The Louis Theroux Podcast - S5 EP3: Bryan Johnson discusses life-changing psychedelics, superintelligence, and night-time erections

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

In this episode, Louis is joined by tech entrepreneur turned longevity evangelist, Bryan Johnson. Dialling in from his home in Los Angeles, Bryan tells Louis all about his quest to live forever, from the psychedelic experience that changed his life, to the role of superintelligence in the future. Plus, Louis learns the importance of night-time erections.    Warnings: Strong language and some adult themes.   Links/Attachments:    Mind – UK Mental Health Charity  https://www.mind.org.uk/     Suicide Prevention UK  https://spuk.org.uk/     Book: The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler (originally published in 1967)  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Machine-Arthur-Koestler/dp/1939438349     ‘How to be 18 years old again for Only $2 million a year’ - Bloomberg (2023)  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-25/anti-aging-techniques-taken-to-extreme-by-bryan-johnson?embedded-checkout=true    TV Show: ‘Silicon Valley’ (2014-2019) - HBO   https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley     ‘Harvard study, almost 80 years old, has proved that embracing community helps up live longer and be happier’ - The Harvard Gazette (2017)  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/     Credits:  Producer: Millie Chu   Assistant Producer: Maan al-Yasiri  Production Manager: Francesca Bassett   Music: Miguel D’Oliveira   Audio Mixer: Tom Guest  Video Mixer: Scott Edwards   Shownotes compiled by Immie Webb  Executive Producer: Arron Fellows       A Mindhouse Production for Spotify   www.mindhouse.co.uk   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

1212 ready? Mike number one. Hello, Louis Theroux here and welcome back to my podcast, the Louis Theroux Podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Brian Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity evangelist. Brian made his fortune selling his online payments company to PayPal in 2013 for an alleged $800 million. But you may be more familiar with him from headlines from a few years ago claiming he was getting infusions of his own teenage son's blood. And also someone else's blood, I think, but we talk about that as part of his own teenage son's blood, and also someone else's blood I think, but we talk about that as part of his quest to live forever. This in turn became don't die, a movement, a philosophy,

even a religion, again more of that to come, for which Brian is the figurehead. Brian lives and breathes his philosophy, spending every waking and non-waking hour dedicating himself to slowing down aging and doing what he calls biohacking. Other people call it that too. Whether it be a highly restrictive diet, I mean, when you say restrictive that doesn't even do justice to the narrowness of the supplements. It's kind of like space food to my mind anyway. Also plasma transfusions, repeated shocks to his penis to increase erections. Not just for pleasure. We talk about his exhaustive routine in the chat. So it's a little different

from some LTP episodes that we've had in the past. It's arguable what branch of show business, we haven't ever really just done show business, but in a sense, Brian is a tech guru. He's kind of a self-meaning influencer of a sort. So he obviously has a public profile, but he's also part of the business community and is one of several, maybe more than several, people in the tech world who have become fixated on this idea of extending their life, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, there may be others. In many ways, Brian is the face of this pervasive fascination with everlasting youth.

So it should speak for itself that it's a chance to talk to someone who's got a gift for kind of hacking the internet, among other things, like Brian's level of exposure has given him a kind of e-celebrity. But also it's a chance to talk about life, philosophy, what are we here for? What is, you know, do we want to live forever? What would that really mean? What are the possibilities? What is the human potential? What does fulfillment look like? You with me? In a way, it's kind of

overlaps with things I've looked at in documentaries as well. We recorded the interview in September of last year. He joined me from his complex in California. There were a couple of technical difficulties at the beginning. Brian was very patient and he bore with that process. But please excuse the video quality on Brian's side. Warning, there is strong language in the episode as well as discussion of sensitive subjects like Brian's boners and mine. Do we talk about that? I don't think we do. It's not a term I use very much. We can put a human on the moon. We can live to be 500. But we can't hook up remote conferencing. That will always be the case. How's your day going? Excellent.

I feel like every day is a good day for you. Honestly it is. No, that's it wasn't the case before, so that is true. If I've done my maths correctly you are you are eight hours behind so it's coming up on 20 past midday and one of the extraordinary things about you and and part of the mythology around you is that you lead this highly regimented existence you've described yourself, I think, as the most measured man alive, correct me if I'm wrong, the most measured human, I should say. That's correct.

So describe, I know this is probably boring for you, apologies, but you've been through it many times, but do you want to give me an idea of what your regiment looks like and what your day has looked like so far? Yeah, I think it's probably true that if a person looks at what I do on a database, they would conclude that I'm very unusual. And I think that's because I deviate from the norms today. To understand what I'm doing is we're trying to explore the possibilities of what can current science do to slow down the speed of aging and reverse aging damage. And so yes, my day is probably a sequence of protocols of maybe 100 different things

that we have adopted from science. And so for example, every day begins the night before when I go to bed at exactly 8 30 p.m. Then I get a perfect night's sleep. I'll wake naturally around 4 30 or 5. And then I'll commence a series of activities that are kind of an autopilot. I'll get out of bed, I'll weigh myself, look at muscle, weight, hydration, fat, cardiovascular capacity. I'll do some light exposure. I get up before the sun rises so I get 10,000 lux of light into my eyes. It sets my circadian rhythm, it improves my mood. And then I'll do, you know, 10 to 15 other things in the morning.

I'll go downstairs, I'll take about 30 pills, I'll eat some food, I'll work out for an hour, I'll do some red light therapy, I'll shower and get ready for the day and then commence work. And then throughout the day, there's a scattering of various therapies and activities. And then you, correct me if I'm wrong, you basically, you've got this highly restricted, is that the right term? You've got a diet that's strictly controlled, right? You eat various, how do you describe them? It's not food in the sense that I understand it. It is. It's delicious food and if you that I understand it. It is. It's delicious food. And if you were here with me, you would love it.

I know that there's a perception that you wouldn't, but you would eat it and just say, I guarantee you, honestly, I could do this every day. It happens every single time. And so the approach we've had is that every calorie that enters my body has to fight for its life. It has to have a specific job. If it doesn't, it doesn't enter my body. So I never consume a calorie that is not purpose-driven inside

the body. But I like fish finger sandwiches, for example, which I think aren't the worst thing in the world to eat. I sometimes put a little cheese on there. It's brown bread or wheat bread. But I think if I said to you, if you were at my house and I said, hey, Brian, I'm making myself a fish finger sandwich, do you want one? What would you say? I would say, thank you, friend.

