The Bryan Johnson Podcast

What's up Brian?

Glad you're here.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Of course.

Yeah. It's a bit surreal being in the home. I was just watching several videos of about the last 48 hours. Basically getting up to speed with all your newest developments in your biohack. Do you call yourself a biohacker or do you hate the term?

I moved away from it. I use the term rejuvenation athlete.

Ah, okay. Yeah, typically I don't know if there's like a subsect of the anti aging community that calls themselves biohackers or what, but it's definitely gotten a bit of a connotation that could be seen as negative or a bit out there.

I mean I walked in and the names there was like tech bro, biohacker. What are the other. The menu of options. None of them seemed appealing so I figured I, I needed to create a different nomenclature for it.

Has anyone adopted the same nomenclature as you?

They have. They. Yeah, that website. Rejuvenation Olympics.com.

Oh right, right.

Yeah. So I, I tried to create some standardized way to make a measurement that people can compete on. But right now how do you know if you're winning in the game of longevity? And I wanted to make a sport out of it and yeah, we launched it I think almost a year ago now. And it's interesting that it's a pretty significant social standing indicator. I mean people who make the leaderboard, it's a big deal and they, yeah, they put all their muscle behind it of shouting to the world that where they're standing is. So yeah, it's actually worked.

How many people are entered now because I know it only shows the top whatever and presumably there's far more obviously. How far deep does it go?

I haven't had an update for a while. It was significant. I think over a thousand.

Oh nice.

Yeah, I mean and to, to do so you need three measurements over six months. So it's not a lax. You know, it's not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of rigor so that, that many people would be willing to play the game I thought was pretty cool.

So three measurements over six months of the like what are the metrics of which you deem acceptable criteria?

The speed of aging. We're just looking at true diagnostics. Denudin pace. This is their third gen clock and so we're just looking at speed of aging. The methyl. Methylation score.

So they have two products. I think one is like a more elaborate. And is that the one you need to be Getting to hit the criteria.

Mark, it's the lower cost one they have, I think the primary test they do extrinsic age and then intrinsic age and then speed of aging. We just use speed of aging for that leaderboard.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, I would love to dig into that deeper. But first, I feel like before I get off to the races.

Yeah. Diving into this stuff went in fast.

A quick bio would be worthwhile. Although I'm sure many people here watching already know who you are and what you're about and what you've been up to. But just for the audience who's new to your stuff, who is Brian Johnson and how did you end up in this position where you're, you know, trying to defy the laws of aging? I suppose.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's been really fun with my identity being different. Different things. So I was accustomed previously in life where people knew me and those who knew me knew me very well. And so I wasn't accustomed to trying to package myself in a few sentences. And then, of course, as you do things in life, then your identity gets distributed a bit more, and then you get to some point where you're just known by the headlines, so none of the details matter. You're just whatever headline reads. And the majority of the people in. In the world know me by headlines.

Yeah.

And very few understand me by the other stuff. So it's been a fun evolution. I never thought I'd be a headline person in life.

And I can just imagine it gets tougher at scale to steer it the way you'd want it.

There is no way to control just goes out there. And so that's the other thing is it's really been this invitation to be accepting of being misunderstood, that you're never going to be understood and people are always going to not fully understand who you are, what you're trying to do, and just to be okay with that, because if you really get hung up trying to wrestle control, it's a losing battle and it just creates way too much angst. So, yeah, I mean, the short bio is that I became an entrepreneur at 21. I started building various companies and I sold my company, Braintree Venmo, at 34. I made a few hundred million. I sold it for 800 million. I made a few hundred million of that. I then posed this question, how can I be useful to the human race?

See, it's interesting with the headline thing too, because I see all over billionaire and it's like, not that there's like, what's the difference in quality of life between these numbers. At the end of the day, it's all kind of the same, I guess. But it's like to make their headline, they will twist and turn it to make it more appealing and make it out like you're some sort of like, evil genius entrepreneur that has unlimited amounts of money.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

The media gets everything about 75% wrong.

Right?

It's like. Like roughly, just like generally this thing happened in this rough direction. But sure, accuracy is just not their thing. So, yeah, I made the money then. And then the first thing I did was I wanted to become familiar with Deep Tech and with this idea that I held a whole bunch of dinners and I got really smart people together and I tried to understand what they thought was happening in the world. Where is the future? Because it's really hard to discern. Where's the edge of possibility at any given time? You need to be really plugged into people doing that. Otherwise there's just no information access. And so I stumbled upon Deep Tech and this idea that can you actually take atoms, like the basic building blocks of reality, and can you build stuff like Legos? Now? Of course, we didn't really know the atoms existed until a very short time ago, and now we have the ability to manipulate them. And so I invested, for example, in this company, Newmat in Chicago. They use a technology called metal organic frameworks, and they build atomic structures to do amazing things, whether it be how to create higher density of storing gases, or whether it's a filter to get to filter out chemicals, or take your application to. You just build these elaborate structures. And so this company is the first one in the world to bring about this new technology that's been one of those promising areas of precision chemistry for the past few decades. And now they're scaling it in all sorts of applications. I made investments in them and about 42 other companies that.

And do they approach you to angel invest because of your previous relevant, overlapping experience or, like, how does this come about that you could have 43 opportunities thrust on your doorstep that are like, contextually exactly what you want to be about initially?

I mean, because I was coming from payments, you know, Braintree, Venmo, and so showing up to Deep Tech. I think initially when I was having the conversations, it was probably like, what's happening? Why are you in my neighborhood doing this stuff? But I remember I met up with Jason Kelly, one of the first investments I made. He's the founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. I think there's five founders, and they're now the world leader in synthetic biology. And so the coolest thing about synthetic biology is you basically can program biology like a yeast cell to do something that otherwise you'd go through a normal manufacturing process. Like you'd plant plants, harvest the plants, and get the yield from the plants. Instead, you just program a yeast cell to produce what you want it to produce. And you eliminate having to plant and fertilize and water and harvest. So it's incredibly powerful because now we can take on problems like if the coral reef is dying in the ocean because it's more acidic and it's hot, how would you design coral reef so it survives in a new environment? And they now have these tools like design coral reef. We didn't have that before. And so I met up with Jason Kelly and he's like, here's how we program biology. And he pulled up his laptop and he showed me his tech stack. And I thought, wait a second, that's my brain tree stack. That's how we build code to do payments. You're doing the same thing with DNA. That's amazing. So it was this easy map me to say I've built tech before. He's treating biology like tech now, and I can see the match. And so on the spot, I'm like, yep, 250 grand. Let's go. And then I led their next round. But, yeah, I was first money in that company and they're now the global leader in synthetic biology. So I got a few good wins. And what it taught me is what's cool is Da Vinci was remarkably creative because he could just sketch. And his mind, he was so creative, he had this boundless curiosity of doing whatever. We now have the ability to basically create all the imaginations we have where DaVinci could just sketch. Now we can build these things from the atomic level. And so I spent my first few years post that acquisition investing in deep tech, trying to get a degree in all the deep tech sciences.

Okay. And then transitioning from that into the hardcore rejuvenation athletics. How does that pivot happen?

Yeah, so after I did OS fund, I actually jumped into a brain interface company.

And because there's a big gap between 34 selling and now you started at 43, the hardcore rejuvenation stuff like this.

Which is, you know, this was the thing when I was going through the contemplation process whether to sell, you know, we had an offer on the table I would walk away from with 300 million. And my true passion was Trying to do something that would legitimately improve the human race on a scale where I could imagine some few in a few hundred years. The contribution is appreciated by our ancestors, and it's what I respect from people who I learn about. And I knew that trying to put my finger on that sort of thing would take me at least a decade, because you have to go out and find something incredibly unique. Then you need to spin up something you've never done before. And that just takes time. And so at 34, if I would have hung, you know, kept the company, we probably could have made a lot more money. I probably would have made billions. But I would have done so at the cost of time. And so maybe I would have been my late 30s, maybe my early 40s. And I really wanted to get after this project. So, yes, it took me 10 years to figure out, to answer that question, what one thing can I do that would potentially meaningfully impact the human race for hundreds or even thousands of years?

And over that time horizon, though, you have the money from the sale at 34, and then you're contemplating for nine years while you're actively sort of dipping your toes in, or how has it kind of come to be?

Yeah, so I, I sell the company, I make the money, and then I start playing with how can we engineer physical reality? Atoms and molecules, organisms, biology. Then I started a brain interface company. And the idea was we succeed as a species because we can engineer reality. If you look around us in this room, this is an engineered physical reality with doors that are certain sizes, windows that are a certain way. Things are manufactured according to spec. And this helps us live predictable lives. Water is going to be clean because it's clean according to spec. I wondered, could we imagine evolving our own cognition as a species if we could evolve our minds according to engineering and scientific standards? Because right now you could take a blood draw and see where you're at. That's really helpful. But it's very hard to get your brain measured. You can do an MRI or something, but it's hard, it's expensive. You're in a coffin, like, environment. Nobody wants to do it. And I wondered, can you make brain measurement easy? And if you can, then you could pose all these basic questions about reality. Like, you know, is blank good for my brain is like all, like thousands and thousands of questions. And so we built the world's first mass market brain interface. And so think of it like FMRI as bike helmet. It took us seven years. I invested $64 million in the company. We built A chip from scratch, which was really hard to build. Like, that is one of the hardest things you can do. And we got it to work. So now we're in clinical trials with cognitive decline and depression. And so, yeah, I did my fun. I did a brain interface. And then along the way of doing that brain interface, I started playing around with my own body of if I'm going to rigorously measure my brain, then can I also do it with my body? And then that led to the pulling this in full circle to this thing of could this be the singular thing that I identify that is my life's work of don't die. Basically where I landed. And so, yeah, it took me 10 years to kind of get here. And I think it's a reasonable hypothesis. I think it took me a lifetime to arrive at this point. Yeah, I've been working towards this my entire life.

Awesome, man. Yeah, that's very cool. I didn't know the full backstory. One thing I did, before I forget, I can't ignore the fact that you posted like 2 hours ago about injecting your penis. I didn't want to say at the start of the podcast. I knew it would probably get us demonetized too, and it was just a hard detour. But. So could you tell me about how you arrived at the, I don't know, epiphany that penis enhancement was worth pursuing? Because it's certainly not like anti aging really. It's more, if anything, confidence. That is almost an unjustifiable insecurity for many men who have average measurement to begin with. So it's like often an ego thing too. Not even like a real practical use of time.

Yeah.

So what is the thought process behind this?

Well, we, with blueprint, we've endeavored to measure every organ of my body, and no one's done that before. It's really hard.

So what's the measurement?

Measurement stuff. Yeah, that's very good. Well played. So doing blood is easy. Doing blood really well is hard. But when you start going into imaging and fitness tests and all the other thousands of tests, that's very hard. And so that's really where we've excelled as an endeavor, is I've become the most measured person in history. And so the penis is a really important organ. And so it's a pretty critical thing to us as a species. And so is this going to be.

Published on the website with the before and afters and everything, or is it just going to be the delta of change?

I mean, you know, I have to call My mom. I need to see how she feels about it.

Sure.

I do call her every week. And I'm like, mom, just so you know, here's what I did this week.

Yeah, yeah.

So that her friends don't surprise her. Of like, your son, you know, he's in a pretty conservative community.

Sure.

But the. So the penis is really important. And so we. We were talking as a team, and we wondered, what if we were trying to get the most quantified penis in the world?

Well.

What would you do? Like, how would you actually measure penis function? And so we just laid it out, and I think we came up with about seven different things we could do that measures penis and sexual function. And then we did all those things. So we started with nighttime erections. We have a. You know, that's not something people are familiar with, but the little cube you put in the shaft of your penis, it sits at the base. You go to sleep, you don't even know you're wearing it. And it measures the duration of your erections and the number of erections. And there's a good age calculator, so you can determine based upon that data what your biological. Well, yeah, your biological age is for erection. For erections. And also it's a representation of physiological, mental, and physical and cardiovascular health. And then we did extensive ultrasound measurements. So I got the injection in the penis that creates an erection, which I would never do again. It was painful. It made me sick. I think we would just do, like, manual stimulation next time. It would be a better way of doing it. But we did all kinds of ultrasound measurements looking at blood flow. I did a max urination speed. I did. I maxed out how much I could store in my bladder. We. I took three different surveys on sexual health and penis function. I think there's one or two more I'm forgetting, but basically, yeah, we just did everything we could to measure. And then we said, okay, so now we have this quantification. What are the. The therapies that actually rejuvenate the penis? And we found focused shockwave therapy, and that was primarily used for people with ed. And then same with this Botox. And then. Then there's a few things you can do.

Aren't the results of that kind of contingent on you having poor cardiovascular health to begin with, though? Like, how much could it take somebody who's in optimal health baseline to.

You're exactly right. Yeah. So this is the thing is, and we've seen this with many things, is once you achieve a certain level of optimization, some Things don't stack. And so yes, the focus shock wave was basically for ed correction and then the Botox, but also it increases penile length, but also includes, you know, improves blood flow. And so I mean the thing that I'm trying to do with this right is blueprint is a rigorous scientific study. We're also having fun. And so if you just pose the question, it's fun, like how would you quantify the penis of a function and then how would you actually rejuvenate the penis? And so it is just play for us. But we are doing it in a scientific fashion with data.

What's the delta between average erection duration during sleep for a young vital 19 year old or you know, peak male versus elderly?

Yeah, 3 hours and 30 minutes would be an 18 year old marker. I'm 2 hours and 30 right now, so I need to increase it by a full 60 minutes. Sure, yeah. And that's what we're wondering is will the combination of these therapies have a kickback effect?

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That's. That was my baseline.

Oh, okay.

Gotcha. Yeah.

See the thing that's tough with this stuff though is it's like so contingent on other conflating factors like hormones. So if you're calorie deprived and your testosterone levels are suppressed, obviously that's going to have an effect on it. If you are, I don't know, even your temperature at nighttime, if you're trying to be as cold as possible, the vasodilation capacity is going to be lower. There's so many things that. And even if you were to implement interventions like tadalafil, I'm blocking PDE5 and I'm getting better, stronger, longer erections, you could just be band aiding the the real root of the issue to some extent if there was an issue and inflating your biological age perception of that organ. So it's like how do you make sense of these things to even justify it as worth your time? I suppose aside from the fun.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. We try to hold as many variables constant as we can and so. I agree. So bed temperature is going to be a factor there. So it's constant. So whether it has an effect or not, it's still constant throughout the measurement period. The diet is constant. So we do try to control for these compounds. We realize it's not a perfectly controlled experiment. Definitely some variability and that's the trade off space we've accepted that given that we're moving as fast as we are and I'm N of 1, we're trying to tease out what we can with these experimental therapies but fully aware that we are shy of a perfect experimental condition.

Now I know you've been doing this for a few years now, but more public facing with high exposure factor for maybe a year and a half or so. How long do you give a therapy with no factors change in any other subcategory of what you're doing with yourself lifestyle wise to actually give it a shot. So there's no contraindications, there's no cross contamination of results etc we usually try to replicate papers.

Okay, yeah, I guess as a baseline to understand what we did at Blueprint it's really pretty simple. We looked through every single health span and lifespan study ever done. We ranked them according to effect, and then we graded the evidence and we said, can we take all the power laws of all the scientific evidence ever done and implement them in me as an experiment to say, where are we at with the, you know, science of anti aging? And then we did that. We put that into a family of blueprint products for others to consume. And it's, I think it's an interesting question if you just say in the year 2024, where are we at? And so, yeah, we played the power law game. And so if something, something's down on like the 100 or 200 level spot, and there's thousands of those things, we typically don't even pay much attention to it because it's just too much effort. The evidence doesn't cross a certain threshold.

So with that being said, though, how do you justify implementing things that are experimental research chemicals? Because sometimes you will implement something like epitalon for potential telomere lengthening properties, but it's like, didn't even pass FDA approval. Not that that's the end all, be all, of course, but sometimes there'll be things being implemented that are like, legitimately not founded in trials with no efficacious dose really established for humans with a set duration of exposure. But then there will be certain kind of like tried and true things that maybe don't meet the criteria too. And then people are left wondering, why did this not make it? But then these things that the most exotic things possible, that typically only a bodybuilder who's high risk or a biohacker would go try.

We grade these things according to their safety profile and then the potential effect size and then the ease of implementation. And so, for example, what's one? Oh. So doing the thymus rejuvenation was really hard. It took us probably six months. So the HGH was easy. That's easy to get an rx. But then the MRI and doing the computational reconstruction of the thymus was really hard. We had to employ two specialists and write our own code to do that. So it was just the entire project. And we thought it was interesting. So even though it didn't rank on the power laws in our initial research, we thought thymus rejuvenation was so interesting and so powerful, it was worth a shot.

So there's a novel factor as well that has to be accounted for.

It's not just exactly, okay, yeah, so I mean that. So that's a really good summary. Like we did the power law thing, but then we also carve out these unique paths where we think no one.

Else is going to test it.

Exactly. And like if we actually do something interesting, could it have a huge difference?

Sure.

And does it have a safety profile that we're comfortable with? And so, yeah, we do. We have carved out these unique paths. Now of course, when you're doing that, everyone's going to have their own observations and opinions on what is safe, what the potential effect size is, etc. It's just an endless debate of disagreement. And so we take our best go of what hits where and then we have a go at it.

See, it's really interesting though because it's almost paradoxical to the whole motto of don't die. You know, because it's, this is your number one primary goal above all else is stay alive. But then yet you will justify the risk to reward as a clear positive on like very exotic, unproven chemicals sometimes. And again, I'm not to judge. Like I've certainly taken my fair share of random stuff that's not made it even through phase two trials. Not as much nowadays, but when I was younger that was something, you know, I would take. I'd be willing to take Carterine, which is like a super enhancer of endurance, but caused cancer at every dose in rodent studies and got canceled in clinical development. Like that's the kind of stuff I was willing to take back then, but now I'd say hell no. So I'm just like trying to make sense of the logic or the risk aversion or lack thereof. Like I suppose the novelty factor and how fun it is can supersede the don't die. And you think the, the risks are reward, the risk isn't as high as perhaps, you know, other people might perceive it to be. I suppose.

Yeah, I don't think nothing has ever, we've never done anything that compromises safety.

I don't know man. Like some of the drugs, like oral.

Minoxidil, tell me what, what do you think is the risk profile of that? And why would you be.

I don't think it's super high, but when it's in can, like in accordance with all the other things, many of which are cardiovascular modulating and you already have a resting heart rate that is so low and presumably a pretty low blood pressure too, and it's used as a primitive hypo hypertensive anti agent and there's just so many cases of arrhythmia edema like all these things that for the upside of potential, I don't know, like some cosmetic difference in hair count that maybe is slightly better at the microdose than you would have got from topical. And you could have just got a transplant which is inconvenient but risk free short of the actual surgical procedure. But isn't an extra drug. Like to me I'm thinking if I'm Brian, I'm doing transplant over a black box warning drug.

Yeah, yeah. I guess the, the way our team thinks about this, and I see our team because I do rely upon them for these decisions, is we did a pretty extensive analysis of the risk profile. At the dosage I'm doing is 2.5 milligrams. And the team thought it was a basically a benign approach to doing it. And so we saw that the risk factors were primarily in those with hyper. With high blood pressure. But those that didn't. The risk profile didn't seem to be excessive. And so I guess what I found is someone else's assessment May grade minoxidil 2.5mg in a higher risk category. And it's just a difference of scoring the risk of each different intervention. Yeah, and I respect that. I mean the data is out there and people take different approaches to how they evaluate it and you know, whether. Yeah, we score low and some scores high. That's just the game. But we, we generally have not made any decisions that we thought were created unnecessary risk.

Are you opposed to. Because I can understand the desire to achieve results with endogenous processes to kind of show that it's your biology facilitating it. So reversing hair loss, obviously very difficult once you've miniaturized to a certain point and if you're able to reverse it, it's far more impressive than getting.

Yeah.

You know, transplants put into your scalp.

Yeah.

Is that kind of partially the motivation too is that you want to do it by means of. It's your own body functioning at a high level facilitating the result. More than like, I don't know what your stance is on cosmetic procedures that are literally pure cosmetic.

Yeah, we, we've tried to not be righteous, we've tried to be open minded and anything that comes our way we will contemplate. I know that there's, there's this purist idea that you're only going to do regeneration, which we were largely doing that for the first little while and that something that cosmetic surgery would be terrible. There's a lot of people who want to combine both modalities so I'm actually more open minded. I haven't done any cosmetic surgeries and so. But I'm open to them. You know, it's not like we will say that we're drawing a hard line in the sand for any reason. Like we're really after this, this endeavor of how do you evolve from Homo sapien to homoevolutus. And are there rules that game? Probably not. You know, they. If we can try to avoid don't die, then that's really the ultimate one, which is why we carefully pay attention to risk. But of course everyone's going to disagree on that risk profile.

Yeah, yeah. It's like the novelty factor on some of the hair loss prevention stuff to me just doesn't seem worthwhile when you can predict with reasonable accuracy that a transplant would be uncomfortable acutely but get a far better result and have a lower drug burden with less contraindications. Have to worry about. Like the protocol you're on has oral minoxidil, which, you know, it's not a high dose by any means. I'm not saying it's a super dangerous thing. And then there was a diclofenac or something with some other drug in your topical that I don't recall exactly what it is, but I often see people getting on like corticosteroids and stuff to try and quell the immune response they think is happening on their scalp, among other things. And it's like, I'm not. Like, I don't have a transplant. I will probably get one one day to avoid having to go on extra drugs to get to where I want to be. But it's kind of just like, I don't know, I feel like that might.

Be a. Yeah, it's a, it's a fair stance. Like, absolutely respectable.

Cool.

And I wouldn't come to the party with like a different opinion. Like, fine. Like, we're all trying different approaches and I don't think, you know, we've, like, if I think back through the things that have been pretty negative, HGH was catastrophic. Yeah. I mean, I had intracranial pressure, it messed up my glucose. I had headaches, I had difficulty sleeping. It was just. I took it for a hundred days and I never want to do it again.

What was your dose?

0.6 milligrams.

So 1.8 international units.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, 1.8. And it was five days a week. And you know, I think now there wasn't because there's the, the trim trial which did that. And so we Were we're replicating that trial. There's so many things we would do differently if we approached the thymus rejuvenation. Again. Yeah, we definitely would not use hgh.

What brand did you use? Or do you remember Nordicropin? Yeah. HGH is interesting because sometimes even among pharmaceutical grade brands you will find variable response from an edema standpoint and water retention and whatnot. But you know, that's, you know, one of those things too where it's like the minoxidil could just as easily have caused something similar with the edema orthostatic hypotension for that I guess as opposed to hyper. But yeah, it's quite. I, I've had friends who've had crippling nerve pain from the, the water. It's. Yeah, it can get pretty hectic or people that need to go on diuretics just to keep on it and because they're bodybuilding and think they need it, they will, you know, be polypharmacy out the ass just to stay on their gh essentially.

