comes in and I just showed my phone.

I'm like, I couldn't be bothered to.

Use the radio to get outside. I'm like, brian messaged, are we doing this?

And he sort of went, that's so funny.

Yeah, put his thumb up like that. So, yeah, hyperbaric red pilling.

I was, when you messaged me, I was worried about you because like a week before somebody had blown up in Arizona. So, yeah.

So what does that look like?

Well, so in, in hyperbaric, the idea is you pressurize. So you're actually so at atmosphere at sea level, we're about 15 pounds per square inch of, of concentration of oxygen. At 2 atmospheres, you're at 30. So you, you pressurize. And some hyperbaric chambers, they pressurize and then they just push 100% oxygen into the chamber. So you're just hanging out and breathing the oxygen. But if you're doing that, you're sitting in a pressurized chamber and you're basically a flammable.

Candle.

You're bomb. Like, so if something, if, if there's a spark of any type. Yeah, you just blow up your phone.

Or some device that you've got with you, whatever the fuck.

Okay, so.

No, no, no, no, no. This was, I was not. I had the, I was breathing the mask. I was doing stuff.

Cool.

Great.

Okay. Cool. Yeah. So, yes, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I think to date, it's fair to say, has been the single best performing therapy we've ever done. And this is both good news and bad news, because the bad news is that it's expensive, it's inaccessible, it's time consuming, super inconvenient. So it sucks because I hate sharing this because people, it's very exciting. But then it sucks because people can't do it.

Like, I mean, if you're already to say, I've got to find a sauna to use and most people don't have a sauna in their house. Oh God, now you're telling me I need to produce my own oxygen. This thing weighs fucking 2 tons. Where does it fit totally. Yeah.

And like, who has 90 minutes in a day to go do this thing? So I would just say for people who have a serious condition and there's a variety of conditions that this could address, like even cognitive decline or, you know, wounds for diabetes, what would be on the list? So there's a lot of emergent evidence for cognitive decline that if you're entering the latter parts of your life and you're really struggling, this could have a meaningful impact on that. It is used for diabetics who can't heal very well. It's used for healing. So people who've had surgeries to accelerate the healing process. If you have some kind of injury you're really trying to overcome, that can be great. So there are some telling me that.

Some athletes post surgery are in 90 minutes three times a day.

Exactly.

They're trying to hit that 98 session number within weeks.

Yes. So like, there are some specialized applications where. And people where it makes sense for the person to do. But I just want to be very sensitive. I understand, like, it sucks to hear something's really efficacious and you can't get at exclusion. Yeah, it makes sense. So, like. But yeah, we, we, we basically, like we do with all things we measured, we had this, we cast this really wide net. We measured everything we could. My brain, my microbiome, a full blood panel, saliva, stool, metabolomics, proteomics, like you name it, we measured it and we just found improvements across the board. It was really because most therapies will improve like this particular marker or that marker, but rarely do they have this broad spectrum improvement. So we saw like the, the cognitive decline marker, P Tau217 drop. We saw my microbiome. I had zero dysbiosis in my microbiome. Like no signatures at all of dysbiosis. We saw I had no detectable inflammation in my body. So when my HSCRP came back zero.

The 99.99, like he's beating the test.

Exactly. Like, it's just like, it was really remarkable across the board. And so it was really efficacious. I did 60 sessions over 90 days and I've continued to do it. I've now done something like 200 sessions over the past year or something like that. So I just have it as part of my routine. I do it. You want to be careful not to do it too much because you're. You'll have oxygen toxicity.

Yes.

So you want to have somebody.

But that's why the five minute break is so important.

Right, yeah. And I also take like a week long break, I'll do a sprint then a week long break. So you just need to be careful because you can overdo it and cause.

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Mask off, 20 minutes on, five minutes off.

Cool. Yeah, I was doing that. That what the one super fucking annoying thing there is. It's very relaxing to be in. It can be very relaxing to. Once you've pressurized. But you can't sleep.

Yeah.

Because.

Exactly. Yeah. You're busy.

Gotta put this to take this thing on and off. One of the things that I really enjoyed doing was hrv Resonance breathing.

Yeah.

While I was in there. Have you got into resonance breathing yet? Have you been doing it in the H part?

Yes.

So much fun.

Yeah, it is so much fun.

There's a product that I got sent. I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got it. It's this little lamp. I wouldn't be able to take it in. It would all fucking hell would break loose. But it's basically a resonance breathing stone and you pick it up and it's Got an FDA approved thing in it and the lamp goes up and down. You put it back and it's done. So you don't need your phone, you don't need anything else. That's brilliant. But Elite HRV is what I was using with the strap. I'm going to guess you'll have seen one thing that I noticed about that niche, niche issue. The strap that came with the Elite HRV thing, which you put on so that it can detect like real high fidelity, high hertz heart rate thing.

