Modern Wisdom - #631 - Bryan Johnson - The $2M Anti-Ageing Protocol For Longevity

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Bryan Johnson is a founder of Braintree and Kernel, a futurist, biohacker and an author. What does it take to achieve immortality? This is the frontier that Bryan Johnson is beginning to pioneer. Armed with a team of the world’s top researchers and an unlimited budget, he is using cutting edge science and technology to see just how long he can live for. Expect to learn why Bryan chooses to be on a fully plant based diet, what Bryan Johnson’s full morning routine looks like, the optimal body fat percentage for living longer, why humans are addicted to self-destructive behaviour, why Bryan doesn’t fear death, why Bryan doesn’t use saunas or cold plunges for increasing his lifespan, what his training plan looks like and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Bon Charge’s red light therapy devices at https://boncharge.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Check out Bryan's website - https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.co/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Brian Johnson. He's the founder of Brain Tree and Colonel, a futurist, biohacker, and an author. What does it take to achieve immortality? This is the frontier that Brian is beginning to pioneer. Armed with a team of the world's top researchers and an unlimited budget,

he is using cutting edge science and technology to see just how long he can live for. Expect to learn why Brian chooses to be on a fully plant-based diet. What his morning routine looks like, the optimal body fat percentage for living longer, why humans are addicted to self-destructive behaviour, why Brian doesn't fear death, why he doesn't use saunas or coal plunges for increasing his lifespan, what his training looks like, why he doesn't use saunas or coal plunges for increasing his lifespan, what is training looks like? And much more. Don't forget, if you're listening, you might not be subscribed, and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up. It is the best way to support the show. It ensures that

you're not going to miss any of the episodes, and it makes me very happy indeed. So go to Spotify or Apple podcasts and press the subscribe button. I thank you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Crafted London. They are the number one men's jewelry company worldwide, literally the biggest in the world with over half a million happy customers. And they make the best pieces of jewelry for men. It is very difficult to get good guys stuff to wear that doesn't look too gaudy or too cheap or too tacky and they've nailed it. They've got gold and silver custom

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And MW15. A checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. Brian Johnson. Do you see a death? No, I love life. Is there a distinction between those two? I... I do not have a... I know what fear feels like,

and I don't experience that emotion when contemplating death. I spent a good bit of time looking at the longevity subreddit many, many years ago when David St. Claifers came on the scene. And one of the things that I kind of realized, or I thought I might have realized, was it seemed like a little bit

of a rehabilitated denial of death in a way. It seems like there are certain elements of the longevity community that do see that. But based on what I've looked at from what you're doing, it seems like a very enjoyable fun experiment where you're trying to see how far you can push your body. But I'm trying to work out, you know, is the deeper down in the recesses, is there something, is there a denial of death, is there a fear from what's coming in the future, driving you at all? My main source of inspiration

is having read hundreds of biographies. I love learning about people in their time and place that we're able to work on impossibly hard things. So talent is the ability to hit the target. No one else can genius hits the target. No one else can see. And the majority of us in life, we play the games that society gives us.

So that's hitting the target. So it currently, it's social media followers and this and that. So people like to play games where points can be kept and you can be compared to people and ranked. Genius is a different game. It's trying to find things that don't exist and you need to have the stamina and fortitude to go out and pave your own path and do things that are not recognized, appreciated or valued, even in your lifetime. And so to me, that reading biographies is about people who do that. Is they really try to survey all of existence.

They are somehow immune to their time and place and are able to see these things. That's really, so in my understanding of my reality, I seek to be like those people. And with that, it means disregarding current wisdom around approaches for health, fitness, sleep, diet, nutrition, training, everything. Everything. The reason why we exist, what we do with our existence, everything. Everything. The reason why we exist, what we do with our existence, everything. Okay, so in your view, what is the reason why we exist?

Lucky us we exist. I mean, I do not recall asking to exist. It just happened. And I really enjoy existing. And I would like to continue to exist. And these questions, for example, like, what is the meaning of life? I think that is an example of what it means to exist. I don't think there is an answer. It just is, a person's answer is reflective of that of the time and place. Basically, it's a mirror of the social and cultural norms and the person's trying to express themselves within those norm structures. And again, trying to hit targets. To me, we live at this really special time.

No human before us, no generation before us has ever been in a situation we're in, No human before us, no generation before us, has ever been in a situation we're in, where we're on this precipice of potentially radically extending and altering what it means to be conscious being. And it's just, it's delicious beyond words. And I think the faster we can fully embrace this opportunity, the better off we are. But I think we're still a little bit zombified. Like we just haven't quite seen it. And we'll be better off if we can try to catch these waves.

I like the idea of the meaning of life being basically dependent on the local ecology and the local time. So if it was written in 1100 AD, it would be in service of God. It would be hoeing the garden and the sun beating down on your back, but you're doing it because you need to praise the Lord. And if it's, pick your time, pick whatever it is that people desire.

I feel like I said, I mean, just, just building on your comment, like if you basically look throughout thousands of years of human history, and if you look at the emergent spiritual practices and religions that have emerged, and you put a shiny, you know, you put a wall in between the technology that time and place and the ideologies that are merged. So it's just not even including the personalities who gave birth to these ideologies. There's simply a reflection of what was technologically capable in that time and place. That's it. Human guru narrative aside, that's your set. It's just a

mirror on what, on the practical extent to which humans can aspire. Okay, so in this regard, does technology unlock our ability to think about our meaning and our place in the world? Yeah, I mean, the behind blueprint, I mean, a lot of people observed that blueprint, they think that blueprint is about health and wellness and anti-aging, it is really a contemplation about the future of our existence. And what I think we've demonstrated is that we've built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can. And we know what happens when algorithms get better at us

of doing things, flying airplanes, calculators, digital navigation, you name it, we embrace them because they do a given thing better, and they help us achieve our goals better than we could ourselves, so we can free our minds up and do other things. With Blueprint, I think I'm following Nietzsche of God is dead, I think the mind is dead. If the algorithmic ability, if I can measure the 35 trillion cells in my body, an algorithm can better manage entropy than I can. Of course, I'm going to opt into it and free myself up to do other things. And I think that's what we're at as a society. I mean, so yes, does technology unlock it?

Yes. I mean, I think at the most fundamental level and the most meaningful philosophical revolution to happen in a long time, the mind is dead. It's here. Like it just arrived. I think a lot of speculation about artificial intelligence maybe five years to ten years ago was that yes, you will be able to automate certain things it'll be able to do kind of Normal forward thinking processes, but you can't do creativity. It can't do art. It can't do writing. It can't do

music and then it turns out that it probably can, and given enough time, it's going to be able to do it better than us. One of the interesting things to reflect on from your point there was that navigation system. Everybody uses Google Maps or Apple Maps or some equivalent now, right? Why? We used to navigate by our favorite roads.

We would look at a map and have an A to Z out and go through all of the different routes and there would be a co-pilot that would be giving you the wrong directions. Why is it that we were so quickly prepared to switch from this personal orientating approach to using a GPS? connected to their ability to do wayfinding. I think that there is a difference in kind in terms of how people see their own regulation of their physiology, right? That there is some sacred sense that I shouldn't go in and tinker with what nature has already done, that it is able to regulate itself, it can optimize so on and so forth. You know, you can see this around vaccines, as well, that the difference between somebody taking a pill versus getting an injection, there's just, there are certain relatively arbitrary sort of rules that we place on what feels sacred,

what doesn't, what we should tinker with, what doesn't, what prepared to relinquish control of an outsource to a computer and what we're not. And given that we, as we just said, we thought that AI could do certain things and there was a limit and it seems like that limit has been pushed through, it seems quite timely that you are trying to break through another frontier of assumption, not creativity, but I guess self-regulation of the body, also using technology. Very well said. Yeah, I would give you, yeah, you absolutely synthesize that beautifully. I'll give you two thought experiments, which I think capture the essence of this. I hold these blueprint branches at my house. I call them the first supper.

