The Ultimate Longevity Routine: Diet, Supplement, & Sleep Tips You Need To Know | Bryan Johnson

And so I was trying to look in the negative space to say, what could I do? And I couldn't see anyone trying to tackle death. And I wondered, is it possible in 2020 that one could say with a straight face, I'm going to go after death?

So, Brian, welcome to the Dr. Strange Podcast. It's great to have you here.

I'm really excited to be here.

I'm excited you're here too, because you're, you're kind of everywhere now. You're in Time Magazine, you're in every major outlet, you're on podcasts everywhere. People probably heard a lot about you and heard your story. And I imagine some people go, this guy's nuts because I would never live like this and I don't wanna live like this. And someone said, I live longer, it might feel longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, the way I see it is quite different than that. I think you're doing an experiment for the rest of us. You're taking a hit for the team. that is using your own biology to see what's possible at the limits of human potential. Some people climb Mount Everest. Some people, like my friend Colin O'Brady, ski across Antarctica. But your endeavor has the potential not just to be one for the Guinness Book of World Records, but to actually teach us something about the nature of our own biology, the nature of aging, what's possible within the limits of human potential. from a physiologic perspective, from a psycho-emotional perspective. And I find it fascinating and I'm kind of jealous 'cause I wish I had sold my company for $800 million and could just spend all my time doing this stuff. But I get there, I get there. And I just wanna start by kinda asking you how this idea came in your head because you had a great career, you made a lot of money, you did a lot of good in the world, and you could have been off partying on a big yacht and living it up, traveling around the world, and you decided to do something very important for humanity. What was the impetus for this decision?

Yeah, I've been working towards this my entire life. So when I was 21, I decided that I wanted to do something useful for the human race. And it was because I had just been in Ecuador and I was among extreme poverty. So every day it was people with dirt floors and mud huts and not knowing where their next meal was going to come from. and I came back to the US and I just felt this burning sensation inside that I wanted to do that. And so I didn't know what to do. I wasn't really good at anything. And so I decided that I would make a whole bunch of money by age of 30 and then with money decide what to do. And so then I spent 14 years being an entrepreneur. I sold my company at age 34. And, you know, it was more challenging and painful and hard than I ever thought possible. And so at that moment, you know, I thought it would be a gleeful moment of celebration and the opposite was true. I was depressed out of my mind. I was in a challenging relationship. I was struggling to leave my born into religion. I was having to reformulate my existence. And so in one year's time, I sold my company, left my religion, and got a divorce and emerged from chronic depression. And that was about a decade ago. And so for the past 10 years, I've been trying to answer that question, what to do to try to make a difference for the human race with the Yeah, succeeding in phase one of trying to make a whole bunch of money.

So you did phase one really well. And I think that you said is really important. You reached the pinnacle of success and yet you were frickin miserable, right? You sold your company, your marriage was a mess, you're questioning your belief systems that you grew up with in your faith. And it was a period of kind of darkness for you. And out of that darkness for many of us grows something great. And your insight about wanting to do something great for humanity was a good one. A lot of us have that. I have that, and I know a lot of people have that. But yours took a very interesting perspective, which is how do we even question something that's not even something that we even question, right?

Yes.

The only thing certain is death and taxes.

Yes.

And I don't know what we can do about taxes, but you're actually... Maybe you move out of California. But you're, questioning death as a predetermined phenomena for humans. And I've heard others say this, like David Sinclair, and there's some people talking about it, the longevity escape velocity. I wrote about that in my book, Young Forever, which talks about the advances in science happening so fast that we can actually outpace the rate of aging and come up with technologies and tools and solutions and medications and who knows what that's going to help us to keep extending our life faster than the pace of aging.

Yes.

And you're saying this concept and you wrote a book about it called Don't Die, which is very kind of crazy. I'm just gonna say it 'cause it's like, we've hung out, you're kind of a normal guy, you came to our house, we had a great conversation. He's not a weirdo, but he's challenging things. He's saying, wait a minute, the earth, isn't the center of the universe or it's not flat or, you know, you're, you're, you're talking about like the theory of evolution, something that's so radically different than our paradigm.

Yeah.

That it's hard for us to even accept it or even conceive of it. And, and, and it's easy to dismiss and say you're a whack job, but you're not. And, and so I want to dive into kind of the sinking behind this, this approach to, to investigating this. And, and I wrote a lot about this in my book young forever and, and how there are many things that we now know can actually reverse our biological age and slow the rate of biological aging. What you've done over the last three years is develop a regimen to really test this hypothesis and to not just conceptually talk about it, not just do studies on mice, but do studies on humans. And just to frame this for people, most doctors will say this is an anecdote. And anecdotes are the lowest possible form of evidence. However, that's not really true. if you look at the NIH standard on what are the levels of evidence, it's N of 1 data. N of 1 means number one, meaning you measure a person, you do an intervention, and then you measure their outcome after. And that's what you've done in spades by looking at over 200 data points a day on your health by dozens and dozens and dozens of millions of data points on your health over time, imaging data, blood data, stool data, saliva data, urine data, you're like the data guy, right?

Yeah, I have the data.

This is data-driven insights about human biology that we really had before. I mean, I've been practicing a physician for a long time and I worked at a place called Canyon Ranch, had my own practice, and have dealt with people who could afford to do $5,000 to $10,000 worth of testing. And, I've done that on tens of thousands of people. So, I've seen literally millions in data points. But, in a sense, it's helped me learn about everything that I know, but it also hasn't really come close to the kinds of things you're measuring and looking at on a regular basis over time. I just don't have the capacity and even to make sense of it all. So, you know, this approach really helps you to not just have this abstract data, but to see what's off. You know, in medicine we treat diseases, we don't really talk about health. But what you're looking at is you don't have a disease, you're looking at how do I deviate from optimal levels of health? Not health of a 45 or however old you are now, but a health of a 18 year old, right?

That's right.

Or how do I get to really look at, what are the metrics I should be moving towards in terms of optimal levels? And how do I dial my lifestyle, my diet, my sleep, my exercise, my supplements, my relationships, my mental chatter, all of that? How do I regulate that to influence this? So, you kind of are doing all this stuff for yourself and you created something called the Blueprint. So, you're not just doing this for yourself. You want to make this available to everybody. Not everybody, obviously, is going to do $2 million for the testing on themselves, but you sort of created a model where you can actually use yourself as a guinea pig and then actually will help create a model for people to follow. So what is the vision for this framework of Blueprint and the vision for this company that you created?

It started with a thought experiment. After I sold my company, I arranged a bunch of dinners with friends across the nation. I identified my smartest friends and I would pose a thought experiment to them.

You didn't invite me.

We were friends at the time. You would be invited now. And I said, okay, let's do it. thought experiment, let's imagine we're living in 2050 and the world is this extraordinary place. What did we do in 2017? This is when I was doing the dinners that made 2050 so extraordinary. And then I would just listen intently to everyone's answers and I'd write them down. And so I did about 10 or so of these dinners. And then I drew a circle on a paper. I wrote down everyone's ideas in the circle. And then I said, I can't do anything that's in the circle. I have to find whatever I'm going to do to be in negative space. And the premise behind that was that if you look throughout history, rarely do you find the future in the status quo of a given age. You find the future on the fringe of society. And even then, it may not be present yet. And so I was trying to look in the negative space to say, what could I do? and I couldn't see anyone trying to tackle death. And I wondered, is it possible in 2020 that one could say with a straight face, I'm going to go after death? Now, people, of course, have been trying for the fountain of youth. Have you seen the startup?

Since the beginning of time. Yeah, since death.com.

Who owns that URL? Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, it's like trolldeath.com. yeah. And so yeah, I wrote that outside the circle and I thought if one were to be serious about this, how would you actually try to do it? And then I started plotting it out. There's one element that is the health, but then there's also a philosophical element, there's a economic, social, like it plays on a whole bunch of different planes. And that's what I've been working on for the past couple years, is trained my sights on This is like when Magellan said, I think I can circumnavigate the globe because the ships are good enough, the navigation tools are good enough, I can do it. So at any given age, someone says, I think this thing that has been impossible or not imagined, we can have a go at it. And so I set my sights on that.