Yeah.

So yeah man, that's yeah my personal experience.

I would never do it again and it is not a lightweight decision.

What was your blood pressure while you were on it?

I think my blood pressure was fine.

It didn't change at all?

I don't think so. Or if it did, it's imperceptible.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess like to your point on, you know, what is dangerous? What, what is dangerous? What is, what is high risk. One thing we like is I get so many things measured at such a high frequency that we can keep side effects in check. And so with the HGH we were able to quantify the negative effects so fully and so fast to see. I mean I can just list off everything that was wrong and in doing the other things we have a pretty good view of what's going on. So I know from a person's vantage point they have these ideas after reading papers or being in forums and reading whatnot and also hearing anecdotal reports of certain things. But we really, I don't know if we, I can't think of another time where we've been. We've identified significant side effects from a given thing. We've done bodybuilders for sure, they're the best ones to show us what, what, what really happened.

Yeah, you'll see at the extreme too. It's like self inducing acromegaly level, IGF1 levels.

Yeah, don't tell us what happens exactly.

That happens all the time.

Yeah. But I guess to your point, like I guess I'm. What I'm trying to establish is whatever someone perceives the risk profile to be, we try to keep that risk in check with as robust measurement as possible. Now, some things we maybe create a larger unknown. Like for example, I take a pretty high dose of rapamycin and so that's immune suppression. So we can look at all the immune profile. We measure my immune system very extensively, so we can assess that. But you know, are we missing something in the measurement we should be capturing? So we really try to play very carefully in that line of not never trading risk for potential gain.

Do you use the empirically coated rapamycin?

We do, yes. That is. That's the. Is that Pfizer's Rapamune? Is that right?

I believe there is two formulations of it that are coded correctly. I forget exactly. But I know that there is a lot of compounding pharmacies selling just straight up in a pill and yeah, seemingly not bioavailable at all. But yeah, I've been interested to see somebody who's actually measured things to say for certain because this is extrapolated from rodent literature as far as I recall.

That's right.

Is generic. That is just like shoved in a capsule. Still going to do the same thing. And it's just the marketing gimmick with the coding.

But yeah, we switched away from a non property coded to a property coded. I believe it's Pfizers. I think it's Rapamune.

Okay.

Yeah. It's expensive.

Oh yeah.

It's $32 per milligram. I do 13 milligrams in on day zero and then day six, nine milligrams. And then throughout the months I do four. So 26. Yeah. I almost 40 milligrams.

So that's a established protocol in literature presumably to arrive at that like variability or we.

No one knows proper dosing. We're just plain. So I started.

Would you resemble it off of though?

We did. So we absolutely. We absolutely mapped it on the animal studies.

Sure.

Uh, but even the animal studies they didn't conclude what the ideal. They didn't look at enough variability. And so we started with animal. With the translation from animal protocol to human.

Yeah.

And then we've been playing since where to measure it. We've been looking at my immune system stack plus my sirolimus levels post consumption. So I'll take Grappa and measure blood levels two hours after 24, 48, 72 and 96. So we look at the Half life. And then we make sure that it's entirely gone from my body before the next dose is done. So there's a washout period. And so we're trying to. But we, we look at C max and we see when it eliminates. But no one knows what ideal protocol is.

What is that time point approximately based on your days per full elimination?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yep. Five or six. Like when I take a 13 milligram dose, I think day four was something like 2.3 level.

And the capsules are 13 milligrams or what is it?

It's 1 milligram per capsule.

Oh, so you have to take 13 of them. Damn.

Yeah. I don't. Interesting question. I, I don't know if I'd buy Rapa from a non trustworthy source.

That's a, it's a. Yeah, I wouldn't get non.

It's a pretty serious drug.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like the variability in dose absorption. Like you don't want to mess around with that.

Well even. Yeah. Like if you take it with a, a high fat diet, then the absorption increases by 25 to 35%.

That's in humans too.

Yeah, that's in I think Pfizer's disclosure sheet on the drug.

Okay. Yeah. It's crazy how much stuff will you have to think about timing on too? Because stuff will inhibit the absorption of other stuff. You find basic vitamins.

Yeah.

Gets intense of the exotic kind of anti aging drugs. I know that you've kept metformin in despite whatever evidence has suggested that it may not be as great as it was once touted. Yeah, above and beyond that. 17 Alpha Estradiol, which presumably has been essentially benign and unnoticeable in effects. Um, is there anything else that you've used that you can recall as far as anti aging? I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. The, the things that have the largest effect size. The full statin gene therapy that I did. Many circles. So they've got a plasmid for a full statin gene therapy, which in our analysis ranked number seven as the most powerful lifespan extension. It was over 30% in mice. And so I did the therapy on September 10th and then two weeks later my follistatin levels were up 160%. So the therapy did in fact have the effect. Now it's, it's not editing the genes, it's just sitting inside the nucleus and the production of folletin increases.

And via the gene though. Okay.

Via the protein. Yeah, yeah. And so you, you have the effect of.

So you're not modulating the follistatin gene expression at all.

Yeah. You're not changing the DNA.

Got it.

And so that, that one was cool because we have been trying to figure out gene therapy for over two years and we have been looking at AAVs and particular AAV9. But it's challenging because if you do that gene therapy, you can't turn it off.

Yeah.

So something goes awry. There's no kill switch.

Right.

And so we didn't do gene therapy. Then we found this one and so that was I think the highest ranking one we had done. And then I also did 100 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells intravenous. That one's unknown because it's not certain if it stacks. So it's. It well indicated for, in for inflammation and a bunch of other things. But someone like myself who's in pretty good health. We're not sure if it stacks, but that ranked number 34 on our list.

Yeah.

And then the other ones. Yeah, the 1782, I think that was. I forget where it ranks, but it's pretty high. Like 13th or 14th Rapa is pretty high. Oh, Rapa metformin is. Ranks 10th as the highest under the gene therapy.

That's crazy.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Cause it was like what about the follistatin? Gene therapy is so attractive in humans specifically that it gets such a high ranking? Because I've like in the bodybuilding community, fall statin has been one of those things that always had such promise but never actually did anything because of you'd administer it and supposedly it would just essentially be eliminated nearly instantly with how short of a half life it was. Sure you would have to use this gene therapy to actually get it to work, was what we all thought and knew to be the case, but no one actually got it. But the clinical trial that I've seen on it in humans was not as impressive as I would have hoped for. Something that is hyped using like double muscle phenotype like cattle and the. The whippets and those like jack mice and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Like what have you seen in terms of actual impact to justify a number seven on your thing? Because presumably it's body comp related.

Yeah, it. So we actually, I think this is maybe the interesting thing is we're looking at over 30 organs for effect. I know that's been primarily pegged at muscle.

Yeah.

We're looking at epigenetic age, speed of aging, inflammation. So we're looking at a Whole bunch of different markers that people have used in the past. And yeah, it was. The effect size was. Was huge on increased lifespan. And so what we're thinking is that there's possible effects in the body that just haven't been robustly measured. And so the company that is looking at that's doing the gene therapy mini circle, they're doing many of these measurements, we're doing many more than anyone else. And so we'll see.

I mean, yeah, I've talked to the guy who. Or at least the one who's the forefront spokesperson. Adil Khan, I think his name is. Yeah, I might be forgetting from. He's from Canada and he's on a podcast all the time.

Okay.

Am I misremembering his name?

Walter Mack Ryan. Those are the three co founders.

Oh, maybe he's the main MD behind it. I'm not sure. But anyway, he's often on the forefront talking about this and perhaps I just haven't seen the podcast with the other the. The founders. But this thing, like, how much does it cost per shot? First of all, that's something I've been. Because the ROI on it is. It's definitely there.

What are you drinking, by the way?

Oh, this is my energy drink by my company's gorilla mind.

Yeah.

And it has a host of nootropics. And as of now, until somebody rips us off and adds plus one to the ingredients, is the most potent nootropic formula infused into a suspended energy drink format. That still tastes good.

Huh? What's in there?

Saffron extract. Which is great. If you haven't. I don't even know. I don't know if it's in your protocol, but it's amazing. For its antidepressant activity, it's has effective as SSRIs but also can completely reverse the ED induced by SSRIs simultaneously. So it's shown as efficacious for the same outcomes, but with the relative lack of side effect profile. L Theanine, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, uridine monophosphate seems to at least this is more of a speculative one. But increase it can restore destroy dopaminergic neurons and increase dopaminergic neurotransmission as a whole. So it kind of like elevates the stimulatory capacity of the other ingredients by actually getting your brain to a heightened state. Because a lot of people just abuse the hell in their brain stimulants, but don't actually take care of like the substrate Alpha gpc I'm sure you're very familiar with, but an actual dose that does something as opposed to pixie dusting it like other companies. And acetyl L tyrosine, the only form of L tyrosine that can be suspended in liquid. I used to think it was useless in humans, but after I read deeper, it turns out those are all IV infusion studies. And orally it actually does do something, so. And who pairs DNA acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, that is.

Can I try one?

Yeah. Do we have one? Yeah, as long as sucralose doesn't up your next blood test or something.

That's how sweetened.

It's pretty sweet, man. Yeah, if you like it. Because I'm assuming you're like, pretty have a palate that is adjusted to not.

You're exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can. Yeah, you can try this.

Oh, watermelon. That's exciting.

Sour watermelon candy specifically.

Okay. God, this is gonna be.

Your tongue is about to explode.

Really? It's gonna be. Whoa, look at this.

Yeah.

Great packaging. That's exciting.

Are we filming Stuart?

Yeah.

Oh, you don't mind if I put this in?

Yeah, yeah, put it in. Do your thing. This is exciting. It's like really exciting packaging.

Yeah. Thank you, man.

We. We're excited to be here.

Yeah, Yeah, I figured it's the. The logo definitely contrasts better and features the elements of design more favorably on darker backgrounds, which has been problematic for some of the brighter cans.

Cheers, friend.

Cheers.

What's. What's this the second half of the podcast going to be like more of.

The same, man, I got tons of questions.

Whoa. Yeah, you're right. That's straight up candy.

Yeah. Hence the name. I wouldn't be offended if you didn't want to drink more, so don't worry.

No, I'm. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna go there and see what happens.

It's 100. Gonna up your sleep routine tonight?

Why?

Well, there's 200 milligrams of caffeine. Do you.

Oh, you didn't mention that. 200 milligrams. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. I will sip this.

Yeah, I really wouldn't be offended if you didn't. So it's up to you.

I appreciate that. All right, so it's right now. It's. What time is it?

1:30. So you've got like. Okay, so I've eight, seven hours to a five hour half life.

Am I going to be okay? Can I metabolize this thing. I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer.

Oh, are you? Yeah, I think if you're just sipping it, you'd be fine. But I also don't know what your intake's like, so.

Zero.

Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know.

That looks at it all.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah, I'd be careful.

I'll play this game with you. Yeah, let's do it. All right, cool.

All right. So we left off on follistatin gene therapy. So this is something that expectedly I'm piqued my interest as somebody who's seen over a decade plus now of people talking about this and everyone's seen the Belgian blue double muscle phenotype cattle that are super jacked, like the Mr. Olympia of cows, essentially. You have, you know, the, the whippets who are jacked. You have the, the mice that have. I forget if it's a gene deletion. They don't. I don't know if they use folletin, but it was either way. A lot of the outcome sought was similar or overlapping enough to justify seeking if myostatin inhibition was worthwhile in humans. Yeah, so I've seen the phase one trial in this exact gene therapy and there is markers of biological age that did go down. Like you said, lean body mass outcomes increased by 1.8 pounds of lean body mass with a drop in body fat of 0.8 pounds. Interesting thing though is, and this is, I guess reflects that it's actually follow statin working, although we see it in the serum that it goes up, so we kind of know it's there. But increase in pre diabetic looking markers. So it seems to be it has like a adipose tissue insulin resistance inducing effect in literature in rodents. And it seems to play out in humans a little bit too based on some of the negatives in that study too. So kudos to them for still putting it out there and letting people dissect it and whatnot. But to me, like the ROI for what I understand to be a $25,000 shot, that's experimental. Maybe you get a similar outcome to taking creatine monohydrate or something. How do I rationalize using this? Did you pay the 25k yourself or was it complimentary or like how does a normal person think about something like this?

Yeah, what were the pre diabetic markers that they were looking at?

I'm gonna pull up the study. Let's see. Insulin went up, glucose went up, hemoglobin A1C went slightly up, leptin went up. Obviously follistatin levels went way up, but that's not necessarily a marker of glucose utilization. But yeah, in general it was. Oh yeah. And then the lipid profile skewed. So LDL went up 8, HDL went up a bit. So it's not like it was super dramatic, but it's like there was a clear trend that was significant to actually show that there is something going on from the fall stand that may be worth consideration before, you know, haphazardly assuming it's going to make you this jacked superhuman, which I think is what a lot of people think it's going to do. So I think realistic, I'm not saying it doesn't work, by the way. And the, the guys behind it, at least the one I've talked to has been super forthcoming about all the data, knowing that I could, you know, dissect it or whatever.

Yeah.

So kudos to him. Seems like a super nice guy. But yeah, to me it's like the results are relatively unimpressive proportionally to what I've seen hyped up on social media because I've seen this exact therapy been talked about and even of your results, the only thing I've heard from you is your serum levels went up of fallostatin. It's like, okay, I would expect such an outcome. Like, what else did you notice?

Yeah, so we September 10th was the injection, so we're now end of January. So yeah, we're four months in. I just had a blood panel done two weeks ago and all of the markers you talked about of glucose, A1C, lipids, insulin. Yeah, insulin. They're all unmoved from my previous history, so we haven't seen any change in those. I, I have my next mri, my whole body MRI for muscle and fat, and we're going to do a six month marker, so we'll see then I also completed two speed of aging tests to see if that would happen over the past month. So the data is still coming in. So we haven't seen anything negative yet. Nothing's moved in the wrong direction. And I think we'll, we'll assess the other variables at the speed of aging, we'll get those tests back in a few weeks and then muscle and fat. But yeah, I guess we have yet to prove any upside.

Hmm. Yeah, the thing that's tough too is it's like as much as you'd want to keep all factors the same, four months is a long time. Like, I think you've Increased your calories by 250 or 300 since then too, which literally attenuated your need to be on trt. So it's like to compare a result from then to now and attribute anything to the follistatin gene therapy is just like hard for me to wrap my head around. So it's like is it not just a useless experiment at that point or.

Yeah, the caloric restriction increase was before.

Okay.

Yep. So that we feel like that one we had, we accounted for the change in, in the bloods other measurements with that for the trt. Yeah, I went off. That could be a confound. We went off TRT for sure. And I think November, something like that.

Yeah. By the way, I'm not, I'm not like poo pooing the way you go about it. It's just like I would, I would have a hard time taking any sort of result seriously given the velocity at which you have to proceed with your life accordingly and do the things you want to do. So I guess you could chalk it up to this is what happened. Here's the confounders and take from that what you will kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. And what my team does is. So we use these statistical models to try to isolate effect. So there are standard ways in pharma where you can say we're going to go through this 15 step process and try to create a probability of prediction whether a given intervention can accommodate a certain thing. Because pharma has the same problem too where you give a drug and you have these whole body effects you're looking at and you're trying to isolate can we say what this drug does do and what this drug doesn't do. So we use those same models to determine effect on our side. So it's not, I don't want there to be a perception that this, this haphazard approach, we're just throwing things. It's actually really rigorous from a statistical model perspective. And so. Yes. Are there some things that cross and close and confound and make that hard? Yes. Also it's the game we're playing and we're moving very fast, but we're also very rigorous from a stats perspective.

So typically when you replace like I know this isn't necessarily like an endocrine hormone but when you do something that's, I don't know, body comp related or something like trt, you'll have a, a target almost of here's what high end production would look like for a, you know, 20 year old Brian, for example, like, how do we even know what we're shooting for with follistatin, the dose proportional to the gene therapy. Like, what are we using as targets here?

From an outsider's perspective, what it may look like is we're throwing darts against the wall. We can't isolate anything, so therefore we don't know what's working. Our internal operations are very different than that in terms of the rigor the team has in terms of the scientific research. For example, we recently started a few thousand person clinical study, self experimentation study, I should say. And we went through with the group why we chose to have grape seed extract as an ingredient in the stack. And the team presented a four page document with a complete comprehensive summary on everything that's ever been done on grapeseed extract as a intervention modality. And I think for many people's observation was, it was the most extensive assessment they'd ever seen in their entire lives on whether an ingredient should be included in a given thing. And that's really the reality of the team is the robustness we have. And now this is partly our fault. We should share, we should be more, we should share this more of like what goes in a lot of this is our own proprietary research where we spent a lot of money devising this. Basically the, the research that gives us confidence to do one thing over another thing. And so we share what the protocol is and we share my results, but we don't share the IP we built in terms of how to, how to arrive. And so therefore people are left thinking this is darts against the wall. They don't know what they're doing, they can't separate anything. And so when you dive in on these things, typically with my team, we've had several conversations where people come to the conversation and be like, I'm going to ruin you guys with all these points. And they usually walk away and say, huh, okay, like, much more robust and thorough than I ever thought and not what I perceive at all. And so I think the, I'm not the best person to make these arguments because I'm not the team and specifically I trust them, not myself because I'm not the expert. But definitely I think your points are valid, I understand your perspective and it's entirely reasonable with what you're saying.

Anecdotally, have you seen anyone else try it that got reliable results that were controlled in a controlled setting to some extent with full setting?

Yeah, the company's now done, I think over 200 and their measurement panel, you know, they have a protocol Ours is much more robust. So I think the results are still emergent. I think the research supports a reason to be excited about it. But I think they, you know, it is probably short of having answered all outstanding questions.

Okay, yeah, yeah. It's like I don't really know what to make when it says something like extrinsic epigenetic age was an impressive minus 27.91 years. And it's like I could nearly guarantee that person is not going to live that much longer, if even a couple years probably. So it's like, I don't know if this stuff gives, gives false sense of security almost to some extent because it's like the person using it just wants to get told what the result is and why it's worthwhile. They don't want to have to do the research. So if they are thinking this thing has reduced my biological age by 27 years, it's like, well, I shouldn't, I don't even need to take lipid modulating drugs. I don't need to exercise, maybe even I don't even need to do anything. I just, you know, take this thing. So I don't know, like, obviously there is more intelligent thought that should go into what you're putting in your body. I think for somebody who is doing something like this, that's largely experimental, but it's hard to overlook some. Like the, the biological age stuff is like very, very aggressive to the point of, I think misleading a little bit in some cases because it's like, I don't know. When I look at biomarkers, to me that's a reliable metric of I at least know atherogenic potential here. I know how well you dispose of glucose. I know how well your body comp. Reflects with age and trends and top percentile of your, you know, where you're at. But then like the age stuff, it's like, I don't know.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think what you're raising is like how, how do you measure effect? What measures? And you're, you're gravitating towards phenotypic markers which have the all cause mortality strength behind them. And we agree. I don't think. Yeah, I think everyone concurs that the methylation clocks are not gold, that they're still silver because they haven't made that bridge to all cause mortality into clinical outcomes. I think everyone's on the same page there. I think it's an interesting question for this gene therapy. How do you measure effect? And so you're coming from a History where you say we're looking at muscle, we're looking at these variables, but there's this long list of other effects in the body. Somehow there was a 30% lifespan extension in mice. And so the question is, do we understand why and do we have the tools to measure those things and is the protocol set of property to capture those things? And it passed our assessment, is it safe? We thought so. Is it create risk? We don't think so.

Was what was the resveratrol wrote in the literature like back when it was super hyped up? Was it like, what were the age reductions in those studies, do you recall?

I don't remember. We've never done resveratrol because it's been.

Disproven in humans, presumably, and also appropriate.

For diabetics, not for anyone who's not not diabetic. That's what I understand of it. Okay. Yeah.

It's just like to me this seems, I don't know, the gene therapy sounds like, I get you can turn it on, turn it off, et cetera. But it's like, I don't know, like knowing I haven't even seen evidence really that in adults inhibiting myostatin is a useful pursuit. Perhaps it is to some degree. But like the real results you see are in utero seemingly where you develop like more muscle fibers because of a deficiency, not necessarily a 40 year old now enhancing fall statin levels. Obviously there's a, you know, a process by which you still produce it for a reason. You have a limitation in myostatin to facilitate some sort of rate limiting activity. But anyway, it's, I guess it just intrigues me.

But yeah, I think, I think your perspective is, is fair, I think it's reasonable and I think it basically captures where we're at in the state of health, wellness and anti aging. I think it really is legit. And so I think reasonable people can come at this from both sides and conclude different things. And then with that conclusion you can say are we willing to try it and at what risk profile, yes or no? So I agree with you. It is not the case that this is just straightforward. There's an answer. And honestly I really feel bad for all of us because all of us want to be our best selves and then we go out in the world and try to identify what is or is not true and everybody has a different opinion. There's no consensus. And then the person stuck with what do I do now? Do I choose my person and always go with them? So it's A pretty challenging spot for someone to be in.

Yeah.

And so we've, you know, we've done our best to look at the evidence. We've tried to make good decisions on risk and reward. But like, yeah, like we're just really at that stage where no one's acting with 100 certainty.

Right. I might have misspoke earlier on the body fat loss. It was body fat percentage loss of 0.87 and fat free mass gain of 1.96 pounds. So I just wanted to correct. Yeah, because I was just pulling the number out from what I remembered.

But that's like a, like a 2 to 3% muscle gain.

Yeah, yeah. Potentially. I'd have to read through it more carefully to get the full metrics, but yeah, something of, I don't know how much of it's conflated with, you know, like fat free mass. I'm sure you're well aware of how that could be finagled. But you know, I think they have a phase two trial underway so that has more promising results potentially. So I guess I'll await what that looks like before and reserve judgment. I would just be relatively cautious about stuff like this. Are there other gene therapies the company does like? I know they had mentioned the MD who was sending me this literature said they had some other stuff that they were working on for other gene targets. Is there anything that interests you that they're doing?

Yes, we have two others that we're working on with them.

Oh, you're going to do them both?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean pending they pass safety. Yeah. But yeah, we've. So I won't speak on their behalf but yes, we as a team, we love the plasma delivery model. We love that it's a kill switch with tetracycline. We love that it's an 18 month window of time.

Right.

And so we feel like if things do go wrong, there's a quick kill on stopping them and then we feel like we can walk into this with some safety. So. Yeah. So I think we will probably do two more if we meet the thresholds in the coming six to eight months.

What levels of Follistatin have you seen since the administration have they been decreasing precipitously like you said, 18 months interval wise. How it's supposed to stay in your system and work for that long or. And at a steady state Concentrate or it's like peaks and then declines. Like normal drug therapy.

Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it's, it's consistent for that duration of Time, it has a pretty precipitous decline, but I need to check that. Okay.

Yeah, I think I might know one of the gene therapies, but I don't want to say, just in case it's confidential as well, because I. I just realized that might be for all I know.

Yeah.

As far as what blueprint is, like, how would you define it for the layman who is just finding your stuff for the first time? Like, it's. The word blueprint makes it sound like it's something to be replicated. Like this is the, you know, the way you go about doing it to achieve the outcome desired. But I also know that often you will take a more nuanced take and say, only do stuff that's, you know, applicable to you. Don't necessarily be a vegan just because I am. Et cetera, et cetera. So how do you kind of define it and the overall goal of it? I suppose.

I'm really trying to make the observation that after 4.5 billion years on this planet, we are baby steps away from superintelligence. And whether you believe superintelligence is one year away or 10 or 20, it's now on that timescale. It's the biggest event, as far as we know, that's going to happen in the universe, as far as we can tell. And it's happening right now in our moment of time. And that invites the question for us as a species, what do we do? It's the biggest question in existence. And this is why, when I say that question is all consuming, I try to reduce it to something that is intelligible and actionable to everybody. And the synthesis is, don't die. So when intelligence achieves a certain threshold of capability, the only thing intelligence cares about is continuing its own existence. Blueprint is my attempt at trying to be. Trying to actually be. The existential problems we face as a species, we have several. We have. One is, can Earth be a sustainable biosphere for us? Two is, can we avoid killing each other with nukes and other weapons? Three, can we survive the creation of superintelligence? And in doing all those things I wanted to actually, then if you explain those problems, most people are going to say, well, I feel powerless to do anything about any of those problems. And I flipped that and said, not only can I do something, I can actually be the problem. And my conclusion was that, for example, so I treated my body like I broke myself out and said, okay, I'm 35 trillion cells. That makes up me. Brian Johnson, how could I Go about an approach to computationally align all my cells towards a single objective. And that's a challenging thing because you have to take you as a human and you have to identify all the things you do as a person that are not in your best interest. So every time you eat too much food or the wrong food, or go to bed late, or any action that increases your speed of aging and the probability of disease and death, and then how do you get yourself to be a single entity? And then we create. Created this computational model where I said, okay, we're going to look at the science. We'll measure my body and we'll create this closed loop system. So we build the body like you build technology. We're going to engineer, we're going to treat my body like a piece of technology and go about this process. And so blueprint. I know the headlines are about, you know, penis injections and, you know, other stuff. It really is a sincere attempt on my part to say, how do we, as a species, we're the only known life in the universe as far as we know, as far as we can detect, how do we not extinguish this flame? And I talk about diet and supplements and gene therapy because it is a bridge to these natural things we can do. And so your understanding of health and wellness is robust. And you can make informed decisions on a daily basis what to do. My parents, they just want to know what to eat for breakfast and when they have to go out in the world. And my parents are both in their 70s and they're starting to experience the ravages of aging. They really don't care about scientific consensus. They don't care about the debates. They just want to live another day and hurt a little less. And I'm trying to speak to that raw human situation that we're all in. We're all in pain to some degree or another. We all have uncertainties. We just want to take the next step in life. So blueprint really is my attempt at trying to start something where if we survive this moment in the 25th century, we look back on the 21st century and say, what did humans do in the early 21st century that allowed intelligence to continue to thrive in the galaxy? That this would be a moment. They'd say they figured out that don't die was the only thing they agreed upon as a species. And they did so with their bodies, with the planet, and with their new computation of intelligence of AI. That's what this whole thing's about. It's not about being A health, a wellness influencer. It's not about, you know, it's like really is about species thriving in the galaxy is why I started this whole thing.

So a lot of your personal preferences, so for example vegan versus having meat in your diet, a lot of people will ultimately, for simplicity, like you said, they just want to know what to do, follow it to the letter and that's largely what you know, the products are going to be built around and whatnot. Is there some sort of thought to the nuance behind I don't know. Still making blueprint accessible and not seem exclusionary to those who have meat in their diets? Because I imagine a lot of people that may otherwise have preferred to and have more easily hit their bioavailable B vitamin intake or protein quality intake scores might have got there easier should they kept it in if they had no qualms about removing it. It's like how do we. Like how. How's that approached with blueprint? Or is it just that there's some level of responsibility that needs to be taken to understanding there's nuance to what you're saying.

I really tried to be open that wherever you're at, whatever your situation is, come on in, you can take what you want, you can leave what you want, you can substitute fine. Like I really have tried to be hands off and not be, not be prescriptive.

I think the marketing is kind of like this is the way though.

It's, I know from my interactions with people when you pull up to a situation and they're trying to assess what to do, they're going to have a thousand questions, especially if they feel like it's their responsibility. If you have to decide whether to take NR or nmn, if you want your intracellular entity levels to be at some level that will consume a person for months and then even then they'll be still undecided because they'll find legitimate opinions on both sides of that argument. And I just see people get paralyzed. And so instead of doing anything positive for themselves, they do nothing because they feel totally paralyzed. And so what I'm trying to say is if you're in a situation where you feel paralyzed in life, this is an option for you. Now, is there a power line here? Maybe. Could you be doing, could you get an additional 10 to 20% benefit by doing this or that? Maybe. But better than being paralyzed and doing nothing, here's an option for you. So I've just tried to put it in to say I know you're confused. I know you're paralyzed. I know you have other things in life to do other than endlessly research these given topics. And then like just when they think they have stuff, you know, situated, it's like a new trend happens where blink is now the thing, it's like God damn it, I just got my life settled and now I have like wrestled this whole complicated thing. And so I'm really just trying to. For those who just want a simple answer, I'm trying to say here's what we found to be supported by evidence. Here's what my body said when it did this thing. Thousands of other people are doing it, we're gathering data and that's why I started this 5000 person self experimentation study. We're going to put them on the same thing. What happens? And so we're measuring body composition, extensive blood work, questionnaires, wearable and then daily check ins. And so it's one of the largest and fastest studies ever done. We pulled it together in three weeks time.

Yeah, I definitely want to dive into that and the diet and the supplements and whatnot. One thing I did want to touch on though, before I forget is like you're the headlines you mentioned. You're often criticized and I feel like people give unrealistic expectations around what they think you should be looking like given the elaborate depth of your protocol. Because if you have a hundred pills a day, you spend this much money per year, then you should look like you're 19 years old even if you're 46. That's what people will assert, which is obviously unrealistic. And you only started really doing this front facing a few years ago anyways. There's only so much you can do with current technology, obviously. But one thing I did see that was kind of interesting is a tweet by Elon Musk seemingly agreeing with people shitting on you for this. So some guy, Matt Paulson. My unpopular opinion of the day is that Brian Johnson looked way better before he started spending 2 million per year on his body. Elon Musk 100. And then you replied, he said former Brian didn't get invited to vampire cosplay as himself. And you tweeted with your likes higher than Elon's. Yeah, so. And then further to that, somebody basically shot back at you for like why are you posting this? And you said the difference between Elon and me, I'll nourish you and drink your blood. He'll fire you and leave you to die. What is there beef between you and Elon or what is going on There?

No, we're. I'd say we're friends. We actually spent a lot of time together in the early days of brain interfaces when he was going to join Kernel as a co founder with me and it didn't work out. He ended up doing neuralink, I did Kernel, but it was fine. Everything's great. So. No, it's just playful banter. But what I'm trying to highlight here is. We. We behave in ways that oftentimes escape our own awareness. And when someone like Elon has a presence in society, people will mirror his behaviors knowingly and unknowingly. And he represents a certain Zeitgeist of basically being a martyr for technological progress. He fully expects to die and he lives his life in a manner where he's okay with the trade off of accelerating his own death in exchange for pushing technology forward.

He's still doing that.

You think he's still doing that? And his companies, if you are familiar with the culture of his companies, it is definitely an environment that people are not bragging about their speed of aging scores, right? Yeah, it is definitely like I'm grinding and my professional accomplishment in the pursuit of this mission. So it's wonderful in that it motivates people to do really hard things and to work very hard. So it, from a human perspective, very. There's a lot of admirable things about that. And what I'm trying to call attention to is that disposition is representative of a time and place when death is inevitable. Philosophically now that's been true for 200,000 years with homo sapiens. And my observation with blueprint is when you look at the time and place of how we've acquired the ability to engineer atoms and molecules in biology, and you look at the progress in medicine and you see we're approaching superintelligence, we may have just crossed the threshold where death is no longer inevitable, or there's some radical extension of how long and how well we can live. Now when that happens, you have to remap all of society from a framework to say death is inevitable to death is like our lifespans are this unknown horizon that changes everything about how you approach life. So now if I'm confronted and I say, am I willing to grind myself and increase my speed of aging and my probabilities of getting disease in exchange for this objective, or am I in a different era? And so what I'm calling attention to is he and I are the polar opposites of Zeitgeist expectation. He says it's inevitable, I say it's worth the gamble to say we may be on the cusp of the most extraordinary existence in the galaxy, and I don't want to miss out. And so what I playfully was saying is, I'll nourish you and drink your blood. What I was trying to say is, in a funny way is I am feeding people, literally, I'm trying to help them with their health and wellness. I'm trying to give them a framework and infrastructure to do that. Meanwhile, I'm also going to drink the blood, which plays on my son's situation. But I'm in this with you. We are traveling this journey where it's not a situation where I say if you can't cut it, you're out. I'm saying we're all in this together and we all have to solve this thing together. And contrast, you know, in the situation where Elon's running his companies, if someone's not making the cut in this martyrdom path, they're axed and they're gone, and so you're left for dead. And so what I'm trying to say is, as a species, we are shifting from this modality where inevitability and just like, we're pushing people aside to like, we're all in this together. And if we're trying to solve the existential crisis before us, there's a new way of being. And so obviously, what I just said is very layered, and so not many people probably captured that. They just read the headline and it's like they understand the blood thing or whatever. But I'm trying to say, when you pull back and look at this from a century in the future, you might see this huge shift like we've seen in the past. You see major shifts in cultural zeitgeist, how we do things. This may be the most. The most revolutionary shift in the history of Homo sapiens.

Awesome. Yeah, it's. I'm not really sure if he's becoming more cognizant, though, of what he should be doing, because he's taken measures clearly pharmacology wise to try and, like, stop overeating. And he's done certain things that are in the right direction, maybe as far as getting on the path, but perhaps not as. As much as he should be. And I still see him saying, oh, yeah, I only need six hours sleep, things like that. I feel like it's pretty rare for somebody to be able to get away with six hours.

Yeah.

Is that.

Yeah. I mean, so I would say nothing to knock him. My objective would not be to Criticize him Anyway, I'm trying to make an observation about what he stands for and what I stand for and that if people can tease out there's a different way of being. Because I know as an entrepreneur and you know as well the social pressure to grind and to flex your grind, you know, to flex the some small number of sleep or to flex, you know, your number of hours you work a week or whatever, it still creates social standing among people and you want to do it. And so what I'm trying to say is you're safe in being a different person that prioritizes your health. Because most people who do want to prioritize health, they feel like they have to hide it.

I almost feel like nowadays it's more of a flex to say I work out every day, eat well, sleep eight hours and still have successful companies.

It's new. Like that is, that is very new as a flex where people are like that. You don't get dinged in some way as not being so. You could say that, yes. But are you still an epic entrepreneur, you know, or are you kind of like this?

I would say yeah, but that's somebody who's informed about like how difficult it is to balance everything. Yeah, yeah. So perhaps it's a biased take from my own experience. But anyway, speed. So you know, he basically said 100 for looking young. And I think it was an unfair. I typically think it's unfair when people expect you to look like you've anti age 20 years given it's like, you know, if you've been exposed to the sun for decades trying to or you've miniaturized certain hair follicles and literally have like fibrosis and calcification, trying to just expect you're going to grow 18 year old hairline. It's not realistic. So you do what you can. One thing that has always perplexed me though is people who seemingly do pay very little attention or none to what they're doing and yet still do much better and look way better than people who are doing everything.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen this guy Schwando tan before?

No.

Oh my God. Dude. So you need to see, you need to guess how old this guy is and let me know, let me know your best guess.

Yeah, I was just gonna meet up with him. He's in Singapore. Yeah, of course. I was just in Singapore and didn't get a chance. To me he's like 54.

He is turning 58 in a month. Yeah, that's absurd.

Yeah.

Now obviously some of his Images are relative, low resolution to not show all the details. And maybe you'd see some of the fine lines around the eyes and stuff if you've met him in person. But I mean it's pretty undeniable that the guy looks at least 20 plus years younger than he is, seemingly. So a guy like this who's just a phenom of aging and when he's interviewed about it, basically just says, I eat eggs and exercise. Oh, wow, amazing. Thanks for the insight.

That's right.

How do you chalk up, like, presumably your team has dug into this a fair bit. And I know maybe it's an educated guess, but how much of this is genetic versus lifestyle at the end of the day?

Yeah, great question. And I don't fault people for being confused on this whole thing. So they look at that person and then they see the headline, this guy spending $2 million a year. And so you're right, they conclude, well, this guy should look like that guy in one year's time. And so I don't blame people because they have no idea what, what the biological principles are of aging where the technology is to rejuvenate it, what a, like what you can actually get in return for that kind of money. So I totally understand people's confusion and then why they then seek to dunk on me because they're like this isn't working or like this is a wasted project. So I don't know the answer of what you're saying, but I guess I would just say I understand why people are confused. And it's actually pretty hard to educate people. What is the value of blueprint? It's really, really hard to land.

Presumably with all the diagnostic criteria though at this point where you have bisegregated organ age classifications and whatnot, or at least estimates of biological age, do you see some sort of trend or pattern among individuals that seem extraordinary in their just natural ability to stave off age? Or like for, for a guy like this, what would your best guess be if he was to implement all the lifestyle factors, all the biohacks, like is he eking out another 10% in anti aging? Or like how do you.

I don't know. I mean this is the question we have with me is we've maxed out many of my markers and so even when we do some of these advanced therapies is there's still room. So if the Follistatin in mice is 30% life extension, where's the starting point? And so in me, is it just basically net neutral? All Right. So we have the same question is we don't know what stacks and at what point.

Yeah. The thing that's tough is there is definitely, I'm sure you could speak to the data better than I even a correlation between how good and young you look and how you feel, and then by extension that indirectly how healthy you are because you're happier person, you have better relationships. Everything about it is more ideal if you can stave off the even visual perception of aging, even if it's not organ deep. So it kind of begs the question, though, why there's such a discordance between or like such a big disparity sometimes between how old somebody might look and they're. Some of these people will be totally unhealthy by metrics of blood work.

That's right.

And everything internally looks pretty horrendous rotting. Yeah. But on the outside, it's like your skin looks pretty damn good.

Yeah.

So how do you make sense of the lack of systemic kind of concordance of these.

Yeah, that would be cool to see him go through a blueprint style measurement profile. Like what, like you're saying, what do his insides look like?

Yeah.

Is it as pristine as what his appearance is, you know, at that age? So, yeah, I think it's a great question and interesting. Like, what are the power laws yielding the results?

Do you think that guy, rather than being whatever, like a fashion influencer or whatever he is or a model, that he might at some point start to take advantage of this like, stat, like stature Online people see him as probably, I don't know of a guy who looks younger at that high of an age to where he could get. He could make a whole career out of just assessing his diagnostics.

Probably. Right. Right.

Yeah. I don't know. That guy is. Got a unique opportunity for sure. It's wild seeing some of the ads he'll show. Here's a. Here's an ad I did from 1993. And he looks like exactly the same.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Yeah. It is promising. This is the thing is, to me, that's really encouraging because biology is capable of the things we're asking it to be and we're just trying to sort it out.

Yeah. Yeah. And. But then it's always tough too, because some people will surgically intervene to the point that it's impossible to even make sense of if what they did is.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's always the insides. I mean, it's very hard to do cosmetic surgery.

True.

On blood work and organs and, and that's what we've tried to do. I mean when people struggle to under to understand blueprint, it's like you to understand your true age and also your risk of death, you know, of dying, you have to look at every single organ in the body because you're, you're as old as your oldest marker.

Yeah. Presumably at this point and maybe the answer is still, you know, we don't know because I wouldn't expect you to have the answer. But just educated guess even based on what you've seen. Some new literature has come out around centenarians and the blue zones and stuff that was once thought to be an explanation for why people are living to 100. What if you had to, I don't know, give a breakdown of the main factors that are driving 100 plus year olds, at least modern day. What do you think the most common findings are?

Yeah, I wouldn't dare guess. Like these are the kinds of questions where I could run my mouth but I wouldn't be speaking with.

I wouldn't hold you to the accuracy of it. Just like what your team has found pattern wise.

Yeah, well, I mean they, they identify five things for power laws. One is don't smoke. Two is a six hours a week of exercise, four and a half hours in zone two through four, then 90 minutes in zone five, a blueprint like Diet Mediterranean, like Diet 4 BMI of 18.5 to 22.5 and then five is moderate alcohol consumption or none, but basically not excessive alcohol. And those five things get you to a life expectancy of 92.

Do we have any twin studies that show only difference being lifestyle and what the outcomes are lifespan and health span?

I haven't seen them.

That would be interesting.

Yeah, it would be.

Yeah. Because I can't think of a better comparison because oftentimes it's you implement a bunch of things you think will work and you hope it worked and you live to a certain age, but you don't actually know if it worked. You're just assuming based on data that also assumed based on those people without a control of a twin.

Yeah, I mean this goes back to like why I love the full ascent therapy. Even with all the caveats that you raise legitimately. If we want to figure out how to punch through the limitations, you're not going to do it with supplementation. Right. You're not going to these things, they can take care of some things, but you're not going to increase lifespan by 20, 40, 50, 100 years. It's going to be Through a power law, a power intervention, like gene therapy or something else.

Yeah.

And so this is why I like playing with it is if, if it crosses some safety threshold and we can get in the body and we can start playing with these things in a safe way, I'm down for it because we're, I feel like we're playing high stakes with the species right now. So I actually, I expect there to be an answer to our survivability in the very near future. And so I actually don't even think about what about living to 80, 90, 100. I think by, you know, in, in 30 years time, the world is so unrecognizable from this moment that I just can't imagine planning for it of the like.

Obviously I can understand why the higher risk, more novel, novel approaches would be pursued to actually get some experiments accomplished that are worth talking about as opposed to, oh, I implemented, you know, fill in the blank supplement and yeah, I got a decrease in average glucose by 2 or something.

Right.

So of the ones you've tried, what have been the most impactful and which ones, if any, were deleterious?

Hmm. I mean, HGH was successful. So I had three MRIs looking at my thymus and I, I rejuvenated my thymus by seven years.

And has it maintained?

We haven't done a follow up. Okay, but just look at the fat fraction. So it was a really hard result to achieve in terms of computationally doing the analysis of the MRI and building the models. But yeah, we are very proud of that. It's. No one really cared because it's not, you know, penis injection is something people understand. Thymus rejuvenation is a much more esoteric thing to understand.

Is there a way you could summarize what a thymus does?

Yeah. Fair. So thymus sits like right here and it modulates the immune system. So as you. It begins aging, I believe at the age 13, and it just steadily declines. And so that's why old people die from, you know, the flu and pneumonia because the immune system has just been worn down. And so the stronger your thymus is, the better your immune system is. And so by taking the thymus back in time, you. It's one of the power laws of staying alive.

Gotcha.

And so that was cool, but the HGH was, came at a huge cost. So we looked at other ways to do it.

Did you try peptides like GH secretagogues in place of it to see if you.

We've looked at it, yeah. So if we tried to do this again, we would have a go with some peptides.

Just 1.8 IU is not that high of a dose to where what'd your IGF one end up at?

1:41.

What was your baseline?

Well, 1:11. No, I'm sorry, 161 and I was like 10111 10.

Huh. Yeah, yeah, see like that's not I. It's the contingent on the person sometimes with liver specific conversion and it's not the same as actual in the muscle. You can't, you're not gonna measure that without biopsies. But you know, like I feel like you could probably get close results if you were only going to push it that hard with exogenous HGH with endogenously regulated peptides using something that's been even FDA approved, like Tessamorelin for example with Ipamorelin or something.

Right. So yeah, yeah, I've got some iPad in the fridge. But like the I say. Okay, so to answer your question, what I think is interesting is if you look at maybe a few hundred biomarkers I have, like the ones that I think are relevant, I have almost no detectable inflammation in my body. So that's interesting. You know, inflammation's a big problem.

Are you just using what markers are you assessing inflammation with?

Hs, crp. There's a few others I'm forgetting. What other ones measure.

HSCP is acute typically as far as reliable ones for like systemic activity.

Off the top of my head, there's others we've measured. I just forget what they are.

Yeah escaping me right now.

So yeah, so like basically zero detectable inflammation in my body, my Cardiovascular capacity, my VO2 max. Right. Top 1.5 of 18 year olds. My strength is also impressive. I don't do any like real serious strength training. It's pretty light in terms of how I go about my exercise, my brain scan, my brain, age looking, mri, my heart. So like if you look at like the things that would be most likely to contribute, you know, zero plaque in my arteries, which is not terribly surprising, I'm only 46. Right. So you wouldn't expect that accumulation to happen. But if you look at the key things that have all cause mortality prediction, you know, my markers are perfect, you know, lipids, kidney, liver. So in that regard, if we're playing by the power laws of what do we know kills humans, I'm perfect on all those things. And then the question is, and then if you look at my speed of aging, if you give a credence to these third gen speed of aging, Clocks my speed of aging. I'm around 0.69 ish. So I've dramatically slowed my speed of aging. So of all of the markers that are known today, I'm winning at almost every marker that one cares to watch. I can't think of a single marker that I'm bad on. And so as a team, we've done a pretty good job of basically saying which are the. What are the power laws, these markers. And we've got near perfection on every single one of those.

So, circling back to the therapies that were very exotic, you said HGH was worked but was at a cost.

Yeah.

Anything else that comes to mind? Because I've seen you mention myriads of exotic compounds over the months.

Yeah.

Epitalon, other peptides.

Yeah, we just started the peptide. So that's. We did the protocol. This is the Ukraine protocol. And we. It's. I did five intramuscular injections five days in a row, one every six months, and thymosin beta 1 and 4, and then epithelium.

Got it.

So those are the three. We didn't do CJC because we felt like there was some risk with some unknowns that we didn't want to get in that area. But those are the three that we did. Yes. I've done one series of injections.

Interesting. On the CJC because that's like endogenously regulated as well. So it would be like assuming your own organ function would. Would screw you over is like what the assertion would be, presumably.

Yeah, it was. I forget the exact conversation. It. I think there were a few case reports that gave the team pause also.

Like unexpected outcomes that weren't even related to the mechanism kind of thing.