Yeah.

The button that you use to press to turn it on has a tiny little air pocket around it. So I got into the fucking HBOT and by the time I'd pressurized to get down there, the button had been smashed and I couldn't. There was no air to press the button.

Yeah.

And then I kept. I was like trying to press it and it's just.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SpongeBob when he gets outside of the water. Yeah. So anyway, HBOT. So I mean a couple of questions on this. 60 sessions as quickly as possible basically with to start to accumulate. It's not like a. A one and done type thing. Yeah, I think I asked you this at the time. I'm interested if there's any more information going from state change to trait change. Like is this the sort of thing that locks in. I'm aware you haven't then tested coming off and seeing what the tail of this is. But the same thing goes for sauna. Are you just fighting entropy with this? Is it something that you just need to do or is there anything. Because I think there's a. I certainly know in me, if I look at a therapy or modality or whatever and I find that there's no carryover, I feel despondent. I'm like, fucking hell, I've just found this new thing. Here's another thing I have to do.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it's because both you and I are on the other side of the entropy curve. The deal you want is youth. When you're 12, you just keep on getting better, but once you cross over into your au, slow down. Exactly. Every day they get up and shit's just better, you know, so like. But yeah, you and I are both on the other side where we're on this irreversible decline. And so yes, you've got to keep it up. But like one thing people are not aware of with HBOT is it's the best skin rejuvenation therapy in the world.

So a lot of people better than Red light. Better than microneedling everything.

Like, better than the vampire facials. Better than any laser. It is because if you look at the data on the biopsies of it rebuilding collagen, elastin, and reducing senescent cells, it basically remodels your entire skin. It's not just face. Like, every layer of skin you're remodeling is really remarkable. Like, if you look at people, like, if I see people now, I can tell a signature of HBOT skin. It's very, very clear to me what it looks like. And so it just. It happens. So, yeah, that's the other thing is, like, a lot of. A lot of women, you know, who really care a lot about skin. Hbot. Getting the hbot. Yeah. I mean, then you. If you pair, like, the best banger protocol is to. If you're for skin is to pair the best devices with hbot. So you basically, you do like a surface level, like a 1550 nanometer to resurface the skin for. For like spots, wrinkles, stuff like that. Then you do HBOT and you can accelerate the healing.

Is that microneedling? Is that what you're referring?

No, just a laser. Like a 1550 nanometer laser where it's like. It's a very, very benign laser, if you do it right, has lower risk of, like, pigmentation issues for wrinkles, spots, just, like, read for texture. And then you can do a deeper device, like a soft wave S O F W a V E where it's ultrasound, where it's 1.5 milliliters below, millimeters below the dermis. So you hit top layer and underneath the dermis. So you're rebuilding collagen and the entire scaffolding the skin. And then you re hbot and then you accelerate the healing. So you basically do more sessions in this. Yeah.

So that's like you do an acute, like, skin rejuvenation thing and then up. Are you still here? She's outside. I think I did software because I went to your dermatologist. In which one? I can't remember the lady's name. It was in. That was why I had a mustache. I grew a mustache because I needed to get rid of my facial hair. Because they needed to do that.

Yeah.

In order to be able to. I'm pretty. I'm almost certain it was software.

Yeah. Was it like it felt like a.

Cigarette burn that never actually got to a burn?

Exactly. Yeah. Like, you're like you're being singed by like a hot metal iron.

Yeah. But it never actually Peaks to the. Yeah, it was a really interesting lesson in. And that. Yeah, blowing the cold shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a really interesting lesson in pain that. Because what you realize is you ride this crescendo for the people that haven't seen it, literally, as if someone was to put something really hot out on you. And when that happens, there is a swelling, there is a crescendo, but it usually peaks at. You can almost hear it. Right. If you have alcohol in an open wound that. It goes like that, but it doesn't ever get above a 6 or so.

So if she set the settings to 3.5 joules, which is the lowest setting, then it gets pretty tolerable if she goes to 4.2, top end, because basically it's a total energy per area.

I think I had it at around about three point. I think she had it at 3.6, 3.7. So I was being a weenie.

Okay. Yeah. So if you have the 4.2, where it's basically like, it cuts down the number of pulses by 30% if you want, like, zip through it. God damn.

That.

That is so painful. No, thank you. Oh, man. It does. It just feels like a red hot iron.

I'm all right.

Send you the face.

No more. Thank you. You mentioned there about sort of vascular health and blood flow. Obviously we started talking enough about erectile, Nighttime erectile stuff for guys to improve blood pressure. Vascular health. And then I guess downstream from that, the impact on erections, erectile dysfunction beyond, like, nighttime stuff.

Yeah.

What have you come to learn about that? What's the protocol for a guy to improve that?