And to prepare people, I'm, I explained to them, I'm going to introduce a few ideas to you that are most likely going to break your brain. They're going to, basically, you're going to experience one or multiple existential crises in this two and a half hour dinner. So here's a few thought exercises to get your brain prepared, like I do those three, and then I give them a thought experiment. And I say, let's imagine a scenario where an algorithm is built specifically for you, your personalized algorithm. And it takes better care of your wellness than you can yourself as far superior physical and mental spiritual well-being. You can have this algorithm that the catch is,

you have to be willing to accept its recommendations and follow its protocol. Would you be willing to do it? And about a third of the participants say, yes, like anything to free me from myself, yes. A third say, sure, but I wanna change a few things. It's like, lol, that's not the thought experiment. And then a third group gets deeply offended. You know, just what you were saying, you touch upon if they can't decide what to eat and what to drink and when to do it, they don't understand their existence.

So that is not thinking the first thought experiment. The second thought experiment, LA on top of that, is when you and I, if we say how good is technology going to be in 20 years time, without questioning it, you and I are going to agree it's better. Now, are we going to say there's nanobots in our bloodstream, repairing our DNA in real time, or is it AGI, whatever our speculations are, it has this dramatic assumption that it's better. If you and I say, what are you and I going to be like in 20 years from now? We don't even question it. It's worse.

We just don't know how slow or how fast that a K is going to be. But what if, in the 25th century people were talking about what humans in the early 21st century changed that fundamentally altered the future of human existence? It was that humans figured out how to attach themselves to the speed, the compounded rate of improvement that we see in our technology today.

So when you and I go to that second thought experiment, we say, what are you and I going to be like in 20 years? We don't know, but better. Unquestionably, we believe that. It's like the human Moore's law affiliation. I like to mean things. Okay, so we've flirted around what it is that you're doing at the moment. What are the headlines of what you've managed to achieve with your protocol, so far? I think the most compelling data is that I've using a state of the art DNA methylation algorithm. I have slowed my speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.

My body now accumulates aging damage at the speed better than the average 10-year-old and better than 88% of 18-year-olds, which means people at 10-years-old are accumulating aging damage, most don't realize that. Just as you get older, you accumulate damage faster in a compounds. And so my body's aging extremely slowly. Number two is I have 50 biomarkers that the things you would normally expect like cholesterol and triglycerides and things like that that are in the perfect optimal clinical outflow range. I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age. Several fitness tests where I test out as an elite 18-year-old, my body runs three degrees

Fahrenheit cooler than normal. So no matter how you're looking at it, where it's my DNA methylation, my fitness test, my biomarkers, my phenotypic markers, whatever you're looking at, the data says the same thing. I'm in near perfect health. Pretty impressive, pretty useful. What is the projection, presuming that you don't get into a car accident at some point?

What is the projection of your age, your potential longevity? Yeah, I mean, people are, a familiar frame of reference would be, what is the return of investment on this company? An investor typically want like a three X return or a five X return or a 10 X return will be out of the park.

Think about that on lifespan. If you can be around for the future of these technologies coming, your return on life investment could be five X, 10X, 100X, a thousand X. No one knows. You could have a massive return in life. And so the goal is be around. It's worth doing the hard work right now to dramatically slow your speed of aging. What I've been trying to do with blueprint is when people talk about aging, it's always this, oh, it's coming and oh, it's exciting. And wouldn't it be amazing if?

But no one had in my estimation said, okay, let's take all of the current scientific evidence. Let's put it in one person and let's see what we're at. Let's just give it a go. Let's see what the data says. Is the fountain of youth here right now? If not, how close, how far, where are we at? And that's what I've been trying to do,

is to say, actually, you know what? It's pretty compelling what's available right now. Are you familiar with the concept of longevity, escape, velocity? I am. Yeah, so it sounds like you're kind of referring to that, basically, that the longer that you stick about, the better the technology will be down the line,

which means that it will be able to extend your life longer. And if there is a point at which the technology will be down the line, which means that it will be able to extend your life longer. And if there is a point at which the technology is able to bypass or the technology gets stronger than the rate at which we age, you go, okay, my point is to stick about until that. And that would be longevity, escape velocity. So I've had a ton of people on the show talking about longevity, health and fitness. And it seems that the conception, the overarching principles aren't necessarily as universal, especially when we add your approach into the mix. What is the overarching principles that guide your approach for longevity?

Yeah, this has been a fun learning for me. You can have four anti-aging scientists read the same five papers and then ask them to design an anti-aging protocol and you'll get five different anti-aging protocols. There's just no agreement and there's not a way of settling the agreement and that's why I've endeavored to do this is I do it and then I share my data and yes, there's limitations of its n of 1, but it's better than n of 0. Okay, given your markers, given what you have learned, what does the framework look like or what are the principles and the longest levers that you're looking at?

It's a process of measuring extensively. I think I'm potentially the most measured human in all of history. Then it's taking that data and it's trying to assess the very best evidence. Now that's an art because again, you're going to have scientists look at the same data and they come with different conclusions. So, looking at the evidence, then it's implemented protocol in a subject like myself where I'm trying to be perfect in protocol adherence and then it's repeating data, evidence, protocol and do it again and again and again.

Why are you vegan? What's the thinking behind that? By choice. So, it blueprint does not express opinions about anything. It doesn't say whether vegan is him as good or bad or meat is good or bad. It just is a process to say measurement evidence protocol. And so I basically just ask my team, is it possible for us to do a vegan protocol and be within the targets of the optimal clinical outcome ranges? So the only exception is I take college and peptides,

I'm trying to find a vegan source for that. But yeah, it's a preference not a necessity. Why do you prefer it? Because I would like to I hope that a scale a scaling law of technology that the more intelligent a system gets the more compassion that it has. So this is an ethical veganism substrate, a little foundation that you're playing on top of

reducing animal suffering. I'm going to guess. It's a, it's a contemplation that the problem that humanity, the only problem we have to solve is species really is goal alignment. We have these godlike powers now. We just simply need to figure out, not simply, we need to figure out how to cooperate. And that means not just humans, but humans and plant our earth and humans and AI, like trillions and trillions and trillions of agents of intelligence, whether they're cells or whether they're bots or whether it's plants or whatever it is, we have this gigantic tapestry of computational goal, I'm it.

And it's a problem of a size and scale that just baffles the mind. So far, it exceeds anything we're capable of. And so when I think about the real game we're playing here, at the largest possible scale of this mathematical model, I hope that we trend towards compassion. Because while we are alpha on this planet right now, that's not, I don't think we're alpha anymore. And I think that we are going to want the attribute of compassion to exist in this broad tapestry

of intelligence. Would it potentially be easier, simpler, more efficient, more effective for you to add animal products in? Have you ever considered trying to do that? Is there a point in the future at which you'll say, let's do a six-month test where fish comes in or seafood comes in or red meat comes in. Yeah. I've shared everything. I've shared the entire blueprint protocol so people can do it and they can share their data. I personally don't want to do it. Right, I understand. In order to get the nutrients that you need without touching on animal products, I imagine that that's a very large amount of vegetables that you need to eat. I mean, I don't know large.

