The Man That’s Ageing Backwards: “I Use My Son’s Blood To Reverse My Age! I’m Now 18!” Bryan Johnson

It used to be that working for yourself was a massive, massive risk, but that world has completely changed. And arguably, in some situations, it can be more risky working for someone else. If you've got a business idea that you can't stop thinking about, I think you owe it to yourself to at least try and make it happen. And that is where our show sponsor Shopify comes in. Their smart platform includes everything you need to start selling and get that idea off the ground.

They have this drag and drop editor, they have this AI sidekick, it helps you, they have analytics, and you don't need to be an expert to get going. Shopify's best in class checkout makes sure that you're getting paid from day one. It helps more of your customers finish their purchase because their checkout is so efficient and it saves their info for next time. Personalized checkouts like that equal more conversion, equal a faster growing business. Nothing kills that early enthusiasm you have for a new idea than that first initial step to get going being difficult, complicated or expensive.

And you need to save as much time and money so that you can focus all of it on growing your actual business, and that's what Shopify gives you. If you're finally ready for your business idea to start, head over to Shopify dot com slash barlett and you can start your free trial right now. Those are all the pills you take in one day.

One hundred, eleven, because that's what the data led me. This is how you don't die. Bryan Johnson

The man who spends $2 million a year to slow down his age,

He's managed to reverse his biological age already

To an eighteen year old

projected to live to 200. The only objective we have is don't die. I've opted into an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. It sounds overwhelming in the beginning, but trust me on this. So my bedtime is at eight thirty

And you had 100% sleep. four months straight now, What about Hanky Panky? not after eight thirty Alcohol

three ounces every morning with breakfast

for breakfast?

for breakfast. My last meal of the day is at eleven am. and every calorie has to fight for its life.

You were very kind in bringing me some food. Presumably, this is what you eat.

That's right. If you ask the body, what do you want to eat to be an ideal health? This is the answer that it generates.

That is a mushroom covered in chocolate. How fun Why is Bryan doing this? I was thinking about what your father went through, and I was wondering if there's some kind of link there.

it was always on my mind. I mean, he's in pain and he's stuck and he can't overcome this terrible thing that's ruining his life. And you're like, Guess maybe I've always felt like a protector of my dad, maybe

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

You're very, very clearly mission driven. The ultimate question becomes, Are you happy? Bryan, what mission are you on, and why does that mission matter to you, but also to everybody else listening to this right now?

my mission is for the human race to survive and thrive. And it's figuring out what we do that creates the highest probability of that being possible.

And why specifically have you taken on that mission versus any other mission you could have committed your life and time to? Why you? And I want the long answer to this the con, all the context, going right back to the beginning.

um. I had this transformative experience when I was 19 years old. I went to Ecuador and I was a missionary. And I lived among extreme poverty, dirt floors, mud huts, people not knowing how they're going to make ends meet day to day. And I came back to the United States, and my family was poor growing up, but it was opulent compared to Ecuador. I couldn't believe that I had lived in a bubble my entire life, unaware of circumstances of other realities, like where I was at in Ecuador.

And I was facing decisions in college, what to study, what to become, who I was going to be. You start creating these identities. All I could identify was this fire that had lit within me that I wanted to spend my life trying to improving the human race at a global scale. I don't know where it came from, but it it just coming back from Ecuador, it seemed like that was what I wanted to spend my life on.

I didn't know what to do. I was twenty one years old, I didn't have any ideas. And so I thought I would become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by the age of thirty, and then with that money, try to figure out a plan to do it. And so, lucky me, I sold Braintree Venmo at at thirty four and made a few $100 million.

It sold for $800 million, right?

And then I set my mind to this question of what one thing in existence could I do that would be relevant in the twenty fifth century? I grew up on biographies, and so I'm accustomed to thinking about things on a centuries timescale. So doing things that not that matter in the news cycle tomorrow, but that intelligence in the twenty fifth century would say, you know what, we appreciate what happened in the early twenty first century.

Take me a couple of years further backwards in the the timeline. I wanna understand before the age of sixteen. How would you describe the personality of that young man? If I, if I, if you walked in here now and you sat down, w- How would you like characterize that young man?

Friendly and fun. So I think the the event, that activity, maybe that defines me the best is I was in seventh grade, going into eighth grade, and there was the kid started breaking out into different groups of identity stoners, jocks, you know, nerds. And it saddened me because I wanted to be friends with everybody. And people started creating these groups, and there was this conflict between which groups can hang out with which groups. And so I made a a map of the social structure of the entire school, of what people were, what groups, and then where they're at within that group.

So were they the the alpha in the group? And then you have the second tiers and third tiers? And then I systematically went about and I became friends with everyone in the entire school, every single group, and it didn't matter who you were. Uh, I w- I was friends with you, and so I really enjoyed connecting with people. I enjoyed the friendships, I enjoyed the interactions, I enjoyed different people for different reasons. And, uh, I guess that's kinda stuck with me, where I the idea of group structure and the hindering, it's same with ideas.

Like, if you're in a certain idea and you can't bridge to another idea,

The outcome wasn't the most telling part of that story. The most telling part of the story was the process, the process. If you made a physical, like a a physical diagram of this school, you didn't just do it in your head. You, you went home as how a sixteen year old or something, or you know

uh, um, yeah. So I was, um, like, thirteen, twelve or thirteen, yeah,

you. You must be able to say objectively that that's unusual behavior for a twelve year old to be that analytical about problem solving for a twelve year old. That's not what I was doing when I was twelve. I was kicking, kicking a plastic ball against a fence. And you're dissecting the social structure of the school and then manipulating it to make friends with everybody.

yeah. That's how information presents itself. Like when I meet somebody, uh, like in the movie A Beautiful Mind with John Nash, who who did, uh, equilibrium, uh, Nash, equilibrium, uh. There's a scene where you go into his garage and he has this big wall and it has like pictures, and then it has pins and it has threads. You know, everything connected, it's like this madman's wall. That's how my my mind understands information is. When I meet somebody or or look at a given problem, I instantaneously go to creating a map of all information of, like, what are the center pieces, what's connecting to what, how is it structured, what's the dimensions of it?

And so even if I meet someone new and they tell me a story, like, you know, I was at the coffee shop. And you know, like, what details do they include in this conversation? Uh, what is their assessment of the person they're telling me about? What about the reaction of other people? What elements do they identify? And that then enables me to create this structure of their mind and how they package information. And so I, yeah, my mind just naturally, uh, hangs on to every single word and creates a scaffolding of how the person understands reality.

That sounds exhausting to someone whose mind does not work in that way.

It's it's exhilarating.

So, nineteen years old, you go from this this Mormon mission to Ecuador. This ultimately culminates in it quest, challenging your faith. Um, happened to me at the same age, in fact, I was very religious when I was younger, and then eighteen, nineteen years old, that's all starts to fall apart. What was your process like,

Uh, it was torture, and I think I'm not sure what religion you are in.

Christianity or whatever, you know?

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. This was not a whatever thing for me. When you when you're raised Mormon, like it is your singular reality and identity of existence. It's not like you're casually involved, it's everything you are as a human. And so when you are, like when you're born into it and then force fed that, and your entire community is built upon that. It creates structures in your mind that you're not even aware of. And so as I began breaking from it, I would rationally be able to walk to the conclusion and say, logically, I don't understand the situation.

But then emotionally, the brain was like, hold tight, you know? Like, we feel the following things, we can't quite structure in a logical format, and it creates this bizarre conundrum in the brain. And so I had that difficulty. Then that got caught up in my depression, where in my early twenties, I my brain, I got into this chronic depression, where the brain was like, life is awful, you know, everything is hopeless, life is not worth living, you should kill yourself.

And so in that moment, I learned that I could observe my brain dropping these thoughts on me, and that I wasn't my thoughts, like depression was, the depression was speaking, but it wasn't me. And when I learned that, I thought, Wait a second, if I am observing depression and action here, what can I trust from my brain? In the first place? So when a thought drops in my my awareness, where did that come from? And can I trust it under what circumstances?

And then I realized, if my brain is doing this to me, other brains are doing this to other people, how can I trust their brains? And so it it just like this authority collapse, where in religion, all the people who I had trusted to tell me to give me wise advice about life, that fell apart, my brain fell apart, other people's brains fell apart. And I began arriving to s this observation, who in reality can I trust, and under what circumstances?

And that really started, that kick started the process of me trying to reconstruct my reality in a way that I felt was stable. Versus, like ping ponging around to like this wild emotion and this random thought from my brain.

How long did your depression last, and when did it start?

Uh, age twenty four. I remember I was in the UH parking lot one day with my brother. We were working on a startup and something just broke in my brain. I remember telling him like, Hey, like, something just happened. I feel it. It's weird. And he was like, just power through it. And I'm like, Okay, but I, I physically felt something happen one day, and then I just got in this funk for ten years and I couldn't get out of it.

Ten years? And what did that funk look like practically day to day or week by week?

It it was, uh, there was like all these different layers of problems. So I, I was married, we had a, uh, we had our first baby at the age of twenty five. So I've got a baby at home. I'm not sleeping, we're taking care of the first one. Then I'm building startups on top of that, and then I'm also working my way out of Mormonism. But then that's a conflict because my wife is, you know, also Mormonism, and the kid, like the communities around us and all my entire world, is this community.

And so then we don't have any money to pay our bills. Cause I'm in a startup, I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the religion thing, trying to keep my marriage together. It just creates this disaster of a circumstance where I just am paralyzed and stuck in the depression, in the relationship, in the religion, not sleeping, depressed, trying to survive in the startup world. And it it was that that was kind of my state for about ten years, trying to navigate all those competing complexities.

W When you look back and try and you diagnose the factors that caused that depression, is it that that pressure from all different sides that you think caused the depression?

