The Blueprint to Anti-Aging and Longevity with Bryan Johnson

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WHOOP podcast where we're on a mission to unlock human performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of whoop. We got a great guest this week, Brian Johnson, who I'm going to get to in half a second. But first I want to give a big shout out to Patrick Mahomes. Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs that just won the Super Bowl. I was in the stadium for that game. What a gutsy and amazing performance by Patrick, long time WHOOP member. We've been publishing some of his WHOOP data during the super bowl, which to my knowledge is actually the first time in the history of the super bowl that that's been done. And, and Patrick wears whoop 24 7, including during games. So it's pretty fascinating heart rate data. The spoiler is that his body experienced roughly what a marathon would feel like for an amateur athlete. And there's some really interesting heart rate data to go with it. Okay, congratulations, Patrick. This week I am joined by Brian Johnson, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, writer, author, and the founder and CEO of Kernel. I think most importantly, Brian has become obsessed with slowing down the pace of aging. He's been personally following a daily regimen to increase his endurance, optimize his heart health, and even improve his skin, all in an effort to reverse aging. Brian has been able to reverse his age by five years in just two years. So his biological age is meaningfully decreasing. He's slowed his pace of aging by 24%. He has 4.8% body fat as measured by an MRI. He's got over 100 markers that are in the perfect range. And a lot of this stems from his behaviors and habits which we get into. I'll also say that he shared all of his WHOOP data with us and he's been able to increase his HRV by close to 20% in the last three months. He's in the 99th percentile for recovery data, 97th percentile for sleep data. So this is someone who is looking incredibly healthy on WHOOP while also being a hard charging entrepreneur. Brian and I discuss on the podcast his journey as an entrepreneur, his sleep and recovery data, Brian's blueprint health program where he takes hundreds of measurements on his body every quarter and really measures the effect on his organs. It's quite fascinating. The impact of self destructive behavior. This was a big theme. Brian actually talked about removing any notion of his own autonomy in making decisions as they relate to health. He just fully follows a protocol that he set out for himself and you may find that the discipline required to do that is different than you'd perceive it. I thought it was a pretty interesting topic. We get into anti aging. We talk about society at large and the role that that educators, politicians, and more have on wellness. And we also talk a ton about whoop. If you're new to whoop, you can use the code Will, when you check out, get a $60 credit on Whoop Accessories. We just announced new pricing so you can get an annual membership for $239, which is our lowest pricing ever. That's all@whoop.com and without further ado, here is my conversation with Brian Johnson. Brian, welcome back to the WHOOP podcast.

Hey, great to be here again.

So, since we last spoke, I feel like you've become, you know, the. The leading influencer around health and wellness. I don't know if that was an intentional pursuit or not, but you've gotten a lot of traction in the space.

I was just playing around, so it's been surprising.

Well, it's. It's been really cool to, to read all about it and, and to get to dive in on your WHOOP data, which you've given us permission to look at, I guess. Before we. We dive into that, why don't you just explain how you got so into health and wellness lately and a little bit about your background.

It's been a. Health and wellness has been of interest to me since I was young. I was playing high school sports A few years ago, though, I got my pilot's license, and one day I was flying an airplane and I turned on the autopilot and it was stunning how well the plane could fly itself. It had all these different gauges that was monitoring things outside the plane and then making these micro corrections to keep the plane basically motionless in terms of the tilt and yaw. And that was very different from when I was trying to do it, when I was using my hands, when I couldn't maintain the same kind of precision. And I wondered, what if we could build a autopilot system for our bodies and our health that could take care of our health better than we could ourselves? And that kind of started blueprint in that the measurement systems would be, can we measure all organs of the body? Can the organs then speak independently? And with that data, can we reference scientific literature and then develop protocols? And that's what we've done today is I've built, I guess what I call my autonomous self, a system that takes care of my health better than I was able by myself.

Well, we're proud. That whoop's a piece of that. If you take a second just to think about being an entrepreneur and you know, your amazing journey as an entrepreneur, at any point in that process did you feel like you were out of shape, you were stressed, you were, you know, not prioritizing health, or have you always felt like you've had health first.

In building Braintree Venmo, that was in around 2010. The culture then was if you were ragged and were sleeping under your desk and would go nights without sleeping, it was a badge of honor, a source of mythology. And so in the entrepreneurial community, you would be rewarded socially by those kinds of behaviors. And it always struck me as odd that as an entrepreneur you're an athlete of the mind. And I mean really in anything you do in life, you're an athlete of the mind. And so to impair yourself in such severe ways by doing the self destructive behavior just seemed foolish. And so I'm glad that the culture is starting to turn a little bit in greater awareness that it's not seen as a badge of honor, it's really seen as foolishness and that you make inferior decisions when you do that. So now I'd say that the. My priority has been intensely so it was then back in Billy Braintree Venmo was certainly there, but not as nearly as intense it is now.

And it's also worth noting that you're running Kernel, which is a really exciting company. So it's not like you, you know, just have an enormous amount of free time on your hands.

That's right. I mean, every moment of the day is spoken for with something.

So, you know, living a great example as a hard charging entrepreneur. Now let's get into blueprint and what you've actually been able to accomplish. So you're developing your own anti aging protocol, right? That's blueprint. And if I look at some data from your website, you've had a five year age reversal. So this notion of your biological age, you've slowed your pace of aging by 24%. You've got perfect muscle and fat. So that's MRI. Do you want to just describe what is perfect from a muscle and fat standpoint?

