Pirate Wires - Bryan Johnson On His Mission To Defeat Human Aging & Live Forever

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

EPISODE #32: Bryan Johnson, Founder of Blueprint, joins us for an exclusive interview! His mission in life is DON'T DIE. In this episode, Bryan joins Mike Solana to discuss the public's reaction to his project, his daily routine, why he’s made life extension his life’s work, and more. You can also read Mike Solana's piece on Bryan Johnson on Pirate Wires. Along with the full transcript of the interview. Link below.. Featuring Mike Solana & Bryan Johnson Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/bryan-johnson-interview https://www.piratewires.com/p/transcript-bryan-johnson-interview Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Bryan Johnson To Pirate Wires!1:15 - Selling Braintree for $800M in 2013 - The 10 Year Journey To Today’s Mission8:00 - Bryan Was In A Deep Depression Prior To Blueprint - This Mission Saved His Life11:00 - Bryan Revels His Thoughts On The Hate He Receives Online14:00 - Working On The Most Ambitious Project Of The 21st Century18:00 - Metrics For Success, Daily Routine, Diet20:15 - Penis Rejuvenation!25:30 - Can Curing Aging Actually Work?28:00 - Bryan’s Biological Age Today33:00 - Does Bryan Feel Alone In This Journey? Personal Interactions vs. Online46:00 - Reacting To The Diet & Health Trends - Ancient Wisdom vs. New Data55:00 - Embracing Of Death In Society59:15 - A.I. Advancing Data On Human Aging01:01:00 - Advice To A 21 Year Old01:04:00 - Where Does Bryan Get The Willpower To Deal With Hate & People Questioning Him01:06:40 - Thanks Bryan For Joining The Pod!

The future is here. It's always here. The question is, can you see it or not? I was absolutely suicidal for a decade, and I would have taken my own life had it not been for my three children. We tried to treat my body like a smartphone that improves every single month. And so to do that, we just said we're going gonna measure every single biological element of the body we can. We're going to look at all the scientific evidence we can. It's the moment where Don't Die becomes possible for the first time in human history. In this moment, we are living the ideas of dead people.

I've been personally pretty surprised at the intensity at which people defend death. It's an indication that I've properly set my sights correctly. Either die or try to live forever. The single most ambitious thing intelligence can do in this moment is don't die. Welcome back to the pod. Today we have Brianson with us this brian you are someone who um i have watched over the last couple of years now with a lot of admiration for a handful of reasons that we're going to get into today um it's a range of things both from your actual work to i think just the way you navigate attention online in service of your goals. So just first off the

bat, thank you for joining me. I am genuinely very excited about this one. It means a lot to have you here. Your company Braintree acquired Venmo in 2012. You sold all of it to PayPal in 2013. And by all sort of tech measures of success, this was like a grand slam, right? You've knocked it out of the park. This is kind of you achieved, you've climbed the mountain. You've done what so many young people work decades in tech to do. And I think at that point, from where I'm sitting, my read of kind of what you were going through, there are a lot of things you were going through, but on that one piece, on the company piece, there's a natural question that follows. And I've seen it play out for sort of every massive success. It's like, what do you do now that you've done sort of the huge,

enormous thing? And some people go and they do a venture, they go to a venture firm. Some people start like another company or two, they invest. Some people just fuck off and go on vacation for a decade and call it a day. A few charities, I don't know. You decide, you go on a, let's just say there's a different path for you. You have a goal of arresting the human aging process. And right off the bat, I mean, I would like to go back, before I get into what that means, before I get into your routine, before I get into any of these sort of like the media's reception of that and the tech industry's reception of that, which I think is maybe the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today. I would like to get back in

your head around that time, because you have also previously alluded to sort of a period of depression and sort of coming out of your former relationship, your former relationship with God, your former relationship with a church. What is the timeline there? At what point do you decide to go on this sort of journey through the longevity space? In one year's time, I sold Braintree Venmo, got a divorce, left the religion formally, and set off on a new path. So it was all right. So it's 2013 is when this specific,

the journey to Blueprint begins. Because you're popping off, like, that's a 10-year journey, right? You first kind of reemerged publicly a couple of years ago and sort of start making all of the content about this and you get all the attention in the first huge pieces, but it was like sort of a 10-year journey through this. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is when I was 21 years old,

I came back from Ecuador. I was a Mormon missionary there, living among extreme poverty. And I came back to the United States, and it was this reckoning moment where I was understanding where I came from, where I had been, and what the future meant to me. And the only way I could understand existence was that I wanted to do something that improved the lives of all of humanity. It didn't make sense to me to make money, to get a job and make money for status purposes. It was just, I don't know, it just seemed like it was the only conclusion a reasonable

person could make. And so at the age of 21, I determined I would become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by age of 30, and then with money, go out and try to do something meaningful for the human race. And so that was my orientation from the get-go. So entrepreneurship was a means to an end, really, for that goal. But you also, I mean, in that year, that pivotal year that everything changes, in the time preceding that, where you were doing your most, you were sort of doing this initial phase of work, you've characterized that as quite dark.

I'm wondering, was there a catalyst, something that sparked you, something that you saw or something that challenged you, whether it be a conversation with another person, trip, a book, what was it, if you had to look back or a few things, what was the trigger for you to go on even just this sort of, I guess, rediscovery of yourself? I mean, it really goes back to my upbringing where I was raised in this small rural community on a farm with my grandpa. And the only reality in that entire community was Mormonism. I was never presented with an alternative reality. I didn't meet an engineer until I was 21 years old. And so when you grow up with a singular understanding of all existence, where

specifically the world is painted into good people and bad people, you're the good people, everyone else is the bad people, and you're there to convince bad people that you're the good people, then when you engage with the real world and you start being exposed to other ways of understanding reality, it's a pretty big shock. And that happened in my 20s. So I was already married to a Mormon woman. We had Mormon children. My entire community was there. I was building startup companies. I was in that process. And so I actually left the church mentally

far before I left it formally. But in that moment, if you discontinue your obligations in that community, you sever your relationship. Youue your obligations in that community you sever your relationship you sever your relationship with the community you're just kind of an outcast like everything crumbles and then what do you do with your kids and so i kind of just put my head down and stayed with the program like in the relationship in the community but meanwhile i'm trying to understand reality and my mind always went to these questions of like, what is happening? Like, what is really going on? It never made sense to me to just play the game that was in front of me, which is like, you know,

make money, buy a house, do a car, have status, have authority. I was really at all point in time trying to understand like what is actually happening in existence and what does that mean to me and what do I do because of it? And so it was just basically this premise that no game in society was worth playing unless I could reconcile that idea with my understanding of existence. You make the transition at the top of this conversation and also in the piece.

