Dhru Purohit Show - The Anti-Aging and Longevity Routine Designed to Help Us Live to 120 & Beyond with Bryan Johnson

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and InsideTracker. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Bryan Johnson to discuss how he’s slowed his pace of aging to that of an average 10-year-old, how he’s optimized over 50 biomarkers, and why he feels the future of humanity is in desperate need of a new operating system. Bryan Johnson is the most measured man in human history. He’s on a quest with his Blueprint framework to reverse his biological age and show others how they can do the same. Bryan founded Blueprint to create a world where humans and technology seamlessly collide to level up human potential by leveraging advanced neuroscience, machine learning, and engineering. Johnson is also the founder and CEO of Kernel, creator of the world’s first mainstream noninvasive neuroimaging system, and OS Fund, an investment firm that focuses on backing entrepreneurs who are leveraging breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, space exploration, and other frontier technologies. He is also an outdoor adventure enthusiast, pilot, and author of children’s books Code 7 and The Proto Project. In this episode, Dhru and Bryan dive into: -Bryan’s evening routing and why he places such value on sleep (3:15) -Why Bryan fired “Evening Bryan” (15:01) -Bryan’s early life experience and how it influenced his work and health journey (28:50) -Understanding that temporary pain can lead to long-term happiness (36:34) -The Blueprint framework (41:30) -Key events that have taken place to make society so sick (50:09) -How data collection can help resolve the problem (1:01:27) -Top-line biomarkers for aging (1:06:17) -The role of calories in diet and healthspan (1:17:08) -How Bryan achieved and continues to maintain a 100% sleep score (1:20:01) -The “SAD” score (self-aided destruction) (1:29:11) -Posture (1:39:25) -How Bryan helps his son follow the Blueprint framework (1:44:55) -Addressing Elon Musk’s perspective on longevity (1:48:40) Also mentioned in this episode: -blueprint.bryanjohnson.co -rejuvenationolympics.com -The SAD score (Tweet) -Sign up for my Try This newsletter here. For more on Bryan Johnson, follow him on Instagram @bryanjohnson_, Twitter @bryan_johnson, YouTube @BryanJohnson, and through his website, blueprint.bryanjohnson.co. ButcherBox has a variety of different boxes, and you can choose your box and frequency. For a limited time, you can sign up today and get two pounds of ground beef free for a whole year PLUS $20 off by going to butcherbox.com/dhru. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Johnson, Vice Magazine called you the most measured man in history. You spend $2 to $3 million a year to slow down aging. I consider myself to be an explorer. There was an idea that money could be a vehicle to do something useful. I was marching myself towards an early death. Was there a moment that you knew you had hit rock bottom? I desperately wanted to die. The only thing I care about is continuing my existence.

If the anti-aging scientists can't agree among themselves, what does the average person like myself do? Are you heading in the right direction? Do you ask for blood from your son? Some people might think you're crazy. Why do this? Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset.

This week's guest is Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson is the world's most measured human, and he's on a quest to not only reverse his biological age, but to show others how they can do the same with his blueprint framework. And on today's podcast, Brian details out how he slowed his pace of age. to that of an average 10-year-olds, how he's gotten over 50 plus of his biomarkers to optimal levels, and most importantly, why he feels that the future of humanity is in desperate need of a new operating system. Now, a little bit more about Brian. Brian sold his company, Brain Tree Venmo, to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. Since then, he's been investing millions to slow and reverse his own aging.

In 2021, he set a world record by reducing his epigenetic age. by 5.1 years in seven months. In 2023, Brian launched Rejuvenation Olympics and epigenetic leaderboard assessing one speed of aging. Of the 1,700 people that have been using the state-of-the-art algorithm to track their progress longitudinally, Brian ranks number one in the speed of aging reduction. Brian has open-source his health protocol and encourages others to not only do the same, but to also publish their data publicly for everyone to aspire to. This is all part of a process and an endeavor to achieve humanity and Earth-scale cooperation starting within the self.

Additionally, Brian is also the founder and CEO of Kernel, creator of the world's first mainstream non-invasive neuroimaging system. He lives in Los Angeles and is an outdoor adventure enthusiast, pilot, and author of children's books Code 7 and The Protope Project. Stay tuned for a fascinating conversation on all things aging and age reversal with Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, welcome to the podcast. You are currently 45 years old. But by following your blueprint framework to slow down aging and reverse aging, you've

share a few top line numbers, slowed your pace of aging by an equivalent of 31 years. You're now aging slower than the average 10-year-old. your body inflammation is 66% below the average 10-year-old. You have 50 plus optimal clinical outcome biomarkers and 100 plus markers that are lower than your chronological age. And the list goes on and on. Now, one of your followers sent you a tweet and said, of all the things that you do, which we're going to break down a little bit, what protocol has had the greatest positive effect on your health? and you replied back with one word.

And that word was? Sleep. Sleep. So I'd love to start there. Can you break down your evening routine and your sleep approach and sleep mentality that has helped you achieve a 100% perfect sleep score for I think the last few months now? That's right. Three months streak.

Yeah. Break it down. I'd love to hear about it. Yeah. My conscious existence changes based upon whether I've slept well or not. So, I mean, the biochemical state I'm in of how I feel about life and the things I'm doing the next day, whether they're hard or fun, I have a different conscious experience based upon the night before. And when you frame it like that, you understand that we are conscious beings and we're trying to perceive reality. We're trying to act within the space we're given.

When something affects you that much, it's one of the most important aspects of your life. And I think for quite some time, sleep, I accepted the culture of bad sleep. That if you get a bad night sleep, the next day you just power through and you just accept it. And then you become numb to your state of affairs. But when you have a good night sleep and you're refreshed and you finally you feel what it's like to do that, it reset your frame. And when you can make that the new norm, it just changes life so fundamentally. it's hard to even contrast the two perspectives. So to me, when people are talking about what, if they're trying to, so if we're endeavoring to try to change our lives to be the kind of person

we want to become, it's a gigantic workload. We're sizing up all the bad habits we have, the difficulty of eating well, the difficulty of exercise, and then the challenge of being consistent. That's like a herculean task to take on. And when you're trying to do that kind of stuff feeling positive about life, is it a helper. When did you know that your sleep was significantly off enough to know that you needed a radically different routine? I'm in, when I was 24, I guess I'd say I fell into a deep depression. It was a combination of having a newborn and not sleeping at all and a startup and a bunch of

other existential life crises. And I didn't have a. good night's sleep for some duration of time, a few months. And I think it was the combination of the stress and the sleep and everything else that slumped me into this negative state, and I stayed there for 10 years. And I just couldn't get out of this black hole of depression. And having been there, you know, for someone who's experienced that, you never want to go back. It's just the worst kind of existence one can imagine. And that's always in the back of my mind of that state that is probably not too far away, you know, a few slips in life. And I could be able to be

back in there. So we're going to get to Blueprint and its origins. I want to just come back to sleep for a second because it seems to be the common theme in your tweets when people come to you. And for you, you share that sleep is a non-negotiable. So for a lot of people, they might just think that's, you know, getting sleep. For you, there's a whole series of, processes that lead up to getting 100% sleep score. Yeah. Can you just highlight some of those? And you've made an incredible video.

We'll link to it in the show notes too, but just highlight some of those things that help make sleep the appropriate priority in your life that it is that helps you feel great and do everything else that you want to do. There was one story in particular that did it for me. It was a commander of a naval fleet is navigating. and one of their shipmates wakes up the commander and says, come up to the, I don't know the words, come up and pay attention.

You need to look at this thing happening. And they find an oncoming object. And so the captain radios them and says, change your course 30 degrees north. And not wanting to do that, he radios back. You change your course, you know, 30 degrees south. And they radio back, no, you change. And at that point, he usher, he invokes his authority.

I'm a blank star of this naval fleet, you know, change your course. And it comes back to the response, I'm a lighthouse. And to me that really did it is we humans try to muster authority of some form. And whether it be authority, I need to get my homework done, I need to do my work project. I want to stay up and watch this movie. I've earned this late time by myself. Whatever the rationale is, we use these stories. of authority to justify changing sleep.

We consider it to be something we can just push around at will whenever we want. And when you shift your mindset to say sleep happens at a specific time, just like other things in life happen at a specific time, and you need to show up and do that thing at that time, it changes your relationship with it. So you're no longer to push it around because our culture is, we can always push sleep around to accommodate other objectives. It's the one that always gets the short end of the stick.

And I just said, that's not going to be the case anymore. Like if something bumped up again, that that thing has to give, It's a lighthouse in my life. I'm not going to push it around. I cannot push it around. This episode is brought to you by Butcher Box. You know, I've tried a lot of different diets. And the one that I feel best with is called the Pagan Diet,

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I'm talking about raw foodist, vegan, vegetarian, meat eater, you name it, I've tried it. And the truth is, at first, I felt pretty good on all of them until I didn't. The common denominator for all these diets is the fact that they're all made up of mostly whole foods and free from processed foods, which will do anybody good. But after some time has passed, I still didn't feel. like I was thriving. I was dealing with some lingering gut issues, endotoxemia, and acne breakouts. Through a bunch of trial and error, I found that following one specific eating style wasn't the answer for me. And maybe it hasn't been the answer for you either. In my personal opinion,

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to nutrients and hormones. It even tests your cortisol levels to help you better manage stress, and you have the option to see how your inner age compares to your chronological age. Inside Tracker makes their results easy to understand and provides tips on how to use food first for optimal nutrition. And now you can even connect Inside Tracker to your Apple Watch to unlock deeper, more personalized insights into your health with real-time exercise, resting heart rate, and even sleep data synced with your InsideTracker plan, you can truly wear your health right on your sleep. Right now, InsideTrackers offering my podcast community 20% off.

Just go to insidetracker.com slash DHRU. That's true. InsideTracker.com slash DHRU to get your 20% discount code and try it for yourself. That's InsideTracker.com backslash DHRU for 20% off. So that's one of the first pillars in that and probably the most important, having a consistent time that you shoot for every day, probably first getting in bed, but then ultimately end up falling asleep. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, like these, and these stories really help me understand it because if you try to convey the concept and say, okay, sleep happens at a specific time, then fine. But you're still going to bump up on a daily basis when you want to do something. You're going to be in this vulnerable state and it's late at night and you're low on willpower. You want to justify your behavior so badly and it's easy to slip into that mindset. So in my mind, thinking about like a lighthouse also makes sense. But I'll give you one other layer things that help me understand this.

