The Dr. Hyman Show - The Science of Living Longer: Diet, Supplements, & Sleep | Bryan Johnson

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Believe it or not, data can empower you to live a longer, happier, and healthier life. In this episode, I’m joined by Bryan Johnson, a health optimization pioneer. Bryan shares his meticulous approach to tracking and measuring every aspect of his health to make informed lifestyle choices. We break down his structured diet, supplement regimen, and sleep optimization techniques, all designed to enhance longevity and well-being.  In this episode, we discuss: The importance of rigorous measurement and data-driven interventions to optimize health Maximizing nutrient density and minimizing unnecessary calories How chronic inflammation and insulin resistance drive disease and accelerate aging The Blueprint program, a systematic approach to health optimization that others can follow, incorporating diet, exercise, sleep, and supplements Don’t miss our fascinating discussion of the “don’t die” philosophy and how it could revolutionize our approach to health and aging. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Butcher Box, Thrive Market, and Cymbiotika. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,500 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. ButcherBox is giving new members two pounds of wild-caught salmon for FREE plus $30 off. Visit ButcherBox.com/Farmacy and use code FARMACY30. Head over to ThriveMarket.com/Hyman today to received 30% off your first order and a free gift up to $60. Upgrade your supplement routine with Cymbiotika. Get 20% off with free shipping on all orders. Head to Cymbiotika.com and use code HYMAN.

coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. And so I was trying to look in the negative space to say, what could I do? And I couldn't see anyone trying to tackle death. And I wondered, is it possible in 2020 that one could say with a straight face, I'm going to go after death? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know there are a ton of functional

medicine practitioners who listen to this podcast, and I want to ask you a question. Are you tired of wasting valuable time on complex lab ordering procedures? If so, I got fantastic news for you. Rupa Health has made ordering and managing labs effortless. In just a few clicks, you can access over 3,000 tests from over 35 lab companies, all in one convenient portal. Plus, Rupa Health ensures that you only pay one invoice for all your tests, making everything simpler and more efficient. No more juggling multiple invoices or dealing with administrative headaches. And the best part, it's completely free. That's right,

there are no hidden fees or complicated billing systems. So don't let lab ordering hold you back anymore. Visit rupahealth.com today and unlock the potential of hassle-free lab testing. That's R-U-P-A-H-E-A-L-T-H.com. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. I'm always talking about the health benefits of wild-caught salmon, and it's one of the easiest ways to up your intake of protein and healthy omega-3 fats. And eating it twice a week can cut your risk of a heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, and high triglycerides. But it has to be top quality salmon. And sadly, most salmon you find online or in grocery stores, the salmon is double frozen, meaning it's frozen whole,

thawed out for processing, then refrozen before it's sold to you. This process often results in lower quality fish when it comes to taste and texture. And that's why I love ButcherBox. Not only do they make it really easy to get healthy meats and like 100% grass-fed beef and organic free-range chicken, but they also partner with responsible fisheries to source some of the best wild-caught, sustainably harvested Alaskan salmon on the planet. ButcherBox is giving new members two pounds of wild-caught salmon free plus $30 off. Visit butcherbox.com slash pharmacy and use the code pharmacy30. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y-3-0 at the checkout. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And

that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F at place for conversations that matter. And if you want to live forever and don't want to die, you probably want to listen up to this conversation because it's with a really extraordinary man who's doing

an N of one experiment on himself to determine if he can continually reverse his biological age and stay ahead of his aging clock so he may never have to die. This is a crazy idea. I know it sounds crazy, but he's doing it in a scientific way. And we are going to dive deep into this incredible conversation with Brian today. Now, Brian is the world's most measured human. He's sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. And they're now using his own wealth and his own interest in science to look at his body through something called Project Blueprint. Now, his current pace of aging, which we'll talk about in the podcast, is 0.69.

Now, if your pace of aging is one, you're basically aging a year for every year you get chronologically older. If you're 0.69, you're aging at a far slower rate. So for every 365 days, he only ages 251 days. Now, he's achieved the metabolic health equivalent to a 18-year-old, to the top, sorry, 1.5% of 18-year-olds. His inflammation rates are 66% lower than the average 10-year-old, and inflammation is the biggest driver of aging, and he's reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent

of 31 years. Now, Johnson freely shares his protocols and data publicly for everyone to use. Project Blueprint is built on over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications, and Johnson's daily routine, which includes 200 science-backed protocols, and this is his endeavor to achieve humanity and earth-scale cooperation, starting with the alignment of self. We'll talk about what that means. In 2023, he launched Rejuvenation Olympics. That's great.

A leaderboard assessing one's speed of aging using DNA methylation. I did mine. I'll tell you what mine is. And his is a little bit better, but mine's not bad. Of the 1,750 people using this state-of-the-art aging algorithm to track their progress longitudinally, Johnson ranks number one in the speed of age reduction. I'm coming after you, Brian. Johnson is also the founder and CEO of Kernel, the creator of the world's first mainstream non-invasive neuroimaging system, an OS fund where he invested

$100 million in the predictable engineering of atoms, molecules, and organisms into companies now collectively valued at over $6 billion. He's an outdoor adventure enthusiast pilot. Hope you don't die that way, Brian. I risk a never. And he's the author of children's books, Code 7 and The Proto Project. Now, Brian and I get into a deep, wide-ranging conversation about why he is so interested in this, why he's taking this project on, and how he's using this to understand biology in a way

that, in a sense, leads the path for all of us. Probably none of us are going to do what he's doing, spending millions of dollars on his own health every year to try to unpack and learn everything he can and optimize his health. But through his own self-experiment, we are going to do what he's doing, spending millions of dollars on his own health every year to try to unpack and learn everything he can and optimize his health. But through his own self-experiment, we're going to talk about how his insights lead to insights for all of us about how we can both optimize our health, our health span, and potentially extend our lifespan. We're going to talk about his belief that maybe we can live forever and that dying is optional.

That's an interesting thing philosophically. We'll talk about that, what it means, and we'll talk about how he came to this and what he's learned about his own body and what he does in terms of exercise, diet, supplements, sleep, sex. I mean, you might have heard him brag about having 179 minutes of nightly erections, which is better than the average 18-year-old. I'm not sure what he does with all those, but anyway, we'll talk about that. And we're so excited to have Brian on the podcast.

So let's get started with a Dr. Sarno's podcast with Brian Johnson, who's maybe the first man ever to not ever die. So Brian, welcome to the Dr. Sarno's podcast. It's great to have you here. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited you're here too, because you're kind of everywhere now. You're in Time Magazine, you're in every major outlet, you're on Time Magazine. You're in every major outlet. You're on podcasts everywhere. People probably heard a lot about you and heard your story. And I imagine some people go, this guy's nuts because I would never live like this.

And I don't want to live like this. And someone said, I live longer. It might feel longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the way I see it is quite different than that. I think you're doing an experiment for the rest of us. You're taking a hit for the team that is using your own biology to see what's possible at the limits of human potential. You know, some people climb Mount Everest.

Yes. Some people, like my friend Colin O'Brady, ski across Antarctica. But your endeavor has the potential not just to be one for the Guinness Book of World Records, but to actually teach us something about the nature of our own biology, the nature of aging, what's possible within the limits of human potential from a physiologic perspective, from a psycho-emotional perspective. And I find it fascinating and I'm kind of jealous because I wish I had sold my company for $800 million and could just spend all my time doing this stuff, but I'll get there. I'll get there. And I just want to start by kind of asking you how this idea came in your head because

you had a great career, you made a lot of money, you did a lot of good in the world, and you could have been off partying on a big yacht and living it up, traveling around the world. And you decided to do something very important for humanity. What was the impetus for this decision? Yeah. I've been working towards this my entire life. So when I was 21, I decided that I wanted to do something useful for the human race. And it was because I had just been in Ecuador and I was among extreme poverty. So, you know, I, every day it was people with dirt floors and mud huts and not knowing where their next meal was going to come from. And I

came back to the U S and I just felt this burning sensation inside that I wanted to do that. And so I didn't know what to do. I wasn't really good at anything. And so I decided that I would make a whole bunch of money by age of 30 and then with money decide what to do. And so then I spent 14 years being an entrepreneur. I sold my company at age 34 and you know, it was more challenging and painful and hard than I ever thought possible. And so at that moment, you know, I thought it would be a gleeful moment of celebration. And the opposite was true. I was depressed out of my mind. I was in a challenging relationship.

I was struggling to leave my born into religion. I was having to reformulate my existence. And so in one year's time, I sold my company, left my religion, got a divorce, and emerged from chronic depression. And that was about a decade ago. And so for the past 10 years, I've been trying to answer that question, what to do to try to make a difference for the human race with the, yeah, succeeding in phase one of trying to make a whole bunch of money.