Yeah, we did a whole body MRI looking at muscle and fat ratios. And so in, in looking at data sets for optimal clinical outcomes. I was in the 99th percentile for.

Both what's your weight and your percent body fat?

163 is my weight and 4.7% this morning on my body fat.

Wow, you've got 50 plus perfect biomarkers. What would be included in that?

The typical ones that most people are familiar with. Cholesterol, triglycerides, 100 plus markers that are.

Under your chronological age. So if you think about common metrics there, what comes to mind?

One foot standing test, VO2 max, right? Yeah. One single rep bench press distance run in in a 12 minute period of time.

And your body runs three degrees cooler. I actually hadn't heard much about this. It intuitively makes sense. But explain why having your body run cooler is a sign, a good sign.

Part of the protocol is I'm on 25% caloric restriction, so RDA for me is around 2,500. I consume 2,000 calories a day and as a result my body temperature just hangs out in the high nine five points or nine nine five or nine six.

Fascinating. Now you gave us permission to look at your whoop data. So this is Brian versus other males born in 1977. You're in the 99.2 percentile for recovery, which you're also in the 0.8% of recoveries, which is pretty awesome frankly. Your sleep performance of 97%, 18% higher than 18% higher than males in your age group. You rank in the 98th point 6th percentile, which is pretty amazing. You're in the top 1.4% of sleep performance. You spend almost nine and a half hours in bed. That's a pretty remarkable statistic. How did you ramp up your sleep so dramatically?

There's no single thing I do for my health is more important than sleep. I mean it's the number one. It's the number. I mean if, if sleep is right, life is right and when it's off, everything feels worse. And so I, you know, I guess as a, as a family cultural thing, for example, when our bedtime arrives, it doesn't matter what we're doing as a family, what conversation we're having, what movie we're watching. It does not matter what is happening. That moment strikes, everyone runs to their bedrooms. And we do this in a dramatic fashion, in a playful way, but it reminds us how seriously we take sleep and that how conscious existence is depends upon that night's rest. And so I do the things you would expect. I have a blacked out room, I have temperature controlled bed. I fast for, I guess it would be around 10 hours before bed. My resting heart rate needs to be around 46 to 48. I know when I get that right before I go to bed, my, my sleep will be great. I wear blue like blocking glasses two hours before. But I basically, I'm trying to think of all the things I do. I've been fine tuning this for years and you know, having whoop as my feedback mechanism is extremely helpful. I'm trying things every single day and I now have these deep intuitions on what will and won't work. Like when I typically lay down to go to bed, I usually can predict how well I'm going to sleep because I've done this hundreds of times. Sleeping and then seeing the data. And so I now have these models that are pretty accurate.

And you've also created a lot. It seems like you've isolated for a lot of variables. Even just your sleep consistency is remarkably high for an entrepreneur and probably for someone who has to travel from time to time. If you think about variables you've tried that haven't really made a difference or things that you, you kind of sense, oh, if this is this, you know, I'm not going to have quite as good of a sleep. What comes to mind?

I'll tell you a few things that cause negative results in sleep. If I eat certain foods, like heavy carbohydrates, I never do, but when I have in the past, like any breads or pastas, that will result in decreased performance. If I eat too closely to bedtime, that will as well. If I don't have a one hour or so wind down period to get my brain in some kind of stabilized state where it's out of the loops of the daily activities that will also be negative. When I, when I try new therapies, I'm always doing something new at Blueprint and sometimes the first or second time I do a therapy, it will have disruption in my HRV and sleep. And so yeah, there are a few things I watch out for and I try to control for as many as I can.

What would be an example of a therapy?

For example, I tried a new product this week that was using electromagnetism to induce better sleep that sat just below the pillow and it was a 60 minute go to sleep thing. And I did for 20 minutes and I woke up 30 minutes later and I had a headache. And that night I think my deep was something like an hour 20 versus you know, they're on two where it should be.

I, I've tried that pillow product actually. I two, two people who are crazy enough to try that. I didn't have good results either.

Hmm. Yeah. So sometimes it's a initial result and then I can, if I level set over a few days. But yeah, so something like that. But it's nice, you know, I have this feedback device where I can fill it in the morning, but then the data confirms what I'm feeling is, is right.

I imagine you've gotten quite good at feeling what's happened to your body. But what are, what are examples where you've been like a little surprised almost by the results?

I've been working on my HRV for quite some time now, almost doubling it since I started Blueprint. And recently, the past few weeks, I've been using theta waves. So I just listened to the theta waves for a half hour before bed. That's dramatically improved my hrv. So surprisingly, just putting on headphones and listening to this before I go to bed. So.

And what exactly is that?

It's a video on YouTube. It's theta frequency. And I forget, I forget how exactly, I forget how we discovered this, but it's had a sustain, had an initial spike of my HRV and a sustained increase of hrv. And, you know, we've been trying everything for hrv. We, we do the vagal nerve stem, like five or six different devices. And, you know, caloric restriction also has improved it. So we maybe have like 10 or 15 attempts now at improving HRV. And cycling through this one is now a few weeks strong, still going. So these surprising interventions.