I do, and so during that ten years, I I pursued solving my depression with equal rigor as I have anything else. I tried everything known to humans to solve depression. Nothing worked. The thing that worked is my relationship ended and I left the Mormon church and it just lifted. And that was the most remarkable experience of my life. I just thought it was like this permanent state I couldn't exit, but it those two modifications just lifted the cloud.

And what did that teach you about the nature of your depression?

I was paralyzed and those decisions felt unthinkable to me, even though I could logically conclude this religion was not something I was gonna follow and the relationship wasn't working out. The idea of becoming a divorced father and being in that circumstance, the idea of leaving my entire community, of going out and staking out a new existential reality. It paralyzed me and I couldn't get over the idea that it would be better on the other side. And once I once I got myself there, that it's actually better for the kids, that was the key thing for me.

Is there was one experience I was in Turkey with some friends late at night, and it snapped in my brain. The kids are better off with these decisions, and that's all I needed. And then the next day, I put everything into motion.

And why? why did that matter to you so much? Do you think,

I suppose that, uh, for whatever reason, I have been an intensely devoted father, like I cared deeply about being there for my children. for whatever reason, Yeah, I I mean, I don't know why, you know, like it's just it's. Maybe it's part of my identity, maybe I'm trying to compensate for something, I don't know. But I I invested very, very heavily into my children. And the idea of being a divorced father, you know, with like some kinda split custody situation, with some kind of weird thing between mom and me.

And like, you know, that whole thing, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't sign up for it. And so I can't. I stayed in the bad relationship, I stayed in the religion, trying to thinking that it was my kids were better off because of it, and I really, they weren't.

somewhat l links to your own childhood, doesn't it? Where your parents separated when you were super young,

Yeah, like, so much is going on in my mind when I'm three years old and my dad is no longer present. And then my mom remarried at eight. My father goes through a bunch of problems. And like, I remember my father, uh, I give credit to my father for owning up to his life. I remember I. I knew my father was on drugs at the age like seven or eight, and I would call him when I knew he was high.

I'd say, Hey, dad, like, how's it going? And you know, like, um, I just knew it. I'd write him letters and like, he, you know, um, yeah, we just worked through it together, but, uh, it was always on my mind.

makes you visibly emotional to say that why?

I mean, he's in pain and he's stuck and he can't overcome this terrible thing that's ruining his life. And he's not a father to me. And you know, he, he, uh, he can't pick me up when he says he's gonna pick me up, and he can't do the things that he wants to do. So it, it's just it, uh, it, depr, it's, uh. It steals life from him, and it steals life from me, and it's something that, uh, you know, dominated his life for a long time.

You make that decision to separate and to leave the community of Mormonism. What's life like from then onwards?

Uh, I mean, so it was I. I sold Braintree, uh, so within one year's time, I sold Braintree, got a divorce, left the church, and, um, overcame my depression. wow, what And

a year.

one year. And I think maybe the moment that captures it the most is I was. I was in Virginia at the time and I was looking at where I was going to live next. And so I spent some time in New York. And for the first time, I went to, uh, a party in, uh, Brooklyn, uh, a warehouse party. Or they they started like at midnight or one, and I'd go there with some friends. And I would dance for six, seven hours.

And it was, I think, one of the most joyful experiences of my entire life. I had never danced before, but for some reason, this moment of eliminating all this weight that had been on me for all this time, I just felt free and I could move my body. Uh, like I never had before. My friends would, uh, they would be. They were in disbelief that after five, six, seven hours, I'm like, let's go, I'm, I'm, let's find something else.

But it was, I think it was probably an outpouring of, um, desire that I'd had for all these years that just was bottled up. And it was also the time that I, I was starting to reconstruct. I mean, I had the money, I didn't care about spending the money on anything like I didn't like. Money has no value to me outside of the objective to do something meaningful for the world. And so I really started spending an enormous amount of time thinking about.

Through this question, if if you apply this filter, what matters in the twenty fifth century? Like, you go back and look, what matters in the fifteenth century and sixteenth and seventeenth, and you find that 99% of all things that happened, I'm making up a number, is gone. And we're left with these teeny little nuggets of information. Now there's more that we're capturing more than we ever had before, but time has a way to filter out non essential relevance.

And so if you say that now, if we say what we're doing in 2023. And you look at your life and you map out what's gonna be left of your existence in ten years, a hundred years, 200 years, 300 years. And that's what I wanna focus on is only those things. Everything else is to me, in my, it's not for everyone, for me, it's a waste of my capacity as a person.

When you describe dancing in Brooklyn, I mean, if I lived in Brooklyn for three years, so I, I know the warehouse parties, I know the vibe, the very low, unsuperficial nature of the place and the energy. You, you. You describe it almost therapeutically as being able to kind of shake out weight that you were holding. Specifically, what is that weight you were holding? You've sold Braintree, you've, you're dancing in Brooklyn. What is the weight you're, you're shaking out?

my entire life, I have been told by authority structures, whether it be a religion or society, or a relationship or a community. You can do these things, you can think these things, you can say these things, and you can become these things. Everyone wanted l to put limiters, and after that, none. It was no longer a game of what you can't do, it was a game of what I can do, and it just exploded. And now my entire life is what I can do.

The potential is terrifying.

And I can, I? The moment somebody starts creeping on that, that they want to superimpose a label on me, or superimpose a norm, or superimpose any tool. Humans have to say, Oh, you stepped out of line, you need to be punished. I can feel it like I know where people try to create those guardrails, and everyone does it. Because it's like, Oh, if you're doing something that's not normal, I feel uncomfortable. I wanna bring you back into the herd because that's gonna f make me feel a lot better.

And so I'm attuned to the constant attempts at people trying to normalize everyone else.

We do that in language, right? We say someone is weird, and you know, I think of moments where I broke out of my my community. When I say my community, I mean, like, you know, you have a group of friends. And and then you say, I'm gonna start business and I'm gonna be this guy and da-da-da-da. And the they use words to pull you back in, That's right, they use facial expressions. Little subtle, you know, the little you're the telling you you're weird and stupid and ridiculous without saying it with words.

Um, people think you're weird, don't they? They that do, don't they?

that's one word they use. Yeah,

Yeah, now it makes sense to me now. Now it makes sense to me. With the context of your religion and how imprisoned you, you say you felt in the context of that religion, I can now understand your resilience and your resistance to falling in line.

yeah. And not only that, it's it's play now for me, right? It's like a mousetrap. It, um, I wanna push the part of the mousetrap that makes it snap and pull my finger out before my finger gets trapped. And it's just like this whole little thing is a set of mousetraps. I'm like, this one today. And then, like, by doing that, you really f- get a feel for these, all these invisible layers we have in society.

So what you just said is, it's so you're. I loved your comment. It's just like, like, the smallest facial feature, and, uh, audio captures the whole thing, right? Like, I disapprove of your behavior, of your thought process. If you do this, I'm going to penalize you by not offering you my friendship and approval. And you put them in the penalty box. And it's like half of a second of a gesture, but it collapses the entirety on your shoulders.

Where you're like, Oh man, I don't wanna be part of the outgroup, I wanna be part of the group.

I wonder how much potential is trapped behind those little facial expressions and that little social conformity pressure. You know, like human potential of creativity and ingenuity and thinking for yourself, and you know, must be a Jesus Christ, most of human potential must be trapped behind that.

Yeah, so this is the thing. This is what I'm saying. When you build this wall and you have images, you have strings attached to each one, you're trying to scaffold, like, how is information scaffolded? You can use this, you can poke a system and get the response back and then get it. Fill in the contours, like, oh, like, this is what people think and feel in this moment of what the norms are, cause otherwise they're invisible.

So that's why when someone tells you a story about their behavior at the coffee shop and how some person was rude to someone or whatever, they're revealing to them that to everyone else in the conversation, all the norm structures they have. And so if you listen carefully, you understand how they have scaffolded information, what norms they've accepted, which things they're rejecting, and where they play in that hierarchy.

Are there any correlations between the most successful people you've met, or happy people you kn you've met, and their ability to embody and take on these social constructs? Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, you. My mother is one of the happiest people I've ever met in my life, and she plays exactly in the norm structure of the religion. She's deeply religious, she's still Mormon, she thrives in the Mormon community, everyone loves her, she's delightfully happy. And so my mother does not need to push boundaries, she doesn't need to explore the possibilities, she she has a singular reality. It works for her, she's happy, she's joyful, she's a a fantastic mother.

So I guess there's like all these different archetypes of people who play in different spaces. For me, that wasn't where I thrive.

You thrive?

My education has come from biographies, and I've read, I don't know, over a hundred all throughout history. And I love learning about people in their time and place who identify something impossibly hard to see and do. And they did both. And when you do that, it the algorithm of human behavior is so predictable of defiance and hate and vitriol. Like it just goes through the same cycle every single time. And so I have all these models in my mind of people who have done these things, and so I know when I do this myself, I know what models to anticipate.

I know how that naturally winds its way through society. And also had a fingerprint, what things are inevitable? So you find a given thing, you say, what are the characteristics around this idea or invention or whatever? And then, like, once you have it, you know its societal adoption is inevitable. It does not matter what humans say, doesn't matter if they revolt, doesn't matter if they're being the pitchforks out, doesn't matter. It's gonna find its way through, push all the way through humanity, and that's the thing is.

The what are the ideas you can't see, what characteristics do they have, and when they become inevitable?

And do you consider yourself to be an instigator of new ideas?

If I were to make a whimsical and flimsy statement, I would say I was born to introduce these new ideas into society.

And what is that new idea?

Uh, it's that in the twenty first century, the only objective we have is don't die.

Don't die?

It's that simple.

But we're gonna, we all, we're all gonna die, no, you don't think so.

This is the thing. So this is why it sounds silly.

Because I was told everybody dies, the only thing inevitable in life is death. We were driving past a graveyard the other day and I pointed and said, Great business that because because, you know, I think it was like a, it was like a. It wasn't a graveyard, it was a, um, like a funeral home. And I was like, great business that they'll never, they'll never have a customer shortage.

yeah, yeah, okay. So if you l uh, let's think about the structure of why that statement may be the rallying cry for the twenty first century. Those two words. So we may think like, uh, we're, we're inclined to think that, uh, genius or sophistication or whatever is in this much broader complexity of statement. It may be two words don't die. So Galaxy is thirteen point, eight years old, Earth is 4.5, right, something like that.