And it's true. I mean, this is this crazy intersection of technology, science, biomedicine, understanding of aging, that's completely different than, you know, even, you know, 45 years ago when I went to medical school, or it was 40 years ago.

Yeah.

No, it was 1983. I started. So I was 41 years ago. I started medical school. So, you know, it was, it was not even in the conversation to think about the things that we're talking about in biology and health now in medicine. So it's so exciting that you're thinking about that, that place that, you know, is, is really outside of what is normally conceived as possible. Right.

Yes.

So what is the blueprint a little bit high level? What's the basic framework of this sort of blueprint protocol?

It's a question first of measurement that if we can in fact, so I guess blueprint was, can we measure the biological age of every organ of my body? Could we then comb through all the scientific literature and rank them according to power laws? And then could we apply all the science that Homo sapiens have discovered in the past couple hundred thousand years and can we apply it into me? And then can I become the most measured person in history? Like just to get where we at roughly. And it does have limitations. It's N of one, sure. But it was really interesting to us that as a starting point, a, a holistic perspective from an organ, basis to all the scientific literature to then quantifying everything. So there was no storytelling. There was no, trust me, it was just data and science. And we wanted to run the experiment and then be open with the entire thing so that everyone could follow along, they could do it themselves, they could learn from our successes and also our mistakes. So, I tried to just be open science across the board on all of it. Okay, so take us through it.

Because you go to your doctor, you get your annual checkup, he listens to your heart with stethoscope, he looks in your mouth, he looks in your ears, he looks at your eyes, this is an abdominal exam. I mean, I learned this. I actually I remember my preceptor in medical school was, you know, we're training you to do a physical exam, but it, you know, it's not that helpful and you're probably rarely going to find anything. I mean, yeah, sometimes you will. If someone's really sick, you'll find signs, but most time you won't. And then the lab panel we get is, like, kind of archaic. It's, you know, tested are really outdated, like the wrong cholesterol profile. And, you know, maybe 20, 30, maybe if you got a really fancy doctor, 50 analytes. We're talking about getting thousands and tens of thousands of data. bits on yourself to know what's going on so you can modify your environment, meaning your global environment, we call the exposome, everything you're exposed to, your diet, your activities, your microbiome, toxins, everything, water you drink, the air you breathe, sleep, all these things are your exposome. Modify those to really regulate disturbances in this dynamic balance in the system. And so, in functional medicine, we think of the body as an ecosystem as a network. And I think of it as the science of creating health, of health optimization. treat disease, I simply look at where the body's off center or off balance and try to restore balance by taking out bad stuff and putting in good stuff. And essentially that's sort of what you're doing. And what I'm curious about is what are the metrics that you're looking at? What are the things that you're tracking? What are the tests that you've done? Just kind of walk us through it because I think it's important to understand how you've come to learn about yourself. It's not just looking at your nocturnal erections. That's kind of fun to know. No, fun fact, but it's not really that. It's a secondary indicator of your blood flow and everything else. But what should we be looking at for your health?

Yeah, we would take a given organ, for example, the heart, and we would pose the question, where can we find scientific evidence where the heart has an age equation? So, it could be max heart rate. It could be regurgitation levels. It could be, you basically start listing out and then you say you can do a blood panel on the heart, you can do an MRI, you can do ultrasound, you can do an EKG. And so you just start listing out all the ways to measure the heart. And then you try to find literature where they have a study of significant size that you can then age quantify and say, okay, my valves are operating at this biological age. My aortic structures are the following. And so we would then just start Doing that for every organ, like how would you do so for the lungs? Like what are, you can do spirometry, you can do a whole host of tests. Biopsy of course would be great. Biopsy in these organs are hard, so where you can't biopsy, we try to get all these measurements. And so we went through my entire body and tried to tease out hundreds of biological ages. We did fitness tests, we did of course DNA methylation, we did like balance, strength, nerve sensitivity, eyesight, you name it. Any age test we could find that we thought was legitimate we would do. And then we would do these baselines and then I'd do a bunch of therapies and we'd do it again and we'd say, did it change anything functionally or anatomically? Has the age of that organ changed at all?

Yeah, interesting. So these aging clocks for organs are something we don't learn about typically in medical school. We know your maximal heart rate. For example, I'm 64. My maximum heart rate should be 156. That's the amount that my heart can maximally get to when I'm working out like crazy. But I routinely get in the 180s because I'm, you know, my biologically just 43. So I think, you know, the body has that capacity.

Yeah.

And we have these declines that we think of as normal, but this is what you're challenging. The very hypothesis is that, gee, why can't you be as fit or as uninflamed or as healthy as someone who's 18 or 20 or 25. And why can you have the same VO2 max, which is your fitness level or your heart rate or your lung capacity or all these different metrics, your mitochondrial output, but you're finding you actually can. And one of the things you say is you're measuring, for example, the inflammation level of an 18 year old. So how do you know that?

Yeah, that's one example where I think my high sensitivity CRP is, I think, 0.1. So it's barely detectable. And so we found a paper that has an age graph on these inflammation scores, and it put us at that level. And we did the same thing with, for example, NAD levels, intracellular NAD. So we were trying to, because as you said, in medicine, you the way medicine is practiced, you do a test and they say good or not good. It's really a binary. You may have a reference range where you're on the lower end or higher end, but it's not as precise as saying you've got levels equivalent to an 18-year-old or a 65-year-old. And a lot of things in our biology do follow an age trend line, in a reasonable amount. Not all reference ranges are the same. And so we really wanted to put it in context of where am I on that age range? and it was fun because my boys are 20 and 18, my daughter's 14, and so any test I would do, I would immediately message them and be like, Hey, I got a new funnel for you because I'd always want to measure myself relative to my boys and figure out, even as they've got half of my genetics, what is their biological characteristics of their age? So we were trying to look at it from every data point we could.

Yeah, I think it's important because we now don't think about medicine that way. When I look at lab ranges, people don't realize when you look at a lab range for Let's say blood sugar. It says your lab rate should be 70 to 100 is normal fasting. But when you look at the data, if your levels are over 87, you're have a linear increased risk of having heart disease. Is it better to be 80 or 75 fasting?

Right.

That's right. And, and so we don't think about medicine like that way. It's like binary. You either have it or you don't. You have diabetes or you don't. You have high cholesterol, you don't. You have high blood pressure, you don't. But it's, you know, I got my blood pressure test the other day, and the, and they were very upset. I'm like, why was it, it's like 110 over 70, which, you know, I'm 64, it should be like a lot higher, right? And they're like, this is low blood pressure. I'm like, no, it's not low blood pressure, it's normal blood pressure. And when you look at the risk, and this is, he's talking about data, when you look at the risk in terms of cardiovascular risk, stroke risk, and it increases in a linear fashion from optimal levels. So it's not like this is an on or off phenomena. So the lower your blood pressure, the better. I mean, obviously you don't want to pass out if you have too low blood pressure, but like you don't have too low blood sugar, there's too low, But there's that Goldilocks level, which is really what's optimal. And what did you find in your own body that when you started this was not good that you were surprised at? 'Cause you were a young man, you were till what, 40 something when you started?

Yeah, 43.

Yeah, when you started this. So you were not a spring chicken, although my biological is 43, so I'm good with that. But you, what did you find?

Yeah, several things. One, my left ear is age 64. So between 4,000 hertz and 12,000 hertz, I'm deaf. Basically deaf. And that was from shooting a lot of guns as a kid and loud music. I never had hearing protection on. I'm right-handed, so my left ear had the exposure, my right ear was more protected. And we've tried very hard to reverse that with no success. So that's one. Two is I found this is a congenital issue. I have narrow internal jugular veins and the combination of that plus my poor posture was causing some backup of blood in my brain. So I had intracranial pressure and I had a I think my white matter hyperintensities aged me at something like 47.

Oh wow.

They've since gone down the equivalent I think of like 13 years. since correcting my posture and a bunch of other therapies. So that was an interesting find. So for those listening, what you just.