Yes, I guess, like, I would say to people listening, like, maybe the. The thing I. That's most interesting is when I started this when I was 42, I was pretty beat up. Like, I had eaten sugar cereal as a kid, soda, like, you know, downed 70 grams of sugar, like, daily canned foods. I was. I did the entrepreneurial grind, right. Didn't sleep. I was depressed for. For 10 years. I was overweight. Like, I did all the stuff starting behind the eight ball, like, all the bad things, right. And so I'm 42. I'm pretty beat up. My. My aches hurt, losing my hair, and so I didn't really know what could be done. I'm. I'm really shocked by how efficacious this entire thing has been. Like, I. I'm just really stunned that the body really has this capacity to bounce back no matter how bad things are. And so one. For anyone listening to, like, who Needs hope in their life. It really like the body is too far gone. Totally. Like I just like don't give up. The smallest of things can have the biggest yields and so have hope. And then two is I've been jamming on this for you know, five years now. My markers keep on getting better and so we still like I've aged, you know, a past five years in time but I'm still hitting new record highs in like nighttime erections, infertility markers in my speed of aging, in my DNA and my TMI telomeres. Like all these things are improving as age, as time doesn't seem to be a ceiling. So like I mean on the grand scale of things I suspect these are like I'm. This is not going to get me to 200 years. Right. Like it's not on that kind of scale but still like in how I feel as a person. Like I do feel extremely energetic. I feel very clear headed. I feel my mood is very stable. I don't get irritated. Like I'm just kind of cool with existence which is like for me that's the marker of health, you know, like that. So one hope two is I think it's really worth the investment of this stuff. Like just paying your, like paying the discipline to do it. Consistency. And then the last thing is you don't need to do what I do. Like you don't need to chase these expensive therapies. You don't need to do hbot. Like the basic stuff has the dividends. And so I don't want, I want people to feel hopeful and not discouraged. I want them to feel empowered. Not like damn it, that's out of reach because it really is. Like it's within people's reach.

And I hope they're intimidated.

Yeah, I hope they walk away feeling like damn it, I can do that. Like I'm gonna do it. I can do that.

What are the big moves? We've already said sleep and you've given a good breakdown there. If there was a top three, top five, however many you need for okay, the Pareto 80% of the results come from these things. What are those things?

Yeah. So I would first I would frame this in a moral philosophy. So I'd say if believe yes first, like your most prized possession is agency. Nothing values more than your agency. And right now most people's agency is compromised that they are not the architects of their life because they compulsively scroll down, they compulsively eat fast food, they compulsively do all these addictive behaviors. And then when pressed on it, they rationalize it as virtue because they're trapped. And so I would challenge everyone here to say, like, reclaim yourself. Don't do anything you don't want to do. And that the enemy is the motherfucker who's trying to get you to do something that is not in your best interest. Them that is the enemy. And so, like, that gives you real moral power. Don't be puppeted. Now once you have that principle, like, I'm going to set my bedtime, I'm not going to doom scroll, I'm not gonna eat that bag of Skittles, right? Like, I'm not gonna eat the fast food that's it's poison. They're gonna trick me into thinking it's a treat or something. You're like, but like, that's, I think for me the boundary conditions of like how you create the kind of energy state of like, I can do this and I have a moral will to do it. Not just because of self help, but I'm fighting an enemy, I'm overcoming adversity. I'm a man standing on my agency. Or woman like that to me gives it the juice too. Like, I have the willpower to do it.

Okay, now that we've got the moral framework, what are the tactical things?

Yeah, so you, once you have agency, you want to reclaim your willpower. You need to have juice in the tank to say, like, I can make decisions, that I can do it. So one is you want to master sleep. You want to build your entire life around sleep. Sleep, that's very counterintuitive. But you want to plan when you go to bed. When your wind down routine is, you want to set strict rules. You want to plan your lighting. Like, again, like you can choose your archetype whether you're really regimented, whether you're like more flexible, like whatever your thing is, but just build your entire life around sleep. And if you need justification, realize those not doing that are 10 to 12 points stupider than you. Like, they're actually dumb, so they take a retardation exercise for them. You're actually going to be smart once you do that exercise. Cause that also is going to boost your willpower. So boost it with sleep, boost it with exercise. And then once you get those two down, then tackle food. Because food is the most complicated. Food is where we go to like soothe ourselves, to do like the self therapy. So only tackle. Then try to start just having a bit more good things for you and a few less bad things. Like Slowly walk your way into it. Radical change is hard for a lot of people, but it's like slow walk into. And then if you again have that in the back of your mind like a rule, you will never ever eat fast food ever again. Like none is better than some. So there's no moderation, there's no once a day. The idea of a cheat meal is the worst idea in history. Like don't do cheat days, don't do cheat meals, don't do cheat weeks, don't do cheat anything, don't cheat.

