Reversing Age: The Quest for Immortality with Bryan Johnson | 1115 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly you're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. And today is a long awaited show with none other than Brian Johnson. I've been a remote fan of Brian's work, not in the field of longevity, which is something I think that he's been more public within the last couple years, but because of his neuroscience background. So Brian started a company called Kernel that has what I would say is the most comprehensive way of looking at the human brain ever. Because he took his tech disruptor brain and said, why doesn't someone do this the right way? So first, Brian, hats off for your work with Kernel, and then let's talk about aging and brains and stuff like that.

Thank you, Dave. Yeah. Very few people are aware of Kernel or that neural tech is actually useful. We basically in a similar way where the blood glucose monitors made it very easy to put one on the back of your arm and understand where your levels are at and then understand how food affects that. We are trying to do the same for the brain, make it easy for anyone to figure out what happens to my brain when and to have biomarkers that help make decisions on health and wellness.

It's a shift from when we first talked about Kernel, where you were sort of saying, I want to know how the brain works so that we can figure out how to make AI better. Seems like you shifted a little bit more into the brain, wellness and brain as a system, a sort of feedback on your environment. More of a biohacking approach.

Yeah. The big dream is still that. That which we can measure, we improve. And our brain is one of the remaining things about our existence that remains difficult to measure. So with more measurement, we can then create a closed loop feature feedback to improve ourselves with AI. So that's still the ultimate objective. In the meantime, having it be practically relevant to daily life of making better health and wellness decisions. Useful for pharma, for drug development, for other indications like cognitive decline and depression, mental health. Yeah, if we can be useful in those areas, then it's a win.

It is a win. And ultimately, who cares about having a body that lives a long time if your brain's not in there and doing good work? Even on the AI side of things, it feels like Jeff Hawkins, an old 3Com US robotics guy, the guy who invented the handwriting analysis for the first handheld called a Palm Pilot way before your phone. I used to work with that company when Jeff was there. He's written a couple books that probably do explain how the brain really is architected and talks about AI, so I feel like we're making more progress theoretically. And then you're doing some visualization stuff that almost no one knows about. But I think you deserve actually credit for that because you spent something like $80 million of your own money to figure out how the brain works. So kudos, my friend. That's awesome.

Thank you. Yeah. Boy, was that difficult. It was my first time doing a deep tech startup, and we spent two years as a team looking at every possible modality that we could use to interface with the brain. We looked at. We just started with the laws of physics. How could you potentially measure what was happening in the brain? We spent two years investigating every single approach. We acquired prototype systems, we stood them up, internally acquired data, and then we mapped each one to. Is this commercializable? What do you need to do? Do you need to build custom chips? If so, who's the fab? Can you build them? Do they have the scale, the energy requirements? And then we spent six years building it. We had a team of experts across 12 different disciplines, and we built it, ground up. All the experts in the field didn't think this was possible, and we pulled it off.

They never do. I've been theorizing. We had a few conversations back and forth, and I've been fantasizing about doing something called HEG Feedback or MEG Feedback and heg. I actually used to sell a system like that years ago. But you put it all together in an elegant way. And so if people are skeptical of your commitment to understanding biology, I kind of think that you already proved yourself with Kernel, even if maybe you didn't hire a good PR team to talk about it. But I just think it's a worthy effort in furthering our understanding of being human beings and what's really going on.

In there even now. I've tried to speak about kernel several times, about measuring the brain and why it's potentially useful and interesting and exciting. No one cares. I just cannot get any pickup on that company. I did a. A YouTube video with a bunch of retirees. Yeah. Where they're trying to, like that moment of life where you know that the horizon is potentially threatening and you savor every moment. And even that it's been very, very hard to generate interest in a technology. It's just. It's not intuitive yet. People don't know why they would want to measure their brains.

It's. It's. I've never understood that, as, you know, an early guy in the nootropics Movement, you know, about my 40 years end, because I want to get a kernel so I can use it to validate some of the work we're doing there. So I think I sent you an email about that, like, two years ago, and you're like, we're not doing that. So I don't know, maybe. But I, I, I do, just as a genuine, you know, one biohacker to another. Wanna want to extend my respect for that.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, you're, you're welcome. Now, let's talk about the biohacker thing. Professional rejuvenation, athlete versus biohacker. What's the difference?

