The Man Thats Ageing Backwards: “I Was 45, I’m Now 18!” - Bryan Johnson

Those are all the pills you take in one day.

111. Because that's where the data led me. This is how you don't die. Brian Johnson, the man who spends $2 million a year to slow down his age. He's managed to reverse his biological age already to an 18 year old projected to live to 200. The only objective we have is don't die. I've opted into an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. It sounds overwhelming in the beginning, but. But trust me on this. So my bedtime is at 8:30.

And you had 100% sleep.

Four months straight.

Now what about Hanky Panky?

Not after 8:30.

Alcohol?

Three ounces every morning. With breakfast.

For breakfast.

For breakfast. My last meal of the day is at 11am and every calorie has to fight for its life.

You were very kind in bringing me some food. Presumably this is what you eat.

That's right. If you ask the body what do you want to eat to be in ideal health, this is the answer for.

The gen root that is a mushroom covered in chocolate.

How fun.

Why is Brian doing this? I was thinking about what your father went through and I was wondering if there's some kind of link there.

It was always on my mind. I mean, he's in pain and he's stuck and he can't overcome this terrible thing that's ruining his life. You know, like, Guess maybe I've always felt like a protector of my dad. Maybe.

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

You're very, very clearly mission driven. The ultimate question becomes, are you happy? Before this episode starts, I have a small favor to ask from you. Two months ago, 74% of people that watch this channel didn't subscribe. We're now down to 69%. My goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know. And the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Brian, what mission are you on? And why does that mission matter to you, but also to everybody else listening.

To this right now, my mission is for the human race to survive and thrive. And it's figuring out what we do that creates the highest probability of that being possible.

And why specifically have you taken on that mission versus any other mission you could have committed your life in time to? Why you and I want the Long answer to this. All the context going right back to the beginning.

I had this transformative experience when I was 19 years old. I went to Ecuador and I was a missionary and I lived among extreme poverty. Dirt floors, mud huts, people not knowing how they're going to make ends meet day to day. And I came back to the United States and my family was poor growing up, but it was opulent compared to Ecuador. I couldn't believe that I had lived in a bubble my entire life, unaware of circumstances, of other realities, like where I was at in Ecuador. And I was facing decisions in college, what to study, what to become, who I was going to be. You start creating these identities. All I could identify was this fire that had lit within me that I wanted to spend my life trying to improving the human race at a global scale. I don't know where it came from, but it just coming back from Ecuador, it seemed like that was what I wanted to spend my life on. I didn't know what to do. I was 21 years old. I didn't have any ideas. And so I thought I would become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by the age of 30 and then with that money try to figure out a plan to do it. And so lucky me, I sold Braintree Venmo at 34 and made a few hundred million dollars.

It sold for $800 million, right.

And then I set my mind to this question of what one thing in existence could I do that would be relevant in the 25th century. I grew up on biographies and so I'm accustomed to thinking about things on a centuries timescale, so doing things that. Not that matter in the news cycle tomorrow, but that intelligence in the 21st century would say, you know what? We appreciate what happened in the early 21st century.

Take me a couple of years further backwards in the timeline. I want to understand before the age of 16. How would you describe the personality of that young man? If I. If I. If you walked in here now and you sat down, how would you like characterize that young man?

Friendly and fun. So I think that the event, that activity, maybe that defines me the best is I was in seventh grade, going into eighth grade and there was. The kids started breaking out into different groups of identities, stoners, jocks, you know, nerds. And it saddened me because I wanted to be friends with everybody and, and people started creating these groups and there was this conflict between which groups can hang out with which groups. And so I made a map of the social structure of the entire school of what People were in what groups and then where they're at within that group. So were they the alpha in the group? And then you had the second tiers and third tiers. And then I systematically went about and I became friends with everyone in the entire school, every single group. And it didn't matter who you were, I was friends with you. And so I really enjoyed connecting with people. I enjoyed the friendships, I enjoyed the interactions. I enjoyed different people for different reasons. And I guess that's kind of stuck with me where I the idea of group structure and the hindering same with ideas like if you're in a certain idea and you can't bridge to another.

Idea, the outcome wasn't the most telling part of that story. The most telling part of the story was the process. The process. If you made a physical, like a physical diagram at school, you didn't just do it in your head, you went home as a 16 year old or something.

Yeah, yeah. So I was like 13, 12 or 13, yeah.

You must be able to say objectively that that's unusual behavior for a 12 year old to be that analytical about problem solving for a 12 year old. That's not what I was doing when I was 12. I was kicking a plastic ball against a fence. And you're dissecting the social structure of the school and then manipulating it to make friends with everybody.

Yeah, that's how information presents itself. Like when I meet somebody in the movie A Beautiful Mind with John Nash who did Equilibrium Nash, Equilibrium. There's a scene where you go into his garage and he has this big wall and has like pictures and then it has pins and it has threads, everything connected. It's like this mad man's wall. That's how my mind understands information is when I meet somebody or look at a given problem, I instantaneously go to creating a map of all information. Like what are the centerpieces? What's connecting to what, how's it structured? What's the dimensions of it? And so even if I meet someone new and they tell me a story like I was at the coffee shop and what details do they include in this conversation? What is their assessment of the person they're telling me about, about the reaction of other people, what elements do they identify? And that then enables me to create the structure of their mind and how they package information. And so yeah, my mind just naturally hangs on to every single word and creates a scaffolding of how the person understands reality.

That sounds exhausting to someone whose mind does not work in that way.

It's exhilarating.

So 19 years old, you go off on this Mormon mission to Ecuador. This ultimately culminates in it challenging your faith. Happened to me at the same age. In fact, I was very religious when I was younger, and then 18, 19 years old, that all starts to fall apart. What was your process like?

It was torture. And I think, I'm not sure what religion you were in.

Christianity or whatever.

Yeah, okay, yeah. This was not a whatever thing for me. When you're raised Mormon, it is your singular reality and identity of existence. It's not like you're casually involved, it's everything you are as a human. And so when you are like when you're born into it and then force fed that, and your entire community is built upon that, it creates structures in your mind that you're not even aware of. And so as I began breaking from it, I would rationally be able to walk to the conclusion and say, logically, I, I don't understand the situation. But then emotionally, the brain was like, hold tight. We feel the following things we can't quite structure in a logical format. And it creates this bizarre conundrum in the brain. And so I had that difficulty then that got caught up in my depression where in my early 20s, my brain, I got into this chronic depression where the brain was like, life is awful, everything is hopeless. Life is not worth living. You should kill yourself. And so in that moment, I learned that I could observe my brain dropping these thoughts on me and that I wasn't my thoughts, like depression was. The depression was speaking, but it wasn't me. And when I learned that, I thought, wait a second, if I am observing depression in action here, what can I trust from my brain in the first place? So when a thought drops in my awareness, where did that come from and can I trust it? Under what circumstances? And then I realized, if my brain is doing this to me, other brains are doing this to other people, how can I trust their brains? And so it's like this authority collapse where in religion all the people who I trusted to tell me to give me wise advice about life, that fell apart. My brain fell apart, other people's brains fell apart. And I began arriving to this observation, who in reality can I trust and under what circumstances? And that really started, that kickstarted the process of me trying to reconstruct my reality in a way that I felt was stable versus like ping ponging around to like this wild emotion and this random thought from my brain.

How long did your depression last and when did it start?

Age 24. I remember I was in the parking lot one day with my brother. We were working on a startup and something just broke in my brain. I remember telling him, like, hey, something just happened. I feel it. It's weird. And he was like, just power through it. And I'm like, okay. But I physically felt something happen one day. And then I just got in this funk for 10 years and I couldn't get out of it.

10 years. And what did that funk look like? Practically day to day or week by week?

It was. There's like all these different layers of problems. So I was married. We had our first baby at the age of 25. So I've got a baby at home. I'm not sleeping. We're taking care of the first one, then I'm building startups on top of that. And then I'm also working my way out of Mormonism. But then that's a conflict because my wife is also Mormonism and the kid, the communities around us, and my entire world is this community. And so then we don't have any money to pay our bills. I'm in a startup. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the religion thing, trying to keep my marriage together. It just creates this disaster of a circumstance where I just am paralyzed and stuck in the depression, in the relationship, in the religion, not sleeping, depressed, trying to survive in a startup world. And it was. That was kind of my state for about 10 years. Trying to navigate all those competing complexities.

When you look back and try, you diagnose the factors that caused that depression. Is it that that pressure from all different sides that you think caused the depression?

I do. And so during that 10 years, I pursued solving my depression with equal rigor as I have anything else. I tried everything known to humans to solve depression. Nothing worked. The thing that worked is my relationship ended and I left the Mormon Church and it just lifted. And that was the most remarkable experience in my life. I just thought it was like this permanent state I couldn't exit. But those two modifications just lifted the cloud.

And what did that teach you about the nature of your depression?

I was paralyzed. And those decisions felt unthinkable to me. Even though I could logically conclude this religion was not something I was going to follow and the relationship wasn't working out. The idea of becoming a divorced father and being in that circumstance, the idea of leaving my entire community, of going out and staking out a new existential reality, it paralyzed me. And I couldn't get over the idea that it would Be better on the other side. And once I got myself there, that it's actually better for the kids. That was the key thing for me, is there was one experience, I was in Turkey with some friends late at night, and it snapped in my brain. The kids are better off with these decisions, and that's all I needed. And then the next day, I put everything to motion.

And why did that matter to you so much, do you think?

I suppose that for whatever reason, I have been an intensely devoted father. Like, I care deeply about being there.

For my children for whatever reason.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know why. Maybe it's part of my identity. Maybe I'm trying to compensate for something, I don't know. But I invested very, very heavily into my children. And the idea of being a divorced father, you know, with like some kind of split custody situation, with some kind of weird thing between mom and me, and like, you know, that whole thing, I just. I couldn't. I couldn't sign up for it. And so I kept. I stayed in the bad relationship, I stayed in the religion, trying to thinking that it was. My kids were better off because of it. And I really. They weren't.

Somewhat links to your own childhood, doesn't it, where your parents separated when you were super young.

Yeah. Like, so much is going on in my mind. When I'm three years old and my dad is no longer present, and then my mom's remarried at 8, my father goes through a bunch of problems. And like, I remember my father. I give credit to my father for owning up to his life. I remember I. I knew my father was on drugs at the age like 7 or 8, and I would call him when I knew he was high. I'd say, hey, dad, like, how's it going? And, you know, like, I just knew it. I'd write him letters and like, he, you know. Yeah, we just worked through it together, but it was always on my mind.

Makes you visibly emotional to say that.

Yeah.

Why?

I mean, he's in pain and he's stuck and he can't overcome this terrible thing that's ruining his life. And he's not a father to me. And, you know, he can't pick me up when he says he's going to pick me up. And he can't do the things he wants to do. So it steals life from him and it steals life from me. And it's something that dominated his life for a long time.

You make that decision to separate and to leave the community of Mormonism, what's life like? From then onwards.

I mean, so it was. I. I sold Braintree.

Yeah.