So you and I had a full conversation. We're going to have the transcript partly edited, lightly edited online at piratewires.com, as well as the piece that I wrote about our exchange and sort of some additional thoughts on the longevity project in general. But throughout this, I've sort of characterized your goal high level here. Obviously, there's this greater human, the sort of human, the goal of human welfare or flourishing or greatness. But to narrow it down a little bit, I've been characterizing it as arresting the human aging process or extending human longevity. Would you sort of accept that characterization? Yeah, I would. Yes. And I would yes and that. I would say I was heavily persuaded by, influenced by Albert Camus,

the French philosopher. And he's a formidable intellect, and he explored the frontiers of philosophical thinking on existence. And he came back with this remarkably simple conclusion, which is if you go to that extreme of thought, you come back with this really simple question, do you commit suicide? That's the only question that matters because you realize that everything is meaningless. hard. And then I jumped to James Kars. And if you're going to play, do you play a finite game where there's winners or losers? There's a start time and an end time. Or do you play an infinite game where the only objective of the game is to keep on playing? And that's how I reconciled my existence is if I'm a conscious entity, I think I exist. I think I'm experiencing consciousness. Not sure, but that's what it feels like. Given that's the state of affairs for me, then the next

step i could do is to say well the only thing to do is to keep on playing the game which means the only thing that matters is to focus on eliminating death would you be i mean this is sort of a strange question maybe but while you're speaking about this i have this idea that is it would it be fair to say that you were contemplating an end to your own life and the alternative was this? It was like either die or try to live forever. Exactly right. I was absolutely suicidal for a decade. And I would have taken my own life had it not been for my three children.

I mean, this is obviously an enormous and dark sort of space in your life. But from there, the sort of the levity with which you approach the next chapter has been really remarkable to me. You get tons of hatred. you get tons of of hatred and i think that it is i mean i have so many thoughts on on why people are mad about what you're doing um right you know a couple years ago the first slew of pieces start coming out um obviously the press has a problem with you because the press is run from sort of one ideological point of view in that spectrum of thought. Rich people doing anything is kind of not allowed. Like anyone who wants to do something big or weird or says they have an ambitious goal, that's considered suspect right now in this climate. But then on the other hand, you know, you get a lot of it from, it's like the tech industry as well. And there's a reaction

perhaps to your aesthetics at some point. How do you, I have some thoughts here. How do you, what do you think about the sort of, the hatred you get for your work in longevity? I have such a positive emotional relationship with the hate. I love it. I mean, it absolutely makes me so happy. I love to engage with it. I love to see it.

I love to see people's insults. I love it when they work hard at them. I actually have a question. What is your, do you have a favorite insult? Oh man, there's been so many good ones. Like one time somebody posted a picture of like what would look like an animal skin, like all flat, pulled out to the side. And it was basically a human.

So basically like a skinned human, just one layer. And it was something like this guy looks like Brian Johnson. That was pretty clever. There's been so many good ones. I need to... Maybe back up slightly before we get into all of the hatred and how you think about it and I have some further questions

here. They're reacting not just the aesthetic, the aesthetics of you, I think. It's like you are naked quite a lot in your pictures online. There is the outlandish outfits and things like this. It's also the actual process. So before we get maybe into aesthetics, it will be helpful to go through just maybe the constellation of programs that you're working on now, the sort of companies and projects, just what they are,

you know, briefly that you're actually working on, and then your routine. I would love to know about your diet and your daily personal routine. Yeah, I think so. If this is helpful for anyone who's listening, this is how I think about hate is once you realize that in any given moment, the zeitgeist, that is the beliefs that people have, the norms they adhere to, the things they care about, the meaning-making games they explain they're going after, those are relics of the past. Those are ideas of dead people. In any given moment, we, in this moment, we are living the ideas of dead people. And that's been true for every generation before us. The future is here.

It's always here. The question is, can you see it or not? And so when I work as an entrepreneur, I do not, I specifically do not want to be respected by people in my time and place. I want to be respected by the people from the 25th century. Because if you seek the respect for people now, you're married to the past. And you can't be a true, you can't push the boundaries of what's possible, because you're wed to that looking backwards. And so when people are having these reactions, it's so predictable that they're just basically saying, hey, Brian, you don't match the 2023 zeitgeist, which is built upon the ideas of dead people. And that makes me feel uncomfortable.

Of course, I'm trying to bridge the 25th century. Of course, you're going to get that reaction. So to me, it's an indication that I've properly set my sights correctly. Hey guys, thanks for listening to the Pirate Wires pod. Make sure you like, subscribe, comment below, and share this with your friends. If you were respected by contemporaries in the 21st century, it would imply necessarily that you were at least not, you might not be wrong in what you were doing, but you were not working on the right thing according to the future you characterized um a thought experiment of yours where you communed with beings from the 25th century um there's just how you came to your goal about the longevity project can you talk a little bit about just i mean maybe characterize that uh or sort of lay that out for us briefly

yeah i mean it's i think it's cool think about, just go back in the centuries and say, all right, if you lived in the seventh century, what would be the most ambitious thing somebody could imagine doing? What would that be for the eighth century and the ninth and the 10th, the 11th, and just go walk through the centuries. And you could say, okay, like in the 15th century, you could endeavor to sell around the world. The navigation tools were good enough. The ships were good enough. They learned enough about navigating the oceans. You could have done it probably in the 12th century or 13th century.