Said was as we age, we tend to get these little scarring tissues in our brain called white matter lesions. They can be from like mini little strokes or little hardening of the arteries and they accumulate as we age. And for a young guy, it's really unusual. Yes. I just had my functional MRI done last week as a sort of just because I'm into this stuff too. And I was like, he's like, wow, your brain looks good. There's no atrophy and you have almost no white matter lesions. You have like one. and most people your age have like dozens of them. So, I think it's interesting to see you can actually start to track this. But, you know, what are the other things that you found that were things that most people would check? Like, most people aren't checking their, I mean, their hearing maybe, but they're not looking at their internal jugular vein and white matter lesions. What are the things that you found that was your cholesterol off, was your blood sugar off, did you have, you know, your liver up or what was sort of something that you found that was surprising? I know it's hard to remember from all those millions of biomarkers you did.

Yeah.

I mean, my speed of aging initially was, I think, over one. Ah, okay.

Yeah.

Well, that's really important. Yeah.

Yes, my clock, I'm trying to think.

Yeah, I need to go back in time, my mind and find the surprises. Well, let's talk about the speed of.

Aging thing because I think it's really important. You know, there's something called the Dunedin Pace of Aging. So, just as a background for everybody listening, there are many biological clocks that are being used to track the rate and, and your biological age. And they're all kind of over the place. You know, you know, if you stay with the same one over and over, it's internally consistent, but they often don't match up. One, say you're 53, one, say you're 43 and so forth. But there's a particular clock that you found really helpful. That's called the Dunedin Pace of Aging, and it's really the rate of Aging. So if you age a year for every year you're alive, right? It's, you know, 50, you'll be 50, 60, you'll be 60.

Right.

But if you slowly, what you were saying is you were actually accelerating, you were aging faster than your chronological age when you started doing this. Now, out of 1,750 people who are tracking this with you, you're like number one, meaning the slowest pace of aging. So, you want to slow the pace of aging. And, you're at 0.69, meaning for every year that you get older chronologically, you only get older .69 years.

Yes.

Right.

And so tell us about this test and what you've done to kind of modify it, because it's very impressive. I'm 0.84. I thought I was excited about mine, but yours is better.

Honestly, 0.84 is great.

Okay, good.

I don't think we, it's like if you're in that range, you're doing a great job. I wouldn't pick the difference with Relative minor differences, but okay, so DNA methylation.

A lot of people- so you're gonna put me up at number one with you on this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're trying hard, you're doing a lot of good stuff. It's great. And I think it's better for everyone to feel rewarded for the effort and to not be nitpicky about the exact number. I don't think it's that, I don't think we can say that much about it in this point in time. So I think it's more that we're in that general range. But the DNA methylation clocks, a lot of people will say two things about them. One is they'll say, I did various clocks, I got different ages, therefore they must all suck. And the other thing they say is, it's not yet tied to all cause mortality, therefore, you know, it's not a gold standard for you to make marker. And so on the first one, what they don't realize is these clocks are trained for a specific algorithm. They train with certain data, for the algorithm. So it's not like they all have the same algorithm and they just have different outputs. They're trained for different objectives, so you can't compare. They're using different math essentially, right?

Exactly.

And different variables. And so you can't compare one to the other or use that to discredit. And so we've, as a team, we like the Dunedin Pace because it's not an age, it's just your pace of aging. And we think of the clocks, it's a good one. that we can do repeatedly to say, how is this changing like other markers? It's relatively steady. And so we've liked it because we've seen that my speed of aging has gone up and down with various therapies. Like sometimes a certain therapy that's doing something positive also temporarily speeds up my speed of aging and then it comes back down. So it's been cool to see, just like you'd see cholesterol up and down or you'd see inflammation up or down with various changes in life. And so yeah, we really succeeded initially getting my speed of vision down to 6.69. It was best in world at some point. And we've since been playing with a whole bunch of therapies, watching that go up and down. But we like DNA methylation clocks. We think the next gen ones, even the Omeiclocks, are even much better because now you can do an organ by organ basis clock. So I love the trajectory because with cholesterol, Is there an improvement curve for looking at cholesterol? Kind of not. We kind of have that one nailed, whereas these DNA methylation, it seems like we've got a lot of frontier to explore. What in fact is changing these? Now, is it going to be tied to all cause mortality and how strongly? It's emergent, but we're bullish. We like them. We think they're great.

It's a low-cost, easy-to-do test. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's important to start to track these things for ourselves. you know, to become the seal of our own health, because you weren't leaving up to your annual checkup with your regular primary care doc. They would have, you know, never looked at any of this. And.

Yeah.

If you would have said, you know, I'm going in there. I want to. I'm, like, 43, but I want to become, like, 33 again. They're like, yeah, you're doing fine. You look great. You're skinny or, you know, look like you're in shape. You know, keep doing what you're doing. Come back. And, you know, when you're 50, get your colonoscopy.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's really unfortunate because not how we should be practicing medicine. We should be practicing medicine exactly like you're thinking about it, which is where are we deviating from optimal ranges of health in every area? And how do we implement very specific lifestyle practices, supplements, hormetic therapies, medications maybe, maybe who knows what treatments like plasma feresis or stem cells. There's all kinds of stuff we can do, right? And what's possible? It's such a fascinating question. I think to me, it's like, It's so cool to meet you and to talk about this because I've been having this thought experiment in my head and really haven't been able to sort of do it at the scale you're doing. I've done it obviously with myself and patients at a smaller scale, but it's just so incredible. So when you started looking at the things that made the most difference.

You.

Went from a pace of over one aging to 0.69. What made the most difference for you?

Yeah, one of the more interesting things is that when the topic of health and wellness comes up, it depends on whose company you're in. But usually everyone's going to have their thing. One person's going to say, I swear by ice baths. That's the thing. The cold plunge is what others are going to say, not, it's the sauna. And others are going to be like, no, it's this Eastern practice I have. The others are going to be like, no, no, no, this celery juice is.

The thing that's- My attitude journal in the morning.

-Exactly. Everyone has a vector to talk about what is contributing to their wellness. And then it just becomes disastrous because there's no baseline to talk about anything. And then you're just dealing with, you know, the storytelling. And so we combed through all the literature and we tried to say, if we just look through every paper ever done and we rank them according to effect size and then grade the evidence to say, are there power laws here? And can we just take the power laws? Like, let's forget about the things at the bottom side right now, the bottom 20%, it's not even gonna be in our thought process. So we tried to master the basics, sleep, diet, exercise, weight. So the top five are, no smoking, six hours a week of exercise, a Mediterranean or blueprint-like diet, a BMI of 18.5 to 22.5, moderate to no alcohol, and then sleep. And so first things we did is master those. And so one demonstration is I think I recorded the best sleep score ever, where I had eight months of perfect sleep using a Whoop wearable. And it was for eight months in a row, I mean, I built my life around sleep and I wanted to demonstrate that perfect sleep is possible. You just need to structure your life around that.

Did they call you and say, is your Whoop broken?

Yeah, it was fun. It was really a fun exercise. No one had ever done that before. And sleep to me is the number one thing we do as an intelligent being. When sleep is right, life is right. Amen. When sleep is off, like life stinks. It's so much harder. It's like 10 times harder when you're not well.

It's like walking through, I call it.

Like walking through a hair gel. Awful. And so, yeah, getting the basics right, that was initially, that's what drove down the speed of aging is, and then on the diet side, we tried to say every calorie I eat has to fight for its life. Not a single calorie can be present that doesn't have a specific function in my body. And we became that ruthless, where if it didn't achieve something in the body, it was out. Now, of course, there's many ways that you can achieve a perfect diet. There's all kinds of foods you can play with, all sorts of ratios. I'm vegan by choice, but definitely people do meat, great, do your thing. But I was trying to say, can we design a perfect diet and then.

Tag it inside the body with the name? But you say by choice, meaning a moral choice or a scientific choice or environmental choice or...

It's the only choice I've imposed in this experiment is veganism.