That is so nice of you to offer. I think I'm okay for now. Do you have some tea? Would you have brought a meal with you? Well, so am I at your home? Yes, in this scenario. Okay I probably would have figured out what I would have eaten because I wouldn't expect you to have the foods I would consume and I wouldn't put myself in a

situation where I'm just randomly choosing something to eat. So what would you have brought with you? I mean depends on if we're close by or I'm traveling, but maybe something from the grocery store, like maybe an avocado, maybe some berries, maybe some nuts. You don't do cheat days, right? It's not like, oh, but everyone's human and actually on Wednesdays, I give myself a cookie. That's right. Yeah, no two days. And the plan is to, I don't want to mischaracterise this because according to tabloid legend,

which has to be taken with several grains of salt, the plan is to live forever. But I don't know if that's quite how you would put it. Well, I mean, so living forever is a concept. So for example, if you ask somebody if they want to live forever, most people will say no. And they say no, because they'll come up with a reason like, what would I do? I would become bored. What if my family died? What if my friends died? They would come up with all kinds of excuses. But if you say, do you want to live tomorrow? They'll say, yes. And then if you say, how about tomorrow's tomorrow?

Yeah, I've got stuff planned. I'm going out with a friend, I'm doing this thing. So living for tomorrow and living forever is the exact same idea. There's no difference. And so people already live their lives like they're going to live forever. Now we know like at some point in time you can imagine you age, you can imagine death might come, but we don't think that's imminent. In our lived experience,

we live forever, every moment. Well, I don't want to be petty, but I've known elderly people who've said, I've lived enough, I'd like it to end. I'm tired. I've lost my loved ones. Life hasn't got the meaning it used to have. I wish I would die. Yeah, I empathize with that. And I was in a deeply depressed state myself.

And I wanted to commit suicide for 10 years. So I understand the interest in dying and committing suicide. But you know what, I'm really happy that I didn't. And I'm not sure I trust my mind to tell me what I really want. Now, people who are at end of life and suffering the ravages of aging, that is an unbearably painful thing. And so I'm empathetic to that situation. And what I'm trying to say is that in every other moment in the history of the human race,

death and aging has been inevitable. And just in the past few years, we entered a new era of being human, where we may no longer be on that same trajectory. We may be able to rejuvenate ourselves to useful states once we get into those old decrepit states. And so what I'm doing requires a little bit of a jump of imagination,

because if you take the status quo, the person looks at me and they're like that's stupid or that's weird That's crazy doesn't make any sense You have to really look at this in a larger context to realize that What I'm doing may be exactly correct, but only from the perspective of the future Leaving that for a second Can I throw a random factoid at you? Please. Okay, do you know who the oldest man now living is? Currently, I believe it's 111.

An 111 year old man from England? Yeah. Born in 1912, the world's oldest living man says the only diet he follows is eating fish and chips every Friday. Your response? This is very common for people who achieve long lines that they will be interviewed and then of course the interviewer is like, what is the secret to longevity? And then the person inevitably provides some ridiculous response like a shot of tequila and a cigarette every day, their responses really have no information. They won the genetic lottery, but there's definitely, it's not fish and chips, which

is the contributor to longevity. It's a funny antidote that this person told. Maybe it's a representation of their humor. But this is a thing that, again, pattern matching, not art responses. Most of what humans say in any given moment is not truth. We're not truth machines. Yeah, I get it. And I don't think anyone really thinks the secret to longevity is fish and chips on a Friday.

I think the point is just that a lot of this stuff is down to dumb luck or good genes. The other one I just wanted to put out there just because it's in there as part of folk legend that the longest lived person of all time was Jeanne Calment, a French woman who lived to be 122. Do you know that she was the one who said the secret to her smoking is cigarettes. she literally gave up smoking when she was 117 and had met Van Gogh and described him as very ugly. Do you remember this story? Yeah, I do. And so I guess I do respond to this because I hear you.

I would love to play around with you on this concept. I responded with seriousness because the majority of people I interact with, they believe those statements and it leads them then to make real life decisions based upon those statements. Oh, I buy that. And also, I wanted to add in though, that Jeanne Calment was, according to my reading, may have been not quite who she claimed. She may have actually been Yvonne Calment and that she was pretending to be her own mother and was 23 years younger than advertised. But it's funny how once the legend gets established, the truth never catches up. So just, and you sort of answered this, but it would be nice to have a clear answer realistically, and I understand like the point about, I just want to live another day,

and that you extrapolate that into as many years as you like. But realistically, do you have any sense of what might be possible for you? Do you have an ambition? Do you have a number for how much you would like to live too? There's no reason I should die. I'm 47 years old. If you look at the progress of artificial intelligence and medical technologies and biology, it is the most reasonable contemplation that we will solve aging and regeneration in the time span I have. So let's just say I'm going to live to 90 or 100, something on that range without any further interventions.

So that gives us 40 to 50 years. Let's exclude accidental death as a cause. 40 to 50 years, our current rate of progress. I don't think there's any reason I should die. Technologically, we should be able to solve aging in that timeframe. Is the idea that you're attempting to achieve what's sometimes called escape velocity on this subject? So that each year you live, you can add another year or more to your life

and that the aging process never catches up. That's right, and it's noteworthy that my current speed of aging, I already celebrate my birthday every 19 months. So my speed of aging is 0.64. And so we've already meaningfully slowed down how fast I age or how slow I age. And so that's just the current technology.

And we've got some really innovative technologies on the horizon that could dramatically change that. How do you celebrate your birthday? Because it's certainly not by eating a big cake. Well, it's challenging because every time I go to celebrate my birthday, it gets further out. Keep on, it's certainly not by eating a big cake. Well, it's challenging because every time I go to celebrate my birthday, it gets further out. Keep on, it's just postponed.

I think you're going to think I'm a basic bitch on some of this because I'm sort of antithetical to so much of what you propose, and I don't mean that in an adversarial way, but I don't live well. I got a whoop one of these bio tracking devices for the first time a week ago, but explicitly for this interview, I just thought I better get some bio data and find out what's going on with me. I drink much too much. I don't smoke, but I smoked until, I didn't really, actually that's not quite, I used to smoke a cigarette a day until about 10 years ago. I'm not saying I'm a hellion,

like I'm not an absolute libertine, you know, like I try and eat kind of okay, but I definitely, I'm not in any way a health nut, if I can use that term. So in a sense, with the yin and yang of this particular topic, the Nietzsche quote, right, the relevant quote from Friedrich Nietzsche on this subject, because I think in some ways Nietzsche represents the opposite thinking, and one of the things he says is that actually the idea that organic creatures, humans, etc., wish to survive as their ultimate expression of their will is fallacious, is incorrect, that in fact what we want is to vent our strength. Does that make sense? To discharge our strength and that survival can be an offshoot of that.

Fundamentally we want to live, like it's not don't die, it's live. We want to get out there, chase and run and hunt, bungee jump, do you know what I mean? Have adventures that take us to the extreme of life and if they involve physical risk and possible death, then in certain ways that adds spice to the endeavor, right? I recognize this is something you disagree with, but when you hear that, when you think like, well, instead of don't die, shouldn't the imperative be live? What do you say to that? Yeah, I say you are a typical homo sapien that lives in the year 2024 on planet Earth. The views you express, the ideas you have, the preferences you have, your lifestyle, you are a representation of how homo sapiens exist in the year 2024.