And so at a given time and place, and that's the question I ask is, okay, we're in 2023. What is the single most ambitious thing I can do in this moment? And now, I mean, in the 21st century, your sense is that dramatically extending the human lifespan is possible for the first time. Yeah. It's basically the single most ambitious thing intelligence can do in this moment is don't

die. But do you think something has changed recently that has sort of opened this up? Because I mean, presumably this was also the most important thing that people should have done several hundred years ago. But are we just like technologically closer to that project? Yeah, I learned this in my, I started OS Fund after I sold Braintree Venmo as a way to basically get a degree in deep tech. Of learning all the hard sciences and engineering. And I invested in, I was first money in Ginkgo Bioworks, who's now the dominant provider in synthetic biology, a company called Numat, which is doing precision chemistry,

building structures atom by atom. It's using metal organic frameworks. And being in the trenches with these companies for, like 42 companies in the past decade, has shown me that we have the ability to reliably engineer all of reality. We can engineer atoms and molecules. We can engineer biological organisms. We can engineer digital reality. We can even engineer our own biochemistry. We have now, we've acquired the skills of gods to engineer reality. And when you have those basic skills, you just simply apply the function of time and you're going to solve it.

We know that biology is radically extending our lives is doable because it's already done in nature. Nature already has shown that you can you can regenerate oneself and so it's not like we're up against the laws of physics and trying to figure out how to travel faster than light and so to me and then you're do you map on the final element which is like what how fast is artificial intelligence improving and yeah it's it's the it's the moment where don't die becomes possible in the first time in human history? The canvas for the project is yourself. You know, that's where you do the work. It's in your own body.

And that's what you reveal online, your progress and whatnot. It is a process of measuring, which is, it seems to be the really important thing here is sort of naming metrics for success. And where in my body, what in my body is dying, so to speak? How did I die today? Measuring how much you died in a given moment and then correcting for that.

Can you sort of lay down maybe like a list of the sort of average or a list of the tests that you'll take in a day? What are the metrics for success? And how do you go about living every day so as not to die? What are you measuring? And just, yeah, what does your day look like? With technology, we are accustomed to doing version control. Version one leads to version two, to version three, version four, it just gets better every single version. We tried to do the same thing with my body. We tried to treat my body like a smartphone that improves every single month. And so to do that, we just said, we're going to measure every single biological element

of the body we can. We're going to look at all the scientific evidence we can. So yeah, my day today, I woke up at 4.32 in the morning. I did, yeah, I'll walk you through the things I did. I did a few minutes of light exposure with 10,000 lux at 12 inches from the eyes. I took my waking body temperature through my ear. I do every morning. It's a really good indicator of overall if something's happening. I weighed myself. I got body fat, muscle, water, hydration. I then did HRV therapy. I did some meditation. I took 62 pills and 20 ounces of liquids with creatine, two pills and 20 ounces of liquids with creatine, collagen, peptides, cinnamon, cocoa powder, some electrolytes, did an hour of workout. I did some red light therapy,

bathed, did some skincare, ate a couple pounds of vegetables, and I started my day. And that's the first four hours, yeah. Yeah vegetable right what is your what is your diet consist of it seems like you you've broken down this you've broken this down for me previously as sort of the the core things are still it's it's diet sleep and exercise um what are you eating because it seems americans are kind of famously obsessed with their diet um and it tends to tie to people's identity I've noticed so you have the carnivores and the paleo people and that's a lot of you can sort of start to understand their politics just from their diet typically yeah which is unique to this country your diet clocks in a strange way maybe it's so extreme that it's not

so different but the vegetarianism clocks is someone who tends to be nature-focused and not super into self-transformation, but you're a vegetarian, right? What does your diet look like? So breakfast is broccoli, cauliflower, ginger, garlic, black lentils, hemp seeds. The next meal is a pudding, nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, berries,

pea protein, and pomegranate juice. The next meal is a bunch of berries, nuts, and vegetables. And then that'd take 100 pills. And the 100 pills, it's not to address deficiencies in the diet. The 100 pills is to basically be like, again, this is the question Magellan tried to sell around the world. We're trying to achieve perfect health. And so the 100 Pills is basically taking all the scientific literature that's ever been done to say, what is the very best health you can create in a human in the year 2023?

Okay, so we've got the diet. We have the routine. You have this massive team of doctors. You spend, I mean, millions of dollars a year no this is what this is what the headlines say yeah uh i need to know about the penis rejuvenation um i've seen a lot of about this online uh you've talked about erection health as a metric i think for sort of youthfulness um Maybe just, can you break that down for me and explain to me, the penis layman, how to get to like optimal penis health?

Yeah. The first thing to do is to take baseline measurements and you can do those with questioners and they assess, you know, erectile strength, duration, you know, penetration ability. And so once you take those tests, I scored a 25 out of 25. So I have, I have 100% performance of my sexual abilities now. So that was my baseline. If somebody does that, and they have, you know, some form of erectile dysfunction or something else, then the path would be different. So that was my baseline. So that was my baseline. And then we said, we proposed this idea. Could I have, could I basically have the most quantified penis in the world?

And so then we looked at all the scientific literature and we said, okay, how do you quantify the penis? How do you scientifically measure penis function from every possible direction? And so we looked at it, we did a comb through the evidence. And we came up with like six or seven ways to measure my, my penis, my sexual function, my penis health. And we just start doing that. So for example, like one of the tests was, you want to look at blood flow through the penis. So a determining factor on how hard you can become is the flow of blood through your penis. And so to do that, I got an injection in my penis that it creates an erection. And then ultrasound is used to measure blood flow rate. And that can be age quantified. And so the younger you are, the stronger the blood

flows to penis, the older you are, the less you have, which means more flaccid. And that was one. And then other ones we looked, we did something looking for penis plaque. A lot of people hear the word plaque and you think plaque on teeth. There's actually a disease that is formed with penis plaque, which makes the penis curve. So we did a penis plaque. I had zero penis plaque. We did some adjacencies to the penis. We looked at my max urination speed. So how fast can you pee? So you have to drink a whole bunch of liquid and then you're measuring the volume of that. We looked at, um, that we, we just got this device. We haven't done the measurement yet, but the sensitivity of the tip of the penis, because just like your,

your nerve endings age, like everything else. And so you become less sensitive over time. Uh, we did a few more things. Oh, yeah. So then we, that was like the measurement protocol. And then we jumped to the therapy of like, what do you do to improve sexual performance and penis health? And one thing we landed on was focused shockwave therapy.