So you did phase one really well. And, you know, I think you said it's really important that, you know, you reached the pinnacle of success and yet you were freaking miserable, right? You sold your company, your marriage was a mess, you're questioning your belief systems that you grew up with and your faith. And it was a period of kind of darkness for you. And out of that darkness for many of us grows something great. And your insight about wanting to do something great for humanity was a good one. A lot of us have that. I have that. And your, your insight about wanting to do something great for humanity was a good one. A lot of us have that. I have that. And I know a lot of people have that, but, but yours took a very interesting perspective, which is how do we even question

something that's not even something that we even question, right? The only thing certain is death and taxes. And, uh, I don't know what you do about taxes but you're actually maybe move out of california but you're but you're questioning death as a predetermined phenomena for humans and i've heard others say this like david sinclair and there's some people talking about it the longevity escape velocity i wrote about that in my book young forever which talks about the advances in science happening so fast that we can actually outpace the rate of aging and come up with technologies

and tools and solutions and medications and who knows what that's going to help us to keep extending our life faster than the pace of aging. Yes. And you're saying this concept, and you wrote a book about it called Don't Die, which is very kind of crazy.

I'm just going to say it. We've hung out. You're kind of a normal guy. You came to my house. We had a great conversation. He's not a weirdo, but he's challenging things. He's saying, wait a minute, the Earth isn't the center of the universe,

or it's not flat. You're talking about the theory of evolution, something that's so radically different than our paradigm yeah that's hard for us to even accept it or even conceive of it and and it's easy to dismiss and say you're a whack job but you're not and and so i want to dive into kind of the sinking behind this approach to investigating this. And I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever, and how there are many things that we now know can actually reverse our biological age and slow the rate of biological aging. What you've done over the last three years is develop a regimen to really test this hypothesis and to not just conceptually talk about it, not just do studies on mice, but do studies on

humans. And just to frame this for people, most doctors will say, this is an anecdote. And anecdotes are the lowest possible form of evidence. However, it's not really true. If you look at the NIH standard on what are the levels of evidence, it's N of 1 data. N of 1 means number one, meaning you measure a person, you do an intervention, and then you measure their outcome after. And that's what you've done in space by looking at over 200 data points a day on your health, by dozens and dozens and dozens, millions of data points on your health over time, imaging data, blood data, stool data, saliva data, urine data, you're like the data guy, right? So this is data-driven insights about human biology that we really had before.

I mean, I've been practicing a physician for a long time and I worked at a place called Canyon Ranch in my own practice and have dealt with people who could afford to do $5,000 to $10,000 worth of testing. And I've done that on tens of thousands of people. So I've seen literally millions in data points. But in a sense, it's helped me learn about everything that I know. But it also hasn't really come close to the kinds of things you're measuring and looking at on a regular basis over time.

I just don't have the capacity even to make kinds of things you're measuring and looking at on a regular basis over time. I just don't have the capacity and even to make sense of it all. So, you know, this approach really helps you to not just have this abstract data, but to see what's off. You know, in medicine we treat diseases, we don't really talk about health. But what you're looking at is you don't have a disease,

you're looking at how do I deviate from optimal levels of health? Not health of a 45 or however old you are now, but a health of a 18-year-old, right? That's right. How do I get to really look at, what are the metrics I should be moving towards in terms of optimal levels?

And how do I dial my lifestyle, my diet, my sleep, my exercise, my supplements, my relationships, my mental chatter, all of that? How do I regulate that to influence this? So you kind of are doing all this stuff for yourself and you created something called the blueprint. So this is not, you're not just doing this for yourself. You want to make this available to everybody. Not every, obviously is going to do $2 million for the testing on themselves, but you've sort of created a model where you can actually use yourself as a

guinea pig and then actually will help create a model for people to follow. So what is the vision for this framework of Blueprint and the vision for this company that you created? It started with a thought experiment. After I sold my company, I arranged a bunch of dinners with friends across the nation. I identified my smartest friends and I would pose a thought experiment to them. You didn't invite me. We were friends at the time. You'd be invited now. And I said, okay, let's do a thought experiment. Let's imagine we're living in 2050 and the world is this extraordinary place. What did we do in 2017? This is when I was doing the dinners that made 2050 so extraordinary.

And then I would just listen intently to everyone's answers and I'd write them down. And so I did about 10 or so of these dinners. And then I drew a circle on a paper. I wrote down everyone's ideas in the circle. And then I said, I can't do anything that's in the circle. I have to find whatever I'm going to do to be in negative space. And the premise behind that was that if you look throughout history, rarely do you find the future

in the status quo of a given age. You find the future on the fringe of society. And even then, it may not be present yet. And so I was trying to look in the negative space to say, what could I do? And I couldn't see anyone trying to tackle death. And I wondered, is it possible in 2020 that one could say with a straight face, I'm going to go after death. Now, people, of course, have been trying for the Fountain of Youth.

That's a good startup. Since the beginning of time. And death.com. And death. Who owns that URL? Yeah, that's a good one. It's like trolldeath.com. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I wrote that outside the circle and I thought, if one were to be serious about this, how would you actually try to do it? And then I started plotting it out. There's one element that is the health, but then there's also a philosophical element.

There's an economic, social, like it plays on a whole bunch of different planes. And that's what I've been working on for the past couple of years is trained my sights on, this is like, when Magellan said, I think i can circumnavigate the globe because the ships are good enough the navigation tools are good enough you know i can do it so at any given age someone says i think this thing that has been impossible or not imagined can we can have a go at it and so i set my sights on death and it's true i mean this is this crazy

intersection of technology science biomedic, understanding of aging that's completely different than, you know, even, you know, 45 years ago when I went to medical school. It was 40 years ago. No, it was 1983 I started. That was 41 years ago I started medical school. So, you know, it was not even in the conversation to think about the things that we're talking about in biology and health now in medicine. So it's so exciting that you're thinking about that place that is really outside of what is normally conceived as possible, right? Yes. So what is the blueprint a little bit at a high level? What's the basic framework of this sort of blueprint protocol? It's a question first of measurement that if we can, in fact, so I guess blueprint was, can we measure the biological age of every organ of my body? Could we then comb through all the scientific literature and rank them according to power laws? And then could we apply all the science that homo sapiens have discovered in the past couple

hundred thousand years? And could we apply it into into me and then can i become the most measured person in history like just to get where we at roughly and it does have limitations at the end of one sure but it was really interesting to us that as a starting point a a holistic perspective from an organ uh basis to all the scientific literature to then quantifying. So there was no storytelling. There was no, trust me, it was just data and science. And we wanted to run the experiment and then be open with the entire thing so that everyone could follow along. They could do it themselves. They could learn from our successes and also our mistakes. So I tried to just be open science across the board on all of it. Okay. So, so take

us through it. Cause you know, you go to your doctor, you get your annual checkup. He listens to your heart with a stethoscope. He looks in your mouth. He looks in your ears. He looks at your eyes. This is an abdominal exam. I mean, I, I did, I learned this. I actually remember my preceptor in medical school says, you know, we're training you to do a physical exam, but it, you know, it's not that helpful and you're probably rarely going to find anything i mean yeah sometimes you will if someone's really sick you'll find signs but most time you won't and then the lab panel we get is like kind of archaic it's you know tested are really outdated like the wrong cholesterol profile and you know maybe 20 30 maybe if you got a really fancy doctor 50 analytes

we're talking about getting thousands and tens of thousands of data bits on yourself to know what's going on. And so you can modify your environment, meaning your global environment, we call the exposome, everything you're exposed to, your diet, your activities, your microbiome, toxins, everything, water you drink, the air you breathe, sleep, all these things are your exposome. Modify those to really regulate disturbances in this dynamic balance in the system. Yes.

And so, you know, in functional medicine, we think of the body as an ecosystem, as a network. And I think of it as the science of creating health, of health optimization. I don't treat disease. I simply look at where the body's off center or off balance and try to restore balance by taking out bad stuff and putting in good stuff. And essentially, that's sort of what you're doing. And what I'm curious about is,

what are the metrics that you're looking at? What are the things that you're tracking? What are the tests that you've done? Just kind of walk us through it. Because I think it's important for people to understand how you've come to learn about yourself. It's not just looking at your nocturnal erections. That's kind of fun to know.

It's a fun fact, but it's not really that. It's a sort of a secondary indicator of your blood flow and everything else. But what should we be looking at for your health? Yeah, we would take a given organ, for example, the heart, and we would pose the question, where can we find scientific evidence where the heart has an age equation? So it could be, you know, max heart rate. It could be regurgitation levels. It could be like you basically start listing out and then

you say you can do a blood panel on the heart. You can do an MRI, you can do ultrasound, you can do an EKG. And so you just start listing out all the ways to measure the heart. And then you try to find literature where they have a study of significant size that you can then age quantify and say, okay, my valves are operating at this biological age. My, you know, my aortic structures are the following. And so we would then just start doing that for every organ. Like, how would you do so for the lungs? Like, what are, you can do spirometry, right? You can do a whole host of tests. Biopsy, of course, would be great.