Well, we'll include that one in the, in the show notes. And when, folks, when Brian says he's tried everything you can, you can trust that he's trying everything. Well, I've got the data here actually to back this up. So your HRV's risen from 43 to roughly 51 in the last three months, which is, you know, about a 20% increase. So that's a big deal. And it also looks like your REM sleep has improved about 20% over a similar time frame. What do you think is. Is driving that?

I'm uncertain on the rim. I would say that the, you know what it could also be the theta sleep has just been higher quality. Yeah.

Yeah, it could be that.

Yeah. When I first started, I think my earliest whoop data, I think my HRV was hovering in the mid to low 30s.

Yeah. Which is, which is, you know, a lot of these things are somewhat genetic, but going from 30 to, you know, 50 plus is a huge increase. And I think people underestimate as you get older, just in general, your HRV naturally declines. So if you can actually make it go up, that's a, that's another hugely reinforcing perspective on anti aging.

And I'd say, if you looked at my stats initially when I started gathering this on a daily basis, it looks like a profile of, of an entrepreneur, like a, you know, a hard, brain grinding, stressed out person. So it's just taking some time to reconfigure that.

What would you say has been the sacrifice of some of this progress?

I would flip it, flip that question and say, what expansions have I experienced in life because of it? This is. I like to refer to myself as a professional rejuvenation athlete. And when someone looks at how LeBron James is his daily regimen of exercise and taking care of his body and his sleep, not many people are making the observations that he's crazy or that he must be poorly sacrificing things in life. I mean, he's devoted himself to becoming excellent at his profession. It's just in the frame of when you say, okay, this person is an everyday person person, therefore the norms that we apply to them are this and he does that, therefore it's weird. But if you apply that I'm a professional rejuvenation athlete, then you understand my product, my lifestyle may be structured to achieve those objectives. And so weirdly, I'd say most people will like, they, they look at me and they look at this thing and they immediately go in their mind of all the things I potentially lose in life and, and all the things that they would lose in life, like you can't have a bagel for breakfast and your wine with friends and blank, blank, blank. They think it's a. I must be miserable. I must have severe loss of all things, of joy and my life. The reality has been the exact opposite. I've never experienced more joy. I've never been happier. I've never been more fulfilled. I've never had better social environments. I've never had better friends. So it's been entirely expansive to me. It's not been a loss at all.

Well, it's a really helpful framing. I mean, the reason that I think it can be helpful to frame, to introduce the notion of sacrifice is that for people to make a transition like the one you've made, they have to make changes and there's going to be things that they previously enjoyed. Yes, there's a new path to enlightenment that you're describing. Right. But there was, you know, there was probably things in a person's life. Maybe it's drinking beer while watching a football game. You know, maybe it's staying up late and watching a movie. Like there's things like that that someone previously enjoyed that you're suggesting if you can meaningfully shift, you'll come to a new form of enlightenment that'll make you happier.

Exactly. It's like monkey bars. So you've got your hands on two different bars, you let go of one bar, and you need to reach out and grab the next bar. Now, monkey bars are easier because you can see what the target of the next bar is. But oftentimes in life with something like this, you don't know what's going to replace your current sources of stimulation and joy. And so, like you're saying, if it's a beer and watching football, it's very hard to let go of that, that rung and reach out to the next one. You don't know what's going to replace it. So it's really just this fear of loss and not knowing where your source of joy is going to be. But I can tell you my source. It's. It is better being on this side of the equation than the other.

If you think about the, the blueprint program for a second blueprint method, what are, like, what would be, you know, sort of a general summary for people who haven't, who haven't had a chance to research it.

It's the idea that the Fountain of youth is, is a story as old as humanity. And typically it's people in a boat in the jungle traveling to a temple to drink in a magic elixir. And what I wanted to propose was, is the Fountain of youth here right now is just hiding in tens of thousands of scientific publications and a lot of really hard work. And so my team and I, there's 30 of us on this team, we've scoured all the literature, not all like, we've scoured the literature we think is relevant to this project. And we've assessed what we think the highest potential interventions are. And then I've agreed that I'm going to elevate all the organs in my body as they're measured through every measurement modality. Clinical grade protocols are created, and then I follow it with perfection. And so it's a system of measurement, science and protocol that runs my body, not my brain. So I'm not reading blog posts, I'm not listening to the latest advice on blink. It is a system of scientific discovery. And so this first phase has really been about how dramatically can we slow the rate of aging. And that's like you mentioned, it's been 28% that I've slowed how fast I age. As a result, my epigenetic age was reversed 5.1 years. All these other things happened as a result. But I achieved near perfect health in these optical clinical outcomes. Phase 2 of Blueprint is going to be reversing the aging damage that has happened. And so we haven't even got to age reversal yet in our endeavor. It's just been the reductions we've seen have been a result of trying to slow down the rate of aging. And so I think really the summary of Blueprint is the science of slowing aging and reversing the aging damage that has happened is here right now. It's just hiding in publications and extremely rigorous protocols. But as a society it's extremely exciting that it's here. It's not somewhere in the distant future and something that we have to wait for. It's here right now.

What are some of the protocols that go with it? So you mentioned measuring all of your organs, for example. Like what does that process look like?

We take hundreds of measurements every 90 days and that's the ones you would expect. Blood, saliva, stool, urine, mri, ultrasound, fitness test, DNA methylation, microbiome. We test everything we can that we can map to evidence based medicine. So everything is looking at gold standard scientific evidence and then again a clinical grade protocol. But yeah, I mean I, I get poked and prodded and imaged and tested all day, every day. And so we're, and I publish all my data. So this is, we're not saying that Blueprint is the only way this can be done. People can maybe do a better job than what we've done. It's simply trying to demonstrate a process of the measurement, evidence, protocol, process.