When I first started doing this, I saw that people were struggling to put me into a category that was intuitive to them. And so they would reach out in their mind and find a frame that they had. It was like, is this a biohacker? Is this a health enthusiast? Is this a blank and blank? And I didn't think that any of those things necessarily captured what we were trying to do. This was an endeavor trying to map the next phase of human evolution. And like all good structures in human organization, competition breeds engagement. And when you, like, I did this for two years, nobody paid attention. And then it went viral, and then people freaked out, not understanding why I was doing this, what I was doing. But the disconnect was, if you observe an athlete like LeBron James and you see him taking care of his body and sleeping well and doing these things, no one's going crazy over LeBron James protocol. They respect him for his play on the court. And so I thought the thing to do would be to reframe this endeavor as an athlete, because people respect performance on the field and what you do to achieve that is respected. Whereas I was being vilified because they didn't have an endpoint to connect it to.

Welcome to the club, man. Saying that you're going to reverse aging or you're going to live longer than you're supposed to, it really triggers a lot of Muggles. And I eventually got to the point where I, I think it's kind of a game, like, oh, does it trigger you that I am planning to live longer than you are? Like, that's okay. Like, you'll be dead before I will. You know, like, there, there's just no rational argument for them. And I just realized they're not the people I'm trying to reach, the people who are triggered. But I have to ask you this, and this is a real thing. It took me a long time, like, you know, Joe Rogan came after me for a while in a commercially related thing. I took a lot of hits in making Biohacky. I mean, way more than most people will ever really comprehend. And eventually I got to the point of amusement, but it was only after a lot of pain. And that kind of pain is not good for your longevity. It's actually a negative. Right? You're. You're getting some criticism, and you're also getting a lot of, like, what the heck is this guy doing? And it's usually vocal critics, a small percent. How do you keep all the critics from making you old?

It's. The response is algorithmic. It's mathematically predictable. And so if you. In any given time, over the past couple thousand years, if you take norms of human behavior and you plot a behavior that is outside two standard deviations from norm, you get a biochemical reaction and people responding to it. It's the same process that's been happening for thousands of years. And so that's true for anything. Is that basically what responses are? People identifying outside the norm, thinking behavior, you know, ideas. And so, yeah, it is, actually. I have zero emotional attachment to it. I view it with amusement, and I view it as predictable as the sun rising. Is that, you know, we all experience our consciousness as unique and original.

But.

But it's not. It's been playing on this loop for a long, long time. And so realizing that it really means nothing to me at all. It's just. It's fun.

Are you on the spectrum?

Did that question provoke the question? That answer provoke the question?

It might have had a few little signals in it.

I mean, the. That question has embedded within it assumptions about what is normal and not normal, which then maps to what is good versus bad versus what is respectable versus unrespectable or trustworthy, untrustworthy. So are you sure?

Or is that your own mapping? Because I, by the way, I had Asperger's syndrome for a long time, and I fixed it.

Like.

Like, I reversed it and kept some of the aspects of it that were useful. But, like, I. I have no judgment about that. A lot of my friends are on the spectrum.

So it.

It. It's not about are you good or bad? It's just. It's a question of, like, being neurotypical or average, which would be the same as normal, or possibly above average, which would be abnormal.

Yeah, yeah, and I wasn't suggesting that. Your statement was suggesting that. I'm saying, in society generally, in a colloquial sense, when people say that they. There's Baggage associated with it. It's not. It doesn't come with the neutral place of assessment. And so that's all I'm saying.