Biopsy in these organs are hard. So where you can't biopsy, we try to get out all these measurements. And so we went through my entire body and tried to tease out hundreds of biological ages. We did fitness tests. We did, of course, DNA methylation. We did like balance, strength,

nerve sensitivity, eyesight, like you name it. Any age test we could find that we thought was legitimate, we would do. And then we would do these baselines and then I'd do a bunch of therapies and we'd do it again. And we'd say, did it change anything functionally or anatomically? Has the age of that organ changed at all? Yeah, interesting. So these aging clocks for organs are something we don't learn about typically in medical school. We know your maximum heart rate.

For example, I'm 64. My maximum heart rate should be 156. That's the amount that my heart can maximally get to when I'm working out like crazy. But I routinely get in the 180s because my biological age is 43. So I think the body has that capacity. And we have these declines that we think of as normal.

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

Yeah, that's one example where I think my high sensitivity CRP is, I think, 0.1. So it's barely detectable. And so we found a paper that has an age graph on these inflammation scores and put us at that level. And we did the same thing with like, for example, NAD levels, intracellular NAD. So we were trying to, because as you said, like in medicine, you, the way medicine is practiced, you do a test and they say good or not good, but it's really a binary. You may have a reference range where you're on the lower end or higher end, but it's not as precise as saying

you've got levels equivalent to an 18 year old or a 65 year old. And a lot of things in our biology do follow an age trend line, you know, in a reasonable amount, not all reference ranges are the same. And so we really wanted to put it in context of where am I on that age range?

And it was fun because like my boys are 20 and 18, my daughter's 14. And so any test I would do, I would immediately message them and be like, Hey, I got a new, I got a new fun one for you because I'd always want to measure myself relative to my boys and figure out like, even as a, they've got half of my genetics, what, what is their biological characteristics of their age? So we were trying to look at it from every data point we could. Yeah. I think it's important because we now don't think about medicine that way. And when I look at lab ranges, people don't realize when you look at a lab range for, let's say, blood sugar, it says your lab range should be 70 to 100 is normal fasting. But when you look at the

data, if your levels are over 87, you have a linear increased risk of having heart disease. Is it better to be 80 or 75 fasting, right? And so we don't think about medicine that way. It's like binary, you either have it or you don't. You have diabetes or you don't. You have high cholesterol or you don't. You have high blood pressure or you don't. But it's, you know, I got my blood pressure test

the other day and they were very upset. I'm like, why, it's like 110 over 70, which, you know, I'm 64, it should be like a lot higher, right? And they're like, well, this is low blood pressure. I'm like, no, it's not low blood pressure, it's normal blood pressure. And when you look at the risk,

and this is, he's talking about data, when you look at the risk in terms of cardiovascular risk, stroke risk, it increases in a linear fashion from optimal levels. So it's not like it's an honor off phenomenon so you lower your blood pressure the better i mean obviously not you want to pass out if you have too low blood pressure but like you don't have too low blood sugar there's too low but there's that goldilocks level which is really what's optimal and and what did you find in your own body that when you started this was was not good that you were

surprised because you were a young man you were still what 40 something when you started 43 yeah when you started this yeah so so you were you were you were not a spring chicken yeah although you're my my biological is 43 so i'm good with that but but but but you you you uh what did you find yeah several things uh one my my left ear is age 64 so between 4 000 hertz and 12 000 hertz i'm deaf basically deaf and that was from shooting a lot of guns as a kid and loud music i never had hearing protection on some it was i'm right-handed so the gun my left ear had the exposure my right ear was more protected and we've tried very hard to reverse that with no success yeah uh so we that that's one uh two is i found this is a congenital issue i have narrow internal jugular veins and the combination of that plus my poor posture was causing some backup of blood in my brain so i had intracranial pressure and I had a, I think my

white matter hyperintensities aged me at something like 47. They've since gone down the equivalent, I think of like 13 years since correcting my posture and a bunch of other therapies. So that was an interesting find. So for those listening, what you just said was as we age, we tend to get these little scarring tissues in our brain called white matter lesions. They can be from like mini little strokes or little hardening of the arteries and they accumulate as we age.

And for a young guy, it's really unusual. I just had my functional MRI done last week as a sort of just, because I'm into this stuff too. And I was like, he's like, wow, your brain looks good. There's no atrophy and you have almost no white metal lesions, you have like one. And most people your age have like dozens of them. So I think there's, it's interesting to see,

you can actually start to track this. But what are the other things that you found that were things that most people would check? Like most people aren't checking their, I mean they're hearing maybe, but not looking at their internal jugular vein and white metal lesions. What are the things that you found that were, was your cholesterol off, was your blood sugar off, did you have your liver up? Orions what are the things that you found that was your cholesterol off of your blood sugar off did you have you know your liver up or what was what was

sort of something that you found that was surprising i know it's hard to remember from all those millions of biomarkers you did yeah i mean my my speed of aging initially was i think over one ah okay yeah well that's really important. Yeah. Yes, my clock, I'm trying to think, yeah, I need to go back in time in my mind and find the surprises. Well, let's talk about the speed of aging thing, because I think it's really important.

You know, there's something called the Dunedin pace of aging. So just as a background for everybody listening, there are many biological clocks that are being used to track the rate and your biological age. And they're all kind of over the place. You know, if you stay with the same one over and over, it's internally consistent, but they often don't match up.

One say you're 53, one say you're 43, and so forth. But there's a particular clock that you found really helpful that's called the Dunedin pace of aging. And it's really the rate of aging. So if you age a year for every year you're alive, right? It's, you know, 50, you'll be 50 and 60, you'll be 60, right? But if you, you know, slow, what you were saying is you were, you were actually accelerating. You were aging faster than your chronological age when you started doing this.

Now you're out of 1750 people who are tracking this with you. You're like number one, meaning the slowest pace of aging. So you want to slow the pace of aging. And you're at 0.69, meaning for every year that you get older, chronologically, you only get older 0.69 years. Yes. Right?

And so tell us about this test and what you've done to kind of modify it, because it's very impressive. Yeah. I'm 0.84. I thought I was excited about mine. But yours is better. No, that's honestly 0.84 is great.

Okay, good. Yeah. I don't think we, it's like, if you're in that range, you're doing a great job. I wouldn't pick the difference with relatively minor differences. But like, okay, so DNA methylation, a lot of people- So you're going to put me up at number one with you on the list?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're trying hard. You're doing a lot of good stuff. It's great. And I think it's better for everyone to feel rewarded for the effort and to not be nitpicky about the exact number. I don't think it's that,

I don't think we can say that much about it in this point in time. So I think it's more that we're in that general range. But the, yeah, the DNA methylation clocks, a lot of people will say two things about them. One is they'll say, I did various clocks. I got different ages, therefore they must all suck. And the other thing they say is,

it's not yet tied to all cause mortality. Therefore, you know, it's not a goal standard if you don't have a big marker. And so on the first one, what they don't realize is these clocks are trained for a specific algorithm. They train with certain data for the algorithm. So it's not like they all have the same algorithm

and they just have different outputs. They're trained for different objectives. So you can't compare- They're using different math, essentially, right? Exactly, and different variables. And so you can't compare- They're using different math, essentially, right? Exactly, and different variables. And so you can't compare one to the other or use that to discredit. And so we've, as a team,

we like the denudant pace because it's not an age, it's just your pace of aging. And we think of the clocks, it's a good one that we can do repeatedly to say, how is this changing? Like other markers, it's relatively steady. that we can do repeatedly to say, how is this changing like other markers? It's relatively steady.

And so we've liked it because we've seen that my speed of aging has gone up and down with various therapies. Like sometimes a certain therapy that's doing something positive also temporary speeds up my speed of aging and then it comes back down. So it's been cool to see just like you'd see cholesterol up and down, or you'd see inflammation up or down with various changes in life and so we yeah the we really succeeded initially getting my speed of aging down to 6.69 it was best in world at some point and uh we've since been playing with a whole

bunch of therapies watching that go up and down but we like we like dna methylation clocks we think the next gen ones even the omen clocks are even much better because now you can do an organ by organ basis clock. Yeah. So I love the trajectory because like with cholesterol, is there an improvement curve for looking at cholesterol?

Like kind of not, like we're, we kind of have that one nailed. Whereas these DNA methylation, it seems like we've got a lot of frontier to explore. What in fact is changing these? Now, is it going to be tied to alcohol's mortality and how strongly? It's emergent, but we're bullish. We like them. We think they're great. It's a low cost, easy to do test.

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That's symbiotica, C-Y-M-B-I-O-T-I-K-A.com forward slash hymen and use the code hymen for 20% off plus free shipping. Yeah, I think it's right. I think it's important to start to track these things for ourselves and you know to become the seal of our own health because you weren't leaving up to your annual checkup with your regular primary care doc they would have you know never looked at any of this and yeah if you just said you know i'm going in there i want to i'm like 43 but i want to become like 33 again they're like yeah you're doing fine you look great you're skinny you're you know look like you're doing fine. You look great. You're skinny. You're, you know, look like you're in shape, you know, keep doing what you're doing.