If you just look at the evidence and you say, I'm trying to goal line 35 trillion cells that make up me and the objective function is to reduce entropy. So I'm running this massive computational model with 35 trillion cells on goal alignment with myself. And I'm basically saying, can everything inside of me try to go after one goal, which is less entropy?

And we're looking at all the evidence, we're looking at all the different data. But to me, it's a really interesting quandary because we think about goal-liameter and cooperation of, can we get AI to align with 8 billion humans? Can we get 160-some odd nation states to cooperate on planet Earth? Like, we're always thinking about these big cooperation problems, but the cooperation problem, the goal-limit problem almost never is asked of each one of us. We get to always point our finger at everyone else and blame everyone else and ask everyone else to align their goals with ours. We're not being asked to do the tough work to say, hey, you know what? Inside of each of one of us is an absolute war

It's a Balkanized war with our very with our various selves And so to me the mastery of self is the ultimate challenge for anyone to go after It's harder than going to the moon. It's harder than going to Mars And that's I think where if we're going to succeed as a species. That's the hard work. We need to do We do not have complete control over ourselves though, right? We don't even know what ourselves are. We are self-deceptive. We often have contradictory and destructive behaviors

and desires that we want to engage in. And how do we know? We don't have a metric that says, I want a relationship, but I also want to be good at business, but I also want status, but I also want to have fun with my friends, but I also want to sleep well, and I also want to be healthy. You know, for us to be able to pull all of these together is challenging. And I want to get onto self-destructive behaviors, but before we even get to that, how can someone work out what it is that they want to want in life? Yeah, so if this is fun talking to you. This is the exact problem I've been trying to solve, and this is why I say the mind is dead.

So when I approached this problem with myself, the difficulty I had was I myself was out of control. I would overeat, I would engage in all kinds of self-destructed behaviors. I was 50 pounds heavier than my healthy weight. I was marching myself into the grave and I couldn't stop myself no matter what. And so that was like the personal problem into the grave and I couldn't stop myself no matter what.

And so that was like the personal problem I was trying to solve, which then mapped to some other ambitions I had. But when I look at myself and I'm trying to distill those kinds of questions, like, who am I, what do I want, what are my goals? There's thousands of Brian's chiming in. Like right now, it's, you know, it's 10 30 AM Brian speaking 5 30 PMs gonna have a different

Brian's gonna have a different answer Saturday Brian's gonna have a different answer With friends Brian's gonna have a different answer like there's thousands of different ways in going answer it based upon my biochemical state I trust none of them and That's why you know, I don't know how to tackle this complexity. So what I said is like, what is the most basic and simplest possible thing I can do that would actually wrestle my chaos into some order and, you know, like try to eliminate the unrulyness of my existence. And that's what Blueprint has done. and that's why I follow the algorithm.

It's freed me from this insanity, which used to be me. But you have to make a value judgment at some point, right? You have to say that the goal that I'm going for isn't to maximize status. It's not even within the world of health and fitness to maximize muscle mass, compete in a bodybuilding show to maximize my endurance or my HRV or my V02 max or whatever it might be. There was a point at which you had to go through a process of stepping back and saying what do I want to want. Yeah, that was the first step that had to be the first step. Yeah. And step number one, don the first step. Yeah. Yeah.

And step number one, don't die. Stay alive. Well, that's the problem with alignment, right? You know, that's the, yes. And everybody has as soon as you get a self-aware, recurring improvement, AGI. Okay, so Daniel Kahneman often talks about this idea of two levers that you can use to encourage behavior change. One of them being try harder and one of them be sort of stop doing the things that are

stopping you from doing the thing more. So press on the accelerator further or release the brake. And I think what I like about your approach is that your first priority as far as I can see is stopping pressing the break Before starting to press the accelerator stop doing the self-destructive behavior What is your framework for identifying self-destructive behaviors and overcoming them? It's a complicated question and I've tried to simplify the thinking of it anything that increases my speed of aging, I label as self-destructive.

Anything that slows my speed of aging is regenerative. So I try to make it very clean, left or right. What about overcoming it? How do you do that? You've got the many Brian's coming in. Yeah. And I've heard you talk previously about the fact that it's not about what 5 p.m. Brian wants to do.

He's a dick. It's what the plan says that he's supposed to do. And then when 5 p.m. Brian comes around, I have a friend who uses the term, I'm just working for the boss. So when it's his time to do something to get up and start writing a book or whatever it is that he needs to do, I'm just working for the boss. I don't make the decision. The boss already made the decision previously. I'm working for the boss. The boss also happens to be you, but it's not as simple

as I have made a prescribed set of rules that I'm supposed to follow, therefore at 5pm when my felt sense changes. Oh, I remember the protocol. There's motivation and there's a felt sense of what we're supposed to do. So, like, take me through or what are the lessons that people can take away for improving that adherence, for not having to rely on motivation as much, for improving their discipline, if that's even what you refer to it as. Yeah. Yeah, I am currently putting together a team of behavioral change experts, and I wanted to do this as a public experiment. I'm going to invite whoever wants to participate in a 30-day challenge to try to get their self-aided destruction scores to zero. And so the easy ones we target would be eating too much food,

eating junk food, skipping exercise, not meeting your bedtime, just some really basic ones. Not getting to the nuanced ones where, you know, is gaming good or bad under what circumstances, you know, like let's leave those complicated ones out. Just can you stop the blatant self-aided destruction behaviors? Then to have five behavioral change experts present their school of thought. Here's our protocol, here's how you go about doing it, CBT or whatever, and then have people

choose the school of thought that they resonate with. And then just have the team's compete for who can lower their sad scores the most. So I'm in no way an expert in this area on behavioral change. And I just thought it'd be a cool thing to try to popularize sad. That we've normalized sad in society so much so that you can do it out in the open with friends and everyone's cool with it. No one calls it out and it's all expected. And if you don't participate in sad, you get called out and ostracized from the group. You're the one who's meant to feel like you don't belong. And so for me personally, food is a gateway for bad behavior for me. And that was really where the dam was breaking.

And so doing this protocol of blueprint was a way to arrest the most violent destructive behaviors I had. And then the other ones have just been baby steps on top. Once I got control there, that kind of discipline has been naturally extending everywhere else in my life. But this is, I guess this is why I get excited about the future of being human, is if this algorithm legitimately can arrest my worst proclivities that I'm helpless to get to arrest, you know, can it do other things for me too, including can it get into things for me too, including

can it get into my mind one day of stopping all the self-destructing harm to myself with my own mind? And so this just takes a remapping of what it means to be human, but I've never been happier and more fulfilled. And it's funny because people, when they observe my behaviors, their assumption is that I'm sad, which is weird, which is ironic. Meanwhile, they're drowning in their own sad behaviors, and I'm the one that should be ostracized.

So it's a really funny self-defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they're doing. What would the steps that you found most effective at stopping yourself from binge eating? It was separating myself into multiple. I'm not one person. I am many. And then it was identifying the specific most egregious version of myself, which was evening Brian. He showed up at 7 p.m. every night, so identified who he was. I gave him a name. I listed out his persuasion tactics. It's been a long day. You deserve it. You did really well at this. You worked out really hard. You probably

already burned the calories off. Tomorrow we start all the persuasion tactics. And then when he shows up, I treat him as other. Hi, Brian. Hi, Avon Brian. I see you're here. I see what you're trying to do with your persuasion techniques. And you're not like you have been unauthorized to make decisions on how to, you know, you can't eat food, like period, you have no authorization. And so it's like this, this game of going about doing it. And in my mind, when I do that, I can see Evening Bryan throw a tantrum, you know, that the fact that his authority has been revoked

and how offended he is and how outrage he is and how he's just, if he could be violent, he would be. But it's this phenomena that's psychologically so interesting to watch how I myself play within myself on these dialogues. And at first, it was really, it was contentious. You feel that tension and you're so close to breaking, if for him, of repowering. But it was really personalizing these aspects of myself and making them other. And then I could work on them one at a time. aspects of myself and making them other and that I could work on them one at a time. That's interesting.