We're baby steps away from creating super intelligence. We cannot, we cannot model out what the future is going to be like in any way, shape or form. We do not have the intellectual capacity to predict, to model, to anticipate. We're blind. It's an intelligence far superior than us. In that situation, the only thing we can play is don't die, don't kill each other, don't ruin our biosphere, don't ruin planet Earth, and don't underestimate aligning with AI.

The only objective of the future of our existence. We have to figure out how all intelligence on this planet cooperates, humans and the planet, artificial intelligence. It's this big tapestry of goal alignment, of cooperation that is the only task humanity has ahead of us.

Okay, let's start with number one then. So the first one is don't die. So I guess yes or no question Do you think it's possible for us in the in the short future to live forever? Okay, right, I'm gonna go one one step further back. Your health journey before you came to that realization, what did that look like? In terms of were you a a healthy young man? were you did? were you drinking alcohol? You know?

I mean, as a as a kid, my mother did a did the best she could under the circumstances. We were pretty poor. She ground wheat, she made bread for us. We also ate sugar cereal, we put sugar on our sugar sugar cereal. We were in the sun constantly with no sunscreens, we had excessive skin, uh, sun exposure, um, you know, we ate processed foods like it was just. It was unite the United States cultural environment in the nineteen eighties, like we just were cemented in that cultural norm.

So I'd say, you know, not terribly healthy, uh. Then twenty years of entrepreneurship, depression, bad relationship, trying to leave. Religion. I kind of destroyed myself, body and mind for twenty years.

And how do you feel about that now? Because I I remember reading a quote where you said, It pains me to think about the damage you've done to your body up until that, up until now. It pains me, it Really,

pains me to see all the damage I did to myself.

really pains you. It does Did, did, when I, you know, p- that's a phrase, right? But is there reality to that pain?

I. I feel like I have a relationship to my former self as though my former self were present. I don't view it as a it's gone by. Because in many ways, when I'm reversing my aging, when I'm, when I'm becoming more healthy, I'm moving back in time, I'm moving back to a a younger biological state. So I'm occupying the person that formerly occupied me, and so I, I have this relationship with time that is atypical. Where typically, I would normally say, like, well, that just happened, and now I just have to go forward.

But given where the science and technology's at, I do believe we can travel back in time. Uh, now it's, you know, we're blueprint is showing the possibilities. We're not there yet on doing this, these dramatic things, but I think it's coming. And so, yeah, I, I literally feel pain because I'm moving into that space.

You feel pain because you're moving into that space. Okay, yeah, that that is, yeah. Most of us consider the past to be gone.

Exactly, I don't, I. I feel like I feel like it's recoverable and that I experience it.

So take me forward from that point. Then I wanna know when things started to change in terms of your health perspective. And this do not die.

Yeah, well, I, I started taking care of myself after I sold Braintree and the divorce and all that kind of stuff. I started paying attention to my health more so than I ever had in my entire life. And it came back to this question, you know, what one thing do I do in existence that would be meaningful? Not five things or six things, like one thing that matters in the twenty fifth century. And I worked on, I came up with this idea that basically the core of it is I can't trust myself to act, act in my best interest.

And it stemmed from depression. I knew my mind, my mind was encouraging me to commit suicide on a nonstop basis. And I w- And I, yes, yeah, that's what chronic depression feels like. Is you desperately wanna commit suicide every moment of every day? You just want relief from the awfulness, and you can't, you cannot imagine feeling not depressed. And so I, I knew that I couldn't trust my mind, uh, when it was doing these things. And so then also I have this problem with food, where I would feel so depressed and I would feel stressed from the day from work with my kids.

And so it was my inability to stop myself from overeating every single night and walking myself into an early grave. So then I paired those thing two things together, like, okay, first of all, my brain's like, Hey, why don't you commit suicide? And two, my body's like, why don't you just eat yourself into oblivion? And I couldn't stop myself. I thought, this is really weird that we humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, yet I'm doing these behaviors that are not in my best interest.

This is really weird and I can't stop it. I'm totally helpless in doing it. I started piecing together this philosophy of, like, okay, this is interesting. We kind of treat planet earth like we treat our bodies. My behavior's not too dissimilar from what society's doing. And I thought, what is the larger implication of the situation? We humans have a problem of acting in our best interest. Is there an alternative structure of authority that could do a better job?

And that's when I really came up with the core of what blueprint is, which is, I said, Okay. Instead of my mind doing this on a regular basis, I'm going to measure every organ in my body. I'm gonna ask it what it needs to be in its best space. So my kidney and liver and heart and lungs, I'm gonna take the data, look at scientific evidence, and then create an algorithm, and then I'm going to follow that algorithm, uh, perfectly.

And so my body is gonna call the shots, not my mind. And that was when it all kinda came together, uh, with trying to piece together AI. Uh, maybe the revolution is we humans have done a wonderful job to arrive at this point. Maybe it's time for us to pass the reins to other control systems that manage our long term interests better.

And what are those long term control systems that you believe can manage our our interests better?

I mean, for example, now, like my, my mind is not authorized to look at a menu and order, it's not authorized to have a piece of pie. It's not authorized to just on the whim decide I want to have a cookie. My body is in charge, my body reports this data, it looks at scientific evidence, an algorithm runs, so I have opted into an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. My mind can chirp and can heckle from the bleachers, but it does not have the authority to make the decision.

But you must understand, the mind is doing that for a reason. The mind is also concerned with survival. It's not there to, um, cause harm to to you. That's not its objective, you know, it wasn't. That makes no sense from a survival perspective that you'd have this enemy in your head. So how do you reason why the mind is telling you to do these things?

If we just let the data speak, so let's just say, uh, we're looking at DNA methylation patterns, and it's, uh, these are. This is data that shows how fast the body's aging, shows your speed of aging. So I take my former self and say, what does the data show? How fast am I aging, and how fast is d disease progressing, and what's my? What's my likelihood of dying then and now? And you compare the two, there's no comparison.

The system that's running me now so far out competes the other version, it's ridiculous. And so just from a from a. So let's just, um, I'll go one layer deeper on this. What I did is I I asked this broader question. So we have AI, we have superintelligence being created. We have to figure out alignment. How do we use AI so that we humans continue to exist, so we don't kill each other, so that AI doesn't destroy everything?

Like, so we're just trying to survive, right? Society to survive. How would you possibly go about doing that problem? And so I started thinking about this alignment problem within me. So I'm 35 trillion cells, thereabouts, maybe more. How could I, as an entity, align my 35 trillion cells to cooperate? And we're trying to do that with HU- with society, right? You're trying to get this huge number of things to cooperate. And then I wanted to measure it and say, okay, what is perfect cooperation?

On the objective of me slowing my speed of aging, and then I did hundreds of measurements and we said, Okay, here's actually what science can do in this moment. With everyth- with diet and sleep and exercise all being perfect. Here's the maximum amount of slowing speed of aging for my 35 trillion cells to do. Anything above that, I consider to be an act of violence. Now we use violence, you know, in society to. We typically associate people beating each other, like physical acts of violence.

I expanded the term to capture my own behavior. So if I did, if I ate something or did something that would increase my speed of aging, that was an act of violence against self. Because my 35 trillion cells were no longer aligned. It was like this one aberration. Be like, Hey, I wanna do this thing, but it ruins 35 trillion cells. So I, I wanted to pose a question We as a species are trying to figure out how to cooperate.

Can I do that with me as a single entity? And that's what I've been trying to do. Goal alignment within Bryan Johnson, 35 trillion cells to a single objective exist.

So why is the brain our adversary? Why is it being uncooperative with the longevity of the 35 million cells?

I mean, let's just say, like, let's just remove all story. Let's just say if we categorized as violence anything we did as a species that brought death closer to us, whether it be our personal death or whether it be the earth's death. And we quantified that, and we said, how much violence do we s do we do in a self destructive way? What is that number? Huge. So if you when you look at that frame, we are a self-destructive species.

Now it goes back to this idea that of death of like, if you say death is inevitable for everybody, it doesn't matter if I commit these self-destructive acts, like, I'm gonna die anyway. So, like, why do I care if it's ten years earlier than normal? Whatever, I'm thirty five now, and I've, and when I'm seventy, I don't care if I live to eighty. Like, that's how you think. So that's why this this whole death idea feeds the self-destruction, because no one cares.

If death is not inevitable, you immediately come back to the thing that threatens the thing you care about the very most, which is anything that threatens existence. And so s the society we have right now, the majority of the philosophies say, be, you know, play by these rules and you get this afterlife, right? They've said death is inevitable, but we're all playing for this later game. And so everyone feels fine in this colossal self-destruction. If you take that away and then you say you can live in this life, it's an entirely different game.

And that's why the twenty first century, the singular rev- revolution, could be, don't die, cause it. It flips the philosophical structure of society on its head.

And this all led you to Project Blueprint, which is what?

Uh, Project Blueprint is an attempt at don't die at every layer of society, individually, collectively, with AI and the planet.

So you trying to reverse your your age, or you trying not to die, or you trying both?

Both. And so the same thing is true, like, just like I've done blueprint with me. Planet Earth is the body. So you'd approach the same problem. You would measure Earth with millions of measurements at some interval. You'd use scientific evidence to say, what is the appropriate sustainable biosphere of coral reef, of ocean, you know, of temperature in the in the world, of ocean acidity, of all the different parts of our biosphere. And you apply the scientific evidence, and that creates the closed loop system to say, this is how you don't die.