So within one year's time, I sold Braintree, got a divorce, left the church and overcame my depression.

Wow, what a year.

And I think maybe the moment that captures it the most is I was in Virginia at the time and I was looking at where I was going to live next. And so I spent some time in New York and for the first time I went to a party in Brooklyn, a warehouse party or they started like at midnight or one, and I'd go there with some friends and I would dance for six, seven hours. And it was, I think, one of the most joyful experiences of my entire life. I had never danced before, but for some reason, this moment of eliminating all this weight that had been on me for all this time, I just felt free and I could move my body like I never had before. My friends would, they were in disbelief that after five, six, seven hours, I'm like, let's go, let's find something else. But it was, I think it was probably an outpouring of desire that I'd had for all these years that just was bottled up. And it was also the time that I was starting to reconstruct. I mean, I had the money, I didn't care about spending the money on anything I didn't like. Money has no value to me outside of the objective to do something meaningful for the world. And so I really started spending an enormous amount of time thinking about through this question. If you apply this filter, what matters in the 25th century, like you go back and look what matters in the 15th century and 16th and, and 17th, and you find that 99% of all things that happen, I'm making up a number, is gone and we're left with these teeny little nuggets of information. Now there's more because we're capturing more than we ever had before. But time has a way to filter out non essential relevance. And so if you say that now, if we say what we're doing in 20, 23 and you look at your life and you map out what's going to be left of your existence in 10 years, 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, and that's what I want to focus on, is only those things. Everything else is to me in my. It's not for everyone, for me, it's a waste of my capacity as a person.

When you describe dancing in Brooklyn, I mean, I lived in Brooklyn for three years. So I know the warehouse parties, I know the vibe, the very unsupervicial nature of the place and the energy. You describe it almost therapeutically as being able to kind of shake out.

Yeah.

Weight that you were holding.

Yeah.

Specifically, what is that weight you were holding? You've sold Braintree. You're dancing in Brooklyn. What is the weight you're shaking out?

My entire life, I have been told by authority structures, whether it be a religion or society or a relationship or community, you can do these things. You can think, think these things, you can say these things, and you can become these things. Everyone wanted to put limiters, and after that, none. It was no longer a game of what you can't do. It was a game of what I can do. And it just exploded. And now my entire life is what I can do.

The potential is terrifying, and I can.

The moment somebody starts creeping on that. That they want to superimpose a label on me or superimpose a norm or superimpose any tool humans have to say, oh, you stepped out of line. You need to be punished. I can feel it. Like, I know where people try to create those guardrails and everyone does it because it's like, oh, if you're doing something that's not normal, I feel uncomfortable. I want to bring you back into the herd because that's going to make me feel a lot better. And so I'm attuned to the constant attempts at people trying to normalize everyone else.

We do that in language, right. We say someone is weird. And, you know, I think of moments where I broke out of my. My community. When I say my community, I mean, like, you know, you have a group of friends and. And then you say, I'm going to start business. I'm going to be this guy. And. And the. They use words to pull you back in these facial expressions. Little subtle, you know.

Exactly.

The little telling you you're weird and stupid and ridiculous without saying it with words. People think you're weird, don't they? Don't they?

That's one word they use. Yeah, yeah.

Now it makes sense to me now. Now it makes sense to me with the context of your religion and how imprisoned you you say you felt in the context of that religion. I can now understand your resilience and your resistance to falling in line.

Yeah. And not only that, it's play now for me. Right. It's like a mousetrap. I want to push the part of the mousetrap that makes it snap and pull my finger out before my finger gets trapped. And it's just like this whole little thing is A set of mousetraps. I'm like this one today. And then by doing that, you really get a fill for these. All these invisible layers we have in society. So what you just said is. It's so you're. I loved your comment. It's just like. Like the smallest facial feature and audio captures the whole thing. Right. Like, I disapprove of your behavior, of your thought process. If you do this, I'm going to penalize you by not offering you my friendship and approval. And you put in the penalty box, and it's like half of a second of a gesture, but it collapses the entirety on your shoulders where you're like, oh, man, I don't want to be part of the out group. I want to be part of the group.

I wonder how much potential is trapped behind those little facial expressions and that little social conformity pressure, you know, like human potential of creativity and ingenuity and thinking for yourself, you know, Must be a Jesus Christ. Most of human potential must be trapped behind that.

Yeah. So this is the thing. This is what I'm saying. When you build this wall and you have images, you have strings attached to each one you're trying to scaffold. Like, how is information scaffolded? You can use this. You can poke a system and get the response back and then get. Fill in the contours, like, oh, like this is what people think and feel in this moment of what the norms are, because otherwise they're invisible. So that's why when someone tells you a story about their behavior at the coffee shop and how some person was rude to someone or whatever, they're revealing to them, to everyone else in the conversation, all the norm structures they have. So you listen carefully, you understand how they have scaffold information, what norms they've accepted, which things are rejecting, and where they play in that hierarchy.

Are there any correlations between the most successful people you've met or happy people you've met and their ability to embody and take on these social constructs. Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah. My mother is one of the happiest people I've ever met in my life. And she plays exactly in the norm structure of the religion. She's deeply religious. She's still Mormon. She thrives in the Mormon community. Everyone loves her. She's delightfully happy. And so my mother does not need to push boundaries. She doesn't need to explore the possibilities. She has a singular reality. It works for her. She's happy, she's joyful, she's A fantastic mother. So I guess there's all these different archetypes of people who play in different spaces. For me, that wasn't where I thrive.

You thrive.

My education has come from biographies, and I've read, I don't know, over a hundred all throughout history. And I love learning about people in their time and place who identify something impossibly hard to see and do. And they did both. And when you do that, the algorithm of human behavior is so predictable, of defiance and hate and vitriol. It just goes through the same cycle every single time. And so I have all these models in my mind of people who've done these things. And so I know when I do this myself, I know what models to anticipate. I know how that naturally winds its way through society. And also had a fingerprint, what things are inevitable. So you find a given thing, you say, what are the characteristics around this idea or invention or whatever? And then once you have it, you know, societal adoption is inevitable. It does not matter what humans say, doesn't matter if they revolt, doesn't matter if they bring the pitchforks at doesn't matter. It's going to find its way through, push all the way through humanity. And that's the thing, is what are the ideas you can't see? What characteristics do they have? And will they become inevitable?

And do you consider yourself to be an instigator of new ideas?

If I were to make a whimsical and flimsy statement, I would say I was born to introduce these new ideas into society.

And what is that new idea?

It's that in the 21st century, the only objective we have is don't die.

Don't die.

It's that simple.

But we're gonna. We're all gonna die now. You don't think.

So this is the thing. So this is why it sounds silly.

Because I was told, everybody dies. The only thing inevitable in life is death. We were driving past a graveyard the other day and I pointed and said, great business that. Because, you know, I think it was like a. It was like a. It wasn't a graveyard. It was a. Like a funeral home. And I was like, great business. Yeah, they'll never have a customer shortage.

Yeah. Okay, so if you. Let's think about the structure of why that statement may be the rallying cry of the 21st century. Those two words. So we may think like, we're inclined to think that genius or sophistication or whatever is in this much broader complexity of statement. It may be two words. Don't die. So Galaxy is 13.8 years old, Earth is 4.5, right? Something like that. We're baby steps away from creating super intelligence. We cannot, we cannot model out what the future is going to be like in any way, shape or form. We do not have the intellectual capacity to predict, to model, to anticipate. We're blind. It's an intelligence far superior than us. In that situation, the only thing we can play is don't die, don't kill each other, don't ruin our biosphere, don't ruin planet Earth. And don't underestimate aligning with AI the only objective of the future of our existence. We have to figure out how all intelligence on this planet cooperates. Humans and the planet, artificial intelligence. It's this big tapestry of goal alignment, of cooperation. That is the only task humanity has ahead of us.

Okay, let's start with number one, then.

Yeah.

So the first one is don't die. So I guess, yes or no question, do you think it's possible for us in the. In the short future to live forever?

Yes.

Okay. Right. I'm going to go one step further back. Your health journey, before you came to that realization, what did that look like in terms of. Were you a healthy young man? Were you drinking alcohol?

I mean, as a kid? My mother did the best she could under the circumstances. We were pretty poor. She ground wheat, she made bread for us. We also ate sugar cereal. We put sugar on our sugar cereal. We were in the sun constantly with no sunscreens. We had excessive sun exposure. We ate processed foods. It was the United States cultural environment in the 1980s. We just were cemented in that cultural norm. So I'd say not terribly healthy. Then 20 years of entrepreneurship, depression, bad relationship, trying to live with religion, I kind of destroyed myself, body and mind for 20 years.

And how do you feel about that now? Because I remember reading a quote where you said, it pains me to think about the damage you've done to your body up until that. Until up until now.

It pains me, really. It pains me to see all the damage I did to myself.

Really Pains you?

It does.

When I. You know that's a phrase, right? But is there reality to that pain?

I. I feel like I have a relationship to my former self, as though my former self were present. I don't view it as a. It's gone by because in many ways, when I'm reversing my aging, when I'm. When I'm becoming more healthy, I'm moving back in time, I'm moving Back to a younger biological state. So I'm occupying the person that formerly occupied me. And so I. I have this relationship with time that is atypical. Where typically I would normally say, like, well, that just happened and now I just have to go forward. But given where the science and technology is at, I do believe we can travel back in time. Now. It's, you know, we're blueprint is showing the possibilities. We're not there yet on doing this, these dramatic things, but I think it's coming. And so, yeah, I literally feel pain because I'm moving into that space.

You feel pain because you're moving into that space. Okay, yeah. That is. Yeah, most of us consider the past to be gone.

Exactly. I don't. I feel like. I feel like it's recoverable and that I experience it.

So take me forward from that point. Then I want to know when things started to change in terms of your health perspective and this. Do not die.

Yeah, well, I started taking care of myself after I sold Braintree and the divorce and all that kind of stuff. I started paying attention to my health more so than I ever had in my entire life. And it came back to this question, you know, what one thing do I do in existence that would be meaningful? Not five things or six things, like one thing that matters in the 25th century. And I worked on. I came up with this idea that basically the core of it is I can't trust myself to act in my best interest. And it stemmed from depression. I knew my mind. My mind was encouraging me to commit suicide on a nonstop basis. And I. Yes, that's what chronic depression feels like, is you desperately want to commit suicide every moment of every day. You just want relief from the awfulness, and you cannot imagine feeling not depressed. And so I knew that I couldn't trust my mind when it was doing these things. And so then also I had this problem with food where I would feel so depressed and I would feel stressed from the day from work with my kids. And so it was my inability to stop myself from overeating every single night and walking myself into an early grave. So then I paired those two things together. Like, okay, first of all, my brain's like, hey, why don't you commit suicide? And two, my body's like, why don't you just eat yourself into oblivion? And I couldn't stop myself. I thought, this is really weird that we humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, yet I'm doing these behaviors that are not in my best interest. This is really weird. And I can't stop it. I'm totally helpless in doing it. And started piecing together this philosophy of like, okay, this is interesting. We kind of treat planet Earth like we treat our bodies. My behavior is not too dissimilar from what society is doing. And I thought, what is the larger implication of the situation? We humans have a problem of acting in our best interest. Is there an alternative structure of authority that could do a better job? And that's when I really came up with the core of what blueprint is, which is I said, okay, instead of my mind doing this on a regular basis, I'm going to measure every organ in my body. I'm going to ask it what it needs to be in its best space. So my kidney and liver and heart and lungs, I'm going to take the data, look at scientific evidence and then create an algorithm. And then I'm going to follow that algorithm perfectly. And so my body is going to call the shots, not my mind. And that was when it all kind of came together with trying to piece together AI of maybe the revolution is we humans have done a wonderful job to arrive at this point. Maybe it's time for us to pass the reins to other control systems that manage our long term interests better.