So, othering yourself, creating a distance between you and the things that you tell yourself, understanding that it is you, but it's a malignant version of you. It's like an evil alter ego or some conjoined twin that keeps on coming in and talking to you about things that you kind of they're born out of your desires, but they're not your highest desires. They're not your truest desires. They're not the things that tomorrow you would have wanted yourself to have done. Yes. You're creating that distance. I like that. I like anything that involves having a mindfulness gap You know a break in between stimulus and response. I think more of that is very very good What is it some insane number of our decisions? We've made the day before some insane number of the thoughts that we have today

We had yesterday some insane number of I mean I mean, here's a really really great insight from a friend Alex Hamosi and he says that When people talk about changing their diet to improve the things that they eat, they often get lost in the weeds around conceptualizing what the diet consists of. But he said, you probably eat maybe 80% of your calories from the same 10 meals. There are 10 meals that you have that probably consist of like almost the entire lion's share of your diet. Like I'm not a chef. I have maybe five good recipes in my back pocket. Okay, so all that you actually need to do is just change those things, right? You're actually focusing on those small number of decisions and it's kind of the same with this. So yeah, I mean, I think that for me, I've realized

that the most self-destructive behaviors that I have to is probably evening eating. I've had this long day, and I mean, I live in Austin, Texas now, and everybody goes for barbecue, everybody goes for whatever, and they, oh, well, there's dessert, and then there's home, and then there's snacks, and then so on. Yeah, fuck, it's 10pm, and I stopped eating half an hour ago. Yeah. So that's why I'm particularly interested in your approach for it. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to be human. And I think if we can all be honest, just for a minute, and to confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self-destruction all

the time as a starting point and not try to spin up these pretty little stories about that's what it means to live or this is what brings me happiness, their lives. But we've done such a phenomenal job of making them pretty stories and protecting them because we don't want to face this uncomfortable reality. But we are a species addicted to self-destructive behavior. And I don't think this is the form of intelligence that we want to be

walking in as we engineer AI. I think we again, we have this tendency to point our finger at everything in the world except for ourselves as the thing that needs to change. To play devil's advocate for the other side, I think that much of the behavior that people do could be classed as self-destructive, especially using the parameters that you set out earlier on. But people can't know what they don't know. And for somebody who doesn't understand that the behavior that they, that doesn't understand that binge eating isn't actually good for them because it helps them to relax. For those people, we're getting into a philosophical sort of linguistic

lexical question here, but I don't know if it is quite the same. It's the Pandora's Box or Plato's Cave thing here, right? Like, if you don't know that the thing that you're doing is destructive, is it fair to say that those people have the same sort of obligation to be aware of their self-destructive behavior? You can't know what you don't know. to be aware of their self-destructive behavior, you can't know what you don't know. Talking about training, that was one of the other levers, binge eating, skipping training sessions. What has the data said to you about the optimal setup

for a training protocol for yourself? What does it consist of? How often do you do it? What time of the day, etc. Yeah, I work out an hour a day. Basically, I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. And we've worked back through the science of what is cardio zones to be in. And we also look at this in terms of measurements of my VO2 max, of my flexibility, of my tendon, ligament strength, of my, we measure my muscle with ultrasound, we do whole body fat on MRI. So we're, we're using these quantitative endpoints. We probably do a hundred different

markers that quantifies my exercise protocol. And they're all markers that we can map to optimal clinical outcome ranges. So again, the goal I'm a problem I'm working on is my 35 trillion cells having less entropy. So I'm not trying to engage in a marathon. I'm not trying to achieve some athletic record. And so really it's that one goal. And so, yeah, so it's just a bunch of weights, cardio, flexibility, strength training. I noticed looking at your routine that you've got a good bit of knees over toes and Patrick's stuff in there.

And that's been born out in the data as something which is very effective. Yeah, as we measure my tendons and ligaments, specifically, they've all dramatically improved. And this is a good bit of backwards sled drag, some of the ATG Neesovatoz's lungi stuff. What were you most surprised by? What are the exercises or the contributing routines that you do where you're like? I wouldn't have thought that that

would have been in there. I wouldn't have thought that the data would have been happy with me doing this. I suppose overall I'm surprised by how robust I feel. I've actually never felt this robust in my entire life, even when I was 18 years old and an athlete in high school. And I don't have a single ache and pain in my body. I've never been more flexible. I've never had better cardiovascular capacity. I guess I'm just surprised that at the chronological age of 45, I would be peaking in my life of ability.

I don't feel like I'm entirely... I think there's more I could gain. I suppose I didn't... I previously viewed this as trying to stop and it ever will downward trend, but it's actually dramatically improved and maintained. Are you adding in walks each day on top of this, you know, an hour a day for me, if I was to think about it, doesn't seem like much to optimize, you know, the absolute optimal amount.

I would have presumed it would have been two and a half hours and it would have included all manner of high intensity interval training in a shitload of zone two and then there would have been a 45 minutes of Yin yoga stretching with right? I would have thought it would have been more, but why isn't it more? Why aren't you training more? There's a tricky puzzle we're trying to solve. I mean, so I'm on a caloric restriction diet, so it's 2,000 calories, and I take 100 pills a day. And so the scientific question we're trying to solve is, if in the year 2023, someone like myself wants to be an explorer like Shackleton or Magellan

or Lewis and Clark, and I want to say, all right, I want to go to the absolute limits of what's possible in the form of slowing my speed of aging. Then we're trying to optimize for caloric input, cardiovascular activity, heart rate variability. When you do too much exercise, there's a U-shaped curve where you start inflicting harm on the system.

And so you're trying to tune all of these things. With chlorochistriction, it has a side effect of lowering testosterone. So, you know, I need to supplement testosterone to get myself in the normal levels. And so, we're just playing this really tricky playoff, tradeoff space all across the board. And we're always making minor adjustments here and there, trying to maximize for this very narrow goal of slowing entropy in my body. Interesting.

Yeah, because if your RDA of cows is what, 26, 25, sorry. What would be your recommended maintenance for you would be 25 or 26, 26, 25, yeah. Right, okay. And you're at you would be two five or two six. Yeah, two six, yeah, two six five. Yeah, right. Okay. And you're at nineteen eighties or something like that, basically two thousand. If you were to train more because that's not, I mean, you're quite light, right? You're about 160 pounds, I think. Yes.

Yeah. So you are quite light, but still like maintenance at two six given that you train for an hour a day. And it's not like you're not doing other stuff throughout the day too. Exactly. Isn't isn't a massive amount. So I understand now if you were to really start to push that, if you go from 60 minutes to 90 minutes to two hours, your maintenance cows then get up into the sort of 3000 range and then you go, okay, do we want to be in a 1000 calorie deficit every day? Well, no, okay, therefore we need to bump calories up.