It uses acoustical technology to, basically, it's like working out the area. So when you go to the gym, you work out, it creates micro tears, which then rebuilds. And this is doing the same, and it can be used throughout the entire body. So all tendons, all ligaments, all joints. It can also be used on the penis.

So people who have erectile dysfunction, they get the focused shockwave therapy done on their penis, which helps them regenerate in certain ways, and they can recover from erectile dysfunction. And so even though I didn't start with erectile dysfunction, I did that to say, could we amplify it? And one of the measurements we were doing was nighttime erections. So we have this little device, you put it on the shaft, you wear it at the base, and then you wear it before you go to bed. But you, it's really, you think about it like you're going to be irritated the

whole night, but once you put it on to go to bed, you just forget about it. And it has this little string that wraps around the shaft. So then when you go to sleep, as you become erect in the night, it expands to measure the quality of the erection and the duration. And as you age, nighttime erections naturally decreases. And so if you find a person's biomarker on the nighttime erections, you can actually bio-age them. And it's a marker of physiological,

sexual, and physical health. So it's a really important marker about the health of somebody. If you're somebody in life that's grinding and you're not sleeping well, you're likely having zero nighttime erections. I want to table for a minute the question of the i love the concept of better erections personally for the world i it's an important project and

i'm in favor of it but when it comes to the link to longevity um this in the bucket with maybe many of you run countless tests every day there are. You have sort of monthly tests that you return to. You are called the most measured man in the world. So these are markers for age, but is there an underlying... And it seems like your theory here, and correct me if I'm wrong, or maybe your hypothesis, is if you just correct for all of the markers, you're sort of correcting for age in general. What, is there an underlying aging thing that we don't understand, don't know about? Like, are you, is this going, can this work? I guess is what I'm asking. Can, can, by just sort of, it feels like you're just sort of band-aiding the markers of age is is that actually reducing the human age or um reducing sort of uh the detrimental or mitigating the detrimental health effects of aging um yeah like is that enough or is there something some

bigger piece it feels like because it just seems from obviously you've researched this for years but to me it feels like it's there's something bigger like this kind of hidden thing yeah yeah you can uh slow one speed of aging or you can reverse aging damage that has happened and they're two distinct categories the majority of things that people do like better diet, sleep, and exercise, you're slowing the speed of aging. And then there's things like gene therapy, which can actually, or epigenetic reprogramming, which can reverse age. And those are the more powerful therapies coming down the pipe. So we employ both. We do both age slowing and age reversal. And the majority is age slowing at the moment as these new age

reversing technologies come online. And then how do you name that in yourself personally? So like what, I'm wondering what age, what sort of biological age would you say you are right now? And what is your aging? How much do you age in a year compared to the average man? Let me tell you. I have the exact data. Okay. So I currently age. I accumulate aging damage slower than 96% of 45-year-olds, 92% of 35-year-olds, 90% of 30-year-olds,

88% of 25-year-olds, and 86% of 18-year-olds. So the older you get, the faster you age it compounds and what would you say you're you you haven't been able to revert so you've just slowed down the process because i think that one thing a lot of people react to and in any conversation of yours is you'll say something like i have like and i don't want to this is not a verbatim quote this is i think a rough sense of it's like you know my my jack my my erection is that of an 18 year old or something right like people hear that and they think this man thinks he's 18 or this man thinks he's 25 how old are you and and then it seems like you're aging slowly, more slowly than other people on average.

But how old are you? Yeah. Yeah, this is a new concept. So it's really cool. People are grappling with this. If you looked at a baby's heart, at an 80-year-old heart, you know they're different by both how they look and how they function. So you can determine biological age looking at structure and function. And so if you, I can be chronologically, I'm 46,

but my heart can look like and function like, you know, a 32 year old. And that's what we've done is we've measured every single one of my organs, all my biological processes, and we basically have quantified. So for example, my cardiovascular health, my VO2 max, has a functional capacity of the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds.

So it's not that I think I'm 18. It's that when I compare that right capacity, and we do the same thing with my entire body. My lungs, for example, my diaphragm strength has the functional capacity of an 18-year-old. My left ear has the functional capacity of a 64-year-old. What's going on there? I have hearing damage from a kid,

as a kid when I shot a lot of guns and listened to loud music. This is a slight departure but i'm curious what is the i mean is there a program to assist you there have you figured anything sadly no we haven't had any success i have all sorts of ear problems too i got a lot of tubes as a kid and so i'm going through your stuff right now i'm sort of maybe selfishly obsessed with this question right now um yeah it's so there's nothing damn the one thing i really needed right now yeah there's a few gene therapies that are in labs right now but nothing that we can find that is close to being uh uh applicable to youth right now the okay so the the look of it is

is fun and you've talked about the playfulness of this already. That is the way that you approach a philosophy of life. Once you decided to live, you were going to live. It was going to be fun. You were going to try to maximize that life. You were going to share your results with everybody, which is what you're doing in public, which is one of the things that I really love about your work is you show us everything that you're doing. And we get to kind of learn as we go or challenge it. You handle the criticism really well. If you were to get rid of all of that, um, and we get to kind of learn as we go or challenge it. You handle the criticism really well. Uh, if you were to get rid of all of that though, the sort of look of it in the public piece of it, just the idea of interrogating yourself, trying to understand how your body

works and how to become healthier, uh, measurements, the empiricism of that and workarounds. Like these are classically sort of tech industry things this is like the engineering type person should love this and historically has um i expected the media to sort of come after you and i expected people online random people online to make fun of it all because that's always happened in tech um i will say some of that's new right the history of longevity in fiction for example is as old as our old literally our oldest fiction gilgamesh etched in tablets right we have been talking about immortality or eternal youth the fountain of youth right it's it's coded into all of our stories it's not really until modernism that that becomes um a it's also in our faith right i know you're kind of rejecting some

of this right now but like that is deeply what christianity is about is uh eternal life through a mystical process but like this is we see it everywhere at every lever of western culture until recently um we see it so it's fallen off in the media, but where you still saw a lot of this hopefulness, maybe 12 years ago or so when I first started working in tech, was this industry. There was a strong, robust, technologically progressive, super groovy, almost Burning Man type vibe among, I would say, who I consider the elites, the people I like the most in the industry. They were fearless. They would get made fun of it and not care. There were many of them. And I guess the sense that I've been having, this sort of strange sense