And what are those long term control systems that you believe can manage our interests better?

I mean, for example, now my, my mind is not authorized to look at a menu and order. It's not authorized to have a pizza party. It's not authorized to just on the whim, decide I want to have a cookie. My body is in charge. My body reports this data, it looks at scientific evidence and algorithm runs. So I have opted into an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. My mind can chirp and can heckle from the bleachers, but it does not have the authority to make the decision.

But you must understand the mind is doing that for a reason. The mind is also concerned with survival. It's not there to cause harm to you. That's not its objective. You know it wasn't. That makes no sense from a survival perspective that you'd have this enemy in your head. So how do you reason why the mind is telling you to do these things?

If we just let the data speak. So let's just say we're looking at DNA methylation patterns and it's, these are, this is data that shows how fast the body's aging, shows your speed of aging. So I take my former self and say, what does the data show? How fast am I Aging and how fast is disease progressing? And what's my. What's my likelihood of dying then and now? And you compare the two. There's no comparison. The system that's running me now so far out competes the other version in. It's ridiculous. And so just from a, From a. So let's just. I'll go one layer deeper on this. What I did is I. I asked this broader question. So we have AI, we have super intelligence being created. We have to figure out alignment. How do we use AI so that we humans continue to exist, so we don't kill each other, so that AI doesn't destroy everything. Like, so we're just trying to survive, right? Society just survive. How would you possibly go about doing that problem? And so I started thinking about this alignment problem within me. So I'm 35 trillion cells thereabouts, maybe more. How could I as an entity align my 35 trillion cells to cooperate? And we're trying to do that with society, right? You're trying to get this huge number of things to cooperate. And then I wanted to measure it and say, okay, what is perfect cooperation on the objective of me slowing my speed of aging? Then I did hundreds of measurements, and we said, okay, here's actually what science can do in this moment with diet and sleep and exercise all being perfect. Here's the maximum amount of slowing the speed of aging for my 35 trillion cells to do. Anything above that, I consider to be an act of violence. Now, we use violence in society to. We typically associate people beating each other, like physical acts of violence, or I expanded the term to capture my own behavior. So if I did. If I ate something or did something that would increase my speed of aging, that was an act of violence against self. Because my 35 trillion cells were no longer aligned. It was like this one aberration. Be like, hey, I want to do this thing, but it ruins 35 trillion cells. I wanted to pose the question, we as a species are trying to figure out how to cooperate. Can I do that with me as a single entity? And that's what I've been trying to do. Goal alignment. Within Brian Johnson, 35 trillion cells to a single objective exist.

So why is the brain our adversary? Why is it being uncooperative with the longevity of the 35 million cells?

I mean, let's just say, like, let's just remove all story. Let's just say if we categorized as violence anything we did as a species that brought death closer to us, whether it be our personal death or whether it be the earth's death. And we quantified that and we said how much violence do we do in a self destructive way? What is that number?

Huge.

So when you look at that frame, we are a self destructive species. Now it goes back to this idea of death, of like if you say death is inevitable for everybody, it doesn't matter if I commit these self destructive acts. Like I'm die anyway. So like why do I care if it's 10 years earlier than normal, whatever. I'm 35 now and I've. When I'm 70, I don't care if I live to 80. Like that's how you think. So that's why this, this whole death idea feeds the self destruction. Because no one cares. If death is not inevitable, you immediately come back to the thing that threatens, the thing you care about the very most, which is anything that threatens, threatens existence. And so the society we have right now, the majority of the philosophies say play by these rules and you get this afterlife. They've said death is inevitable, but we're all playing for this later game. And so everyone feels fine in this colossal self destruction. If you take that away and then you say you can live in this life, it's an entirely different game. And that's why the 21st century, the singular revolution, could be don't die, because it flips the philosophical structure of society on its head.

And this all led you to Project Blueprint. Which is what?

Project Blueprint is an attempt at don't die at every layer of society, individually, collectively, with AI and the planet.

So are you trying to reverse your age or are you trying not to die? Or are you trying both?

Both. And so the same thing is true. Just like I've done Blueprint with me, planet Earth is the body. So you'd approach the same problem. You would measure Earth with millions of measurements. At some interval you'd use scientific evidence and say, what is the appropriate sustainable biosphere of coral reef, of ocean, you know, of temperature in the world of ocean acidity, of all the different parts of our biosphere. And you apply the scientific evidence and that creates the closed loop system to say this is how you don't die.

Okay, so let's focusing again on do not die. Which was actually the only rule of my first company. Now it feels like it has new meaning. We wrote it on the wall when we first moved into the office. We just wrote one rule here. And we just wrote do not die.

That's great.

We said it as a joke, but.

You know, maybe you Were onto something.

Yeah, I was ahead of my revision.

Yeah.

When you think about do not die, what are the things that stand the greatest chance of killing us in order of priority?

Like, there's basic things on a day to day basis. Like, driving is among the highest risk factors. We do, all of us do, on a daily basis. So every time I get into a car, I have a ritual where I say driving, I say it out loud. Driving is the most dangerous thing I do. As a reminder, every time I get in the car, don't text, don't be on your phone. Like, pay attention to the road because, like, you forget every time you jump in the car, you're so tempted to do all these things that imperil your life.

So you say that out loud every time. I'd love to watch you drive. Well, you can drive me whenever as well, because I feel like I trust you to focus on the road. So driving is number one of things that pose a really statistically high threat of mortality. What else?

Yeah, I mean, there are so people have built nice statistical models that, that show risk of death. Like insurance companies. Of course they do that. I'm really after the cultural norms that we have built. A society addicted to addiction. We're all addicted. So you just think about this from a 25th century perspective. You put a human like us in an environment and you encircle them with dozens of fast food chains, dozens of stores selling sugary drinks, of junk food, of porn, of infinite scroll, of Netflix, binging alcohol, smoking, gambling, nicotine. Right.

Like masturbation.

Yeah. Like, there you go. Like your list is. And then you say, like, okay, human on your own, with your own willpower, resist this. And then around them, you've got the power of our godlike powers pointing at the individual with. The only objective is to getting the person addicted to their thing, their app, their food, their show, their whatever. Everything's pointing to the individual. Then the individual's like, I'm overwhelmed. I can't sleep. You know, Like, I don't feel well, I can't exercise. I don't have any time. We were just sick as a society. And it's because we've structurally built this around this. It's kind of a disaster for us in the moment where we're trying to muster up soberness of thought of how do we navigate these simultaneous existential risks we face? How do we not destroy our biosphere? How do we align with AI? How do we humans not engage in nuclear war or biowarfare or whatever? We're just we have really serious challenges to solve and we're all impaired.

It makes you have a great deal of empathy for the human experience. When you frame, as we've taken a human being, you know, baby is born, and then we surround them with fast food chains and sugar and all of these things that are highly, highly addictive. And then we say to them, be healthy, do your best.

Yeah.

You know, don't, don't kill yourself. And you know, yeah, good luck.

Good luck. It's sad.

And then it's, it's. I say empathy because you have. When you frame it like that, I go, no wonder people are struggling, you know, with sleepless nights, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, porn addictions, drug addictions, you know, because we've manipulated the. Not going to try and pretend I'm a neuroscientist, but we've manipulated the chemicals in their brain to control them for. Often for corporate greed and other things.

That's right.

You mentioned sleep and you pointed this as being really foundational to health. When I sit here with these psychologists and health experts and doctors and heart surgeons and brain surgeons, they always point at sleep. They all point to sleep as being foundational. The other day you did a tweet about your sleep. Do you know which one I'm talking about? Screenshot.

Yeah.

I think it was whoop, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And it showed that you'd had 100% sleep for six months straight.

Four months straight now.

Four months.

Yeah. 99%. So, yes, 100% for four months. 99% the other two months. I'm going for a six month, 100% streak.

Why is sleep so important? Because you cite it in your work as being one of the most foundational things. I think you actually called it the most important in one interview.

Yeah, I mean, if you and I were going to make a list of the things that are most influential in our lives in how we think about and feel about life, I would put number one, asleep. Nothing changes my conscious existence more than a poor night's sleep or a bad or a good night's sleep.

I agree. I've become incredibly obsessed with my sleep. Some people's obsessions, they become a little bit unhealthy, but mine, I think is healthy because it certainly moved my life forward in every metric or area that I care about. Let's go on and go in on sleep then. So what do you do to achieve this month over month, perfect sleep? Because when I saw that, I thought, oh, my fucking God, like, I use whoop as well as you can see. And if I contrast your data to mine.

Yeah.

You know, some nights I'm having like 24% recovery, 50% recovery. If I go to a hotel room, then it's even worse. When I flew out here to la, I had three. The first three days my sleep was awful. The fourth day it was fine. What are you doing?

Yeah. I'm so glad you have that shared experience. For those who do try to track it, and even those with whoops, many don't realize how hard it is. The most important thing is I've built my life around sleep. Now that is the exact opposite of cultural norms where sleep is the thing that gets pushed around. So if you want to go out with friends, delay your bedtime if you want, if you need to finish a work project or school project, if you want to hang out, watch your new show just dropped. You want to watch a few episodes. We push sleep around from our earliest of days. Like it's always the thing that can be compromised. And I made a rule that sleep happens every single night at the same time. No exceptions ever.

I mean, that must come at a cost.

It does come at a cost.

What is the cost?

I mean that cost is substantially less now because I've made the hard decisions. And so it's no longer getting there is hard, but once you do that and it's the norm, it becomes much easier. You just have to make the life changes. So that's the first big one. Then I did like a bunch of small things. Like for example, my last meal of the day is at 11am Sorry, what?

Your last meal of the day is at 11:00am?

Yeah, so I eat between 6:00am and 11:00am okay. And so then by the time I go to bed at 8:30, I've got, you know, eight plus hours of digestion. So I sleep best on an empty stomach. Now some, some people don't like that. They feel pain. They do much better sleeping towards night. But I ran a few hundred experiments of a time to eat, how much to eat, what kinds of foods to eat, what kind of exercise protocols. I've trialed hundreds of times and I found a protocol that worked for me where when I do this and I lay down before bed, my resting heart rate is around 45. If I get that, I know I'm going to have a near perfect night's sleep. If it's elevated at a 53 or 54 because of like a few events that could trigger it to go higher, I know I'm gonna have a, I'm gonna struggle to hit like deep and ram goals and I might be a little more restless. I'll still hit my 100% objective, but it's not gonna be as the same level of quality as if I hit something else. So I know all the little, little teeny tiny tweaks to get this to be perfect every night.