What, because G-Flux theory, which you may or may not be familiar with, something we've spoken about on the show before, what's the problem with increasing your caloric output and then increasing the amount of food you could eat? This means that you can eat more food throughout the day. This would mean maybe that you're more satiated, that will be a sweet spot. How come you guys haven't decided to do that? Yep, exactly right. Really well said. So we are... The combination we're doing is not common. So it's caloric restriction, it's intense exercise,

it's vegan, which a lot of people haven't really combined robustly and we're trying to do that all to maximize speed of aging. And so we have not covered all the variations. For example, like, I don't know what my markers would be like with meat. I don't know what my markers would be like with 90 more minutes of cardiovascular exercise and more calories. So we haven't covered all the iterations. And the reason why I've been trying to share all my data is to say, here's the process we're going through to try out this thing.

You can do this yourself and you can do different iterations yourself. So AdMeet, add more exercise, do this or that and then share your data too. But let's try to accelerate the speed in which we can structurally advance the field, even if it's N of 1. It's getting better than N of 0.

The evidence of my teams looked at, their current hypothesis is what we're doing does optimize. I guess there's some interesting data where using DNA methylation patterns, looking at this denutin-pace algorithm over this longitudinal study of nearly 2,000 people who have been measuring their speed of aging over several years' time, I rank number one as the most reduced speed of aging out of the entire group. And so it's interesting.

I hope others take that spot from me. That's the goal of me. reduced speed of aging out of the entire group. And so it's interesting. I hope others take that spot from me. That's the goal of me. Let me say, what if somebody someone might come in and do that, would you consider switching protocols if somebody did do that? Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole goal.

I mean, I want someone to beat me for that same purpose. Like build the field and share with everyone what you're doing. And so that's why I share free and share with everyone what you're doing. And so that's why I share free that with everyone what I'm doing, is I want them to do it and then apply their own betterment and everyone improves. And so crowd sourcing longevity research.

Yeah, and yeah, it's just like it's, I mean, the intensity of competition which this has triggered has been incredibly inspiring. I mean, people, of competition, which this has triggered, has been incredibly inspiring. Like, I mean, people, it's a big deal. And so I'm in private conversation with a ton of people about how they can beat me. And I rise sincerely, hope they do. What would your testosterone be at without the supplementation? Have you got any idea?

Because you're walking around at 5% body fat, heavy, caloric restriction, etc. Yeah, I don't know. We hover around 800. Wow. So we hover around the... We hover around normal. But that's with I think it's nine units a day of testosterone. That's true. It's two MG patch. I think each one converts into like nine. I'd something like that. I feel like that's a dermal patch of testosterone.

I've never heard of that being a delivery mechanism for testosterone before. Is that common? Works. Yeah, so I mean, it keeps my levels steady. It's a journal patch. Yeah, fuck yeah. That's, I mean, it's much cooler than having to, you know, pin

I am every three days or whatever, two and a half times a week or something, throw the patch on, go about your day, peel a patch off, put the second one on, go about your day. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. So you mentioned there that we both mentioned there that you're running a quite low body fat percentage. Why is that the optimal position for somebody to be in? You would have thought, well,

ancestrally, the average body fat for somebody that was moving around a lot would have probably been significantly higher. How is it, what's your thinking behind the fact that in the fives range, which is like ridiculously lean? Why do you think that that seems to be optimal as opposed to having high level of body fat? Yeah, I mean, in questions like this, I would always defer to my team. I can echo what I've heard them say, but I mean, I learned this is a pie that I trained.

I got certified to fly in several airplanes. It got typed, but I had a rule for myself that I always flew with someone else who is a professional because when I was in the cockpit, even though I knew what I was doing, I was never as fluid and as competent as them. When they, all they did, every day all day, is thinking about that versus me jumping in and out. And so, and then also just knowing that if you have five longevity experts doing this,

they're all going to just disagree. But yeah, we've just been following the evidence of, you know, caloric restriction has some meaningful evidence. And, you know, we're looking at these, made these lifespan and health span studies and we try to follow it. And so I don't know if a 5% body fat is a target of more of where the body has settled out at.

It's a byproduct of the fact that you're doing this caloric restriction, and that is why your particular body ends up sitting at somebody else would be at three and a half, someone else would be at seven and a half on the exact same protocol. Okay, interesting. One of the things that I haven't heard you talk about is heat and cold exposure. This is the current most popular, um, bro, science approach for a longevity routine. Are you using ice baths? Are you using stoner exposure? Do you consider it?

A whole meast this stressor have you tested with it? We, um, we kind of don't do anything that's popular right now. And, uh, we, we've looked pretty carefully at a cold and hot exposure. We've looked at hyperbaric. And it's not to say that these things don't have benefit. It's that they don't have benefit in the ways where we have objectives. And so I mean, there's an unlimited number of things I can do in a given day that would potentially be useful to me, but we have an extremely specific goal of slowing my speed of aging.

And when you have that narrow of a goal, it just creates a really clean workspace to say, does this thing have inclusion or does it not? And so, no, we don't do any colder or heat exposure. That's interesting. I'm starting to get a conception about this single-ordinating principle slowed down the speed of aging. That means that there are other things that other people who have slightly different-ordinating principles might need to add in. Let's say that it was your goal to optimize dopamine throughout the day. Okay, well, maybe you would look at adding in cold exposure. Maybe you would even look at adding in cold exposure multiple times throughout the day,, maybe you would look at adding in cold exposure. Maybe you would even look at adding in cold exposure multiple times throughout the day. And maybe you would do some research to look at whatever the equivalent of a circadian rhythm for dopamine is.

And well, maybe we can bring it up on flat points. And maybe we can boost it on other points. And maybe we'll be taking a bunch of supplements. And that would be the ordinating principle if we want to maximize dopamine throughout the day. It's interesting that slowing the speed of aging and you would have done it had it have been something that you think would have contributed to it hasn't folded heat and cold exposure in. You said we're not doing the things that other people are doing but you're not doing them because other people you're not doing them because other people do them. You're not doing

them because presumably the data doesn't suggest that it's something that's really worthwhile. Yeah, again, very well said. But it's strange that it's not looking at the data. The data doesn't suggest that it's something that's really worthwhile. Yeah, again, very well said. It's strange that it's not looking at the data. The data isn't screaming at you, get in a fucking cold tub or like go in a sauna. Like it's strange that that's not happened, I think. Yeah, yeah, it's hard. I really, we get asked about, I get asked about cold exposure or I think, more than anything. And my objective is not to rain on anyone's parade. It's not to discourage anyone who's trying to do good for themselves.

It's not to try to be a know-it-all. I've just really not wanted to engage in the conversation. It's not part of my protocol, fine, whatever. I don't need to go out and trumpet it. And I don't want, if other people are excited about it, that's wonderful. But really, this is trying to move the entire field forward. And I think there's a certain disposition

that helps people feel encouraged. And so maybe we'll find the evidence, and maybe it'll be something we do in the future. I never know, every time I've expressed an opinion, I've come back to think, I'm never expressing an opinion again because you just never know where it's going to go. But I will say that with what are we doing now with sleep and diet and exercise, maybe it solves my dopamine for me.