And none of it is true. None of it is eternal. None of it is based upon, you know, things will be enduring like physics and math. It's a social cultural manifestation of this moment. And the future is going to arrive and it's going to wipe away all of it and it's going to Replace it with brand new ideas that will make this moment look primitive Ouch I'll take that and Leave that with me and see how I'll see how it percolates One of the things you've said is, I no longer trust my conscious mind, I think we need to hand over the reins of power. Another thing you said was I can't

trust myself to act in my own best interest. So I thought of an alternative structure of authority. Do you want to talk a bit about how you've seeded control over your life? Yeah, me so that just to be clear, my previous statement was on influence to you. Oh, no, I didn't feel well. Yeah, you that just to be clear my previous statement was not an insult to you. Oh, no, I didn't feel Yeah, you know I feel insulted no, I think it no no, I didn't feel insulted I was I was trying to be a little faithful But you know, it's it's um Sorry, what you're questioning was it was um, you said I can't trust myself to act to my own best interest. You were talking

about there was a moment, there was a Damascene moment. And I say Damascene advisedly because there's aspects of your arrival at your philosophy that have the flavor of a religious experience and people have accused you or maybe complimented you by saying that your followers and the movement that you've created has cult-like qualities. Yes. But what was it? How did it happen? So, a couple of years ago, I was spending my days building a payments company, Braintree Venmo, and I would spend all day building the software for this financial system.

And we would go from version one to verse two to version three. And we would remove the bad stuff. We would add new good stuff, but it just reliably improved every day. And then after work, I would go home and I would gorge myself with bad food. Like even when I didn't want to. Well, I mean, if there were brownies in the kitchen or cookies or- I love brownies. Yeah, you know, just one bite and then it leads to a whole pan

and then like, you know, like whatever. And I was really bad. One of the things I love about your origin stories, like you at your lowest ebb, like resembles me at my medium ebb. You know what I mean? Like, it's not like I was drinking two bottles of vodka and I would smoke crack

and then I'd go out and find hookers and then I was rolling around in the gutter. You were just eating brownies in the kitchen. Yeah, you're right. That's really funny. Yeah, so, but you know, like I hated being fat. I had these pants, this pair of pants and I refused to get a bigger size because if I did, I'd be like, I'd be sitting in the ground. And so I had to keep the top button undone, otherwise it was too tight. And so it was this omnipresent reminder of how fat I was. And I hated it.

I couldn't look myself in the mirror, I couldn't take pictures of myself, I have this big moment of time and there's no pictures of my history, I just want my kids. And like, I didn't want to of myself. I have this big moment of time and there's no pictures on my history, I just want my kids. And like I didn't want to overeat. I didn't want to be fat. I didn't want to not sleep well. I didn't want to look as bad as I did. And I thought this is crazy. Like what? Why am I so out of control? And so I said I

need to fix this. Like just like I build software that gets better reliably, I need to build myself on software where I can reliably get better and stop doing really stupid stuff. So what did you do? Well, one day out of desperation, I fired myself. I said, evening, Brian, the guy who occupies me from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., I just revoked his ability to eat food

from 5 p.m. to 10 p 10pm, which is my high risk zone. So no matter what, no matter what happened, what occasion, there was no certain circumstance which allowed me to eat that time ago. Evening Brian was fired for the crime of eating brownies. Yes, and he was forever banished, his authority was forever banished. I mean we've all said never again, right, about not usually for eating brownie. For my case, it would be for drinking bourbon until two in the morning on a weeknight, right? And then I'd fire evening Louis.

And then by five o'clock the next afternoon, evening Louis would be rehired. Exactly. So I'm curious how you kept him fired. So I wrote this down. I gave him a name and then I wrote out all the arguments. So when Ian Bryan shows up at five, six or seven, he usually says, hey, we've had a tough day. We did some good things, but definitely some hard things have happened.

If we just had one bite of that brownie, it would feel so good. And we're just going to had one bite of that brownie it would feel so good and we're just gonna do one bite and then you know we'll work out tomorrow morning extra hard burn the calories off um and so you go in the kitchen one one bite of brownie sarts and then you know let's just do one more probably for one more bite and then a few minutes later the entire pan is down and it's like you know what well fuck it we might as well eat the ice cream too right and it's like, you know what? Well, fuck it. We might as well eat the ice cream too, right? And it's like well fuck it There's a bag of chips. You might as well down those two like this is the last day Let's make the most of it

And so I would write down his arguments and say are eating a Brian like we've been through this dance, you know a few hundred times you Present really compelling arguments, but guess what? They never, in our history, have we ever felt happy after eating a lot of food. Ever. Not once. So we're not going to do it anymore. So I just prepared for those conversations.

And when I realized how destructive eating Brian is, that he's basically that, he's a good guy. He's just dealing with stress of life. He's not a bad guy, but he just has a really bad way of trying to solve his problems. It sounds like you used some kind of structured willpower. At the end of the day, it wasn't as though you got a chip put in your brain or empowered the people around you to slap the brownie out of your hand. In the end, you just overcame through argument and persuasion of yourself, your urge to eat the brownies, right?

Yeah. I tried to code software. I tried to make rules and say, between 5pm, 10pm, when my willpower is very low, I'm never going to put myself in a situation where I rely upon my willpower. Because if I have to make a decision in a situation where I rely upon my vote power. Because if I have to make a decision in that moment, I will lose every single time. So I'm trying to basically code out my existence by software. And so you asked what my daily routine is. My life is software code. It's basically just a bunch of rules written by science and data on everything.

What I eat, when I sleep, what I do for exercise, it's just an album. And so when people hear that, they're like, Oh my God, that's this topic. That sounds awful. But you know what, I've never met anyone in my entire life who has complained to me that they feel so goddamn fucking good. They just hate it. And that's where I'm at. Like I have never felt better in my entire life, ever. But just to be really specific on this, in the end, it came down to something quite simple. And we can, it sounds kind of cool and high tech if you say I made an algorithm, but really you wrote down, you basically wrote your rules down. You made sure there were no brownies in the house, and then after a while you acquire a habit and then it becomes easier and things

go more smoothly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And this is why I say, seriously and jokingly, as a species, we need to fire ourselves. We are helplessly self-destructive to ourselves, to each other, to this planet, and that is the last thing you want to be true when you're giving birth to superintelligence. I want to pick up on this because this is really interesting. We need to fire ourselves because we are breeding grounds of bad habits. And in fact, in the book, there's a book by Arthur Kersler called The Ghost in the Machine, where he advocates, have you ever read it? He advocates kind of mass lobotomies in effect. The last chapter, you're like,

what? His thesis is that the human brain, because of the nature of evolution, at its heart it has the amygdala, which is a driver towards all kinds of aggressive and anti-social impulses and self-destructive impulses. Now, that's kind of insane that we're all going to line up, or whether it was through an injection or a surgery, create more moderate, more pro-social and healthier forms of consciousness. But so, but I'm wondering if there's, what do you advocate? Like, how do you enforce that? How do you enforce the idea that we upgrade ourselves?