I asked you a second ago, I wanna make sure I get an answer to this. I said this must come at a cost.

Yeah.

What is the cost?

So my bedtime is at 8:30, because that's where the data led me. I tried 11, 10:39, I tried all the different variations and this just worked. So anything that happens past 8:30 I don't participate in. And so sometimes my friends are doing things past 8:30 that I want to do, but I don't do them. So I miss out on certain social events. Now my friends have been cool enough where they'll do things to accommodate my time frame so they'll do something in the late afternoon where I can do things with them and hang out and have fun and still make my bedtime. And so my friends have been. And family have been great to adapt to allow me to participate in community while still doing this.

So I've been, I've been experimenting as well. I mean to say, to tell you I've been experimenting, feels like. I'm not going to say my experiments, but I've got a bunch of hypotheses around my sleep, one of the big ones, as well as the room temperature. So during summer in the uk, because most houses in the UK don't have air conditioning because we don't expect the sun. So it's a surprise through those four weeks where, where we have sunshine. I don't. My sleep is awful, I'm sweating in bed. What would you say about temperature? And also got a broken blind in the room.

Yeah.

So, you know, 6:00am or whatever, the light starts pouring in. What would you say about all those factors?

I agree temperature plays a significant role. Light does sound. Yeah. Whether you have a partner in bed with you or not.

Yeah. I want to talk about this.

Yeah.

Because I actually was speaking to Simon Sinek last night about this. We went to dinner and I was talking to him about having sat with Matthew Walker and we discussed, I think Matthew Walker, don't quote him inaccurately, but he said when there's divorce and couples break up, 15% of the reason is attributed to sleep, I. E. Them compromising each other's sleep. What do you think about sleeping in bed with somebody else?

It's a hard topic because a lot of people don't have the luxury of sleeping in different rooms.

Yeah.

When somebody wants to have good sleep, there are some things they can control. Like trying to go to bed at a certain time is something they have some control over. They need to adjust lifestyles and family and stuff like that. But sometimes that relationship. But so people who do have the fortunate circumstances to be in separate rooms, it is substantially better because trying to negotiate with another person, their bedtime, their sleep hygiene is really difficult. And wake events are very costly. Once you get woken up and then going back to sleep is very hard. So it's just extremely challenging when you've got to coordinate with another human.

So do you have a sleeping bed with someone else?

No.

What about hanky panky?

No.

You have no sex?

Not after 8:30. Okay.

So you've got to do like morning glory.

Yeah. I mean, so these are the kinds of things, like, you know, so I'm single in circumstances where I've tried to date. The first thing I do is I give them a list of 10 things. Like, here's all the things you're gonna hate about me and it's gonna make me an impossible partner for you. And like, you know, those are like, it's a big deal.

What is on the list? Give me the list.

I mean, so sleep is one thing. I go to bed at 8:30. My food regimen is another. Now I do compromise on food. So if I go out with friends and we'll have dinner time, then I will save up a certain number of calories and I'll eat something at the restaurant, some steamed vegetables or something like that. So I do try to be normal. And also when I'm out with people, nothing makes people feel more uncomfortable than an empty plate. You know, think, why? What are you doing? And are you on a fast protocol? Are you in a juice cleanse? And so I just try to blend into the environment. Like, there's no questions. Everyone can enjoy being present. So I try to do those things. But other. Yeah, other things. For example, like my desire to speak. I'm not a talkative person. I. I don't do small talk. So my son and I have a protocol at the house where there's no exchange of, like, good morning, how are you? You know, like, I'm deep in thought. Like my morning, my. I go to bed early, I wake up early, and I have these four or five hours of concentrated thought where I can think about these really big pictures and try to pull myself out of my situation and just be as sober as possible. Like what is really happening to the best of my abilities and probe myself to these deep levels. And you can get knocked off so fast. Just like a little teeny interaction. Hey, how are you doing? How was your sleep? You have to activate this mode of like, I'm going to be a nice person, I'm going to engage with you, I'm going to listen to you and just shifting. That knocks me off. And so there's. With the path that I've chosen that I really care about achieving these objectives. I break all these social norms and it's offensive to a lot of people. You know, it's just not, not an acceptable situation for a lot of people.

That's another instance though where someone would say, oh, he's weird.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And when you. So when I was just saying this, I absolutely amount to everyone listening to this being like, that dude, it was awful. I would never want to be with him. Oh, what a bore. Like I imagine I can see all the comments on social media now, like dozens and dozens of people ripping me to be like, oh, that dude. And like making their meanest comment. I know that's going to trigger it. It's like throughout this whole thing, of course, like people are going to grab what I say and they're going to try to just dissect me and rip me apart for all the things I violate that they don't want to exist.

So it's a constrained romantic relationship we're going to have if we're me and you together, Brian. Because in the morning speech. In the morning. Can't really do any hanky panky after 8:30. So I mean there's kind of a small window for our relationship to exist. We're gonna have to get a lot done in that, like three or four hours we're gonna have to have sex and then we're gonna have to resolve all of our problems and then I'm gonna have to offload.

Yeah.

What else is important there? Tell me about your sleep regime. So the things you do just before sleep. We know you don't eat near sleep. Anything else that's really important.

They let me take them off. It's go to bed same time every night, no exceptions, Temperature controlled room andor mattress.

What temperature?

I currently am at I think 71. I go to bed at 78 and then Fahrenheit and then I sleep at 71 thereabouts. Then I come up for REM at 73. So temperature and then sound.

Sound.

Yep. So aware of potential sources of noise that could wake you up. So if you, if you're in a noisy environment of sirens, like a big city environment or dogs barking or something, being aware because sound will wake you up. And so you're really trying to minimize the number of times you wake up. If you need to do something to limit what gets into your ears or doing white noise or whatever you're doing, then identifying when you eat and what you eat. For example, I know from my experience in trying these things, if I were to sometimes I would try an almond crust piece of pizza. Like this is years ago when I'm really trying to start figuring stuff out that would wreck my sleep. Flour of any type wrecks my sleep. It elevates my resting heart rate into the high 50s and I know I'm going to have about 5, 50% less deep sleep. And it's all these little teeny tiny understandings of how a particular kind of food is going guaranteed to wreck my sleep. Or even 3 ounces of red wine anytime afternoon guaranteed to devastate my deep sleep. And so understanding how food intake affects that. And then I know I try to have an hour, a wind down time every night if I go to bed, if I work right up to when I go to bed, I will ruminate all night long on that topic and say it will feel like I never actually go to sleep because I'm always just in that light sleep ruminating on this problem. But weirdly I found that if I follow my entire protocol right before I go to bed now I'll assign my brain a problem every night before I go to bed. And I now have my very best thoughts in life in my sleep. My brain figures things out much more efficiently in my sleep than I do when I'm awake. So now it's become an asset to me versus before. It was just a terrible experience.

And if, if I, you know, I, I sometimes I've got to be honest, sometimes I have snacks before bed. You know, we're amongst friends here. I can be honest. Sometimes, you know, you know, sometimes it just gets better because I feel that because I work quite late into the night and then I get to 9 or 10pm and I'll be sat there thinking I've not eaten yet and I've got this pain in my stomach. So getting just going to bed with the pain in my stomach feels quite difficult. So I'll just, you know, order something on one of these little apps, don't tell anybody because you know, but then, and then I Eat it. And you're right, 10 seconds, it feels great. And then after that I feel like crap.

Yeah, you have to pay the price the whole next day.

Is there anything that I you, you can eat later in the day or you can eat at dinner time that has a smaller negative adverse consequence in your sleep? Is it just like vegetables and stuff without.

Vegetables are fine.

Vegetables are fine.

And this is for me. I need to clarify what I do is for me. Other people thrive on other things. So this is just a data point people can use in their mind that you fine tune all these different things. But I think the data is interesting. I've never seen anyone with a four month streak of perfect sleep. I'm in the 98, 99.6 percentile of recovery too. So it's not just my sleep quality which people often say, oh, you can just gain that, not a big deal. People who know really know that's not true. But then also optimizing for your HRV and your, your respiration rate. My recovery is also 99.6 percentile. So I'm hitting all the markers on the highest quality possible performance in sleep and my body's recovering at the maximum capacity. And so it's good data that I'm not just making stuff up. The data shows I'm potentially best in world on this measurement profile or among. So it's interesting that it's a reasonable way for someone to contemplate what they might do in their life.

Do you think there's anyone better in the world at sleeping than you?

Probably. There's probably some people may. I wonder if all the years of ruining myself if it has a carryover effect like I just can't make up entirely for all the things I did. I wonder if that's the case. And I wonder if people who haven't done that naturally sleep better than me and that I have to try extra hard now because I'm compensating for all the damage I did to myself. I don't know for those in my certain circumstances. I don't think anyone tries harder at sleep than me.

Hrv, you mentioned that. Why is that important and what it is? What is it?

Yeah, it's a heart rate variability and it's a representation of your nervous system. There's two parts, your parasynthetic nervous system and your. It's like your autonomic nervous system and you're trying to basically tether between being chill and being in fight or flight. And so when you're stressed your body's like all right, like we're, we're amped up, we've got called all the resources to do this job, but you can't be in that high state long. You need to be in a relaxed state as well. So you're trying to bring the parasynthetic nervous system on in time and to relax the sympathetic nervous system. And so the HRV is a representation of are you chill or are you stressed? Having a high HRV is better than having a low hrv. I worked very hard at it. It's been one of the hardest markers we've had to move. I had a meaningful increase in my HRV over the past 500 days. I started, I was believe in the mid-30s range and I'm now up in the low 60s on average. So good gains, but still not anywhere close where I want to be, where I thought we'd be at this point. It's been really, really hard to move.

And you hate heart rate variability, right?

Yes.

Is that what it's called? And what is that? As in it's the gaps between your heartbeats or something?

Exactly, yeah. It's the interval between. Yep.

So it measures the interval between your heart beats and how much that varies or.

That's right.

Okay, so you want high, you want. So if my heart rate variability is like 120, I think great. It's definitely above 100 depending on, you know what I've done that.

I'm jealous.

Well, yeah, maybe that's one thing I can teach you about. But what is that 120? What? I've always wondered. I see it and I know that milliseconds. Oh, milliseconds, yeah. So 120 milliseconds variance between the heartbeats.

And there's a whole bunch of ways, if you get into the actual math, you can measure them, you can actually do this calculation a number of different ways. It gets really technical and sophisticated but the general understanding is you want to higher number, you want a bigger number.

You do you do some things before bedtime to improve your heart rate variability?

I do. I've tried several devices. I've used sensate, which is a vibrational thing on the chest. I've used pulsetto, which is a vibration on the vagus nerve here. I've used neural sim, which is on the left tragus here.