Yep. And so I don't think it was a hard. No, it was just that we were implementing the other three. So start the three, do the injections, will come back to the cjc. It was just a pause to fully vet what these other report. Case reports were showing.

Gotcha. Okay.

And that's a good example. Like, we do generally stop if anything creates a risk profile that makes us feel uncomfortable. We try to stop. Now, in retrospect, you know, the HGH is the one identify is like the. The one that came with the biggest cost. But I'm struggling to think of anything else right now that we've had that we've quickly killed for negative reactions. I'm trying to think maybe there has been. I'm trying to think of any.

What about. So TRT was sort of short term.

Yeah. Yeah.

How Come you decide to come off. You just wanted the fertility metrics back.

Or we hypothesized that caloric restriction would be one of the biggest yields. And so I was 25% caloric restricted and I got really skinny.

Yeah.

And then we decided to go to 10% and we saw none of my markers change negatively. So we, it appeared as if we were getting the same benefits from 10% to 20%.

And just to clarify, the 25 or 20% was 1,950 calories and.

That's right.

The 10% is 22.50.

That's right. Okay. Yep. And so the. But you know, like to an observer's credit, we haven't taken me to 2700 and done the test on what's going to change from 2250 to 2750.

Yeah.

So I would just give them. I agree, like these observations are legit. And so, yeah, I'm up. And then in doing that, yeah, I went off TRT and my fertility did increase. And yeah. Trying to think if there's other markers.

LH and FSH, how did those change from 1950 to 2250?

We just got that data back. I forget they never exited normal ranges.

I would be curious if they were like subclinical on the, the 1950 though, because you said your natural T was like 400 or something when you were that calorically restricted before TRT.

I need to look. Yeah, I think it's 500, but I.

Need to check because it's not even that bad.

Yeah.

Realistically, like 500 is. I know plenty of people with 500 that function just fine. So were you symptomatic or was it more just like. I want to make sure I'm at the upper optimal.

We were trying to make sure. Yeah. So like. Yeah, like would we do TRT again? Maybe not. Yeah.

Did you notice a difference when you went on it in terms of vitality, quality of life, libido, muscle building potential, etc?

I think I feel better now than when I was on it.

Okay.

But it's also hard to know because I may be getting the uptick of the Follistatin.

Sure.

Like I've. I've had over the past. So now I'm four months into the Follistatin. I've been experiencing some weird things where like my, my stability to stand on one foot and to be able to be stable on one foot has dramatically improved. And I was just doing this with my kids where we were playing this game of like, let's both stand on a foot and play the game and who can push each other over. And I was beating them. And I think this is weird. Before I was not this stable. And so I actually was talking to mini circle and they were saying, yeah, like people are seeing improvement in these neuromuscular structures of this and that. I thought that's unexpected. So we haven't measured this, so I can't speak with confidence, but. But I can just say my experience has been I feel better, more stable, more capable than I have I can remember myself feeling. And yeah, also, if going off the trt, the folletin may be picking up some things. I also did the mesenchymal stem cells. So back to the point before we're trying to isolate, but some of these things become emergent and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's happening there.

One of the things that is interesting about follistatin and its effect on fertility, though, which is notable because we're talking about how it might be causing an uptick, is it's a binding protein. So it's not like it just binds myostatin. That's its only function. It actually used to be called FSH suppressing protein. So one of the concerns with it, one of the primary ones, is actually lowering fsh. So obviously I would assume it not to be the case. Obviously it's conflated with the fact that you're off trt, so your pituitary is going to do what it needs to do to produce hormones. But I'd be interested what baseline metrics of FSH relative to post fall stem. Because I would expect if anything, diminishment in fertility, hopefully none, though not necessarily improvement. So that would be kind of odd to see upticks responsible by the. Because it's like it's literally released as a regulating mechanism to inhibit FSH output in humans, like endogenously. So I would be quite skeptical of that. But the balance thing is interesting for sure.

Yeah. I want to pull up my data right now so we can talk about it.

Oh, sure.

But this is the thing. In no way do I feel righteous about what we're doing. I'm fully open to being wrong. I'm fully open to being corrected. I'm fully open to there being another explanation. I'm genuinely trying to be an open science experiment where I don't come with an agenda that is trying to spin.

Things, I guess, just for transparency then on that, like which endeavors do you have monetary upside in of the things that we talk about or you Talk about at all.

None. So we have the blueprint products which people can buy. Outside of that, people can do whatever they please.

So like the age tests, there's no like phantom equity structure.

This. No, this is the, I think they have the best methylation test. Yeah. And I basically just share what I do.

Yeah.

And just say you can have it. But no, there is not a behind the scenes evil scheme on what I say, what I, and why I say it.

So whose olive oil did you buy before yours?

We bought it from four or five different manufacturers. We were trying, we were sourcing from farms around the world. So we, we have these specs we are trying to achieve and we call them and say we're looking for high polyphenol oil. Can you send us some stuff?

But like the stuff you used previous to that, just as you were in your diet.

Oh, you were literally sourcing from all over the place. And then it became a thing where we were sourcing this olive oil. And then friends and family would be like, we want. And so we're like, okay, we need to solve this problem. But no, I, I've tried to have a very clean structure of this is the open science project and this is my money making stuff. They don't cross.

Yeah.

And so, you know, can I find an error? Maybe. But I've really tried to be clean to say like, you can trust this stuff.

Yeah.

And I'll, and I'll raise the flag if there's a conflict.

So you said 15 of your diet is comprised by olive oil calories.

Yeah.

Or extra virgin olive oil. Just for clarity, could you like explain the difference between regular and extra virgin? Because I feel like it's often not known.

Yeah. We look at six criteria for the olive oil. So one, it's, there's a process where it's cold pressed, you know, it's early harvest. That's how you get the higher polyphenols. We look at total polyphenols, dags, free fatty acids, oleic acid, and one more variable. Those are the primary six characteristics. And then we do a full panel on looking at anything pesticide or, you know, otherwise related. And it's, I think it's something like 1 to 3% of the global harvest meets the criteria. It's a, it's a small number. Whatever the number is, it's small because they usually weigh later in the harvest. It's higher yields. And that's. Yeah. When we did our research, extra virgin olive oil was one of the most powerful whole body foods one can eat.

And is that primarily driven through the polyphenol content or what is like, the major underpinnings of why it's so great?

One of the things is it reduces oxidized ldl, so when you eat, you know you're creating a lot of damage in the body. Oxidized LDL is the damaging portion of it. So looking at my oxidized LDL ref range was something like, I forget the data. I was in a 97th percentile optimal for oxidized LDL. It's like basically none, which maybe explains I have no plaque in the arteries.

Is that via CT angiogram or how do you assess with ultrasound for plaque?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I've got a Philips EPIC here for whole body. We haven't done the ct, because we haven't. We don't think the. The. The radiation exposure justifies doing it. For my risk profile.

Yeah. If your blood work is super clean, then your atherogenic potential could be, like, so negligible it's not worthwhile, presumably.

Yeah. And then, yeah, the polyphenols, you know, for the extra virgin olive oil. But if you look at the evidence, it, you know, we can't say this publicly because the FDA strips down the language you can use to basically, you can say nothing. You can say something like, helps promote blank or may support blank. But the evidence we saw in terms of. Across the spectrum, from every indication, it's just one of the most powerful foods. And so, Yeah, I do 45 mls a day, three tablespoons. Huh.

That's interesting on the claims, because there was a couple I had written down that I thought were pretty strong that I heard on the Diary of CEO podcast.

Um, you know what? That was before we went through the process. And so when I did that podcast and we started going through the whole process, like, oh, my God, I really should have cleaned up my language.

Okay, so.

Yeah, that was before.

Okay. I will not say those things.

Thank you.

Yeah. One thing I do want to say, though, because this is a trial and wouldn't be asserting anything. It's just a fact of what occurred is you mentioned there was a study where individuals consumed extra virgin olive oil for nine weeks and lost 5.2 pounds. And it was in addition to what they're currently eating. So. And then you've said it's. And again, this is like, not a statement of disease prevention or anything. You just simply said what I would interpret to be opinion. It's better than Ozempic.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll leave up the other statistics that were.

Yeah.

So like that kind of a claim, is it via, like how is it facilitating this weight loss? Mechanistically.

Yeah, I was with that statement. What I did is I created an infographic and I said, here's why I consume extra virgin olive oil. And I listed out five things that's different from me saying, I personally am doing this thing for these reasons versus, hey, this is blueprints olive oil and here's what you can expect.

Yeah.

So we tried to parse out so I could say within FDA guidelines, something to that effect. And the entire statement I was saying was I said extra virgin olive oil is better than nr, cold plunge, heat therapy, your favorite podcast, and something else. So I was being cheeky. I was basically saying, look, I understand most likely you who's listening, you're out and about trying to find out what you can do for your health and wellness and you're picking things, what to do. Like, do you buy a cold plunge for your house, do you do sauna, how often, et cetera. And oftentimes when people are making that consideration, you're not looking at effect. You're not saying, like, how significant is this intervention to my wellbeing? And if it's not, if other things are higher into its effect, then I want to prioritize those things, even if they're not sexy or they're not socially, you know, dominantly talked about. And so what I was trying to say is if you're looking for effect, you might have a power law in extra virgin olive oil that exceeds the power laws of all these other things that are trendy because it works across all these different variables inside the body of things you really care about. So I was really trying to get to that point of the difficulty of someone finding out how to decide what to do and why.

So like, I am not to dispute its utility. Like, I think it's, you know, a no brainer if people can handle the calorie burden without it resulting in overeating as a whole. I guess my curiosity is in the mechanism by which it's accomplishing the weight loss. Like, is it such that it's like. I couldn't find the study, by the way, so I was hoping you could speak to it. Is, is it, did they find that it enhanced some metabolic output or was it more that they perceived they were eating the same diet, but in reality it was attenuating hunger signaling dramatically and they were portion controlling just by indirect subconscious behaviors?

I don't know. We can pull it up. Okay, let's Pull it up.

Sure.

Let me see if they can find it. Yeah, I don't remember what the mechanism was.

Yeah, I tried googling the, what you said, you know, nine weeks, 5.2 pounds evo. I can, I can find it easily. But like, I would think by law of thermodynamics, there's some sort of proportional change in the way people are eating the other stuff to like, you know, accommodate the olive oil. And perhaps there's some upregulation in health processes that helps to some extent. But you know, like 5.2 pounds in nine weeks is pretty solid for adding calories. If it was actually on top of the current diet. It's like that's the best fat burner on the planet if that's the case.

Yeah. And so like, you know, is it truly comparable to Ozempic? You know, like I'm, I'm trying to, I want, I'm not doing a straight comparison. Trying to really accomplish an objective. Okay. Yeah, Here we go. Consumption.

Oh, wow. I can't type. Consumption of extra virgin improves body composition, blood pressure in women. Okay, awesome.

Thank you. You see what it says fat loss.

Was roughly 80% higher on extra virgin olive oil compared to the control group. It also reduced diastolic blood pressure when compared to control. Let's see. Our results indicate well received daily high fat breakfast containing 25ml soybean oil or EVO during nine consecutive weeks. All right, so breakfast, we're part of an energy restricted normal fat diets in 2090. Huh. So like, I wouldn't be one to state there's no difference between the oil comparisons. Obviously olive oil is going to be superior. But would you, would you discern from this result that it is like an appetite satiety signaling regulated mechanism? More than likely. And then some fringe health benefits that are more impactful on health status, but not necessarily metabolic output. I, I wouldn't hold you to it. Yeah. Like I'm just guessing myself.

Yeah, I, I have tried to stay within the bounds of my knowledge.

Sure, sure.

On all things.

Okay.

Yeah. I try to eagerly lean into what I don't know.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

Yeah.

I respect the not answering too. If you don't feel comfortable chucking out a. I would consider it an educated guess, but I guess nonetheless. So like, I wouldn't hold you to.

You know, the thing. I made an educated guess. Unquestionably someone would say you said this. And they wouldn't, they wouldn't parse out whether I said I'm making a guess.

Or I. I feel like that would further in discredit press that are trying to take you down personally because it would be very clear contextually that I framed out the question with so many aggressive caveats that who can you trust now? Who's shit talking Brian Johnson?

Yeah. No one cares about context. Okay, fair. They all just want a headline.

Sure. Okay. Well, yeah, I think olive oil is def. Or extra virgin olive oil is definitely worthwhile if you can find good stuff. So in general, I know there's a. Similar to fish oil. It's often said everything's bad. The grocery store is terrible, everything's even to the extent of the rancidity might be make it worse for you to take it than to not.

That's right.

With olive oil, how difficult is it? Like I would imagine the answer is what you've already said. You had to search far and wide.

And it's very hard. We just tested a batch out of Portugal. I think it's a year and three months old from harvest, something like that. And yeah, we found that the oxidation was extreme. That, you know, wine gets better in time, presumably, I guess, you know, whatever people value wine, that it aged longer. But evil is a declining curve. So you want to eat it when it's fresh. And yeah, we found when we did the chemical analysis, it's a really tight window to get the specs we need for the health objectives. In fact, you want to try some?

Yeah, I'll try some. Sure.

Tyler, can you get a tablespoon? Tyler, are you around?

All right, so I have some extra virgin olive oil with maximum polyphenol content. And when I drink this, I will lose. I will have a six pack after. Right. Potent. Yeah, I'm. I don't typically drink oil straight, or at least I haven't since bodybuilder days when I used to try and get extra calories. I just dump shitty olive oil at the time, I guess into my protein shakes and stuff. But yeah, that's. It's good.

What's your caloric intake now?

Depends. But often around 3,000. Yeah, but I should cut back, realistically.

You should cut back, Yeah.

I would like to maintain a leaner body composition sustainably. And I am still a little bit of the entrepreneur who burns the candle at both ends right now and often will choose convenience over exactly what I'd even advise often. So it's like a practice, what you preach. You need to actually do that kind of thing right now. For me, it's not like I'm terrible by any means, but my Standard, certainly not where it would be. And I've been much leaner in the past with, you know, and I felt it was a much better representation of like for me in particular, I hold fat in areas that I need to get very lean to get like a lean chiseled face, for example, I need to be like borderline sub 9% body fat often. And you know, it's just a matter of probably writing it down and just adhering to it because it's been a minute since I've actually wrote a plan for myself, but that's always what made me get the job done.

So what's your body comp and where you want it to be?

Right Now I'm about 2:10, 2:15. If I was to ballpark I'd say maybe 14% body fat, 15% maybe and 10 at the same body weight probably. And I think just getting back into the regimen would be enough to get me there. But yeah, right now it's very, you know, time efficiency mode. Not necessarily prioritizing what I should be. But is it primarily work pulling?

Yeah, yeah.

The problem is when you're a content creator, you're the face of the companies. But I am also kind of like playing I have to make the products too because I'm the formulator. So with supplements in particular, like even this energy drink for example, like there's no one I would trust to make it and often not even designing it because I don't want to endorse something with my face on it if I'm not intimately involved with its creation. So it's often micromanaging the product dev process, which is a never ending endeavor because there's infinite amounts of SKUs, different flavor variants, different product weights for the same products, new regulations around labeling, proofreading, everything to make sure there's no typos and weird obscure ingredient names. It's just like I describe my day as death by a thousand cuts and it needs to not be like that. And I think at some point I'm just going to have to let what happens happen and kind of just go hands off mode. But yeah, it's, it's tough because it's often when I see influencer run brands, the influencer gets to be an influencer versus actually operate. So I'm sort of playing like both roles. Pseudo cmo, CEO, product dev manager, simultaneous with content creator and doing a bad job at the content creation. I used to be two videos a day output wise and now I'm like, I don't know, one a Month, if I'm lucky. So today. Ruthless.

That's intense.

Yeah, that's dedication. That was savage back then. I had sort of deluded myself into believing something bad would happen if I didn't get them done. And I think I went a year straight without missing a day.

How do you feel now? Are you. How would you compare your state of well being now versus before?

I would say it's. I'm definitely happier now because I have a lot of other things worked out in my life that support that happiness. Like, relationship is great. She supports what I do, even with the crazy schedule. And it kind of works out very well considering she does shift work too. So it's like my weird entrepreneur schedule aligns with her weird physicist schedule. But I don't know, it's just like the companies have so much promise and potential that I know can be realized. It just needs to happen. So I'm very optimistic and enthusiastic about each day. I just, it just physically pains me to see my time just bleed away. And even when I get to as close to inbox zero and think everything's okay now, I can actually start new, you know, 17 more tasks pile up the next day and it's just, you know, it's good problems to have, I suppose, but I need to get better at letting other people just go hands on and not be so micromanaging because that's often what I do is I'll just kind of like sit there hawking over people's desks, jumping and doing stuff because I want it to be, you know, perfect and I could have accepted it at 70% of what I deemed perfect and it just would have got done.

So, yeah, what would you say? What is the life game you're playing?

I think for me, I don't think the, the companies I have fortunately align with my exact interests. So it's not like any of them are being built to like, I have goals for them to be billion dollar valuation companies and I'm confident they're good. At least my two main ones are going to get there. And the reason it feels sustainable though is because I actually care about what I'm doing as opposed to it being for the monetary upside. Like I don't even really plan on selling them ever. I just kind of enjoy the process of building them. So for me, the motivation factor is kind of intrinsically there above and beyond. You know, I could say without a doubt I could probably retire and just chill and have nothing to do, but that would stress me out more than the micromanaging and everything, so.

So you like the tension a little bit?

I definitely thrive under pressure.

Is it too much?

Not yet. Yeah, there's been a couple times I've been like, yeah, like, pretty hectic. But fortunately, at least the like. Merrick Health, for example, it's a telemedicine platform, but we pride ourselves in diagnostics and the analysis of diagnostics as opposed to typical TRT mills that exist that are essentially just cookie cutter prescriptions of steroids and exist solely to make it look like they're, you know, optimizing you, but in reality they're just getting a very basic blood test. Oh, you have a 500 total T that's clearly not optimal for your age at 23. So you should be on TRT plus seven other experimental peptides plus DHEA plus supplements. And then before you know it, you have this kid on a laundry list of things because you've convinced them via your telemedicine company that seems really official and has influencers endorsing it. And that kind of thing just disgusts me. So for us, we're not that and we pride ourselves in that. And we have medical providers who pride themselves on continuously educating themselves. So for me, like, the reason I like making content too is because I talk about the newest literature, things I'm learning about endocrinology, pharmacology, biology, human performance optimization, preventative medicine. And the doctors and medical providers we work with are the same. They are individuals who didn't just become credentialed to see patients and then stop. They are, you know, subscribed to membership sites like Peter Atias and follow new updates on, you know, the Traverse trial and what's happening with the risks of TRT and anything and everything cutting edge that is relevant to our vertical, they're on top of. And that's kind of the criteria by which we vet providers. So for me, like, that endeavor in itself is very noble in that it's not just monetarily rewarding, but also it's like I see the feedback in real time of people whose lives have been changed and often is through education about their biomarkers and diagnostics and how to go about changing natural things that could impart massive benefit before jumping to pharmacology and pharmacology if warranted, because sometimes you'll have a guy with a pituitary adenoma and he went his whole life without knowing that. This is why he's, you know, could barely, couldn't even get through puberty because he literally wasn't shooting hormones down to his testes like he should have been. And there's stuff like this that goes shockingly overlooked, especially by family doctors and whatnot, who just won't know the answers. And this kind of stuff is like obscenely, if that's even the right adjective, rewarding for me to see in real time. And then the company succeeds as a byproduct of the enthusiasm of the organization. Like what we're doing feels noble. So to me it's like that in itself is unlimited motivation, even though my days feel pretty time sucking Quick interruption to bring you a note from Merrick Health, my preventative medicine platform, and I felt like a very fitting integration for this podcast. In particular, talking about the value of in depth diagnostics, the rigor in interpreting them, individualized protocol design. This is something that may seem out of reach given the context of the subject matter and, you know, some of these expensive, you know, teams and therapies being done, but in reality there are passionate individuals that work with companies that reflect those same values and are on the cutting edge, staying on top of the most recent literature to provide evidence based solutions when it comes to lifestyle intervention, sleep hygiene assessments and changes, dietary manipulation supplementation implementations, pharmacology when warranted, and design of all those protocols in correspondence with the diagnostic metrics that have that rigorous interpretation by somebody who is years in the trenches actually learning about this stuff and genuinely interested in the subject matter to maximally assimilate every single thing that comes out that is new and is impactful. So when it comes to these companies, you know, TRT clinics, they often get a bad rap in just a justifiably so oftentimes because of the cookie cutter prescriptions that often are given out at scale under the guise of anti aging. Unfortunately, a lot of these companies like to portray themselves as, you know, super cutting edge anti aging. You know, care about your optimal performance and this is how you reach the, you know, next level of, you know, quality of life essentially, when in reality you are often leaving the company going out the door more unhealthy than you were when you came in the door. And that is not an exaggeration. Oftentimes these cookie cutter protocols that involve a array of different compounds when it comes to androgens, you know, TRT at dosages that often are not individually tailored appropriately with all the context with the diagnostics that actually and you know, symptom assessment that actually justifies certain implementations. But in addition to that, just like an array of peptides that sometimes and often not are just deployed for no Reason as opposed to waiting until the utility actually makes sense to be using them strategically and then an array of other things just haphazardly because they don't understand the science and just want to make their money on the medications and don't actually know how to provide high quality service. So they don't. They give you the impression that they are comprehensive care about your health, when in reality they just want to get you on steroids and other shit. And that is not what we do. There are some companies that are doing things right and miracle is, you know, part of that small fraction of companies that are staying on top of the cutting edge and have a commitment to educating ourselves with a degree of rigor that is reflected in the service that we provide. Ultimately, when you come in the door, you want to get your diagnostics evaluated by somebody who is extremely intelligent, knowledgeable, and has seen, you know, hundreds, oftentimes sets of labs and has very, very rigorous insights into interpreting where you stand, what you could benefit from, what you need to optimize from all angles, not just from what drugs can be implemented to make you feel a bit better and mask something or, you know, sometimes correct an issue. But oftentimes there are many baseline things that need to be done to truly optimize. You know, you can mask and band aid a lot of, with, you know, hormones and experimental compounds, but oftentimes if you do that, you are not just masking the issue, but you are, are ending up in a state of accelerated disease onset just in a different, through a different medium to a different area of your body than you thought was, you know, otherwise going to happen. You know, you might end up with heart disease rather than some other thing that your, your erectile dysfunction may be cured, you may feel vital now or offset your, you know, chronic fatigue to a significant extent. But now you have a, you know, you're on the fast track to elevate LVH and your blood pressure is in disarray and you end up with premature atherosclerosis. You know, you never know with this stuff. You need somebody who's looking out for you and understands all angles and cares about it like the subject matter. You need a genuine interest in this stuff to actually provide the care. Like, I can't even count how many times I've seen a local physician and the piss poor assessment of, you know, a thyroid issue that was underlying or, you know, a premature heart disease situation that was just completely negligently overlooked. And that's not to say that there aren't you know, good family doctors, there are plenty that are excellent. But ultimately, if you want to be proactive with your health for you and your family, which is ultimately the motivation behind this company that I started it for, was to find and get that service to myself and my family and to bring it at scale to the masses if possible as well to whatever capacity we could scale it. Getting that is of imperative importance in my opinion. Like there's not many things I would put with higher priority than making sure that you are proactively looking out for yourself and your family and ensuring that nobody is flying blind and also living in a state of accelerated disease onset or just a worse state of quality of life than they need to be and just genuinely being unhealthy, like you don't want that for you or your family. And it's not just about optimization, getting jacked or any of these things, or cosmetic appearance. Ultimately you want to know with a high degree of accuracy what is going on regularly, at regular intervals with longitudinal data and get assessments of where you stand and what you should be doing to improve not just your performance, but also your actual health metrics because they all overlap significantly. If you want to get access to, you know, Merrick Health and work with us or just get self service labs, you can check us out. Link in the Description below. Merrick health.com I think I've sufficiently rambled enough. Sorry. I just get really, really long winded and passionate when I talk about this stuff. So anyways, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Yeah. So you're willing to endure an enormous amount of pain and over a very prolonged period of time to experience acute moments of joy.