Okay, so let's focusing again on do not die, which is actually the one of the the only rule in my first company. Now it feels like it has new meaning, right? We wrote it on the wall that when we first moved into the office, we just wrote one rule here, and we just wrote do not die. That's great, We said it as a joke, but you know, maybe

you were onto something.

yeah, I was ahead of my You're visionary. Yeah, time. Wh- When you think about do not die, what are the things that stand the greatest chance of killing us in order of priority?

like, there's basic things on a day-to-day basis. Uh, like driving is among the highest risk factors we do all of us do on a day-to-day basis. So every time I get into a car, I have a ritual where I say driving, I say it out loud. Driving is the most dangerous thing I do as a reminder. Every time I get in the car, don't text, don't be on your phone, like, pay attention to the road, the road.

Cause, like you, you forget, every time you jump in the car, you're so tempted to, like, do all these things that imperil your life

So you say that out loud,

every time.

I'd love to watch you drive. I mean, you can drive me whenever you as well, cause I I feel like I trust you to focus on the road. So driving's number one of things that pose a really statistically high threat of mortality. What else?

Yeah, I mean, there are so people have built nice statistical models that that, uh, show like risk of death, like insurance companies, of course, like they do that. Um, I'm really after the cultural norms that we have built a a society addicted to addiction. We're all addicted. So you, you just think about this from a twenty fifth century perspective. You put a human like us in an environment and you encircle them with dozens of fast food chains, dozens of, uh, group, uh stores selling sugary drinks, of junk food, of porn, of infinite scroll, of Netflix binging, uh, alcohol, smoking, gambling, nicotine, right?

Like, like you, masturbation. and that, yeah, like, there you go, like your list is. And then you say, like, okay, human on your own, with your own willpower, resist this. And then around them, you've got the power of our godlike powers pointing at the individual. With the only objective is to getting that person addicted to their thing, their app, their food, their show, their whatever. Everything's pointed to the individual. And the individual's like, I'm overwhelmed, I can't sleep, you know, like I don't feel well, I, I can't exercise, I don't have any time.

We we're just sick as a society, and it's because we've structurally built this around this. Yeah, I mean, it's a it's kind of a disaster for us. In the moment where we're trying to muster up soberness of thought of. How do we navigate these simultaneous existential risks we face? How do we not destroy our biosphere? How do we align with AI? How do we humans not engage in nuclear war or bio-warfare or whatever? It's, um, we're just we have really serious challenges to solve, and we're all, uh, impaired.

It makes you have a great deal of empathy for the human experience. When you you frame it as we've taken a human being, you know, a baby is born, and then we surround them with fast food chains and sugar and all these things that are highly, highly addictive. And then we say to them, be healthy, do your best, you know, don't, don't kill yourself, and you know, good luck.

good luck. It's sad.

And then it's it's you. I say empathy because you have when you frame it like that, I go, no wonder people are struggling, you know, with sleepless nights, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, porn addictions, drug addictions, you know. Cause we've manipulated the I'm not gonna try and pretend I'm a neuroscientist, but we've manipulated the chemicals in their brain to control them. For often for C, you know, corporate greed and other things.

that's right.

You mentioned sleep, and you pointed this as being really foundational to health. When I sit here with these, you know, psychologists and health experts and doctors and heart surgeons and brain surgeons, they always point at sleep as they all point at sleep as being foundational. The other day, you did a tweet about your sleep. Do you know which one I'm talking about? Screenshot of I think it was Whoop, right?

yeah, that's right.

And it showed that you had had 100% sleep for six months straight,

Four months straight now.

four months straight.

Yeah, 99%, but so yes, 100% for four months, 99% for the other two months. I'm going for a six month, 100% streak.

Why is sleep so important? Cause you, you cite it in your work as being one of the the most foundational things. I think you actually called it the most important in one one interview.

yeah. I mean, if if you and I were gonna make a list of, like, the things that are most influential in our lives, in how we think about and feel about life, I would put number one as sleep. Nothing changes my conscious existence more than a poor night's sleep or a bad. Or than a good night's sleep.

I agree. I've become incredibly obsessed with my sleep. Some people's obsessions, they become a little bit unhealthy, but mine, I think, is healthy, cause it's certainly moved my life forward in e every metric or area that I care about. Um, let's go on s go in on sleep then. So what do you do to achieve this month over month perfect sleep? Cause when I saw that, I thought, Oh, my fucking god, like I use Whoop as well as you can see.

And if I contrast your data to mine, you know, some nights I'm having like 24% recovery, 50% recovery. If I go to a hotel room, then it's even worse. When I flew out here to LA. I had three. The first three days, my sleep was awful, the fourth day it was fine. What are you doing?

yeah, um, yeah. I'm so glad you have that shared experience. For those who do try to track it, and even those with Whoop, uh, many don't realize how hard it is. The most important thing is I I've built my life around sleep now. That is the exact opposite of cultural norms, where sleep is the thing that gets pushed around. So if you want to go out with friends, delay your bedtime, if you want, if you need to finish a work project or school project, if you want to hang out and watch your new show just dropped, you wanna watch a few episodes.

We push sleep around from our earliest of days, and it's always the thing that can be compromised. And I made a rule that sleep happens every single night at the same time, no exceptions ever.

I mean, that must come at a cost.

It does come at a cost.

What is the cost?

I mean, that cost is substantially less now because I've made the hard decisions. And, uh, so it's no longer getting there is hard, but once you do that and it's the norm, it becomes much easier. You just have to make the life changes. So that's the first big one. Then I did, like, a bunch of small things, like, for example, my last meal of the day is at eleven am.

Sorry, what your last meal of the day is at eleven am.

Yeah, so I eat between six am and eleven am. And so then I'm, by the time I go to bed at eight thirty, I've got, you know, eight plus hours of digestion. So I sleep best on an empty stomach. Now some, some people don't like that, they feel pain, they they do much better sleeping towards night. But I ran a few hundred experiments of, uh, time to eat, how much to eat, what kinds of foods to eat, what kind of exercise protocols.

I've trialed hundreds of times and I found a protocol that worked for me. Where when I do this and I lay down before bed, my resting heart rate is around forty five. If I get that, I know I'm gonna have a near perfect night's sleep. If it's elevated at like fifty three or fifty four because of, like, a few events that could trigger it to go higher. I know I'm gonna have a sh, uh, uh. I'm gonna struggle to hit like deep and REM goals, and I might be a little more restless.

I'll still hit my 100% objective, but it's not gonna be as the same level of quality as if I hit something else. So I know all the little little, teeny tiny tweaks to get this to be perfect every night.

I asked you a second ago, I wanna make sure I get an answer to this. I said, then this must come at a cost. What is the cost?

so my bedtime is at eight thirty, because that's what the data led me. I tried eleven, ten, thirty, nine. I tried all the different variations and this just worked. Um, so anything that happens past eight thirty, I don't participate in. And so sometimes, uh, my friends are doing things past eight thirty that I want to do, but I don't do them, so I miss out on certain social events. Now, my friends have been cool enough where they'll do things to accommodate my time frame.

So we'll do something in the late afternoon, where I can do things with them and hang out and have fun and still make my bedtime. And so my friends have been and family have been great to adapt to allow me to participate in community while still doing this.

So I've been, I've been experimenting as well. I mean, for fucking hell to say to tell you I've been experimenting feels like I'm not gonna say I'm an experiment, but what, what I've. I've got a bunch of hypotheses around my sleep. One of the big ones as well is the t room temperature. So during summer in the UK, cause most houses in the UK don't have air conditioning, cause we don't expect the sun, so it's a surprise.

Um, through those four weeks where where we have sunshine, I don't. My sleep is awful, I'm sweating in bed. What would you say about temperature? And also I've got a broken blind in the room, so it, you know, at six am. or whatever, it the light starts pouring in. What would you say about all those

yeah, I agree.

factors?

Uh, temperature plays a significant role. Light does, uh, sound, yeah, whether you have a partner in bed with you or not.

Yeah, I wanna talk about this, cause I actually was speaking to Simon Sinek last night about this. We went to dinner and I was talking to him about having sat with Matthew Walker, and we discussed, I think Matthew Walker. Don't wanna quote him quote him inaccurately, but he said, When there's divorce and couples break up, 15% of the reason is attributed to sleep, i e them compromising each other's sleep. What do you think about sleeping in bed with somebody else?

it's a it's a hard topic because a lot of people don't have the luxury of sleeping in different rooms. When somebody wants to have good sleep, there are some things they can control. Like trying to go to bed at a certain time is something they have some control over. They need to adjust lifestyles and family and stuff like that, but sometimes that relationship. But so people who do have the fortunate circumstances to be in separate rooms, it is substantially better.

Because trying to negotiate with another person, their bedtime, their sleep hygiene is really difficult. And wake events are very costly once you, uh, once you get woken up, and then going back to sleep is very hard. So it's just extremely challenging when you've gotta coordinate with another human.

so do do you ever sleep in bed with someone else? What about Hanky Panky? You have no sex?

uh, not after eight thirty.

Okay, so you go to, like, morning glory,

Yeah, I mean, so these are the these are the kinds of things like, you know, uh, so I'm single. In circumstances where I've tried to date, the first thing I do is I give them a list of ten things. Like, here's all the things you're gonna hate about me, and it's gonna make me an impossible partner for you. And like, you know, those are like, it's a big deal.

what is on the list? Give me the list.

I mean, so, uh, sleep is one thing, you know, like I go to bed at eight thirty, uh, my food regimen is another. Now I do compromise on food. So like, if we, if we go out with friends and we'll have a dinner time, then I will save up, you know, a certain number of calories and I'll eat something at the restaurant, some steamed vegetables or something like that. So I do try to be normal. And also when I'm out with people, nothing makes people feel more uncomfortable than an empty plate.

You know, it's like, why? What are you doing? And are you on a fast protocol? are you on a juice cleanse? And so I just try to blend into the environment, so, like, there's no questions, everyone can enjoy being present. So I try to do those things, um, but other, yeah, other things, for example, like my desire to speak. I I'm not a talkative person, I don't do small talk. So, uh, my son and I have a protocol at the house where there's no exchange of, like, good morning, how are you?