So in other words, you didn't come in a prior saying, I'm open to any diet. You were like, I want to be vegan to do this as a vegan. Exactly. So it's not that you can't do this without that. I want to get into that because I think, as a doctor, if you don't do veganism right, it can be harmful. Yes. Massive nutrient deficiencies, loss of muscle, I mean, cognitive effects, I mean, it's just fertility effects. Yeah, yeah. So, and, and you, I'm looking sitting across from you here, and you're, like, ripped, you know? I'm like, how do I get muscles like that? You know, like, and, and, you know, you, you obviously are doing something right, so. And, and I'm imagining you're not taking a lot of processed protein powders and weird stuff because it doesn't seem like that would fit into your, every calorie has to count philosophy. So take us through your diet because it's fascinating. Because, you know, one of the things that is, is this sort of Paradox of Aging. and we talked a lot about in the podcast, I've had a lot of nutrition and science experts on, Don Layman and others, but as we age, we lose muscle and that becomes one of the fundamental phenomena that causes us to age faster because you lose muscle and it's a vicious cycle. You get increased inflammation, higher cortisol, lower growth hormone, you can't repair tissues as well, you go lower testosterone, you get worse cholesterol, worse blood sugar, it's just a disaster and plus you can't function, do the things you want to do. so keeping your muscle is a real key part of healthy aging. And in order to do that, you need adequate amount of protein, the right amino acids, and you need to exercise, which obviously you're doing. And if you look at, you know, this phenomenon of mTOR, which is what people kind of often talk about when they suggest being vegan, is that mTOR is this thing that will make you age faster because it prevents autophagy or self clean up or recycling.

Right.

So if you eat meat, that's going to shut that off.

So.

They'Re right. But it's also kind of, you need them to be activated to synthesize muscle, otherwise you're going to lose all your muscle. So it's kind of like the Goldilocks, like you need to turn on and off. Exactly. And so for you, how have you kind of thread the needle on a vegan diet and looking as ripped as you do and managing the risks there?

Yeah, you're exactly right because you have to, if you're doing vegan or any diet, you're optimizing for your speed of aging, your muscle mass, your fat, your cardiovascular capacity, your inflammation, your cholesterol. You can't just optimize for one thing, muscle and other things for sure. You have to hit every single one. And so I think what's unique is I've done veganism plus caloric restriction and I'm still in the 99.5 percentile for muscle and for fat and 1.5 top 1.5% of 18 years old for cardiovascular capacity. and top 99.8 percentile for total bone mineral density. So if you look at my metrics across the board, across every vector of my health, the diet is hitting perfectly on every single thing. And so a lot of people have, they just dismiss veganism as incapable of accomplishing these objectives. That plus caloric restriction, and you're out of the game, you can't compete. But yet I've shown I'm as competitive.

As-- Sitting on the edge of my seat here, Brian, what are you doing? Give us a recipe.

I just got my latest MRI results. Just before I arrived today, I want to see what the new data is. So, for breakfast, I eat super veggie, which is broccoli, cauliflower, lentils, ginger, hemp seeds, and garlic. And then the next meal is-- you-'re.

Not kissing anybody after breakfast then?

So, it's the garlic is not-- you cannot sense it. You can't smell it, you can't taste it. Okay. Yeah, it's invisible. And then the next meal I have is.

How do I get some of that for my wife? Because she loves garlic and it's not invisible. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, so the way we do it is we cook it, we boil it, and then we chop it and or blend it. And it just doesn't, yeah, the smell's gone. All right.

So that's breakfast and lunch is.

And then the next meal of the day is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, pomegranate juice, Berries, pea protein.

So pea protein.

Yes.

So using some type of like food product that's made in a factory in order to do this. So you need the actual protein. Do you know how many grams of protein you're having there?

Yes. For every day, I'm having 110. Okay. So that's a lot. The lentils are. Is it a lot? Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's probably not for your weight. What I would say would be what you need to look like you, but. clearly it's working, right? So somewhere between half a gram to a gram per pound.

Yeah, it's funny, most people's imaginations of protein, they're in the 150. Most men I know are in the 150, 200, 250 a day. That somehow that has become the standard of people's expectations. But we even saw when my protein was around 120, I think my bun was a bit high.

That'S your, that's your, kidney ability to kind of process urea, which is in protein.

Right. Right. So I lowered it to the 109-110 range and the bun came back down to 17. And so, yeah, we've tried to very carefully titrate the perfect. And so, yeah, I eat a lot of fat. I have extra virgin olive oil with every meal. Um, so I do 45 MLs a day, three tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil.

So in that pea protein, what was.

How many grams of protein was in that 20? 25, I think.

25. Okay. And so that, that was, is that a spiked pea protein? In other words, does it have additionally amino acids that increase leucine content? It's just pure organic pea protein, right?

Yep. And then it's, we do pea and hemp and then lentils. Yep. For the 110.

Okay. And then dinner?

I'll have, it'll be some combination of vegetables, berries or nuts.

Okay, so that's interesting. So it's a very low grain, almost no grain except for beans, no dairy. And the only thing you have sort of processed is pea protein. And you do that once a day.

Yep.

And that's amazing. So are you doing anything else to support muscle growth in terms of supplements, hormones, anything like that?

Yeah, I take. I have creatine. Creatine, right? 2.5 grams a day. And then I, you know, I do calcium Alpha ketoglutarate just for ferility index. But that's not really for muscle. You know, I don't think anything else for muscle. Testosterone. Yeah, I'm. No, no testosterone. No testosterone. You know, and my. My levels are around 800. Amazing. Yeah. Without it. And, yeah, there's nothing else I do. for muscle.

You don't take amino acid supplements?

No, I did. And that was my. It was contributing to the higher bun.

Oh, yeah.

Yep. So, no, no amino acids.

We call it BUN.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

There was a. It was a funny thing happened when I was in medical school. There was a. A new. A new medical school on the. On the rounds. And, you know, sometimes you see a low level and we call it BUN.

Yeah.

And we made a joke on the medical student because he was like, wow, look, they're BUNs low, we call it BUNs low, or they're BUNs low. And he said, well, you should call the lab right now and get two units of BUN stat. And they called down the lab. It was very funny. Anyway, inside joke. So that's your diet. And one of the things that I joked about earlier is, that I think is so important for life is joy and laughter and pleasure. It's something that sort of makes life good, right? It's our friends, our community, our ability to enjoy things and savor things. Do you feel like you're missing out on some of the joy of food?

It's so funny that when people, you mentioned this before, when people see me, they will make five conscious observations and then another five unconscious observations. and they're all negative. They assume I'm miserable, they assume my food is awful, they assume I'm missing out on life, they assume that I just can't imagine the joy they have eating donuts and pizza. So it's all negative. It's such a rare person to pause and say, huh, like we are currently having an insanity contest. I'm thinking this person's insane. Is it possible that I'm the one who's insane? And there's probably 998 people who do the accusatory I'm insane and two who will say, Huh.

Yeah.

And so it's remarkable. So yeah, I mean, I'm always put on the stand to be interrogated of you're so miserable and I know you're miserable and I'm going to interrogate you to find, you know, until you tell me how miserable you are. But I would say on food, I've never enjoyed food more in my entire life. And you talk to people, it's not just me, you talk to people who do Blueprint and they have a contrast where they go out to a restaurant, they can taste the oils, they can taste the junk, the food supply chain is not clean and it's instantaneous and then they see how they feel afterwards and then they'll eat more food than they should outside the protocol. They feel awful. So it's an immediate response that it's pretty miserable to go out there and eat too much food and eat processed foods and junk food.

It's awful.

It's such a terrible existence.

It's true. It's true. Absolutely true. And I think people don't realize how food makes them feel. And I can tell you after practicing medicine for 40 years, even the most brilliant human beings, and I take a lot of very smart people, do not make the connection between what they eat and how they feel, their energy, their mood, their brain function, their cognitive ability, their energy, everything, their digestive function, their skin. I mean, nothing. They just, it's like, yeah, food has it to do with everything that's going on in your body. It's basically the raw materials for everything that's happening. And, you know, when you came over to our house the other day, you know, you said something that really struck me. You said, I've never been happier in my life. you know, and that's no small thing to say. For many people who struggle with mental health issues. Yes. And we know, we know. And I've done podcast after podcast about this, the role of Ultra processed food in our mental health. It was just an article in the Wall Street Journal about it. It's hitting the mainstream now. I've talked about this for years, but we know these things inflame our brain, inflames our bodies. It's all connected. So I think it's, it's important. And, and again, it's like, what's the payoff?