Yes.

And that's your superpower, is your ability to endure pain?

I guess. Yeah.

Where you, you basically can be in a dopamine desert.

Yeah.

And then find that one moment where you deliver the value to the person that hasn't had it their entire life.

Yeah.

And it's because of your work that they get that.

Yeah. And it also just happens. It's not just like I feel like it's noble. So that's why it's motivating. It's also that I am enthralled in myself. So before I even made content online, I was a nerd who researched this stuff out the wazoo until I knew everything that I thought I could know and became top 0.1% knowledgeable in whatever I thought I could that was relevant to it. I just become obsessive about when I'm interested in something. So being able to Make a career around that and somehow make it into a packaged format that is information too. I can impart on people and educate them to then make guided decisions on what they spend their money on too. It's like, what's better than that? It's the dream job.

Do you feel. Is there a difference in how you feel connected to people? Whether you're a content creator and you're directly speaking to somebody and seeing comments and the reactions versus building something that people then engage with? Is that a different experience for you?

Yeah, it's definitely. As a content creator, there's definitely an aversion to monetizing because you will inevitably receive backlash of you've sold out. When often I think this is probably the case with some of the stuff you're embarking on is to actually achieve the goals that you feel worthwhile. It involves the necessity to raise funding or monetize it in some capacity that is scalable. Even if it's. For example, we know there's nuance behind who's gonna take on like a blueprint protocol, but like, having it packaged in a way that it's accessible and scalable is necessary for you to get your message to as many people as you feel worthwhile. So, you know, to me, there's definitely a. A different psyche, I suppose when I make a video that I don't feel like I'm trying to, there's no part of me that feels like this is just free value I'm imparting. And then the services I don't ever. Although I'm aware there's a monetary upside, I never feel guilty about it because I actually believe in what it is. So I suppose I have a different feeling, but it's not a negative one.

When you go about your endeavor to become the most educated person you can become in that given topic and you view the world of health and wellness and you see the variety of opinions being expressed from a variety of people, some who are credentialed, some who are not.

Yeah.

How does that look? How does that appear to you?

Very complicated. So I can just imagine how daunting it is as a viewer trying to figure out who to trust. Fortunately, I think one of my superpowers is identifying people who are trustworthy and actually have high quality information and being able to sway through the nonsense. So for me, over the years, I've been fortunate enough to be connected in some capacity with people I respect and consume their content. Or like essentially the who's who of actual credentialed, respected science based Creators. And I was just, you know, a meathead bro who happened to fumble my way in somehow to being friends with some of these people too. And over time it's become, I feel like, at least to me, somewhat clear when there is alternative ulterior motives, but in a way that I don't know what it is. There's just a sense I get if somebody is a shady character and I don't know how to put my finger on what it is. But sometimes you can tell when somebody is speaking of something because they know it may financially reward them and enrich them and not because they actually care versus they actually care about the information and monetizing to some extent, which is not a bad thing in my opinion. Yeah, but as a viewer, all you can really do. And this is like, it's hard to teach, but I mean, there are certain people who have high trust factor among other people that have high trust factor and being able to actually recognize patterns and who is friends with who not because of overlapping financial incentive, but because of information quality. And the trust factor that overlaps within the networks, I feel like, is how you identify high quality creators. That you should actually take their advice because you will find heavily contrasting opinions from all sides of the spectrum. And ultimately you almost have to assimilate and consolidate a framework of. These are the guys who seem to be the most trusted. I think they're trustworthy based on any kind of reasonable educated guess I can discern from their content compared to others. And it seems like the other people I trust also trust them and don't trust these other guys. It's almost just like a pattern recognition thing at the end of the day. And while that may not be a super scientific way to go about it, there really isn't that much better of a way to discern between noise and quality. And then you just have to take that and make an informed decision for your own personal health journey from there.

Can you think of a time where you serpentine your way to a certain conclusion? You. You have now, but you were on the opposite side of that observation some time ago and others were too. Can you map your own evolution through the fog of trying to figure out the science? Not to say we've ever landed, but just, you know, whatever the time and point is now.

So like something I've changed my mind on potentially like, okay.

And maybe where you've seen those who you respect also maintain a similar opinion. And then people kind of moved about in their opinion. So you alone and then you plus.

Others, man, that there's definitely examples. I'm just trying to think of a good one. I remember back in the day, this is, I guess, relevant to our conversation. We used to think the only rate limiting step on muscle growth potential was myostatin, because there was certain rodent literature where you would administer anabolic steroids at a super physiologic level and they would work out and gain muscle, but then their myostatin would elevate. And then we were under the impression that this is the thing that if you were able to eliminate it would prevent any bottleneck of growth. But it turns out, shockingly, there's many other things going on. It's not just that. Yeah. So. Because if it wasn't like, if it was the case that it was just that, you know, the, the gene therapy, for example, you could just megadose into the stratosphere and become Mr. Olympia and never touch steroids.

Yeah.

And it doesn't work like that. That was one thing I changed my mind on, because I had even made content years back saying, you know, the reason, like there was a whole cycling protocol around hormone use based on this myostatin elevation too, would be you would use a certain amount of PEDs until the myostatin had reached some level that made it impossible to continue to grow. And then you come off the hormones, let it clear, wait for myostatin to drop down. And in human studies we actually saw of the limited data available, there wasn't really a clear pattern of what myostatin was doing. Sometimes you would see individuals exposed to high doses of testosterone and their myostatin would go up, and then you'd assume, okay, well now they're gonna stop growing or something. But then by the end of the study week 20, their myostatin would actually go back to baseline. It was like, oh, well, like, how do you explain that? They're still on 600 milligrams of testosterone, which is a lot. So stuff like that kind of changed my opinion of, I guess, mechanistically, how muscle growth in performance enhancing drug users was accomplished or limited. That's just one thing I could think of. There's a lot of stuff I used to think was worthwhile to take too. I'm sure similar to you based on literature at the time. Oh, you know, anime or resveratrol or, I don't know, like a million things that you thought were impactful. And you might have even gone on record and been like, this thing hits hard, it's sick.

That's right.

And then you find out there's some study that comes out. It's like, this is useless. You feel like an idiot. Yeah, yeah. That that happened. And as long as you're candid about it though, then that's all you can really do.

That's right.

So transparency, I think is ultimately the name of the game because that's how you identify shady people too. Is the people who stick to their guns, even through.

Yeah.

Clear evidence against them and are unwilling to acknowledge the opposing viewpoints.

Yeah. Yeah. So of the 3,000, can I ask you questions?

Sure, yeah.

Of the, of the 3,000 calorie diet you have now, is there something in that caloric intake you wish you didn't eat? So is, you know, if, if you want to slim up a little bit, is that reducing caloric intake, is that increasing exercise or is a combination of both?

I think more than anything it is optimizing sleep and exercise regimen. I think the.

How's your sleep?

When I'm doing it to the length I need to be, it's great.

Yeah.

But oftentimes I am it. It's. I have great latency, my stats are great. When I'm actually in bed, I have no problems actually achieving good metrics. It's just a matter of time I'm willing to spend in bed.

Yeah.

Which unfortunately is like, I know the answer.

Yeah.

And oftentimes I still rationalize.

Yeah. What happens? So what happens in self? You understand the science so well and then you're making these decisions in life, what is the thought process you engage in to?

Part of the problem is employees working in different time zones. And sometimes there's meetings that you just need to be on. And then also the only time I don't have people bombing me with new things to micromanage is the middle of the night. So I am a night owl who stays up until 4 to 5am often because 12 to 4 to 5 is the only period of time I'm super productive. As paradoxical as that might be. A lot of people do great in the mornings. I'm terrible in the morning because my phone is. Even if it's on airplane mode, it's like, I know the pile up that's happening. And it's almost worse because I know it's right when I hit off, it's like, whoa, it gets devastated. And yeah, I don't look forward to it. So, you know, for me it's, that's the time of night when I get the most done. But then sometimes it's, I have a critical meeting I need to be on the next day and it's. Oh, it's four hours from now. Now you're, you know, boy.

How do you. How does that feel?

Not great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's again, it's not something I would ever endorse. It's not something I try to make a habit of.

Yeah.

It just happens often. And eventually I hope to get to the point where I've delegated enough things and I'm hands off enough that I don't need to fall into that kind of a routine or I just somehow become more disciplined about focusing during the daytime and follow a regular sleep schedule. But yeah, like at the end of the day it's kind of like that is the situation I've imposed upon myself and I just need to learn to deal with it the best I can.

Yeah.

And yeah.

Yeah. What does your partner think about this?

She thinks I need to sleep more. But she has just as erratic of a schedule self imposed through her job. She works at a particle acceleration facility. It's like nuclear stuff that I don't even understand. And it's shift work. So it's. And the rotation is aggressive. It's like eight hours for a few days and then it flips another eight hours ahead for three days and then it flips again. So it's like you don't even get set into your rhythm. So I would argue that's even worse almost because it's like she's constantly cycling between these like three day spurts. But I don't think she's gonna be doing it forever. She doesn't think she's gonna do it forever. She'll promote to something else or whatever. But yeah, her kind of schedule is sort of accommodated and encouraged my. Indirectly encouraged my weird nightly schedules.

So when you're encountered with a decision that you can add this other SKU and that's gonna kick up 10 things to do, a new design requirement.

All.

The things that kick up and then you can map out and say it's also going to mean likely 200 interactions over a time frame of six weeks. This much stress, this many surprises. Like you can kind of say. So you can say yes or no to that given thing.

Yeah.

What do you do in that moment? How do you decide whether to be one. One thing more ambitious in life and what you're trying to do with your companies?

I think the, the difficulty I have. So one thing I have tried to do is stop trading time for money. So I used to do consultations and eventually I RA rates to Such a high amount to justify my time investment. And eventually I just stopped doing them entirely because I could no longer justify any amount of money for my time. And I also just felt weird about charging that much for a half an hour that I knew I wouldn't vet the information enough to give that person the value they wanted out of the consult. Because sometimes you get like a set of labs or something and somebody asks really specific question. Yeah, there's no way you're going to do that due diligence just by popping in.

That's right.

So I stopped doing those and that was my stop trading time for money at that time. And then it transitioned to this new thing which is similar to what you said. How do you justify a new SKU or a new service with products? It's difficult because once you've actually finished designing it and rolling it out, it can become a passive sort of source of revenue that you are no longer responsible for overseeing because now it's the logistical oversight, which is fulfillment operations warehouse. So similar to after you've tested all the olive oil, you've checked the packaging, the screen printing looks great, the bottle design, the quality of the glass, all this stuff, you're gonna have to vet yourself because you're not going to put out garbage. Once that's done, though, you know you now have this exact product. As long as the quality is equivalent each subsequent time, you no longer need to oversee it with the same rigor and meticulousness. That's how I feel about products, often to a point where it's like the upside long term is so significant it's hard to say no to because I know it's a shitty grinding task now that will eventually lead to something that's potentially infinitely scalable. So you know, it's like, why do you roll out any blueprint product, for example? Because you think it's worthwhile and if you put the time in now, it'll pay dividends down the road.

So these are short term sprints of enduring pain for longer term passive income. And you anticipate your life settling down once you get a certain number of SKUs.

Yeah, yeah.

Which may be a mirage because there may be endless things to do just because that's your personality and you're never actually going to give yourself a reprieve that in the moment in your mind, it's an acute sprint to achieve this thing. And once you arrive there, then you have an opportunity to say, where am I at? And if I need to prioritize sleep, then you can do so at that point, roughly.

But there is also only such a bandwidth of capital allocation that can be utilized to where at some point we have to stop expanding the catalog and scale it. So I feel like I'm just getting there faster to be able to then take the step back and dial things in. So, yeah, like pretty much what you said is how you. I can rationalize it all, but I know it's not ideal.

Yeah. So if you, in taking a step back, if you, if, let's say people in the year, you know, 2253 are observing your life and they're making commentary on you as a human, what do they say about you? Do you even care about that thought experiment or does it just not register as a value that you would care about?

I feel like my perception of legacy, I feel like is different than yours because you have a goal to change the world, seemingly. At least that's my perception. Whereas for me, I think I can change things on a scale that is memorable while I'm here, but I don't necessarily know that I'm gonna pull like an Elon Musk level thing ever to where it's really worth even consideration of what somebody 200 years from now will think. Like, I truly don't think my great, great grandkids will even know my name. Like I know for certain, I, as bad as it might sound like, do not care really about my great grandparents history. Like it's interesting, but like I actually don't even know their names off the top of my head. That's not that long ago. So for me to think that 200 years from now what I'm doing is somehow impactful on my, you know, successors like it, let alone random people, it's just hard to fathom. So you're kind of just making a trade off of time for what do I think will increase my quality of life in the relative short term future, some time horizon, given the opportunity you have because your relevancy is not guaranteed as well.

Yeah.

So like you right now, striking while they iron taught is of critical importance. If you took a step, took your foot off the gas, who's the next biohacker dude who takes your place like Ben Greenfield. Could have easily been you if he came around 10 years later. Instead, he's established his niche and he's the guy who does, you know, his stuff. The family man guy who talks about, he makes books on. He's a great creator by all means, but like he's done pretty rigorous stuff that is very analogous to what you do. And I'm certain there's gonna be another guy who comes along who does as extreme of stuff potentially as well. And you've hit like a great timing. It's not just about, like the rigor and quality of things that you're doing. It's also the luck and timing to some extent. So I'm aware of that. I know I'm not the only one capable of having these thoughts in my brain. So it's like capitalizing on that in the moment is. Feels like it could be fleeting if I were to just take a step back and try and take it easy. It feels like I'm doing myself a disservice.

Yeah. And to be clear, there's no judgment on my. In my questioning.

Sure.

I'm not putting any value above the other. I'm curious on what motivates you, how you understand the world, why you do what you do, how you think the trade offs that are presented to you, how you try to structure some reliability in the world of chaos, of health and wellness and where it's really the wild, wild west.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tough, man, for sure. I'm very privileged and fortunate, though, to be where I am, especially not being a traditional MD who's, you know, Dr. Derek, going on podcasts and stuff. Like, I worked through imposter syndrome for a while until I realized, like, actually I'm pretty smart about what I'm talking about and I should be talking about it.

How do you feel about that? How do you feel not having the form, the. The credentials that people look to as being qualified? How do you.

I think it used to bother me more and sometimes the comments will. They're not. It's not like they're the majority ever, but sometimes, like, for example, if I go on Peter Ortiz podcast. A couple comments. Why would you ever have this meathead on here? Not even a criticism of the content or the things being said. Just straight up like, this guy is a idiot.

Right.

He has no credentials. Why are you talking to him like you couldn't even be friends with somebody who's not a doctor? Like, why is he on your show? It's not fair.

Yeah.

You know, and it's like, it's. It's pretty wild that. I don't know, the call to authority is very strong often. I'm sure to some extent you might deal with that. Fortunately for me, and similar to you, I have a team behind me of people who are credentialed and I can call to and say, this is where My information comes from too. It's not like I'm just pulling this out of my ass and going on bodybuilding forums and coming up with these conclusions like I was 20 years old. Yeah, because that's what I used to do back then, similar to every other bro out there. But over time we evolved and we now have, you know, teams and people we work with and colleagues and whatnot. And at the end of the day, like, my company works with very high level providers who are very passionate about this stuff. And I'm also fortunate enough to be acquaintances and friends with people who are also have the traditional credentials and have, I guess, endorsed me as well. Enough so that I don't feel like I shouldn't be talking about this stuff anymore. And I will never say take what I say as medical advice, obviously, but no credential guy would ever say that on a podcast either about what they say. Typically they would say, take this information for what you will and run it by your doctor. And this is just what we believe to be high quality information. That's what a good content creator should do. With the caveats. And yeah, you know, that's kind of all. You know, it sometimes is frustrating, but I would say much less so than it used to be.

If you could change anything in the health and wellness world today that you think needs to be changed or you wish would change, would you put your finger on anything?

Man, that's so.

Or so many things.

Well, there's a lot of things for sure, but part of, similar to the, the passion behind the preventative medicine, telemed stuff in Canada, it's horrendous trying to get anything proactively. At least in the States you have the, the luxury of being able to pay for it out of pocket. As absurd as that sounds. In Canada you could actually get rejected trying to pay for your blood work. Like you will literally make an appointment with the doctor, go in, ask to pay for a lipid panel, and get told to go home and not waste their time because you're too young or whatever. You need to literally be having a heart attack sometimes to actually get seen. I know people who faked like major events to actually get what they needed for certain things or what they wanted. And I'm not saying it's bad or good, it's just what it is. Yeah, if you have the money and you're willing to pay for it to support the economy, I feel like you should be able to. And if the economy doesn't support that structure, like something's pretty fundamentally wrong with it that you can't even pay for it. I feel like. So I found myself driving over the border often just to be able to pay for what I wanted to get because the free healthcare was so, you know, piss poor. So for me being able to get preventative medicine for my family, for myself is pretty important. So it's what partially what led me down the rabbit hole of the whole telemed thing to begin with. Because I don't want to wait until my mom has a heart attack to figure out what's going on. I don't want to wait for my dad to get prostate cancer. Like I want to to you know, figure this stuff out sooner.

Yeah.

So yeah. Like if it were me it would just be more readily accessible. High level diagnostics with at scale education about what the cutting edge markers are.

Yeah. Interesting. Like the exact opposite of how the system's been built.

Yeah.

A proactive measurement for the common good.

Yeah. But I could understand that maybe it's not sustainable to have every single person checking all their stuff. But it's like I don't know, like just charge more then. But then it's a monetary capital thing.

I wonder if you could and then almost arrive at the monetary probability probabilities of justifying why the routine measurement actually yields a higher economic outcome.

Yeah. There's definitely an argument to be made if you get really granular on it of why you're burdening the system less with people who are proactive and whatnot. Not. But it's like as much. Maybe that's one of the main motivations for an influencer to get more influence too. Why you should push the gas pedal even harder.

Yeah. While that you're in Canada, that you as a human are in Canada and.

Stuck there more or less like they.

Have you perfectly boxed in.

Yeah.

So especially because now all of your financial accumulation is in Canada. So. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want their cut. Yeah. It's tough man. Because it's like we could say the answer but actually facilitating it is difficult. And then it gets back to the whole burning the candle at both ends. Why not just optimize all areas of your life and do practice what you preach. It's like you don't know how influential you'll be for how long. And if you can be at velocity for a certain amount of time. I've seen so many influencers like burnout in seemingly weeks who were just on fire. And it's you know, more difficult if you have high quality information. You're not hinging on like a crazy physique or something that's more like viral, rather. It's just good information, but it's still, at the end of the day, something that, you know, maybe you get canceled one day, maybe another. 17 people come out of the woodwork and are just as informative and cutting edge as you are. And now it's diluted the message and you no longer have the push you do to accomplish what you were trying to set out to. So it's like, you know, how do you. There's not really a real answer, unfortunately. And you're kind of just hedging your bets on what you're doing is the right way to go.

Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense. So you find yourself really in this opportune moment. You've worked towards this for your entire life. You feel the tenuous tenuousness of the situation. You appreciate it, you have gratitude for it. And you're saying you're willing to work very hard in this window of time.

Yeah.

Because you want to create. If and if you can build your product and you can build your community and you can then have this as an ongoing stream, then it makes sense. Yeah. I understand where you're coming from now.

Do you?

Your parents? Can I, Mel, can ask you more questions?

Sure, yeah.

What about your parents? What are they like, where do they come from and what's their situation in life?

My mom is full Italian family, comes from Italy. She was an ESL student when she was younger and learned English and is fluent now, but she was in an Italian community when she was younger. And then my dad's just like, I don't know, typical white guy and I don't really know. He's like Irish and Scottish mix or something. And yeah, they fortunately are still together and they imparted good values on me, I think. And it's interesting though, because I have a sister and she does not necessarily share the same. She's more polite, more easy to speak with, just like an all around great human, but certainly doesn't share the same, you know, brain chemistry as I do. I don't know, certain types of behavior, I guess, or maybe masculine traits anyway. So perhaps it's also just, you know, the hormonal differentiation, but like, it's. There's definitely some component of rolling the dice of. As I was. As I grew up, I kind of just like diverged in not doing the traditional. I went to university and got a degree, but then something about the system just didn't appeal to me. And I knew I had to go do something else. And then it led me down this rabbit hole that no one else is really doing in my area because in Canada, at least at the time now it's popular to be an influencer. But back then it was. No one was doing it, especially where I'm from.

So.

Yeah, it's my upbringing was. It's funny because I've had dinners with hyper successful entrepreneurs and they often point to some traumatic episode or like thing in their life that made them the level of insecurity to achieve what they have. And I was at this dinner relatively recently with people, net worths in the hundreds of millions and they did a poll, they were like, raise your hand if you're not fucked up basically. And nothing that you could point to is triggering is why you're the way you are. And I think one other person and myself put up our hands and no one else did in a room of 20 plus really successful rich people. And they were more interested in hearing about my lack of trauma then they wanted to hear about everyone else's Trump, because that's the rare thing apparently. So that was pretty baffling to me. So I don't think I could point to any like significant thing that, you know, I'm not even sure if I've answered the question. But yeah, I feel like I had a very standard but good upbringing.

Yeah. It sounds to me like you are an anomaly in the path you chose from where you're from, from the social expectations of your community of how someone spends their life, what level of success is achievable, like what how a person can reasonably imagine becoming successful and you've kind of just defied all odds to become the person you are today with the opportunities that you have.