Okay. Because some people are judgy about that. Got it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like people use that framework sometimes in a way to be derogatory or as an insult or to somehow ostracize someone from a community. And I frame it like this. I mean, I've read hundreds of biographies, and when I read about people in their time and place, the patterns are so familiar that there's somebody that identifies something that is unique and actually the future. And in response to that, they get the predictable outrage and crazy assessments and other things. And my frame of thinking is I genuinely would rather be respected by people in the 25th century than I would to be respected right now. Because by definition, the majority of everyone who lives right now is living in the past, living the ideas of dead people. Now. We think we're future forward. We think we're on the cutting edge. The majority of our values, ethics, norms, ideas, understandings, really are of dead people. And that's been true for all of humanity. And you look back and you say in those eras, the future was always present and a very small sliver of society could identify it, but it was a very small sliver. And sometimes those people weren't vindicated for a hundred years or 200 years. That's why we can look back at the 16th century with this cold, detached, objective view and say it was so clear that leeching was not a good idea as a way bloodletting was not the right thing for blankety blank. So that's why I say right now, I assume by default, which is a correct assumption, that the majority of that which is easily accessible to me in thought and action is dated. And I need to search relentlessly for the future because it's hiding. It's very hard to see. Hmm.

So that sounds like a yes.

Oh, that's good.

This is one of the most fun pregnant pauses ever.

I wanted it to go longer.

So you've looked at your brain. I've observed your interactions with reality, and I actually can't tell. Right. So now this is me being judgy, but not in a good or bad way, but just in like a neuro neurological assessment sort of way. Right. And it's clear to me, and if you don't like this part, I'm even happy to delete it, whatever. But it's clear to me, because you've talked about it, that you have some Some childhood trauma stuff that will affect the rationality. We all do. I've been open about mine as well, so no judginess there at all. And you also have like a very active, rational brain, right? And sometimes if you have the neurological wiring that comes from neuroinflammation when you're young that forces your brain to be hyper efficient at some things, which is kind of what puts you in the direction of ADHD or being on the spectrum, you'll present that way. And other times you'll just do that because like there is too much chaotic emotion in the brain that wastes electricity. And the brain's like the easiest thing for me to do to be highly functional in the world is just to like not worry about all that stuff and just rely on rationality versus interoception. If you, if you do either one of those seem like a good assessment or are you just an alien or some other thing? I haven't, I haven't thought of here, if you don't mind me asking. It's a pretty personal question. I'm trying to figure out what makes you dick.

Everything is open for discussion, so happy to go wherever you want. I find Robert Sapolsky's framework that he outlines in his new book determined, persuasive, where he articulates that in any given moment we are influenced by millions of factors that date back thousands of years to 2 minutes and 10 minutes. And that we are for the most part a oblivious to the forces that are upon us in any given moment that determine what we do, including childhood trauma, including my hormones, including my sleep levels last night. And so I kind of really enjoy this quote by Edward Murrow. It's kind of my favorite quote ever. Those who are not confused don't really understand what's going on.

That's a great quote. I love that.

So in this moment, you know, can I whip up a story of my self assessment and do some psychoanalysis and you know, I'm just saying, you know, could I. It would just be, in my estimation pointless because of my complete obliviousness to what is really going on that invite my behaviors. And I wouldn't even begin to expect this. I think it's actually a more honest answer to say I, I have no idea. I would rather refer to a methodical framework like Sapolsky's and say, what are the factors? What weight do they carry? What is influencing my behavior? Than I would to try to endeavor to answer the question with being as naive as I am with all those variables.

I hear you. It sounds like you're not going to answer it, but I will tell you, your media training is really good. So nice. Nice work.

Thanks.

By the way, guys, you're listening to this. The media training. Brian and I have both been CEOs of sizable companies and we've both had PR companies tell us exactly how to handle. This wasn't a hostile question, but it was a difficult and funny question. So nice ninja moves. I just gotta say, when I was.

Doing my first media training, it was at Braintree when I had never engaged with press before. And there was one thing, they probably told me many things. I don't remember them. There was one thing I remember. They said, you don't need to answer the question.

Yes.

Like you're there to explain what you want to explain. You're not there to answer the questions. And so the training was, your objective is to take their question and, and say yes, and, and then figure out a way to answer the question in the way you want to talk about it. And you know, that was such, you know, they, they ask a question of like, you know, this. We want to know an answer to this thing. And the politician says something different. You're like, oh my God, just please answer the question because I don't want to hear your bullshit. So there's a really fine line that you need to be honest, you need to be transparent. You need to be. To create the rapport with everyone so that what you're doing engenders trust and community. Also not being trapped because the reporter clearly has agendas on making sharp edges and spinning a narrative they want. So it's a really delicate balancing act. You can never do so in a way that creates distrust. That's a suicide mission, right?