And how long have you been doing it for?

Two years.

So in those two years, what would be a few areas where you've seen the most dramatic improvements?

I mean, generally speaking, I've never felt better in my entire life. I was accustomed as an entrepreneur to the peaks and valleys of life. Great days, terrible days. And now my life is extremely consistent and stable. I rarely feel emotional arousal. I rarely get upset over anything. So I'd just say the stability of my life is dramatically improved versus the whipsaw I was on before. My body. I can compete with my boys, my 17 or 19 year old on the basketball court or trail running or whatever. I'm right there with them in every physical form, which is amazing. I have zero aches and pains. Not a single thing in my body hurts. My sleep is wonderfully restorative. I wake up every day feeling energetic and great. I just, I never really, I never thought I could feel this good in Life.

Do you. Do you drink coffee?

I don't. I have. I have a few cups of tea a day.

And they'll have caffeine in them.

Yeah. So it's about 60 milligrams of caffeine per day from a. A green tea concoction.

You measured, you mentioned not feel, not getting upset. And I'm curious if you've introduced some type of meditation or breathing techniques as part of this process.

Yeah, I do. I do have breath work and I've kind of incorporated into my daily life, like, I'll stop throughout the day maybe five to 10 times and breathe for two or three minutes. And again, this is what whoop. Has really helped me. I just. I pull up my heart rate and I can control very. I mean, with great accuracy, where I'm going up and down. And so being able to pull it open and just watch it go down has really helped me calm myself throughout the day. I mean, yesterday, for example, I was. I was with some friends and we were driving and I did something that perturbed the person behind me. I don't know what I did, but they immediately accelerated and got inches away from hitting the back of my car. They had a nice car. And then he's swerving around me, flips me off. Like, he just went into this absolute fit. And I guess it was such a sober moment for me because I thought, this is unbelievable that we as humans, like, we explode in this emotional anger over the slightest slight on the road and, like, we imperil two people to their death. And these cars, like, you know, that are so expensive and, I don't know, just. It made me reflect a lot on our emotional stability as a species, you know, of how it's wild. And I. I felt this. I know this. I mean, it's not really an issue in my life now, but really caught me in the moment of sobriety, of just realizing how wild our emotions are and turbulent they are.

I mean, I imagine that there's got to be some filtering as well of your relationships over the past two years, just listening to you talk about how stable you feel and also how sensitive in some ways you may be to other people who aren't. Like, have you found that you've had to do a little bit of filtering with the way, you know, with your relationships and maybe weed some people out?

I mean, even going back to Braintree, I guess the culture has been inspired by Ernest Shackleton. The culture of the team has always been something that I've cared about the very most in building Teams and we've always had extraordinary people, low drama, low politics, low backbiting. Just a group of extraordinary people trying to do something very hard where 99% of the attention is focused on the task and 1% on the other peripheral stuff behind the scenes. But I'd say that's really how I've built the majority of my life. I just don't have high drama, high politic people in my life. It's just not where I'm at. It doesn't suit me. Well.

And what's your family life like? Married, kids?

Yep. I have one son living with me, he's 17, he's finishing his senior year and we're best friends, we do everything together, we pal around and it's such a rewarding experience to, for him to be growing up in this time and place. And so I just cherish that relationship more than anything. I've got a 19 year old son who's at college and then a 13 year old daughter, middle school, she's with her mother.

Got it. And do you find that they are as equally excited about sleep and good habits as you are? I mean, how have you been able, in a way, if you can figure out how to teach your kids to get bought into this, maybe there's a lesson for the rest of society.

I'll tell you the most effective thing I've done with the kids because for years, for example, I tried to get them to wear sunscreen and they would always just blow me off. And so I have this device at the house in the clinic, it does multispectral imaging. So it gives you 10 or so data points on your face, UV spots, brown reds, pore size, et cetera. And when you get in there, your face, you look like a zombie because it shows you these things you can't see with the naked eye and, and it reveals damage, sun damage. And so I had my children do this and they saw all the damage on their face from the sun that they couldn't otherwise see from their plump, you know, faces. And they were terrified and now they wear sunscreen. So the fastest way to get them to change their behavior has been through measurement, showing them what the effect is on their body when they do a certain thing.

Well, it's funny, the most common messages I get about WHOOP are from people where the product has improved their life directly. But the second most common messages I get are from parents who have their kids on whoop. And they're like, you wouldn't believe this. My son now goes to bed early I don't have to talk to him about it, so. It's very funny.

Yeah. And it's, I mean our data, you know, all of my children have whoop devices, so. And some are better than others. And wearing them, my 17 year old is like me. But it is a common, common conversational topic in the house. You know, what was your recovery? What was your deep, what was your resting heart rate? What was your hrv? And we pattern match it to our lifestyles and what we do together. So it is absolutely a common language that captures our life in ways that we're both, we both care about.

Do your kids have high HRVs?

I will say that we have a team and I'm, I regularly beat them on several things.

Very political answer. It's interesting like I've found that, that teenagers, often teenagers who play sports just genetically have higher HRVs. I think it's something about being that young. But sounds like you're, you're in the mix with them. Have you ever tried wearing blue light blocking glasses before bed?