Perhaps. And I appreciate you gassing me up, but I also am hyper aware that it could be fleeting and I'm not the most special person ever and I need to capture, capitalize on the opportunity and feel very motivated to do so because I don't know for certain that it won't be fleeting.

Yeah, exactly. So you, you completed what I would say as the assessment.

Okay.

Is yeah, you defied all the odds of what someone would reasonably expect you to accomplish. Born in your time and place. Yeah, you've arrived there, you're there now. You fully appreciate the situation and like over your dead body. If you're going to miss this opportunity to realize basically the success of you defying the odds up until this point.

Hopefully not over my dead body. That's the goal.

Okay, let Me.

Let me rethink that. Yeah, that's the goal. Remember, don't die.

Well, I mean, but, like. But your goal is not don't die. Your goal is. Your goal is to maximize this opportunity that you've created for yourself. And it's kind of the. Yeah. It's a result of. Of your hard work throughout your life. But, yeah, you. You have a very specific. Specific objective. Yeah, that's very helpful to understand.

Okay.

I appreciate you. Yeah.

No, yeah, that was cool. I. Yeah, that was. I actually just did a podcast with. Do you know Jordan Peterson?

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's.

He was dunking on me yesterday.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

What happened?

He was saying that my life philosophy sucks, basically.

It's really interest. Interesting because. So I was just in Toronto.

Yeah.

And did his podcast, and it's the first time I've ever. And it was. It was cool, but I felt like I was being, like, psychoanalyzed.

Sure.

And then I came here, and then I also got psychoanalyzed. Yeah. And it was. No, I've never had that. And to happen, like, twice in a row was pretty. Pretty interesting.

What did he assess?

Basically, just the whole podcast was centered around how I got to where I am and the journey there, and then dissecting the pieces along the way of what psychology I might have had and why it is motivating me and takeaways for people who are entrepreneurially inclined. And, yeah, he's just a gold mine of, I don't know, motivation and insight. So, you know, it's kind of interesting to watch him kind of just dissect my journey, so to speak. But it was cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What'd you think of him?

He is very professional, amazing speaker, literally no errors, even when he's doing a introduction of your podcast. I don't know if you've ever seen his intros to podcasts. He will do a summation of. Of a biography. You would think that it was. Do I have something here?

No, I thought that was a hint. I had an inch, so you're good.

Anyway, so I was under the assumption he probably got a scripted bio of people that he would read out to introduce it, but he actually does the podcast with you, consolidates all the information, turns to the camera, and then does the intro bio of you based on what he just talked about for two hours. And it's crazy watching in real time because he didn't even know you prior to that. And for me, no outtakes. Didn't have to redo it once. Spoke articulately perfectly, succinctly, perfectly described my whole journey without fucking it up once. It was pretty wild to see. But he's a professional speaker, so I guess maybe that's expected for a guy who is literally the pinnacle of his. What he does. So I guess it's interesting. Like, what did you say that made him say what he said to you?

I said that it was a clip taken from a conversation I had with Rich Roll.

Okay.

And I was suggesting that as a species, we are transitioning from stewards of knowledge and knowing to not knowing that artificial intelligence is going to take over stewardship of knowledge. It will be better at that than us. And when that happens, we will find ourselves displaced as the stewards of knowledge. And our value add will not be in knowing things, it will be in something else. And he said that not knowing is. What did he say? Sucked in some way. He framed it as like, it was a terrible philosophy.

Does he follow you on Twitter or how do you even like come across it?

He saw the clip and it was on someone else's.

Oh, gotcha.

So I, Yeah, it's the first time I think he's commented on anything I've done. Yeah, I don't know what he knows about me, but that's what most people said in the comments, is that I came. We respect you, Dr. Peterson. You took this clip out of context. This is what people do to you. So you of all people should be aware to not fall for the same trap. And if you understood the context of what Brian Johnson was talking about, you would have a different perspective. So a lot of people did try to, in, in a good natured way, like, hey, you're missing the larger context here. But fine, like that's how relationships start.

You know, like, yeah, dude, the amount of times I've had people dunk on me and then later ended up realizing I wasn't like a meathead, idiot, know it all, whatever, multiple times.

Yeah.

And ended up being friendly with them after and.

Exactly. So, yeah, I oftentimes people who dunk on me the hardest, I'll message them privately and just say, what's up? Like I'll give you a call and just do a friendly 5 to 10 minute chat. It's like, oh, this is a reasonable guy doing reasonable stuff. Like take away the headlines and the crazy interactions online and you connect and you create friends. Yeah, I've done that so many times. And it's. Yeah, it's. The online world is. It's a pretty rigorous, pretty tough environment. It's like A gladiator environment. And there's so much warfare going on, and it's subtle and it's packaged in these, all these different layers, but there's so much happening for a fight for status and attention and power. And it's more, so much more than the eye can see in how the interplay happens.

Were you prepared for how much scrutiny your appearance would get based on the experiments you're doing?

We totally missed it. We. We went about it trying to measure every organ in the body.

Yeah.

And then the Bloomberg article came out and I was pretty skinny.

Yeah.

And we really hadn't thought about aesthetics almost at all. And so, yeah, we got beat up pretty badly.

And presumably your approach to how you handle it is changed or it just surprised you. Like, did you handle it not well. And it was, like, hurtful.

Yeah. So actually it was. Was almost two years ago where it first went viral. Like a year and a half ago. Someone wrote a tweet and I turn, I pulled up X one day and I'm just getting absolutely slammed.

Yeah.

Everywhere. And I was so surprised.

You know something's up when your notifications thing is like, way more volume than normal.

It's like, oh, hitting harder than any time in my time life. And so I'm trying to figure out, like, what is happening? Why is everyone dunking on me so hard for trying to try my best to do something new in health and wellness and publish the whole thing for free and share all my data. Like, this is such a clean thing of like, here's all. There's no catch. It's just out there. And in the first few interactions, for some reason, I just started saying yes. And so somebody would dunk on me and instead of being defensive, I would just say, yep. And I would play right into it. And I saw that when that happened, it just diffused the situation and created a much better outcome than if I'm out there trying to defend myself. And so I don't know why I did that. It was not a forethought. It was just naturally in that moment. And that's been what I've done ever since is I don't fight. I just play and I say yes and to everything. And I'm fine being the butt of the joke. I'm fine making fun of myself. I'm fine being memed. All that's in good, good spirit and good nature. So I'm fine with it.

Have you ever thought about or tried just not responding or reading the comments?

I love them so much.

So, like, when you read mean tweets, for example. That's like. I see a lot of people say they do.

Oh, no, I do.

Okay.

It genuine. No, I.

Because I could be like, for example, I think a lot of creators could say they have a thick enough skin to deal with it now, but, like, the genuine enjoyment of it would be seen as very odd to most.

No, I do. Yeah. I. I sincerely try to tell the truth always. I really, really do. And I'm trying to think of, like, something I would just lie about, you know, Like, I'm sure I do lies here and there, but I genuinely always try to speak the truth. And this is. This is the case that I. I do love mean tweets. I love the dunks. I love the meanness that's said about me. You know, like, when I'm wrong about something, the protocol, I try to say it. If we screw up, I try to say it. You know, if a marker's bad, I try to identify it. Like, it genuinely. I'm just trying to speak, you know, say the truth in all situations.

So we talked about me and my monetary incentives and passions and whatnot. Obviously, you got a lot of heat recently for coming out with the supplement line.

Yeah.

And you've said yourself, like, you're, you know, candid, forthcoming about what your motivations are, what you get monetary upside in. Obviously, the supplements are endorsed by you. There's some sort of financial backing by you to then, you know, mark them up to make money on it, presumably to reinvest and scale it or whatever. Like, how do you, I don't know, explain that to people who were under the impression and maybe feel a bit misled that I'm not here to sell you anything.

Oh.

But now every meal I eat can be found in this, like, ready to eat, processed format, because some of the stuff is not exactly how you would eat it too.

Yeah, presumably, yeah. So where I've tried to deal with this is when I started the project, I had no incentive to make money. It was legitimately a scientific experiment and I didn't do anything commercially for two years. Then it blew up. And the most common request we got was, make this easy, because this is hard. I'm not going to track down these supplements. I can barely do what I'm responsible for in life anyways, let alone spend two hours cooking and whatever. So that was the most common request. And so I thought, should I? And so I never thought of myself as a food entrepreneur. I come from payments, I did deep tech. I've been in nanotech I've been in synthetic biology. I never imagined myself being a food entrepreneur. So it kind of is like, I don't know, kind of sounds like a pain in the ass.

Yeah.

Which it is. You know, like everything you said I completely resonate with. It is a pain in the ass. Like, food is a very hard business. And so I grappled with it for quite some time, and I knew that if I had some kind of monetary, if I was making money doing something, it was putting my project at risk. So I had to make a decision. Do I do something to make it easy for others, or do I keep on doing this thing? And ultimately I decided to do something about it because blueprint is valuable. The. The value is capped. Right. If I just put this stuff out for free, it's only going to have a certain amount of adoption in the world because otherwise you hit a threshold where it's just too hard for people to implement it. So if you really want to have impact, you need to make it easy for others. But then you enter the territory where you have trust issues. And so what I've tried to say is, I have this product stack. You can buy it if you want. You don't have to buy it. You do your thing. And in fact, for olive oil, I said, here's the criteria you want in your olive oil. Like, go buy it. Like, go do your thing. I'll empower you to go buy it. And here's mine. If you want it, fine. But either way. So I've really tried to parse it out to say, I'm going to continue doing this protocol. I will continue to share my data. I'll be just as open and transparent. I'm also going to give you an option, but you don't have to. And so far, it's, you know, like, it seems to be going well. And there's always going to be people chirping no matter what you do. And that's just part of the game. But I've now moved forward on this, and now I guess I've kind of transitioned from caring about that situation. I've just moved beyond it where it's just like, whatever. I don't care what you say, I'm going to do this thing and people who are into it, great. If you're not, fine. And so I'm on that next stage now. But that took a little while to reconcile. How do you maintain trustworthiness when there's complications?

So, like, the nutritional value of this stuff proportional to buying it fresh from a grocery Store should you be the one to go spend the time finding it and whatnot. Like, is it apples to apples or is there some.

Yeah, so I actually, I'm on the blueprint. Every product we make right now, I eat today. I have been for the past two.

Weeks, like out of the bag, literally. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I'm doing it myself. And so, for example, we had a version of Super Veggie where we made the equivalent of 3.4 cups of vegetables in a powder. And we were assessing that question ourselves. Is it inferior, the same or better? And we concluded it is the same or better because you're basically, you know, vegetables are 90% water.

Yeah.

You're eliminating the water and you're. You're consolidating the nutrients.

Yeah.

And so we were willing to test it because I'm basically getting the same nutritional value now. Will there be deficit somewhere else, like we can look at? But we were trying to tease out, am I going to be in an inferior position because I do this? And we couldn't come up with a reason why.

Yeah, it's tough because, like, I've candidly making a greens formula right now and seeing when you get to the 40 gram actives plus range and what you can actually fit. Trying to equate it to like a bowl of vegetables, though, like, I don't know that you can actually dehydrate and get enough to justify a total replacement. Like, I think that certain products can be framed like supplements, but I don't necessarily know they can be like, here's your whole meal kind of thing. You found that you've been able to get it to like, at least based on the supplement facts. I think the super. The greens product is 40 grams per serving. And that's like the equivalency of the actual meal being 8 otherwise of 3.4 cups of vegetables. Yeah.

The same nutrient value as 3.3.4 cups, including the fiber. And so, yeah, that's what we were saying. Like, where are we missing here? Like, what is it that the body's not getting from this powdered product versus these, this whole product?

Okay. So if you plug it into chronometer, you get like the same output of all the micronutrients and everything too.

Yeah.

Okay, now do you have to like add synthetic micros into it to like, achieve the like, pseudo equivalency or is it yielded through natural means?

It's a good question. I don't know.

Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but obviously naturalists might be skeptical And I don't even know the answer as to if that's problematic. But sometimes you'll see synthetic vitamin E or something is linked to cancer or like, whatever.

Yeah.

And maybe I would have more confidence getting it through actual food, whereby I haven't seen this outcome in the literature.

Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, the arguments we had. So this is to say this, this is not to say that someone's not going to present an argument that would be a good one that will suggest the whole food is in fact better than these powders. Totally open to that. When we looked at it, we said, okay, with whole foods, you've got the problem of what is the quality of this whole food? Because it's not, you're not guaranteed, like, it could be inferior in nutrient value, it could be inferior with the pesticides, it could be inferior in a whole bunch of ways. It could be cooked in property, it could be going bad. There's so many things that, that call that value and a judgment. Whereas the powders are done under highly controlled circumstances, you're getting verifiable outcomes.

Yeah.

And so in many ways your production value chain is better on the powders than it is on the whole foods. Now, like, so it just, what I'm saying is it's not a clear cut case that powders are bad and whole foods are, are better. They could be competitive with each other.

Sure.

And so, yeah, so that's what we're trying to say. And even, and we're not even trying to say that powder should replace whole foods. Like, if you'd whole foods, fine. We're trying to say if you're trying to improve your diet, these things can be plugged in and they're beneficial.

So, you know, as a formulator, I don't know how granular you're willing to get on this, but like, I'm interested in supplement fact panels. When I see this stuff, I'm like, okay, what do you deem to be not just a supplement but a replacement for the literal foods that you're eating? So, you know, obviously we talked about the extra virgin olive oil. I, you know, totally get it. When you get into some of this stuff though, like, first of all, the changing protocols, obviously things are shifting constantly. You'll swap in and out certain supplements weekly probably, I'm assuming, or quite frequently given that part of the goal of this thing is to scale it globally. One of the bottlenecks that at least I've run into as a supplement creator too is it becomes increasingly more difficult to pivot on formulations at scale to where you might be stuck with your exist. Like once you hit global scale, stuck with it for a year plus before you can make a pivot based on new information you found. Like is that kind of just information you bring forth as this is the reality of it and you just gotta deal with it if you're buying it.

Yeah.

And it might not be what I deem to be the most ideal thing at this exact point in time.

Yeah, we, it's a great point we have. So in the blueprint basic stack we have available now we have 67 interventions that is supported by our research as worthy of being a population scale, all ages and genders. And so we think that this formulation is going to be stable for populations. So we haven't really put anything experimental in there. But I'm sure as you know we're going to find side effects. We're going to find certain areas of the world where they respond favorably to one thing, not to something else. So absolutely agree it's going to change. We try to anticipate that in saying what is the population thing we can do now? And so I know, for example my supplementation protocol, it's modified from where I'm at now. So I do the full blueprint stack but I still take other stuff that on top of what I'm taking the blueprint because like for example NR, I think we have 250 milligrams in the supplement and I take 750 a day. So I supplement an additional 500 milligrams a day for my chronological age in my situation.

Gotcha.

So yeah, so we really tried to hit clinically relevant doses, no skimming and then be stable. We'll see how we did.

How do you feel about supplementing calcium just in general because it's something that you feel most people should be doing or because like to me this is one of the minerals that typically almost everyone's hitting their rda. That said it's an RDA so you know, up for interpretation if that's adequate for every single person. I can understand the justification for elderly people to maybe be pushing it. But like for example, AKG in literature is like a potential anti aging thing.

Yeah.

It being molecularly bound with calcium though and having a yield of almost 450mg of calcium per serving.

Yep.

That you know, to me just stood out as a high dose of like that's something you would take anyways. Or it was just a necessity to get the AKG yield that you.

Yeah.

Want to get for anti aging purposes.

I think it was the other. Because we do have the CA akg.

The thing that sucks is some ingredients need to be bound to actually be able to use them. Like L3 and 8 for example. If you wanted to use that while you're using magtine and you're putting in some magnesium amount with it. Not that magnesium is bad, it's great. But certain ingredients you're forced to use like a mineral that you don't want just to get the yield of the thing you're looking for. But anyway, that was just like, like I could only find studies on mice and fruit flies for the akg. So I was just wondering the justification on that.

So we've got 250 milligrams of C. Okay. As ascorbic acid and then we've got the CA AKG that 200 milligrams. 2,000 milligrams.

Yeah. So like the molecular mass of that, if you were to look at the combined calcium is 40.8 daltons. AKG is 144 daltons. If you just proportionally ration it, it's of the 2 grams you have almost 500 mgs of calcium, which to me seems burdensome for like a single hit supplement. But if it's replacing food entirely, like I don't know, like I, I always see negativity around calcium supplementation. So I just wanted to like see your opinion on that.

Yeah. Without being able to speak with authority on this topic, what I have heard is that above a certain threshold it becomes you have oxidative damage and below you're good.

Yeah.

So I think that was the rationale of trying to be below threshold where it becomes bad.

Okay. And this non controlled trial by the True Age team, presumably is this the only human study on alpha ketoglutarate or is it based on like what is the literature we're pointing to to find the utility in it to be as part of like a daily stack?

Yeah. I don't know.

Okay.

Yeah.

Creatine, you only use two and a half grams a day.

That was. So I do five.

Okay.

But we put in the product 2.5 again trying to do population level. How do you hit clinically relevant dose and still be applicable to.

Right, yeah. It's tough when you're trying to like apply it for everyone counting for body weight differential and what? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's exactly. That's the window we really tried to hit. And we'll see. This is why we started. We launched the BP 5000. So we'll have a few thousand people go through, basically consume the blueprint stack for 90 days and then on the front end they have body composition questionnaires, blood and wearables. And then we'll get that on the tail end. So as far as I know, I don't know of a supplement company that has done more rigorous measurement of their stack ever. And we're making this as an open science project. We're going to open source the data. So we're trying to be very transparent and say what happens when. And we have some people who are arriving fully optimized and some people who are just doing this in the very beginning. So we have a pretty interesting group of people.

Not. Yeah, I guess the criticism at that point is just then like, what a great marketing tactic. You've like trick people into buying it and then also giving you the data to support the thing and then you can tweak if it's not ideal. But it's like, you know, to each his own. Maybe you want to be part of that journey. I suppose.

I mean there's. If you take the approach where the company is the sole financial provider of studies, you can only do so much.

Yeah.

If you take an approach where you build a community and you have people willingly trying to improve themselves and extensively measure the biomarkers, you broaden this so far on what you can do together. So now maybe the supplement stack next may be gene therapy, next it may be. So you. Basically what I'm trying to do is build community that wants to actively engage and do this project with us. And we're going to move so much faster and be able to do so much more together if we can pull our resources. Because we're not. There's no company, I mean, not the company. It's hard for companies to sustain the financial wherewithal to continually do things at scale. There's drawbacks too. It's not controlled. There's definitely a give and take here on how to go about doing it. But we like the idea of open science. We like the idea of being transparent. We thought it'd be really cool with a lot of us going through the process together.

What was the initial investment to spin this whole thing up?

The supplement stack? Yeah, the food products. I mean it depends on how you're going to do the accounting.

Like cogs.

I don't know. Yeah, like we've been doing. We've been.

You don't have to say if you don't want.

No, it's fine. We've Been working on this for a couple years. Like this has been the whole process of what are the power laws of. Yeah, so if you put together 67 things that go in the body, what do you choose and what amounts? And so we've been working on this for a couple years, really in my body, but based upon scientific evidence. So yeah, a couple million dollars over the past couple years. Okay.

As far as like the blueberry nut mix. So like this one seems a bit more simple. Like the longevity mix had like 600 mgs of ashwagandha, among other things that I feel are a bit more difficult to justify as like daily necessity. But like blueberry nuts, I can imagine everyone's going to benefit. The question then is why would you not just buy fresh blueberries? Because it's a pretty simple stack. Is it just. What about it? Is it retaining more nutrients or is it the same and it's just the proportions that are ideal or what is it about it that's ideal?

Yeah, we're trying to make it as simple as possible to eat the highest quality food and going to the grocery store takes a lot of effort and a lot of people don't.

Yeah.

So a lot of people will do order the order in and you're getting food from restaurants and fast food and whatnot. So we're trying to say if it's there right in front of you, how can we get you the highest value nutrients?

Okay. And like what is the equivalency of the like a serving of blueberries? Because I know there's very strong literature on, you know, like anti aging of blueberries for example, potentially even more like polyphenol content in berries than olive oil per calorie basis. Like what is the ideal. Maybe it's on the site and I'm just didn't write it down, but it's like what is the ideal amount that you've generalized for?

Yeah, yeah, I think we're. It's a half a cup blueberry equivalent.

Okay, gotcha. So it's like, is there some sort of like proportional allocation for. If you're a man, use this mantra. If you're a woman.

Same for everybody.

Damn, dude. So is, is it more like. At least for now, you said the, the amount was 400 plus calories for the stack that exists. So presumably that's how you can justify the equated amounts for men, women, whatever, because it's on top of your current diet.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the idea would be pick your shittiest 400 calories.

Exactly.

And get rid of it.

That's exactly right. And then said we have new products coming out to replace the other calories we're trying to satisfy for the entire caloric intake. And so women, you know, would be around 1750, men would go a bit higher.

A lot of the instructions that use are like put it on stuff. How, how do you end up with that? If it's everything though, is it just like you're eating soup all day of powders or what's the outcome?

Well, yeah, we're trying to solve for flavor, texture, variety and fun. And so we have for example we've got freeze dried fruit chips, we have freeze dried or dehydrated vegetable chips. We have some soups, a protein drink. Yeah, things like that. We're trying to. So it's not going to just be powders and drinks, it'll be whole food.

Okay. And have you noticed a difference on like you have a CGM in terms of like. Obviously there's going to be some difference on speed of transit, intestinal transit of this stuff being in like pre digested format essentially almost like ground up. What is the differential on, I don't know, glucose spikes for example, or like ability to you process it well and digest it well. Is there any notable difference? Because it's like you'll often hear for example in the nutrition community never have fruit juices because it's like, you know, the, the spike in blood sugar is like so much more aggressive and the hit you get is so concentrated compared to if you just ate fruit. Because that's sort of something to be considerate of here or is that not the case and you just add a proportional amount of fiber on top to account for the.

That's a good point on that's the only thing that'd be applicable to would be the fruit chips.

Okay.

Everything else, I don't think there's anything that would cause a glucose spike.

Apple chips are really good by the way.

Yeah. But yeah, it's a good question from that perspective. I don't know. Well, yeah, I think we need to learn more about that.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that's like wrong. It's just like you know, something to be considerate of.

Yeah.

Because it's probably unavoidable I guess. As far as omegas. So I believe you have EPA and DHA in your supplement list. But then in the nutty pudding you have hemp and pea protein and then only Ala Omega 3s. What is the rationale for no EPA, DHA in this Stack.

We were trying to find a vegan source. We found one. So algae. It's coming. Yes, exactly.

Okay. Yeah. That's the supplement you have presumably is the micro algae, I think.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. So we. We realize we need to up that and so we'll add that to a next iteration.