When it comes to exercise for longevity, most people are already doing. Almost everybody that's listening is going to have some sort of training regime. I would imagine the vast majority of them are going to be something like.

A push per leg split.

And maybe other people are runner boys and runner girls. If you were to design the minimum effective dose, this is where I think the blind spots are for people, what would you say? Exercise wise?

Yeah, I mean I. Because everyone's got their jam. Well, there's pilates, weights, fighting, whatever, just do it. Like just be active for roughly an hour a day. Do cardio to strength to balance, do flexibility. Everyone's got their own preferences. But I think I don't go after the details here because there's like endless material to go after. Just be active and commit to being active.

So does some people like chicken, some people like salmon, some people like kale, some people like spinach.

Exactly. Like just. And I same thing with food. Like I don't get into the game of carnivore versus vegan versus paleo versus whatever. They're abstractions which are irrelevant. Eat what you want, measure your body, make sure you're good and then fine tune yourself. Like I have a don't die food guide. We tried to look through all the scientific evidence to say what are the very best foods in existence with the highest value evidence that you can put into your body. So we just said by a power law perspective, here's what I'd put on so I can share that as a plate. Outside of that, like, like do your thing. Like just eat what you want, just measure your body, make sure you're good.

Right. Okay. Bethlehem blue. How'd you get on with that?

You know, I stopped it because I started 25 milligrams a day and then. Oh, it was conflicting with. We started a therapy doing altitude training. So you take your blood oxygenation down to 80%. We did it and the two have conflicting mechanisms of action and we realized it on day three. So we're like, we better stop methylene blue to sell the therapy.

So, okay, is methylene blue it's like nicotine derivative, Right. Or it's something to do with nicotine.

I mean, it's a synthetic diet. Initially it was buil because surgeons wanted to see like where they're actually in the surgical body. But it was actually FDA approved for. What was it? I forgetting now. Yeah, FDA approved quite a while ago. But overall on. We don't think that's really. We don't think it's worth it as a therapy. Yeah, it's more, more for like mitochondrial health.

Okay. Testosterone. Yeah, testosterone. The, the hormone of the 21st century.

It is.

What have you come to learn about testosterone?

Yeah, so I'm in like the seven hundreds naturally. So just by doing all the basic.

Stuff, what were you when you started? Do you know?

I, I guess like when I was 42. I don't know. You look at my data. Yeah, but if, if, if a man is low on testosterone and the natural approaches are not addressing it, it probably makes sense to do something about it. Like being low in testosterone just has really negative consequences. So. Yeah, good one to watch after.

What are the ways to intervene naturally? What are the biggest needle movers that you.

Yeah, I mean, all the basics. Right. Like sleep, like, I think poor sleep, four hours of sleep a night will knock you down something like 10 to 20% on testosterone. So like really big drop less of a man again. Again, yeah. Like high sassy status. So then sleep, exercise, nutrition, like all the basics. There's. I don't think there's a lot of proven supplementation that can move the needle.

I think without getting into pharmacology.

Yeah. I think people have played a bunch of stuff. I don't. If I'm not mistaken, I'm not sure the clinical evidence is very strong there. I need to look at it. I guess. I have never had low testosterone, so I've never had to look at supplementation as a means to do it. So I guess I would be cautious in. And my knowledge is limited in terms of the true evidence for clinical interventions.

The thing that's interesting around sort of male hormone and I imagine it's the same for women, but I don't know anything about them. The relationship between. It's such a fucking balance beam of lh, fsh, testosterone free T shtb There is no, it seems to me, total white belt. It seems to me like one intervention is not one intervention. It's. It starts to roll away into this domino effect.

Yeah.

So talking about I want my testosterone higher, it's like, well, do you? Yeah, yeah. Do you? Maybe your FSH needs to. I mean, people that go on enclomiphene or HCG chronically.

Yeah.

What is it like 20 or some big percent of them talk about that inducing depression. You go, okay, so you were worried that you had low energy because of your low testosterone and you tried to take a non like exogenous solution to create that. So I'm going to kick start my own production by using these compounds. And in the process of doing that, I've made myself have depression, which almost certainly made you a fucking low. Forget low energy, you got low mood now. Yeah. And so. Yeah, be careful how you intervene with that.

Yeah, I think that's very true. Yeah. It's like we, I guess the way we thought about it is we approached this holistically. We just said our frame entirely is scientific evidence. Just like what does the body of evidence say to do? And we took the most powerful molecules in the form of foods, supplements, and then lifestyle, sleep, diet, exercise, and then therapies, sauna, hbot, you know, and we just said like, take the very best high performer ones, put it all into one package and do the entire package. And it makes sense. Like if you, if you're taking care of the entire body on every level, you have these systematic effects online. Exactly. So I think people approach these things very narrowly. But like our hormones, like is a very, like you see like microplastics. Right? Like microplastic in the testicles has a negative feedback loop for fertility and hormones. Right. The same is true with toxins. So like that's. When we talk about testosterone, we don't talk about microplastic intervention, which then leans back to sauna, which then leads back to. So like we've tried to just be holistic, like give me the whole thing and let me build that into one daily practice so I don't have to then try to figure out like this and that thing.