I've been having while talking to you both now and earlier in our earlier conversations is you're doing something that is very new and yet it feels like, and you're being attacked for it as if it's new, but there were many people doing this 12 years ago. Maybe not like you're doing it now, right? Like not this extreme, but there are many people talking about this. They have fallen off. The conversation in the technology industry has changed significantly, which is alarming to me. Like you have the media left going after it because you're a really rich person doing something. Now on the political right, there is a huge ascendant push towards the natural.

It's like the hippie right is what we're seeing rise up. That's the soul bras of the world. It's like the meat eaters. They're out there suntanning and getting muscled. They're not here for all this gay stuff. And it's like, that's the vibe that we're getting over there. And you have no, it seems like you have no more natural base of support. I have a lot of questions on this subject.

My first one is just, I mean, do you agree with that? Do you feel like a little bit lonely in tech right now? Do you feel like you've had as much support as you would have liked or thought you might have? I don't know. Let's just maybe start there. My private interactions are a different reality than the public interactions. My friends and even acquaintances are so generous with me and kind, and they've been eager to engage.

I've seen nothing but positive reactions privately. So it's not the reality I live in. That's why the online space is so fun for me. It's just like this circus. We all get to play the fun games. But privately, I was reminded as a young father, when I was learning how to teach my child to swim, I was exploring the ways I could teach him. And I looked up online and I found a few suggestions. One, you could push the child into the pool, like good luck. Or you could jump

in the pool yourself and say, jump into my open arms. Or three, you can show them their friend doing the given thing. And of those three things, the most powerful way to teach your child how to swim is to show them their friend that can swim. Because if their friend can do it, they can do it. If their friend can do it, they want to do it. They want to be in this tribe. They want to be part of belonging. They want their respect. You see this in world records for things like races and strength competitions and whatnot. Previously, you would think unattainable goals. Also, you see this in figure skating when crazy techniques are innovated, the axles and the trick to the double to the triple axles.

Once it happens, multiple people figure it out pretty quick. Exactly right. Exactly right. Exactly right. And this is the thing, this is what I was trying to prove with Blueprint, is anybody can talk about a given problem. Being the problem is an entirely different answer. And so if you just simply take health and wellness,

we know that's primarily our responsibility. But if you take into a broader frame and say climate change, most of us will say way past my ability to do anything. I can recycle my boxes and I can plant a tree, but I'm really powerless in this bigger question on planet earth or like our nation state is going to go to war powerless. I can't really do much about the situation. So we assess these problems. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to take on the world's problems, every single one. I wanted to take on the risk of annihilation risk. I wanted to take on AI goal alignment. I want to take on climate change. I want to take on death. And the way you do that is you become the problem. And that's what I've done computationally. So yes, I post nudes. Yes, I have a certain aesthetic. And those who are paying attention, and it's increasingly more every day, I'm trying to demonstrate a zeitgeist of existence that will dominate in a century from now, but which we cannot see. And it hits all the things. Yeah, it is a, we keep talking about the aesthetics of it, or I keep talking about it,

because I'm just very interested in sex generally and sort of what they evoke and what culture follows. And you were very clearly, yes, you're having fun, but you have created your own aesthetic sensibility. And it is this, you know, futuristic aesthetic. It is what is the world going to look like in a hundred years? It's like that kind of an aesthetic from the way that you dress to the way sometimes that you don't dress to the way that you wear your hair and things like this. That is also, that's something I think generally

in the tech industry. So for years, I would beat the drum of like, we need a better vision for the future, both in terms of what it is going to look like and also in terms of what it's going to be. You know, people often talk about the, you know, techno utopianism. And I'm like, what is that? What, you have to describe it to people if you're going to get them on board.

Like, what does their energy bill look like right like how are they living what does their home look like how are they dressing how are they falling in love um these how are they having children and raising them what are they eating like these are the things that these sort of the texture of a human life that's always been missing from techno utopianism which is something that i really cared about a while ago i will admit that over the last few years especially i've been really beaten down by like this relentless culture war stuff and i've lost a lot of that um and i don't think i'm the only one because i look around and again i just don't see the i don't see that stuff um i don't see as strong of a strain of the techno utopian

there are all sorts of people who will pay lip service to it and they'll talk about it. And there are some people who do take it even a little more seriously. The, the, the yak guys, I think are a version of this, but, but they're also still, you know,

they're, they're mostly, it's a very powerful and very important meme, but there are less people willing, I think to live truly groovy kind of wild lives. You are one of them. I think, am I getting this wrong? Do you feel like the industry is sort of less on that beat, more on that beat? And then I would like to talk about sort of what the vision for the future needs to be. But first, just like, do people have, am I wrong? Like, do you feel like the vision is

still there? Is there less of it? Is there more of it? Where are we in the narrow sort of tech industry space on that question? I was with about 15 people at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago. And one of the people there went on this little monologue and said, where is the future? And he made a couple comments like, you know, in my circles, we're just talking about the latest guest on the Lex Friedman podcast. We're listening to Peter Till said, you know, like, whatever. And he's like, where, like, where is the future? And I had spoken a few minutes earlier about Blueprint and about this idea of aligning myself and of zeroism and a bunch of things. And however I said it, it just didn't resonate with him as being interesting at all. And part of me was like, you know, I've failed.