Are you ever gonna have non vegan stuff once you've like built out the stack and then you.

Yeah, I think we're open to that.

Okay.

Yeah, it gets. It'll come back to a contemplation of SKU complexity and time. Yeah, it seems like. Exactly. Always time.

You'll become me.

Dude, you know what if I do I. I'll call you at 2 in the morning. I never pick up.

Yeah. Okay.

What time do you say you go to bed? You're.

It depends, man. It's four. Four to five is typical.

Yeah. God, I can just imagine seeing on my calendar and meeting like 9am and it being 4 and just feeling the awfulness of that situation.

Usually I'll try and at least hit six hours that night and go to bed a bit early, but sometimes it's tough. And the problem too is my maric health is Michigan based, which is EST time zone. So often the most critical of meetings. I just have to make it to EST time zone because there'll be lawyers there, accounting firms. It's just like this mega expensive call that I'm not going to make them switch to my schedule. That's absurd to begin with and also hours behind. So it's like I just got to show up. And yeah, sometimes it's rough, but is what it is. Okay. Essential capsule. So to me, I'm assuming this is like the multivitamin of the stack or like the. The basis of. Yeah, nutrients of B vitamins and stuff.

So actually we. I think we would call that differently and use a different name if we did it again. It's not meant to. To basic to identify any importance of those over other things.

I think this is. By the way, I think you bring yourself more scrutiny than necessary via not being a little bit more intimate with the titlings. Because if I was somebody who wanted to dismantle the shit out of you on this podcast, I could call to the fact that. And I understand that maybe it wasn't you who wrote this, but it says the most nutritious program in history. Yes, essential. And then you have a bunch of stuff that's not like you would even tell me like Genestein, like certainly not essential. Part of your diet, presumably.

Right.

So it's like, if you could not get scrutiny unnecessary, like, just one word change, you could avoid somebody being like, what's all this stuff? That's not.

But you know, on the. On the Competing for the most nutritious in history. That's legit. Like, we really are competing for that spot.

Who's second?

How was that?

Who's second? What's.

I'm saying, like, so let's establish.

You must have a benchmark.

Let's establish a leaderboard. I mean, who's in second place? Like, we legit are trying to say, can you quantify? You know, can you create a rank? And we're saying that, hey, we are volunteering to compete for this number one spot.

I feel it's almost like people who are like, do you know who Logan Paul is?

Yeah.

Okay. So he has a podcast called Impulsive, and the start of every podcast, they say the number one podcast on the planet. And it's like, he just says that, though. And it's like, no one tells him he's wrong, but it's just, like, not necessarily the case. So I don't know, man. I just feel like it might be, like, unneeded scrutiny.

I'll. I'll take the heat. Like, so people have done takedowns on this already, so that's fine. So I'll take the heat on that. The essentials is just like, we just. We formulated. We said we have 67 things.

It's like you could find. Like, let's just grab a Thorn multivitamin. It'll smoke all your B vitamins in your essential blend.

Like, why would that. Would that happen?

Just dosages.

Okay.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, for saying the most. What was the word?

Nutritious.

Yeah. So it's like, just factually, by nutrition fact panel, it's not as nutritious because it doesn't have as much of the vitamins. So it's like. Like others. And again, it's not a game of who's more potent either, because it's just a dick measuring context. But, like, there's different ways, I feel like, to tactfully not get dismantled.

And so you're saying that bring about the pain.

Yeah.

Bring about the dunks.

Yeah. But, like, maybe. Maybe it's good marketing, too, to, like, have all these people criticizing it. Like, one of the. One of the segments I used to do on my channel, it's like, scientifically dismantling X and it would be like, some product.

Yeah.

And, like, this, to me is like, the ultimate scientific dismantle. You know, just being called. So anyway, but you do whatever you want. I'm just saying like how my perception of it is, is the, the portrayal.

So okay, so I, I also say tongue in cheek blueprint is the best health protocol ever built. Prove me wrong with your data. Right. So I mean, I'm basically saying I've published all my data. Is there anyone else in the world that can basically do the same measurements I've done and prove they can achieve better markers? And so clearly there's a lot of nuance in that statement. But I'm basically trying to say like legitimately, for all of you who want to be healthy, is this not the best thing in the whole world? And I'm now, if there's something better, let's see it. Yeah, but they really, I think it encouraged you don't buy. Encourages, you know, like humans are competitive and it encourages people to stand up. Now if someone does a better job, great. Like the goal is not to be number one. The goal is to encourage improvement across the board.

So many people are gonna be like, that's such a cop out. Because it's like you have so many expensive treatments on the background that influence your biomarkers too. And it's not in a controlled clinical setting. So it's like, sure, no one's gonna dispute the fact that you're the most measured, but it's like via your own oversight. You know what I mean?

So it's like. But they, I guess what I'm saying is someone else should also the therapy. So what I'm doing is not expensive. It's the measurement which is expensive.

Sure.

But somebody with money could easily pull up into the same game I'm playing. No one has, but it's an open invitation for anyone to do it.

I think typically this is accomplished via the trials on the singular ingredients separately though. And then it's like extrapolating those out and fitting them into the formula. So it's like by nature of assimilating the consolidated literature, you can create what is an efficacious product.

Exactly.

I just feel like, okay, one more.

Point is like if you, you can do that, you can piece your, your all together one supplement at a time. Sometimes like your drink, like you put together multiple things. You say this combatorial thing is, you know, I think you presented to me it's the best drink on market. Isn't that what you said?

I don't know what I said. I said it's the most comprehensive nootropic formula suspended in a Liquid format. That is an energy drink that I'm aware of. I think maybe it's on record. I don't know. Like it's in the video. I did something to that effect. But I would go. I would say that the. Of any company I'm aware of, until somebody plus ones us, it's the best. No, I. I think it is great of what I'm aware of.

So then I'm with you. Right. Good job. Like, you built a product, you're proud of it. You think, you think it's supported by evidence. Amazing. Good job.

Sure.

Someone beat you, right? Like, I mean, like it's an invitation, don't get me wrong. So I think it's great. But it raises the standards of everyone because you've put yourself out there. So it's a fun game.

No? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I know that you're on 17 alpha estradiol and you thought it was an impactful thing. The ITP thought it was very impactful as well. Yeah, I can understand the rationale. And seemingly benign. I've also seen it used in hair loss prevention.

All.

But.

That's right.

In Europe, all but unsuccessfully. Alpha Trudiol is not very effective, but for anti aging purposes, perhaps it might be in some capacity. I'm wondering. Genistein, an ER beta agonist that can compete with estradiol. Is this not like if you had an adequate hormone production to begin with and you didn't need additional support to stimulate receptor activity because of deficient estrogenic systemic activity? Is this something that's still worth implementing? Because it's like, it's classified as essential, you know? So like that's where I'm wondering. As the formulator. And I hate this. I feel like a dick as I'm bringing it up. But like, to me this is just stuff that stands out as. It's great.

It's all welcome.

Okay, so. So what is the logic of. I can see on the product page it says antioxidant hormone balance. So. Okay, I get the. The appeal from the marketing standpoint. Yeah, I understand the antioxidant angle potentially, if you're making up for an estrogenic deficiency, but it's like competing for receptors. If you had adequate hormone production and you're not like post menopausal or something. Like, how do we justify this as an everyday thing that we're going to utilize?

Yeah, I don't know the comprehensive evidence justification for it.

Fair enough.

Fair enough. Yeah. But this is. I mean, I think what would be useful is I Think your point is great. I think we should address this publicly. I think we need to speak to each one, explain why it exists, get several people to come criticize it, and then have a dialogue. So I think that'd be really productive.

Okay. By the way, statins, are you not a fan of lipid modulating therapies, or have you just not found a use for them? Because I see the red yeast rice product is essentially a pseudo statin. Do you think that's better or do you use it or what's your take on it?

I haven't, but now I'm on it. Now I'm on the blueprint stack.

Okay.

Yeah. So I'm also on 10 milligrams of atorvastatin. I just started.

Okay.

Huh.

So it's like the red yeast rice and that at the same time.

Yeah. So it's a. Yeah, exactly. This is a new thing. So basically, I'm doing the blueprint stack. I inherited the red yeast rice.

Yeah, yeah.

On my. So we're gonna evaluate what happens with that.

What's your baseline APOB?

I think 78, something like that.

Okay. Do you have, like, a target that you're hoping to hit?

It's a ratio the team uses.

Okay.

Yeah. And I don't know the formula.

Okay.

I think under 90 is desirable. I know a lot of people drive it down to, like, 20, 30.

Yeah. If you wanted to go, like, the hardcore longevity route, you could essentially guarantee an absence of atherosclerosis by driving it down to nothingness and maybe be unscathed or have some, like, level of, you know, myopathy or something.

But I have several friends who've taken that path. They're extremely aggressive, and they've taken it down to teens, 20s, 30s, and my team just doesn't buy it.

Hugely heated debate. Yeah. In the nutrition world, like, even if you're not even seen as a guru or an expert or whatever on it, just speaking of it, you just like. Yeah, you know, it's. It's hectic.

So, yeah, for now, I think they're. My team's concluded they're cool with me hanging out in the 70s, 80s, whatever, you know, haven't seen them below.

So how come statin over, like, something more Benign, like a PCSK9 inhibitor or is that a MIBE or.

Yeah, we looked at those. I don't remember the rationale of what they decided on, why, but we looked.

At them because I feel like with your access and resources, choosing statin first, I don't know.

You go Somewhere else.

Well, you know, I would just be spitballing. I just, you know, for me that's like the most side effect written option potentially. But it also depends on, I guess are you a hyper absorber, hyper synthesis? You know, it would kind of depend on stuff that presumably they dictated that I wouldn't be aware of as far as fat soluble vitamins. So presumably this essential soft gel is segregated because it's the fat soluble stuff that you wouldn't put in the dried format. Is this ubiquinol is the only thing I have actually asked around and never gotten a clear answer. Do you know if it's bioavascial available in dried format? Because it is not in the soft gel, which is typically like I buy Jaro, which is like a Kaneka patented version. It's always in a soft gel in here. It's in the essential capsules. And if it was bioavailable in generic non patented format, like I would love to use that myself, but I've avoided it because I thought it just didn't absorb.

Yeah.

Have you found otherwise or.

Yeah, also. I don't know. Yeah. So I think I understand where you're coming from if you're a formulator on your own products because it's exactly right. I was present enough to see what went into the decision making process. Like for example, I saw in the selection of a given nutrient we would look at five different suppliers. You probably know all this stuff. And then when you look at the supplier, you have to understand their processes on how exactly they arrived at the endpoint of that product. If you don't understand their entire process, you've got five options. And they all appear the same, they all say the same thing, but they're very different molecular structures. And so we went through with every single supplier. I think we have 127 different ingredients. We went through every single one through the. All the way through their supply chain to see what exactly did you do to process this thing. And then we go back to the paper and say what did they do for this outcome of the study? Like how do they actually. And so we really tried to piece it together, full spectrum from an inception through the endpoint on the study. So I know we are that thorough, but as to the specific things, I don't know how that level of detail, everyone is justified by a clinical guideline that we've written.

Sure, sure. Okay, I'll skip the rest because I'm assuming you have like a formulation team that oversees.

Yeah, okay.

So you have participants so far there's 5000 or 2500 that are evaluating the markers and everything around.

We started with 2,500 and we got 13,000 people wanting to be involved in a couple of days time. Jesus. Yeah, it was amazing. And we ended up expanding to 5,000.

Hmm. So do they have to put up a subscription amount upfront or is it. They're on a wait list to then pay the amount once the products are available or how does it work?

Yeah, they've. So each person has taken the responsibility of paying for their measurement of doing body comp. So if they have a scale they can use or they buy a scale withings, like a 99 to 179 depending on if you want PWV. And then questionnaires are free wearables if they have it. If not, then sign up for one of the wearables and then blood. We have two panels that people can do. One is 495 for before and after. And what? The other one's 995 before and after.

Dude.

So the other one's extended.

I. I don't know if it's still the same panel that I saw on your Twitter with like the high priority versus the optional, but if you can get it, our prices are way lower than that. Like, let's see. I got it earlier today, just in case. Yeah, it's 189 bucks for the high priority, 500 for the nice to have. Plus that.

Yeah. Go to blueprint.randox healthla.com if you can't pull it up right now.

Sure.

You can see the panel. Yeah, we went through a. So we tried to find a partner that could help us do blood because.

Yeah, by the way, I wasn't saying that that's wrong. I was saying if you wanted a better partner.

Yeah, yeah. Well, like we are absolutely open. We. We tried to drive this cost down. We make no money in any of this.

Oh, yeah, I can chop this in half, dude.

Straight pass through.

What is the. Sorry, blueprint.

What? Blueprint.randox health delay.com R A N D O X.

Okay, here we go.

Yeah. So go down and see the essentials.

Extend. 495. 995 for this.

And then also the price includes a phlebotomist to the person's house.

Dude, that's tough, man. I would be careful on that because we've done a lot of home draw phlebotomies and the amount of error that we've found through that is extreme. Like super unreliable. What do you find missing markers so they just don't draw messed up samples. Missing stuff, not showing up for appointments, logistical issues out the wazoo. Just like horrible experiences in general.

You're just saying logistical complications, sort of.

But also just like poor sample collection technique that would make the markers unusable. So sometimes we would send a phlebotomist to like a VIP person that we want to impress too and they would still it up miserably and they'd end up with half the panel that they wanted.

Yeah.

And it's like then you have to go coordinate it again. Like I guess technically if they're paying for it, it's kind of like they're. It's on them. So perhaps it's not that big a deal. But if possible I would highly recommend just like going to a local lab corp. As inconvenience as it is, I've seen just like, it's like literally flip a coin at this point for how many times I've seen phlebotomists screw up. So just putting it out there. Unless you have your own team of phlebotomists that you can count on, the outsourced ones are like, they don't take pride in their work often or they're. I don't know, it's just like.

Yeah, for what it's worth, I have, I do all of my blood draws with the phlebotomist here at the house.

Okay.

We've never had any issues.

Is it the same person? No, typically same company though.

Same company.

Okay.

Yeah.

Maybe that's why.

Yeah, we haven't had any issues. This one company. So this company we've partnered with, they run a global network.

Are they in every state for.

Yes. And also in some large number of countries. And so they. We like them because we're in five countries for the study. We're in Canada, uk, Germany, Australia, US and they can accommodate the same process across all participants. And they've been doing this I think for like 50 years. So they've. Yeah, they're not new to the game here and trying to spin up a remote phlebotomist infrastructure. So I'll pressure shot. It's great to hear. I mean like this is the case, we spun this up very quickly and a lot of companies who've done clinical trials have used them. So they're not new to being required to have high quality standards. But point taken and I'll poke around at that by the way.

They are not doing themselves service in that they have the price. But then under it says you get the test run twice for that price, so you're actually getting double the value. So my initial read is that it's 500 bucks for one essential. In fact, they're saying at day one and day 90. So these are pretty good prices and.

It includes a phlebotomist.

But they should definitely put that at the top of their screen. If they don't want. People just look at the dollar amount and then run because just at a glance.

Yeah, I thought the prices were great.

Yeah, these are not bad.

We negotiated very hard on this. This. They get this. I saw it. I think.

Yeah.

I'll have them update the website.

Sure. All right, cool. As far as, like the average person starting the journey of preventative medicine diagnostics, do you think that this panel, for example, like, the essentials are. Is that like the panel you would typically recommend in general for most people to get, like a baseline screen? Okay.

We, we tried to identify, we tried to go with the power laws. Yeah, yeah. What are the highest value tests we can squeeze in with that dollar with that budget.

Okay, cool. And frequency of testing for like the average person, what do you think?

Depends on their age?

Let's just say they're taking a proactive approach and there's nothing like discernibly wrong.

I don't know. I'm not sure what the literature says on that. What is. Do you know?

No, like, I guess, like, my answer would be similar to your initial impulse of depends. I was wondering if you had, like, for example, people who are starting interventions to assess frequency to determine change or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. We chose 90 days as what we thought would be when the 67 therapies would have some kind of measurable result.

Okay, cool. Okay. So I don't know if this was a joke or not, but on that same Diary of a CEO podcast, you said everyone should know three things. Three things. How much you should, how much you weigh, speed of aging test and duration of nighttime erections. So, like, obviously those are, you know, I would imagine worthwhile, but the way it's framed is sort of like, these are the three most important. Or is it like, how would you classify these three things? Is it just you should know these, but they're not the most important or they are the most important.

No, it was really done. Okay. So I guess this is a nice self reflective moment. I'm tongue in cheek all the time.

Okay.

And I haven't really used the currency because I'm not an MD providing medical advice. I'm someone who's doing Self experimentation and sharing my journey. And so I don't use the currency of seriousness because I'm not playing that game. I use the currency of play because that's what I'm doing. And so in this moment I'm playing, I'm calling attention to how ludicrous the Idea is in 2024 that you must know your nighttime directions because nobody knows their nighttime erections. No one measures it. And the idea. That is just funny.

Yeah.

Because I'm just messing around. But. Yeah. But I suppose those who don't know I'm tongue in cheek would be like, I don't understand the situation.

Yeah.

So fair point.

These are.

Okay.

Yeah. Like I, I think it would be worthwhile if you could know the answers to these accurately. That would be great to know though presumably.

It's actually like, it's not bad to know.

Yeah.

But I'm. Yeah, it's, it's a commentary of how far away that is from the norms of society. I'm basically making fun of myself.

Yeah.

In saying that.

Understood. Okay. One thing that I definitely need to touch on that. I can't believe I forgot until now. So you called me out on Twitter after I went on joke.

So nice about it, wasn't I? So nice.

Yeah, you're pretty polite. So I was on Joe Rogan's podcast and said basically the biological age clocks can be manipulated. They are prone to acute change dependent on lifestyle. Lifestyle variables and whatnot. Yeah, you said very respectfully. I appreciate your kind words. And I mentioned how gamifying. It's cool. And like, I like the process of, you know, encouraging people through something that's.

Yeah.

Self motivating. So you said the biological age clocks are scientific. There's over 1200 scientific publications on DNA methylation clocks and specifically the clock that is utilized for the rejuvenation Olympics created by researchers at Duke in Columbia. It's the only third generation clock that has been validated in 50 plus publications and it's responsive to validated interventions like caloric restriction. So. And then you go on to say how it's, you know, like basically the, the best in class of the clocks available. And then you go on to sort of highlight some of the limitations of the clocks in the past. Could you speak to, I guess the difference between like, first of all, how'd you even get connected with true diagnostic to know this is the go to place and this is the best clock of all the clocks, et cetera.

Yeah. I mean, so this is kind of, I think this is interesting. So you said this and you're a smart and informed person, right? You say this and the people in the clock community go nuts, right? They're just like, what the fuck is he talking about? He has no idea what he's talking about. Like, he totally miss it, right? So, like they just dunk on you, right? It's like fine, like, but that's what happens. But I. This is the thing that I think it's important for everyone to know is everyone's getting ferociously dunked on for everything they say. It's just across the board. So it's just state of play. So my origin with the methylation clocks was we thought they were cool and that they're up and coming, clearly not as good as phenotypic markers. So we did an experiment where I measured my speed of it. No, actually my epigenetic age using six clocks. Because nobody had done that. People had used individual clocks. And I did six and I did over a certain time span. And then I published that and I was like, hey, the mean of my epigenetic gauge over this duration of time using six different clocks reduced by the average of 4.5 years. And so we thought, interesting what's happening here. And then that became a headline in of itself where people are like, Brian Johnson claims he's reversed his age by 4.5 years. And we were just like, like, but totally not what the point we were saying. We were like, hey, we're playing with clocks. We're looking at this thing. We didn't just use one. We didn't cherry pick the clock we thought was best. We used all six. Some said worse, some said better. So we're just being open about this. And so that's what grabbed a lot of the headlines. And the big leads of people are like, but wait a second, he still looks a 46 year old. But yeah, we looked at all the different clocks and we found true diagnostics to be a company that is systematically pushing the clocks forward. So a lot of people, all the researchers are doing great work. We found them to be a different way, a different approach to applying a rigor of doing it at scale. And also they are moving clocks and they also working with Harvard, they're working with other. So like they're kind of at this locus of cooperation among various people using clocks. And so we kind of set up shop with them. They said, let's do something together. Let's do a leaderboard and let's standardize for something fun for the entire community to do. So this is not to Say that other clocks are better than theirs. It's not to say that up and comers are going to outcompete them. It was just like, let's. Clocks are interesting. They're a data point we like to include and it'd be fun to compete on a shared standard.

Okay, now when you say that traditional markers are superior, how come that wasn't used as a standard for like the Olympics, for example? Like, if it's more reliable and like science based. And to be clear too, like when I said it's not based in science, it's like, it's really like no way to show that it means anything other than maybe it identifies how biologically equivalent you are at this moment in time. But does it like really inform more than that of interventions?

They would say yes. Yeah. Okay, so if you brought them in this conversation, they would put forward a pretty compelling case that they would concur, they're realist that it's not yet gold standard, but they would say, here's all the evidence on why we think this is meaningful. And so they do have compelling arguments and I think they're interesting to listen to. What was your question before that?

Basically, oh, why not use phenotypic markers?

Because you could do that. You could basically get a panel and say, we're going to look at these 12 phenotypic markers and then we're going to calculate your age, which there's a lot of online calculators who do that kind of age. You've seen those. The challenge with that is that it requires a poke in the vein to draw blood. And the DNA methylation is a finger prick. Anybody can do it. It's low cost. It doesn't require getting an Rx from the doctor to get a blood draw. So it lowers the barriers of entry. Yeah, and it's just, it's a, it's a fun game to play. And so whether these things are. Whether they'll cross the threshold into gold standard, you know, let's see. But we've seen interesting things. Like, for example, when I did hgh, my speed of aging spiked. When I did statin to do senescent cell clearing, also spiked. So we've seen my clock be highly responsive to various therapies. Well, does it mean anything? I don't know. It's interesting. Like, we see it plays. Plays in certain predictable ways when we do certain things.

Do you think it kind of suggests strongly that an intervention is useful, though, when you say I did this and then it did this to my clock? You could Caveat it and say, but I don't know what that means. But then it's almost like, you know Joe Rogan when he's on podcast, like, but I'm an idiot. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, but it's like you obviously know like what you're, you know, talking about and what you're suggesting. At least I think the layman would take from that. I did this therapy or intervention and it reduced my biological age by some fairly significant amount. That was worth me even mentioning to you.