For the longest time, humans used storytelling as the most powerful technology we had to build things. We've built narratives like where we came from, why we're here, what's meaning making, institutions, money. Like we build all these stories about things. We build that. As of the past few centuries, we've built science, technology, engineering, and math. It's another form of technology that allows us to do things. And when it comes to our health and wellness, what blueprint is trying to identify is what's the better technology to achieve health and wellness?

Is it storytelling or is it a science and technology path? And that's when you identify sleep as a bedtime and it's non-negotiable, you're saying, you're basically identifying you're no longer going to use storytelling as the method in your life to decide what to do and when to do it. You're going to let the technology of science and technology manage that part of your life. And it's a really big shift, and it's not clear in most people's minds

where one of those technologies ends and the other one starts and then it just gets very hard to execute. Does that make sense to you in terms of bifurcating the two technologies in trying to achieve that? Absolutely. And I think the best example of that you've shared before is that we all have, including you, Multiple selves.

We think of ourselves as one self, but there's multiple selves. And you have this whole framework that you've illustrated that you've identified these different parts of you. And one of your most destructive parts of you, you gave him a nickname Evening Brian. And to achieve many things in your life, but especially the most important thing for you, one of the most important things as it's related to your health and you responding back to the people who follow you, which is sleep, you had to fire evening Brian. So do you remember those comic books or like stories we had as a kid, right? I forgot what it was called, but it was like goof and gallon, I think it was like,

but it was basically contrasting. What does a good kid do? What does a bad kid do? You know, it'd be at the like Scholastic's book fair. So if you had a contrast evening Brian and the storytelling that he had that would shape the narrative of destructive behaviors that would impact his life, but in particular sleep, with Brian today. Yeah.

How would you compare and contrast that so that our listeners can feel like a real sense of like, oh, this is what you were doing for? This is what you're doing now. Yeah. I mean, first, so to empathize with evening Brian. So he comes on duty at roughly 7 p.m. at night. The moment when the day's stressors are at their peak. So you're ruminating about this conversation and that conflict and this problem at work

and this thing you said that you wish you hadn't said. and you're dealing with potentially disagreement with your partner and you've got a kid who has homework they forgot to tell you about until 15 minutes before the bedtime. It's a four-hour project. Like, you know, in that window of time where everything in the world kind of collapses. You're tired because you didn't sleep very well the night before and you still exercise because you're trying to be a good person and you didn't eat as much food that day because you're trying to watch where you eat. So you're starving. So in that moment, Evening Brian has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And all this pressures on him. And we,

expect him to still perform well. But in that moment, all he wants is relief. I just relieve me from this intensity, this burden of existence where I feel stressed out. I'm in pain. I just don't want to deal with it. Now, if you look at his problem solving abilities, he's going to say, I want the most immediate thing that's going to give me relief, which is, you know, brownies or cookies, or whatever is an immediate reach to say I'm going to eat this thing. It's going to give me some kind of sensation that I'm going to feel good for a moment, but then, of course, you're going to feel worse afterwards, having done that act.

So Evening Brian's problem solving is really not great because he doesn't effectively solve the problem. He just has this very short, this inadequate form of compensation for the real problems at hand. But I do empathize with him. I mean, and we all know this. We experience this.

Life is heavy and it's hard. And we get cornered in these situations and we're just dead. desperate for a moment of reprieve from the intensity. So you understand even, Brian, but you don't want him to control the narrative. That's exactly right. And I don't want him. He's proven that he's not a good problem solver. So, you know, he could say, look, okay, I've got a bad situation here. I'm pretty stressed out. All you other Bryans have kind of given me a lot to deal with. I need some sort of solution here

where I'm not just sitting here in pain. And so in those moments, it's important that all Brian's are there to have a discussion and say, okay, we clearly need to cooperate here. We don't want to have one version of us that's misbehaving and causing pain for everyone else. But I like empathy as the first move, understand him. Now, I did say I fired even Brian because when you try to talk to him, that version of me is just going to say, no, like, I just need reprieve from my pain. And so I had to remove that version of me and come in with something else.

But it's more of like a state of mind play. like how do I talk to myself, how do I understand myself? And importantly, how do I separate my behavior from myself? So the person, the version of Brian who overeats, that behavior is not me. That's not my identity. And separating those two things is really important because if I feel shame and guilt, it can really have this emotional burden on me. It's separating that behavior from me and then try to work through that with my different versions. And so, yeah, I mean, to basically save myself from myself, I just said, I'm so sorry, but what we're going to conclude here is evening Brian from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. like a window around you,

no authority to eat food whatsoever. Like it does not matter what's happening. No special event, no birthday party. Even if your kids' birthday parties there and everyone's having cake, sorry. Because no, there was just, I was marching myself towards an early death. It was just a bad situation. And so I had to take extreme action in setting those rules. So all those other Brian's got together and they essentially worked on an algorithm, an algorithm that you takes better care of your health than you could do by yourself. So let's just play that out a little bit with that example that you had from 5 to 10 p.m. Right? I think you typically go to sleep around 8.30. Is that right? So in this algorithm that all the Bryans have put together to help counteract

the narrative of evening Brian, what typically happens after 5 p.m.? So evening Brian previously was overeating, probably reaching for ultra-processed foods occasionally. was sacrificing sleep time and not hitting a consistent sleep time for the prioritization of work, for the priorities of other people. What are some of the things that all the other Bryans got together? And how does that algorithm play out from 5 to 10, from 5 to 8.30 by the time that you sleep? What are some of the behaviors, external things? If people had a documentary and they were watching you, what would they notice that this Brian now is doing? Yeah, that's well said. So when, When evening Brian was eating food at that time period, ultra-processed foods and too much, that would have an effect if it would eliminate my deep sleep.

I would get maybe 30 minutes of deep sleep. So I now get around two to two and a half hours per night of deep, which happens in that first part of my evening, of my sleep window. I would get almost a fifth of that in deep quality. The next morning I'd wake up and feel awful. And so my willpower to then exercise or eat well is severely impaired. My decision-making capacity the next day to do other things I need to do is severely impaired. I'm grumpy. I'm irritable.

I'm literally, I am an impaired person because of that event. It has this cascading effect. And so all the negative things that happen, then once you start that chain of cascading actions, then the next evening follows, what's the likelihood I'm going to overeat again? extremely high. And so it just creates this vicious loop where I just have no time I'm getting dunked under the water every day and I just can't even catch my breath. And that's why I say sleep is the most important thing because when anyone sizes up anything you want to do in life, you have this certain reservoir of willpower and you're going to spend it a certain way,

but you only have so much and then it depletes until you have to replenish it again. And sleep gives you the baseline to say, I can start making baby steps to making some positive steps in my life. Without it, I know from experience, it's very, very hard to make any positive steps. And so, yes, all the Bryan's got together. They had this discussion. They identified him as not being in a state of mind that was capable of changing the, like basically we said, Evening Brian, in this window of time, you're in an impaired biochemical state. We cannot reason with you. We cannot help you. We cannot work on a strategy with you. You basically are not at a point where you can be helped.

So we're very sorry. We understand the situation. You also don't have authority. And so this is such an important point. In my own self-awareness, I acknowledge there's versions of me that you have these characteristics of insanity. Like this version of me was actively doing things to accelerate my death, which is a really weird behavior as an intelligent being. And this person was incapable of making changes. And so having enough self-awareness to say, okay, there are these things going on, which are contrary to my best interest, we need to think through this thing in a cohesive way so we don't commit these self-destructive behaviors.

But to me, that was the most helpful thing is breaking myself down on these component parts and understanding who is who, who is doing what and why, what their motivations were, what their needs are, and then how to create strategies to try to create an ecosystem. that would be more balanced. As you follow this algorithm that the Brian's all came up with, did you notice that evening Brian's voice and sort of tantrums, as you've called them in the past, did they become fewer or less loud? Yeah. And the part two of that is that as the other Brian started to speak up,

how did you decide to spend that open time that you had now in the evenings? I love this topic. So I'm going to answer it in a little bit of a tangential way. in this process of me trying to understand myself, all the brands are getting together and we're talking about, okay, we really do want to be the best version of ourself. And we are acknowledging that, hey, there's this evening version of Brian who's just not reachable at this point in time, like maybe later, but not right now.

And this is the moment where I was saying, okay, we run our health and wellness based upon storytelling technology. It's like a list from, you know, I grew up in a religious setting. There was like an ideological list of like things you can eat, things you shouldn't eat, you know, like a very typical thing for that kind of setting. You're talking about the Mormon tradition. Yeah, that's right. And then there's like cultural trends like you do, you eat certain things at restaurants or certain things on menus.

There's these society kind of gives you this narrative on like what to eat and whatnot. And I needed to identify an alternative form of power within me because I was looking at my different versions of me and saying, I really don't think that's the best technology. I want to look to my biological processes and ask, hey, guys, would you be up for managing me instead of my different personalities? It's like, hey, liver and hey heart and hey, pancreas and lungs, can I ask you how you're doing? And can I ask you what you need?

And can you speak up? And then can I pair you with science and technology? And can you guys run the show for me? And this is the shift where I'm saying, okay, I'm a human operating in a story-based world. I want to transition the management of me to a technology-based system where it's automatically doing this. And that's what I called my autonomous self.

And so when you raise this question of what happens, there were versions of me who were panicking. They were like, we're not going to give up control. This is a dystopic situation. This is terrifying. This is awful. And this is a very common reaction I hear to people. who look at this and they respond and say, if I can't decide what I'm going to eat and drink and when I'm going to do those things, I don't know why I'm going to exist.

I don't, I just, their existence falls apart and they feel like it's an assault on their free will, on their agency, and that it's like the most, it's the most sacred thing we have as a human. And to me, it was the most liberating thing I've ever done in my entire life, which has transitioned myself from this, the tyranny of my mind to this freedom of this autonomous self working by probing my biological systems and having that paradigm of science and technology. But to your question, though, it invokes panic. Initially. At what point in time does that panic, or just in your experience, and now you've been seeing other people adopt the blueprint framework, they're sharing their scores on the leaderboard that you've created? What point in time do you start to notice that there's a little bit of shift in at least the strength of that voice that is driving that panic.