I don't know. I don't currently have a dopamine problem, I think. My mood has never been more stable in my entire life. I've never felt more stable in my entire life. I've never felt more motivated in my entire life. So it's just different ways of saying it. But I think what you said really was a nice construction where if you don't have the clarification of endpoint, then it really gets in this fuzzy space where you don't really know where to put that piece of the puzzle and then people can misinterpret how to think about it.

don't really know where to put that piece of the puzzle. And then people can misinterpret how to think about it. I remember I heard stories about both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and during his time at Amazon Bezos had one ordinating principle that every single decision went through and it was does this improve customer experience? Does this improve customer experience? Every single decision and Musk's apparently made still be was does this get us closer to Mars? Every single thing every was, does this get us closer to Mars? Every single thing, every single question, does this get us closer to Mars? Do I go to the party this evening or do I go to bed? Do I decide to hire this person or do I decide to hire this person? Do I decide to start this new company or invest here or buy Twitter or sell Twitter or tweets or do

whatever? Does this get us closer to Mars? There's maybe an argument to be made that some of the tweets that he's put out, probably don't get as close to Mars, but I think it taught me the value of a single ordinating principle. Ryan Holidays' book from last year, Discipline is Destiny. The biggest takeaway that I took from that conversation was that without a goal, without an ordinating principle, there can be no discipline before that because the discipline is in service of the outcome. What are you being disciplined for? Like, what is discipline? And given the fact that we are these multifactorial multi-variant creatures with all conflicting goals and self-deception and 5 p.m. Brian and 7 p.m. Brian and tired Brian and hungry Brian. If you don't have a very, very clear goal, it's

almost impossible to be disciplined in the service of it. And okay, in your opinion then, is it more difficult to live a life with more than one goal or the more goals you have, does life become exponentially more difficult working back on that? Yeah. After doing this for a while, this is why I arrive at the mind is dead. So if it's so let's just walk through the process. Like if I say an algorithm now takes care of me better than I can myself with the goal of minimizing aging. So it's all a singular objective that simplifies all the decisions around it. But what I'm really trying to demonstrate is this is a system of goal alignment. So it doesn't matter what you choose of your goal. When you can take 35 trillion agents and goal align them around a singular thing,

you've built a tapestry of goal alignment. So blueprint can scale to anything. Blueprint can scale to climate change. Right? The earth is the body. You take millions of measurements, you look at the evidence of what is a proper biosphere for the coral reef and the city and the oceans and all the above, you apply a protocol and you repeat data evidence protocol. The same is true for everything else. And what I'm really trying to say is if we are thinking about the future of existence, the problem we have to solve is goal alignment.

And that we have to do that so we don't destroy our biosphere. We have to do that so we don't have just topic outcomes with AI. We have to do that so we don't annihilate each other because we're of our propensity towards violence. It is the singular goal we have as a species. And so I'm trying to prove this system with myself, the one thing I have control over. I would maybe be tempted when you say the mind is dead. It's nice because it's like playing off that God is dead thing. But you must have throughout your day

thought that you enjoy creative insights that reflect on your life, introspection about memories, dreams, and hopes for the future. So there is still a very real role for the mind. It seems it's a little bit more like decision making is dead in that regard. But yeah, I think you've spoken a couple of times about where your emotions are at, regulating emotions. You even said earlier on that spirituality, like being spiritual is a component of this. Fold in your protocol for emotional health and spiritual health as well. How does that play a role?

How have you learned to optimize that? What are your frameworks and perspective on it? Yeah, you're right that the sitting beneath the abstract layer of the mind is dead, there's all this nuance of even when autopilot flies the airplane, I'm still landing the airplane and taxing the airplane. So my mind is still engaged in some of these activities, but the bulk of the autopilot, you know, it's nice to know I've got that when I'm flying. And so, but what it is really trying to convey is the only tool we've ever had in existence to manage ourselves is our mind. And when I look at myself, my objective is to destroy my nemesis before my nemesis

destroys me. And my mind is my most powerful nemesis. And so as we start breaking out the complexities and the nuances of what role do our minds have in society going forward? And if we are trying to look at this large computational problem of goal alignment, what is that role? And to me, it's a legitimate question.

But the very first thing that I can say confidently about myself is, who inflicts the most self-destruction upon me of anything in existence? It's myself. If we say as we as a species, who inflicts more pain upon us than anything else, it's ourselves. If I say probabilistically, who's a bigger worry to me, AI or humans? Humans. Like, I'm trying to get to the root of where is the threat coming from? And what might we do to try to offset that? Now, what spawns after that in terms of what kind of spiritual practice we have? And how do we find meaning? Those are all really cool and fun questions we can play with on,

you know, once we have the free space to do so, but we're not in a safe, safe place right now as a species at all, like we're under extreme threat. And so what I'm really trying to do is address the things that are most pressing that threat in our very existence and survival, so we can get to this play space. What about when you face negative unwanted emotions throughout the day? They're going to arise. That the sort of things that you have significantly less control over than what goes in your mouth than how you train, than the time that you go to sleep, than the temperature of your cool and heated mattress.

These are unknown unknowns in some regards. So how have you learned to deal with emotional regulation in an effective way? And what strategies can people take away from that? I mean, I was chronically depressed for a decade. Likely the result of being an entrepreneur, working my talent off building a brain-treatment,

having three little babies in a bad relationship, all the stuff that you go through a hard time's in life. And so if I look at that time and I look at the avalanche of negativity that buried me every second of every day, it absolutely pinned me to the ground and I was suffocating, I couldn't breathe. If I look at now, relatively speaking,

the amount of negativity in my mind, there's like zero. So getting these basic things right in my mind, in my life, like sleep and diet, eliminating these self-destructed behaviors, I almost rarely ever now have a genuinely, what I call it, a genuinely self-destructive thought. Now, I may contemplate, say, boy, I wish I wouldn't have said that thing, or I wish I would have said this thing differently, or I wasn't as nice as I wanted to be, or I feel a little ashamed about this kind of thing, like sure. Those are all little mind.

We all do that with our self-interspection. It helps us improve. But I would say, generally speaking, Ivy eliminated the most hurtful and self-interspection, it helped us improve. But I would say generally speaking, Ivy eliminated the most hurtful and self-destructive things that plagued me to the point of suicide. And I just never thought that would be possible. Andrew Hubemann, the first things that he said

on a podcast episode I did with him was, you do not control the mind with the mind, you control it with the body. And it seems to me like your mind is downstream from what you've been doing with your body. But I have a pet obsession for evolutionary psychology. And it seems to me that almost every animal humans included aren't meant to be satisfied with what the inbuilt base programming outcome, the state that humans are supposed to be in is minor dissatisfaction. Life is suffering from the Buddha, right? The word for suffering is duke, dukk, h a, I think, and then some scholars contest that that word doesn't mean suffering. It means unsatisfactoriness.

Life is unsatisfactoriness. You know, the holiday that you plan to go on, the steak that you intended to eat, there's always something the sand between your toes. It could have been a tiny little bit more salted. It could have been a little bit less well done. It seems pleasantly surprising to me that you was somebody that is trying to optimize the body as much as possible, downstream from that has found a very large amount of peace in the mind as well, given what my assumptions would have been about what unperturbed human mentality would have been. I mean, thinking about your frame, if I were to try to oversimplify our existence, it's like we become conscious and we become aware that we're in some sort of

unpleasantness, hunger or need for status or ambition like whatever, but we just spend our entire existence trying to address our unpleasantness. That's it, that's all we're doing. And then we make up all these stories and games and like the Buddha was saying, like, hey, like this is existence and the like the Buddha was saying like hey like this is yes this is this is existence and the only way to a deal with existence is to eliminate this permanently. But to me that's really what we're we're just walking around trying to deal with our conscious selves. And what I like about what we're at as a species is.