Come back and, you know, when you're 50, get your colonoscopy. And it's really unfortunate because not how we should be practicing medicine. We should be practicing medicine exactly like you're thinking about it, which is where are we deviating from optimal ranges of health in every area? And how do, how do we implement very specific lifestyle practices supplements hormetic therapies medications maybe you know maybe who knows what treatments like plasma free cells or stem cells there's all kinds of stuff we can do right and and and what's possible it's such a fascinating question i think to me's like, it's so cool to meet you and to talk about this because I've been having this thought experiment in my head

and really haven't been able to sort of do it at the scale you're doing. And I've done it, obviously, with myself and patients at a smaller scale, but it's just so incredible. So when you started sort of looking at the things that made the most difference, like you went from a pace of over one

aging to 0.69 yeah what made the most difference for you yeah that one of the i think the more interesting things is that when the topic of health and wellness comes up it depends on whose company you're in but usually everyone's going to have their thing. You know, one person's going to say, I swear by ice baths. That's the thing. The cold plunge is what, you know, others are going to say, nah, it's the sauna. And others are gonna be like, no, it's this Eastern practice I have. The others are gonna be like, no, no, no. This celery juice is the thing that's the better. My gratitude journal in the morning. Yeah, exactly. Everyone has a vector to talk about what is contributing to their wellness.

And then it just becomes disastrous because there's no baseline to talk about anything. And then you're just dealing with, you know, the storytelling. And so we combed through all the literature and we try to say, if we just look through every paper ever done and we rank them according to effect size and then grade the evidence to say, are there power laws here? And can we just take the power laws? Like let's forget about the things at the bottom side right now, the bottom 20%, like it's not even going to be in our thought process. So we've, we tried to master the basics, sleep, diet, exercise, weight. Um, so like the top five are no smoking, you know, six hours a week of exercise,

um, a Mediterranean or blueprint like diet, a BMI of 18.5 to 22.5, moderate to no alcohol, and then sleep. And so first things we did is master those. And so one, one demonstration is, I think I recorded the best sleep score ever, where I had eight months of perfect sleep using a whoop wearable. And it was for eight months in a row. I mean, I built my life around sleep and I wanted to demonstrate that perfect sleep is row. I mean, I built my life around sleep and I wanted to demonstrate that perfect sleep is possible. You just need to structure your life around that. Did they call you and say, is your whoop broken? Yeah, it was fun. I mean, it was really a fun exercise. No one had ever done that before.

And sleep to me is the number one thing we do as an intelligent being. When sleep is right, life is right. Amen. And when sleep is off, like life stinks. It's so much harder. It's like 10 times harder when you're not well slept. It's like walking through a hair gel. Awful. And so, yeah, getting the basics right,

that was initially that's what drove down the speed of aging. And then on the diet side, we tried to say, every calorie I eat has to fight for its life. Not a single calorie can be present that doesn't have a specific function in my body. And we became that ruthless where if it didn't achieve something in the body, it was out.

Now, of course, there's many ways that you can achieve a perfect diet, right? There's all kinds of foods you can play with, all sorts of ratios. I'm vegan by choice, but definitely people do meat, great, do your thing. But I was trying to say, can we design a perfect diet

and then tag it inside the body with the megabit? But you say by choice, meaning a moral choice or a scientific choice or an environmental choice or- It's the only choice I've imposed in this experiment is veganism. So in other words, you didn. So, so in another way, you didn't come in a priority saying I'm open to any diet.

You were like, this is, I want to be vegan and do this as a vegan. Exactly. So it's not that you can't do this without that. I want to get into that because I think, you know, as a doctor, if you don't do veganism, right, it can be harmful. Yes. Massive nutrient deficiencies, loss of muscle. I mean, cognitive effects. I mean, it just, it can be harmful. Massive nutrient deficiencies, loss of muscle, I mean, cognitive effects. I mean, it just, fertility effects. Yeah. So, and you, I'm sitting across

from you here and you're like ripped, you know, I'm like, how do I get muscles like that? You know, like, and, and, you know, you, you obviously are doing something right. So, and, and, and I'm imagining you're not taking a lot of processed protein powders and weird stuff because it doesn't seem like that would fit into your every calorie has to count philosophy. So take this to your diet because it's fascinating. Because one of the things that is sort of paradox of aging and we talked a lot about it on the podcast.

I've had a lot of nutrition and science experts on, Don Lehman and others. But as we age, we lose muscle. And that becomes one of the fundamental phenomena that causes us to age faster because you lose muscle and it's a vicious cycle. You get increased inflammation, higher cortisol, lower growth hormone.

You can't repair tissues as well. You go lower testosterone, you get worse cholesterol, worse blood sugar. It's just a disaster. And plus you can't function, do the things you want to do. So keeping your muscle is a real key part of healthy aging. And in order to do that, you need adequate amount of protein, the right amino acids,

and you need to exercise, which I've seen doing. And if you look at this phenomenon of mTOR, which is what people kind of often talk about when they suggest being vegan is that mTOR is this thing that will make you age faster because it prevents autophagy or self-cleanup or recycling, right? So if you eat meat, that's gonna shut that off. So they're right, but it also kind of, you need mTOR to be activated to synthesize muscle, otherwise you're gonna lose all your muscle.

So it's kind of got the Goldilocks, like you need to turn on and off. And so for you, how have you kind of thread the needle on a vegan diet and looking as ripped as you do and managing the risk there? Yeah, you're exactly right. Because you have to, if you're doing vegan or any diet, you're optimizing for your speed of aging, your muscle mass, your fat, your cardiovascular capacity, your inflammation, your cholesterol. You can't just optimize for like one thing, muscle and other things. You have to hit every single one. And so I think what's unique is I've done veganism plus caloric restriction, and I'm still

in the 99.5 percentile for muscle and for fat and top 15 top 1.5 percent of 18 years for cardiovascular capacity and top 99.8 percentile for for bone mineral total bone mineral density so if you look at my metrics across the board across every vector of my health the diet is hitting perfectly on every single thing and so a lot of people have they just dismiss veganism as incapable of accomplishing these objectives that plus caloric restriction and you're out of the game, you can't compete. Yeah. But yet I've shown I'm as competitive as sitting on the edge of my seat here, Brian, what are you doing? Yeah. So give us a recipe. Yeah. I, yeah, I just got my latest MRI results just before I arrived today. Uh, I want to see what the new data is. So for breakfast, I eat

super veggie, which is broccoli, cauliflower, lentils, ginger, hemp seeds, and garlic. And then the next meal is... You're not kissing anybody after breakfast then. So it's, yeah, it's the garlic is not, you

cannot sense it. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. Okay can't taste it. Okay. Yeah, it's invisible. And then the next meal I have is- How do I get some of that for my wife? Because she loves garlic and it's not invisible. Yeah, yeah. I think, so the way we do it is we cook it, we boil it,

and then you chop it and or blend it. And it just doesn't, yeah, the smell's gone. All right. So that's breakfast and lunch is? And then the next meal of the day is nutty pudding, which is macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, pomegranate juice, berries, pea protein. So pea protein.

Yes. So using some type of food product that's made in a factory in order to do this. So you need the actual protein. You don't have any grams of protein you're having there? Yes. I'm for a tall, every day I'm having 110. Okay. So that's a lot. The lentils are, um, is it a lot yet? Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's probably not for your weight. Uh, what I would say would be what you need to look like you, but clearly it's working, right? So somewhere between half a gram to a gram per pound yeah yeah it's funny

most people's imaginations of protein they're in the 150 most men i know are in the 150 200 250 a day that somehow that that has become the standard of people's expectations but we even saw when my protein was around 120 i think My bun was a bit high. That's your kidney ability to kind of process urea, which is in protein, right? Right. So I lowered it to the 109, 110 range, and the bun came back down to 17.

And so, yeah, we've tried to very carefully titrate the perfect. And so, yeah, I eat a lot of fat. I have extra virgin olive oil with every meal. So I do 45 mLs a day, three tablespoons a I have extra virgin olive oil with every meal. So I do 45 mLs a day, three tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil. So in that pea protein, how many grams of protein was in that? 25, I think.

25, okay. And so is that a spiked pea protein? In other words, does it have additionally amino acids that increase leucine content? It's just pure organic pea protein, right? Yep. And then we do pea and hemp and then lentils.

Yep. For the 110. Okay. And then dinner? I'll have, it'll be some combination of vegetables, berries, or nuts. Okay. So that's interesting. So it's a very low grain, almost no grain except for beans, no dairy. And the only thing you have sort of processed is

pea protein. Yes. And you do that once a day. Yep. And that's amazing. So are you doing anything else to support muscle growth in terms of supplements, hormones, anything like that? Yeah, I take, I have creatine. Creatine, right. I take 2.5 grams a day. And then I do calcium alpha-ketoglutarate just for frailty index, but that's not really for muscle. I don't think anything else for muscle.