Right?

Yeah.

Do you want to feel like crap? just for having a moment of pleasure as sugar passes your mouth or are you gonna make a choice that's gonna be the right choice?

I got invited by a friend to go talk to a group of high school students and the conversation turned pretty intimate where they started sharing the burden they felt of their depression and anxiety and just mental cloudiness. And to your point, my first question was, are you sleeping, you know, what's your sleep like and what's your diet like? And it was, there was no connection in their mind whatsoever between the two things. They were struggling with existence. It felt incredibly painful. They didn't know what they could do to alleviate the pain, but there was not a single thought that sleep and diet may be a problem. And when I probed it, you know, sleep was awful. They were staying up until way too late on their phones, you know, in their beds, just like procrastinating going to bed, just scrolling. and the food, the diet was just fast food, processed food, junk food. And so yeah, just calling attention like, you know, you could really maybe make a nice positive stride if you could get a few basics in place. But I agree, it's pretty surprising that these things are not the most obvious go-to moves when you start feeling bad in life.

It's true. People don't know the connection. I mean, my book's right there called the UltraMind Solution. I wrote 15 years ago on the top shelf that basically is about how our body affects our brain.

Right?

Yeah. And, and, you know, one of the challenges I see in people adopting what you're talking about is, is this catch 22 where you're in this cycle of living and eating a certain way and it makes you crave and want the foods. Yes. And you can't break the cycle and at least some more mental health issues and you get more depressed and you want more crap. And it's like, it's like a, a Vortex that sucks you down into a spiral of disease and depression and, you know, maybe even suicide, something we talk about. And by the way, I'm not just saying that flippantly. We know in studies of young kids who swap out junk food for a healthy diet, that suicide rates go down by 100%. So it's not, as I'm talking about data here, you know, how do, how do you recommend people break that log jam where they're in that vicious cycle? They're listening to this. They go, God, I want to feel good. I want to have energy. I want to feel all these ways. How do I stop doing these bad things to myself that I even know are bad?

Yeah.

The thing that worked for me, I was stuck in that spiral for a decade. I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now.

60 pounds.

Yeah.

That was obese.

Big Brian.

Big Brian. You know, I couldn't buckle the top button on my pants. It was just too tight. And it, you mean, it drove. And I, I didn't want to buy bigger pants because then I would be giving in. you know, I'd be like accepting the new norm. So I kept those motherfuckers and I was like, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna do it. But every single day it was just such an uncomfortable reminder of my inability to get control. And so the trick I applied was I learned this when I was depressed. I read a book that made the wise observation, which has been around for a long time, that I am not my thoughts. That when my brain would say, Hey, Brian, maybe you should commit suicide because life is awful and there's really no hope to exist, you might as well end it. You just, you need to be out of pain, commit suicide. And I would have that thought every day, all day in variations. And then reading a book, it was this invitation to realize that I could observe the thoughts landing and I wasn't those thoughts. I was not me. That was just something in my mind was generating. I could observe it and try to be impartial and say, Thank you for the suggestion. This may be rough right now, but you know what? I don't want to end it because I probably can come out of this and I'm going to feel differently. And so I applied the same trick.

You went from do die to don't die. Yes, exactly.

Right, the juxtaposition is beautiful. And so now, so when I was struggling for my particular advice was when 7 p.m. would arrive, it was I had bathed the kids, I'd fed them, bathed them, read them stories, and put them to bed. and then I was at the tail end of the day exhausted from all the wear and tear of building a startup and like, you know, my partner was there waiting to have a fight with me and it's like, you know, I just wanted to be dead on the floor. Just play dead. It was so bad. And the only thing that would bring me pleasure was contemplating going into the kitchen and getting that pan of brownies, you know, and just eating myself into oblivion. I wouldn't throw up, but just overeat and I would be still sick. And then I couldn't sleep. And then I'd wake up the next morning, I'd feel awful. And then I'd start the new cycle of like, today's the day, I'm gonna do it. And then 7 PM would come. And like. And so after trying so many things for all these years to stop myself from committing this self-destructive behavior, one day just. I was basically just fed up with myself. Like I had given up. I said, evening, Brian, you're fired. You make my life miserable. and you no longer have the authority to eat. And so separating my different versions of myself from me gave me freedom to say, who is this evening Brian character? What are their characteristics? What arguments do they use? They show up and they'd be like, Hey, today's the last day. Like legit, you know, tomorrow's Monday.

Great con man. That's a great con man.

Yeah, exactly. It's so persuasive. He's so good. You know, tomorrow's Monday, tomorrow we start. we'll work out extra hard tomorrow morning. We're just going to do one bite of the brownies, you know, not two, just one. And I was able to then make this character, and then when he showed up, I was able to say, hi, Evening Brian. I see you're here, and I could talk to him. And that was the last time I did it. And I made the rule that Evening Brian could not eat food no matter what. So from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. I created a buffer for safety. I could not eat in that window. And that is still true today. That no matter what, I cannot eat in that window, because that's even Brian's territory. And I just, I'm now, he's a great character to have around, but he's not responsible and he kind of ruins every other Brian's life.

Yeah. Well, I think you speak to something really important, which is how do we start to learn about our own mind? And realize that we're not at the effect of our mind, that we actually need to be the author of our own thinking. and have agency and not believe every stupid thought we have.

Yes.

And realize as a inner idiot that's running the show a lot of the time.

Almost all the time.

That you can learn about and that you could work with. And there's a lot of practices. I spent years working on my inner idiot. Sometimes they call my inner asshole. And I've gotten pretty good at it. And now he shows up occasionally, but actually it's like an annoying cousin that you just don't want to have around Thanksgiving, but I just kind of ignore him and he goes away. So, I think it's a tough thing, but that's a whole deeper conversation about how do we tackle our minds. But, at the end of the day, there's some really practical things that you've learned about not just tackling the evening Brian, but how do you go from just stopping eating the sheet cake of brownies to understanding some better practices? So, sleep you, you made a big point about it. I think, you know, it's interesting when you say that I want to just linger here for a sec because what you said is I didn't eat between 5 and 10 p.m. now you don't eat between 11 in the morning and when you go to bed, which is 8 p.m. right.

Yeah.

And that's a long time. I feel like, wow, stop eating at 11 o'clock. I'm not gonna have a breakfast at 11 o'clock. Yeah. And, and you get up early, you get up like at four or something.

Right.

So it's a normal sleep. But, you know, in Sardinia, for example, where I visited in Korea, in, in these countries where they look to be very old, they're like people, I mean, I met one couple, they were like, 200 and I think they were 210 years old together, you know? And they eat late. I mean, they have lunch and then they eat like late at night. I don't know how they do. Because I go to Europe, I can't stand doing that. How do you explain that?

Yeah.

There's so many ways to get to the same destination. And I've tried to say that my way is not the only way, it's a way. And if somebody wants structure, I have something for them. Because the burden is if you're wanting to be in good health. It's like this almost this infinitely large undertaking where you have to go out and read books and listen to podcasts and compare notes with friends. Yeah, you have to reconcile, contradict the opinions. It's a mess. And when you've got a full-time job and maybe kids and other stuff going on, trying to tackle the entirety of human health is a pretty big project for an individual. Yeah. And no one's got to help you guys. Even your most trusted people are going to give you different opinions. And so I wanted to try to offer up something for someone to say, you know what? This is pretty good. It's working out pretty well for me. If you want to just have something that is stable and structured, here you go, it's free. Do that. Here's the food you eat.

That's the blueprint.

Yeah, exactly. Here's my protocol of what I do when I go to bed. And so it's basically a shortcut to health and just say, now start here. If you want to change you know, when you eat, great. If you want to change the time you go to bed, fine. But just something stable so you're not spending 45 hours a week trying to figure this out and driving yourself insane doing so.