Yeah, yeah. The way we try to address that is if you go to my website, we list, I don't know, 15 markers. And so we basically say, okay, like my bone mineral density and, you know, whatever. So basically what I'm trying to say is anybody who wants to approach blueprint and say, we don't think this is valuable because blank sucks fine, like, let's remove DNA methylation entirely from the situation. Now you've got to contend with my VO2 Max and my bone mineral density and my inflammation. And so basically it's like go ahead and pick and choose the things you believe are valid or not valid. But no matter how you spin it, I'm in pretty good health. My markers are almost perfect across the board.

I think the concern though isn't necessarily that you're portraying your state of health as something that it isn't. I think people are pretty aware that you're super dialed across all metrics of even elaborate imaging diagnostics and whatnot. It's more about the representation to how to interpret your own state of health, to the layman who's trying to figure out how to go about this in a way that's reproducible and also accounting for the fact that they have very much more significant variability in their lifestyle. Stressors, diet parameters, sleep, hygiene. Like nothing's even close to as dialed and consistent as yours. And then above and beyond that, the budget that they actually have to allocate to diagnostic analytics is a fraction. So it's like they have to be a lot more cognizant of what's actually useful and what isn't. So these things are a few hundred bucks each and they tell you some number that you could hang your hat on and feel good about if it's better than last time. But it does not really do a whole lot more than guide potentially misguided interventions to some extent because there's no like, validated way to actually say for certain. Even caloric restriction is like, gonna help lifespan. So it's like I'm, I'm just like wondering. I'm not saying these things are useless by the way. Like, I think it's cool that they're becoming more dialed in and accurate and whatnot. I just would be concerned of the representation of them. Like this is the gold standard of our Olympic Games, especially where it's like the guy who's at the forefront of anti aging has the best bioclock, but who knows what everything else is. Like people are incentivized to buy these clocks more than actual blood work. Almost seemingly so it's like, would you say that's not the case in terms of how encouraging it is because it's fun? Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool. I think it's cool to say you have a biological equivalency of whatever.

Yeah.

But it's like, I don't know, like how do you rationalize the responsibility to inform people of the heavy hitting science based things that need to be done and then get this thing after if you can afford it?

Yeah, we're meeting people where they're at. And so the first stage was for me to say I'm going to do everything and then share all my data. You can do as you please. And so on the website we include, if you want to get your blood draw drawn, here's the panel to do it. If you want to do sleep measurement, here's how you do it. Like we basically outline the entire thing. Here's how you do the whole thing.

But if it's blueprint telling you what you need to do, then you think it would be worthwhile to be like not just if you want a blood test, if you wanted this, if you wanted that, it's get this and then get that.

Yeah, yeah. So the gamification is different than the blueprint stack. So the gamification has been how could we potentially create fun and some kind of comparative relationship with each other on what we're doing? But that's very different than the blueprint stack. But it's also notable that for example in the BP 5000, so the next step, what we're saying now, we're going to do more robust measurement. We aren't doing speed of aging measurement. We couldn't fit it in the budget. So it's not that we don't value it, we think it's interesting. But we are using gold standard measurements over the silver standard.

Okay.

And so, so I guess when it came down to like we're really putting this in the test, we're going to have a few thousand people do it. We go back to gold standard phenotypic markers and you know, wearables and all the stuff that has the most evidence. So we're trying to be intellectually honest with even like. So yeah, when we put, when we're asking people to spend money to assess the efficacy of what we're trying to do, we have settled on gold standard stuff. When we're doing gamification, we're saying this is fun, it's low cost, it's easy to do. Now you can still do your blood and you can still compare with me, all that kind of stuff. But we thought it was a nice approach. Now it's a fair observation you make, but it's been, I think it gets people into the fact that anyone's measuring anything is positive. Now you're right, it can have negative knock on effects because they could conclude improper things from that thing. But the fact that they're saying I'm going to get data and I'm going to start a process of doing continued refinement based upon data, I think it's positive.

But if I'm like a 60 year old and I get a bio score of 35, would I not be more inclined to not then get blood work after? Because I'm probably spot on.

This is why we don't talk about epigenetic age. We only use speed of aging.

Okay. Even that though it like heavily implies I'm aging slower than everyone else my age. So why would I like get a ccta?

I'm not sure. I don't think it extends that far though, because I don't know, man. Really?

Yeah, like I think a lot. You'd be shocked how many like wealthy, intelligent people get these things thinking it's actually a gold standard for assessing how they're doing. At least that's been my impression. And even assessing the data for reasonably intelligent people who can discern nonsense in many different areas, it's not crystal clear that these things are not a representation of exactly where you stand.

I've never heard that feedback that the speed of aging somehow replaces knowing what your cholesterol levels are or somehow.

Well, I know that's not. They certainly wouldn't assert it. I'm just saying what a lot of people would extrapolate is if I'm so healthy that I'm aging half the speed of everyone else in my, at my equivalent age chronologically, like surely I'm doing things right. Like why would I be looking deeper into proactive, you know, atherosclerosis prevention or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like some of this stuff is insidious and would not show up in age scoring typically. So I don't know, like, like I wouldn't expect a bioclock to pick up that you have a genetic predisposition to a sky high lp. I just, just wouldn't. So.

Yeah. And yeah, I think I, I've never heard anyone make these observations or make decisions based upon that. Most people I, I know because I.

Think they don't even know. That's the thing.

Yeah.

And maybe I'm just an idiot about it and I don't know enough about the clocks to even have the criticisms that I might have. Like, maybe I'm just overthinking it.

I don't know.

It's not like I've even got one.

Yeah.

Like I've obviously discerned that I should get blood work instead. So maybe I'm just overanalyzing.

I mean, with this feedback, I'll get some feedback. I've. I have not heard negative knock on effects. It's. I think people who do speed of aging tests that I'm aware of realize it's an emergent field. It's interesting. We don't know exactly where it's going. It's kind of a fun game. It's. It's a game of curiosity. Where am I at? How do I compare? But I don't see anyone thinking that this is replacement for any serious medical assessment that would conclude their true risk factors.

So if you get, I don't know, let's say speed of aging of whatever, fill in the blank. Is this like, do you think people are using it to predict lifespan or are they just doing it because it's fun?

Yeah, I think it's fun. Everyone I know realizes it's an emergent assessment and that no one is taking this and replacing blood work as the primary workhorse of what decisions to make.

Are they guiding interventions based on this though? Like, for example, I have two identical blood tests. I've had two speed of aging tests. The only thing that's improved is the speed of aging test. And I did this intervention between them. I've now concluded this intervention that's experimental, exotic, I don't know.

Yeah, I think people are definitely curious about observations of what changes that this is the case. A documentary just came out on Netflix and it's twin studies and they break out the twins and they look at Carnivore diet and a vegan diet and they use speed of aging as one of the primary measurement modalities. And they conclude in the analysis. They just published this paper, but yes, I mean, it's made it to mainstream awareness.

Didn't I ask about twin studies earlier?

Yeah, you did, actually. And I said I'm not aware of anything. Yeah. So I just watched the first episode. But I also just read the paper. Diagnostics was behind the company behind the study they just published. I think in. I forget where, but yeah, they. They showed that vegans, I think, had a slower speed of aging than carnivores. But they also, I think, in the paper showed that the responses were nuanced. There wasn't like this clean cut victory. It was like, we need more investigation in these areas. But these tests have made it into the mainstream. People are aware of this concept. I think it's in the same way I joke around about nighttime erections. I'm being serious too. Right. Like, how long you're erect at night is a really important indicator of sexual health, physiological health, cardiovascular health, like all the above. So I'm joking, but I'm also very serious. These emergent tests, and there's all kinds of fields that fall into this category where they're just shy of gold standard measurement. We still do them, we still play with them, we still talk about them, but. And whether a person can discern is this gold standard civil standard? Like, not everyone's going to have that, but people still play in all these different areas. This, to me is just like the community of health and wellness. Like, how do you make decisions? And this is what we've tried to make easy is like, this is a package protocol for you that we think represents a pretty good power law on what to do in this complex landscape.

Fair.

So you're done with that one. Okay.

No, I get what you're saying. So if they've. They've never been used to test future lifespan, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't assert like your. Okay.

Yeah.

So, like, given that is the case, how much confidence can we have about it being a predictive tool that's of any utility?

Yeah, none. They acknowledge that we acknowledge that we've.

Do they acknowledge them?

Yeah, they do.

I feel like you do. I don't know.

Oh, really? Oh, I've never heard them, like, what.

What have they said? Paraphrase for what the utility of it is.

Okay.

Because it certainly isn't. This is for fun.

I've never heard. I've never heard them.

I'm not going to put words in their mouth and say they've said other lies, though. I just don't think maybe they have.

And I haven't heard it.

I feel like the portrayal is that it's like a diagnostic tool that could be used to guide your decisions to some extent.

Yeah.

Or reinforce confidence in what you're doing.

I think that they would say, I think if they were present right now, I think they would make.

And to be fair, they're not here to speak on their behalf. So like, I don't want to on them.

I think they would make a highly persuasive case that these are in fact extremely valuable. They offer real world insights that people can map to the reality. I think they would say, and here's the evidence that tells that story. Now, not being a master of that literature myself, my role is to say we know gold standard and we know emergent. And because I can't speak authority to this thing, I'm not going to try to bridge that because that's their role. In the meantime, we know where they sit. And so we're playing to gold standard in our try in our study and they're emergent. We are bullish on them as a technology. Like, I think it's interesting. I think the progress is actually it will put them in an interesting place in some duration of time. The clocks are just getting much more sophisticated by the day. So I think actually that people listening to this podcast, if they were here, would leave feeling persuaded that they're interesting and worthwhile. Whether they cross the threshold and be gold standard. Like, maybe not. Or maybe some people will be like, yes, kind of maybe not. But I think if they were here, they would really change this conversation and people would walk away with a much higher opinion of them.

Yeah, I think it would be worthwhile for them to emphasize on the material though. Like, this is not a replacement for gold standard diagnostics. And like, here's what you should probably also get. Maybe that's not the most conducive to. I don't know, maybe they don't have a responsibility to do that. I'm just being way too critical, but just trying to play devil's advocate. Yeah, yeah. I guess the only thing that's kind of like I'm still learning about them candidly too. Like, how easily do the outputs change proportionally to inputs? So, like, one of the criticisms is that you could have a major swing should you have a lifestyle change that is like, you know, your glucose level is different and now all of a sudden your rated aging is way different. Like, how contingent is it on These things.

Yeah. They would tell you that different clocks are trained for different things.

So the one that everyone's using though, the Dunedin pace one.

Yeah, the true diagnostic one. Yeah, I would. Yeah. If you talk to their CEO, Ryan Smith, I think you would really enjoy learning. Every time I've engaged with them, I've walked away feeling more confident that it's worth something to be paying attention to. Are you making life and death decisions on it? Maybe not that yet, but still, I think you'd really benefit from that. But then the nuances of how the clocks are trained and what they're trying to measure will determine what they're going to be responsive to and in what ways. But there's not universals among all clocks because they're varied.

Right. Okay. Yeah. I guess my understanding, or at least what I thought was being portrayed, is this is the one you go to for everything because it's the most accurate. Not necessarily that you should use it for these purposes specifically.

Yeah, we like it for how the model's created, we like it for how it's trained, and we like what for the objectives we're using it for. Now, this is not to say other clocks are not valuable. It's not to say that they don't serve a purpose. It's just that we think this clock is interesting for our objectives, for our specific purposes of trying to slow the speed of aging.

Okay. If you were to rank on a tiers list, like gold standard diagnostics that the average person with a budget should be getting, like, let's just say A, B, C tier, what do you put?

Yeah, it would probably. I don't know exactly what the team would say. I'm sure they'd have a methodical approach. I can just say what we put into our study, which is questionnaires, body composition, blood and wearables.

Okay. Awesome.

That made the cut of all the things we could put into the smallest budget possible.

The. I think we already covered all of this. Yeah. Thyroid hormone. I was meaning to ask you about that. So you've been on it since 21, and have you ever considered coming off now that you're super dialed? Like, was it an autoimmune thing or.

It wasn't. We tested for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sure. What do you suggest?

No, I'm just wondering, like, if you came off, would you crash or do you have an idea of what caused it to begin with or.

I. I came back from Ecuador after being in Ecuador for two years.

Yeah.

I just did a routine blood draw and my doctor Called me in and diagnosed. So I don't think I had. Had. I don't remember having a blood draw earlier, you know, like I'm sure I did as a kid. I just don't remember. So I'm not sure when, how long it was around and when it was properly diagnosed.

Huh. So they just like shock you on Synthroid after a sky high TSH or something?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they put me on yeah, yeah, Synthroid. And then I started taking armor thyroid. So I've paired those two and that nailed it for me. But it's just on Synthroid alone, I could never get my T3, T4 free T3. Right. T3, T4 free T4. Forget this.

Yeah, the binding protein thing is the same. So like you have t3 free t3, t4 free t4.

Yeah, yeah, those are all. Those have been dialed in now for a decade.

Okay.

They're, they're great. But yeah, it's a great question, like could I do something? We haven't touched it at all on blueprint.

It's just, it's just interesting because you have the confidence to come off of testosterone, people.

Yeah.

But for thyroid, which. Yeah, like I guess you've been on it for 20 plus years, so perhaps there's more hesitancy to come off of something you like rely on in the transition phase of what could happen. Is that.

Yeah, it's an interesting experiment, I think. Yeah. Why not? I don't know.

That's what I was wondering if you.

I mean, it's going to be hyper responsive. I mean I go off for two weeks and the levels are going to change. So I'll get a very quick answer.

But no interest in that.

Or we just haven't touched it. Basically we don't have a reason for why we've not touched it. We haven't talked about it.

Sure. I guess it's like a factor then you'd have to consider for conflating other things.

Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder. I'm oftentimes surprised by what the team says.

One thing I did want to get your reaction to before I leave is I don't even want to say it before I play it because it's so absurd. Or maybe not. Maybe it's not. So, urine drinking. Have you heard of this for anti aging? I have. Okay, so watch this and let me know your thoughts. All right. My own urine since 2005. I heard it was a health thing or whatever and I wanted to try it. And I think I was driving to San Francisco and I didn't want to stop. And so I peed in a cup and I drank it and I was like, yeah, that's not that bad. And I like the energetic.

It's like a hair of the dog.

It's like you're a bio computer. Right. You're a complete intelligent being. Right. And then this just came out of you and you put it right back in. And it's like a diagnostic tool, like.

A hair of the dog.

It's like, this is what's going on with you. And now it's like there's too much coffee. I'm like, oh, yeah. I don't like that. I can feel things. I can feel things for sure. It's a diagnostic tool. I snort it, I age it, and it's amazing to sund with it, really. And how long do you eat? I mean, look at my skin.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm Irish and I've used sun zero sunscreen. Wow. My sunscreen is my nutrition. And I'm not advocating for anybody to do it. I'm just reporting live.

Troy Casey reporting live.

This is what I've done for the last two decades. So I thought this guy was a troll.

Is it a parody?

I thought it must have been, but I have seen he's been. I've been tagged in his videos multiple times since, and I've looked at least at a cursory glance through his existing catalog of stuff, and I have not seen him break character ever. And he seems pretty convinced that this is something to do now. Maybe I am, like, socially oblivious and it's actually all a big joke.

That's so good.

But there's more people talking about it recently. I don't know if it's just my algorithm that's just feeding it to me now, but have you heard of this before?

Just recently.

Not the same guy, though.

Maybe. I don't know.

Yeah, it's creating some. A bit of a stir, seemingly. Yeah.

Oh, man. I don't even know what to think. There's so many things about that.

So I'm assuming your team doesn't think it's worthwhile.

We have not talked about urine drinking.

You gotta show them the video.

But, you know, like, if anyone's urine should be, you know, like, my urine would be at the very top.

Yeah, that's true.

It'd be like a premium quality urine product probably.

Yeah.

I mean, what do you think of it? You should.

That's your next blueprint right there.

I don't be like, I'll sell my fecal matter. My Urine.

Yeah.

My plasma.

There you go.

Yeah. Sperm.

Yep. Everything by the dollar. I did mention at the start, entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

And I talked about my, you know, the Canadian tax system and some other stuff and your successful exit. I just, I did want to ask if you could, you know, impart wisdom to younger Brian or other up and coming entrepreneurs who want to know how to handle something like that. What could you tell them as advice?

It's like the world has changed so much since I, I started my entrepreneurial career career 25 years ago. And so the advice I would give myself at that moment is in the context of the year 2001 and the context now is 2024. And the only thing happening on planet Earth right now is artificial intelligence. Everything else just fades away. That is the singular thing that is going on on planet Earth. And so every time I think about trying to provide advice, it has to be in that context. Otherwise if you're blind to that larger picture. So this is. I go, I go back to my son where he's in school right now. He just started a four year career. It's almost unimaginable to me that he is now in a four year program to achieve some form of basic professional skills. By the time he comes out, the world is unrecognizable from where it's at right now. Yeah. How, how does someone even go to school for four years at this point? And so in giving advice to people, I really don't know what to say. No one knows what's going to happen three months from now when GPT5 drops. No one knows when these open source models are, you know, blooming. Nobody knows. I just don't, I don't know how we all make important life decisions anymore.

Perhaps a bit more specific if you were the owner of a company and about to sell it.

Okay. At the end.

Yeah. Then how do you handle the financial security approach to retain as much as possible and not get rinsed? Not expecting you to know all the current laws and everything, but a lot of it is similar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean there's.

Is there any like major mistakes you made that you wish you could have told yourself back then that perhaps apply now?

Yeah. I mean your, where you live is a really big deal.

Okay.

And where you sell your company, it's a big deal. So when I was selling Bridge of Venmo, I because the tax consequences were so significant, I contemplated domiciling in some other place not to do that. You have to legitimately be in that place and you have to comply with certain laws like you're there for a certain duration of time and even then in the US the IRS can come back and challenge that situation and say that's invalid and you still end up paying the taxes. So you're, you're in the U.S. the state really matters a lot, country matters a lot. So. But oftentimes when you're in a situation selling your company, that's a decision that was made years ago and it's kind of too late. So it's complicated. But two is there's all kinds of things you can do on the estate planning side and especially in the U.S. i don't know Canadian laws. But in the U.S. there's all kinds of things one can do to structure money in ways that accommodates generational passing or foundational interests or whatever your objectives are in life. So there's just a mindful to get people involved who can help you. And then I say third is once somebody makes a lot of money, they don't know what's going to happen. It's hard for a person to model out what it means to go from some level of wealth to a, to an extreme level of wealth. And I found the best thing to do is to take a beat after you make money. Like don't jump into new things, don't make big purchases, don't make big lifestyle changes. Just do what you do and try to steady state yourself because you can quickly walk down a path of becoming a new person and encumber yourself and just leads to bad outcomes. So if, if you. Yeah, I mean spending money and having money is very complicated. It takes a minute to get right. Yeah, it's like build your models of this new reality. It's not obvious what's going to happen and everything around you is going to change. All of your relationships are going to change. Your personal, your friendships, your professional. Everything's going to change. And you imagine things are going to be the same and like it's going to be as it has been. It's not just different games.

One of speaking of relationships, last thing I want to touch on this is something that is one of the most impactful things I'm aware of for impacting health, quality of life, pretty much everything. But I have not seen or heard spoken about in the blueprint protocol. At what point is relationship management and or finding a significant other trumping the lifestyle meticulous rigor that prevents somebody from actually finding that person potentially? Because it's like there was a study a couple weeks ago that came out or it was an article published in JAMA assessing almost 400,000 participants. It found that social isolation was ranked higher than lifestyle related risk factors including alcohol, physical activity and healthy diet for estimating the risks of all cause mortality, cancer related mortality and cardiovascular disease related mortality. So it's like to me that seems like one of the most important things to think about first and foremost before, you know, gene therapy shots or fucking age clocks or whatever. So I'm not saying that there's a right or wrong way to do any of this stuff, but like when you get to a point where you won't sleep with somebody in your bed because it's going to break your, you know, whoop streak or something, like, how do you. Not that I think everyone's gonna follow blueprint as rigorously as you do, but like, I don't know, like what, how do you rationalize this with the rigidity of the protocol as a whole?

Yeah, we, with blueprint, the objective has been to try to create trust. And so in a sea of different opinions where there's no consensus, we wanted to say you can trust us with these basic protocols. And so therefore we've really limited ourselves to where we can speak to things with evidence. And we've tried to avoid going into territory where we don't have reliable evidence because if we do that, our opinion is the same as everyone else. And once you get discredited, just like you're running your mouth, it's hard for people to discern are you running your mouth or are you speaking with evidence? So we try to say like we'll be very, very focused now not to say people are going to disagree. People will certainly disagree with us, but we feel like we have a defensible position from an evidence perspective on everything we do. And on the outside on relationships, we could certainly do that. I then would, if I, if I do that, I'm basically becoming like a relationship coach where I'm giving guidelines on how to find a partner and how to maintain a relationship. And that's an entire ecosystem in of itself. And so we try to just take a very narrow focus of the basics of life, of sleep, diet, exercise. Over time we'll expand to more areas, but we've tried to just find our entry point into a very chaotic world, land trust, and then build from there. And so there's so many things we could talk about that would be comparable of relationships and other stuff like that, but we'll get to it in time. But right now it almost feels analogous.

To my justification of shitty Sleep schedule. But like on the relationship front, it's like pushing it out a little bit while you handle the other things that you feel are important to get the message out on, even at the detriment potentially of like, yeah, that's fair.

Yeah. And with my own personal schedule, I was trying to say, you know, I'm well read in history and I'm fluent in historical events that have changed humanity. And what I perceive to be the case is if I could become a person that pursued the fountain of youth with a certain level of vigor and a certain level of quantification and of evidence, it might be enough to snap it that I could become like a model citizen of sorts, which you just need one and then others follow the model citizen approach. And so my attempt at doing eight months of perfect sleep. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. And so my meaning making game is trying to be the person in the early 21st century that snaps the zeitgeist to the path of don't die. Now others of course can take that and say, I'm going to modify these things because I value this portfolio of things. But my effort was not trying to be, was not trying to accommodate all objectives. It had a single objective.

Awesome. I appreciate your candid insight and transparency on all this, especially with some hard hitting questions. It was awesome to finally get to meet you in person and thank you for welcoming me into your home and.

I'm glad you came. I had a really good time. What was your assessment of the conversation today?

I think it was great, man. I think we talked about essentially everything I wanted to and I feel like you, you know, hand took on hard hitting questions too openly, which is I think ultimately what will lend to the trust factor with your audience long term too. And I certainly appreciate it.

So that's the thing is in this game you can't avoid answering questions. You just have to answer them because if you start dodging and you start mixing things up, it just ruins everything.

Yeah, I appreciate it, man. And where can people follow you?

All social channels. Hang out on X a lot. Yeah. And Ryan Johnson at Brian Johnson. Yep.

Okay.

Yeah, yep. I had a good time. I'm glad you came.

Awesome. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah.

All right, subscribe. Like, talk to you guys soon.