Yeah, I mean, first, it's worthwhile to acknowledge we've already done that in society. So the algorithms that run our society, social media and other things, that's what's happening. Like we've already had a lobotomy. Now it's not pointing us in a positive direction. Like it's actually pointing us in this dystopic direction. So we've already done it, it's already happening

and it's not doing well. I'm trying to have an honest dialogue about the true state of affairs of being human and the context we're in as a species giving birth to AI and trying to have a sober conversation. What do we do in this most important moment in this part of the galaxy? And it really begins with our self-destructive habits and our behavior. But so I, and I'm trying to pin you down a little bit.

I hear what you're saying. I sort of agree I think that social media has amplified some of our less pro-social inclinations, it's inflamed division in many ways, but what does the opposite look like? What does that actually look like in concrete real-world terms? I mean we already kind of have been tiptoeing around this concept. For example, like when someone has a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.01, they can't drive a car because they're impaired, they endanger people's lives. So we've already made the societal agreement

that when someone is in putting someone's life in danger, they can't have certain societal privileges. So if you just naturally take that extension and say, okay, what are other circumstances where humans are impaired and not making good judgment calls that impairs the well-being of others? For example, like over 16 hours of, 16, 24 hours of sleep deprivation, I forget the exact number, is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level

that would get you arrested. So when you don't sleep well, you're just as impaired as if you drank alcohol. And so if a politician is not getting proper sleep, they're impaired. They shouldn't be able to make decisions on behalf of the voters. If a CEO is sleep impaired, their judgment is compromised. They shouldn't be able to make decisions on behalf of the organization. It's the same concept.

I get that. And I want to move on in a second because we don't want to get too philosophical. But the obvious rubbing point here is that it could be a civil liberties issue and that a state in which technology rules, you know, and whether there are laws that are permanently creating conditions that are pro-social but deprive people of their liberty, like that's obviously a huge red flag. Yeah, and I'm not arguing or state intervention. I'm trying to identify things that exist in society that we've kind of agreed upon. And so I'm much more of a proponent of a system inside of a company that has data available where you see the impairment score of your

CEO. And then you either want that CEO present or you don't. But it's not a state controlled thing. It's a social thing that you want a leader that is not impaired. And so I'm much more supportive of societal systems that support pro-social behaviors. I've got you. It's worth reflecting that you achieved, I mean, to be fair, this is one of the reasons I'm speaking to you, you achieved a level of internet fame. There's something about you, whether deliberately or accidentally, you've got a gift for going viral. And over the last couple of years, several times you've taken the internet by storm.

I mean, I don't know if that's painful to recollect. You became a sort of internet meme, a punching bag to some, to others, I suppose an exemplar of tech bro culture or something. But I just wonder, can we quickly deal with that? Yeah. Where do we start? I mean, I think the first thing was a Bloomberg Businessweek article that set out your routine and it's, you know, we sort of covered that. But the big one that followed on from that was when it was alleged that you were kind of siphoning off the blood of your 17 year old son. In fact, it was a little more complicated.

You were taking a plasma infusion from your seventeen-year-old son and in turn offering some of your plasma to your father, correct? That's right. In what you characterized as a family bonding thing that you hoped would be helpful for your father's health. And then it was said that, and along the way the term blood boy came up, was that your coinage or something that the internet came up with? I think it was there before but I embraced it.

What does that come from? It was parodied in a HBO series, Silicon Valley, where one of the eccentric executives had a blood boy. So during a meeting they came in and they hooked him up and he was there giving him a plasma transfusion during the meeting. And it was his private blood boy. But then this article in Bloomberg also said that, oh, for at least a month or two previously you'd been receiving plasma donations from an anonymous donor. Is that correct? That's correct. How many infusions did you get?

Six total. Five from the previous donor, one for my son. And then another one was the erections of an 18 year old. What was the story behind that? I know this is a bit low road, but just let's get it out there. Let's go. I think the allegation with the contention was that you had incredible nighttime erections and this was a great mark of health If you're not having nighttime boners You're 70% more likely to die

Just sitting with that how we how do you know if you're having nighttime boners You need a measurement because they happen during sleep cycles. And so you're oblivious to a lot of you can catch it on the tail end But it's just like when you image the brain you can't really see your brain you need that technology and so you need a little cube you put it on the penis it sits at the base and then as your penis engorges throughout the night it measures the duration and the strength of the erection. A cube with a hole? It has a band. So the cube and then there's a band that wraps around the shaft. Your research has kind of met with a positive response in some quarters, others have been

more sceptical. One of the articles I read described how actually the most important thing for longevity was close relationships. According to Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, the people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. Yeah, there are power laws to longevity and community and relationships is definitely one. Agreed. I mean you've been open about the fact that actually if you if you abide by these rules as stringently as you do it is kind of it's kind of cock blocks you a bit. What's the term? It can get in the way of having a relationship. So I would say if you were to compare my sex life and my relationship well-being and my levels of happiness and my overall energy for life,

I bet I score higher than almost anyone that I'd be compared to. There's this idea that lifestyles of debauchery and late nights with alcohol and these ideas, that somehow that's the vector for community. And this goes back to the question of the 124 year old says, it's tequila and cigarettes. I'm like, see, I told you. So they all kind of, it leads together. But the idea that I'm a vampire in my home, that's true.

Also, I have a robust community of friends. I'm very happy. My sex life was wonderful. We're achieving all the health metrics that have been shown to be the longest-living. I got it. How old are you, Brian? That's such a complicated question. I'm a few hundred different ages. My brain is a certain age, my lungs are a different age, my pancreas is another age, my heart's a different age,

different parts of my heart are different ages, my cardiovascular capacity... What's your chronological age? 47. 47. And your ear is 60-something. 64. My left ear is 64. According to a kind of rounding off metric, like if you just round, if you rounded, if you collected all the other bits of you, does it arrive at a rough biological age? Are you saying if I averaged out? Yeah. I would guess the average would be somewhere in my 30s.