Never create distrust. And in the modern world too, you can just receive a question and you can just mumble a bunch of words that don't make any sense and they still think you're suited to suitable to be a leader. But this is not a comment about any political party versus another. I think that's true of all political parties. So there's that. So, all right, who's your favorite Star Trek character?

I've never watched Star Trek.

Are you kidding me? You're a nerd. I don't believe you. Okay, Star wars then. Come on.

What, what categorizes me as a nerd?

Is that a real question? Yeah, I mean, here's one little example. You spend $80 million studying the human brain and going into 12, you've answered like 5,000 questions of the 20. I asked you already that. Say nerd, nerd, nerd. Which is a compliment. I'm a nerd too. That is not at all derogatory. Unless you're still from the 80s, which we're not. Not so.

Yeah, so I guess, like, okay, why would neuroscience bundle with Star Trek?

Well, geez. I mean, there's all sorts. I guess if you've never seen Star Trek, you wouldn't know. But there's whole times when they put on like virtual reality helmets. They have like the holodeck. There's a whole thing with Leslie Crusher and these things that take over your brain with little lasers going into your eyes. I'm telling you, it's, it's up your, it's up your alley. By the way, Brian and I have discussed science fiction over text or email a couple times, so I know he's into some sci fi. I was just assuming that you would have at least, you know, made fun of one Star Trek character at some point.

No, this, this is, of course, this is why I choose to not answer questions about myself that, that get me into territory where I may be in trouble making assumptions with bundlings or certain psychoanalysis or other things. I mean, I, I grew up where Star Trek was not a part of my life or my culture. Oh, of course, I got to a certain age in life and it was, I was past it and I was never drawn into it. And so no, I, I miss, I have major cultural blind spots. Like I find I find myself in conversation, being clueless more often than I do find myself in, in the swing of things. And I'm oftentimes very surprised by my level of ignorance of cultural things.

That makes so much sense. So let me ask you this then. How often are you lonely?

I've never experienced the feeling of loneliness.

Do you know how to recognize it if you did experience it?

I understand it as an emotion that you, you want to be with others that, like that basically, like your being with self is inferior to being with others and that it's a need. And I, I don't know if I feel that emotion as, as something that drives me. I mean, I appreciate others, I appreciate community, and I appreciate friendships and relationships. But it's not something that compels me to action in a way that like, I have a need. Like, it's not like a need present, like hunger, where I feel like I'm driven to acquire food to satiate myself.

Got it. Yeah. There. For, for many people, loneliness is expressed as some sort of diffuse pain that that is alleviated by spending time with someone that they trust and care about.

That's right, yeah.

Yeah. And so you don't experience that. It's, it's interesting. For me, until I was, until I was about 30 and I did like a 10 day, really hard personal development thing, I didn't know how to map out anything other than like happy and angry. Those are my two settings. I found that there were nuances and there was additional signal in all of the noise that I had not learned when I was young because I was on the spectrum. And the reason I'm asking you that is, you know, know there's a Harvard study for longevity that shows one of the biggest things that determines how long you're going to live is how many close friendships you have when you're 50 and what your community is for the entire length of your life. And, you know, I look at community and relationships as fundamental variables for longevity. And you've talked about, you know, you, you sleep, by the way, I've slept with brain monitors on my head or somewhere else on my body for 15 years. I'm, I'm. Victoria Secret doesn't like either one of us. Right. So. But you've talked about how, you know, no one's going to sleep in your bed and things like that. So what's your deal there with longevity versus relationships versus community?

Growing up, my existence was community. That's just how reality was in this deeply religious world. You just were the community and it was lovely. You know, there are some drawbacks to that kind of environment, but generally speaking, it was beautiful. We were in a neighborhood where we were generally welcome to walk into someone's house unannounced. It was that familiar and cozy and fun and nice and it was beautiful. And I'm in touch with many of those people today, and it's wonderful. Then I got married and had kids and I was an entrepreneur working full time. And then the prior, we were still deeply involved in our religious community, so still having deep friendships. But the objective of my life really became grinding. As an entrepreneur, you're so fixated on the objective of building a startup that everything else just kind of moves to the side. So you have kids, you've got a relationship and you've got your work and like, that's it. And then post selling Braintree Venmo, it was this new opening of my reality of what is reality, what is life. And I was, I got a divorce and like restructured my whole life.