Anything any of them work?

A little bit here and there, non sustain. I mean I, given the amount of effort I put into my health and wellness, I would like to think I'd be over 100 in my HRV, I can't. It doesn't move. It's just a really hard marker. I wonder if all the decades where I was depressed out of my mind and really stressed out of everything, if I just ruined myself to degrees that are hard to come back from. So we've been trying to find something more advanced that would do something outside of diet and exercise and routine and sleep. We haven't found it yet.

It's crazy that one of the most pivotal moments in my life was when I put my whoop on and the founder told me about this, how important that HRV marker is, how much of an indicator it is of overall health. You know, crack on with my life. Had a glass of wine one day, I wake up the next morning. Yeah. And it's flashing red and I click on it and it's like, did you have some alcohol last night? And I'm thinking, oh my God, yeah. Like genuinely that moment was, was when I realized that these choices I make, however small I think they might be, especially with alcohol, have my heart notices and it's saying to me, you're either. It said you're either stressed, you're either sick, or you had some alcohol last night. Yeah, I thought, I don't like those three things being in a category together. Alcohol, what do you think of it?

I used to drink 3 ounces every morning with breakfast.

You used to drink 3, 3 ounces.

Of alcohol every morning with breakfast. I enjoyed drinking alcohol. I enjoyed drinking the wine.

For breakfast.

For breakfast. Because I had to create the longest time period between my sleep to avoid it negatively affecting my sleep.

Okay.

But then I got rid of it because it was too expensive from a caloric perspective. It was 72 calories for the 3 ounces and I couldn't fit it in with my calorie budget.

So what do you think of it in terms of, in terms of longevity?

I think the science says in moderation is fine. I just, I don't rig it at all ever anymore.

And you've only really been. Been following this protocol for a couple of years now, right?

Yeah, I mean, my. I guess I, I really do understand myself as on a singular mission for intelligent existence to thrive. That is what I am. That is what I'm doing. That's what I'm pursuing. Nothing else matters to me.

The question, the ultimate question, I think in, you know, you just said all these people are going to say I'm weird or whatever else. There's this ultimate question because you're very, very clearly mission driven and there's always a cost. Much of what I do here, I meet extraordinary people is to understand the cost. In fact, the reason I started this podcast is because we. We that's called the Diary of a CEO is because we see the CEO stuff, but we don't see the diary. That's why it's called what it is. And it started as me just sharing my diary. And I shared everything from masturbation, my mental struggles, everything, my issues with my family. I shared it all to. To put the cost out there to the world. Cost of my mission, my calling, my pursuit, the thing that was dragging me. The ultimate question becomes, are you happy?

Never more so in my entire life, unquestionably.

And what does that mean?

I've never felt more fulfilled. I've never felt more stable. I've never felt a more expansive consciousness. I've never felt more free. I've never felt more bold. I've never in my entire life been this alive.

And you experienced the antithesis of happiness, Right? You experienced. I mean, maybe some people would argue that it's something else, but you experienced the bottom of the crevice of depression. You know what that felt like?

I do.

The voices in your head that were telling you to do things, the unthinkable actions of suicide. What goes on in your head now? What are the same voices saying?

It's all play. I've never had more fun. Most of my life has just been a grind. It's like doing the things to achieve the objective because that's what the societal role play says to do. And that what I'm doing now. I'm not doing this for anyone's expectations. I'm not doing this to achieve anyone's acceptance. This is the game I've selected to play. I don't care what anyone says about it. Sincerely. I just feel free.

When was your last dark day?

It was about something I can't yet talk about. I wish I could. I will be able to soon. Okay.

I respect that.

Yeah. Yeah. But I guess my answer is a genuine. In time, this will be a good story.

But outside of that.

Yeah.

What are the things that. And are there things that get you down these days?

Yeah, I was recently I was pretty bothered. The hate that comes my way is energizing to me. It's thrilling. When my father did something with me publicly with his plasma transfusions, the Internet kind of had their way with him. Making fun of him and saying rude things and mean things that really got to me, like hurl up my way. Cool. But I My father was courageous enough to do this thing publicly and put himself out there and he just got torn to shreds. And it, it made me feel very sad and ashamed of humanity. Like my, like my 70 year old dad, you know, like he's not there picking a fight with somebody, you know.

Why does that hurt so much?

I don't know. Guess maybe I've always felt like a protector of my dad, maybe.

Why?

It's just kind of how our roles developed, I suppose. You know, when, when he was in a state of need, I was in a state of ability to give. Started off when we were young. When I was young.

You talked about plasma. I saw the image on your Instagram when I was waiting for you in there. I was going through your Instagram and looking at all the captions on your posts and stuff and looking. And there was that photo of you, your son, who looks very much like you, by the way, and, and your father, beautiful photo of you, all of you wearing vests. And this was one of the sort of experiments you did. You had a hypothesis. The hypothesis was.

I don't know, what was the hypothesis? Yeah. As a team, we have scoured every scientific study ever done on longevity and lifespan and we've ranked, prioritized all of them. And we filtered out like, which one? Animal models, human models, and we tried to decide which things to do and why. And plasma exchanges surfaced as a potential option and people were doing it for cognitive decline. And so it came up where I was talking to my dad and he said, hey Brian, I want you to know something that when you begin experiencing cognitive decline, which I have, you don't know, said, I always thought that if I'm starting to lose my mind, I'm gonna pick it up and be like, oh, I'm not as sharp as I used to be. But you don't know, it's invisible to you, which makes sense. And so he said, I've been on blueprint for a couple months, it's come back. So I'm aware of how fast I was losing my mental acuity. I'm back. So in that conversation I said, dad, you know, I've been looking at these plasma exchanges and there's some interesting studies going on right now with cognitive decline, Alzheimer's and things like that that are showing interesting results now. The science is still emergent. We're not sure it's going to work, but if you were interested in doing this, I'd be more than happy to donate my plasma to you. That's how it happened. And so then I tell my plasma is, oh, yeah, so we have blood in our body and plasma. So you take the blood out, we're half blood, half plasma. You take blood out, you spin it up, it separates into yellow stuff, which is plasma, and the red stuff, which is blood. And so they're just different things in the plasma. So it's basically taking plasma from the body. And so I gave my father a liter of my plasma, but I was talking about this to my son. I was like, hey, I may give up a liter of plasma to my dad. And so my son is like, cool. Can I be involved? It's like, all right. So it was like this really organic thing around my father. And so it was. A lot of people learn about this, and then they immediately imagined, like, I'm in a dungeon drinking my son's blood and I'm harvesting his organs. And the reality was it was a very. It was a whimsical, fun, you know, heartwarming thing that our family was discussing. And so we did it.

And there was some sort of efficacy shown in mice or something, wasn't there?

Yeah, yeah. There's. So this. The evidence is like, not bad. It's not terribly persuasive. It's emergent. So it's not like we were going in there and realized, thinking that we had a slam dunk. It was like, it's interesting, it's safe, so let's give it a shot.

And it didn't really work. So you've.

On me.

On you.

Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, so I'm chronologically 45. Many of my phenotypic markers are in their 20s.

Right, of course.

So my donor was 19. And so it makes sense, the age differential, given I'm so tuned, it would make sense that you wouldn't see a big change. But for my father, maybe, because there's a much bigger difference between his health status and my status and a different age range too.

Was there a difference in your father or did you not measure?

We're still waiting for the results.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. His subjective reporting was that he felt phenomenal. But we really want to see the data. And you also need to probably do more of these. One is not enough. You probably need to do it successively. So it ended up being. Even though we approached it as my father's cognitive decline, and we were looking at it through a medical perspective, it ended up being a family bonding experience. Where my father left the church when I was young. He was ostracized. I left the church, I was ostracized by my children and their family. So in my estimation, it was. We are divided by the mind, united by biology. This goes back to blueprint, which is, are there control systems that help us cooperate? Not the mind, now our mind. We want to create tribes. We want to fight with each other, and we want to find good and evil and all that sort of thing. Biology doesn't. I mean, biology maybe is a different control system. And so we were just trying to optimize health. And so you go back to that system. What are the control systems running? Humanity. Running our families, Running you and me, running society. I thought it was beautiful because it was an experience my father and son and I never would have imagined we'd have in our entire lives. And it ended up being a spectacular experience for the family that we really appreciated.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about something I've just written in the book that I've been writing. One of the pages is when I discovered my father's cigarettes. And it was this, like, earth shattering moment in my life because I was suddenly haunted by this feeling that my father was gonna die. You know, because as a kid, you know, cigarettes are bad. Everyone tells you that. And then when you find out your father is smoking them. When I was, like, 14 years old, it was this kind of crisis in me that my father's gonna die. I was. I was thinking about what your father went through and how that might have introduced the concept of death to you at a young age. Then I was also observing how much he means to you and every word you say about him and your protectiveness over him. And I was wondering if there's some kind of link there. Hmm.

How did you reconcile with it?

Trying to get him to stop smoking?

Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

At all costs.

What'd you do?

I think I cried about it a few times, but I think I just made him feel bad about it as much.

Right.

Yeah.

That's like the best tool you can use when you're 14.

What about you?

I'd write him letters.

Really?

Yeah. Every week I'd write him a letter, Tell him. Tell him how much he means to me. I'm thinking about him, yeah.

In the hope that.

That he. It would give him the power he needed to overcome his addiction.

Did you think about his. Him dying at that age? Had the concept of death crossed your mind?

I just wanted a dad. Yeah. I wanted. I wanted him to be a part of my life.

That explains why being a dad matters so much to you now.

Probably.

Yeah, I. I noticed there's something on the chair over there and I'm. I'm actually starving. It's. It's just gone four o' clock and I haven't eaten today, but you were very kind in bringing me some food. So I want to talk about. I want to talk about food. Jack, could you bring me the food, please, and you can tell me what you've brought me to eat. Presumably this is what you eat.

That's right.

Good. Thank you. Okay, so you've, you've brought me a meal today?

I did.

Just for anyone that's looking. I'll try and tilt it up so people can see if anyone's watching on YouTube or Spotify, where you can get the video. You can see what's in these bowls. And you've bought me two little buckets of pills here and there's a drink here. What is this food?

This is the answer. If you ask the body, what do you want to eat to be in ideal health, this is the answer that it generated. So this is not to say that is the only food you could eat. It is a version where you could eat. So my daily caloric intake is 2,250 calories a day. Every calorie has to fight for its life. There's not a single calorie in my entire life protocol that exists for any reason other than serving an objective in the body. So dish number one is called super veggie. It's broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, garlic, ginger, hemp seeds. And over a month, if you were to do this with me, you would eat around 70 pounds of vegetables per month.

70 pounds of vegetables per month. Wow. Wow.

And I think we also have in there extra virgin olive oil and chocolate.

Yeah, I can taste like cacao, like dark chocolate.