And there's an 80 20 on this stuff, right? You're going for that extra 20. Yeah. But the 80 20 is, is pretty straightforward for most people, you know? And I think sleep, you know, you mentioned is, is being the pill, which people think, oh, it's diet or it's exercise. But sleeping, what, what is your sleep? Practice. How do you get a hundred percent? And I'm taking those.

I've built my life around sleep. Yeah, I will prioritize my sleep schedule over anything else. And so I do a few things like my bedtime routine starts the moment I wake up. So I do 10,000 lux of light in the eyes right when I wake up to cement my circadian rhythm. I'll eat all my food by 11:00 a.m. because I did a few hundred experiments of what kind of food I eat and when I finish eating and what my resting heart rate would be and how my sleep scores would be. And so now I just saw my best sleep is when I finish around 11:00 AM or noon with food. If I eat later, my resting heart rate goes up, my deep sleep goes down, my RAM goes down. Like I've tried so many times to test this and inevitably every single time. And so I eat earlier in the day. I also don't eat things like carbs, like breads and pastas. That will make my resting heart rate go up and my deep and RAM go down. Am I awake after sleep onset go up? And I never drink alcohol. Even the smallest bit of alcohol in the afternoon or evening hours will wreck my deep sleep. And then for my bedroom, it's blacked out, so there's no light in there whatsoever. I have a temperature controlled mattress, eight sleep. I do a wind down routine every night, like 30 minutes or so, where again, I do this self-talk where I say, okay, Sleep Brian is now in charge. and we're going to say, Hey, work, Brian, we appreciate your ambition for life. Thank you for wanting to do things. We're currently getting ready for sleep. So when you start reminding us about everything we need to do and the problems we need to solve, and you're like, we can do it tomorrow, but I'm not gonna write it down. We're just gonna be sleep, Brian, right now. And so I try to really focus my mind on the objective at hand, because otherwise, my, I have a lot of ambition and so my mind is always popping off with like what it can do next and how it can work faster and how it can solve this and how it can solve that. And those things ruin sleep. Like if you hit your pillow thinking about work or thinking about a problem or if you're upset, you'll be in light sleep all night long just ruminating on that problem. You never go into deep around like very little and then you wake up the next morning, you feel awful. So yeah, those are some of the basics I do, but I really try to Nothing is more important in my life than high quality sleep.

Did you find EMS play a role in your sleep?

Sorry?

EMS like technology, Wi-Fi, cell phone.

Oh, yeah.

Like you sleep at a Faraday cage.

I've recently been wearing lambs material. Lambs make, they're here in Santa Monica. They make EMF protective clothing. Oh, it's a company clothing. Yeah.

I thought you were taking like, like a lamb skin.

Yeah, they make EMF protective clothing. They have a whole, like, underwear, shirts, jackets. And I've been wearing that lately. I have it on now. And so, yeah, I've been trying to do more EF EMF protective stuff, like in your house.

Do you turn off Wi-Fi at night or. I don't.

And it doesn't affect your sleep. Yeah, I also don't have a router in my room, so it's a certain distance away.

So we got sleep, we got diet. Talk about your supplement regimen.

Same thing with the diet. We said every calorie has to fight for its life. We said the same for the supplements. Every supplement has to fight for its life. If we can't measure the endpoint, then it can't be included. And same then we said, if we're doing this, can we measure the kidney and the liver to make sure there's no accumulative damage? So make sure it's very clean. So we're trying to look at whole system effect because the moment someone hears, I take at peak, I was taking 111 pills a day. I'm now around 42 or so. We created for Blueprint, we did ourselves our own pill stack and we compress the number of pills I take. And so some of them are basic vitamins and minerals like vitamin D. I take some of the more interesting ones around aging, fisetin, luteolin, calcium alpha-ketoglutarate. Yeah, like turmeric, green tea.

Yeah. Yeah.

You take NMN or NAD NR?

I take NR. Yeah. I tried, I did 90 days of NMN and I did 90 days of NR and both got my intracellular energy levels at the same place. So they're both effective as far as we could tell. Or if there's other effects, we couldn't identify them.

When you're saying you're measuring outcomes, are you measuring like CoQ10 levels if you're taking CoQ10 or are you measuring some function of the body related to CoQ10, like your respiratory chain and your mitochondria or like how do you, how do you look at these metrics?

Yeah, we measure CoQ10.

So that's what you're saying, you can measure a blood level, but you don't know if that blood level is doing.

The thing you wanted to do, right? We've played with the levels up and down. So we'll take a given variable and see if we adjust it if it's doing it, like vitamin E. I just.

67 milligrams of vitamin E. But you're targeting it toward blood levels or toward a biological function? Blood levels. Okay. So you take these nutrients to basically fill in the gaps and given that we live in a toxic world and we're all basically floating in a sea of pollution and toxins and stresses and other things we can't manage, right? You kind of need that. And I agree. I think it's unfortunate we need supplements, but I think given everything that's gone on with our world today and the insults we've have and the poor quality food supply and the stresses and the toxins, it's definitely essential. So, do you take any drugs?

Yeah, I take, CF, this is a funny thing. So I hurt my leg hiking, I was out mountain running and I tripped and fell and I went in for stitches. And so the doctor got me on the table and he said, All right, son, before I stitch you up, are you on any medications? And I thought, oh God, what do I do? So I said, okay, I'll give it a go. I said, yeah, I'm on metformin. He said, the drug they give to diabetics? Yep. I said, I'm on a carbos. What's that? And then I said, I'm on artemisinin. The drug they give people with organ transplantations to suppress immunosuppression? Yes. I'm taking... Cystatin. The leukemia drug? Yes. And then... Cystatin is a supplement too, right? Well, Cystatin, yeah, but I'm taking Dostatib. Oh, sorry, I meant to say Dostatib. Yeah. And so it was funny, it was such a interesting moment where it was, I had lost myself in the project. and I had forgotten how far we had moved away from mainstream medicine. But he was just shocked. He said, what the hell, son? What is going on? Why are you taking all these drugs? So it was a funny moment and brought me back to where the world's at and what we were doing.

So what Brian just kind of unpacked was some of the most promising molecules in the space of longevity. I've written about that in my book, Metformin regulates insulin resistance and blood sugar, rapamycin inhibits mTOR, which can help with autophagy and self-cleaning has definitely been the most promising drug, I think, in terms of lengthening life. Carbo is another one of those things that helps with regulating blood sugar. It's a subs, basically a sugar blocker in the gut. And what was the other drug you mentioned?

We've been doing for cenolytic assessment. Yeah, just that I've been interested in.

Yeah, yeah. That was a, a drug that was studied looking at reversing biological age along. with course attendance, I think.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think, you know, metformin is an interesting one because, you know, I had near barsalai on the podcast, and he's right now conducting a large randomized control trial. They'll give us a definitive answer. But there's a lot of contradictory data about it. Some of the observational data show that it was harmful. Some sure it was helpful. And, you know, one of the concerns I have is it inhibits mitochondrial ATP production.

Yeah.

And so the performance after exercise, the response to exercise in terms of muscle building is, is lower if you're taking, for example, metformin. So I'm not quite sold on that yet. I'm not opposed to it. I just think, you know, I'm sort of holding out for the data. Yeah, but. Yeah, but I think, I think, you know, we all have a different tolerance, risk tolerance for things now.

These.

These are, these are drugs that are relatively inexpensive. They're, I would probably not try them at home without your doctor and consulting with someone being tracked, but, but they can be helpful. What dose of rapamycin do you take?

13 milligrams, week one, six milligrams, week two, 13, six. So, so off and on. Yeah. Yeah.

So you do it once a week. And the data shows that if you do it episodically, it doesn't really suppress.

Immunity, which is good. Right? Yeah. And we, we, we measured my blood level. So I did 13 milligrams. I measured My blood levels two hours post ingestion, 24 hours, 48, 72, and 96. And so we're looking at the C-max, so where it peaks, and then we look at the half-life decay to see that if I take 13 on day one, by day five it should be gone from my system, or day six, nearly gone. So we're trying to see that there's no carryover and it's compounding and accumulation in my body. So we've that dose has been determined by blood draws, not a random number that we were trying.