Yeah.

And so it's, I guess the, the Concept of community has really changed throughout my life. I now have more and deeper friendships than I have in my entire life. I think I figured out how to build friendships and it's, you know, I guess I did that as a kid. When it's really easy as an adult, it's hard. And so as an adult, how do you get to a place where as friends you can talk about everything and you can go to all the dark places and the sunny places and you can be there for each other? And so I guess maybe reflecting on this question, this is how I spend a majority of my time with my children, is talking to them about how to build lifelong relationships. And you have to invest very heavily in them. They don't come easy and it takes a lot of devotion. But yeah, I wish I would have received some tutoring in my younger years of how to create lifelong enduring friendships. I agree with you. It's important. It's a skill set that is not obvious.

I never knew it was important when I was younger. No one ever told me, or maybe they did and I just wasn't listening, which is often as it is when you're young. Being the father of a teenage boy, I definitely understand that even teenage daughter, sometimes they just don't hear what you say. But yeah, I invest a lot in those long term relationships now, but I probably should have done that in my 20s. Just didn't know it was on the to do list. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Like one of my friends, he, he's been doing annual trips with the same five guys for the past 25 years.

Isn't that the coolest thing ever? I've never done that, but every time I hear it, I'm like, wow, what.

Would that be like? And that's the really, the value of building these relationships is oftentimes we come together because we share an interest in a given thing, whether it's a professional endeavor or we're neighbors or whatever. But there's few things that supplant longevity and the deep familiarity of those relationships where you've all been through different versions of yourselves. And that's what I've really been trying to do, is I try to be in situations where I can accelerate that development so that my friends and I feel that familiarity where we do things to create the attributes that contribute to friendships, like shared trauma. How are we going to have shared trauma? So we bond in unique ways, but it's how to achieve that familiarity that you otherwise gained that is so satisfying that we all experience and love.

Yeah, it's the shared trauma, shared suffering. And you're just being there when, you know, seeing that people care about you and love you and respect you even, you know, when you're not at your best. And that just. That takes time.

Yeah. And they. Yeah, you are. You go to them when you're not your best. Like, that's the place you go. Yeah.

Almost every entrepreneur who's been through my neurofeedback program, and we go really deep on personal dev stuff, kind of like you would if it was, you know, some plan, medicine thing or something. And every one of them has experienced sometimes profound loneliness. Like, it's kind of part of being a guy in the modern world. But I think entrepreneurs experience it even more because when you're the leader of the company, you know, everyone you. You can. You can say they're all friends, but when you can fire all of your friends, there's a power dynamic where there's closeness and there's friends, but that. That's always in there. And then, especially if you put your time into your kids and your companies, you know, sometimes relationships that are neither one of those take a backseat for at least the first 10 years of your kid's life. So did you go through some of that?

I have spoken to others about this, and in those moments, I find sinking into a book as equally enjoyable, if not more so, than even many of my friendships. And I guess this is why in the moment where I have free time to do something, I find there's so many options that are at my disposal. I don't feel loneliness. And so a friend can fill that, A book can fill it. You know, some kind of learning game can do it. And so I guess that there's so many things that bring me that fulfillment that I don't feel. The loneliness and like you're saying, the pain that I need to seek out another human.

Interesting. So even as a. As a CEO during, you know, with young kids and all, just. It never, never was a thing. Very, very interesting. And thanks for. Thanks for talking about that. I mean, it's. It's one of those things where there aren't that many people who've built sizable companies who are willing to talk about that stuff. And I think it's a major aspect of aging. If you have emotional or psychological or even spiritual pain that is unaddressed over time, I think it affects your cell immunity, your cell danger response, your hormone levels, your cytokines, whole networks of signaling that are invisible to us unless you have really good data. Which is why I'm so interested in them. So thanks for going there with me. And we gotta talk about some more hints on longevity and biohacking. All right, first up, I do about 150 pills a day and it varies depending on the day. And. Oh, shoot. I just realized this is totally not planned, but I was supposed to take these with a steak I had at lunch and I forgot, but this is my morning, my morning thing. And now I'm kicking myself because my aniracetam is in here. That makes my memory IO increase. But. Oh, well, I'll take those. Not on the air. How many pills do you swallow at one time?