I think most of us want, most of us have this feeling that we are deciding on a moment to moment basis what we're doing. We feel like we have free will. Now we may, we may not. Like I don't really want to get into that debate. Like we have this feeling that we do. If I want to choose to drink this, I feel like it's making my choice to do that. when I when this conversation comes up people feel threatened that that part of their existence is going to go away and what I have found is as I've built my autonomous self and blueprint where the science and technology is running in a closed loop fashion with my body in my mind I still have the same experience of free will and choice and joy there's just a system that runs underneath doing all of it for me

And so it's not threatening me. It just takes a little bit of adjustment of mind that we still feel the same things what it means to be human and have these dialogues. And we can still play the game of being human like we've always played it. Just underneath, you've got a system that's doing a better job managing health and wellness than you ever could yourself. And it's such a nuanced argument and understanding where it just so closely toes a line of of someone saying that's totally dystopic.

And on the other side, being like, you know what, like I can see this being a situation where in the 25th century, people look back at our time and they say, that was one of the most important things that the human race figured out is how to apply science and technology to run this system of automation for near perfect help for everyone in society. That it didn't threaten human free will. It didn't threaten their way of being.

They could still exist in their minds and how the freedom of movement they always wanted, it just has this different system, a different way of managing it. So let's take a step back a little bit and talk about life before blueprint. In our intro, we talked a little bit about your past. You are a serial entrepreneur.

You created one of the most successful companies in the credit card processing, payment space. You ended up buying Venmo. That company was Braintree, which, by the way, I was an early customer of in my last company. So I've worked with your team for many years. They're awesome.

Well, the old team that was there. And you bought Venmo. You packaged all that up over years of building that up. You sold it to PayPal. And you've shared that a lot of your life was focused on driving outward success and building this company. Right. You've also hinted earlier in the conversation. You were going through, I don't know exactly what period of time, but you're going through a major debaout of depression.

What else was going on in your life? And what was running the show in terms of your motivation at that time? My primary understanding of reality was developed when I was 21 years old. I came back from after serving as a missionary and living among extreme poverty, mud huts, dirt floors, came back to the opulence of the United States. And the contrast was jarring. I'd never seen a different reality outside of my very small town in Utah with 30,000 people. That was my only reality.

So going from that one single little town, going up on a, like, you know, working on a farm to that kind of reality coming back, it is it invited me this motivation that I wanted to spend my life to do something that would be useful to humanity around the world. It didn't make sense to me to get a job, make money, aim for retirement, and then do something. For some reason, that was my orientation is. And at 21, I mean, I haven't grown up in a smaller town, I wasn't really good at anything. I had never met an engineer in my entire life. We didn't have a computer. So I thought, why don't, I mean, if I'm resourceful, why don't I apply my skills and try to become an entrepreneur and make a whole bunch of money? Then with money, use that to try to do something useful in the world.

So even at early age, there was an idea that money could be a vehicle to do something useful. Yeah. So you pursued that path. do you feel like you sacrificed your body and mind through that process? Entirely. Yeah, I mean, I was aware of my health, but I very much had a grind culture mentality. And I ran on the elixir of youth. You know, when you're 20 something, you don't feel it as badly as when you, as you get older.

And, I mean, I had five burning fires everywhere in life. I had multiple, I had little babies. I had a challenging personal relationship. I was leaving the religion I was born into, having an existential crisis. I was chronically depressed and then running a startup. And we all know, you put a few of those pieces together. It's like, it's a pretty tumultuous existence. And when you're fighting on every single one of those fronts every day, it becomes a lot.

And it just compounded itself over time. And so as you add one more bad night's sleep to the next day and then one layer deeper of depression over time, it just gets to be to a breaking point. Was there a moment that you knew that you had hit rock bottom? Yeah, I mean, on Sundays, they were my worst days. I would come home from church. Church was such a triggering event for me. It was just, I would break out into sweats.

I would just shut down. I'd come home. I'd lay on my bed, and my son would come up and rub my back. For some reason, he knew. I don't know how he knew. he was six or seven at the time and just rub my back. But in that moment, I just desperately wanted to die. There's just nothing that would bring me relief of thought except for the idea that I would die.

And I didn't, you know, in that religion, it was like you would have an afterlife. And I thought, I don't want an afterlife. Because when you're depressed, you cannot imagine not being depressed. Like your imagination shuts down. You can't be like, oh, I can imagine being happy again or I can have that state for a minute. You can't. You're just shut down. And so existence just seems eternally depressed, and you cannot change your mindset out of that. Did the people around you know this was going on? I didn't speak to anyone about it. I mean, I would imagine some people were observing various things about me, but I just kept that all to myself.

In a religious setting, your social status is important in the community, as you would imagine, and expressing doubt. about the community target you as a person of concern. You know, like, then people are focused on you, right? You just change it. And so you're in a community with your family and your friends and you're trying to be good example to your kids. And so to be outwardly doubting the whole community, it's just like a big event. And so it's the lower cost path is to keep it internal.

I remember one in the church group I was in, one of the leaders did. an anonymous poll. This was men, you know, 25 to like 40 or something like that. How many of them would categorize themselves in a severe level of doubt? And it was like 70%. But the, how much secrecy was maintained was, that was one of the most important events in my life. When I realized that wasn't alone, that there was this deep doubt that was prevalent or everywhere. I just didn't have the mechanisms of understanding what was happening in that system. From there, what was the first few moments or the entry point or the book or the something that you experienced that started to show you that there was a different possibility?

I mean, I mean, there were two things that were ultimately the answer to everything it was happening. One is my relationship and then two was the my associate. with the church. And I had three babies, three kids, and being a good father was such an important part of my identity that I was willing to sacrifice almost anything to be the father I imagined myself. I'd read this book, A Good Man, Sergeant. Tessa can look it up. A Good Man. Mark Shriver. Yep. So Mark wrote this book about his dad. And it was basically a love note. And he chronicled what his father did. You know, like he would slip him notes under his door and say, like, you, I saw some cuts on your face, here's some new razors, and some shaving cream. And he just, his whole life, he did these things. And I was so touched by his father. And I, I was so touched by his father. And I, I, wanted to be like him. So wow, like this gets me. The contemplation that I would be a divorced dad and not do that was just like unthinkable. So it was and then you're having in

that religious community of leaving all my family and my friends and everyone I've been with, that was unthinkable. And so it felt like I was trapped from two unthinkable positions. And so moment that it all changed is when I could, I felt like I could finally muster clarity of thought and realize things would actually be better to not be a part of either the relationship or the religion, that I could actually achieve the things I had in mind in a different way. And that point was when everything changed in my life. It's interesting because there's a parallel there with both the self and then our relationship with other people. You know, you have all these competing priorities that are pulling in different directions, no different than the competing

priorities that are pulling in all of us that we've all experienced. So in a family system, you have the yearning to want to be a great dad and what does that look like? But the fact that you can't be a great dad if you are stuck in this particular system that you feel you're in. but then the feeling and fear of losing family, losing friends, causing harm, causing hurt to other people. And it almost sounds like there was, I think you call it like an endpoint goal or a goal like a main, like what's your driving goal, right? There's a word you that you use for that in blueprint. Do you know what that word is? It's like the one goal that drives everything else.

What do you reference that as? it'll come back to. Yeah. So you got clear that if you didn't leave, which may seem that it causes some temporary pain and panic, no different than the panic of evening, Brian, feeling like my life is over if I can't eat or reach for junk food, you knew that there might be temporary pain, but ultimately it was the right thing to support everybody in their long-term path of being healthy and happy.

Is that fair to say? That's fair to say. Yeah, and I wish that in the same way that, his father would slip a note under the door. And it was so warming that he, when he went through his shoebox full of notes, there were as many unopened, if I remember the book correctly, as there were opened. As a teenager, he didn't appreciate what his father was doing. It was lost on him.

He knew he had a good dad, but no idea how extraordinary his dad was. And so going through these notes later. and in trying to look at that, I've, I certainly pay attention to things like shaving gel and razors to my kids. Also, I try to help them understand these basic ways of working with mind that I wasn't taught. So I was raised in this small community in a singular reality. I wasn't taught these basic skills of understanding multiple realities. You're like Plato's Cave. Like you're looking at the shadows on the wall.

What are the realities you're playing with? And just like you were saying, when you navigate and say, there are other realities that could make even more sense or even be better than the current reality, where you think if this reality ends, like me being a family man dad and I transitioned to become a divorce dad, it actually can be a better outcome than this one I had. I just wasn't trained by anyone with versatility of thought. How do you navigate these tricky things where I was captured in certain ideas and ways of being and it paralyzed me? And so you're correct in that this maps directly to Evening Brian because I was trying to develop these thought processes and say, what is really happening with me as a person?

Like, why am I doing this behavior? What's really going on? I wanted to deconstruct the systems and understand the forces it be and structure it in a way where I could truly understand it. That's really where I spend all my time in life right now is trying to understand the systems I'm in, trying to penetrate to find the outer layers of the systems I'm in that I can't even see yet. I just keep on going out because I know I'm blind. I just don't know. I'm always going to be blinded to where I'm at in reality.

I'm just trying to punch through to ever greater levels of awareness. And this goes back to this idea of me being a story-based teller, me living in story land of my health and wellness versus living in a system of science and technology. And can I reconcile both those worlds with free will and health and wellness and failing alive as a human and living society? Like, can we deal with this kind of nuanced thought as a species? Because it really is in all of our best interest, but it takes a moment to exercise these muscles and understand how to think through these different systems. you know, taking what you just shared and laying it on top of now, or laying blueprint on top of that, which is one of the frameworks that you use within the system that you're in. The top line for anybody who's writing your articles or maybe you heard our intro for this podcast is you created this framework, this algorithm, as we hinted to earlier, that can take better care of you than you can take care of yourself by not just looking at one endpoint, but looking at over, I think, 150 plus biomarkers. as you were sharing earlier, what does my heart want me to do?