Fascinating. So what about exercise? Because, I mean, you know, like I said before, you really look ripped, and I'm, like, kind of jealous.

And.

And you said also that exercise six hours a week is enough. So when I look at you, I mean, this guy's in the gym, like, three hours a day, but you're not. Right. So tell us about what optimized exercise routine you've had. And do you use, like, fancy equipment, like blood flow restriction or Vasper or, you know, electrical. stim exercise gizmos or you just sort of doing the old fashioned pump and iron and it's really basic.

Run on the treadmill or run outside. Exactly. Yeah. So I have, it's a routine of about 30 or so exercises and I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body every day. So it's low weight, reasonable rep. Like I'll do 10 or 15 reps per muscle group, but it's really nothing out of the ordinary. I stretch a lot. Uh, I do some weights. I do VO two max training.

It's cardio.

Yeah, yeah, but nothing special.

You work with a trainer or you do it on your own?

I do it on my own.

An hour a day?

Yeah. Ish.

Damn, that's pretty good.

Yeah.

That's pretty good. So again, you don't have to be kind of fanatical about it. And if you do it the right way, you can actually make a difference.

Yeah, this is the thing is people, they hear the $2 million headline and they think it's not accessible, but that's for the measurement. That's the expense for the medical research team and for the measurement I do. But Blueprint by itself is $1,000 to $1,500 a month. That includes your groceries. So it's actually very comparable. I mean, it's actually affordable on most people. And then the commitment on exercise and sleep, they're just basically lifestyle choices. And so it's doable by many people.

Yeah, I think about it. Your sleep is free, you just lay down.

Yeah.

You exercise, okay, you need maybe a few weights, but now you buy them once in your life. and food, you got to eat that anyway. And if you're eating food that isn't that expensive, you know, like you're not talking about a $70 grass-fed ribeye steak. You're. Yes. You know, lobster tails, you're basically having vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds and oil and some. Some lentils. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. Yeah. And the supplements can be expensive. You know, they can. They can be pricey, but, you know, there's an 80 20 on that, too. You know, I think not everybody needs to take everything. You can take, you know, basic multivitamin fish oil, vitamin D. and magnesium. And I think that covers it for most people. And then if you want to play around like I do, or if you have specific things you're treating, you need to be more aggressive. But I think, you know, the, the, the one thing I sort of want to talk about is your sort of your life in general, because you say you're, you're so happy now. And yet, you know, listening to some podcasts you did and talking about that, I'm like, you know, you stopped eating at 11. So for me, you know, one of the most incredible pleasures is gathering with friends and having dinners and meals. And I also know that both, you know, I wrote a book years ago called Ultra Metabolism, talking about the Sumo wrestler diet, which is how to Sumo wrestlers gain weight. They basically eat and they go to sleep.

Right.

So I've written about this and that you shouldn't eat before bed. But, and I know if I, if I give myself four or five or six hours, I do better than if I'm three hours. But yeah, I think how do you reconcile the sort of this, this phenomenon of longevity has to do with the social connections.

Yeah.

And the relationships and the meaning and purpose we get from being embedded in a deep social web with the more sort of structured way you live that kind of precludes some of that. Or you just go out and don't eat.

Yeah, I had a dinner party at my house on Monday.

You mean a lunch party?

A dinner party. So I had them all over. We started at 6:00 p.m. And I made everyone, there was 14 of us, I made a blueprint spread. So everybody has super veggie and nutty pudding and we talked about the future of being human. And everyone had their food. I didn't have food on my plate. I normally do. So when I go out with friends, I will, if we go to a restaurant, I'll order steamed vegetables. So I have a plate in front of me and food on it. If you don't, then everyone's so upset that I don't have it, then all the attention is directed towards me and it ruins the vibe of the event.

Yeah, yeah.

So just to fit in, I tried to do that. And the event- They don't go to.

Pizza joints because they don't have seen veggie there.

I mean, I'll meet people where they're at. Yeah. Like I definitely, I'm cool with kind of going to the flow and I've learned how to blend in. to not call attention to myself. And then if people want to poke around, what if you stay up late?

I'm like, I love going to the Dead and Company shows. Like, I'm going to the Sphere in a next month. It's like I get like the amount of pleasure and joy I get from doing that is so high. Yeah. But the concert doesn't start till seven or eight at night. So I'm not in bed till like after 11 or 12, right?

Yeah. So yeah, on Saturday I did a health rave in San Francisco. So in the morning we did a don't die event. We had 500 people come up and we did a whole bunch of health activities and we had blueprint food. And then we had a party in the evening and then we had our health rave that started at 9. And so I do do these things occasionally, not every day, but I have enough- Reserve. Reserve, yeah, exactly where I'm fine. I got, I think, an 87% sleep score that night.

Okay, well that makes me feel better that you occasionally have a party.

Yeah, I'm really- I tried to do the perfect sleep for eight months and then I've really tried to relax it to make this much more approachable because as you're touching on when people see what I'm trying to do, there's a list that's like 20 things long on why the person can't do it. It's like, oh, it's 2 million or, oh, he's miserable or, oh, he hates his food or, he can't be out with friends or, so they want, no one wants to make change because change is very hard. And so everyone's motivated to list all the reasons why this is impossible for them to do. And that makes them feel better that they can't do it and therefore I must be miserable, therefore it's actually okay. They're the ones in the better position. But if you break these things down, you can't actually modulate this. And I do understand people's perspective. If you go into the grocery store and buying food is hard. Finding time to prepare it is hard. If you have kids, that's hard. There's so many practical things in life that make this really challenging to do.

Yeah, but it's doable. When you take a look at your life and take real stock of all the choices you make, of all the things you do, of all the ways you spend your time, the way you spend your money, the way you spend your life energy, and the result in return on investment you're getting, it's often not what we want. So we say we want to live a life that looks like this or that. but we don't often take the actions or steps that allow us to do that and make the choices that actually do it. And I think it's important for people to realize it's like you're saying, it's not that hard. We're talking about here, it's not that hard. And maybe we're not going to live forever like you, but we'll for sure extend our health span and our lifespan. And I think most people listening today could easily get to 100 healthy years. And it's something that's really achievable. I want to sort of dive into a little bit more of the Blueprint program because one of the things you've done for your community is diagnostic testing. Now, not the $2 million each because they can't afford that, but you've come up with the, again, the 8020 on what are the diagnostic tests that are important. And so can you talk about some of the things you really think are important for us to measure and know about our biology that we're not looking.

At with our traditional healthcare?

Yeah.

We, so we just built a Blueprint food product trying to make what I do very easy. And we started to do this, we started a self-experimentation study, 5,000 participants, and we set out with them the basics of a blood draw, body composition, wearables, and then questionnaires. And for many people in that cohort, it's the most robust measurement protocol they've had in their entire life. And the blood panel is more extensive. They've of course known their weight, but maybe not had a scale that gives them all the data.

Your body composition.

Exactly. Wearables, you know, our next level, but then paired with the other things and then questionnaires, which touch on a whole bunch of different aspects of life where it teases out, it quantifies our subjective opinions in a structured way. And so I like this because it's introducing to people this idea that health begins with measurement. That's how you find your baseline. Tests don't guess is what I say. Exactly.

Tests don't guess.

Yeah. And yeah, so it's really each person is going to get a few hundred biomarkers on themselves, which is remarkable. And the enthusiasm in the group is palpable. It's cool that a lot of people want to do this, but like you're saying, they go to the doctor and the doctors don't offer this up. They have a specific routine where are you sick and do you need a drug or they're directing you down these paths, but they don't say, how do I think about holistically measuring you? It's very uncommon. And so it's cool to see this in action and then we're going to publish all the data. And so I like this because most, as you know, most supplements, you don't even know if they're legit, let alone them being out there doing open science on their supplements without them controlling the message. And I'm just trying to again be open about everything I'm doing, about myself, about the products we're building. It's just an open, yeah, so it should be how we build.

It's great. So you've got the questionnaires, the wearables, the body composition measurements and the blood work.