So we. I pair the chocolate in here. It's an unexpected pairing. The way we think about this is you could say chocolate is good for you, which might lead you to eat a Snickers bar. The more precise way of thinking about it is you want dark chocolate undutched, tests for heavy metals and has a high polyphenol count. If you don't do all five layers to qualify the value of the chocolate, you have an inferior chocolate nutritional value for your body. So everything we do at Blueprint uses that frame of reference of understanding everything. A full stack way of how do you serve the body's objectives in the.

Maximal way that is mushroom covered in chocolate.

How fun.

So interesting.

Yeah, those. Oh, those are matake mushrooms.

Matake mushrooms. This is A normal broccoli, isn't it?

That's right.

You didn't put anything on it?

No.

No salt.

I use potassium chloride. No salt.

And we got some broccoli in there. So is that. Is that that dish explained?

That's explained.

Okay. And then this is. Looks like dessert to me.

Nutty pudding. It is. Many people consider it to be a dessert. It's macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, sunflower, lechen, pomegranate juice, berries, and pea protein.

And is this the entire meal you'd have in one day?

There's one more dish which we don't have, which varies day to day.

Okay.

But this is really it. I have three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil ones in here. Then I have an avocado and a third meal a day.

And this drink here that you've given me, what's that?

Yeah, make sure you stir that up. That's the Green Giant. So the way that it works is I'll wake up in the morning, first thing I'll do is drink the green giant, take 60 pills, work out for an hour, then eat super veggie, wait for an hour, eat nutty pudding, wait for one more hour, and eat my third meal of the day, and then I'm finished for the day.

How many pills will you take in one day?

Currently 111.

Wow. And you take 60 of them in the morning?

That's right.

Wow. Wow. That's an interesting taste, I've got to say. It doesn't taste amazing, you know, it's not like something I'd. I'd find in a. Like a juice bar or something. There's a little bit of a aftertaste to it that's not. Not fantastic. And I mean, I like vegetables, so I like most of this stuff. The chocolate, I think, is a bit of a spanner in the works because it's not like a chocolate that you'd get. It's not milk chocolate or a Mars bar. Right. It's a very, very dark, bitter taste, which is a strange thing to add to a mushroom.

Yeah. You could also put the dark chocolate in the nutty pudding, or you can have it independently. I find it's fun because it's a new experience for people to try. So it's really an optional thing.

Oh, this is nice. This nutty pudding is really nice. That's really nice. That's really, really nice. So what are your principles for eating then, Clara? You talked about calorific restriction. How important is that? Because I'm I eat a lot and I don't count, I just, just eat. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, my heaviest on 15 stone fives, which is what, about 100 kilograms or something. So I'm, I'm quite heavy and I eat and I go to the gym every day, but I eat a lot out, kind of out of control.

It has compelling evidence, caloric restriction has compelling evidence that it's one of the most effective longevity interventions that can be done.

And what are your sort of wider nutritional principles that people can very easily introduce into their lives?

It's, I have this, I have this experience where I, I learned how to fly an airplane. I became a pilot and we get up at altitude and I would use my hands and try to fly the airplane and I'd go left, right up, down. I'd try to be perfectly on the attitude indicator of maintaining exactly the altitude which I was pegged at and the direction. And then I would engage autopilot and it would, this plane would just sit up straight and it would be perfectly pegged. It was so far superior to my ability to do it. And that's kind of how I think about my diet is if I use my mind, I kind of ping pong around life eating this and that and like I hear this thing there and I hear this thing there. I kind of do whatever's available to me. If you think about putting your body on autopilot, I call it my autonomous self, let the body report out evidence algorithm in and it just runs. This is the result. This is autopilot for my body. And so every single thing we do is tracked in the body. Every pill has to justify its existence. If it can't be measured and quantified, we don't do it. And so it's a system, a closed loop system that has an algorithm running me which is so far superior to my mind, which is going to do. It's going to add the cookie to the order and it's going to eat blank because of whatever.

I'm presuming you're not going to take these back. Okay, so this, Those are all the pills you take in one day?

That's right.

100, 120 odd pills in a day almost.

Yeah. 111. Yeah. That big one right there. Can see that guy right there.

This one here?

Yeah.

Jesus, Lord Jesus. What is in these pills?

A lot of things you'd expect basics like vitamin D and C, more advanced things like alpha ketoglutarate or metformin or carbos or other things. Like that it spans from basic and common to some more advanced drugs.

A lot of my friends, when they, when I. Well, one of my friends in particular, when he knew that I was speaking to you, he asked me about NAD plus. That's obviously something that's become quite popular in the longevity culture. What's your perspective on nad?

Yeah, he's trying to modulate those levels in his body and there's nice age graphs. So people, to enter this into an understandable frame. People. It's not commonly understood what a biological age is versus a chronological age. Somebody can be chronologically, I'm 45, but I can biologically be different. I could be either 30 or 35 or 55 or 70, according to the markers. So in levels of NAD, intracellular NAD in particular, there are certain levels that would peg you at age 18, age 30, age 50, because they reliably go down with age. And so when you supplement to try to change these, you're trying to peg yourself to a more youthful state because it's a energy the body runs on. And so what I did is I. People in the longevity community do have a lot of questions about how you increase your intracellular NAD levels. And there's a big debate. Do you do NR or nmn? I think there's this big debate and everyone's always wants to fight about it. And so I trialed both. I did 90 days on NR, I did 90 days on NMN and I measured my intracellular blood levels throughout and I showed that both were basically effective in doing the objective. So I was able to peg my intracellular nad at the 18 year old mark on both supplements.

Oh, wow.

So it basically doesn't matter. Just get it measured and just titrate your dose to make sure you're getting what you need.

Nice. And I want to, I really want to make sure because I feel like you're. If I'm never going to, you know, meet someone who I feel like is so well versed in how the things I put in my mouth have an impact on my biological age. So what advice would you give to me about say that you could. I'm a blank canvas and I'm going to, I'm going to believe everything you say. My objective is to increase my health span and to not age poorly.

Yeah.

What would you say about the things that I put in my mouth? Give me some rules.

Do exactly what I've published.

Okay.

I'm going to make it dead simple for you. I say tongue in cheek. That blueprint is the best health protocol ever developed. Prove me wrong with your data. If someone has a better. If someone can achieve better biomarkers with their protocol, it's going to be amazing for me and everyone else because now we have a comparison. But right now, the tricky thing for someone like yourself is if you go out into the world and try to figure this out, you've got to sort through a hundred gurus. Yeah, everyone's saying a different thing. And even now, if you give five anti ag experts the same scientific papers and ask them to develop a protocol for you, you'll get a different protocol from every single one. They're not going to agree. There's no way to go out there and get consensus in the world. You need to pick a path and then measure. And I've done exactly that. So I've basically tried to punch through all the noise and say, is there actually something I can do which has some believability? That's what I've done. So I've published all my data and so blueprint provides people a starting point to say I'm going to do something that I can see works and I measure myself, then iterate and improve upon it. So health and wellness is all like religion, where the King James version of the Bible supports a hundred different denominations. They all say they're God's one and true only. Same with health and wellness. Everyone claims they're God's true health and wellness program. And I've tried to punch through the whole thing to say it doesn't matter what guru status is, share the data.

Eat in the mornings.

If I was a blank canvas, I'd say trial. I'd say follow my protocol. Exactly. See how you feel and then try and experiment what you do later in the day and then compare the two sugar. Zero.

Zero sugar.

Zero sugar.

Why?

It does nothing useful for your body now, like, our body needs sugar to run. So if you eat sugar in berries, which you're having now, that's great. But highly processed white sugar or cane sugar, there's no value for your body. There's other things of much higher value for your body.

God, it's hard to exist in this world without sugar, isn't it? Do you do anything with your testosterone levels?

Yeah, I do a testosterone patch. I supplement with a patch. I supplement because I'm on a caloric restriction diet. And when you do that, your testosterone naturally goes down. So I keep my testosterone pegged in the normal range between 6 and 800. I'm about 850 right now, so I'm not trying to get above it. I'm just trying to be normal.

One of the reasons why I said to you before when you sat down that men of my age start thinking about longevity is we notice that our hairlines have started to recede. I mean, getting to 30 with the receding hairline is actually quite good. Some of my friends started a little bit earlier, and then we start noticing these gray hairs in our. In our heads. You have fantastic hair. And in fact, a lot of the comments I saw were, what's he doing with his hair? There was one particular comment I was like, someone asked him. This was online. Someone asked him how he's got that hair. What advice would you give to me? Listen, I'm at that age now where I've got to make a decision. Do I let this thing go back.

Yeah.

Or do I fight it?

Don't do it. Yeah. Fight. Fight with everything you've got in you.

Really?

Yeah. Trust me on this.

I will. Trust me.

You don't want to clean up of. You don't want to clean up aging damage that you can prevent right now.

And I can prevent my hairline receding?

Yes. How? I. I started losing my hair in my early 30s.

Yeah.

And it's been a grind to try to keep it. And so my hair protocol. Here's what I do. I have a custom formulation that we've built. It basically has minoxidil and a few other things so people can get that easily. I have a red light therapy cap I wear every morning for six minutes. In my morning routine, I do prf. So I inject. I get blood drawn, spun up, and then re Injected into my scalp once every maybe a month or three. And then I take a few supplements that are listed online for the Blueprint website. So basically, like, four things. Helps prevent hair loss and incur. Encourages hair growth.

I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do all of that and walk my dog. So I'm like, is there a. Is there like a silver bullet like that I could.

So here's how it works. Is. I know it sounds overwhelming if you build habits that just make these things so you don't think about it. It sounds overwhelming in the beginning, but if you just get into a routine where every morning you do your thing, and when you're doing that thing, you just throw a cap on your head and it just is on for six minutes. And then at night, before you go to bed, you put a little liquid on your scalp and you rub it in, and then you Take a few pills every day with your routine. It's entirely about building systems so you don't think about it ever. So it's never a burden on you.

My friends are taking different approaches to keeping their hairline. And the side effects are the reason. The proposed side effects are the reasons why I've always been scared to do it. One of the clear side effects that people talk about is loss of libido.

I haven't had that. So we do the dosage. So if they're taking finaster, finasteride, which is an oral, then it does have sexual side effects. But we. I have not yet encountered any intervention that has compromised my libido anywhere in anything we're doing.

How do you measure your libido? Or is that just kind of anecdotal?

Yeah, I mean, so I. This historically became known about measuring nighttime erections. So I didn't know I was talking to a reporter about this. And he had just done an article on blueprint, and he read it and he came back. He's like, hey, my editors are asking about penis health. And I was like, funny you ask. I gotta tell you something. And so I just bought this high frequency electromagnetic stimulation device. Working on. Basically, I sit on this little thing. It stimulates my pelvic floor. And I was trying to strengthen my bladder so I wouldn't get up to go to bed at night. It had this side effect of every time I woke up, I was erect. And I was like, this. This is like what happened to me when I was 10. You know, like, when you're 10 years old, you're always erect. And I was like, I haven't experienced that for quite some time. I'm always erect. And so I was telling him about this thing, and then I didn't realize he was going into the article. And so. So then it came out, I was like, oh, no. So, like, this. This guy. Then it's like, this dude is so weird. Like, he measures his nighttime erections and he drinks his son's blood and he started stacking. And people are like, this guy's nuts.