I do it daily.

Yeah. How long do you wear them before bed?

Two hours.

Yeah, we're in the same camp on that one. That for me was the single biggest game changer for sleep and recovery and I became so obsessed with them. It's in part why WHOOP now has our own blue light blockers because I figured we could design them better and I wanted to be able to control exactly the amount of blue light that we blocked.

Oh, I need a pair.

Oh, I'm going to send you a pair.

Okay. Please.

I'm bummed you're not using the WHOOP ones.

I didn't know you had it, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, we came out with them a few months ago and they actually sold out. But I'll send you a batch and those for those listening. Part of the reason blue light blocking glasses are so valuable is that if you're looking at screens before bed, that could be a television set, that could be a cell phone, it's emitting blue light. And the blue light, to simplify the equation, stimulates your brain to be awake. And so if you can wear blue light black and glasses, it's like a get out of jail free card for looking at screens. And it naturally makes you sleepier. Is that fair, Brian?

That's fair. Yeah. I, I never deviate from one of those. The routine is locked in. Yep. And I, I wouldn't. It's now so a part of the routine. It's just six o', clock. It goes on now.

Do you find that you're like, you don't travel anymore or you have to decline a lot of, I don't know, dinner parties or certain social gatherings because they disrupt the regimented routine that you're on?

I have a much higher bar for what. What will get me out of the house. Yeah. And so I'd say so. I've also started to shift things to other times. So I've been hosting blueprint brunches. I call it the first supper. And so we get together, we talk about health and wellness and the future of being human. I think there's this really interesting conversation if we really zoom out on planet Earth and say what is really happening and what is this moment in time like? Every generation has their opportunities to do something that defines the future generations. And I think now is aging is one of them slowing the rate of aging and reversing aging and in doing that, rethinking ourselves. And so I like the companies like yours that are building these closed loop systems that enable humans to intuitively and with data build themselves into a better life and then take baby steps and do it further and further. But I do think there's a special moment in time we're at right now that we, we can map a different potential, a different horizon of human potential than has ever been possible before. And so I think in, in doing that, social events take on a different meaning to me. You know, going out and doing certain things or it really is about this larger objective of what we can become as a species.

I think you're absolutely right. And, and certainly my perspective on it through Whoop is the, is the fact that we now have sensing and computing at a level that you can continuously measure the body 247 and very quickly figure out the status of an individual or what's working for them or what they need to change about their lifestyle, their behaviors. I do wonder though, if you fast forward, like, are you almost looking at two very distinct populations amongst the, amongst humanity where you have one population that is pushing 100 and kind of accelerating past. Right. And if you were to look at, call it that percentage of humanity, maybe it's 5 or 10% of humanity as a, on a percentage basis, their age is so much older than the prior top 5 or 10%. Right. So you're like pulling this, this top end of society up. Like if you keep doing what you're doing and barring no accidents, like I think there's a legitimate case to be made, you could live to be 120 or something like that. But on the flip side, you also have all these indicators that are incredibly negative. Right. Like we can blame this in part on Covid, but for the first time in about 40 years, life expectancy declined in the United States over the past two years. You do see obesity increasing. You see cardiovascular disease increasing. You know, what do you make of this? Do you agree with the way I'm thinking about it or do you think there's potential to pick all of society up and bring everyone along for this age reversal?

I like to think about this in terms of self destructive behaviors. So every day when we navigate the world we need to, in driving to work, we need to pass McDonald's and Starbucks that has the sugar drinks and you know, 50 other possible temptations of engaging in some kind of self destructive behavior. Food that we know is not going to be good for us, it's going to lead to bad things. And then we need to navigate social media algorithms, TikTok and others. Then we need to navigate streaming late up to the night and then drinking with friends and then, and then late nights without friends. We have a culture of self destructive behavior that is cheered on by our social norms and it's people looking for arousal in the forms of food and digital algorithms and whatever else. And I don't know how to measure this, but if you say on the timescales of human history how much self destructive behavior is being committed on a daily basis by the human race and is it potentially higher than it ever has been just because it's never been easier to engage in these behaviors and they've never been more powerfully addictive. Which goes back to the first of our conversation. When someone looks at me and they say, oh man, you must be miserable. That's a defense mechanism of saying, I'm not sure if I want to move my hand from this, this rung of the monkey bar to the next one because I don't know where I, what I can grab a hold to that's going to give me my form of pleasure. And so to me it really is a defining attribute of our time is how addicted we are as a society to these self destructive behaviors. And it's invisible to us because we celebrate it and endorse it by and by ostracizing people who don't participate in it, like me.

And I actually saw that like, you know, as you came out with blueprint and you know, my gut reaction if you had told me, hey Will, I've come up with Blueprint, I'm really focused on longevity as Someone who's been in the space for, like, over a decade. I would think that'll be generally received warmly or it'll generally be received by people who are interested in it or curious in it. But I think you're. You saw a lot of media backlash, am I right? Like, maybe talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, yeah. This was really a. I was just messing around with blueprint. When I started, it was like this open question, where are we with the fountain of youth? And I started blogging about it publicly, and I started sharing all my data. I'm like, hey, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm trying out. And then this article just blew up. And it was like it had 100 kilotons of raw energy underneath it, and it lit and it just blew up in every direction. And so, yeah, the amount of vitriol and hate was unreal. And to be clear, I loved every second of it. Like, you know, the. The hate makes me so happy. All the blowback made me happy. It was such a beautiful thing. And it. It's not. I mean, it certainly I was a part of the conversation, but I think what's really happening, there's a lot of internal dialogue going on with people, and they're just saying it out loud and using me as the foil. But this is very deeply interwoven in people's psyche and society's psyche. So the conversation is not so much about me, it's about society and each person inside their own head.