Yeah.

And what are the things in the blood work that you're looking at that.

Are not typically looked at? I think we have, if I remember, 63 markers that I should pull it up.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's stuff that, it's stuff that.

You know, some may be typical stuff you get, like your blood chemistry, your blood count, but some of it's different, like your nutrient levels or your metabolic health and things that are really important. I mean, that's really why I co-funded with my, with my partners, a company called Function Health, which we talked about, which essentially gives people access to tracking their data, to learning about what's going on under the hood. And actually, for less than 4.99, you can get, for 4.99, you can get a 110 biomarkers on yourself and then another repeat in six months for about 60 plus biomarkers and look at what's going on and track the results over time and see what interventions have done to those biomarkers and whether you've found, we've now had over 30,000 people in and 3 million biomarkers. We're seeing 30% with an autoimmune seeing Apo B, which is a very important, probably the most important cholesterol biomarker that nobody checks 50 plus percent. We're talking about working together on this. It's really, it's kind of a, you and I are both really in the same mindset, which is information to see what's working, what's not working in their life.

Yeah.

To up level their health and to have a roadmap or a blueprint for actually how to move forward. So you created it really. It's, I love this because, you know, like you already made your money. You're not like making a bazillion dollars out of this stuff. You're just trying to like share your knowledge and give people insights and get people enthusiastic and using yourself as an example to say, here's what's possible. Yes. So maybe we'll do another podcast in 100 years together.

Maybe soon.

Wouldn't that be amazing? All right, we'll do it next year. We'll see if you're, I'm gonna work on my pace of aging. I'm 0.84, you're 0.69. But I think, I think I'm so enthusiastic about this conversation because, you know, and the reason I wrote my book Young Forever was to kind of give people a sense that the science has advanced pretty far. And we know a lot about how to dial in diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, healing our microbiome, optimizing nutrient levels, optimizing our hormones, reducing our exposure to toxins, and then even some of these other therapies that, you know, we talked about some of these drugs that may be coming around. And there's even cool stuff that's coming around that we're still exploring like, you know, plasma fusions and exosomes. And you've done a little bit of that to kind of exchanging young plasma from your son and so on. So, you know, you've kind of explored a lot of these things that are outside of the box for most people. But it's kind of an exciting moment, isn't it?

Yes. I think that the thing I like that's most exciting to me is the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead said that society advances by the number of things you can automate without thinking about them. And I wonder when it comes to health and wellness, if we are going to bypass education altogether and system change, and algorithms are going to run our health for us, because they'll be so much more efficient at being able to assess our individual needs, the scientific evidence, and then the therapies to be, and that's what I've tried to build a blueprint. I've tried to basically build an algorithm that runs me as it relates to my health and wellness, diet, sleep, exercise. And we're now on this trajectory of intelligence where it's possible when you start getting these closed loop systems. And that to me is bullish that we can imagine a society that basically tries to generate near perfect health for everyone by default. No one's thinking about it. We're not fighting systems in this arcane way. We do it now.

I think it's, yeah, how do we make it frictionless to actually do the right thing? And I think, you know, I think we're getting there. I mean, I think, you know, you talk about, you're being, you know, I used to watch a show and as a kid called the $6 million man, the bionic man. You're like the $2 million man. But, but, but the thing is, you know, that price tag is going to come down. Yes. Right. So it costs you 2 million, but it cost, I don't know, a billion or 3 billion to decode the first human genome. Now you can get it done for a few hundred bucks. That's crazy in terms of savings as we see the technologies accelerate. The cost drops dramatically, even exponentially. And so it soon became affordable for people to access their own biodata in ways that we just never had before. And then using computational power and insights from the science and from the research and from folks like you, we can actually start to create personalized roadmaps for people. to optimize our health in ways they never had before.

Yes, the future is exciting. Don't die.

Don't die. Okay, so let's talk about that for a minute. I mean, to me, you know, and this is a daily thing for me, right? Because I'm 64. I daily think about that the time ahead of me is likely shorter than the time behind me. And it influences the choices I make. who I spend time with, what I focus on, and what I let into my life or what I discard from my life in a way that it was really consequential. And in some ways, knowing you're gonna die makes every moment so much sweeter. So how do you reconcile this idea of living forever with the sort of beauty that mortality gives us in this weird way? I'm sure you've had this question asked.

Before, but yeah, don't die is the result of a thought experiment. It's how I enjoy thinking. So if you transport yourself in time to the 25th century, and you're listening to them as they converse in whatever way they communicate, and they're observing the early 21st century, our time right now, and they're remarking at what we did that allowed intelligence to thrive in this part of the galaxy. What did we do?

I mean, was it, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the first thing comes to mind is artificial intelligence and making things better, but there's a downside and dark side to that. It's not dying, maybe? I don't know.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I came up with, is that basically, You know, in the same way we look back at the 15th century, we remember that century, we remember maybe 10 things about the entire century. 99.9% of whatever happened there is gone to history. We just don't pay attention to it. So there's a compression of time. And so while we are, of course, are all caught up in our lives in this moment, the 25th century is going to compress our moment to a very small number of things. and that thought process forces you to try to reconcile with, it tries to pierce through all the noise and say, what really matters in this moment? And that's when I came back that basically we're baby steps away from super intelligence. And when you're right there on the- I mean AI. Yeah, exactly. With AI of like basically creating computational intelligence in the form of AI. that is so far superior to us, it's unimaginable. We know it's capable, we know it's improving in what ways, we're not entirely sure, like we have some ideas, but we definitely can't predict it. And it's improving at a speed that our minds can't comprehend.

Totally.

So it's going to go in some direction and we're going to likely be very surprised. And so given that, and we'll have all this new capability, what does intelligence do? Do we take this new intelligence and say, now we're going to make more money, We're going to become better at going to war. We're going to become better social media people. And so what I'm saying is that.

Intelligence... More Instagram followers is not the thing. Exactly.

Exactly. But when you are naive, you basically say the only thing intelligence cares to do is to continue intelligence, is to continue to exist. And so if we say right now the guide that the most played game on planet Earth by every human on this planet right now is Don't Die. Every second of every day, Don't Die is played when we breathe, when we look both ways before we cross the street, when we throw out moldy food, every human plays it as the zeroth game they play. On top of that, if they don't die, then they play capitalism, or they play religion, or they play whatever the game they play, it sits atop don't die. And so what I'm trying to observe here is I'm saying that if we as a species want to avoid annihilation, destroying each other with our nuclear weapons or bioweapons, if we want to avoid destroying our planet, if we want to avoid some disastrous outcome of AI, if we're trying to navigate existential risk.

We.

Would rally around the concept of don't die as the singular philosophical, social, political, moral, ethical framework of our existence. So, to complete the thought experiment, the 21st century would say Homo sapiens, as primitive as they were in the early 21st century, like they're basically cavemen.

Pretty much.

They realized that the only objective they had individually and as a society was to not die. That's it. And everything in society was rebuilt around this framework as the zeroth principle order of all things.

So Brian Johnson's gonna be the most famous guy in 2025 then? Or maybe he'll still be there.

Yeah, I want to be there listening to that conversation.

Wow, me too. Me too. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your work, dedication to not just living longer for yourself, but making what you've learned available to all of us. I think it's worth everybody taking a deep look at Brian's work.

They can find it at... Yeah, blueprint.brianjohnson.com or if you want my protocol for free, you want to see my recipes and my supplements, all of it's there for you for free and all my data is there too. That's protocol.brianjohnson.com and you can get a good start on your new life.

Great. And we're going to put a link to all of Brian's work and all the data and all the things you want to look at in the show notes, you can have a deep look at that. And, it might take you a minute so you surely want to follow his advice so you don't die before you finish reading it. It's really quite amazing.

-Start by going to bed on time tonight.

-There you go. Start by going to bed on time tonight.

-Just baby steps.

-Baby steps, yeah. I love when I get to bed at 9:30. It makes me so happy. So, Everybody, thanks for listening again to Dr. Pharmacy. Brian, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks for what you're doing. I love this discussion. Let's do another one soon when we learn more and you can compare notes again. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.