Really? Mm-hmm. You could cut that ear off, the 64-year-old ear, and it would take another... That must be dragging you up. That's right. It's a big one, and we have been unsuccessful in lowering it. But your solution is a good one. You mentioned the idea of super intelligence. One of the ideas that's come up a lot obviously is that AI is going to dominate us

and that actually presents a huge risk. Another idea is that we're going to in some way merge with AI. And there's some people who are experts in this field who call themselves transhumanists, who believe we're going to more or less discard our meat bodies, our kind of substrate of biology and upload our consciousnesses into the cloud. Is that anywhere, I mean, in certain respects, it feels to me kind of more, in some ways, a more plausible scenario, like, because information, digital information is eternal, right? But is that something you subscribe to or that ceased to be you?

to that cease to be you? My assessment of the situation is that no human can say anything intelligent about the future. Literally nothing. Come on, that's a total cop out. We can say all kinds of things about the future. Like what? Tell me. Maybe not with absolute, well, that you will in all likelihood live another year. I mean, it may not happen, but we're going to operate under that assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow. It was David Hume, the philosopher who said we can't prove that. No, we can't prove it. Nevertheless, every day I've lived, it's happened and I'm confident it will happen tomorrow. So the Earth rotating around the Sun, that's got some good data behind it.

Tell me something else that is intelligent about the future. Tell me something that someone could say. That technology and our technological power will progress. The processing power of computers will continue to accelerate and that we will, unless current trends change, live ever more under the yoke of technological intelligence. Okay, so technology will improve. So yeah, pending any unexpected

shock, you know, like catastrophes, whatever, human just catastrophe or other otherwise catastrophic situations reasonable. Outside of technology progressing, there's nothing you can say about yoke-ness or anything else. There's no way... Dude, you're the one who said that super intelligence was around the corner. I'm saying that absent an accident, progress is likely to happen. But what that means, whether bondage or yoke-ness or empowerment or whatever, no one knows.

So people jump very quickly from what you can make for a probability statement to a value assessment. And they don't catch themselves making that junk. Okay, I get that. It seems to be a bit of an obsession in big tech at the moment, that longevity, like it's been alleged that this is the big new thing. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google got some people working on it. Jeffrey Bezos put some money into some research, I believe. Peter Thiel, who I think, did he buy your company? Or certainly he was involved in PayPal,

which bought Braintree and Venmo, correct? Anyway, Peter Thiel, who always seems to come up in these conversations about techno-futurism and kind of visionary, slightly crazy sounding ideas, he's on record as saying, well, aging is just another thing, it's just another technological challenge that we can solve. I mean, one of the contentions is the idea that, oh, well, this is the ultimate sort of techno, almost oligarchic idea, that it's fine for these super rich people to get together and they're working on how they can live forever.

But meanwhile, people in West Africa are dying at 54. And it would make more sense to uplift the whole of humanity in a realistic, scalable way than creating regimens that are only really realistic or achievable by a very select community of privileged people. I get the ethical argument. So what are people asking for? Like what are you asking for? Oh, are you trying to put me on the spot now? I don't think like that. I just poke holes in things.

I don't come up with like positive ideas. Well, I know what I'm saying. That everyone uses this vector to poke, right? They identify basically what are referred to as wicked problems. Take your wicked problem, which is inequality or whatever the issue is, and they take this thing and they point it at the person. They're like, well, what about this? Checkmate, motherfucker.

What do you want the person to do that they're not doing? I think it's just the idea. It would be the idea that actually you could do more with your money by. But, you know, I'm not dying on this hill, by the way. Because you get the idea, right? I think I don't know quite what it looks like, but I think it just means let's not obsessively improve the lifestyle of a single person,

but actually think about the broader swath of humanity. Because clearly I think it's not realistic for everyone in the world to lead your life, to observe the protocols that you've created. It's vastly unrealistic for most people. Okay, so let's just take me for example. So someone sees what I'm doing and they say, okay, here's a narcissistic tech bro billionaire asshole. Yes, thank you. Someone needed to say that.

He's taken all of his wealth and he's obsessed with himself. He's holed up in his home, he's drinking his son's blood. This motherfucker is a bad deal for society. He's got a cube on his boner. Exactly. Like, this is privilege gone to the moon. This is insanity. It has to stop.

Someone has to stop him. Well, I don't know if they have to stop him, but they have to explain to him that there might be more important things in the world than his nighttime erections and spending two million a year. It was it was claimed that you spent two million a year, I think, on various technologies to improve your life expectancy. Yeah, sure. Yeah, initially, it's less now, but so let's take that.

Now, what's really happening outside of that person's nature of reaction is my team and I have potentially built the best health protocol in human history. in human history, we've shared the entire thing with the world for free. The entire process, all the data, we've educated people, we've shared the whole thing. Is it the best humanitarian project ever done? But instead, it's framed as the negative. And so what I'm suggesting is I hear you, there's inequalities in the world, it's upsetting, and then people make these statements and sometimes they don't fully capture the situation. Sometimes they're really misrepresentations. And in the case with me,

entirely this is the point for the entire endeavor that I've done this for the sake of humanity. This is not a narcissistic endeavor, but it's just it's lost from the masses and the headlines, you know, the tabloids do their thing. So I'm fine with all that. I'm not complaining. I think it's great. I appreciate the attention to the project. But yeah, one level set that it's definitely not a correct assessment of what has been happening. I got it. And I appreciate you rolling with, you know, framing that is maybe not positive or that feels I mean, your phrase was, what was the phrase? Narcissistic asshole or something?

Yeah. Maybe that was your, those were your words. Yeah, that was my word. You mentioned earlier that you'd been through a lot. You said you had depression. You sat on, you said, I'm not afraid of death. I sat on its doorstep for 10 years. Are you okay to talk about that for a second? Okay, yes. I mean, when I think of depression for 10 years, in all honesty, what I think is, well, it couldn't have been 10 years of depression solidly. And I imagine, and I might be wrong,

that there was a lot about your life probably at the time, that it had highs and lows, right? It wasn't a single flat line of kind of grief or inertia, right? I think you probably, I think you were married at the time and you had children, you had three children, correct? That's right. At what point did the depression hit? What did it look like? What were its features? How much can you say about it? I remember the day it landed. I was in a hospital parking lot. My brother and I, we were building a company together. We just got back from a meeting and I was in his car and I said, Jason, I think my brain

just broke. I don't know what's going on, but I just feel like it broke. And he said, just snap out of it. You know, just bounce back. We were going through some pretty tough times as a startup company and I had a little baby. And yeah, that day on, it just progressively got worse and I became obsessed with wanting to commit suicide.

How old were you and do you have any sense of what triggered it? I was 26. 26. I'm guessing it was the lack of sleep with the new baby, the stress that started up, and probably not good health habits, some combination of those things. When you said your brain just broke, what did that feel like? I remember distinctly feeling it. My brother remembers me having that conversation with him. It was just a feeling I hadn't felt before. And it felt sad, and hopeless, and foreign.