When you say you loved it, what did you love about it? Like, it just gave you a sense, like a. A sense of resolve and a sense of energy for what you're doing.

It makes me laugh. I mean, I find it so funny. I mean, it's like, for example, when I hear people say they don't dare look at the comments section, you know, on a video on YouTube, because the comment section is typically brutal. I mean, don't we all have a comment, an equal comment section in our brains about our own selves? Like, don't we walk away from interactions and say, I can't believe I said this, or I shouldn't have said that, or I was so bad at this? I mean, aren't we doing the same thing to ourselves all the time? And it's just a macro phenomena of what we already experience? And so to me, this is just how. It's a beautiful mapping of the craziness of being human.

What's. What was the. The rudest thing someone said?

I actually made A list. My team and I went around the Internet and we found the sharpest insults and like some of these, like you could tell people put a lot of effort into like constructing the most hurtful possible thing. And I put a list together and I shared all of them. I'm trying to think of some good ones. There were some pretty good zingers. I mean a lot of people, they'll comment on my appearance, you know, saying I look like a vampire or recently an elf from the Lord of the Rings. I need to think, I need to go through the list. There were some pretty good zingers in there.

Okay, well, you know, the cultural piece that you talked about eloquently, I think rings true. I mean the, if someone's really going to attack you for this way of life, they're also saying to themselves that they have to have certain things that you're not, you're now not doing. And so it is, it is an internal dialogue happening out loud or on Twitter or wherever. A lot of these comments are surfacing. And you know, the way you're living is very disruptive. Right? In, in the, from a cultural standpoint, you're, you're saying, I don't need all of these things. I don't need these little chocolates, I don't need these types of meals, I don't need a disruptive bedtime for social activities, I don't need alcohol, I don't need smoking, I don't need, you know, all these different things. And instead actually I'm going to use my free time to enhance a lot of aspects of my body. I mean, people are reacting to the fact that they're not spending any time enhancing their body. And in fact, when they get free time, they're going to lean into a destroy. You know, what you are now defining as a destructive experience. So your, your way of life is. They find very threatening, I imagine.

Yeah. This. And to be clear, the expectation with blueprint is not that people are going to do what I do. It's hard and they don't have the infrastructure I do. So it's an unfair situation. What I'm trying to point out is the insanity of our current society and specifically it is unfair for us to imagine an individual being able to navigate the terrain of self destructive addictions that get thrown at them on a daily basis and expect them to be able to somehow win in this gauntlet. It is crazy. We cannot expect people to survive the addictive tendency, the addictive things that hit, get hit on them every single day. And so we need to approach this blueprint needs to be enabled by default in society. It just needs to be the norm. And so this is the interesting thing I posed this question at these blueprint brunches is I posed a thought experiment. Imagine if a system, you could sign up for a system that was personalized to you and it would take care of you entirely. Like you just have to say yes. And saying yes means you have to follow the protocol, which means you go to bed when the protocol says you eat the foods. The protocol says you just abide by it generally. Now there's going to be some trade offs you're going to have to make in life but in exchange you get as perfect health as you could potentially achieve. So a system takes better care of you than you're able to. Would you say yes to that deal? And this is where we're going. I mean I've proven it with myself is my system does in fact do a better job taking care of me than I'm able by myself. And so it is expensive right now and it's going to come down on the cost curve but eventually it's going to get to a society like we're all going to face this question, do we say yes to this? Now you can take that in a dystopic way, you can take that in a utopic way. There's so many follow on conversations. But the basic principle is true, is algorithmic abilities increasingly get better and taking care of our health and wellness is a very natural step. It's an obvious step, it's an inevitable step. And I've just proven it out to show proof of concept.

Yeah, I love the way, I love the way you're, you're describing it and just the, the general openness you also have to the rejection of it. We haven't talked that much about diet, which I imagine is a big component and I, I've got some notes here on it. But why don't you describe what your diet looks like today?

It's caloric restriction. So that means 25% less than my RDA. So 2,000 calories a day. It's three meals a day from 6am to about 11am So I eat in roughly a five to six hour window and it's for breakfast I have a few pounds of vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, ginger, garlic, lentils, black lentils. And then I have mid morning, I have a pudding which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseeds, pomegranate seeds, berries, sunflower, Lechen, cinnamon, and then a third meal of the day which is vegetables, berries, nuts and seeds. And so it's vegan by choice. I mean certainly it does not say anything about meat other than this can be done on a vegan diet. Others potentially do their own version. And then I take 104 supplements. And so the objective with this is again the algorithm of how do you, if you measure every organ of the body and you inquire of every organ or what do you need to be ideal? And then it outputs its needs list by sharing the data in terms of imagery or function. And then we take all the inputs of food and supplements and we try to create that perfect diet. And so it's entirely a closed loop system that is fed on data.

So the supplements vary based on the results.

That's right.

And how dramatically do they vary? Like will you go from taking a lot of 1 to 0 of it?