Like this person seems like they're genuinely interested in trying to put their finger on the future. And I just presented to him my very best guess on what the future is, and it missed. Like he didn't, he's still like, where is it? And so this is the challenge I always feel for myself and all of us. The future is always, always here.

The only question is who sees it. It's not, you know, that's it. Like we know, like if you look at throughout history, the future had always arrived and a very small percent of the population actually saw it. And then those who did see it, there was a pretty big fork of those who rejected it and made fun of it. And those who did see it there was a pretty big fork of those who rejected it made fun of it and those who actually thought it might be a thing and so for me i'm always in that discerning state of trying to assess whether my own ideas really are or whether i've seen in the world i've missed it but that's the hardest thing is getting sucked into the vortex of the present uh it's a uh yeah it's the omnipresent challenge what resonated the content that you're putting out, I guess, the way that it resonated for me was it felt very much like a return to something important.

It felt very much like a really amazing, beautiful dream that I had and I had forgotten I had. And you were this herald from the past talking about the future um and it got me excited again about really weird things and um really difficult things and solving challenges that you're not supposed to say are challenged um and death is very much this you mentioned peter a moment ago and uh i mean there's a lot of alignment i it's the. I would not say that he's definitely not doing what you're doing in terms of his daily routine. But Peter was the first person in my life who ever challenged me on the issue of mortality. And it was something that

I've always feared and really cared a lot about. But somehow i'd not until i met him allowed myself to wonder if we had to die it was it's so baked into the world right everything tells you you have to die from our religion though some of them i think are more complicated than that or complex i would say i do feel that christianity is very it's a there's a life it at least is promising life everlasting even if it requires death to get there um there are many that don't do that it's like reincarnation death to live again um you have a this meme about aging with grace and it seems not so graceful to me there's no graceful way to i don't see the the graceful way to age i see my parents and i want them to be healthy and alive

forever with me and i want them to be with my you know grandkids and great grandkids i don't want them to get older and it's not graceful um it's horrible i see it as a cancer. Peter helped me sort of get there early on. That was a very important question for me. I certainly got a little bit lost in over the last few years feeling like some other sort of core fundamental things were challenged. And now, I don't know, it's sort of like, it's back to that for me, at least in part, I want to think about this stuff again. And that requires this weird sort of exploration, and it requires being weird. And it's like, I guess you were saying earlier, the respect of your peers is not so important if you're working on a project that is future oriented. It's like, you should be creating something fundamentally new, and that's going to challenge people. Do you think, do you see signs,

maybe more broadly than the tech industry? One, do you agree with my assessment that the death stuff's really baked in at this point culturally? And then two, do you see signs for optimism there, for more alignment on the question of life? Yeah, that's been one of the things I think that I've been personally pretty surprised at is

the intensity at which people defend death. Yeah. And then I'd say on the optimism side, I don't put much stock into what people say generally. Yes. Nice. Yeah.

And I think that when you eliminate the data point of what people say, it clears the air for an extreme level of optimism on my part. Basically, we humans, we adopt technologies that help us do the things we care about instantaneously. If a digital navigation system helps us arrive at our destination more efficiently than a paper map, we say yes to it. If a washing machine cleans the clothes better than down by the creek, we say yes to it. If a washing machine does the clothes, cleans the clothes

better than down by the creek, we say yes to it. We say yes to technology. And then we forget we ever resisted these things in the first place. And technology is now on this path of improving so dramatically. It doesn't matter what we say about it. We're going to adopt it. it doesn't matter what we say about it. We're going to adopt it. It's inevitable. And it's going to produce, you know, we're up against a wall of fog and knowing where it's going to take us.

But I guess that's why I'm so bullish is if we can properly get the philosophical foundation right as we walk into this future, I'm bullish. So basically, we develop this super intelligence. What do we do with it? Do we use it to play the games that humans have always played, which is raise armies, conquer territory, acquire wealth, and dominate? Or do we use it to pursue a new ideological framework of don't die, which is don't die, don't kill each other, don't kill the earth, and align AI with don't die.

And that's what I'm hoping we can cement because if we use these technologies to play old school homo sapien games, we're going to dramatically increase the risk we annihilate ourselves. Well, this brings me to a question on really like what people are, I guess. One idea that has captured my attention for the last few years, I've talked about it a bit on this podcast, I've written a little bit about it, is the concept of Lindy. And in the online orbit of people talking about health, you have the hyper-measured and future-oriented, and you're, in my opinion, the leader in that camp. And then you have the crunchy, hippie, right-wing, sort of new health thing that's happening um maybe the soul bras of the world are there these are the people who sum their balls and eat liver meat and you know they're all like carnivores uh or at least they're eating like heavy meat diets lifting weights what they're taught it's not just a reflexive i want to steel man them a little bit

there it's not just a reflexive anti-progress, anti-future thing. A lot of this is, I think, based in this idea that there is wisdom baked into really ancient stories and ancient ways of doing things. And it's just a process of trial and error, right? Things that have been around for the longest have a very good chance of having benefited people for the longest because they're proven out. So this asks a question like, if there's a drug that's been around for just a couple of years, how long might it be around? What's your best estimate for how long something new will be around? And it's like, maybe as long as it's been around. It's very new. It hasn't been tested yet. There are all sorts of drugs and vaccines that we take that we no longer take and no longer want to

take. Building materials that we had in the 20th century are gone. However, the chair, like concrete, stone, these things have been around forever. But there were probably ancient things that we tried that didn't work out. They weren't as good, right? I think that these people, they weren't as good right i think that these people um the sort of crunchy right or the hippie right uh sort of waving the flag of lindy which nassim taleb has also um really really popularized are trying i think there's a worry that we've lost something in modernity, important truths. And this is maybe a, this is like the aesthetic marker of that way of thinking. Like what have we left behind that we should not have left behind? Now, I sort of, my problem with the Lindy stuff, I'm taken by it generally, or maybe in general, my high level problem is like, there's such thing as a lindy rocket ship

um if you believe in any kind of progressive worldview for mankind that extends beyond this planet it's like you have to take risks if you want to do anything great any new advanced energy forms like like you need to try stuff uh but do you think there's a wisdom at all in in this sort of like this the the soul bra stuff the weightlifter stuff the like the crunchy right like the lindy stuff do you see anything there i think what you're talking about is uh an issue that actually is not being addressed which is that the most formidable form of intelligence that's been on this planet for the past 200,000 years have been Homo sapiens.