You know, like, I'm deep in thought, like my morning, my. I go to bed early, I wake up early, and I have these four or five hours of concentrated thought, where I can think about these really big pictures. And try to pull myself out of my situation. And just be as sober as possible, like, what is really happening to the best of my abilities? And actually, like, probe myself to these, to these deep levels. And I.

You can get knocked off so fast, just like a little teeny interaction. Hey, how are you doing? How is your sleep? You have to activate this mode of like, I'm gonna be a nice person, I'm going to engage with you, I'm going to listen to you. And just shifting that knocks me off. And so there's with the path that I've chosen, that I really care about achieving these objectives. I break all these social norms, and it's offensive to a lot of people, you know, that that it's just not not an acceptable situation for a lot of people.

That's another instance, though, where someone would say, Oh, he's weird, you know what I mean?

And and when you? So when I was just saying this, I absolutely am. That to everyone listening to this, being like, that dude was awful. I would never wanna be with him. Oh, what a bore. Like, I'd imagine I can see all the comments on social media now, like dozens and dozens of people ripping me to be like, Oh, that dude. And like making their meanest comment. I know that's gonna trigger it. And so I threw out this whole thing.

Of course, like, people are gonna grab what I say and they're gonna try to just dissect me and rip me apart for all the things I violate that they don't want to exist.

So it's a constrained romantic relationship we're gonna have if we're in with me and you together, Bryan. Because you see, I can't speak in the morning, I can't speak in the morning, can't really do any hanky panky after eight thirty. So, I mean, there's, there's kind of a small window for our relationship to exist. We're gonna have to get a lot done in that, like three or four hours. We're gonna have to have sex, and then we're gonna have to resolve all of our problems, and then I'm gonna have to offload.

What else is is important, though? Tell me about your sleep regime, regime, so the things you do just before sleep. We know you don't eat, uh, near sleep. Anything else that's really important.

uh, I'd say, uh, let me take them off. It's go to bed same time every night, no exceptions, temperature controlled room and or mattress. What temperature Uh, I currently am at, I think seventy one. I go to bed at seventy eight, and then Fahrenheit, and then I sleep at seventy one thereabouts, then I come up for REM at seventy three. So temperature and then sound,

sound?

yep, so uh, aware of potential sources of noise that could wake you up. So if you, um, if you're in a a noisy environment of sirens, like a big city environment, or, uh, dogs barking or something, being aware. Cause sound will wake you up, and so you're really trying to minimize the number of times you wake up. If you need to do something to to limit what gets into your ears, or doing white noise or whatever you're doing, then identifying when you eat and what you eat.

For example, I know from my experience in trying these things, if I were to, sometimes I would try an almond crust piece of pizza. Like, this is years ago when I'm really trying to start figuring stuff out. That would wreck my sleep. Flour of any type wrecks my sleep. It elevates my resting heart rate into the high fifties, and I know I'm going to have about 50 less deep sleep. And it's all these little, teeny tiny understandings of how a particular kind of food is going guaranteed to wreck my sleep.

Or even 3 oz of red wine, anytime after noon, guaranteed to devastate my deep sleep. And so understanding how food intake, uh, uh, affects that. And then, uh, I know I try to have an hour, a wind down time every night. If I go to bed, if I work right up to when I go to bed, I will ruminate all night long on that topic. And so it will feel like I never actually go to sleep because I'm always just in that light sleep, ruminating on this problem.

But weirdly, I found that if I follow my entire protocol right before I go to bed. Now I'll assign my brain a problem every night before I go to bed. And I now have my very best thoughts in life in my sleep, my brain figures things out much more efficiently in my sleep than I do when I'm awake. So now it's become an asset to me, uh, versus before, it was just a terrible experience.

And if if I, you know, I, I fucking. I sometimes I've got to be honest, sometimes I have snacks before bed, you know, which we're amongst friends here. I can be honest sometimes, you know, I just it is, said, you know, sometimes it just gets. Because I feel that, because I work quite late into the night. And then it gets to nine, zero or ten, zero pm. And I'll be sat there thinking I've not eaten yet and I've got this pain in my stomach.

So getting just going to bed on with the pain in my stomach feels quite difficult. So I'll just, you know, order something on one of these little apps, you know, yeah, I do don't tell anybody, because, you know, I. um, but then I'll, and then I eat it, and uh, you're right, 10 seconds. It feels great, and then after that feel I feel like crap.

Yeah, you have to pay the price the whole next day.

Is there anything that I you you can eat later in the day, or you can eat at dinner time? That has a smaller negative adverse consequence on your sleep? Is it just like vegetables and stuff without Vegetables are sugar, fine. Hm, vegetables are fine?

and this is for me. I need to clarify what I do is for me. Other Of course, people thrive on other things, so this is just a data point people can use in their mind that you fine tune all these different things. But I think the data is interesting. I have never seen anyone with a four month streak of perfect sleep. I'm in the ninety eight, 99.6 percentile of recovery, too, so it's not just my sleep quality, which people often say, Oh, you can just game that.

Not a big deal. People who know really know that's not true. But then also optimizing for your HRV and your your, uh, respiration rate. My recovery is also 99.6 percentile, so I'm hitting all the markers on the highest quality possible performance and sleep, and my body's recovering at the maximum capacity. And so it's good data that I'm not just making stuff up. The data shows I'm potentially best in world on this measurement profile or among, you know?

So it's interesting that it's a reasonable way for someone to contemplate what they might do in their life.

do you think there's anyone better in the world at sleeping than you?

Probably, uh, there's, there's probably some people may. I. I wonder if all the years of ruining myself, if it has a carryover effect, like, I just can't make up entirely for all the things I did. I wonder if that's the case, and I wonder if people who haven't done that naturally sleep better than me. And that I have to try extra hard now, cause I'm compensating for all the damage I did to myself. I don't know.

For those in my certain circumstances, I don't think anyone tries harder at sleep than me.

HRV you mentioned there, why is that important? And what did it? What? What is it?

Yeah, it's a heart rate variability, and it's a representation of your nervous system. There's two parts your parasympathetic nervous system and your, uh, and so your autonomic nervous system. And and you're trying to basically tether between being chill and being in fight or flight. And so when you're stressed, your body's like, all right, like, we're ram, we're amped up. We've called all the resources to do this job. But you can't be in that high state long, you need to be in a relaxed state as well.

So you're trying to bring the parasympathetic nervous system on in time, uh, and to relax the sympathetic nervous system. And so the HRV is a representation of are you chill or are you stressed? Having a high HRV is better than having a low HRV. I work very hard at it. It's been one of the hardest markers we've had to move. I, I had a meaningful increase in my HRV over the past 500 days. I was I started, I was believe in the or like the mid 30s range, and I'm now up in the low 60s on average.

So, uh, good gains, but still not anywhere close where I want to be. Uh, I said where I thought we'd be at this point, it's been really, really hard to move.

And you hate heart rate vari variability, right? Is that? Is that what it's called? And what is that? As in, it's the gaps between your heartbeats or something,

exactly, yeah, it's the interval between. Yep,

so it measures the interval between your heart be beats and how much that varies. Or that's right, okay, so you want high, you want, so, so, if my heart rate variability is like 120, I think great, it's, uh, definitely above 100, depending on, you know, what I've done that

I'm jealous.

day. Well, yeah, so maybe that's one thing I can teach you about. But but what, what is that? 120? What? I've always wondered, I see it and I know that Milliseconds. high is better. Oh, milliseconds, so 120 milliseconds variance between the heartbeats.

and there's a whole bunch of ways. If you get into the actual math, you can measure them, you can actually do this calculation a number of different ways. It gets really technical and sophisticated, but the general understanding is you want a higher number, you want a bigger number.

You do. You do some things before bedtime to improve your heart rate variability.

Uh, I do. I've tried several devices. I've used Sensate, which is a vibrational thing on the chest. I've used Pulsetto, which is a vibration on the vagus nerve here. I've used, uh, Neurosim, which is on the left, tragus, uh, here. Anything, But

any of them work.

a little bit here and there, none sustain. I mean, I given the amount of effort I put into my health and wellness, I sh. I would like to think I'd be over 100 on my HRV. I can't. It doesn't move, it's just a really hard marker. I wonder if all the decades where I was depressed out of my mind and really stressed out of everything, if I just ruined myself to degrees that are hard to come back from.

So we've been trying to find something more advanced that would do something outside of diet and exercise and routine and sleep. We haven't found it yet.

It's crazy that one of the most pivotal moments in my life was when I put my Whoop on. And the founder told me about this, how important that HRV, um, marker is, how much of an indicator it is of overall health. You know, crack on with my life. Had a glass of wine one day. I wake up the next morning, yeah, and it's flashing red. And I click on it and it's like, Did you have some alcohol last night?

And I'm thinking, Oh my god, like, genuinely, that moment was was when I realized that these choices I make, however small I think they might be, especially with alcohol, have my my heart notices. And it's saying to me, you're either, it said, you're either stressed, you're either sick, or you had some alcohol last night. And I thought, I don't like those three things being in a category together. Alcohol, what do you think of it?

I used to drink 3 oz every morning with breakfast,

You used to drink three

3 oz of alcohol every morning with breakfast. I enjoyed drinking alcohol, I enjoyed drinking the wine

for breakfast?

for breakfast. Because I had to create the longest time period between my sleep to avoid it negatively affecting my sleep. But then I got rid of it because it was too expensive from a caloric perspective. It was 72 calories for the 3 oz, and I couldn't fit it in with my calorie budget.

so what do you think of it in terms of, um, in terms of longevity?

I I think the science says in moderation is fine. I just, I don't drink it at all, ever anymore.

And you've, you've only really been f been following this protocol for a couple years now, right?

Yeah, I mean, my, I guess I. I really do understand myself as on a singular mission for intelligent existence to thrive. Like, that is what I am, that is what I'm doing, that's what I'm pursuing. Nothing else matters to me.