Not in the sense of, you know, follow your heart. That's right. Yes. What does your lungs want you to do? What does your brain want you to do? What is your muscle mass and your body muscle wants you? Was your, what is your aerobic capacity and your, all these things? What are they all speaking based on the best science we have available?

What are they telling you about how they want to live? And then you creating by constantly measuring that, I think it was Vice Magazine called you the most measured man in history. And you using some of the wealth that you've been able to build to create a team. You spend I think $2 to $3 million a year on that team. They measure you regularly and they're constantly checking. Are you headed in the right direction? And the best part about all of that is that you put out your data for everybody to

see. Is that an accurate description of what blueprint is? Yes. Now the question would be, why in addition to your own interest of having a healthy health span maybe some interest in longevity what is the why that's layered on top of that why do this of all the things that you and i could talk about that we could be doing they all have one common denominator we exist we're alive now i don't know what it's like to be dead i'll probably figure out

out someday what that means like what that means but right now i think i exist i think i'm alive at least i my experience is that the only thing i care about is continuing my existence everything else to play i would like to propose as a species that we rally around this idea we are so lucky to exist with everything we have. Now, if we can exist and we can be in good health, and this goes back to like this autonomous system, it would make sense to me as a society, we disagree. Everybody should be in perfect health as a system.

Not asking people to exert superhuman levels of discipline. It's just built into our society. We, that's a standard of being human. And so to me, that's really where it's at, is if we try to muster the most sober, simplest, and most basic observation we can today, lucky as we exist. That's it. And then everything is just a bonus on top of that. So I'll add something.

I'll share a quote that you've shared before on top of the beautiful philosophical answer that's there so that I think our audience can connect the dots between the micro and the macro. Right? So and also before we started recording, you asked me, how do I see things? And I just was sharing your words, you know, back to you. And your words that you've shared previously in blog post in interviews are in the context of especially longevity. This is me setting it up. Many people think, this is you, quote, many people think that anti-aging, the fountain of youth radical type is decades, if not centuries away, if ever. And when it does arrive, will arrive. in the form of a magic pill. And now I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't copy the quote, but you're saying, what if there's not one thing? What if the answer to the fountain of youth and longevity is many things, but they're buried deep within the clinical research that's out there,

and it really requires us to combine them all together to get the benefit of them. That's right. So I look at both of those things, that sort of practical answer, is longevity is a hot topic right now. Some of the best sellers that are on the New York Times list are longevity. We have a generation that is the wealthiest generation in history that is spending a lot of their time, effort, and energy thinking about aging. And it's become a lot more part of our culture.

We've gone from anti-aging to really understanding the power of longevity and especially health span, that it's not just about being 110 years old and having Alzheimer's and living in some nursing home, but it's actually about even if you only make it to quote unquote 90, it's about being healthy. It's about being happy and enjoying your life, having access to your body and your brain to do and give love and attention to the priorities that matter to it. So from my understanding of you working on this and putting out all your information and data and doing so many great interviews that are out there, which by the way, thank you for that. I see as your motivation as you've thought of yourself as an explorer.

Some people, and definitely on Twitter, might think you're crazy. And yet, you're willing to go on this journey, you're willing to climb up that mountain because worst-case scenario, maybe there's a few things that you might find that become part of our standard approach that help our lifespan here in America, which has been going downward for a bunch of different reasons, opioid, suicide rates, COVID, et cetera, that it might, in a worst-case scenario, tick up a little bit. Or at least as a secondary degree of it, you inspire other people to start putting out their own version of their blueprint and sharing their data, and maybe one of them comes up with the answer, right? So that's the worst case scenario. The best

case scenario that's there, we fundamentally shift how we operate and prioritize health as a society and that it's not just about our biological health and our body, which is very important, but that actually leads to a complete shift in our perspective as a species. Exactly right. Anything you'd add on top of that? That's really well said. Thank you. So nothing to add on top of that for the moment. One example.

In Running Brain Tree, it was early days for Uber, and we worked with them to create the payment experience. And what we ultimately created, as everyone experienced, is you flag a car, the car arrives, you step in, you arrive at your destination, and you get out. And there was no interaction regarding payment. there was no discussion of payment. There was no pulling out a credit card. There was no credit card machine. There was no signing of receipt. There was no negotiation tip.

It was just all automated and magic. It just went away. And the starting point, of course, was when you're in a taxi cab and you pull up and the driver pulls out the big machine, and wants this carbon copy your card, and then it's a disaster. So in that case,

the payment experience happened behind the scenes, and it was magical. It was just functional. built into the system. And before we did that with Uber, nobody had that experience. It was a gorgeous. It's gorgeous. I'm suggesting health should be the same way. We shouldn't even know it exists. It's just magic. Somehow, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the habits we have as a culture, in our surrounding environment, somehow we just maintain perfect health. Now that is a few steps into the future.

Right now, if you look at my routine where it's extremely analog of like hundreds of things that I'm piecing together in my life is this rickety form of all these different protocols, it's a version that points to this magic layer that just exists and we just don't even notice anymore. And we forget that we ever had to strive for optimal health and wellness because it just is default, as part of our being alive. One of the things that's happening today is that we are not there yet. And in fact, there's a lot of argument about what is the best approach. But also there's a lot of argument about what put us in the problem, what created this big, fat mess in the first place. So I want to ask you about both of those things.

But first, let's talk about how did we end up in this mess? I feel like you love to read. You are a student in your own way of philosophy. You think about the systems that were created that drove certain types of behavior. So when you look at society right now, specifically from a health context, and you look at the growing rates of diabetes, obesity, mental health issues, and many of those things happening at younger and younger ages, what are some of the key things that you feel took place, the sort of Global and national versions of just like Brian has a lot of brines. What were those things that were competing and taking place that created this perfect storm, which is this mess that we're in today? Yeah.

If we're going to play a game then that tries to identify what visible and invisible forces are at play. Here's one for you. It's the fault of Adam and Eve. The story is they're in the Garden of Eden. Ava is persuaded by the serpent to eat things. the forbidden fruit. She gives it to Adam. They get kicked out of the Garden of Eden. What if that story was made up? What if the story really was that Adam and Eve were in this place due to their gluttonous behavior? They ruined their environment. They had to leave the Garden of Eden and go to

an arid and uncomfortable and difficult world. And then their kids Canaan Abel were like, Mom, Dad, why does this world suck so much? We want to go back to the garden. And they're like, oh, we'll get back to you. And then they peel away and they're like, look, this is really embarrassing. We need to tell them something. We're not going to admit about our gluttonous behavior. And they make up a story of like, actually kids, what happened?

We're there, having a great time. Everything's fine. A serpent shows up. Persuades us to do this thing. We're like, we didn't know any better. Then we get kicked out. And like, now we're just a victim. What if the entire philosophical disposition of our mental state starts with the origin story of the species,

where we are not accountable, we're not responsible. We're always blaming other for the problem. What if that, the first story we told about ourselves, is a mirror on how we behave today? And what if it's so invisibly woven into our culture, we've just forgotten about it. And so we can talk about top line things like what's the diet, what's the rate of diabetes, what's the obesity rate and these other stats? And we can try to diagnose the availability of junk food and, you know, whatever.

But what if it's much deeper into our psyche and so deep we can't even see it in the code anymore? What if we all played a part in creating this as part of what I'm hearing you say? What if we are blind to the real cost of, of that are driving us to be who we are. I know in my situation, my mind is continually a nemesis. If I give my mind the slightest opening to do, to behave in a way that is contrary to my best long-term interest, it will. Even now, as disciplined as I am, and I have almost perfect discipline.

If I open that thing up just a little bit, I know I can see how fast my mind tries to fill that void and come up with such a clever justification to do that thing. My mind is an absolute rascal reliably. And that's when I surveyed myself and said, I really want to be part of the future. I think this could be the most extraordinary existence in the history of human existence. I don't want to die early. I don't want to, I want to be a part of this thing. if I want that, then I need to figure out a system that gives me the highest probability of arriving there.

My mind is not. My mind's a devious actor. And that's when I said, okay, I need a system to empower my organs to let them the more responsible power be in control the system. So in short, I think our minds are the source. Our minds are the nemesis. And that's the most counterintuitive thing. It almost be like if we imagined the revolt someone felt when someone said, the earth is not the center of the universe. We're actually orbiting a star.

We're actually in a larger galaxy and we're flinging out in space. If you imagine how much I would break their brains and their reality, it's the same discomfort we feel that what if our minds who we think are our best attribute, the most sacred thing of our existence, is actually our number one nemesis. And then you're telling that to yourself, then the mind's going to revolt and be like, what are you talking about?

I'm the best thing it's ever happened to humankind. It's this wild situation of trying to have this duality of both understanding your nemesis and being your nemesis simultaneously. And that's what I feel like the biggest accomplishment of blueprint is that I was able to separate the two and identify what source of power. could be trusted reliably.

So part of what I feel like I'm hearing for you, and I'm going to repeat it back out, and I want you to feel free to say yes, no, or modify. It's part of my way of processing information. Part of what I'm hearing from you is a little bit similar to the idea of all the Bryans that are there. Okay, we can focus on what evening Brian did to sabotage the show at night, and we can look at all the negative behaviors that he has over eating, etc., which could be useful for a period of time just to identify, but we can't really approach

it until we have empathy of him being part of the entire system and that he, just like all the Bryans, just wants to exist, just like the larger Brian wants to exist. So Evening Brian wants to exist, he will fight for what he wants to fight for. No different than a corporation that might be spraying our planet with some pesticide or another. or a processed food company that's a public company that is like a big dysfunctional family, some people that want to do better and some people that just want to maintain the status quo and are more focused on shareholder price, which by the way, most of us own a 401K, we have investments in the market.