Talking of daily practices, what's this 15 second phone call thing you're doing?

Oh, yeah, with my friends. Yeah. So a friend of mine introduced this to me. So he, I became friends with this person and he's very powerful and.

He.

Would call me and he'd be like, Brian, like blank statement. I say something to him and like, all right, man, I love you. See you. That's it. And I was like, that is amazing. It was so clean. It feels so good. And we just did that through like a couple months and we built this amazing friendship and 15 second friendship. And it was like. But it was like this deep. And I guess I imagine in my mind, like I imagined what his day must be like. Like he's juggling all kinds of crazy things he clearly does not have time for, like, sit down, hang out, do this and that. But yet he does such a great job of maintaining really meaningful, like, deep relationships. So when he says he loves you, it's like you feel it. It's like he's not like just saying it. And so I appreciated his model of friendship so much because before I was stuck in like, hey, Chris, you want to hang out?

You know, it's a big deal. It's fucking Airbnb. I'll book a week off work.

Yeah, it's like a four hour thing, right? Versus calling you like, hey, man, like, what's up? How you doing? And like, you, you can answer because you know I'm not going to be on the phone for 20 minutes.

Yeah, right. I mean, the. I did this series Life Hacks on the show when I first started and we do one every year now at Christmas and back in the day when that was one of the big thrusts of the show, we'd often get asked, okay, what 5001000 life hacks that you've done? What are the highest impact ones? The first one is always sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. But it's an instant 10 to 15% improvement in quality of life in that one thing. So that's actually before sleep, let's take the charging cable outside of your bedroom and put it in the kitchen. But the second one was text your friends when you think of them.

Yes.

And this is my equivalent of the 15 second friendship. And it's just, hey, man, like, thinking of you, hope you're well, like, whatever. Or a photo that you think about your friend and you find an old photo and you send it and it really speed runs friendship. You become tighter friends with people who you've known for less long than people that you've known longer, that you don't do that with or don't do it with you. And I really loved it and it really brightened my day and it felt like I was doing something good for someone at a very low cost. It was like high impact. It was high leverage friendship. Right. Like very, very low investment. Very, very high impact. A little bit of a giggle and it keeps it going.

Exactly.

And the other thing it does, which is, I guess a hack from my world of running nightclubs, it's an idea of Assume familiarity.

Yes.

So assuming familiarity in this context is. Most people that don't know each other particularly well have this. This sense that any text has to be super verbose.

Yeah.

Hello. Dear Brian, I hope that you are in the family are well, I must congratulate you on the da, da, da, da, da. As opposed to, like, funny meme. Yeah. Or whatever. Hey, man, thinking of you. Hope all's good. Whatever. Right. Like, not even. You can take it a little bit too far. And it sounds a bit entitled or a bit like, brusque or like, sharp, expectant. But if I'm like, dude, love the YouTube video, by the way. I'm an age, but how long am I supposed to breathe it for? Like, that's. Oh, thank you for consuming my shit and for the respect, by the way. Here's a thing I don't need to. We don't need foreplay.

Yeah.

Right. Let's get it. Let's get into it.

Yeah. I mean, since we hung out in Prospera, we've been doing that. Right.

Like, and it's no talk for three months and then a no talk for three months.

And I feel as fluid with you as I feel with any friend I've had for any duration of time. Like, we get each other. Like, we're on the same wavelength. We decided to tap into each other's lives. It's like, most of my friends, actually, I'm really surprised. Most of my friends who are powerful and successful and famous are lonely. Right. Like, they. They work all the time. They have work relationships, but the amount of time they have to be down and hanging out is so small. And so if you don't have some mechanism to create deep friendships and time is not your. You can't use time. You have to use something else.

Yeah. It needs to be a longer lever.

To be able to work. And so I've just been surprised that people have this perception that they always perceive others. Like, they must have it all. But loneliness is a real thing. And so I guess again, I say this for those who are listening. If you feel lonely. Right. Understand, like, your pattern is pretty similar to other people's patterns. Independent of resources or position or power.

Status, the people at the top of the tree are struggling with the loneliness.