Probably 15.

Okay, got it. So there's, there's sort of like the, the, you know, you, you can, you can swallow a lot or a little. And I think anyone who's into longevity should know how to do it. I, I once teased Liver King about it, but I'm doing, I don't know if you guys can see that, but like, that's a handful. But you just, you know, when there's one stuck to the roof of your mouth, that just pisses me off. So there's one left.

That's such a weird flex.

Liver King was like, I swallowed 20. Anyone who swallows more pills than me is more manly. So I'm like, well, I see your 20 and raise you 10. And it was sort of like a joke because, you know, it doesn't matter how many pills you can swallow other than you don't want to over hydrate.

So I need to, I need to hang out with him.

Yeah, he's, I want to hang out with him too. He's just an interesting guy. And it's funny because, like, I'm happy that he talked about peptides and, and testosterone and all that stuff. Like, if you want control of your biology, use all the tools, man. There's no rules one way or the other in my book. I feel like it's a good idea to talk about it, which is why I like what you're doing.

I have no interest in his opinion on anything health related. I'm interested that his name is Brian Johnson. He's my same age and we're in a parallel universe.

Oh my gosh. I never even thought of that. I want to know just what drives the psychology on. He'd be fun to unpack. But, but that's really funny.

I want to see if he's me in a parallel universe.

I, I knowing, knowing your, your tastes in, in science fiction. Absolutely. Like, like you guys are like mirror images. Like, like Yin and Yang or something. That's funny. Okay, same name, too. How could this be? I had forgotten that was his real name. All right, so we've established you got to swallow a lot of pills. I've been really hesitant to just say, guys, here's my list of pills. And people have been asking me for years. And what I do is I talk about each of the compounds I take and I talk about, you know, the amounts and reasons you'd want to take it. But I used to weigh 300 pounds. I have a history of autoimmunity. I used to have Asperger's syndrome. I on an aggressive longevity track, and I have huge amounts of data. So if most of the people listening in, in the Upgrade collective, this is our live audience who's just listening in and feeding me extra questions and stuff. If, if any of them tried to take exactly what I do, they would probably fill their pants, like, just so I don't want to cause harm by saying, here's what to do. And I, I, my numbers aren't the same as yours, but they're, they're good on the, the age reversal thing, depending on all the different metrics. But, you know, kudos. You've, you've made a really big swing in a really good amount of time. And I don't want to do that. Like, let's hold up our true age scores and poke fingers because it's ridiculous. But we'll just say we're both doing really good. And I'm concerned that if people did everything I did, they wouldn't get my results. And you've said very, very cleanly with blueprint, hey, this is one way. There are probably other ways. This is how I'm doing it. But you're publishing the whole protocol. How do you account for the bio individuality here? Because I'm genuinely struggling with this. Like, how do I provide good advice for people who aren't me?

I mean, one of the fastest ways for improvement to improvement is trial and error. And the more people hammering away on a given problem, the faster the community moves. And that's been our approach. The majority of our protocols are like, let me say almost all of our protocols are based on population level studies, not my individual measurement.

Right.

So I, yeah, so it's, it's almost as equally applicable to others. Now, there's some qualifications that it's generally true for someone in their 40s, more true for someone in their 40s than someone who's in their teens. Although there's still, there's still Some overlap. My son does a modified version of blueprint, but he still does a very similar profile. Like for example, he's not on metformin or rapamycin or carbos or you know, like more, the more powerful things you do as you get into elevated levels of age. But yeah, I guess with blueprint, the health and wellness are simply a stepping stone into the next step of dreaming of what it means to be human. And I really view it as like it's a means, it's not the end. Let's see if we can dispense of the, the drama around what we each do and stabilize that and move our brains to this next level of thinking. To me it really, it's not where I want to hang out. This should just be automated. It should just be fixed. We should have computational intelligence doing it. Humans should not be in the middle of this thing debating this and that. Like it's just, it's not our domain. We're not going to win. Computational intelligence is going to be superior to it at us. So the faster we can get there. So that's really my objective is trying to get to the stage where computational intelligence is doing the hard work for us and we move on to other things.