We don't like when our stocks and our index value goes down and those companies get the pressure. So my question to you was, how did we end up in this mess? And partly what I heard from you was that we have to understand the empathy for the entirety of the situation. It could be useful temporarily to talk about what works and what doesn't when we have data to support it. But we don't want to start off the conversation with blame because if we can't identify our own place in the process and the nemesis that's in all of our own minds, and how we sabotage ourselves and don't follow the things that we know that help us out,

we're already starting off the conversation in a losing way. Yeah. Yeah. Very well said. The premise of modern day society, I would say, is categorically insane. You take a human

and then you populate around this human thousands of potential drug-like stimulants in that person's reach. From their phone and social media to junk food, to fast food, to sugar drinks. You just take modern society and you populate thousands of options for that person to readily have at any moment in near unlimited supply. And then we say, all right, society, now we expect our society to be somewhat functional. No way. Is that going to work?

We humans were not built. We have not evolved to be able to withstand the powerful levels of addictive stimulants that constantly surround us. So why are we in this predicament is we have designed a society that we cannot overcome. we are we're suffocating ourselves with the way we design things but you don't take away the responsibility of the folks that are playing the part in that

just like we have individual responsibility but you're not turning it into blame because you don't feel that's a good use of your time is that an accurate way to think about things? Every situation is so nuanced right okay if we try to parse this in a story framework,

so you just posed a question to me, and my mind went to all the words I could assemble in my mind to try to capture the situation. And then I realize I'm trying to diagnose and articulate a system with story, and it really is a system of science and technology. If you just look at society and not through a story perspective, through blame,

you just say, this is how humans operate from a biochemical perspective here are the stimulants available to them here's the likely

reaction of these things of course you're going to get the society you have given those conditions no surprise whatsoever entirely predictable and you don't need any story

to explain it you just say biochemical and science technology you're going to look at the algorithmic outcome yes it's so the wisdom of our time is understanding where story serves well and where science and technology serves well. And this is when I say when I talk about my own personal health and wellness, I cannot trust myself.

When I say as a society, when we talk about our health and wellness, we cannot trust ourselves. We are not qualified. We're not capable of acting in our own best interest. So no story is going to do this justice because the story is going to other people's story machines. And they're going to come back with their own story. Story cannot run this. So the modern equivalent that would be talked about in a lot of conversations that be. People say, oh, it's the, it's extra sugar in the diet that's causing the situation that it is.

Or somebody might say that it's seed oils or somebody says this. They all have different things. Exactly. And then you're parsing it through, okay, where's their data to show that does this thing, is this thing supportive? Is this thing not supportive? And then we can make it about the facts about the data. We don't have to get into an argument because if you go far back enough, everybody can put their blame on somebody else. So there was a right reason for wanting to do things. The modern processed food industrial complex comes directly out of a problem. And that problem was how do we feed a lot of people? So it started off maybe with good intentions. Sure, is it serving humanity? Probably not. Okay, great. What's a new framework around that? Exactly right.

So any good, any algorithm, not any good. Every algorithm that's there has to have data points that initially build it. And part of what you've shared is that it makes no sense to have a conversation about, is vegan better, is carnivore better or something else in between. we should actually let the data drive things. And as I hinted to earlier, you spent about $2 to $3 million a year on a team that helps you parse through the data and look at it to come up with what are these objectifiable measures that you might want different biomarkers or organ systems to match up against.

You've also shared, and people have seen on this podcast, every expert that comes on, even people who have deep NIH funding or research or at the highest degree of this or that, they all have a different view on the data. How does your team put together your algorithm from a philosophical approach of knowing what to include and not to include to decide what you prioritize in your morning routine, your evening routine, how much you eat, how much you don't eat, what the ideal body fat percentage is, what it isn't. How does your team come up with that in the best way that they can? Yeah. You're exactly right. If you take five anti-aging scientists, all of a top tier caliber, you give them the same scientific papers, and you say, and you make the request, can you please design an anti-aging protocol for me? You will get five different protocols.

Totally agree. They do not agree on almost anything. It's remarkable. And so what I've been trying to do with Blueprint is that's okay. That's the nature of their disciplines. is to be skeptical and to analyze the data and to look at it differently, that's the game they're playing, and we benefit from that. We benefit from their brains doing that. For the rest of us who are just trying to make a basic decision of what I ate for breakfast, it's not helpful because we're so confused. And so Blueprint was an attempt, is an attempt to basically say, for all of us out there trying to make daily decisions, I'm going to try to provide a model where it answers this thing for you with sound data. because while we don't know everything about aging, we do know some things. We know, for example, the inflammation in the body is not good. We know lower levels of information are better.

We know what a 10-year-old heart looks like versus an 80-year-old heart looks like in functioned anatomy. We know some things about age. And if you can start with these basic things to say these markers are highly predictive of all-cause mortality, you can start there with some really basic things. And that's what Blueprint is trying to do is, is break through all the noise and disagreement and say, this is a model that a person can do that is, that is trustworthy because it has data. Now, is it the best model? Maybe. Are there other other better models? Likely. Sure, that in time. But at least it, it's a, it punches through the current noise to give somebody a stable base to start from.

And that's what I've tried to do is I say with tongue and cheek, Blueprint is the best health protocol ever built in history. Prove me wrong with your data. Now, I would love it if someone prove me wrong with your data. It'd be the best thing, it'd be the best result of the endeavor, because now we have two viable paths for good health, and then hopefully three and four and five. That's the best possible outcome.

And we can layer up and scaffold it from, there. So Blueprint is not trying to be the best, is trying to be an example of how we punch through noise and allow people to have a stable base to start to then do their own protocols. So moving from philosophy for a second to the tangible, because as you mentioned, you know, a lot of people that are listening today are thinking about, well, what do I eat? Not going into what do I eat, but rather give some examples of some of those top line biomarkers that are being really used to drive and help you understand how are you doing and are you heading in the right direction.

So on a specific level, what are some of those that you can mention to our audience? I'd say a few of the most compelling markers we like. We like looking at this DNA methylation speed of aging score. it looks at your body's tree rings. So a couple drops of blood and you can look at your DNA methylation patterns and look at how fast you're aging. We like that a lot. And so as you mentioned before, I've reduced my speed of aging the equivalent of 31 years. And my body is now accumulate aging damage slower than the average 10 year old.

Okay, so let's just say someone says, oh, the DNA methylation tests are garbage. They're not ready for prime time yet. not good enough. Okay, fine. Let's go to something like liver enzymes. If you look at my liver enzymes, ALTA, AST, and G-G-G-T, I'm 49. I've yet to find someone who has a better liver enzyme profile. I would love for someone to show me theirs and find out what they're doing so I can replicate it. But that, we know liver enzymes has a lot of good data. We know, for example, V-O-2 Max is a strong predictor of longevity. I'm in the top 1.5% of the 18-year-olds. So we have, no matter how you want to look at blueprint. We have 15 to 20 data points that roughly say the same thing.

I'm in pretty good health. Am we perfect? No. Are the things we can do better? Yes. Are the things we missing? Yes. All those things are true. Are we wrong on some things? Sure. Like all true. But the level of the amount of data we've now accumulated, it's pretty overwhelming that things are trending positively, especially given the fact that for the first few decades in my life, I trashed my body in every possible way. It was sleep and eating bad food and not prioritizing it. So it's a pretty remarkable turnaround for someone who's 43 years old to now be in my situation in pretty good health. Taking some of those, when you started at your baseline, you know, we've had people come on this podcast talk about things like V-O-2 Max, DNA-age methylation. So with the methylation age,

what did you start off at when you first tested? Was it older? Was your biological speed of aging? was it the same age that you are, which is 45, or was it older? It was older. And so sadly, the test wasn't available. I didn't do the test until I was a year into Blueprint. So I wish I would have captured it right when I started. But the mean of my first three tests, I believe, was 0.84. And then most recent was 0.69.

And then were there any other markers that you had that were at the beginning? To give our audience a sense of sort of what was the baseline that you were dealing with? Yeah, I mean, my inflammation was 19. Right now, I'm point one. Is that like CRP? Yeah, CRP, yeah. Okay, got it. Yep.

So, I mean, 19 is a bad number. Point one is a good number. Looking back now at your life then to now, just taking the category of inflammation, hot topic, chronic inflammation. Everybody's thinking about it. what do you think were the one, two, three biggest things that you did to support that? Is sleep number one? I was obese.

I was 50 to 60 pounds heavier than I am now. And the food, my food was awful, just, you know, highly processed, terrible sleep, unmanaged stress. So I was in, you know, high, like, yeah, I was in a constant state of terror on all. all the things going on. And I'm sure depression probably ravaged my body pretty, pretty well. I mean, it's like kind of everything. As a kid, even as growing up in this little town, drinking soda on a daily basis,

like 32 ounces was the norm. Having sugar on sugar cereal was the norm. It was very hard for me to understand how these could have been norms. But, and being out the sun constantly without sunscreen. So I just kind of did everything. that one would not want to do. I'm glad you brought up the sunscreen and skin because another part of the work that's doing, in addition to the biomarkers that you might get through blood, as you mentioned,

CRP, your metabolic health, looking at your monitoring your glucose to make sure that you're within range over a period of time. You're also working on the external side of the body. Is that for vanity purposes? Or what can you tell our audience about how our appearance is connected to the actual way that we are biologically aging as well? Yeah. We do try to take a holistic perspective. So we work on skin a lot, as you mentioned.

We work on everything. We're trying to achieve a biological state of a younger person. So I'm chronologically 45. We want my body to match the biological specifications. of someone much younger than myself. So, for example, my boys are 20 and almost 18 now. I'm trying to be like them. And it's convenient because every time I do a test,

I can ask one of them to jump in the MRI machine or ultrasound or whatever. And so I can look at my genetics through them. So it's fun for them. It's fun for me. We have these comparisons. And so it might be unreasonable to think that I can achieve an 18-year-old status like them

on all the markers. The science may not be there yet. but it's a fun frame. It's a fun thing to do with them. And I think it's entertaining for a lot of people to imagine that we would aim for that kind of thing. You mentioned the word fun a few times. Are you having fun? Yes.

This is the thing. Never in my life have I had so much fun. I've never felt more alive, ever. And that's not just for PR you genuinely feel. I do. Because your comparison is you being depressed. Yeah. And feeling like.

shit and not wanting to if there wasn't afterlife not wanting to continue because you couldn't imagine any part of a more hopeful future. I feel like it feels like my consciousness has expanded.