Exactly. And this is the cool thing is, like, when I've talked to my friends and, like, they'll disclose that and, like, it's a really. You have to be. It's a. It's a scary thing. Shameful thing. Yeah, it is. To. To actually disclose that it's like, I don't have any friends. Like I, I had a, a friend of mine connected me with a celebrity today. Like one of the A list celebrities in, in Hollywood. I said, talked to this person, I said, why don't you come over to my house, we'll do a don't die dinner, get 10 or 15 of your favorite people, come on over and like I'll do this whole thing. And explained it and they said, I don't really have any friends. And yeah, it was like just such a shocking moment because like they are epicenter celebrity. And one, it was cool they just said that. And two, I was like amazing. So like I will put the group together for you. Come on over, we'll have a great time. But yeah, just like so people realize it's a very common thing in our modern society. So nothing to feel ashamed about or feel bad about. Like you can make these corrective actions by doing like small things like, like.

Voice notes, quick calls, and also by, by making the bar so low if you swing and whiff it. And this person doesn't actually really want to be friends.

Yeah, exactly.

Whatever. Doesn't think you're cool or they're too busy or whatever the fuck. They're not on the. They're not ready to be friends.

Yeah.

You haven't invested anything.

Yeah.

You know, you sent, you tried to, you met somebody, you sent them a few texts like whatever, like it matter. I would just loop back to that thing I said about the emotions piece before. So I understand what you mean with regards to sort of creating a philosophy. But I am still interested in what the practices are and how you look to prioritize the emotional well being, the social element. If there is a spiritual element to this too and how you come to think about. How do I say it off spreadsheet markers of longevity and well being.

Yeah. So in 2025 we did five don't die summits. We 1500 people, they were all sold out. We brought people together and we did, we experimented with different formats, but we brought them together. We did education courses, we did raves like at 7 in the morning. It was amazing. We had so much fun. We did group exercises, we did group therapy stuff. So I think 2026. So we learned a lot by doing this. We're going to do this in 2026 where I've been actually piloting a Don't Die fam in my neighborhood. So I've got several friends and we have this format where we get together every week. First we take a Shot of olive oil. Ritualistic. And then we each go around and we apologize to our body for something we did that week.

Okay.

And so it's kind of funny.

Perilously close to a religion here.

It's kind of funny, it's kind of fun. And then we go around and each person talks about, like, what's on their mind, what they're struggling with. And so it's a very, like, open floor, supportive Alcoholics Anonymous. It's like ypo, aa. It's like, it's a very similar format that's kind of stamped out through various organizations, but it's basically like small, intimate, trusted group where you can be vulnerable. And there's a specific approach where you're. You're focusing on Don't Die, but really it's about human connection. It's about sharing and what you're struggling with. So whether it's that or something else, we're trying to figure out how if Don't Die is to become the fastest growing ideology in history, we're trying to figure out what is the path for that to happen. And so it can happen in small clusters from around the world. We could even have physical locations. We could have something like a sovereign fund where we have. We pool our capital and we start funding things together. So there's. We're sorting on community, connection, emotional, social. In 2026, the past couple years have been like, how do you create something novel, sticky, distinct, and create a structure around it? And now we're going to create the wrapper. So it's just like the next stage of where we're at.

Very cool. When we first ever spoke, however long ago that was, I asked you a question about. I didn't use this word, but the grief of not starting earlier, the potential resentment that you can place at your caregivers and your friends and your culture of this didn't happen earlier, and the entropy. You started on the other side of the roller coaster, right? You're like, oh, fuck. Like, I'm fighting against it as opposed to improving it. You know, like, I can't get younger in the same way as I could have gotten younger or at least slowed it down or whatever. I'm interested in your relationship with that dynamic now a few years hence, more time to think what could have been, but also to think, well, I can't. By focusing on that, I'm losing the very time which I'm claiming has now been more limited. That seems like a very stupid way to spend my life. Where have you come into land with you? Said before. And I think it's a really good point. It's not too late. You can reverse or slow down. You can really, really make great progress no matter where you are, are. But the emotional connection to what could have been had I've started earlier, what I've done to my body, the grief, that stuff, what's your relationship with that like now?

Yeah, I mean, as you might guess, you know, I now I view this question through the moral frameworks, right? Like basically the premise of the question is that I'm in a low status position because of these preceding events, you know, that I didn't, I didn't have parents that knew health and wellness when I was a kid. I didn't understand health and wellness by myself. In my twenties I fell prey to cultural norms that say that said destroy yourself, right? And so the way I'd evaluate any person answering your question is how skilled are they in taking a low status position and converting it to high status? Like how do you flip the question for me to find virtue in my place and attribute, you know, charity to what's, what's preceded? Because really it never makes sense for a person to wallow in grief. Like, yes, it makes sense to reconcile. Like, be honest. Like, we can acknowledge that may have been a mistake, you know, we can contemplate, you know, we wish it wouldn't have happened. But really you're, you don't want to sit in negative emotions. It's just not good for you. You don't want to beat yourself up. And so you can either take a step where you say, I'm reconciled, I'm neutral, like I'm fine with it, or you can say I'm going to invert it. But that's what I've really learned more than anything in my life. This is what I try to train my kids, is don't be subject, don't lose your agency and be subject to pain that is self induced. You can choose how you feel. This is kind of like Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning, right? He's in the concentration camp and he's like, I'm not going to let these conditions determine my state of mind. I'm going to choose that state of mind myself. But that's really ultimate agency. And so I'd take your question and I would invert it and be like, this is the most interesting time in the history of four point whatever billion years that we've been on this planet. I am so fortunate to be alive right now and I'm like, in my 40s, where I'm still, like, in my prime and I can have a meaningful impact on what happens to the human race. Like, that is a possibility. So I wouldn't trade anything under any circumstance to trade the position I'm in right now, because it's the coolest moment in the history of the human race. And so, like, quick inversion. And now I'm like, damn, pretty cool. I'm pretty. I'm pumped about the situation.