Testosterone? No, no testosterone. No testosterone. My levels are around 800. Amazing. Yeah, without it. And yeah, there's nothing else I do for muscle. You don't take amino acid supplements?

No, I did. And it was contributing to the higher bun. Oh, yeah. Yep, so no amino acids. We call it BUN. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

There was a, there was a, um, it was a, a funny thing happened when I was in medical school. There was a, a new, um, a new, and a medical student on the, on the rounds. And, uh, you know, sometimes you see a low level and we call it BUN. Yeah. Um, and, and, uh, we made a joke on the, on the medical student cause he was like, wow, this is, look, they're we call it BUN. And we made a joke on the medical student because he was like, wow, look, their BUN's low. We call it BUN or their bun's low.

And he said, well, you should call the lab right now and get two units of bun stat. And so he called down the lab. It was very funny. Anyway, inside joke. So that's your diet. And one of the things that, that sort of, I joked about earlier is, is that I think is so important for life is joy and laughter and

pleasure. It, you know, it's, it's something that, that it sort of makes life good, right? It's our friends, our community, our, our, our ability to enjoy things and savor things. Do you feel like you're missing out on some of the joy of food? It's so funny that when people, you mentioned this before, when people see me, they will make five conscious observations and then another five unconscious observations. And they're all negative.

They assume I'm miserable. They assume my food is awful. They assume I'm missing out on life they assume that I just can't imagine the joy they have eating donuts and pizza yeah they you know so it's all negative it's such a rare person to pause and say huh like we we are currently having an insanity contest like yeah I'm thinking this person's insane. Is it possible that I'm the one who's insane? And there's probably 998 people who do the accusatory. I'm insane. And two who will say, huh? Yeah. And so it's, it's, it's remarkable. So yeah, I mean, I'm always put on the, on the,

uh, on the stand to be interrogated of you're so miserable and i know you're miserable and i'm going to interrogate you to find you know so you can until you tell me how miserable you are but i would say on food i've never enjoyed food more in my entire life and you talk to people it's not just me you talk to people who it's not just me. You talk to people who do a blueprint and they have a contrast where they go out to a restaurant. They can taste the oils. They can taste the junk. The food supply chain is not clean and it's instantaneous. And then they see how they feel afterwards.

And then, you know, they'll eat more food than they should outside the protocol. They feel awful. So it's an immediate response that like like it's pretty miserable to go out there and eat too much food and eat processed food junk food it's awful it's like such a terrible existence it's true it's true absolutely true and i think i think people uh don't realize how food makes them feel and i can tell you after practicing medicine for 40 years, even the most brilliant human beings, and I take a lot of very smart people,

do not make the connection between what they eat and how they feel. Their energy, their mood, their brain function, their cognitive ability, their energy, everything. Their digestive function, their skin. I mean, nothing. It's like, I'm like, yeah, food has to do with everything that's going on in your body. It's basically the raw materials

for everything that's happening. And when you came over to our house the other day, you said something that really struck me. You said, I've never been happier in my life. You know? And that's no small thing to say. For many people who struggle with mental health issues, and we know, we know,

and I've done podcast after podcast about this, the role of ultra processed food in our mental health. It was just an article in the Wall Street Journal about it. It's hitting the mainstream now. I've talked about this for years, but we know these things inflame our brain, inflames our bodies, it's all connected. So I think it's important.

And again, it's like, what's the payoff, right? Yeah. Do you want to feel like crap just for having a moment of pleasure as sugar passes your mouth? Or are you going to make a choice that's going to be the right choice? I got invited by a friend to go talk to a group of high school students. And the conversation turned pretty intimate where they started sharing the burden they felt of their depression and anxiety and just mental cloudiness. And to your point, I, my first question

was, are you sleeping? You know, what's your sleep like and what's your diet like? And it was, there was no connection in their mind whatsoever between the two things. They, they were struggling with existence. It felt incredibly painful. They didn't know what they could do to alleviate the pain, but there was not a single thought that sleep and diet may be a problem. And when I probed it, you know, sleep was awful. They were staying up until way too late on their phones, you know, in their beds, just like procrastinating, going to bed, just scrolling. And their food, the diet was just fast food, processed food, junk food.

And so, yeah, just calling attention, like, you know, you could really maybe make a nice positive stride if you could get a few basics in place. But I agree. It's pretty surprising that these things are not the most obvious go-to moves when you start feeling bad in life. That's true. People don't know the connection. I mean, my book's right there called The Ultra Mind Solution I wrote 15 years ago on the top shelf that basically is about how our body affects our brain right yeah and and you know one of the challenges i see in people adopting what you're talking about is is this catch-22 where you're in this cycle of living and eating a certain way and it makes you crave and want the foods yes you can't break the cycle and it leads to more

mental health issues and you get more depressed and you want more crap and cycle, and it leads to more mental health issues, and you get more depressed, and you want more crap, and it's like a vortex that sucks you down into a spiral of disease and depression and maybe even suicide sometimes we talk about. And by the way, I'm not just saying that flippantly. We know in studies of young kids who swap out junk food for a healthy diet that suicide rates go down by 100%. So it's not, I'm talking about data here.

How do you recommend people break that log jam where they're in that vicious cycle, they're listening to this, they go, God, I want to feel good, I want to have energy, I want to feel all these ways. How do I stop doing these bad things to myself that I even know are bad?

Yeah, the thing that worked for me, I was stuck in that spiral for a decade. I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. 60 pounds? Yeah, I was obese. You were a little big Brian. A big Brian. I couldn't buckle the top button on my pants.

It was just too tight. And I didn't want to buy bigger pants because then I would be giving in. I'd be accepting the new norm. So I kept those motherfuckers. And I was like, you know what? I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not going to do it. But every single day, it was just such an uncomfortable reminder of my inability to get control. And so the trick I applied was I learned this when I was depressed. I read a book that made the wise observation, which has been around for a long time, that I am not my thoughts. That when my brain would say, hey, Brian, maybe you should commit

suicide because life is awful and there's really no hope to exist, you might as well end it. You need to be out of pain, commit suicide. And I would have that thought every day, all day in variations. And then reading that book, it was this invitation to realize that I could observe the thoughts landing. And I wasn't those thoughts. That was not me. That was just something in my mind was generated

and I could observe it and try to be impartial and say, thank you for the suggestion. This may be rough right now, but you know what? I don't want to end it because I probably can come out of this and I'm going to feel differently. And so I applied the same trick. You went from do die to don't die.

Yes, exactly. Right, the juxtaposition is beautiful. And so now, so when I was struggling for, my particular advice was when 7 p.m. would arrive, it was, I had bathed the kids, I'd fed them, bathed them, read them stories and put them to bed. And then I was at the tail end of the day, I had bathed the kids. I'd fed them, bathed them, read them stories and put them to bed. And then I was at the tail end of the day,

exhausted from all the wear and tear of building a startup. And like, you know, my partner was there waiting to have a fight with me. And it's like, you know, I just wanted to be dead on the floor. Just play dead. It was so bad. And the only thing that would bring me pleasure was contemplating going into the kitchen

and getting that pan of brownies, you know, and just eating myself into oblivion. I wouldn't throw up, but just overeat and I would be so sick and that I couldn't sleep. And then I'd wake up the next morning, I'd feel awful. And then I'd start the new cycle of like, today's the day I'm going to do it. And then 7pm would come and like, and so after trying so many things for all these years to stop myself from committing this self-destructive behavior one day just i was basically just fed up with myself like i had given up i said evening brian you're fired you make my life miserable and you no longer have the authority to eat and so separating my my different versions of myself from me gave me freedom to say, who is this evening Brian character?

What are their characteristics? What arguments do they use? You know, they show up and they'd be like, hey, today's the last day. Like legit, you know, tomorrow's Monday. That's a great con man. Exactly. It's so persuasive. He's so good.

You know, tomorrow's Monday. Tomorrow we start. We'll work out extra hard tomorrow morning we're just going to do one bite of the brownies you know not two just one and i was able to then make this character and then when he showed up i was able to say hi evening brian i see you're here and i could talk to him and that was the last time i did it and i made the rule that evening brian could not eat food no matter what. So from 5 PM to 10 PM,

I created a buffer for safety. I could not eat that window. And that is still true today. Yeah. That no matter what I cannot eat that window because that's even Brian's territory. And I just, I'm now,

he's a great character to have around, but he's not responsible and he kind of ruins every other Brian's life. Yeah. Well, I think you speak to something really important, which is how do we start to learn about our own mind and realize that we're not at the effect of our mind, that we actually need to be the author of our own thinking and have agency

and not believe every stupid thought we have. Yes. And realize as a inner idiot that's running the show a lot of the time. Almost all the time. Almost all the time. That you can learn about and that you can work with.