And then over time, of course, I became that state where it was impossible for me to imagine happiness. I just, my brain could not even imagine not being depressed. It was in that state. And so yeah, I was just trapped in that for 10 years. You were managing to function most of the time, you were still able to do your work, turn up at home, like be present for your family. I mean, because obviously depression can mean different things to different people. For some it's absolute catatonia. You know, it's being in bed with no reason or no ability to get

out or even speak, right? But obviously you weren't subsisting in that state for 10 years. I mean, on Sundays, I would have it, I would be in a catatonic state. Yeah. But yeah, I built and sold a billion dollar company while in this state. And I raised three kids. Did you make attempts to pull yourself out of it? Like what what how were you attempting to deal with it? I Really tried to be as resourceful as I could I Tried multiple therapies at TDCS TMS. What are those? I tried Stimulation on the brain using various technologies. I tried talk therapy SSRIs, auditory behavioral therapy. SSRIs are drugs like Prozac, things like that.

Yeah, exactly, antidepressants, bulbutrin. I basically tried everything I could identify to alleviate the symptoms, and nothing worked. You put it down to what? Overwork? The relationship? Ultimately, I don't know. I mean, I'm basically trying to make sense of an event that happens. I don't have the full... I don't have the data set. So I'm just speculating and observing that my life was stressful in every capacity and also not getting good sleep. Were you drinking a lot?

No alcohol or drugs. There's the problem. No alcohol, no smoking. So it's interesting, it's really striking because I do interview people who've been through extraordinary things and depression is usually paired with some sort of substance abuse.

But in this case, it sounds like it wasn't. Yeah, no. Food was a problem, but not alcohol or cigarettes or some other form of drugs. And so how did you come out of that? In 2014, I sold my company, I got a divorce, I left my religion and tried to rebuild myself as much as I could from scratch. You were LDS, Latter-day Saints, aka Mormon. Had you been pretty observant and had you believed in the tenets of the religion?

I had been born into the religion. I was born in a small Utah town and so it was the only reality I ever knew for the first 20 years of my life. And it's hard to explain to somebody how deeply indoctrinated you become when you're in that circumstance. In my early 20s, I began learning about the Mormon church and realized that what I had been polled was not the entire story. And intellectually, I left the church.

However, I was also married to someone who was a member of that religion, and then my children were born. And leaving the religion would have fractured my entire life, my immediate family, my spouse, my child, and my community. And so I hung in there for a while, hoping to try to sort things out. But basically, I was in the religion, not believing in the religion for several years before formally leaving it. Do you observe any religion now?

Do you have any spiritual beliefs? So Mormonism is similar to Christianity in that it says here there, we have an answer to all of reality. And you may imagine, and now I'm on the other side of things where I don't think there really is an answer to most things. It's been said that you have a tattoo. That's right. What's it of? It's 5-MAO-DNT. It's here on my arm.

It's a psychedelic from the Sonoran Toad. It's sometimes called the God Molecule. That's right. Why do they call it that? It, like other psychedelics, like mushrooms or psilocybin or MDA or MDMA, it induces a different state of mind that can be achieved in normal consciousness. And did you try it? I did. It was the most extraordinary experience of my life without question.

If you try to poke around at this idea of consciousness and say, what is our conscious mind capable of? Psychedelics offer an answer to that that is unimaginable to our non-psychedelic minds. It's unfathomable. You can't get there with words. You can't explain to somebody what they're going to experience. And so what I found to be remarkable is it is so far removed from my ability to imagine. from my ability to imagine it, it to me presents the most exciting possibility of our existence, that we may be able to experience consciousness in ways that are just absolutely unquestionably unfathomable to our current minds, that we may be in such a primitive state right now, and the best may be yet to come. And so when I look forward in the future, that is genuinely what gets me excited, is that we may be in the earliest possible days

of discovering what consciousness is. Mason What point in your life did you do that? It sounds like it was a huge thing. I'm just curious, had you been dabbling before or was that something that you just, what took you to that? Dr. Lee It was after making those big life changes, selling the company, getting divorced, leaving the religion and trying to figure out what the next types of life would be. Mason When you're on the trip or you're having the experience, is there anything you can say to put it into words and how that translates into something that you can hold on to afterwards?

Yeah, there were a few things that happened. One is I'll explain what I felt subjectively, which again, this is not brain data. This is just my subjective experience trying to explain an inexplicable experience. It felt like I existed in 10 dimensions. The dimensionality of the world is much higher, it felt like. And I was almost in fractals. Number two is it felt like the universe is one big record of all things that have happened that there's electromagnetic signatures of all events that have ever transpired. It's just a omnipresent state of information. It's just a omnipresent state of information. And I remember during the experience, I was so energized by what I was experiencing, I

wanted to communicate with those that I was with. And it felt like I could almost feel like my motor neurons fire in my head, which then activated my muscles in my throat to enable me to initiate speech. And when I did that, it compressed my experience from 10 dimensions to two or three. It just swallowed it up. And so I immediately stopped it because I didn't want to lessen or ruin the experience. And it just felt a limiting speech is that when we have to compress our thoughts

through a series of words, we eliminate so much richness to our reality. I also felt that there was, I could hear some sounds around me of like a car and a few things. And it felt like society were just like a dirty, noisy environment that were primitive in how we've constructed our systems and sounds and processes. And it felt like the future was going to be gorgeous and natural and biological.

was going to be gorgeous and natural and biological. And it left me with this wonder that if we make it into the future as a species, we may look back at this time and place for us right now and we just may feel the deepest level of empathy and pity for those of us that existed before we gave birth to superintelligence and that when we did that life became magical in ways that our minds can't even begin to comprehend. And so it really was the most transformative experience of my life that was real and tangible. Is it part of a routine or a regimen now? Was that something you put behind you? It was really in that time period, but not part of my routine now.

But it sounds like it did inform your outlook on life and maybe dovetails with aspects of what we've been talking about, but in a more mystical way that it suggested the possibility of some other way of existing. That is accurate. I think, you know, when humanity has been trying to solve the riddle of existence since we came into existence. Buddha made observations and he said, you know, life is suffering and there's this eightfold path. And then Christianity said, hey, like, follow me. There's this plan because we've got this afterlife. And Islam said something similar.

And Adam Smith said, actually, there's this invisible hand, you know, this thing, capitalism. And Marx said, there's this class warfare. And American founding fathers said, actually, we the people. So people have endeavored since the dawn of time to construct frameworks that solves the riddle of existence. And what I'm suggesting with what I'm doing is that don't die solves the riddle of existence in this moment. It is more accurate and appropriate to this moment than any philosophy and existence. I believe this is the most powerful solve for the riddle of existence today for all humanity. I know I've taken up a lot of your time just to share a couple things. You're active on social media.