This point it's fine tuned. And that's why I share, I mean I've spent millions of dollars building this and I share all of it for at no cost with everybody. Anybody can implement Blueprint and I share all the recipes, all the supplements. In fact, since this is, you know, exploded, nobody can buy stuff anymore. Like everyone's sold out for months of everything. And so it's kind of frustrating. But yeah, it's pretty stable and fine tuned at this point.

Is it possible for you to pinpoint some of the key supplements that you feel like made? Like if you could only have five of the hundred, would it be easy for you to pick those five?

Yeah, people often, I mean that's a great question. And people are wisely looking for power laws. And when they start going into this conversation, my mind immediately goes to, okay, if you are expressing an interest in doing something, number one, stop self destructive behavior. There's no better thing you can do for your health than stopping self destructive behavior. Because we know this, we go to the gym, we do well and then afternoon comes, or like, you know, I worked out this morning, I'll have a second helping or I'll have this dessert because I worked out this morning, like it, it leads to these kind of behaviors. So one, stop the self destructive behavior, prioritize sleep, you know, do something about exercise and eat more vegetables, berries and nuts. But oftentimes I find that people want to get into these highly technical debates, NR versus NMN or this supplement versus that supplement. Meanwhile they're syncing with the self destructive behavior, not getting sleep. And so it's better to focus the attention on getting the basics right than someone trying to soothe their own suffering by feeling like they're doing something by taking the supplement. It sometimes leads to worse outcomes.

Well, I, I appreciate the way you're framing this because the headline is 102 supplements. But what you're essentially saying is that's kind of an afterthought if you don't, you know, if you don't nail sleep, exercise and diet.

That's right.

If we take a, a different direction for this conversation, what do you like, what do you feel is society's role, the government's role, like in better education, around health and well being. I mean, even as, as you were just describing your diet, I was thinking about how fucked up that food pyramid is. You know, and I'm sure you've looked at this, maybe you can even describe that for our audience. But just the way that like there's just been so much misinformation around what's good for you and what's bad for you.

I mean we are, I think there's a sport of complaining about politicians and their worthlessness. But aren't politicians just a mirror to us? Aren't they just showing us back in our own reflections? And so aren't they enacting the policies that we are responsive to? And if that's the case, then what does it say about us and that we are creating the same problem or complaining about? And in doing this for myself and trying to solve my own problem of self destructive behaviors, it was very counterintuitive because the solution was to remove my mind as the problem solver. So I know when my mind gets engaged of looking at a menu, trying to decide what to eat, or going to the pantry and perusing or going to the grocery store. My mind is so prone to selecting self destructive behaviors, its power is uncheckable. Right. It's like it's always doing bad things. And so when I agreed to blueprint it was, I agree, my mind no longer has authority because I know when my mind does, it's going to make the wrong decision more than half the time, easily, if not higher bounds there. And so I remove my mind as a problem solving thing. So your question, how do we think about this as a society and government and the government's recommendations? I would say the human mind is potentially the biggest stumbling block to the human race. The exact thing which we think is meant to solve all of our problems may be the thing causing all of our problems. And I've proven that with myself. Like I, I had this goal alignment problems within Brian. I had my. I was balkanized and at war with myself, inside of me, with all my organs. And once I was able to allow them to speak and to then do goal alignment with the self, I achieved world peace inside of me. And that's the first time in my entire life I'd done that. Versus my mind being a tyrannical force of authority jamming itself around all over the place. And so to me, it really is. I don't think there's any like, simple policy or changing the food pyramid or this politician doing that thing. It's. I think it is genuinely a moment in time where we can reconsider ourselves as a species and imagine things we've never done before.

Well, it was a really beautiful way you described that because in a sense, like, I'm listening to you and I'm reading about you, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, he has this enormous discipline. But the way you're framing it, it's almost like you've just turned off, you know, an aspect of your own autonomy and you're just following now the script. And that's taking you to the promised land.

Exactly right.

And it's. There's a fascinating. I mean, there's a fascinating, fascinating psychology in that.

So, I mean, like I. If you want to do the experiment yourself, like, I had this. My biggest issue was Nighttime Brian. From 5pm to 10pm that version of Brian was an absolute rascal. So the day would come to an end. I would feel the stresses of being a founder entrepreneur. I would, you know, have a fight with the partner after putting. Bathing the kids and putting them to bed. And then all the stresses of whatever's happening in life. And then I would be feeling, you know, right, we know this feeling, like feeling awful. And I would try to soothe my pain with food and overeat, eat the wrong kind of stuff until I was sick. And I couldn't stop my behavior. It was just. I was out of control. No matter what I tried, I couldn't stop it. And so I playfully one day said, evening, Brian, you're fired. You are no longer authorized to eat food no matter the situation. It doesn't matter if it's a birthday party, you, your kids party, a special occasion, it doesn't matter. You cannot eat food anymore. Cause you have shown to be totally unreliable and you ruin life for everyone else. Morning, Brian. Sleep, Brian. Everyone else is miserable because of you. And what I saw on a daily basis is when 5pm rolled around, evening Brian would show up like, hey, everyone, I'm here. How about just today? What about just a little bit? What about, let's just test this one little experiment. And I got to see him in action. And I would say, no, Ethan Brian, you are destructive. You're manipulative, you're just, you're a monster, you know, And I'd watch in my mind, I'd watch him fall on the floor and throw a tantrum and punch a hole in the wall. He would be so offended because his authority was revoked. But having this internal dialogue of realizing all this chaos that was happening inside of me was so illuminating. And so I've then deconstructed the rest of myself. And so if you want to see yourself, like, try to take that introspective approach and watch, watch yourself in action. It's a really interesting movie.