And there's a lot of practices. I've spent years working on my inner idiot. Sometimes I call him my inner asshole. Yeah, yeah. And I've gotten pretty good at it. And now he shows up occasionally, but actually he's like an annoying cousin that you just don't want to have around thanksgiving but i just kind of ignore him

and he goes away yes so i i think i think it's a tough thing but it that that's a whole deeper conversation about how do we how do we tackle our minds but at the end of the day there's there's some really practical things that you've learned about um not just tackling the evening, Brian, but how do you go from just stop eating that sheet cake of brownies to understanding some better practices? So sleep, you made a big point about it. And I think, you know, it's interesting when you say that. I want to just linger here for a sec

because what you said is I didn't eat between 5 and 10 p.m. Now you don't eat between 11 in the morning and when you go to bed, which is 8 p.m., right? And that's a long time. I feel like, wow, stop eating at 11 o'clock. I'm not even having breakfast at 11 o'clock. And you get up early.

You get up at like four or something, right? So it's a normal sleep. But in Sardinia, for example, where I visited, in Nicaria, in these countries where they look to be very old, they're like people, I mean, I met one couple, they were like 200 and, I think, they were 210 years old together,

you know? Yeah. And they eat late. I mean, they have lunch and then they eat like late at night. And I don't know how they do it. Because I go to Europe, I can't stand doing that. How do you explain that? Yeah.

There's so many ways to get to the same destination. And I've tried to say that my way is not the only way it's a way. And if somebody wants structure, I have something for them because the burden is if you're wanting to be in good health, it's like this, almost this, um, infinitely large undertaking where you have to go out and read books and listen to podcasts and compare notes with friends. You have to reconcile contrary to the opinions. It's a mess. And when you've got a full-time job and maybe kids and other stuff going on, trying to tackle the entirety of human health is a pretty big project for an individual. And no one's there to help you guide. Even your most trusted people are going to give you different opinions. And so I wanted to try to offer up something for someone

to say, you know what, like, this is pretty good. It's working out pretty well for me. If you want to just have something that is stable and structured, here you go. It's free. Do that. Like, here's the food you eat. That's the blueprint. Yeah, exactly. Like here, you know, like here's my protocol of what I do when I go to bed. And so it's basically, it's a shortcut to health and just say, now start here. If you want to change, you know, when you eat great. If you want to change, you know, when you eat, great. If you want to change the time you go to bed, fine, but just something stable. So you're not spending 45 hours a week trying to figure this out and driving yourself insane doing so.

And there's an 80, 20 on this stuff, right? You're going for that extra 20, but the 80, 20 is pretty straightforward for most people, you know? And I think sleep, you know, you mentioned is being the pillar, which people think, oh, it's diet or it's people, you know? And I think sleep, you know, you mentioned is being the pillar, which people think, oh, it's diet or it's exercise. But sleeping is the pillar. What is your sleep practice? How do you get 100%? And I'm taking those.

I've built my life around sleep. Yeah, I will prioritize my sleep schedule over anything else. And so I do a few things. My bedtime routine starts the moment I wake up. my sleep schedule over anything else. And so I do a few things. Like my bedtime routine starts the moment I wake up. So I do 10,000 lux of light in the eyes right when I wake up to cement my circadian rhythm. I'll eat all my food by 11 a.m. because I did a few hundred experiments

of what kind of food I eat and when I finish eating and what my resting heart rate would be and how my sleep scores would be. And so now I just saw my best sleep is when I finished around 11 a.m. or noon with food. If I eat later, my resting heart rate goes up, my deep sleep goes down, my REM goes down. Like I've tried so many times to test this and inevitably every single time. And so I eat earlier in the day. I also don't eat things like carbs, like breads and pastas. That will make my resting heart rate go up and my deep and REM go down. And my wake after sleep onset go up.

And I never drink alcohol. Even the smallest bit of alcohol in the afternoon or evening hours will wreck my deep sleep. And then for my bedroom, I have, it's blacked out. So there's no light in there whatsoever. I have a temperature controlled mattress, eight sleep. I do a wind down routine every night, like 30 minutes or so where, again, I do this self-talk where I say,

okay, sleep Brian is now in charge and we're going to say, hey, work Brian, we appreciate your ambition for life. Like, thank you for wanting to do things. We're currently getting ready for sleep. So when you start reminding us about everything we need to do and the problems we need to solve

and you're like, we can do it tomorrow, but I'm not gonna write it down. I'm not gonna, we're just gonna be sleep Brian right now. And so I try to really focus my mind on the objective at hand because otherwise I have a lot of ambition. And so my mind is always popping off with like what it can do next and how it can work faster and how it can solve this and how it can solve that.

And those things ruin sleep. Like if you hit your pillow thinking about work or thinking about a problem, or if you're upset, you'll be in light sleep all night long, just ruminating on that problem. Yeah. You never go into deeper realm, like very little. And then you wake up the next morning, you feel awful. So yeah, those are some of the basics I do, but I really i really try to uh nothing is more important in my life than high quality sleep do you find emfs play a role in your sleep sorry emfs like technology wi-fi cell phone oh

yeah i like you sleep in a faraday cage i know um i've recently been uh wearing lambs material lambs make makes they're here in santa monica they um they make emf protect oh it's a company clothing yeah i thought you're taking like like a lamb skin yeah they make emf protecting clothing they have a whole like underwear shirts jackets and i've been wearing that lately uh i have it on now and so yeah i've been trying to do more emf protected stuff um like in your house do you turn off wi-fi at night or i don't and it doesn't affect lately. I have it on now. And so, yeah, I've been trying to do more EMF protected stuff. Like in your house, do you turn off Wi-Fi at night? I don't. And it doesn't affect your sleep? Yeah. I also don't have a router in my room. So it's a certain distance away.

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

I take like some of the more interesting ones around aging, fisetin, luteolin, calcium alpha-ketoglutarate. Yeah, so like- Like turmeric, green tea. Yeah. You take NMN or NAD, NR. I take NR.

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

When you're saying you're measuring the outcome, are you measuring like CoQ10 levels if you're taking CoQ10? Or are you measuring some function of the body related to CoQ10, like your respiratory chain and your mitochondria? Or like how do you look at these metrics? Yeah, we measure CoQ10. So that's what you're saying, you can measure a blood level. But you don't know if that blood level is doing the thing you want it to do, right?

We've played with the levels up and down. So we'll take a given variable and see if we adjust it if it's doing it. Like vitamin E, you know, like I do 67 milligrams of vitamin E. But you're targeting it toward blood levels or toward a biological function? Blood levels. Okay. Yeah. So you take these nutrients to basically fill in the gaps and

given that we live in a toxic world and we're all you know basically floating in a sea of pollution and toxins and and stresses and other things we can't manage right you kind of need that and i agree i think you know that it's unfortunate we need supplements but i i think given everything that's gone on with our world today and the insults we have and the poor quality food supply and the stresses and toxins, it's definitely essential. So do you take any drugs? Yeah, I take, yeah, this is a funny thing. So I hurt my leg hiking. I was out mountain running and I tripped and fell and I went in for stitches. And so the doctor got me on the table and he said, all right, son, before I stitch you up, are you on any medication? Are you on any medications? And I thought, Oh God, what do I do?

So I said, okay, I'll give it a go. I said, yeah, I'm on metformin. He said the drug they give to diabetics. Yeah. I said, I'm on a carbose. What's that? You know? And then I said, I'm on a rapamycin, the that? You know, and then I said, I'm on a rapamycin, the drug they give people with organ transplantations to suppress immune system. Yes. I'm taking quercetin, the leukemia drug.

Yes. And quercetin is a supplement too, right? Well, quercetin, yeah, but I'm taking distatinib. Oh, sorry. I meant to say distatinib. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was funny.

It was such an interesting moment where I had lost myself on the project and I had forgotten how far we had moved away from mainstream medicine, but he was just shocked. And he said, what the hell, son? What is going on? Why are you taking all these drugs? So it was a funny moment and brought me back to where the world's at and what we were doing. So what Brian just kind of unpacked was some of the most promising molecules in the space of longevity. I've written about them in my book. Metformin regulates insulin resistance and blood sugar.

Rapamycin inhibits mTOR, which can help with autophagy and self-cleaning. Has definitely been the most promising drug, I think, in terms of lengthening life. A carbose, another one of those things that helps with regulating blood sugar. It's basically a sugar blocker in the gut. And what was the other drug you mentioned? We've been doing for senolytic assessment, for senolytic clearing.

Yeah, just that and quercetin. Yeah, yeah, dasinib. That was a drug that was studied looking at reversing biological age along with quercetin and so on and things like that. Yeah, so I mean, I think metformin's an interesting one because I had Nir Barzilai on the podcast and he's right now conducting a large randomized controlled trial. They'll give us a definitive answer, but there's a lot of contradictory data about it.