Yeah.

And so it just creates this. This pattern where people are like, yeah, yeah, he's just out there.

One of the things that's really distinctive about you is you have the best posture of any guest that's ever sat here, ever. Like, to the point where I was like, schlumped. And I looked over, I was like, fuck, there must be a reason why he sat like that. So I corrected my posture, but I keep sliding back down why does that matter to you? Posture?

I wish somebody would have taught me this when I was a kid. It matters a lot with blood flow, I found out, because I have these internal jugular veins, which blood from your brain flows out. And I was born with narrow jugular veins. And so when I have bad posture like this, it stops the blood flow and it builds up my brain. It causes intracranial pressure, which is bad for your brain. I didn't realize I had that until I found in a normal MRI scan, we found that I had some bad things happening in my brain. We're like, why is that happening? And we found these internal jugular veins. So then it focused me on posture of, how do you. How do I actually situate myself to have the proper flow from my brain down into my body? And it became a whole thing. And so we started doing a bunch of measurements, trying to look at my intracranial pressure, looking at my white matter hyperintensities in my brain. Like, basically, how bad is it? And it was bad. My team kind of went on red alert for three months. Am I going to have a stroke? Am I going to have a seizure? We were trying to figure this out. And so one of the ways we fixed this or we've made positive progress where my symptoms have lessened is this posture. So I became obsessed with posture to avoid having some catastrophic event with my brain. And it's been useful and helpful. And so I just got into posture and I learned how to do it, but it was really hard. I never realized how many muscles have to be strong to have good posture. I'd wake up in the morning, I could barely move. I was like, oh, my God, everything hurts.

Did you think there's a correlation between our health outcomes and our posture?

The gentleman I work with on this strongly thinks that there's not evidence yet, but he thinks that it's a significant influence on it.

Yeah, quick one. If you've been listening to this podcast for some time, one of the recurring messages you've heard over and over and over again, especially when we first had that conversation with Tim Spector, is about the importance of greens in our diet. And a while ago, I started pressing my friends at Huel to come out with a product that did exactly that, allowed you to have all those greens, the vitamins and minerals you need in a drink. And after several, several, several months of iterations and processes, they released this product called Huel Daily Greens, which is now one of my favorite products from Hewl because it tastes great and it fills that very important nutritional gap that I had in my diet. And the problem is it launched in the US and it sold out straight away and became a smash hit for Huel for the very reasons I've described. It's now back in stock in the United States, but it's not here in the UK yet. So if you're a UK listener, which I know a lot of you are, it's not yet available. So let's all attack Huel. Let's DM them everywhere we can and tell them to bring Huel Daily Greens to the uk. This is the product. When it is available in the uk, I'm going to let you know first, but until then, let's spam their DMs. For those of you that don't know, this podcast is sponsored by whoop, a company that I'm a shareholder in and I'm obsessed with my Whoop. It's glued to my wrist 24 7. And for those of you that don't know, it's essentially a personalized, wearable health and fitness coach that helps me to have the best possible health. My WHOOP has literally changed my life. WHOOP is doing something this month which I'd highly suggest checking out. It's a global Essentially, they guide you through a set of four activities throughout the month of August that are scientifically proven to improve your overall health. When I wake up in the morning, it's the first thing that I look at. I want the information on my sleep to then plan my day around. So if you haven't joined WHOOP yet, head to join.Whoop.com CEO to get your free. Check it out now and let me know how you get on. Send me a dm. It was quite surprising to see that you've connected AI to the work that you're doing. The fourth principle you said about not underestimating the necessity to align with AI. Why. Why does AI come into this?

To me, it's it's helpful to think about these kinds of questions by doing a thought experiment and time traveling to the 25th century. Imagine whatever ex whatever form of intelligence exists in the 21st century, they're observing the early 21st century. What clarity of insight do they have looking back at us that we can't see right now? That helps me spin up certain frames of mind. And it could be that there was this revolution in the human race where we said don't die and then two is the only thing we have to do to figure that out is to figure out cooperation on how not to die. Now, when you say that, you have to figure out how to get every single agent of intelligence on Earth and maybe beyond, to cooperate.

Cool so far, Kind of. Thanks for checking. So we want the 25th century AI to look back and see that one of the principles of our humanity was do not die in the hope that it won't kill us.

Okay. Yeah. So let me start building this up.

Sure.

So the first, take me as a first example. I'm 35 trillion cells. How do I figure out how to not die? I go through this process to build an algorithm that maximizes existence. We do this between you and me, where we have a cooperation algorithm, not figuring out how you and I cooperate and we don't die. We have the same kind of thing with planet Earth. For example, in my scenario, we say, can the organs talk and can they run me? Can they keep my rascal brain at bay so it doesn't ruin the show? Could the oceans run planet Earth? We plug into the oceans with measurement and we say you run the biosphere. Kind of a weird idea, but not outlandish. Now you have to basically think about the Earth speaks, our bodies speak, we speak with each other. Now you have trillions of artificial intelligence agents around. All agents of intelligence have to cooperate. If any one of these agents or any or a group of them violates the cooperation, it could be the end of you or me or the planet or everyone. We have to figure out coexistence in this huge tapestry of goal alignment it's currently framed of AI Engineers need to figure out how to stop AI from killing everyone. That's part of the problem, but it's not the entire problem. So that's the only objective we have as a species. There's nothing else that matters right now. It's don't die from every vector of potential death.

And you think by us doing that on our level and then at a earthly level that this will just want to make sure I'm clear, that this will somehow feed into the artificial intelligence or will create artificial intelligence with one of its principles at its core, to be cooperative.

Yeah. I mean, so you take the AI problem and it's so high level, you would say we don't want AI to be misaligned with human goals.

Yeah.

What are human goals?

Okay.

And then you start breaking yourself apart, me apart, and we realize we are a disaster set of goals. We want everything all the time, and it always contradicts. We don't have aligned goal. And this is what I was trying to align with myself. Can I answer that question and say I have a singular goal to exist. Now, if I'm aligning with AI, and if my singular goal is to get to zero self violence, maximum life, existence ability, I now have a starting point to talk to AI, talk to AI about, all of us do. And if we say Earth, it's maximum sustainability. This planet we're on, we have a starting point for discussion, but it has to begin with existence. And we have to overcome the biggest psychological barrier in our current culture, which is we perceive inevitable death. And so therefore anything that happens, like whatever, we don't care. And so we have to overcome. And this is why I've been playfully challenging the status and authority of Jesus Christ. I made a joke that Jesus fed wine and bread, accelerating aging and inebriating and I will feed nutrients that will nourish and create life. That why is Jesus the continued representation of a philosophical group of a billion plus people? Why can't someone challenge that status and authority and say no, it's not the resurrection, it's not the afterlife, it's this life, it's don't die, you're not a martyr for some higher objective of some rules to be completed. This is the boundary conditions that people create. They say this is a philosophical thing, it's sacred, you can't talk about it, you can't challenge it. Why not?

I sat here with one of the founders of Mustafa, one of the founders of DeepMind, and we were trying to find solutions to this issue of AI and containment. And I want to make sure I'm clear that you're saying if we change our goals on a human level from being less self destructive and more focused on do not die in our existence, then we have something that we can align with AI on which will preserve our existence as well. But we can't align with AI because currently we, we're self destructive. So for an AI to align with us, it would be self destructive as well.

Exactly. And if you peel back these layers now, this conversation is, if we actually got into the technical details, it'd be much more nuanced. I'm going to make an oversimplification of a statement.

Thank you.

Humans have this broad set of goals. It's to make money, it's to acquire power, it's to have influence, it's to change the world they want. And that's when you, when you talk about containment, you talk about corporations, governments, individuals, ideological groups. Everyone's gunning for their own thing. And this is why I took myself as example If I look at me as the same structure of the world, I've got. Evening Brian. Morning Brian. Ambition Brian, Entrepreneur Brian. Lover Brian. All these different versions of me want different things at different times and they're all competing to achieve their objective. And I understand these different versions of me. I, I had to basically say, hey everybody, like we've got a really big problem. We're all fighting each other after these different things and meanwhile we're accelerating death. And I had to basically say, we're going to compress this space and we're going to acknowledge I, as a, my mind cannot act in my best interest. And so what I'm really saying in the most extreme version, I'm saying humanity, if we want to exist, has to contemplate handing over the reins of control to algorithms. We cannot act in our best interest individually, collectively, corporations, nation states, we can't do it. We need new control systems of power that acts in our long term interests. We're playing an existential game right now with existence. We started playing that in the 60s with nukes and we're now playing it with AI. We're playing it with our biosphere potentially being an unsustainable place for us. The Earth is gonna be fine. Not fine for us. We're playing Russian roulette with our, with our existence. So are we lethargic as a species? Yeah, we all think we're die anyways. And this is why if we flipped it and it's like, maybe not and maybe we're walking into the most extraordinary existence any form of intelligence has ever had in the galaxy, we may get our act together and say, you know what, let's think through this thing from these basic principles, like really easy, let's not die. We don't want to ruin this chance we have to exist in this amazing future.

A rebuttal you must have had is that in the pursuit of not dying, I don't want to not live. Do you see what I'm saying there? Because when, when I think about the sacrifices I would have to make to my life to not die in the same way that you've reversed your age, I think, well then there's no point because I'm not going to get to live. And I want you to just greet that as like a rebuttal. How would you respond to someone that thinks that? Because I imagine a lot of people have heard the protocol, the blue, they heard about the blueprint and they're thinking, well, you know, and I actually saw it. I think I saw it on Rogan or something where the guy was saying like, you know, I'd rather just die at 90, but having lived a fun.

Life or whatever, who cares what your mind thinks? Why is your mind the unquestioned authority that gets to say and do whatever it wants? Why does your body not get a say in this? Why can't your heart speak and your lungs? Why do you, as a tyrant, rule and reign with terror on yourself? This is the thing. This is the unthinkable, most offensive revolution that could happen. As a species, our entire existence, we've assumed our mind is the ultimate authority on all things. Even in this conversation, nothing gets past your mind as having authority. What if it didn't matter what our minds thought? What if they were not the authority? What if there are other authorities there? And why do we even trust your mind to be the thing that can decide on your best interest?

Is that where you are in your life, you've removed the authority from your mind?

Yes.

So when you talked about your being upset and I could see the emotion in you when people were attacking your father, is that not giving your mind authority?

I don't feel like I have control of those things there. It's an emotional response that I.

Based on thoughts.

Yeah. Based upon a reaction that I have this relationship with my father. And so it's complicated, right? In terms of like the thing I've isolated with blueprint is can I take my self violence to zero? You know, there's another layer of like, how do I feel about my father and what is that relationship? Different complexities. This whole thing is incredibly complex. But the, the simplest thing to do is can I do this within the control systems that I have, can I take my life to zero violence? And if I can do it as a 35 trillion cell organization, can we use this little teeny example and map it to a species and say, can we take this multi trillion agent, intelligent agent computational problem? Can we solve this cooperation problem for everyone?