My shoulders have relaxed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember you tweeting a while ago, do you think you're gonna die in a super ironic way?

Of course. Guaranteed.

Yeah.

How's that not possible? It's for sure. I mean, like, so this morning when I was coming here, I was opening a glass jar of sauerkraut, fermented sauerkraut. I popped it and it sliced my fingers in three places, bleeding all over the place. And I was like, you know what if I die from, like, a glass bottle of fermented sauerkraut, like, wouldn't that be just, like, beautifully ironic? So, yes, like, I hope it's spectacular. I hope it's really something epic and not something lame.

Sauerkraut would be a cool way to go.

I mean, I guess, like, you tell me what would be like, an epic, like, oh, wow, what hits the timeline where you're like, okay, like, ready to go with that?

Ah, that would be cool. I mean, sort of car action. A 70s action movie rolling down a huge cliff would be. That seems like a pretty cool way to go. Certainly not being the passenger of a plane where the pilot decides that he's sick and he just wants to crash it into a. Right, into a mountainside. That would suck. Something. Something. That's just me. Something. I don't want to take anybody else with me if I'm going to go up in flames, hit by a bus, but the bus goes on.

Caught in the act of adventure. Right? Like, you're doing your thing, you're pushing the boundaries. You're in your happy state, eating fermented foods. Yeah. You know, like, I think of Shackleton, you know, and I think of his going through the Antarctic and their survival through that whole, like, you know, they were all ready to have a noble death. Like, we wouldn't have found out about. They would have been gone to history. But still, you know, they were. I like that. Kind of.

I love those stories. There's a. A book that you may love if you like Alfred Lansing's Endurance, which is the best retelling of Shackleton's crossing. I think there's a wonderful one called the Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart. British soldier, Scottish, captured by the Japanese bridge over the River Kwai. Forced labor, Hiroshima, bomb blasts, like, everything, everything, everything, everything. And then I read Unbroken, Unbroken, Louis Zamperini. So I only. I never even know because I'm up American. Yeah, right. So I would get Shackleton and I would get Alistair Urquhart, but I'd never get Zamperini. I didn't even know he existed. And he, like, meets Hitler at the fucking Olympics and he goes through all of this stuff. So if you like Unbroken, dude, the Forgotten Highlander will take your head off.

Yeah, unbroken. That broke me. I mean, like, he's, like, on his raft getting shot at from the Japanese airplanes underneath the raft, getting it by sharks, back on the raft of bullet holes, like. And that's like on day 142 of not eating food. Like, yeah, yeah.

And the dude's eating all the chocolate. Your best mate. Yeah, chocolate. Yeah, dude. Those stories to me are wonderful. I ruptured in Achilles 2020, playing cricket, fully British, and asked a couple of friends that had been through some sort of similarly traumatic injuries, big fuck off, severe thing. And they said, the obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart. Ross Edgley's book, the Art of Resilience, which is about his swim around. He was the first person to swim around the uk.

Oh, yeah, I heard about that.

Six hours on, six hours off, and then the Amazon prime documentary called Resurfaced with Andy Murray, Andy Murray's tennis player, Scottish tennis player Ludis Scott. And he gets a hip replacement. That lateral movement means that hips really get tested in tennis players. And he's aging out a little, and they try and do rehab, they try and do surgery, they try and do surgery. It's just not working. And really the only solution, I think, is maybe ceramic socket with a steel joint, but it's not meant for high impact sport. It's very smooth and very reliable, and the outcomes are great, but not if you're pushing it to the sort of steel up against ceramic, like porcelain or whatever it is. It's not gonna last that long. Maybe it's not. And it's just this journey of him going through it, and he's working in his house, just obsessive, just so, like, unrelenting. And those sorts of stories, I think, are really empowering and really enlightening and very inspiring. And it's the ability What I'm really interested in playing with now is the ability to take that kind of inspiration and be like, fuck, I've been kicked in the nuts a good bit this year. All right, you got this, you can lean in, you can do this thing. And then being able to switch it off.