You've tangled with Elon Musk a little bit. One of the things he said is, I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. It would cause an asphyxiation of society because the truth is most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we'll be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance. He's arguing that there is an unsolvable problem in front of us of people changing their minds. That's the core of this argument. And of all the problems we have as a species, figuring out ways for humans to change their minds is like

number 1000 for me. There's so many ways to solve that problem today and in the future. So I don't think it's a valid, an accurate criticism or accurate conclusion on basically romanticizing or justifying death. I don't want to sound morbid and certainly don't want to coast out of this interview on a morbid note, but as I get older, my memories I noticed pile up and the earlier ones become a little more indistinct and each year feels a little less full, a little less revelatory than the ones before. You know, that 10 years in your 50s feels a lot shorter than 10 years between 10 and 20, let's say. And that as you add year on year, a little bit of repetition, a little bit of malaise or ennui sets in.

I know I sound like an old fart, right? But I just think it's in the nature of humanity that as you accrete more years, and then when those turn into centuries, it feels slightly grotesque, the idea of adding another year, you know, so now I'm going to be 998. And, and that, you know, was, how's that going to be different from your 997th year? While you have, you see, you've got children, you see children growing up each year in a child's life is like an eternity because there's so many new experiences. So I don't know if that means anything to you, but it feels to me like, well, I guess this is me saying, it doesn't feel massively appealing. It's not like I want to die tomorrow. And I know we talked about that at the beginning, but I sort of think there's some kind of natural, there's some sense of natural justice in kind

of making way, making space for the younger people and so I guess this is me signing off no you know what I mean does that is any of that landing with you yeah here's a here's a way you can think about this so imagine you and I travel back in time one million years ago. And we're there with Homo erectus. They have an axe in their hand. And we want to pose three questions to see if they can help us out. We want to say, where's food, and where's water, and where's shelter? We're going to trust that they know things we don't.

We're unfamiliar with that environment. Now we say, thanks, homo erectus. Now, can you please explain to us, or please just opine, what is the future of intelligent existence on this planet? It is going to be an impossibility for homo erectus to have the language or ideas to explain even approximate concepts of our scientific and technological knowledge and abilities. We would just laugh. It would be comical. And so what I would propose to you is that we, in this moment, are homo erectus. Our opinions of the future on the eve of giving birth to superintelligence are so primitive and so naive and so ridiculous, they're laughable. We have nothing intelligent to say about the future. And so therefore, given that, our strength is to lean in to the fact

that we don't know, and that any preconceived notion we have is actually our enemy. For the first time, our own knowledge is our Achilles' heel. Yeah, I mean, I hear what you're saying. It feels a bit all or nothing, you know, the idea of an educated guess or different trajectories. And it's certainly been the case that people have made predictions that have proved surprisingly accurate. People like whether it's Jules Verne or more recent people, Arthur C. Clarke or science fiction writers even Ray Kurzweil and others have made surprisingly accurate predictions about things like the internet. I don't say that that means we know what will happen with AI and

superintelligence because a lot of experts have different views but I'm not sure where that's going to get us. I will say though that I read one thing that was one expert on AI who said that there's been no episode in the whole history of humanity in which a vastly superior civilization encountering a vastly inferior one in which the outcome has not been genocide. So the idea of superintelligence in AI, the idea that that will not lead to a decimation of humanity feels naive. I don't know if that lands with you at all. This is my primary argument. If you think about ourselves on a galactic scale, and let's just take two polar sides of the argument.

Let's just say there's the dark forest theory that once a civilization achieves some super intelligence level, they hide themselves from other civilizations because they don't want to be attacked. And on the flip side, there's the great filter argument, which means that once a civilization reaches a certain ability of technological advance, it kills itself, it self-destructs. So let's just say for a moment, let's imagine that we are, like many intelligent civilizations before us, we're a certain point, and we are now at this jumping off point to superintelligence, the point at which civilizations self-destruct. It could be the case that we are the first civilization to make it through. And what I'm proposing is that don't die is the transition philosophy, economic, political, moral, ethical, and social, that allows us as a species to transition from where we have been to a new era of superintelligence,

which we cannot define, and that other civilizations may have self-destructed because they didn't make the philosophical changes at the right moment to basically say when a species reaches a certain level of technological advance, existence is the highest virtue. Don't die. Don't die individually. Don't kill each other. Don't kill the, and align AI with don't die. That the only objective of the species is to not die. For all intelligents. That's the proposal. That's the riddle of existence in this moment. No existing form of human organization. not democracy, not capitalism, not Islam, not Christianity, not wokeism, no existing form of human thought is equal to this moment. Don't Die is the only proposal in existence that is practically applicable for everyone

on this planet. Give that a resonant pause that it deserves. I know I've taken up a lot of your time and I think we said we'd wrap it up around now. Let me just throw a couple of quick ones at you. You said, where's the phrase? I maintain zero naughtiness because I don't trust myself. Someone once said to me like she doesn't trust anyone who doesn't have a vice. And I was like, you know, there's something in that. But I think you have no vices, or at least you, or maybe you do. Do you? I don't.

Maybe you have vices that you consider virtues and other people would consider them vices, but you don't have a vice in the sense of something that's a guilty pleasure, something that you're not supposed to do. I totally agree with that. Vices are subjective and subject to a personal definition, but in the traditional frame of mind that advice is some form of self-indulgence. You know, food or drugs or alcohol or something of the sort. No, I have none. When was the last time you slipped up?

Years. For real? Mm-hmm. When was the last time you slipped up? Years. For real? Mm-hm. Is this a religion? It is, yes. And it is a political philosophy. It is an economic plan. It is a ethical framework. It is a social norm. It is all those things at the same time. What makes it a religion though? Because all those others, that's not controversial, but why do you endorse the idea of it being a religion? With its suggestion of irrationality and revelation. I mean, intelligence is knowing what to do next.

And so when you're posed questions about philosophy, like, what do you believe in death? You need to know what to answer and how to fill and how to act and what to structure. So we create these models of reality that enable us to understand reality and act with some degree of certainty and don't die satisfies their requirements. It helps people make decisions on a daily basis, and it helps people understand existential reality. It helps people understand spirituality. It helps people understand community. It helps people understand sacrifice and contribution. It plays the same role as every other ideological framework. You can be a Christian or a Muslim and still be part of the Don't Die movement?

Yes, it is entirely yes and. Don't Die is not about living forever. Don't Die is, we agree, in this this very moment neither you nor I want to die. It is the one thing that every single human on this planet has in common. Don't die is played more than capitalism, is played more than religion, is played more than any game in any one in the world. It is the most played game by every human on this planet every second every day. So it is the one thing in all of existence that all of us humans agree upon. Nothing else do we agree upon. Well, I question whether we do all agree, but and animals?