Well, behavior change is something we think a lot about at Whoop. And I'm often asked, oh, how did you begin? Ex habit. People ask me a lot about meditating because I've done it for a while and I always say, like, do it every day. And in some ways my. Because people, well, could I start three times a week. And I say, if you do it every day, it's not a choice. Right. And if you have to have choice in the matter, it actually makes it harder. And in a lot of ways, what you're describing is a very extreme version of that. I'm curious, was there, was there a step in between, you know, removing all autonomy? Was there, was there some form that, like, was there some, maybe more of a discipline oriented muscle that you tried to flex into this and then realized, no, I just have to remove all autonomy?

Yeah. The first step was identifying the worst version of myself, which was evening Brian, and then mapping out a specific plan. So this, you name the person you identify when they show up, you identify all of their arguments and then you identify the rebuttals. You're going to say, you just read through the script and you need to build the intuition and power over time because you're going to lose the argument sometimes, like, even though, you know evening Brian's going to show up and they start, you know, he starts putting forward his arguments, you're going to lose initially. A few times you're like, okay, let's do your experiment. Maybe it's going to work. And so once you tackle that portion, then it's just taking these small building baby steps into building up the scaffolding. And so just a win or two a day and get you enough momentum where you can finally get to a point and be like, you know what? I'm good. This whole thing is mapped out into a system. I fully realize that every time I give myself freedom of choice in these situations, I'm more likely to lose than not. And what's been interesting about this whole pattern is I now the idea of eating fast food, junk food, bad food is repulsive to me. So people oftentimes ask you, are you, do you get a cheat day? Do you want a cheat day? How do you stop? I don't want to do it. It sounds awful to me.

Yeah. And that's being fully on the other side. I get it. I think there's a lot of really interesting psychology behind what you're doing as well in terms of thinking about destructive experiences, thinking about your own relationship with yourself and autonomy. But I mean, overall, I love that you're putting all this out there. It's awesome that you're on WHOOP in the process. So big fan of that. Anything you want to leave us with? Like where can people find more information about you and blueprint?

Yeah. I would say that the final thought I'd have is the community that you guys have built at WHOOP is a unique opportunity in that I would imagine the characteristics of people who wear your devices are those who are generally more disciplined, they're interested in well being, they're bringing their a game to life. That's not true. Life is very hard and many people are in difficult circumstances. I would imagine you have this, this interesting group of people and if we're posing this question, you know, in parallel to humans, we're building this new form of intelligence in AI that is improving at a staggering rate. And if we say, how could we put humans on a growth curve that is compounding? Because our growth curves are very different. We make the same mistake thousands of times in our life, which is weird, as the most intelligent species on the planet. That's crazy. We do that. What's interesting to me about WHOOP is if we really start your community is if we really begin imagining what is possible with the human race. You've got a group of people that if we built this closed loop system of improvement where they were no longer committing self harm and these protocols could be implemented at the speed of scientific discovery in real time. You're building the next version of human in real time at a rate that is compounded. And even if we can't expect everyone to do that, that's just not realistic in society. But if we can show it's possible and show proof of concept and paint the excitement that then gives the willpower to rebuild society around these new norms. Because humans are incredibly good at norm keeping if the norm is to go to bed at the same time. If you get social rewarded for going to bed at the same time or eating your vegetables, people are really good at that. It's just when the non norms which are hard. And so I guess I like what you're doing Will at woop. And I hope that we can, we can provide proof of concept demonstrations that will begin to change what we want to aspire to. Because really, you know, with our generation in the early 21st century, what do we aspire to as a species? We just, we haven't answered that question and it's high time we do. It's right there in our front of our face and we can pose it and we can start making our answers.

Well, thank you for that. And you know, it's interesting to think about how WOOP has changed people's behaviors against destructive experiences. The most profound, one of the most profound things is around alcohol, where we just see a massive reduction of alcohol consumption from people on whoop. And that's not us like screaming at people, don't drink alcohol. Although, you know, there are some recommendations. It's just the people see it in their WHOOP data and that is a meaningful enough nudge to say, okay, I'm going to drink a little less tonight or I'm going to drink a little less this week. And there's other examples, but as I was listening to you talk about the WOOP community and this idea of just accelerating the curve towards longevity, I think there's going to be so many opportunities and even how we think about adding new features and new software and new insights has a huge eye towards that. So, Brian, thank you so much for coming on the WHOOP podcast. Quickly tell us where people can find information on blueprint.

Yeah, blueprint. BrianJohnson Co all the information is there for you to follow and make your own improvements. And then I hang out primarily on Twitter.

What's your Twitter handle?

BrianJohnson Great.

Well, we'll put all of that in the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for being on WHOOP and for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, and thank you guys for building a great product.

Thanks, brother. Thank you to Brian Johnson for coming on the WHOOP podcast, giving us that lens into the Blueprint program and his insights on longevity and aging. If you enjoyed this episode of the WHOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on Social Whoopill Ahmed if you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us podcast.com call us 550-844-3452. And with that, stay healthy and stay in the green.