We have remapped this planet to accommodate the things we care about with our intelligence. And it's just like death is ingrained, so is the assumption that our intelligence reigns supreme and should be in the captain's seat making decisions. And the blind spot that's created in that contemplation is that a new form of intelligence

that is superior in certain domains has arisen. And that is when you get data sources of sufficient quality and you apply computational intelligence that can do things that humans cannot do, that becomes the de facto thing. And it's just like navigating from point A to point B, an algorithm that's taking into account all the traffic flows of all the cars on the road is going to out-compete any human. There's no way a human can out-compete that because they don't have access to data. And what the conversation on Lindy doesn't account for is that we have achieved this now with personal health and wellness. And that's what I've been trying to show at Blueprint,

is the age of human intellect being the source authority for decisions on what to do and how to take care of ourselves is now a bygone era. It seems that people have felt this way about every sort of, I mean, we have a whole, at least, let's just talk about the last 50 years of pharmaceuticals, right? There are many people who came with data and they were wrong um or their data sets were too small or they were they were looking for one thing and didn't didn't account for something else um i agree that we have a blind a homo sapien blind spot and probably some sort of massive super massive intelligence uh some ai a few years from now would be able to account for much more um but we are using that

human intelligence to try and search out the right kinds of data to metric or or um or to even make assumptions like we we have uh like we know what the optimal health strategies are whatnot we know that we know it's working but i guess what i'm saying is like what don't you know you don't know and there has to be a lot of those things there there like you there there is maybe um almost a hubris in the assumption that we have like figured so much out it doesn't, unless I'm just completely wrong here and we've really cracked the code, it seems like we have a long way to go. If you, yes, the premise

on the thought experiment was when the data quality reaches a certain threshold. And what I'm proposing is, and what I've been trying to show with Blueprint is, I've become the most measured person in history, and if you look at the way in which we're measuring my body,

and you consider that we're contemplating hundreds of data points from blood, saliva, stool, DNA methylation, MRI, ultrasound, fitness tests, like we're doing hundreds of measurements. And we have that data in hand to then pair up with the scientific evidence. It's, in my estimation far superior than saying what has been should be yes is there a balance though that maybe is helpful or not at all do you sort of like throw away the the wisdom in that completely or is there no utility in that what uh you know without d diving deep i wouldn't

throw away the entire thing but i'm trying to think of anything practical that would say uh that i would find some heuristic of what has been and should be that i would uh i would vote on over an MRI. Yeah. I think that when it comes to health, this is really, these are the two genders, so to speak. And maybe it's always been this way. Go ahead.

No, you go ahead. The thing that is, so like this fight is going to play out at this discussion and it's fine. There's no conceivable future where human heuristic based upon the path wins the day. Nothing. There's no way it's going to happen. At some point in time, it's only a question of when the majority of people basically concede that the data quality they want power, they want status, and they want sex.

And when they lose on the metrics they care about, they're going to adopt the things that help them achieve wealth, power, success, and status. And so I put myself out as a blueprint. If I'm better at achieving those things than them, they're going to have to reconcile at some point the methodologies they're employing. This is what I'm saying. I'm bullish about the future. It doesn't matter what humans say. We always adopt what advances our own self-interest. So ultimately, we naturally navigate to the best solution because it helps

us achieve our objectives. If that's true, then the recent sort of philosophical embrace of death, the aversion to the longevity stuff over the last 50, 60 years, I mean, have we naturally sort of weighed to that because it's helpful in some way? Like you haven't, but culture has, like the average person has. Or is there a storytelling blind spot that the empiricists are suffering from? Yeah. We saw the world change within 24 hours with COVID. We restructured our entire society in a matter of days. We are incredibly capable of changing and extraordinarily fast. And we do so when the circumstances require it. Up until then, everyone runs their mouth on everything, this and that.

It doesn't matter. Like we're on the long time horizon, high horizon. We're headed on a certain path where data combined with algorithms will be superior to our current native form of intelligence. Now, we're going to have some interaction with this intelligence, what it is, TBD, but it's not going to be the case that we retain this capacity. And so our opinions about death and other things, they're going to morph beyond our recognition. about death and other things, they're going to morph beyond our recognition. And that's when I hear you speak and I hear your emotional and intellectual experience

relating to this, you know, people's opinions a decade ago and where you're at now and what you care about. And like, you're trying to navigate the zeitgeist to a certain degree. I feel you. And I also, in this conversation, I feel liberated that I'm tuned out because I legitimately don't think

that anyone knows what they're talking about. They're running their mouth and they're doing so because that's what they, their meaning making game is to run their mouth, right? It's to say a given thing is get a reaction from someone else is to acquire health, power, status, connectivity. Like like we're doing this thing but ultimately it doesn't matter because these systems of intelligence are running us in ways we can't even see right now and we'll do some more in

the future so we really need to nail the philosophy correct we need to basically get it right to say let's not use this new form of intelligence to kill each other let's not do it to annihilate the world let's not do it to kill the planet let's just get these basics right then we can have all our fun and games and like do these status games or whatever the case but this is why i feel some i feel so uh some so much excitement about the future and i like with myself i ignore myself like when when a given topic is you know when i'm presented with a given question the first four thoughts i have are wrong i don't like i don't even care what I think. I'm just working through my gut reactions

at every given question. So I treat everyone else like I treat myself, like kind of like I just don't even care what I think. You return to the data. It's just like you always go back to the measurements. I mean, even the question like, do I want to live to the age of 250? I have no idea.