The question, the ultimate question, I think, in, you know, that you just said, all these people are gonna say, I'm weird or whatever else. There's this ultimate question. Because you're very, very clearly mission driven. And there's always a cost. Much of what I do here when I meet extraordinary people is to understand the cost. In fact, the reason I started this podcast is because we we let's call the diary of a CEO is cause we see the CEO stuff, but we don't see the diary.

That's why it's called what it is. And it started as me just sharing my diary. And I shared everything from masturbation, my mental struggles, everything, my issues with my family. I shared it all to to put the cost out there to the world, cost of my mission, my calling, my pursuit, the thing that was dragging me. Um, the ultimate question becomes, Are you happy?

never more so in my entire life, unquestionably.

And what does that mean?

I've never felt more fulfilled, I've never felt more stable, I've never felt a more expansive consciousness, I've never felt more free, I've never felt more bold. I've never in my entire life been this alive.

And you, you experienced the antithesis of happiness, right? You experienced, I mean, maybe some people would argue that it's something else, but you experienced the bottom of the the crevice of depression. You know what that felt like,

I do.

the voices in your head that were telling you to do things, the unthinkable actions of suicide. What? What goes on in your head now? What are the the same voices saying?

It's all play. I'm I've never had more fun. Most of my life has just been a grind. It's like doing the things to achieve the objective, because that's what the societal role play says to do. And that what I'm doing now. I'm not doing this for anyone's expectations, I'm not doing this to achieve anyone's acceptance. This is the game I've selected to play. I don't care what anyone says about it. Sincerely, I just feel free.

When was your last dark day?

Hm, it was about something I can't yet talk about. I wish I could. Uh, I will be able to soon. Okay, I respect that, Yeah, yeah, but but I guess, uh, it's like, I, my, my answer is a genuine, uh. In time, this will be a good story. but outside of that, Yeah,

what are the things that are? And are there things that get you down these days?

yeah, I, I was, um, recently, I was, uh, pretty bothered. The the hate that comes my way is energizing to me, it's thrilling. Uh, when my father did something with me publicly with his plasma transfusions, the internet kinda had their way with him, you know, making fun of him and saying rude things and mean things. That really got to me, like, hurl at my way, cool, but I. My father was courageous enough to do this thing publicly and put himself out there.

And he just got torn to shreds and it. It made me feel very sad and ashamed of humanity. Like my, like my 70 year old dad, you know, like he's not out there picking a fight with somebody, you know,

Why does that hurt so much?

I don't know, I guess. Maybe I've always felt like a protector of my dad. Maybe,

Why?

uh, just kinda how our roles developed, I suppose, you know, when, when he was in a a state of need, I was in a state of ability to give. Started off when we were young, when I was young.

You talked about plasma? I I. I saw the image on your Instagram. When I was waiting for you in there, I was going through your Instagram, looking at all the captions on your posts and stuff and looking. And there was that photo of you, your son, who looks very much like you, by the way, and your father, beautiful photo of you, all of you wearing vests. And this was one of the these sort of experiments you did.

You had a hypothesis, the hypothesis was, I don't know what. What was the hypothesis?

yeah, we as a team, we have, uh, scoured every scientific study ever done on longevity and lifespan, and we've ranked, prioritized all of them. And we filtered out like which one. You know, animal models, human models, and we tried to decide which things to do and why. And plasma exchanges surfaced as a potential option, and people were doing it for cognitive decline. And so it came up where I was talking to my dad and he said, Hey, Bryan, I need.

I want you to know something that when you begin experiencing cognitive decline, which I have, you don't know. Said. I always thought that, like, if I'm starting to lose my mind, I'm gonna pick it up and be like, Oh, I'm not as sharp as I used to be. But you don't know, it's invisible to you, which makes sense. And so he said, I've been on a blueprint for a couple months, it's come back, so I'm aware of how fast I was losing my mental acuity.

I'm back. So in that conversation, I said, Dad, you know, I've been looking at these plasma exchanges. And there's some interesting studies going on right now with cognitive decline, Alzheimer's and other things like that that are showing interesting results. Now, the science is still emergent, we're not sure it's gonna work, but if you were interested in doing this, I'd be more than happy to donate my plasma to you. That's how it happened. And so then I tell my,

Plasma is?

Oh yeah, so we have blood in our body and plasma, so you take the blood out. Uh, we're, we're half blood, half plasma, you take blood out, you spin it up, it separates into yellow stuff, which is plasma, and the red stuff, which is blood, and so they're just different things in the plasma. So it's basically taking plasma from the body. And so I gave my father a liter of my plasma, but I was talking to my about this to my son.

I was like, Hey, I may give a a liter of plasma to my dad. And so my son is like, Cool, can I be involved? It's like, all right, so it was like this really organic thing around my father. And so it was, uh, a lot. A lot of people learn about this and then they they immediately imagine, like, I'm in a dungeon, drinking my son's blood and like harvesting his organs. And the reality was it was a very, it was a whimsical, fun, you know, heartwarming thing that our family was was discussing, and so we did it.

And there was some some sort of efficacy shown in mice or something, wasn't there?

Yeah, yeah, there's, so this. The evidence is like, not bad, it's not terribly persuasive, it's emergent. So it's not like we were going in there, realized, thinking that we had a slam dunk. It was like, it's interesting, it's safe, so let's give it a shot

And it didn't really work, so you've

on me. on you, Yeah, which makes sense. I mean, so I'm chronologically 45, many of my phenotypic markers are in their 20s, right? Of course, so my donor was 19. And so it makes sense the age differential, given I'm so tuned, it would make sense that you would see a big change. But for my father, maybe because there's a much bigger difference between his health status and my status and the different age range, too.

did. Was there a difference in your father, or did you not measure?

Uh, we're still waiting for the results. Yeah, his his subjective reporting was that he felt, uh, phenomenal. But we really wanna see the data. And you also need to probably do more of these, right? One is is not enough, you probably do it successively. So it was, it ended up being, even though we approached it as my father's cognitive decline and we were looking at it through a medical perspective, it ended up being a family bonding experience.

Where we. My father left the church when I was young, he was ostracized, I left the church, I was ostracized by my children and and their family. So, in my estimation, it was we are divided by the mind, united by biology. This goes back to, uh, blueprint, which is, are there control systems that help us cooperate, not the mind, our mind? We want to create tribes, we want to fight with each other, and we want to find good and evil and all that sort of thing.

Biology doesn't, I mean, biology maybe is a different control system. And so we were just trying to optimize health. And so you go back to that system. What are the control systems running humanity, running our families, running you and me, running society? I thought it was beautiful because it was, uh, an experience my father and son and I never would have imagined we'd have in our entire lives. And it ended up being a spectacular experience. The family that we really appreciated.

as you were speaking, I was thinking about something I've just written in the the book that I that I've been writing. Um, uh, one of the pages is when I discovered my father's cigarettes. And it was this like earth shattering moment in my life. Because I was suddenly haunted by this feeling that my father was gonna die, you know, cause as a kid, you know, cigarettes are bad, everyone tells you that. And then when you find out your father is smoking them, when I was like 14 years old, it was this kind of crisis in me that my father's gonna die.

Um, and I was. I was thinking about what your father went through and how that might have introduced the concept of death to you at a young age. Then I was also observing how much he means to you and every word you say about him and your protectiveness over him. And I was wondering if there's some kind of link there

hm, how did you reconcile with it?

trying to get him to stop smoking. Yeah, there you go, at all costs.

what'd you do?

I think I cried about it a few times, but I think I just made him feel bad about it. Is my guess. My feeling is like, you know,

I mean, that's like the the best tool you can use when you're 14. what about you Uh, I'd write him letters,

really?

yeah, every week, I'd write him a letter, tell me, tell him how much he means to me. Um, I'm thinking about him, yeah, In the hope that that he. It would give him the power he needed to overcome his addiction.

did you think about his him dying at that age? Did had the concept of death cross your mind?

I just wanted a dad. Yeah, I wanted, I wanted him to be a part of my life.

That explains why being a dad matters so much to you now. Probably, yeah, Um, I, I noticed there's something on the chair over there, um, and I'm s, I'm actually starving. It's it's, uh, just gone four o'clock and I haven't eaten today. But you were very kind in bringing me some food, so I wanna talk about, I wanna talk about food. Um, Jack, could you bring me the food, please? And you can tell me what you've brought me to eat.

Presumably, this is what you eat. that's right, Good, thank you. Okay, so you've, you've brought me a meal today.

I did.

Just for anyone that's looking, I'll try and tilt it up so people can see. Um, if anyone's watching on YouTube or Spotify, where you can get the video, you can see what's in these bowls. And you've brought me two little buckets of pills here, and there's a drink here. What is what is this food?

This is. This is the answer. If you ask the body, what do you want to eat? To be in ideal health, this is the answer that it generates. So this is not to say that is the only food you could eat, it is a version where you could eat. And so the my daily caloric intake is, uh, 2,250 calories a day. Every calorie has to fight for its life. There's not a single calorie in my entire life protocol that exists for any reason other than serving a an objective in the body.

So dish number one is called super veggie. It's broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, garlic, ginger, hemp seeds. And over a month, if you, if you were to do this with me, you would eat around 70 pounds of vegetables per month.

70 pounds of vegetables per month? Wow, wow,

And I think we also have in there extra virgin olive oil and chocolate.

yeah, I can taste like cacao, like dark chocolate.

so we I pair the chocolate in here, it's an unexpected pairing. The way we think about this is, you could say chocolate is good for you, which might me lead you to eat a Snickers bar. The more precise way of thinking about it is you want dark chocolate, undutched, test for heavy metals and has a high polyphenol count. If you don't do all five layers to qualify the value of the chocolate, you have an inferior chocolate and nutritional value for your body.

So everything we do at Blueprint uses that frame of reference of understanding everything, a full stack way of how do you serve the body's objectives in the maximal way.