Yes, that's been the case, but it may not be the case. If we have the ability in the form of computational intelligence, and we now can physically, predictably, engineer atoms, molecules, and organisms, we're an uncharted territory. And this is why I think the future is like a zero with principle future. We have no ability whatsoever to model out what's going to happen. And that's never been true with human society. So sure, that may be the state now we're running from constant displeasure, but this is why I thought of this computational goal-limit system because it leads us to this future,

we can't model out or predict. And it may be the most extraordinary thing humans have ever experienced. The optionality is so vast that basically any prediction goes out of the window and the unknown and known start to get exponential. Naval has a quote which you'll be familiar with, desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Given that you sold a company for $800 million, which has permitted you aside from the conversation about you need the physical resources, monetary time, etc. to be able to focus on what it is that you're doing. Noval also has a really great insight, which is, it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. And what you're talking about previously is,

the unsatisfactoriness, the inherent unsatisfactoriness or displeasure that people feel on a daily basis is something that you have largely been able to dispense with. If you hadn't had such success, monetarily achieving the status that you needed. Do you think that open loop would be intruding still on your life, even if let's say somehow you've managed to have the, someone else was paying for all of these things to be done

for you, right? So, like, you know, you materially were able to make it happen. Would that open loop, do you think I haven't achieved the ridiculous success within business? Would that still perturbed your thoughts? Is that a loop that needed closing? Yes. So this is, this is a question which my brain just registered

as I just, I just flagged a few alerts on my brain when you ask me this question. Because it said to me, hey, this person is asking you your opinion. You're un, basically there's no data involved. There's no reference set, there's no evidence. Just your free form, free style opinion. Terrifying.

Dangerous. Terrifying. Any fucking answer my brain comes up with. It's like, but you know what, it's all bullshit. So like whatever words come out of my mouth are absolutely fabricated, have zero basis in reality and are a disservice to everyone, including myself.

Interesting. So do you, let's say that you want to play around with ideas. You're at dinner at the first supper, and somebody asks you a question that you don't have an answer for, how do you venture into the realm of things that you don't know if you're never prepared to venture into the realm of things that you don't know? This is one of the thought experiments I do at my dinners, my blueprint branches. So I say, okay, let's do a thought experiment where the social gathering were playfully having conversation. I turn to someone and I say, hey,

I'm interested in hydration. I want to be better hydrated. How much water should I drink? And so a volunteer will be like, I'll play along with you. And typically they'll say, well, I think it's like, you know, roughly eight ounces or eight cups of water a day. I have this flask. It's pink. I take it with me everywhere. I go, I'm always in the bathroom. It's kind of annoying. My friend Suzy, she has one too. Her mom thinks it's really where she carries it with her. Her mom's kind of not doing very well. She's sick. She has this other friend who flew in from LA that weekend. They're having dinner and they go on thing, right? And then they finally come back and they're like, okay, so yeah, and so I say, okay, great. So your answer is like eight, eight cups of water a day. Yes.

And then I do the thought experiment again, and I say, how much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, the I'm sorry, I'm sorry, at the end of the previous discussion, I say, how do you know eight cups of water a day? And they say, well, I read sorry, at the end of the previous discussion, I say, how do you know eight cups of water a day? And they say, well, I read it somewhere, like on some website or something like, well, have you seen the data? Do you know? No, but I don't have seen it somewhere.

Okay, so I do the thought experiment again. How much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, the person says, I don't know. If not, they'll do the eight cups of water, but it really is meant to demonstrate the majority of our social interactions serve the function of social cohesion, not truth seeking. And as a result, we pass on these this lore, which is not true, but we can't distinguish between the social cohesion, dance, and what we're passing on as knowledge.

And so it's this clear distinction to try to discern. And so if you're really in a truth seeking discussion, great, like have that. But if you're in a social, soothing situation, don't mistake the two because it really compromises everyone's shared ability to understand reality and make good decisions. You muddy the sense-making landscape with people doing performative conversation masquerading is truth-seeking. That's really, really, really interesting. In your opinion, then, should nobody speak on things that they don't have data for and what is the role of playing with ideas that are more difficult to be analytical with? I mean, I suppose it depends on who the conversations with and what the objectives are.

If you're just there to have fun, if you're actually trying to solve a problem, you know, these blueprint branches I put, I bring people together and no one knows each other. So it's, it's a set of accomplished people, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, astronauts, educators. So everyone's kind of doing the dance of filling each other out. They're trying to figure out ranking and priority and status. They're trying to, you know, do all the social stuff. And so people are playing in the different games. I just say that my personal participation varies according to the group I'm in

and what we're trying to achieve. Interesting. One of the other things that you've looked at and that you're optimizing is youthfulness on the outside, not just on the inside, the way that you look. What is your perspective on sunlight exposure? On to the skin, also on to the face,

not just from a youthful perspective, but also from a health and physiology perspective? I don't know. There we are. I'll tell you that I typically avoid the sun because my skin is almost always healing from some kind of laser. You can see here on the screen, see all these dots all over my neck. What's that?

From laser. So, I had, we just bought another laser and my face is still healing from this. So my skin is sensitive to the sun because it's in these healing conditions. So generally speaking, I'm always aware of the UV index when I go outside. I do wear sunscreen and we measure my skin health robustly. We use multispetral imaging where it looks at UV and red and browns and porcise. We use autofluorescence, we use merscores, we do biopsies. So we're looking quantitatively at the skin from every angle so that we can say with some degree of confidence how my skin protocols doing with all the treatments we're doing. But yeah, generally speaking, as I understand it,

But yeah, generally speaking, as I understand it, UV exposure has negative effects on the skin of a certain type with a certain duration with a certain exposure rate. So just generally, I don't get a lot of sun exposure. Are you aware of the brand of sunscreen that you've ended up zeroing in on? Presumably, it's very well researched with a bunch of chemicals that aren't going to make you die sooner. Yeah, we use Cerevae AM, which is a 35 UVA UVB, and then also a Delta MD, which is also UVA, EVA, EMB. Okay, are they regularly available

or is this some Vietnamese pharmacy website that people need smaller. Yeah, yeah, regularity. Oh, cool, okay, that's good. Yeah, it's, again, I think that it's very interesting to see what's showing up in the data. A ton of my friends very, very big into earthing, into spending time outside in nature,

rejuvenative practices, and a big chunk of that involves sunlight exposure. A non-insignificant cohort of them, ones that have massive problems with putting sunscreen on their body, on their skin, because of what's going to happen thermally, is it going to get absorbed and cause me to... Yeah. ...full of East Rigions. I think that stress testing a lot of these assumptions as you are doing is very interesting. I think that it's helping to see where the rubber meets the road. Yeah. I mean, to your point, it is funny. Every time I say anything about anything,

I get these predictable responses. But what about cold exposure, heat exposure, sun exposure? You know, uh, oh wow, I've hit the basic bitch question. I'm gonna try to tell me, Ryan. And nobody like, you know, was I, you know, did I get my bare skin exposed to the grass exposure? Did I, like everyone has their frame of, you know, or have I practiced some Eastern, you know, meditative blank? And so everyone comes to me with their thing of like, but what about? And I, I don't know what to say. We haven't tested every permeation that's ever existed.

We've run, we've looked at the data, we look at the evidence, we do the thing, and we report back. But that's it. But it is so predictable and it's so funny that I put something out and I tried, like, provide something of useful insight. But then people, you know, their questions just smother it into, like, it's not valuable to them at all because all these are the variables Confounded which I understand for me, but it is funny that Sometimes it feels like it's one step forward and four steps back when people parse these things through all their filters Yeah, you should have a page on your website of

like FSRs frequently stated rebuttals and Just what about cold exposure? like FSRs frequently stated rebuttals and What about cold exposure? I it does not seem that we have any evidence to say that we're going to introduce it What about heat exposure? It does not seem that we have any of it. What about sunlight? That would be maybe time saving one of the things to consider You mentioned that you're 45 you mentioned that you'd spent you spent a decade of your life very aggressively building a company. During that time, you were aging significantly probably quicker than your biological age was. Does that mean from an internal body clock perspective that up until somebody really starts to take this stuff seriously or happens upon it just by chance because they end up having a really perfect lifestyle naturally. You're always going to be running ahead of your current age therefore is there a part of you that regrets the fact that you didn't do this 20 years ago.