Some of the observational data show that it was harmful, some show that it was helpful. And one of the concerns I have is it inhibits mitochondrial ATP production. And so the performance after exercise, the response to exercise in terms of muscle building is lower if you're taking, for example, metformin. So I'm not quite sold on that yet. I'm not opposed to it. I just think I'm sort of holding out for the data. But I think we all have a different tolerance,

risk tolerance for things. Now, these are drugs that are relatively inexpensive. I would probably not try them at home without your doctor and consulting with someone and being tracked. But they can be helpful. What dose of rapamycin do you take? 13 milligrams week one, six milligrams week two, 13, six. So off and on.

Yeah. So you do it once a week and the data shows that if you do it episodically, it doesn't really suppress immunity, which is good, right? Yeah, and we measured my blood levels. So I did the 13 milligrams. I measured my blood levels two hours post-ingestion, 24 hours, 48, 72, and 96. And so we're looking at the C-max, so where it peaks, and then we look at the half-life decay

to see that if I take 13 on day one, by day five, it should be gone from my system, or day six, like nearly gone. So we're trying to see that there's no carryover and it's compounding and accumulation of my body. So we've, that dose has been determined by blood draws, not a random number that we were trying. Fascinating. So what about exercise? Cause I mean, you know, like I said before, you really look ripped and I'm like kind of jealous. And, and, uh, you said also that exercise six hours a week is enough. So when I look at you, I mean, this guy's in the gym like three hours a day, but you're not, right? So tell us about what optimized exercise routine you've had.

And do you use like fancy equipment like blood flow restriction or VASPR or electrical stim exercise gizmos? Or are you just sort of doing the old fashioned pump and iron and run on the treadmill or run outside. Yeah. So I have, it's a routine of about 30 or so exercises and I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body every day. So it's low weight, a reasonable rep, like I'll do 10 or 15 reps per muscle group, but it's really nothing out of the ordinary. I stretch a lot. I do some weights. I do VO2 max training. It's cardio. Yeah. Yeah. But nothing special. You work with a trainer? You do it on your own?

Do it on my own. An hour a day? Yeah. Ish. Damn, that's pretty good. Yeah. That's pretty good. So again, you don't have to be kind of fanatical about it. And if you do it the right way, you can actually make a difference.

Yeah, this is the thing is people, they hear the $2 million headline and they think it's not accessible, but that's for the measurement. That's the expense for the medical research team and for the measurement I do. But Blueprint by itself is $1,000 to $1,500 a month. It's very, that includes your groceries.

So it's actually very comparable. I mean, it's like, it's actually affordable on most people. And then the, the commitment on exercise and sleep,

they're just basically lifestyle choices. And so it's doable by many people. Yeah. I think about it. Your sleep is free. You just lay down.

Yeah. Yeah. Your exercise, you're okay. You need a, you need maybe a few weights, but you buy them once in your life. And food, you got to eat that anyway.

Yeah. You're eating food that isn't that expensive. Yeah. You know, like you're not talking about a $70 grass-fed ribeye steak. Yes. You know, lobster tails. You're basically having vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds and oil and some lentils. I mean, it's pretty straightforward.

Yeah. And the supplements can be expensive. You know, they can be pricey, but, you know, there's an 80-20 on that too. You know, I think not everybody needs to take everything. You can take, you know, basic multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D and magnesium. And I think that covers it for most people. And then if you want to play around like I do,

or if you have specific things you're treating, you need to be more aggressive. But I think, you know, the one thing I sort of want to talk about is your sort of, your life in general, because you say you're so happy now. And yet, you know, listening to some podcasts you did and talking about that, it was like, you know, you need to stop eating at 11. So for me, you know, one of the most incredible pleasures is gathering with friends and having dinners and meals.

Yeah. And I also know that both, you know, I wrote a book years ago called Ultra Metabolism, talking about the sumo wrestler diet, which is how do sumo wrestlers gain weight? They basically eat and they go to sleep. So I've written about this and that you shouldn't eat before bed. And I know if I give myself four or five or six hours,

I do better than if I'm three hours. But I think, how do you reconcile this sort of, this phenomenon of longevity that has to do with the social connections and the relationships and the meaning and purpose we get from being embedded in a deep social web with the more sort of structured way you live that kind of precludes some of that?

Or do you just go out and don't eat? Yeah, I had a dinner party at my house on Monday. You mean a lunch party? A dinner party. Yeah, dinner. So I had them all over. We started at 6 p.m. And I made everyone, there was 14 of us.

I made a blueprint spread. So everybody has super veggie and nutty pudding. And we talked about the future of being human. And everyone had their food i didn't have food on my plate i normally do so when i go out with friends i will if we go to a restaurant i'll order steamed vegetables you know just so i have a plate in front of me and food on it if you don't then everyone's so upset that i don't have it then all the attention is directed towards me and it ruins the vibe of

the event yeah yeah so just to fit in i try to do that and you don't go to pizza joints because they don't seem veggie i mean i all meet people where they're at yeah like i definitely um i'm cool with kind of going with the flow and i've learned how excuse me how to blend in to not call attention to myself. And then if people want to poke around. What if you stay up late? I'm like, I love going to the dead and company shows. Like I'm going to the Sphere next month.

It's like, I get like the amount of pleasure and joy I get from doing that is so high. But the concert doesn't start till seven or eight at night. So I'm not in bed till like after 11 or 12 right yeah i mean so yeah on saturday i did a health rave in san francisco so in the morning we did a don't die event we had 500 people come up and we did a whole bunch of health activities and we had blueprint food and then we had a party in the evening and then we had our health rave that started at uh. And so I do do these things occasionally, not every day, but I have enough-

Reserve. Reserve, yeah, exactly, where I'm fine. I got, I think, like an 87% sleep score that night. Okay, well, that makes me feel better that you occasionally have a party. Yeah, I really, I tried to do the perfect sleep for eight months, and then I've really tried to relax it to make this much more approachable

because as you're touching on, when people see what I'm trying to do, there's a list that's like 20 things long on why the person can't do it. It's like, oh, it's 2 million or oh, he's miserable or oh, he hates his food or he can't be all friends.

No one wants to make change because change is very hard. and so everyone's motivated to list all the reasons why this is impossible for them to do and that makes them feel better that like right you know it's they can't do it and therefore i must be miserable therefore it's actually okay like they're the ones in the in the better position but if you break these things down you can't actually modulate this and i do understand people's perspective if you going to the grocery store and buying food, it's hard. Finding time to prepare it is hard. If you have kids, that's hard.

So there's so many practical things in life that make this really challenging to do. Yeah. But, you know, it's doable. When you take a look at your life and take real stock of all the choices you make, of all the things you do, of all the ways you do, of all the ways you spend your time, the way you spend your money, the way you spend your life energy, and the result and return on investment you're getting,

it's often not what we want. So we say we want to live a life that looks like this or that, but we don't often take the actions or steps that allow us to do that and make the choices that actually do it. And I think it's important for people to realize it's like you're saying, it's not that hard.

And we're talking about here, it's not that hard. And maybe we're not gonna live forever like you, but we'll for sure extend our health span and our lifespan. And I think most people listening today could easily get to 100 healthy years. And it's something that's really achievable. I wanna sort of dive into a little bit more of the Blueprint program,

because one of the things you've done for your community is diagnostic testing. Now, not the $2 million each, because they can't afford that, but you've come up with, again, the 80-20 on what are the diagnostic tests that are important. And so can you talk about some of the things you really think are important for us to measure and know about our biology that we're not looking at with our traditional healthcare? Yeah. So we just built a blueprint food product trying to make what I do very easy. And we started to do this. We started a self-experimentation study,

5,000 participants. And we set out with them the basics of a blood draw, body composition, wearables, and then questionnaires. And for many people in that cohort, it's the most robust measurement protocol they've had in their entire life. And the blood panel is more extensive. You know, they've never,

they've of course known their weight, but maybe not had a scale that gives them all the data. The body composition. Exactly. Wearables, you know, our next level, but then paired with the other things and then questionnaires,

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

Exactly. Test, don't guess. And yeah. And so it's really, each person's going to get a few hundred biomarkers on themselves, which is remarkable. And the enthusiasm in the group is palpable. It's cool that a lot of people want to do this, but like you're saying, they go to the doctor and the doctors don't offer this up. You know, like they have a specific routine where are you sick and do you need a drug or they're directing you down these paths, but they don't say, how do I think about holistically measuring you? It's very, very uncommon. And so it's cool to see this in action. And then we're going to publish all the data. And

so I like this because most, as you know, most supplements, you don't even know if they're legit, let alone them being out there doing open science and their supplements without them controlling the message. Right. And I'm just trying to, again, be open about everything I'm doing about myself, about the products we're building. It's just an open. Yeah. So it should be how we build.