That is a mushroom covered in chocolate.

How fun.

So interesting.

Yeah, those, oh, those are maitake mushrooms,

Maitake mushrooms. This is a normal broccoli, isn't it?

that's right.

You didn't put anything on it? No salt,

I use potassium chloride, uh, new salt,

and we got some broccoli in there. So is that is that that dish explained?

that's explained.

Okay, and then this is looks like dessert to me.

Nutty pudding. It is many people consider it to be a dessert. It's macadamia nuts, walnuts, flax seed, sunflower, lecithin, pomegranate juice, berries and pea protein.

And is this the entire meal you'd have in one day?

There's one more dish, which we don't have, which varies day to day, but this is really it. I have three tablespoons of, uh, extra virgin olive oil, one's in here, then I have an avocado and a third meal a day.

and this drink here that you've given me, what's Yeah, make in?

sure you stir that up. That's the green giant. So the way that that it works is I'll wake up in the morning. First thing I'll do is drink the green giant. Take 60 pills, work out for an hour, then eat super veggie, wait for an hour, eat nutty pudding, wait for one more hour and eat my third meal of the day, and then I'm finished for the day.

how many pills were you taking one day?

Currently, 111.

Wow, and you take 60 of them in the morning. That's right, Wow, wow, that's an interesting taste. I gotta say it doesn't taste amazing, you know? It's not like something I'd I'd find in a a, like, a juice bar or something. There's a little bit of a aftertaste to it that's not not fantastic. And um, I mean, I like vegetables, so I like most of this stuff. The chocolate, I think, is a bit of a spanner in the works because it's not like a chocolate that you'd get.

It's not a milk chocolate or a Mars bar,

that's right.

right? It's, um, a very, very dark Yeah, they are, bitter taste, which is a strange thing to add to a mushroom.

yeah. You could also put the dark chocolate in the nutty pudding, or you could have it independently. I find it's fun because it's a new experience for people to try, so it's really an optional thing.

Oh, this is nice, this nutty pudding is really nice. Hm, that's really nice, that's really, really nice. Um, so what are your principles for eating then? Calor? You talked about, um, calorific restriction. How important is that? Cause I'm I eat a lot and I don't count, I just,

Just eat.

yeah, and I'm like, F, you know, I'm my heaviest. I'm 15 stone fives, which is what about a hundred kilograms or something. So I'm, I'm quite heavy and I eat and I go to the gym every day, but I eat a lot. Out kind of out of control.

It has compelling evidence, caloric restriction has compelling evidence that it's one of the most, uh, effective longevity interventions that can be done.

And what are your sort of wider nutritional principles that people can very easily introduce into their lives?

Uh, it's I have this ex, I have this experience where I. I learned how to fly an airplane, I became a pilot. And we'd get up at altitude. And I would use my hands and try to fly the airplane. And I do a left, right, up down. I try to be perfectly on the attitude indicator, maintaining exactly the altitude, which I was pegged at and the direction. And then I would engage autopilot and it would, this plane would just sit up straight and it would be perfectly pegged.

It, it, it was so far superior to my ability to do it. And that's kind of what how I think about my diet is. If I use my mind, I kind of ping pong around life, eating this and that. And like, I hear this thing there, there, and I hear this thing there, and I kind of do whatever's available to me. If you think about putting your body on autopilot, I call it my autonomous self. Let the body report out evidence, algorithm in, and it just runs.

This is the result. This is autopilot for my body. And so every single thing we do is tracked in the body. Every pill has to justify its existence. If it can't be measured and quantified, we don't do it. And so it's a system, a closed loop system that has an algorithm running me, which is so far superior to my mind. Which is going to do it's going to add the cookie to the order, and it's going to eat blank because of whatever.

I'm pre presuming you're not gonna take these back. Okay, so this. Those are all the pills you take in one day,

That's right.

a hundred and 120 odd pills in a day, almost

Yeah, 111, yeah, that big one right there. You can see that guy right there.

this one here. Jesus, Lord Jesus, what is in these pills?

a lot of things you would expect basics like vitamin D and C, uh, more advanced things like alpha-ketoglutarate or metformin or carbos or other things like that. It. It spans from, uh, basic and common to some more advanced drugs.

A lot of my friends, when they when I, well, one of my friends in particular. When he knew that I was speaking to you, he asked me about NAD. Plus, that's obviously s something that's become quite popular in in the longevity culture. What's your p perspective on NAD plus?

Yeah, he's trying to, uh, modulate those levels in his body, and there's nice age graphs. So people to enter this into an understandable frame, people, uh, it's not commonly understood what a biological age is versus a chronological age. Somebody can be chronologically, I'm 45, but I can biologically be different. I could be either 30 or 35, or 55 or 70, according to the markers. So in levels of NAD, intracellular NAD, in particular, there are certain levels that would peg you at age 18, age 30, age 50, cause they reliably go down with age.

And so when you supplement to try to change these, you're trying to peg yourself to a more youthful state because it's a energy the body runs on. And so what I did is I te could. People in the longevity community do have a lot of questions about how you increase your intracellular NAD levels. And there's a big debate, do you do NR or NMN? It's like this big, this big debate, and everyone's always wants to fight about it.

And so I trialed both. I did, uh, 90 days on NR, I did 90 days on NMN, and I measured my intracellular blood levels throughout, and I showed that both were basically effective in doing the objective. So I was able to peg my intracellular NAD at the 18 year old mark on both supplements. So it basically doesn't matter. Just get it measured and just titrate your dose to make sure you're getting what you need.

nice. And I, I wanna, I really wanna make sure, cause I feel like you're. If I'm never gonna, you know, meet someone who f. I feel like, who's so well versed in how the things I put in my mouth have an impact on my biological age? Um, so what advice would you give to me about, say, that you could? I'm a blank canvas and I'm gonna, I'm gonna believe everything you say. And my objective is to increase my health span and to not age poorly.

What would you say about the things that I put in my mouth? Give me some rules.

do exactly what I've published. I'm gonna make it dead simple for you. I say, tongue in cheek, that blueprint is the best health protocol ever developed. Prove me wrong with your data. If someone has a better, if someone can achieve better biomarkers with their protocol, it's gonna be amazing for me and everyone else. Cause then we have a comparison. But right now, the the tricky thing for someone like yourself is if you go out into the world and you try to figure this out, you've gotta sort through a hundred gurus.

Everyone's saying a different thing. And even now, if you give five anti-aging experts the same scientific papers and ask them to develop a protocol for you, you'll get a different protocol from every single one. They're not going to agree. There's no way to go out there and get consensus in the world. And so you need to pick a path and then measure, and I've done exactly that. So I've basically tried to punch through all the noise and say, is there actually something I can do which has some believability?

That's what I've done, so I've published all my data. And so Blueprint provides people a starter, a starting point to say. I'm going to do something that I can see works, and I measure myself, then iterate and improve upon it. And so the health and wellness is all like religion, where the King James version of the Bible supports a hundred different denominations. They all say their God's one and true, only same with health and wellness. Everyone claims they're God's true health and wellness program.

And I've tried to punch through the whole thing to say, it doesn't matter what guru status is, share the data.

eat in the mornings. If you, if I was a blank canvas,

I'd say, tr uh, trial, I'd say, follow my protocol exactly, see how you feel, and then try and experiment what you do later in the day, and then compare the two. sugar, Zero, zero sugar, zero sugar.

why?

It does nothing useful for your body now. Like our body needs sugar to run, so if you eat sugar in berries, which you, you're having now, that's great. But, uh, pro, uh, highly processed white sugar or cane sugar. There's no value for your body. There's other things of much higher value for your body.

God, it's hard to exist in this world without sugar, isn't it? Do you do anything with your testosterone levels,

Yeah, I do a testosterone patch, I, uh, supplement with a patch, I s I supplement because I'm on a caloric restriction diet. And when you do that, your testosterone naturally goes down, so I keep my testosterone pegged in the normal range between 600 and 800. I'm about 850 right now, so it's I'm not trying to get above it, I'm just trying to be normal.

One of the reasons why I I said to you before you, when you sat down, that pe men of my age start thinking about longevity, is we notice that our hairlines have started to recede. And I mean, getting the third with a receding hairline is actually quite good. Some of my friends started a little bit earlier and then we start noticing these gray hairs in our in our heads. You have fantastic hair, and in fact, a lot of the comments I saw were, H, how, what's he doing with his hair?

There was one particular comment. It was like, someone asked him, this was on online, someone asked him how he's got that hair. What advice would you give to me? Listen, I'm at that age now where I've got to make a decision. Do I let this thing go back or do I fight it?

don't do it. Or Yeah, fight, fight with everything you've got in you. really, Yeah, trust me on this. I will trust me Um, you don't want to clean up of, uh, you don't want to clean up aging damage that you can prevent right now.

and I can prevent my hairline receding. How?

I, I started losing my hair in my early 30s, and it's been a grind to try to keep it. And so I my hair protocol. Here's what I do. Uh, I have a a custom formulation that we've built. It basically has minoxidil and a few other things, so people can get that easily. I have a red light therapy cap I wear every morning for 6 minutes. In my morning routine, I do, uh, PRF, so I inject, I get blood drawn, spun up and then re-injected into my scalp once every maybe month or three.

And then I take a few supplements that that are listed on the Blueprint website. So basically, like, four things help prevent hair loss and encour encourages hair growth.

I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do all of that and walk my dog, so I'm like, is there a, is there like a a silver bullet like, uh, that I could?

So he, here's how it works. Is, um, I know it sounds overwhelming. If you build habits that just make these things, you don't think about it. It sounds overwhelming in the beginning. But if you just get into a routine where every morning you do your thing. And when you're doing that thing, you just throw a cap on your head and it just is on for 6 minutes. And then at night, before you go to bed, you put a little, uh, liquid on your scalp and you rub it in, and then you take a a few pills every day with your routine.

It's entirely about building systems so you don't think about it ever, so it's never a burden on you.