That's right.

I need to be able to switch it off. If I can't switch it off, then I am pressing the accelerator, driving downhill.

Yes.

I'm giving myself more of the thing that I already have too much of.

Yes.

So playing with that tolerance, like a dose dependent inspiration in that way. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's a U shaped curve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You need just too little, you're not doing anything too much, you're wide but tired, like just about the right amount.

It's probably the skill set society needs the most help on right now because everyone is right up to the red actually in the red zone and just there constantly. I think it's probably like a chronic thing of our society.

Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're great. I really appreciate you, I appreciate your friendship. What can people expect next, however long of years, months, what's coming up?

Well, this is my prediction. AI is center stage already for society. It will continue to be center stage. I'm not talking about timeframes of 6 months or 12 months, but like over the next few years it's going to just continually to be evolved to be the primary thing of our attention. And as that happens, we are going to want the stability to understand the world in ways that makes us feel safe, that we have meaning and purpose, that things are stable. And I think this is where don't die will step in. It will be a structurally sound, coherent, emotionally resident ideology and moral philosophy that actually answers the most important questions for us as a species, individually, collectively with AI, with the planet. Like we're just due for a revolution. So yeah, in the coming years, that's what I hope to bring to the world is like that we actually can find coherence in our existence and realize the spectacular nature of this moment. The most precious thing that's ever existed. And it's like really ours, I guess. An invitation to sober up, realize how special this is. And for us, we need to prove ourselves worthy of the future. We oftentimes don't think about. We want to demonstrate our value to our peers, to our co workers, to our family, to our partners. I think that same relationship exists to the future that it really does ask us to rise up. And so I hope above all, I hope I'm a positive influence in people's lives, that when they find themselves in moments of struggle or weakness, they've got somebody in their court saying like, you can do this. And yeah, so I'm just really excited about what's happening. I feel like I've been working my entire life at this moment and I'm excited to play the game.

I'm excited to see what happens, man. Just don't do the fucking. Don't start wearing white robes, grow your hair out. Like, I don't want to see the cult leader pivot, but. But what I do think is cool is the sanguine self awareness thing. I think that's really important to just read it out. You mentioned a couple of resources, like a food guide or something. Are there any cool lead magnet bits that people can snag that.

Yeah, so I'll give you the food guide. I'm also, I'm publishing. I have a website protocol, BrianJohnson code, and I'm hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll repost all my updated stuff. So if you want to just see my journey and what I'm doing now and why, I'll have it there for you. So like a free guide. And I'm also writing a book. So, yeah, don't die. So I'm halfway through and it's basically going to be like hopefully a guide. And then, yeah, I'm trying to make this easy. I know it's a lot. And then also we just raised 60 million for Blueprint. And so.

Oh yeah, what's going on with that? What is that?

Yeah, so basically blueprint is don't die in action. And so in the same way where you say, if I want to go to this destination, I put in an address, go. And it tells me what streets to go down or where's the construction, where's the crashes. Blueprint is going to be basically like AI for your health. It's like you say, I want to be healthy. And we say, come on in, we got you. And so it will take us some time to build that. But that's what I have today with my team of doctors. Like, I just follow a practice where we measure me, we get the data, we look at evidence and we say, do this, do this, do this, do this, doing this at scale exactly. So I don't have to chase all these esoteric hard things. So blueprint is basically like autonomous health for humans where I just say like, I want to be healthy. And you get into a system and now we just run the data evidence, repeat again. So hopefully like, that's like the exciting time.

So it feels like I know you're going back to where you started, back into founder mode. I hope that you who don't take your eye off what the ball is supposed to be with regards to that, like the temptation, man, to be, ooh, we could build it more. This is time. It's good this time. It's for humanity. You go. Well, yeah, service is good, but so is looking after, like serving you first.

Yeah. You know, like the. The one thing I care to accomplish in life, like everything else can go by the wayside. The one thing is what is high status. That's the only game I care to play. And so specifically from the frame of, from the perspective of the year 2500, when they look back at this moment and they're looking at moments to say Plato, Aristotle, Renaissance, they'll say a new era was born of a new status seeking thing. And that's otherwise. The entrepreneurship stuff, I really enjoy it. It's been my jam. But that's not where my I want this to work. I want to be successful. It's actually a practical manifestation, but I have one objective in existence is that.

Fuck yeah. Ryan, I appreciate you, man. Until next time. I'm looking forward to the book.

Thanks, man.

Thank you very much for making it to the end of an entire episode. You are not sufficiently TikTok brained that you've switched off during it. And that's something to be proud of. Maybe that's the best thing you've achieved today and I'm here with you. Why not go 2 for 2 and watch one of my favorite episodes right here?