Can we? Are you optimistic, Brian? And I want the honest answer here because, you know, people often have grand plans. But the most important question is, do you think it's possible?

Yes.

You think it's possible?

Unquestionably.

Do you think it will happen?

I do, I do. And here's why. I think that if it were just the human mind in play right now, I would not have, I would not feel bullish. I would be pretty forlorn. I'd probably give up in. Humans are no longer alpha on this planet. And whether you realize that, whether someone realizes that or not. There's a new Alpha on this planet and it's artificial intelligence. When going back to this conversation of the biographies, this is inevitable. Artificial intelligence will run us, it will run this planet and it will run all forms of cooperation. It's inevitable. And we're going to be superseded in our intelligence. On a timescale that is surprising to us. We think we have potentially more time than we do. I don't think we do. And that's why blueprint to me is so urgent, is of the urgent problems we're looking at of how do you, how do you get society to not kill each other with nukes? How do you get AI to not kill us? How do you get us to not die individually? How do you avoid the earth's environment biosphere from collapsing and not supporting our existence here anymore? How do you stop existential threats? And the thought processes people have been spinning up is we need legislation, we need new laws, we are going to protest, we're going to make a big thing. And what I've tried to say is I'm going to actually do the thing no one else is doing. I'm going to point itself, I'm going to say, can I solve all of these problems within me? Can I solve climate change within me? Can I solve AI alignment within me, Can I solve cooperation within me? And that's what I've been trying to do, is a n of one example of how to solve a complicated system. Now, blueprint is like an analog version, like its first version, right. It's like it's. But philosophically it's an interesting model. How do you take a complicated system of intelligence like me with all these inversions, with proneness for self destruction? I mean like if you say what are the risks of AI list like all the things AI does that scare us. That is exactly the same list that I'm scared of for myself and that.

You'Re doing to the 35 million cells.

Yeah, like I am AI and I am my own worst risk. The risk profile is the same. I'm runaway intelligence doing things that is causing self destruction and that's what AI.

Will do if it's allowed to run away.

So that's the thing, it's so funny. If we look at AI and we're scared of it, we just look in the mirror, it's the same thing, it's the same risk profile.

Intelligence is self destructive if uncontrolled or.

And so how do you build intelligence that's actually sustainable? How do you build it so it's not self destructive.

How long do you think we've got? You said you, we've got less time than we think.

I don't know why we wouldn't spin on a dime right now and look at every existential threat and go after it right now. Like why wait one more day? And why even, why even try to calculate the absolute last moment we can do something before everything becomes catastrophic. We don't know the second and third and fourth order consequences of the biosphere changing. We don't know when AI is going to emerge and what level. We don't know what systems are going to. We don't know. Like there, you can't model it, you can't predict it. So creating time frames is ridiculous.

You're emotional about this.

I want to exist. I really don't want to die again. It's like it's really fun to exist and I don't know what death is like. But I've had moments in my life where I get these, these small glimpses into this expansive of consciousness. And it could be the case that we are Homo erectus, that we are so primitive it's just unimaginable. And that if we can step into this future, we could have this expanse of consciousness that is mind bending like so far out, like so far beyond our imaginations. We just can't even comprehend it. Like we could be right there on that cusp. To me it seems like we are like why, why would anything, any other imagination be practical to assume right now? If super intelligence is in the game here and we're within that, that mesh of intelligence, why couldn't we reasonably imagine that we might be along the ride in some capacity?

Are you scared?

No, I don't have an emotion of feeling scared. I don't experience that emotion ever.

Fear.

I don't. I mean as people describe it to me, I don't really feel it.

Very logical and analytical in the way that you see things. Right. You think differently. Right. And obviously people that think different, like people like Elon Musk, etc. He's, he's neurodivergent in some capacity. You've got a divergence to your neurology, if that's even a word, which is very unique. And are you aware of that?

It's hard for me to see that. There are moments where I was at a dinner a few weeks ago and people were going around and talking about stuff and the contrast was like, whoa, I'm really different. What's happening here? So there are these moments of the sharp contrast. But I, I generally view the world as crazy. I view everything else. And I'm like, this is nuts what's even happening here.

Everyone is weird too.

This makes no sense. What the world is doing and how people are behaving makes no sense to me at all. And so I know that if you flip it, people view me in the same way. But God damn, the world seems crazy to me.

People look at you, they think, oh, he's a bit weird. And you look at them think, God, he's a bit weird.

I think people, I think the world is crazy, just insane.

Someone's right. It's either you or the world. Time will tell, right? Yeah, time will tell. What is the most important thing, Brian? I imagine, I would guess, I reckon 5 million people listen to this. That's my estimate based on the conversation. What is the most important thing that we haven't discussed that those 5 million people need to know before we close out?

That now is our opportunity to band, get together and experience the most extraordinary existence that we are aware of in the galaxy. And that this opportunity is going to invite us to divorce ourselves from every sacred idea we have about ourselves and society and each other. It's going to require more sacrifice than any generation and it's going to be incredibly painful. And it's going to test our fortitude on whether or not we choose to exist. The fate of intelligence in this corner of the universe may depend upon us right now creating this bridge to this next evolution of being human and of the fabric of intelligence. It is our opportunity to seize, equally to lose if we don't recognize the moment and step up.

And step one in stepping up is fundamentally stopping the war against ourselves.

It's in daily acts of revolting, of revolution against the status quo which is harming us and lessening our chances every day. People are accustomed to seeing revolutions happen by storming places and using weapons. The weapons at our disposal are to go to bed on time, to eat healthy, to not watch porn, to not get addicted to things. And it sounds weird and weak and different, but revolting against the culture of death and of self destruction. With self, with planet Earth and how we engage with artificial intelligence. And these foundations map the future of our existence. And it begins with self. It's not blaming someone else. It's not pointing at someone and telling them how they have to change. It's looking at self and building the revolution within each one of us.

What would you do if you found out you were going to die next week in a tabular illness. How would you feel?

I would feel satisfied that I spent my entire adult life searching for the singular thing I could try to do to create value for the human race. And I found it just in time and articulated the ideas just in time, barely well enough to kickstart this revolution.

Are you misunderstood? Because the perception of you that I had before I met you is different to the perception I have of you now. Specifically the perception I have of why you're doing what you're doing. Because when I heard the tale of this Brian Johnson guy, you know, he's trying to be 18 years old, he's a narcissist. He's just. He was struggling with the concept of death. He's got so much money now he's fighting life. So you know, he's doing this for himself. He probably wants to date someone young and that's why he's doing what he's doing. It's all sort of self centered. The proposition you've given me today is very much more about humanity than it is Brian Johnson. It seems like the picture painted of you and I know how the press works, right?

Yeah.

It's the things that gets the clicks right versus the person that sits in front of me today feel like two completely different people.

I'm not understood. I would almost prefer to be misunderstood because that assumes some level of understanding and it's not even a close approximation like you're saying. It's so far off from what is really what I'm really trying to achieve.

Your father, 75 years old, he's not going to live forever. Or is he? How do you contend with that? A man you clearly love a lot. But you understand that the. There's an inevitability to life for most people who aren't revolting against life in the way that you are with your longevity routines and your anti aging protocols.

Yeah, it's. It's impossibly hard for me to reconcile. You know, like. Yeah, one time he. I couldn't get a hold of him for a couple days and which is uncommon. And I spiraled in concluding that he had died. And you know, not being able to call him and hear his voice was beyond devastating. And. Death is a terrible thing. We've all experienced it and it would be wonderful if we could bring an end to it.

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

How.

They, my, both my, my parents joke that, you know, they get a package. It seems like every single day I'm sending them everything I can. And you like do this. Do that and it. Sometimes it's too much. Whether I. Brian, I can only take so many pills a day and I can only do so many things a day. And it's a fun relationship. But I am trying very hard to take care of my parents and my children and my family. I care deeply about those around me and I work very, very hard for their well being.

I believe you, Brian. I believe your intentions. I think what you're doing comes from a very, very good place. I think you're wired in a way which is unusual. And that's not to pass judgment on whether we're all unusual in our own ways. Right, but you're wired in a way that's unusual. But because of your wiring, it's very useful. I think that when we think about tribes and chronotypes and the differences within tribes, it's useful to have people that think differently within the tribe because it kind of covers all of our bases. And you present a new perspective about humanity, about the path forward and about the way to live. And I think any new perspective, anyone who is humble and under, you know, is searching for truth, would welcome a new perspective, especially when it's not harming others. Right? You would want a new perspective if you are in the search of truth, not in, in the search of confirmation of your existing ideas or the alleviation of the cognitive dissonance we experience. And that's what I. When I experience you, that's exactly what I think. I'm open, I'm open to your perspective. I don't have to accept it all into my daily life. But being open to listen, I think is something we should expect of ourselves at a very fundamental level. And I would just wish there was more people that would just, you know, have the fearlessness to present a new perspective. Because as I think we said earlier in this conversation, there's so much potential trapped behind the fear of looking weird in life. So we'd stifle opinions and innovations and creativity because we don't want to look weird, because there's a cost to that in our society. You get smashed. Right? And for whatever reason, you've made the decision that that matters less than the mission that you're on. So I respect you and I commend you for that. Am I gonna have the 120 pills? Can't make you a promise there. I'm sure I'll take a couple of them. This was nice. Yeah. Can't imagine putting the chocolate on my broccoli. But you know, there's a lot to learn here and I hope to make this sort of incremental steps in some of those areas of my health that we, we can all agree upon.

Yeah, I, I would thank you for the conversation today. The. As hard as I try to be impervious to judgment in conversations, it's hard to fully go through the expression of ideas when the other person even is making the most subtle of judgments or setting boundary conditions. And I love talking to you because you did none. You just rolled with me and you embraced it and I felt welcomed to express all of it. So I appreciate that very much.

Really means a lot to me. To the point I just got goosebumps because I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews with people and their judgments when I'm actually getting emotional thinking about it. I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews because of people's like their close mindedness when they came to have a conversation with you and how like what a waste of conversation and discourse and progress that is when we come with a closed mind. And so I'm so happy you felt that way because it really mattered to me that you did. And because you did, you were able to share in such a way which I actually think is incredibly beneficial to me and I think everyone that's listened. So thank you for that.

Thank you. The.

That's the one of the best compliments I've ever received. So really means a lot to me. Thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. In the diary of a CEO. The question left for you, huh? I mean maybe you've answered this is.

It how many nighttime erections I have?

I actually did have a question. What was the cost of you coming and doing this interview today to your routine? I thought, you know, I'm gonna sit with him for two hours, which we've done. There's gonna be a cost to your routine. None.

None.

Because of the timing. Okay, good. Appreciate that. We'll get you home before 8:30 for your curfew. The question left for you is if all. I think it says if all you could change is one thing about the world, what would it be?

I'll want to exist. A unwavering, unconditional, Maniacal want to exist.

Brian, thank you. Really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure it'll be the first of many because I've got a lot to learn. So appreciate your time today. It.