Same thing. If you just say what is the most If you just say, what is the most metabolically active game by all of biology on the face of this planet? Humans and animals and plants don't die, is the most played game by all of biology. Is there a scenario, and I don't mean to make this a kind of reductio sort of argument, but is there a scenario in which all of biology becomes, what's the word, like, that in other words this life extension principle is rolled out to every living creature? Dr. Lee I mean, this thing is, we're on a jump-off

point where we just don't know. We're homo erectus. We're dealing with new emergence on intelligence that exceeds our abilities to know and do things. So... Because I can imagine like this, great apes, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas that have consciousness and intelligence and not vastly inferior to humans in some cases. And so it makes sense to include them in the equation, but then we're not talking about flies and beetles and wasps living forever. That feels silly.

Let me just give you one example. When I went to college, I could say I'm going to study the following topic to become the following in my profession. I'm going to do this for a number of years and I'm going to retire. I could plan out my entire life. I could see until I was 80 years old. My son is 19. He just finished his first year of school. He has no clue what to study in school or even if he should go to school. School is a good idea to know what to do to Yashemah. That's how fast the world is changing. That is how it impaired our ability as a species to plan.

Now my son can't get advice from anyone. No one on earth can give him advice on what to do. Nobody. It used to be the case that adults could get children advice on the future. That's no longer the case. Our ability to see the future is up against a wall of fog. And we are pretending when we speculate on these things. We have no idea. Is that because of the singularity? It's because we are in this major transition as a species where AI will know more than any one of

us and all of us and AI will be better at discovery than any one of us and all of us. We are transitioning as a species from knowing to not knowing. And when we're in that situation, it strips us of our superpower of planning. When you don't know, you can't plan. When you can't plan, you're wrong for our primary abilities. This is the primary contemplation. This is if you weave together everything we've talked about here, I'm trying to construct the most sober possible assessment of this moment. Looking back at this moment from the vantage point of the 25th century and trying to say,

let me say it this way, talent is the ability to hit the target no one else can. Genius is the ability to hit the target no one can see. I think that's Schopenhauer. It is, that'd be right, that'd be right. So we'd live in a moment that demands genes, not talent. Yeah, or a paradigm shift, if you like. There's one species that lives forever, I believe, as I understand it.

The jellyfish. Yeah. I think biology has found a way to continue existence. It's not an unsolved problem. No, we are not jellyfish, but we are biology. They look like they're pretty happy floating around, right? I mean, I don't think they're conscious, but then what do you think? You know, like, the most surprising things may happen where, you know, in the future, the state of our consciousness is something akin to a jellyfish.

And we say, can you believe ourselves how arrogant we were to think that human conscious us was the apex of all conscious and how we disregarded every other form as so meaningless that we would never be. Those are the kinds of surprises which we know are going to happen. That the future has been nothing but a surprise along those lines.

I wouldn't expect anything different than the majority of our ideas of this time and place to be exactly wrong. That's exciting. We'll be living forever as jellyfish. What a lovely thought to end on. Thanks so much, Brian. I'm sorry about the glitches at the beginning, but we came out of those and had a great conversation. So I appreciate you taking the time.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello again. Hope you enjoyed that. So Brian Johnson, something different from the usual here on the Louis Theroux podcast, not exactly a celebrity, a kind of celebrity of the internet, certainly a meme, but also a philosopher, longevity guru obviously, and kind of a religious leader. That was the journey we went on, wasn't it? It was revealed that at the heart of this philosophy, this concept is a religious outlook that requires a whole new way of thinking about reality. And that thing that he says

along the lines of, just because something's always been true doesn't any longer mean that it will be true in the future. Like we're at the cusp of a kind of singularity that will mean everything that was previously true is no longer true, which is kind of an amazing get out because therefore you can't ever sort of this iron clad disproof of anything that you can say against his philosophy. He's like, well, that's always been true, but now everything's changed. Because of why? Because of living forever, that there'll be this whole revelation. And it's kind of a revelation, a consciousness-changing religious event that means that we are going to be living in 10 dimensions. It's a few months since the taping. I've continued to use my whoop,

or whoop, however you say that. I'm not trying, they're not giving me any money, I don't need to plug it. It's kind of weird, it turns up in shot in a recent documentary I did, when I'm on the steering wheel, I always think like, man, they should be paying me for that kind of exposure. Not really, but kind of. Anyway, I use it probably more than my wife would like. She finds it slightly annoying. It's a fun game. You gamify your routine. You kind of wake up in the morning and you're like, what was my score on sleep?

And you get a mark and it's like, oh yes, I got 85% sleep. Lately I haven't been doing so well. I'm on 26% recovery today. I had a few whiskeys in Aberdeen last night. So, and you get punished for that. I didn't do very well. I'm on a low score, but I'm going to try and bounce back. And maybe that's good. Like maybe that's a good way of incentivizing good behavior, healthy behavior. So why did I have the whiskeys? I don't know. So partly as a result, well, actually wholly as a result of doing this interview, we slash I decided to

get me tested, get an in-depth biological survey, an audit of my functionality. Yes, we're running diagnostics on my hardware. Hardware? Okay, so I'm now looking at my DNA results. You've got an increased risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. This is fascinating. Bitter taste. You have increased genetic variants linked to bitter taste acceptance. That means bitter foods such as cabbage and broccoli may taste too strong for you. How much should we pay for this? Therefore you will be less likely to enjoy these types of

foods. Have I missed the interesting part? Normal O2 usage, muscle mass… You are… okay hang on. You are gifted, in quotes their words, when it comes to your anaerobic threshold. This is the point at which lactate, that's milk isn't it, begins to accumulate within the bloodstream during exercise. You have a naturally high AT compared to others. This indicates exercise and training can be performed at a higher intensity and for a prolonged period before lactate starts to build up. I'm gifted. I'm kind of an Olympic athlete. That's interesting. Well, you know, I had a workout yesterday and my heartbeat got up to like a hundred and seventy eight Beats per second, which is quite high. I think

or not Very high like it's an amazing like it may is that it's kind of amazing cool anything else So since we recorded Brian's documentaries dropped on Netflix, I think I mentioned that at the beginning, he's still out there selling his products, Nutty Pudding and so forth. And it was like, you know, I'd love to do more chats like that with kind of people who are in the, you know, that are more part of a kind of intellectual or what is it,

philosophical persuasion. I guess not about show business, to mix it up a bit. So Elon Musk, the ball is in your court. I have already tweeted at you. I'd like to get someone on to talk about AI I'd like to get someone on to talk about AI... before it destroys us all. Know what I mean? Okay. That's good enough. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com slash resources. That's it for today. Apart from the credits, the producer was Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Man Al-Yazari. The production manager was Francesca Bassett and the executive producer was Aaron Fellows.

The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira. This is a Mindhouse production for Spotify.