We're both aligned with that. It has to do the intelligence and then you've got to measure the results and if it's not working, change. And I'm doing that especially around exercise and like the physical stuff at one of my companies at upgrade labs because, you know, I'm actually a little bit bitter about the amount of time that I spent at the gym in my early 20s trying to lose weight that didn't work. 702 hours on a low calorie diet and I still had a 46 inch waist when I was done. And now that we have data and there's some population level stuff, but it's actually usually smaller studies that are done, you know, at universities where you control enough variables to learn something, you go, oh, I could have done, I could have gotten the results I wanted probably in 50 hours instead of 700 hours if I just would have done the right thing at the right time and all of that. So I, I, I think we're going to find all kinds of rich stuff in our data, whether it's medical data, whether it's nutritional data, whether it's longevity data, whether it's movement data. All that stuff is, is coming in. I just, I don't, I don't want to waste any time on all that stuff, but I will to the extent it's necessary. What is your. What's your favorite type of exercise for fun versus for results?

Oh, it's all fun. I. The hour I work out every day is my favorite moment of the day.

No kidding.

Oh, I absolutely love it. I. I have my best ideas working out.

So you're getting the. You're getting lots of blood flow in your brain for that?

Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, whether it's. And in particular when I'm doing cardiovascular activity and, yeah, I'm just in a heightened state and I feel increased clarity, I find that I'm more brave and courageous in those moments than when I'm not. And so oftentimes I will make decisions and commitments to myself when exercising that I am going to do a given thing so that when I, you know, when I settle down, I would second guess and be like, are you sure, Brian? That kind of sounds a little crazy. We sure we want to do that? And I've learned to trust that when I'm in those states, I am my best self. And I do make decisions that are on the weighted average, better than when I'm not. And so I find it to be a great source of joy. My body feels limber and flexible, and it feels great all day. If I miss it, my body feels more stiff. But yeah, it's really a favorite moment of mine.

Now, if the one hour a day of exercise is your favorite time. Do you have a girlfriend?

I'll say one more thing on the exercise, then I'll do the girlfriend thing. I think my favorite exercise is there's a trail that my son and I run here in Los angeles. It's a 3.2 miles, it's a thousand feet incline, and we run it like wild men. Like, we take ourselves to the absolute max. And it is so much fun for he and I to do that together. It's our experience. We both put on our music and we're just in it and we're pushing each other. Our best time is 33 minutes. And when we get, when we land, when we arrive, like, we're just absolutely smoked.

Wow.

And. Yeah, and. But, you know, it's up, it's. It's trail running, so you have to be careful. There's. There's sharp rocks, there's a cliff. So, you know, I also love the irony. Like, I'm the don't die guy and I'm doing this thing that has a risk profile, but for my son and me, it's just exquisite. We love doing that.

Taylor so much Yeah, I, I, I love that. In fact, one of my brands is called, is called Danger. And the subtext is, who knows what you might do? Because if you're unwilling to take any risk, life isn't worth it. And you won't start a company, you won't ask the person, you don't progress unless you're willing to take a risk that's worth it. In this case, you're trading joy for some nominal risk, and it's like, it's just a smart move. And because you're a free person, you're willing and able to do that.

Yeah.

Which I totally think is a good call. Because a stale and boring life that's safe isn't probably going to make you live a long time either.

Yeah.

So back to the girlfriend thing. What, you know, how important is that for longevity?

Yeah. I am dating and I would, I think I'd like to be in a relationship. I think statistically speaking, it's highly improbable that I'm going to find someone that's compatible with me because they're the cultural norms surrounding relationships are basically everything that I don't do. And so if you're in, if you live in the year 2023 and you're a female, you have what are considered to be normal expectations of what a partner would be, how much time they spend with you, what kinds of things you do, what kinds of things you talk about. There's these general rules, and I basically break all of them. And so I don't deliver on the cultural norms, which then is challenging for somebody with their head around it. And so, yeah, I'm interested. I just don't know if I would find someone who I think would basically be in synchrony with me on these things.