Yeah. Uh, entirely. Yeah, I. Yeah, entirely. Yeah, I, my parents didn't know any better because they were following social norms, but I ate sugar cereal for breakfast. So does I was in the sun constantly with no sunscreen.

I mean, I shot guns with no air protection. I mean, I just did everything I could have done that would hurt my health I did. And aggressively, I was like, I have full of life. And I certainly had a lot of fun. I'm sure also it's very hard to correct damage that has happened. So with my children, for example, my 17-year-old

who is with me right now, he's almost entirely on blueprint. And, you know, he, to his credit, he fully realizes and he's so grateful for starting this at his age. And so, I mean, it's exciting for him, you know, that this age to be on this protocol. And while I mean, his friends at school, they they he just got accepted to a prestigious institution for college. He went there for this. Yeah, I mean, he did a wonderful job. I mean, he worked as talent off the school. And he went to this orientation and he sent me this video. And here are some of the most talented humans

on planet earth. And they're downing sugar, junk food, drinking, not sleeping. And I was like, oh my God, this is just, I'm so sad. This is the future of humans. And we've normalized these behaviors so much. And they're sitting within this edifice of intellectual aspiration, doing these things, and I thought, what a disconnect

between what we're trying to birth intellectually and what they're doing physically. And I'm glad that he had the wherewithal to be like, you know, dad, I'm glad I'm not doing these things. I know how badly poor sleep affects my cognition. I know how badly junk sleep affects my cognition. I know how badly junk food affects my mood. But I don't know, it's been on my mind ever since I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. There are trade-offs, though. There will be a time where your son needs to pull an all-nighter before some sort of project gets put in. Like we inevitably given the fact that not he right now doesn't just have live as long as possible or reduce the speed of aging. Sorry, as his single ordinating principle.

It's also don't flunk university. You know, it's also probably make my time at university sufficiently enjoyable that I have memories that I am fond of when I look back. It's maybe get a girlfriend. It's maybe play a sport. It's maybe do a bunch of other things. So again, we mentioned this earlier on, the single ordinating principle is great because it creates a very easy filter through which every decision needs to be made. There will end up being compromises that will need to be made during everybody's life, right? Even during yours at some point, you will have an opportunity, which is so good that you think this is for the greater good of blueprint, but it is going to mean that for this next week of traveling and blah, blah, or I am actually going to speed up my aging so and so forth.

The difference is there is much lower hanging fruit that some of his peers could pick up on. Like maybe put the full fat doctor pepper down, like maybe dominoes isn't the best way to fuel yourself the night before an exam, etc, etc. But I think that that displays quite nicely the level of a lack of wisdom level of a lack of wisdom around what actually makes people operate effectively. Yeah. I mean, if we, I understand practically what you're saying, right? The trade-off space you've represented. What I would think would be worthwhile for us to think about is you just pulled out of your pocket all of the favorite things we humans like to pull out of our pockets. Right?

Create enduring memories. We want this experience. You know, like we're justifying the trade-off space and in doing that, what we're saying is, we always have the override switch to do this at all times. And what I want to pose is, and this is how we currently think about ourselves as a species, when we walk into this future, we bring those assumptions that remain hidden to our own awareness. And so I like working with this concept of Gen Zero,

of this idea that we, a group of humans walking into the future that is willing to divorce themselves from all human norms and customs. Because if you look at this, you say, okay, how powerful is artificial intelligence? How fast is it going to move? And what is our relationship in power going to be in relation to this thing? We don't know. And so I understand what you're saying on the tradeoffs, but it comes with a question from this position of luxury that we can always choose under any circumstance and make those trade-offs.

And I want to say I'm open-minded to the future of our existence may be more wild and weird and different than we can ever contemplate. And again, if you just look at the mathematical, if you look at the curves of improvement, I think we're closer to that situation than we realize. And this is what I'm really trying to get across with Blueprint is the mind really dead. Like, are we genuinely in a situation where algorithms better care for us, and we're no longer pulling the funny business of like, oh, well, here's a cool story. I'm going to ediviate from the algorithm because of it. And this just generates like violent responses inside of people because it steps on their

sacredness. But I think this is a relevant conversation for us to have. I think it's, I think you're right. I understand the point that you mean. I think what it does pre-suppose is that, axiomatically, everybody else's single-ordinating principle would also be slow down aging as much as possible. There are people out there for whom they would say, I have taken it from first principles that say that they have all of the insight that you do and more. And they say, my life wants to be something which is not that. My goal is to see as many different countries on the planet as possible.

I don't care about how long I live. Or maybe I do care, but it's third thing down the list. Yeah. As soon as you fold that in, as soon as you fold in any other goal, this is when the trade-offs come. And I understand that as soon as you say there is, there are trade-offs that need to be made you open the door to the executive function of you making a decision not being outsourced to the blueprint or the boss that made the choice. I understand that that's a very dangerous game to play and I

from your perspective and with your goals at the moment I think it makes complete sense. But that does presuppose that everybody else's goal also should be to live as long as soon as you open the door to that not being the case I think that the trade-offs has to come in Yeah, also it's not even I'm not even presupposing that everyone needs to have my goal I'm saying that if you look at the The drivers of our existence where artificial intelligence is a force that needs to be the drivers of our existence where artificial intelligence is a force that needs to be reconciled with, that our biosphere and planet Earth needs to be sustainable, and that needs to be negotiated with, and that we humans need to not kill each other, that needs to be negotiated with. So what I'm saying is we currently do this in society, like we say, you can't kill someone,

that's against the rules, you can't run someone over to your car, that's against the rules. We do this in many ways today. We're already doing this massive goal alignment thing in society, it's just going to get much more computational in nature because right now we see that when humans do whatever they want, whenever they want, it has negative effects on the biosphere that make it unsustainable. So one of those things has to give.

Either the biosphere has to give and becomes sustainable by itself, or humans have to be negotiated with on what their behaviors are allowed to do. And this is what I'm saying. You look at the large-scale goal alignment problem. The presumption that we all have this we can do whatever we want, whatever we want, however we want, may not be true. It's a different set of considerations we're walking into. And so I bring up this as really not to predict the future, but as a thought experiment to say, if we are serious about creating a future that we're going to enjoy, I would much rather have an honest

conversation about the potential things we need to be thinking about and the changes in our lives because everything that, you know, society is so delicately balanced where we don't ask anything of the individual. It's always blaming someone else and expecting someone else to change. We're never pointing itself. And it's always, the presumption is always I can do whatever I want because me. But again, I think we need to call on the question all these primary assumptions. Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you do, where should they go?

Instagram and Twitter. I love it, man. Dude, I find you very, very interesting. I'm very, very, very enjoy this, very much enjoy this kind of a conversation, one that ranges from principles to philosophy to enacting strategies as well is very, very cool. I appreciate the stuff that you do. Yeah, I really enjoy the conversation. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Thank you very much for tuning in. I don't know whether longevity,

it seems like a high price to pay for longevity from Brian there, but it could kind of like how you send a scout out from an army to go and scope the enemy's battlefield. I feel like Brian's kind of doing that, but against aging and disease and stuff. It'd be very, very interesting to see where he ends up over the next few years. Anyway, I appreciate you for listening, and I'll see you next time.