I feels like I can experience more and feel more and think more like my space that I can occupy is more. And I don't know, that's a really challenging thing to use to use words to try to explain that. coming from my previous self where it felt numb and impaired and miserable.

And I think it's why I have this desire to make this observation that we are so lucky that we exist. Let's just rally around the idea that we want to exist. All of us. Now, if I were to, I can say these words because I'm in the state where I feel that. But 15 years ago, I wouldn't have signed up for that. I didn't want to exist. I wanted to die. And I think many people in society don't want to live. They don't have the desire to live. And I understand that. They could be in difficult situations for a variety of reasons. And so as society, it's not surprising that going back to our conversation, you take a human, you surround them with thousands of stimuli with addictive like tendencies and you say good luck. No wonder we don't have a burning desire to exist. We're addicted and we feel miserable and we're depressed and we want to die and we don't think we can think that things are going to change and we feel sour about society and we don't trust society like I understand that and so we we just we don't have

even a starting point to say can we all agree we just want to exist because we're not even a good spot yet and so I mean I understand it I was there going back to the protocol the blueprint protocol which also there's a version that's blueprint light you know not everybody has to follow first of all you want people to do whatever they want to do. Yeah. But you're trying to help people understand why are they doing what they want to do? And is that in their best interest? And only they can ask and answer themselves, that question.

But there's a blueprint light, which we'll get into it in a second. But in the blueprint protocol, were there any things, even for you, who was sort of a pro-am, an amateur professional researcher and looking into things, even before? you start a blueprint, were there any things that surprised you in terms of how much they contributed to your endpoint goal of wanting to slow down your age and then phase two potentially reverse your biological age? I'm surprised by the whole endeavor that basically if you say if you eat this number of calories, these foods, these supplements, this exercise schedule, and this sleep protocol, and I have a few other things, but I should take those things,

that you do those things reliably, it produces near perfect. biomarkers in the body. Yeah. That's unbelievable to me. Like, it's mind-blowing. You didn't feel that that was likely in the beginning? Yeah, I didn't feel like it was, I didn't feel like we knew enough about health and the body and wellness to, to reliably peg near perfect health. Now, that does not mean that bad things aren't going to happen, right? Like, stuff happens to the body all the time. And so I'm, and we found bad things with me throughout the process. So it does not insulate you from bad things from happening. But if you would have told me you follow this protocol and it can be near perfect health, I wouldn't have believed it.

Let's go through a couple of those things. So again, these are your sort of end of one. You're putting out your data, but it's being inspired by the literature that's out there. And again, if people want to do it differently, they can do their own version and they can upload it to this leaderboard website. What's the website called again? RejuvenationOlympics.com. Olympics. So again, if anybody believes they could do it differently, amazing. Not only do you encourage that, but you welcome that because you feel that you could benefit. If you find that they're doing something differently, like surviving all on, I think I saw somebody tweet you and

they said they're doing the cow-only diet, they're only drinking cow milk, eating beef and some other versions of that. Okay, great. If that worked for you, that's great. Put that out there and maybe people might adopt that. But going through a list of those few things. So number one, you mentioned was calories, right? Tell us what you are and your team implemented for you when it comes to, obviously, everybody can assume you're eating whole foods, which you are, but how much food are you eating? Yeah, 2,000 calories a day. And 2,000 calories, and that was based on some of the literature around caloric restriction. That's right. And the idea that if you were underneath a little bit of what your maintenance was, that there was strong enough data to support the

idea that that could help you reverse markers or like get your markers back to the speed of like a younger person or was it this could actually help you reverse age or was it both both yeah there's there's a slowing of aging process and then there's a rejuvenative process that happens in some way shape or form in some organs yeah where organs start functioning and looking more like a younger state. So we already talked a little bit about sleep, but let's just highlight that top line. So you go to sleep at 8.30, you wake up at 4.30-ish, somewhere around there. You don't wake up with an alarm clock. Right. And how did you decide on that approach for you? I tried a few hundred different versions of going to bed between 830 and 1030, 11. And it just

kind of where it naturally settled. And everyone has a different circadian rhythm. So my bedtime is not other people's bedtime. And they can go. The key thing is just consistency on the routine. It's not my bedtime that necessarily matters. But I was also trying to optimize for resting heart rate. You know, when I found out that was one of the best predictors of my sleep quality is 10 minutes before I went to bed, looking at my resting heart rate was a pretty strong predictor of. And so I would time when I had my last meal because when I ate my last meal would determine my resting heart rate and the day's activity. And that would determine my sleep. So I figured out all these relationships I had with myself and they just kind of evolved from that.

So just pulling on that thread, I think that one thing that a lot of people don't know, but that would be surprising, even the people that follow your work is that your last meal is at what time? 11 or so. Yeah, 11 a.m. Yeah. So you found you worked backwards and said that that, that, leads to the optimal resting heart rate, which leads to the best quality sleep. It's not that 11 a.m. is an arbitrary number. Yeah. That was primarily the data. That's right. Yeah. Oh, sorry, please. Yeah, I just found that going to bed with an empty stomach, I slept better.

Now, other people say if they go to bed with an empty stomach, they don't sleep as well. And that they have hunger pains and it bothers them. So this is just me trying to figure out what works in my case. And top line, you were using a whoop, which I use as well. I think is great. People could use ORA or something. But you were using a tracker to see. And what was the thing that got you from mid-90s sleep score to 100?

Do you know what it was? Was it just the consistency of you practicing this routine? Was there anything that you did that not only did you hit 100, which I saw a whoop retweet, but you consistently stayed there and have stayed there for months? Do you know what the difference was? Yeah, and I'm in the 99th percentile for performance among all their users. And so if you, I think it's probably like a stacking mechanism like I do with the Blueprint protocol today is probably 10 things.

And they're all nuanced things. Like, for example, I know if I work right up to my bedtime, I'm going to have a bad night's sleep because I'll ruminate. The thing I am thinking about right before I go to bed, right before my head he hits a pillow, I'll ruminate on all night. and I'll be in like this semi-dream state, semi-awake state going through it. So I have to have a one-hour wind-down routine. Otherwise, I ruminate.

The food is a situation. There's like all these little small things I've learned in life that they have to be just right. And then you can nail the sleep. And so it's, I've built my life before sleep was a nice to have. And now it's become my, I've built my life around sleep. so flipped in priority. One of the things that people know even that have pretty decent sleep is that they wake up in the middle of night and pee.

Yeah. And that gets them up and it's hard to get back to sleep. Yeah. I'm definitely one of those people. If I don't have to pee in the middle of night, I do pretty well. Yeah. But if I have to pee, it kind of takes me a little bit of time.

What did you do to work through that in your own life? Yeah, so I agree. Same situation for me. I started modulating my fluid intake. So I would front load my fluid intake to the first part of the day. And so by the time I hit bedtime, I'm still hydrated, but I don't have to go to the bathroom. And so that's been a nice strategy for me. I tried to do early morning, first part of the day consumption of fluids.

Then I also, we stumbled upon this where we bought a high frequency electromagnetic stimulation machine. So it just like pulses muscles. And you sit on the seat and it flexes your pelvic floor, which, you know, your bladder is there as well. And so I strengthened my bladder. And so the idea behind that was, would that potentially help me? And so I have actually had an improvement in lessening the number of times I get up at night. So it's hard to pinpoint that being the thing that changed it, but it's an example of we're trying to come at it in unconventional ways. That was kind of a surprise when we didn't plan out necessarily. But yeah, maybe to your question, it's a process

I've been trying to perfect for a couple years. And I probably don't even know now all the things I do. It's just hidden to me. How often do you and your team meet to look at the data and then adjust accordingly? Daily. Every day. Every day. We're changing something.

Set time every day that there's a calendar meeting that's there. The team all meets. Is it in person? Is it on Zoom? Yeah, several meetings a week. Then we're always messaging each other. We change something usually daily. And all the individuals that work with you generally, these are part of a full-time staff, of a clinic that you guys have set up?

Yeah, we have a full-time team, and then we have a bunch of part-time people who work. Like, for example, we have a medical-grade ultrasound machine at the house, and then we have three synographers that work for us part-time. One specializes in the heart, the other in muscle skeletal, the other one in other organs of the body. So we do this full-body ultrasound protocol on a routine basis, so they come in and do that. So we have other specialists around the heart and other things like that. that. Coming back to the dietary component, because everybody's curious about that, what we eat has become so polarized, but also in a weird way, there's so much fascination with it. And there's different theories why, but a lot of people think that it's because we all do it every day, you know,

some people three times a day or more. So when it comes to your dietary approach, you've shared that you're vegan by choice. You just had decided that that was important to you, part of your philosophical approach. People can do differently if they want to. But what are the themes, whether people decide to do it vegan or not? Your son is doing it same blueprint protocol, but he's added chicken, I believe. Is it right? So what are the themes that it's come to when you think about diet that people could extrapolate from the lessons that you've integrated and the data that's gone into blueprint? What is what are the dietary themes that are there that anybody could help use for themselves to decide how they want to approach

diet. Okay, I'd say there's two layers to this. There's a thought experiment that I love to use when hiring team members. And it goes like this. This is a thought experiment between me and someone else. I'm going, we're in a social situation. We're having a conversation and I ask you how much water, you know, I've, I've been trying to work on my hydration goals.

How much water should I drink? Now, in a social situation, uh, you're, you're kind of in a, you're doing this social cohesion. And you say, well,

I think Brian, you know, you should probably take, you should probably drink like eight cups of water a day. I say, great, thanks. Like, how do you know that?

And when you realize that question comes back, you don't really know how you know, the other than you just maybe read something somewhere, somewhere or someone said something. And then I propose a question, have you seen the data? No. Okay.