There's not even like a, it is foolish for me to even begin to entertain that question. It's so idiotic for me to contemplate that I would even know what it means to live 250 in this age we're going. What does it mean that you pose any question? How would I even begin to answer that question and be coherent? So it makes no sense in my own mind for me to answer any question like that when I know I'm up against a wall of fog. I can't see. Now, if you ask somebody in the 1700s, you know, what do you think about that?

Like that's reasonable because the world wasn't changing at a speed that it was going to change on their time scale of life and death. Things were pretty much going to stay the same. We're the first generation in human history where we will experience dramatic change multiple times in our lifetime, maybe even multiple times per year. So we just socially, psychologically as a society, we haven't reconciled yet

with what it means to change as fast as we're going to change now and we're trying to catch our breath but these these conversations are already relics of the past like they're absolutely backward looking and they're ignoring the future we're heading into you're alluding i mean i think one of the big things that you're alluding to and done it a few times in this conversation is artificial intelligence um what are some of the things you're looking forward to in terms of the unlocks that uh ai will bring obviously longevity but when you say that like what do you mean what how is it going to help us measure and figure out what to do with our bodies yeah you know when like when alpha fold solved solved the problem of how do proteins fold,

a problem that had 10 to 132 possibilities, nobody thought it could ever be a problem that could be solved. It was computationally larger than the number of atoms in the universe, and it solved it. And so when AI has been, by capable teams like Demis and crew over at DeepMind, when they have been able to apply their intelligence to a very specific problem,

they've cracked it, go and alpha fold at stunning speeds. Now, if you get these tools, you make them more general, like we're doing with the LLMs now and a few other open source approaches, and you have a whole bunch of people applying these things to narrow problems, you do some basic math on what the solve rate for impossible problems could be and what those

things unlock, it breaks the mind. We can't understand it. And so that's what I'm saying, like we're at the cusp of all these things coming together. We have the ability to engineer reality at every possible level. We have the tools of intelligence now getting into people's hands. These systems that are moving about in society, it's a different reality. Like we could, for the first time, can't say anything coherent

beyond six months of our reality. Last question. I would love to know kind of what advice, specifically health advice, you would give your younger self your sort of 21 year old self what are the what what are the easy things um you would put him on the path of whether it be you know sleep diet exercise like what what's the advice that you have for uh the goal of living longer and healthier? Counterintuitively, making health your number one priority will increase the odds you achieve your epic goals more so than any other thing you can do in your life. And currently, that is not the wisdom. The wisdom is burn yourself to the core by sleeping under your desk, eating poorly, going days without sleep, and that's how you do it. You grind your

way to the victory line. And what I'm saying is the exact opposite. Make your health number one priority, and you will achieve your objectives in a superior way than if you would have burnt yourself to the core. You think if you would have burnt yourself the core you think that you would have achieved i mean huge this is hard even you've achieved you achieve pretty tremendous things um while you were in the dark space that is it is a is a conflict that worries me as someone who's trying to build things myself you know like i do think about this exact question quite a lot and you succeeded at considerable cost to yourself. Your assumption is that you would have succeeded more wildly.

Yeah. I mean, let's just say, I know I do have the advantage of having capital right now, but in the past year alone, I've had the best year of my life. I became the most measured person in human history. I wrote a book that is contending to be the guiding philosophy of the 21st century. How does one even go about doing that with my book, Don't Die? And three is we've built the most nutritious food program in human history. food program in human history. Now, three domains, personal, ideological for society, and then a company product. Now, yes, I have the benefit of capital. Also, it's the best intellectual work I've done in my entire life. Now, I certainly could have gone about doing those things, getting very little sleep and eating poorly and not exercising, I bet you I wouldn't have been able to accomplish them, or I bet you the quality would be dramatically

less. And so what you make up in volume, you make up in quality. And there's nothing that can replace clear-headedness. We know this. When you're in the right spot, you can accomplish in an hour what your tired mind can't accomplish in two days. No, I said I have one more question, actually, because there's something we haven't had a chance to talk much about, which is you, a quality of yours, I think the world is in serious need of. The way that you sit patiently and answer questions like this about yourself, often

when they're pointed, is admirable. Online, this this happens all the time i see you engaging with people um i see you laughing at the insults and offering you know friendly not advice friendly um uh expansion on some given topic despite the negativity uh from where do you get the i don't even know what i would call it the the willpower to um interact with with the public that way with such um kindness and a sense of humor like where does that come from i think it's because i make health my number one priority. I'm well-rested. I'm clear-headed. I am emotionally comfortable with myself.

When I was running Braintree in year two, someone called into the company and was trying to buy Braintree services. And I was snippy. I'm sure something was going on, like whatever, 10 fires going on, like typical founder stuff. And the person called back and my assistant answered the phone and she said, yeah, this guy just called and he said

he talked to some other guy who was an asshole. He wanted to call back and talk to someone else. And I was like, oh my God, I need to wake up. Like of anybody in the entire company that should have been courteous to an interested customer to buy our services, and here I was being a jerk. And it was such a moment, a startling moment for me where running ragged had just made me snippy and ornery and just not my best self. I'll never forget that moment. And I've really tried

to change that so that um I can't be my best self at all times and this is what I'm saying I I think I would have built even a better company had I been taking care of my health and wellness now that does mean you need to make sacrifices you need to say no to certain things because if you're going to spend 30 to 60 minutes a day exercising you need to make time for that. And that means maybe one less social event or one less something, or you maybe need to cut an hour long meeting to 15 minutes. So you need to make yourself, you know, you need to gain efficiencies elsewhere, but it's worth it. And this is the thing is when this becomes the norm, everyone's going to forget we ever resisted

it. It's just the cases when every other kid is in the pool swimming, you're going to be in the pool swimming too. We do what our friends do. And when people are taking care of their health and wellness, we're all going to do it and we're all going to be cool with it. No one's going to raise any kind of qualms about it. We're such a social copycat species. And so this is a thing. It doesn't matter what we say. It only matters what we do because we all parrot each other and mirror amazing thank you so much for your time uh and your work i am very much inspired it's been it's been a great honor to have you on today i've really enjoyed it thanks for having me