It's great. So you've got the questionnaires, the wearables, the body composition measurements and the blood work. Yeah. And what are the things in the blood work that you're looking at that are not typically looked at? I think we have, if I remember, 63 markers that I should pull it up. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's stuff that, you know, some of it may be typical stuff you get, like your blood chemistry, your blood count. But some of it's different, like your nutrient levels or your metabolic health and things that are really important. really why I co-funded with my partners a company called Function Health, which we talked about, which essentially gives people access to tracking their data, to learning about what's going on under the hood. And actually, for less than $4.99, you can get 110 biomarkers on yourself, and then another repeat in six months for about 60 plus biomarkers, and look at what's going on and track the results over time and see what interventions have done to those biomarkers and whether you've improved or gotten worse. And it's very motivating because people don't know. I mean, people are just, I'm shocked at actually what we found. We've now had over 30,000 people in and 3 million biomarkers. We're

seeing 30% with an autoimmune biomarker, 46% with high levels of CRP and inflammation, which is the biggest driver of aging. We're seeing A and inflammation, which is the biggest driver of aging. We're seeing ApoB, which is a very important, probably the most important cholesterol biomarker that nobody checks. 50 plus percent have abnormal levels of that. We're seeing 67% with nutrient deficiencies, not at your level of what's optimal, right? Or what I would say is optimal, but what the lab says is deficient, which is very, very, very deficient. That's 67% of people in one or more of these nutrient biomarkers. So we're seeing incredible results that are giving people insights about what's happening that they never knew about, that now

are actionable insights that can up-level their health and maybe slow their pace of aging. So it's super exciting. And of course, you know, you're, we're talking about working together on this. It's really, it's kind of a, you and I are both really in the same mindset, which is people need to have access to their own health data. People need to use that information to see what's working and what's not working in their life to up-level their health and to have a roadmap or a blueprint for actually how to move forward. And so you created it really really, I love this,

because you already made your money, you're not making a bazillion dollars out of this stuff, you're just trying to share your knowledge and give people insights and get people enthusiastic and using yourself as an example to say, here's what's possible. So maybe we'll do another podcast in 100 years together. Or maybe sooner.

Wouldn't that be amazing? Or maybe we'll do it next year. We'll see if you're, I'm going to work on my pace of aging. I'm 0.84, you're 0.69. But I think, you know, I'm so enthusiastic about this conversation because, you know,

and the reason I wrote my book, Young Forever, was to kind of give people a sense that the science has advanced pretty far. And we know a lot about how to dial in diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, healing our microbiome, optimizing nutrient levels, optimizing our hormones, reducing our exposure to toxins. And then even some of these other therapies that, you know,

we talked about some of these drugs that may be coming around. And there's even cool stuff that's coming around that we're still exploring, like, you know, plasmapheresis and exososomes and you've done a little bit of that to kind of exchanging young plasma from your son and so uh and so you know you've kind of explored a lot of these things that are outside of the box for most people but it it's kind of an exciting moment isn't it yes i think that the thing i like that's most exciting to me is the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead said that society advances by the number of things you can automate without thinking about them. And I wonder when it comes to health and wellness, if we are going to bypass education altogether and system change, and algorithms are going to run our health for us because they'll be so much more efficient at

being able to assess our individual needs the scientific evidence and then the therapies to be and that's what i've tried to build a blueprint i've tried to basically build an algorithm that runs me as it relates to my health and wellness diet sleep. And we're now on this trajectory of intelligence where it's possible when you start getting these closed loop systems. And that to me is bullish that we can imagine a society that basically tries to generate near perfect health for everyone by default. No one's thinking about it. We're not fighting systems in this arcane way we do it now. I think it's, yeah. How do we make it frictionless to actually do the right thing? And I think, you know, I think we're getting there.

I mean, I think, you know, you talk about, you know, I used to watch your show and as a kid called the $6 million man, the bionic man. You're like the $2 million man. But the thing is, you know, that price tag is going to come down, right? So it costs you $2 million, but it costs, I don't know, a billion or 3 billion to decode the first human genome. Now you can get it done for a few hundred bucks. Like that's crazy in terms of savings.

As we see the technologies accelerate, the cost drops dramatically, even exponentially. And so it's soon being affordable for people to access their own bio data in ways that we just never had before. And then using computational power and insights from the science and from the research and from folks like you, we can actually start to create personalized roadmaps for people to optimize their health in ways they never had before. Yes. The future is exciting. Don't die. Don't die. Okay. So, so let's talk about that for a minute. I mean, to me, you know, and this is a daily thing for me, right? Cause I'm 64. I daily think about

that the time ahead of me is likely shorter than the time behind me. And it influences the choices I make, who I spend time with, what I focus on, and what I let into my life or what I discard from my life in a way that is really consequential. Yeah. And in some ways, knowing you're going to die makes every moment so much sweeter. Yeah. So how do you, how do you reconcile this idea of like living forever with the sort of beauty that mortality gives us in this weird way? Yeah. I'm sure you've had this question asked before. Yeah. Don't die is, it's the result of a thought experiment. It's how I enjoy thinking. So if you transport yourself in time to the 25th century, and you're listening to them as they converse

in whatever way they communicate, and they're observing the early 21st century, our time right now, and they're remarking at what we did that allowed intelligence to thrive in this part of the galaxy. What did we do? I mean, I don't know. in this part of the galaxy. What did we do?

I mean, was it, I mean, I don't know. I mean, my first thing that comes to mind is artificial intelligence and making things better. But there's a downside and dark side to that. It's not dying, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. That's what I came up with is that basically, you know, in the same way we look back

at the 15th century, we remember that century. We remember maybe 10 things about the entire century. Right. 99.9% of whatever happened there is gone to history. We just don't pay attention to it. Yeah. So there's a compression of time. And so while we are, of course, are all caught up in our lives in this moment. The 25th century is going to compress our moment to a very small number of things.

And that thought process forces you to try to reconcile with, it tries to pierce through all the noise and say, what really matters in this moment? And that's when I came back that basically we're baby steps away from super intelligence. And when you're right there on the ai or yeah exactly with ai of like basically creating computational intelligence

in the form of ai that is so far superior to us it's unimaginable like we know it's capable we know it's improving in what ways we're not entirely sure. Like we have some ideas, but we definitely can't predict it. And it's improving at a speed that our minds can't comprehend. So it's going to go in some direction and we're going to likely be very surprised. And so given that, and we'll have all this new capability, what does intelligence do? Do we take this new intelligence and say, now we're going to make more money. We're going to become better at going to war. We're going to become better social media people. And so what I'm saying is that intelligence- More Instagram followers? Isn't that the game? Exactly. Exactly. But when you are naive, you basically say the only thing intelligence cares

to do is to continue intelligence, is to continue to to exist and so if we say right now the guide that the most played game on planet earth by every human on this planet right now is don't die every second of every day don't die is played when we breathe when we look both ways before we cross the street when we throw out moldy food every, every human plays it as the zeroth game they play. On top of that, if they don't die, then they play capitalism or they play religion or they play, like whatever the game they play, it sits atop don't die. And so what I'm trying to observe here is I'm saying that

if we as a species want to avoid annihilation, destroying each other with our nuclear weapons or bioweapons, if we want to avoid destroying our planet, if we want to avoid some disastrous outcome of AI, if we're trying to navigate existential risk, we would rally around the concept of don't die as the singular philosophical, social, political,

moral, ethical framework of our existence. So to complete the thought experiment, the 21st century would say homo sapiens, as primitive as they were in the early 21st century, like they're basically cavemen. Pretty much. They realized that the only objective they had individually and as a society was to not die. That's it. And everything in society was rebuilt around this framework as the zero principle order of all things. So Brian Johnson is going to be the most famous guy in 2025 then. Or maybe he'll still be there. Yeah, I want to be there listening to that conversation.

Wow, me too, me too. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your work, dedication to not just living longer for yourself, but to making what you've learned available to all of us. I think it's worth everybody taking a deep look at Brian's work. They can find it at- Yeah, blueprint.brianjohnson.com. Or if you want my

protocol for free, you want to see my recipes and my supplements, all of it's there for you for free. And all my data is there too. That's protocol.brianjohnson.com. And you can get a good start on your new life. Great. And we're going to put a link to all of Brian's work and all the data and all the things you want to look at in the show notes. You can have a deep look at that and it might take you a minute. So you surely want to follow his advice so you don't die before you finish reading it. It's really quite amazing. You can start by going to bed on time tonight. There you go. Start by going to bed on time tonight. Just baby steps. Baby steps. Yeah. I

love when I get to bed at 930. It makes me so happy. So everybody, thanks for listening again to Doctors Pharmacy. Brian, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks for what you're doing. I love this discussion. Let's do another one soon when we learn more and we can compare notes again. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes,

and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Mark's Picks newsletter at drhyman.com forward slash MarksPix. I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's drhyman.com forward slash MarksPix. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Altru Wellness Center and my work at picks. Thank you again, and we'll see care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for your help in your journey,

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