So let's read to the thought experiment. Um, we're in a social situation. we're talking about hydration. I say I want to improve my hydration, how much water should I drink? Now, if the person has been paying attention to the thought experiment, their response will be,

I don't know. If they haven't, they'll go off on some other line of reasoning like this much for this reason. And so it's meant to show, to highlight what a person does know and doesn't know, and if they know what they don't know and what they do know, and for what reasons. And this is something that Edison did when he interviewed people as well,

for his lab, he would go to a restaurant and if the person applied salt to their soup before tasting it, he wouldn't hire them. They made the assumption about salt prior to testing it. And so in our societal conversations, it is a natural human disposition to speak before you think and to profess to know when you don't. And even when you think you know, because you may have seen you may have experience looking at PubMed and someone else doesn't know PubMed exists, it's still not certain you know because you found one paper. It's nuanced and complicated. And so in this topic, it's extraordinarily hard as a layperson, as a novice, to actually understand the science. And this is what I've learned myself. As much as I've learned about this

by hearing it day and day out and living it day and a day out and seeing all my data and seeing out the whole process, I still do not have the knowledge to be the authority on what to do and not to do. And the conversation that surrounds Blueprint, people's confidence are like a 98 out of 100 in what they think they should do and why. And it just is so disproportional to what knowledge somebody actually has. And this is again, it's why I created Blueprint, because if the anti-aging scientists can't agree among themselves, what does the average person like myself do? It's very complicated. And so the first step is to acknowledge we don't know and to pretend like we know, we might get ourselves in trouble. And so it's, yeah, hopefully Brooklyn is useful in that it may be a bit better

than what's out there today. Not perfect, but better. But really, the majority of the conversation I see happening is just like people screaming at each other in this warring fashion and I don't think anyone really knows. As your profile has grown, I've seen you even publicly state that you are holding back even sharing opinions on some things because you don't want your opinions to be a distraction or as a tool that other people use to invalidate everything else that you might have to say that could be beneficial to that. That's right. So that's on the one side.

The other side is that you're trying to provide frameworks within frameworks that allow people to at least get started down the pathway of having a better existence and that they themselves might even be surprised how they start to feel. And one of those frameworks that you've shared is this idea of sad. What's your sad score? And kind of like a sad challenge. I don't know if you've called it officially a challenge, but I've seen people do it as a challenge. And sad stands for self and destructive. So the sad score is seven things. Can you share those seven things?

Yeah. And why you put this out there as a challenge to see if people could attempt to go a week with striving towards a zero sad score. Yeah. So I did this to try to awaken the sensibilities a little bit, that when our best self is in charge of us, we want to do positive things, like go to the gym and work out,

take a pill, eat good food. And those things are all positive. When that happens, also the person may arrive that evening and eat a quart of ice cream two bags of chips, a bag of licorice, and watch three shows on Netflix. And they do that sometimes by justifying that they did positive things in the morning, and therefore they deserve it in the evening.

And so oftentimes doing positive things can have this boomering effect of making things worse, not always. But the point is, doing positive things is oftentimes a coping mechanism for the negative things that rule our lives. And so when people say, like, what is your best supplement and what is blank, what I'm hearing them really say is I'm in a really bad situation. I can't stop my overeating. I'm obese. I can't exercise two days in a row.

I can't go to bed on time. And so really the issue is they've got these addictive behaviors that they can't stop. And so the solution is not to try to pile on some good stuff and smother the bad stuff. The solution is to try to stop the bad stuff. Because the most powerful anti-aging protocol for them is not to layer on extra pills. It's to stop the bad stuff that's overwhelmingly smothering their body. And so instead of trying to score good points, you're trying to eliminate bad points. So instead of scoring a one, you want to be a zero.

And so, yes, the ones I've outlined would be eating too much food, junk food, sleep, exercise. And you can then, if you want to include alcohol and you want to include smoking, there's a few others. I've tried to do just the basics of being human of those things. And so it also helps people size up. A lot of people don't think of themselves as addicts. They'll think like, okay, I eat too much food or I have junk food, whatever, not a big deal. I can quit anytime I want. And the exercise is meant to show them, they make the move to stop these behaviors and they start experiencing addiction-like withdrawals and power. And then it's like, oh, wow. I didn't think of myself as an alcoholic or a drug addict or a blank, but it's the same kind of behavioral characteristics.

And it's meant to highlight, it's meant to basically give people a pressure test. Where are you at on the behavioral scale? It's just like a fun thing you do or are you full on in this addiction cycle? And so it's trying to create this self-awareness of where are you out in your life. I think we have the tweet over here at Tesla if you could bring it up so I could reference it. So number one is ate too much. Number two is junk food. Number three is you deprioritized sleep.

Number four is doom scrolling, infinite scrolling on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Number five is you had a drink of alcohol, whatever it might be. Smoking could be in that category too. Number six is content binge, Netflix, Apple TV, et cetera. And number seven is skipped exercise. So as our audience is looking at this and they want to do this sad challenge, right, the goal would be to at least try to do it for a week to see what you're, how controlling these behaviors are in your life.

Could they think of this as kind of like a pre-blueprint light? Yes. Okay, so before you think about blueprint, just try doing this. Yes. And see if you can score a zero. Yes. And if you can't, try again? Yeah.

So for the past two weeks, I've been holding Sunday live streams with people where I do these one-on-one interviews and we're trying to deconstruct. basically we're taking into the process of who's your version of evening, Brian, and what is that version, what is their vice? Yeah, so the last one, it was great. Okay.

There was a woman, I forgot her name. Sarah. She had a British accent. Yeah, yeah. So I'm trying to help people doing this. And so it's funny, like, when Sarah was talking, when she pilled back the layers, like she wanted to go to bed on time,

but it was almost this Herculean impossible task to go to bed on time. Now, that's kind of weird. You put this in perspective. On the one hand, we're marching towards superintelligence. Humans can't go to bed on time. If we sit in that for a minute, just where we're at, it's the most rich juxtaposition that captures this moment in time. And it's important that everybody see that for themselves

because they could hear that. But just like every good therapist knows, even if you think you know the answer, can't give it to the person that you're giving therapy to, they have to come to to come to that conclusion themselves. So when you figure this out yourself, and I've been through this before in my own life when my health journey started, there's almost like an opening that's created where you are a little bit more open to the possibility that maybe you're not in as much control as you thought you were. Exactly. And that's what happened

with Sarah in the conversation is we started pulling this thing back. She realized it was the cultural programming of expectations around her. Work ethic and sleep. Yes. And rebelling as a child and what that meant for her? Exactly. So she took her some time to pill these things back. And then she finally realized, like, oh, like these are the arguments that sleep

sabotage Sarah is making. And here's where she's getting this authority source for her justifications. But she was oblivious to it. And it's why I go back to Adam and Eve. Like you and I, you would probably never even think about Adam and Eve in your daily life, like as a source of potential influence. And this is the thing is there there's this whole apparatus of philosophical and cultural understanding we have about ourselves that's invisible to us all the time. And so, yeah, this is meant to basically surface some of those things to create more awareness of what is really driving my behavior. and most of us figure out through this process,

we have no idea until we actually take the time to figure it out. So, Brian, as we're winding down here with the time that I have with you, and thank you and your team members for making this happen and putting your work out there, it's really been amazing for me to watch. I've just been enjoying it, and I want to start on the process of uploading my own data and participating in the conversation.

I know a few other people have inside of the health community, and I think it's just incredible that you have gotten so many people to get excited about at least putting their data, data out there. Regardless if they follow the blueprint protocol or not, put your data out there and then let's have an actual conversation. So thank you again for doing that, initiating that. So I have a few other categories and just quick things that I want to go through because I ask my audience about some of the things that they might want to hear from you or have you talk on. And I have a few of those that I'd love to just go through really quickly. So the first one is

why did you spontaneously start to have erections in the middle of the middle of the night. What should people know about erections if they're male? Yeah. And the blueprint protocol. Yeah. There are, there's pretty decent evidence that erection characteristics, nocturnal, is a biological age identifier. So when you're younger, you have more harder, sustained directions. And then when you get older, they lessen. And so one of the unexpected outcomes of the things we were doing in a blueprint is I started having many more erections at night. And this was this was not something I planned on sharing. I'm not the kind of I'm not the kind of person that's going to be making a 69 joke or a 420 joke or a bathroom joke.

It's just not my thing. And the journalist I was talking to, he had written this article and he came back and he said, hey, my editors are asking, you know, what do you do for penis health? And I said, well, funny you ask, you know, like, my nighttime erections have been dramatically improved. And so I thought I was having an off-the-record conversation. I had no idea it was going into the article. So it was kind of a mistake that this thing came out. But yes, the number and strength of my erections has dramatically increased has been primarily from this high fems equipment.

So high-frequency electromagnetic stuff where it's improving my pelvic floor strength. So it was just kind of an unexpected outcome of another purpose. protocol, but since it took our attention to look at the biological age characteristics of erections. Well, we've had Dr. Lou Ignaro on the podcast, who is the Nobel Prize winner around discovering the role that nitric oxide plays in vasodilation, and his work was pivotal in ultimately creating Viagra. And obviously, he's proud of it leading to that that's helped a lot of people, whoever need that. But his foundational work is really talking about how lifestyle, very similar to blueprint,

exercise, eating a particular way, sleep, all increases nitric oxide, and then you don't have to be reliant on the blue pill. So, blue pill. So part of what I'm hearing is that there's this device that you're using, but it sounds like your lifestyle is probably a big contributor to that as well. Probably, yeah, yeah. The next one I have is,

you mentioned previously in the conversation that sometimes things happen. Sometimes there's things going on our bodies. People may discover that they have a tumor. They have to modify their protocol. They have to change things. One of the things that you noticed was that you had something going on in your neck that was a red alert. What was going on your neck? And how did that lead to you focusing on your posture? Yeah. We did a full-body MRI and we got the results back. And everyone looked at the MRI and said, all good, thumbs up. And then we took it to a specialist. And because I was having some symptoms. And he had,

identified that I have congenitally narrow jugular veins. So the vein that allows for the blood flow from the brain out are small, which means I've restricted blood flow from those two places. And that, when you have restricted flow, you have intracranial pressure, which is not good for the brain. And you have other things like headaches and you can have brain fog and stuff like that. And so he identified this as a problem, which I never was aware of my entire life. But it makes so much sense. Like, for example, when I was a kid and I was like six or seven years old, every other kid in the room would be able to lay on their stomach and then look up at the screen to watch the show.