I kind of feel like you should come to the biohacking conference, like put on a fake beard or something so no one knows who you are. There's a lot of single women and men who come there, and none of them follow cultural norms, as far as I can tell. And I'm like you. I got consciously uncoupled a couple years ago. I'm dating. I have my own set of expectations that have nothing to do with, you know, the, the standard template. And I'm not having a hard time dating, maybe having a hard time, you know, with, you know, people who want to move more quickly than I want to move. But yeah, I feel like, to at least a lot of the people I know, like, your, what you're perceiving as, like, the lack of cultural norms. It's actually attractive to them. And I mean, you, you, have you been a Bay Area person or have you always been laughing when in Braintree and all that?

Oh, I, I've been Chicago, New York, San Francisco, la.

Okay. Because the Bay Area tech crowd that I, I was a part of for a long time, let's just say there's a lot of non traditional relationships in that group at the very, very highest levels. I mean, a lot of people who publicly follow one norm, but privately do not.

Sure, yeah.

So it, it feels like, it feels like there's a fertile ground out there.

Yeah. The challenge I have is one, once, Once you filter for all the criteria. So the social norms are one filter, but then the other one. Claude Shannon.

I love you bringing up Claude Shannon. I got in an argument with ChatGPT about Claude Shannon. Okay.

Yeah, Claude Shannon, you know, he came up with information theory. And so the idea what he was trying to solve is.

I can't believe you know this. And you're talking about. All right, this is my favorite podcast now.

All right, keep going.

So everyone else knows what we're talking about.

Okay. So he was trying to solve this problem where the transatlantic cables were communicating information and there was so much noise on the cable that the intuition is if there's a lot of noise, yell louder over the. You have to basically louder than the noise. Your signal has to be louder than the noise. And what he figured out was that you could mathematically construct information theory. So if you say if your first word is why, the second word is did, and then the third word is the. Every time I say a word, your mind is calculating probabilities on what I'm going to say. And with every word it creates a smaller probability set. So by the time I say why did the chicken. You have a decent idea of where I'm going with my statement.

I'm embarrassed that you'd bring that up on the show, but yeah.

That'S good. It's like I really enjoy, uh, well, it's. It's a game I play with myself where when a given topic comes my way and there's an opportunity for my brain to think about a given thing in anything, in any capacity of my life, I typically disregard my first four thoughts. Like my first knee jerk reaction is, you know, it is tempted to parrot 2023 societal zeitgeist stuff. And there's nothing original about it, there's nothing interesting about it. It's just parroting then thought number two is a little bit better. But it still has a lot of the baggage of current cultural norms and thought number three. So by the time I get to like thought number five, it's like, okay, this might be interesting, but I'm basically every time I think about something or speak, I'm trying to generate a P300 a surprise in the brain. And so anything that would fall short of generating a surprise doesn't meet my own quality criteria of opening my mouth to speak. And that's a difficult one because I like this because it's my interest in constant novelty seeking that if you bring up a topic, I'm less interested in what I know and I'm more interested in what I don't know. I want to discover new things. I don't want to hear the parroting of all these other ideas. And that's really something in a relationship I cherish a lot. And there's a few friends I have that when I, when I talk to them, I know it's guaranteed that I'm going to be surprised a dozen times talking to them. They're going to say things, map things, configure things in original ways. And it leaves me feeling energized and emboldened about life. And I find that when I'm with in conversations where I hear 99% predictability of what the zeitgeist the world is, I feel not as emboldened and excited about life. And so that's one of the criteria that is the hardest because we have a lot of incentives in society to get along with other people, to say things that are common, that are understandable, that are relatable. Most social interaction is not to educate or inform, it's to socially cohere. And so that's the criteria I think that's the hardest. And so once you pair my usual routines and you pair information theory, it filters down to that's why I'm single.

Got it. Shannon's theorem. And by the way, I think most of reality is explained by information field theory and a lot of Shannon's work. And I think we actually one of the books that we send back.