And I could never do that. I would get a really bad headache. And I had to go back and sit and look at the screen. And I never understood why everyone else could just move their neck up. But now like a lifetime of experience now made sense of, I would restrict the flow of my jugular veins and I couldn't get flow out of my brain. And so when looking at the problems, the team kind of went on code alert, Code Red Alert because I had all these

I had all these biomarkers in my brain that were not good. And so I didn't also didn't know was I going to have a stroke or was I going to have a seizure? Like we just didn't know. And so we spent a few months working on this and I went through a bunch of physical therapy and a huge helper was my posture.

And so now there's a few things that I would just quickly convey that would be helpful to people to be in a correct postural position. Imagine a string is right above your head and you pull it straight up and it pulls your, spine and your neck into this position. Typically, you know, we'd be like in this position or like

this, which restricts flow. And so we, since I've made these postural, everyone's the room. Yeah. Yeah. That has the effect. We, in making these changes, I reduced my white matter hyperintensities in my brain, which you do not want white matter hyperintentities in the brain. It's bad. I reduced by the equivalent, I think, of nine years in several months' time. So it dramatically changed my brain health by changing my posture. So that was persuasive data. And yeah, it was really nice to find. And so now posture is a primary area of focus for me on every moment basis. Beautiful. There was this tweet that you had that had a lot of interaction with it. And it was a list of a few things that you ask your son to do. Right? So it was, hey, I don't ask much. I'm paraphrasing here. I

didn't bring it up, but we can look for it if we want. I'm paraphrasing here. You would know it better. But I don't ask a lot of my son, but I ask him to like clean his room. You know, there was one other thing. And then it was like, give me a liter of blood a month. And at the end of you, were like, just kidding, I don't ask him to clean his room. Do you ask for blood from your son? And is that part of your protocol? Yeah. Yeah. My son's, my son, my son's, my blood boy. No, he, we did this multi-generational plasma exchange. He gave me a leader of his plasma. I gave a leader of my plasma to my dad. Who's on a version of blueprint? That's right. Who's on a version of blueprint. It was a one-time thing. My son, so it's not a routine thing anymore.

We just did it on this multi-generational thing. I'm open to being my father's donor. So I would more, it would make me, nothing would make me happier than for me to be a, value contribute to my father's wellness. If this proves out to be a therapy, that's useful to him. But on a routine basis, no, I'm not getting infusions from my son. My son was my blood boy for a one-time occurrence, but not in an ongoing fashion. But if you wanted to do it in the future, you'd be open to it. I mean, he has a fantastic sense of humor. On his Instagram profile, it's, you know, hit me up for blood. He's leaned into it. It's really fun. for him. And it's been interesting to see that story make the rounds around the world. And

how, like, I've heard from some people that, like, there's this rich guy who's literally drinking blood from babies, you know, it's like it's there. Then it's also on the other side of the spectrum. But as people have tried to understand what is going on, why it's happening, what I'm really doing, what kind of person am I, you know, like, there's just been, it's a people, it's a big idea, people are trying to get their heads around it. For sure. And misunderstandings is going to be far for the course. Yeah, yeah. But misunderstandings and criticisms, and I feel like you handle it well. In fact, I've seen you on Twitter every so often, invite people to give their best criticism towards me. Yeah. And we'll link to some of those.

I thought it's funny. And I feel like you made yourself part of the joke in the conversation and said, hey, look, I get it. I get these criticisms that are there. And I'm going to lean into it. And it's going to be a conversation. Yes. Speaking of your son, he just got into it. to university, I believe. Somewhere prestigious you had mentioned, I think, on social media. So congratulations to him. He's doing a version of Blueprint right now. He's doing Blueprint. And I've seen you talk about this before, but naturally being in school, there's different priorities that exist. Are there strategies that he's thinking about of how he wants to maintain the blueprint framework and still have any kind of experience that he choose to have?

that he chooses to have in college. Yeah, we talk about this daily. And specifically, so he's, we've already mapped out a grocery shopping plan for him to do on a regular basis. We've mapped out what he could do for the rest of his calories. So we've created a rough sketch, like how can he maintain his current diet? we also have talked about the inherent tension that's going to happen where late-night events are happening and certain social events are going to happen with alcohol and other things like that and what he does in those situations. And it's nuanced and complicated because being a

part of community is so important in life, especially when you're that age and participating in those social events, removing yourself comes at a certain cost. It's also the case that when you participate in that behavior, he knows perhaps better than most people exactly what effect it has on his body. So he understands the price he's paying in life points. Like you're literally paying life down when you do those things. We don't think about other, but we are. And so it's an active conversation. I offer perspectives on how he can think about it, but I stop there. This is a model I want him to build on his own. I want him to create his own philosophy, not fulfill a mind.

And so I try to offer him perspectives. And specifically some things that he can do is potentially create alternatives to have those life experiences, but not at the cost of his health. And so we don't have a solve for it. He knows full well what's going to happen. He knows also the risks of fall into some bad habits. once you start eating poorly, eating poorly again is not a big deal. Once you start staying up late and missing your sleep,

staying up late more is not a big deal. And you just slip into these really bad habits very fast. And that's your new norm. And you just forget you ever had anything else. So it's an ongoing conversation. It's complicated. We don't know. I'm trying to help them the best I can.

But we'll see. It'll be an evolving project. And if he came to you in university where I was his first year, second year, third year, and said, hey, I do want to do this anymore. you would understand that as his own journey and his decision to make? I do. Yes, absolutely. And I'm very clear with him that I will offer my best understanding of reality to him. And that's exactly where it stops.

But he is his own person and is capable and responsible for carving out his own path. And I do not want to hang over his shoulder. And for him to feel obligated to be or behave a certain way to try to please me. I'll be his father and I'll be there for him no matter what. And he'll do his thing. But I think it's a really important line to draw that he's not living my life. Beautiful. There was this tweet that Elon Musk shared.

I think it was last year. And it was on the topic when longevity was really starting to pop in. to the zeitgeist as like on a national level, beyond just like our limited groups. And one of the things he was saying was that he's not sure if the idea of living long or living forever, not that we're close to that even forever is a good idea. And his primary reason that he was saying, paraphrasing here, was that it tends to be that the tools and technologies that are available, first are available to the people with means. And then most importantly, as people get older, they get stuck.

in their way of thinking of the world and fighting for them and their perspective, which comes at the expense of often the next generation. How do you think about that in the framework of how you're approaching blueprint with your goals and what you want to be as an example for society on? If I understand what he's saying correctly, his observation is a problem that he's identified is that there's less neuroplasticity with age. That sounds like an engineering problem to me. So of all the engineering problems in the world we have today,

I would put that one, I would grab that one and say that's one I'd like to work on. As one that is solvable, there are much more difficult engineering problems that stand in the way of progress. So I don't think it, I don't think it is a level of difficulty that should even be in the consideration set

that would somehow slow down the speed of progress in health and wellness. So just like he's tackling the idea or anybody's tackling a problem, in its case, reusable rockets, somebody could say it's never going to happen, but that's the thing that we need to solve to go to Mars in his goal,

that's there for him and is driving unified goal. In that same way, we can't use the idea that these tools are not accessible to everybody, which nothing is in the beginning, plumbing, electricity. It's often those things start off with the people that have the means. But we can't let the fear of that and the fear of neuroplasticity and the world being run by people who are older, who are very fixed in their thinking, as an excuse not to invest in these things.

I mean, you're mapping a, like a 20th century reality to a 21st or 22nd century situation. The problems just don't match. You know, it's imagining that the same problems we consider today will be the same problems in the future unlikely. So I don't think it's a proper identification of the thing we should focus on or that should be a guiding principle. I mean, this is why I go back to the most basic observation. So given everything we could say, every construction of words that could ever express a thought or a feeling or emotion, the thing I would hope we all agree on is we want to exist. That's it. Now, like, if we exist, we can play all the fun games we want to play. We can do podcasts and we can disagree about everything.

We can fight about everything. We can do everything we want as humans. But we can't play any of those fun games if we don't exist. So can we agree on one thing? Now, of course, it branches out into complexity, but I just like we, we're, there's, it's so noisy in the world today. And we've created this suicidal situation of a world

with how we built society. It's no wonder we're suicidal. So we've lost touch and the most basic theme we could ever want, which is to exist. Beautiful. Brian, this has been fantastic. I don't want to overstay my time that I have.

here with you, but I want to do take a moment to just acknowledge you. You put out this video about your evening routine, and it started off with, great, here's what I do when I come back home, you know, take my shoes off, you know, I do my skincare routine. And you started walking through all the steps, and I was watching it just because I'm curious of following your journey. And you hit this point where you were talking about a big driver of your motivation to have the evening routine that you have. And that was the thing that you look forward to the most and that your son looks forward to the most is this time together that you guys have. Because earlier in the interview you shared that, okay, I don't eat food after a certain time. So people could take that,

they could project that on their own lives and they're imagining themselves missing birthday dinners, missing this, missing that, which by the way, you're not saying that everybody has to do that. You're just explaining your protocol and your methodology and that's going to be different for other people. But generally speaking, when you adopt health aspects, it's going to come with some initial constraints, even things like not drinking alcohol. You're imagining all the things that you can't celebrate anymore with the reality that you have.

But seeing you talk about that time with your son, and I think you guys were like foam rolling or like doing a little bit of stretching in the evening, and going back to this original idea that you had, which was you didn't want to live a life that... allowed you not to be a great dad. And seeing how your worlds have come together where you have this most meaningful time for your son who's about to go off to college, you're not gonna have as much time with him,

at least in the near future, and yet still being able to maintain and prioritize the goals that you had, it was so beautiful. We have so many examples of 100 millionaires, billionaires, doing all sorts of different things with their time and money, and great, to each their own. But to see that you've decided

to take the proceeds of your sale, $800 million and not only see how you could create this framework that could better society, but also prioritize the things that mattered to you most in your life, which in this case is one instance is your time with one of your kids. It was just a beautiful and very humanizing moment. And it made me feel as somebody who works with both my sisters and as a close relationship with my family, I don't have kids yet, my wife and I, but definitely in the future. it just reignited that feeling of like wanting to double down on the things that are most important.

So thank you for being a possibility of that. And even if folks who are listening today, what's important to you may not be important to them, but I feel like you're asking the most important question, which is what is most important to you and are your behaviors actually taking you in the right direction? And for that, I thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Hi, everyone.

Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about.

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