My friends are taking different approaches to keeping their hairline, and the side effects are the reason, the proposed side effects are the reasons why I've always been scared to do it. One of the clear side effects that people talk about is loss of libido.

hm, I haven't had that. So we do the dosage, so if they're taking finas, finas, finasteride, which is an oral, uh, then it does have, uh, sexual side effects. But we. I have not yet encountered any intervention that has compromised my libido anywhere in anything we're doing.

How do you me measure your libido, or is that just kind of anecdotal?

Yeah, I mean, so I this historically became known about measuring nighttime erections, so I didn't know. I was talking to a reporter about this and he had just done an article on Blueprint. And he read it and he came back. He's like, Hey, my editors are asking about penis health, and I was like, Funny, you ask, I gotta tell you something. And so I just bought this high frequency electromagnetic stimulation device. Working on. Basically, I sit on this little thing.

It stimulates my pelvic floor and I was trying to strengthen my bladder so I wouldn't get up to go to bed at night. And it had this side effect of every time I woke up, I was erect. And I was like, this is, this is like what happened to me when I was ten, you know, like, when you're ten years old, you're always erect. And I was like, I haven't experienced that for quite some time. I'm always erect.

And so I was telling him about this thing and then I didn't realize it was going into the article. And so so then it came out. I was like, Oh, no, and so like this, this guy, then it's like, this dude is so weird. Like, like, he like, measures his nighttime erections and he drinks his son's blood and he. And it just like started stacking and people are like, this guy's nuts. And so it just creates this, this pattern where people are like, Yeah, yeah, he's just out there.

One of the things that's really distinctive about you is you have the best posture of any guest that's ever sat here ever. Like to the point where I was like, slumped and I looked over and I was like, fuck, I'm like, there must be a reason why he sat like that. So I, I've corrected my posture, but I keep slide sliding back down. Why does that matter to you? Posture?

I wish somebody would've taught me this when I was a kid. Uh, it matters a lot with blood flow. I found out because I have these internal jugular veins, which blood from your brain brain flows out, and I was born with narrow jugular veins. And so when I have bad posture like this, it stops the blood flow and it builds up in my brain, which causes in, uh, intracranial pressure, which is bad for your brain. I didn't realize I had that until I found.

In a normal MRI scan, we found that I had some bad things happening in my brain. We're like, why is that happening? And we found these internal jugular veins. So then it focused me on posture of how do you? How do I actually situate myself to have the proper flow from my brain down into my body? And it became a whole thing. And so we started doing a bunch of measurements, trying to look at my intra intracranial pressure, looking at my white matter hyperintensities in my brain.

Like, basically, how bad is it? And it was bad. My team kind of went on red alert for three months. Am I gonna have a stroke? am I gonna have a seizure? We were trying to figure this out. And so one of the ways we fixed this, or, um, we've made positive progress, where my symptoms have lessened, is just posture. So I became obsessed with posture to avoid having some catastrophic event with my brain. And it's been useful and helpful, and so I just got into posture and I learned how to do it, but it was really hard.

I, I never realized how many muscles have to be strong to have good posture. I'd wake up in the morning, I could barely move. I was like, Oh my god, everything hurts.

Do you think there's a correlation between our health outcomes and our posture?

The gentleman I work with on this th uh, strongly thinks that there's not evidence yet, but he thinks that it's a significant influence on it. Yeah,

It was quite surprising to to see that you've connected AI to the work that you're doing. The 4th principle you said about, um, not underestimating the necessity to align with AI. Why? why does AI come into this?

uh, to me, it's. It's helpful to think about these kinds of questions by doing a thought experiment and time traveling to the 21st century. Imagine whatever ex, whatever form of intelligence exists in the 21st century. They're observing the early 21st century. What clarity of insight do they have looking back at us that we can't see right now? That helps me spin up certain frames of mind. And it could be that there was this revolution in the human race where we said, don't die.

And then two is the only thing we have to do to figure that out is to figure out cooperation on how not to die. Now, when you say that, you have to figure out how to get every single agent of intelligence on earth and maybe B beyond to cooperate. Cool so far. Hm, kind of, Okay,

thanks for checking. So so we want the 25th century AI to look back and see that one of the principles of our humanity was do not die in the hope that it won't kill us.

okay, yeah, so let me, uh, start building this up. So the first take me as a first example. I'm 35 trillion cells. How do I figure out how to not die? I go through this process to build an algorithm that maximizes existence. We do this between you and me, where we have a cooperation algorithm, now figuring out how you and I cooperate and we don't die. We have the same kind of thing with planet Earth. So, for example, in my scenario, we say, can the organs talk and can they run me?

and they can? They keep my rascal brain at bay so it doesn't ruin the show? Could the oceans run planet Earth? We plug into the oceans with measurement and we say, you run the biosphere. Kind of a weird idea, but not outlandish. Now you have to basically think about the earth speaks, our bodies speak, we speak with each other. Now you have trillions of artificial and, uh, intelligent agents around. All agents of intelligence have to cooperate.

If any one of these agents, or any, uh, group of them, violates the cooperation, it could be the end of you or me, or the planet, or everyone. We have to figure out coexistence in this huge tapestry of goal alignment. It's currently framed of AI engineers need to figure out how to stop AI from killing everyone. That's part of the problem, but it's not the entire problem. So that's the only objective we have as a species, like there's nothing else that matters right now, it's don't die from every vector of potential death.

and you think by by us doing that on our level, and then at a earth, earthly level, that this will. Just wanna make sure I'm clear that this will somehow feed into the the artificial intelligence, and or will, or will create artificial intelligence with one of its principles at its core to be cooperative.

Yeah, I mean, so you take the AI problem, and it's, uh, like, so high level, you'd say, we don't want AI to be misaligned with human goals. What are human goals? And then you start breaking yourself apart, me apart, and we realize we are a disaster set of goals. We want everything all the time, and it always con contradicts. We don't have aligned goal, and this is what I was trying to align with myself. Can I answer that question and say I have a singular goal to exist now?

If I'm aligning with AI, and if if my singular goal is to get to zero self-violence, like maximum life, like, uh, existence ability. I now have a starting point to talk to with AI, to talk to AI about all of us do. And if we say Earth, it's maximum sustainability. This planet we're on, we have a starting point for discussion. But it has to begin with existence and the and. We have to overcome the biggest psychological barrier in our current culture, which is we perceive inevitable death.

And so therefore, anything that happens, like, whatever, we don't care. And so we have to overcome. And this is why I've been playfully challenging the status and authority of Jesus Christ. I made a joke that that Jesus fed wine and bread, accelerating aging and, uh, inebriating, and I will feed nu nutrients that will nourish and create life. That why is Jesus the continued representation of a philosophical group of a billion plus people? Why can't someone cha challenge that status and authority and say, no, it's not the resurrection, it's not the afterlife, it's this life, it's don't die.

You're not a martyr for some higher objective of some rules to be completed. It's this is the boundary conditions that people create, they say this is a philosophical thing, it's sacred, you can't talk about it, you can't challenge it. Why not

I sat here with, um, one of the founders of Mustafa, one of the founders of DeepMind. And we were trying to find solutions to this issue of AI and containment. And I wanna make sure I'm clear that you're saying. If we change our goals on a human level from being less self-destructive and more focused on do not die in our existence, then we have something that we can align with AI on, which will preserve our existence as well.

But we can't align with AI because currently we're self-destructive, so for an AI to align with us, it would be self-destructive as well.

exactly? And if you peel back these layers now, this conversation is I. If you, if we actually got into the technical details, it'd be much more nuanced. I'm, I'm gonna make an oversimplification of a statement.

Thank you.

Humans have this broad set of goals, it's to make money, it's to acquire power, it's to have influence, it's to change the world. They want. And that's when you, when you talk about containment, you talk about corporations, governments, individuals, ideological groups. Everyone's gunning for their own thing. And this is why I took myself as the example. If I look at me as the same structure of the world, I've got evening, Bryan, morning Bryan, ambition, Bryan, entrepreneur, Bryan, lover, Bryan.

All these different versions of me want different things at different times, and they're all competing to achieve their objective. And I understand these different versions of me. I had to basically say, Hey, everybody, like, we've got a really, really big problem. We're all fighting each other after these different things, and meanwhile, we're accelerating death. And I had to basically say we're gonna compress this space and we're going to, um, acknowledge I as a my mind cannot act in my best interest.

And so what I'm really saying in the most extreme version, I'm saying humanity, if we want to exist, has to contemplate handing over the reins of control to algorithms. We cannot act in our best interest individually, collectively, corporations, nation states. We can't do it. We need new control systems of power that acts in our long term interests. We're playing an existential game right now with existence. We started playing that in the 60s with nukes, and we're now playing it with AI.

We're playing it with our biosphere potentially being an unsustainable place for us. The Earth is gonna be fine, not fine for us. We're playing Russian roulette with our, with our existence. So are we lethargic as a as a as a species? Yeah, we all think we're gonna die anyways. And this is why, if we flipped it and it's like, maybe not, and maybe we're walking into the most extraordinary existence any form of intelligence has ever had in the galaxy.

We may get our act together and say, you know what, let's think through this thing from these basic principles, like, really easy, let's not die. We don't want to ruin this chance we have to exist in this amazing future.

A rebuttal you must have had is that in the pursuit of not dying, I don't want to not live. Do you see what I'm saying there? Cause when, when I think about the the sacrifices I would have to make to my life to not die in the same way that you've reversed your age. I think, well, then there's no point because I'm not gonna get to live. And I want you to just treat that as like a rebuttal.

How, how would you respond to someone that thinks that? Cause? I imagine a lot of people have heard the the protocol, the blue, they've heard about the blueprint and they're thinking, well, you know, and I actually saw, I s, I think I saw it on S Rogan or something, where the guy was saying, like, you know, I'd rather just die at 90, but having lived a fun life or whatever.

who cares what your mind thinks? Why is your mind the unquestioned authority that gets to to say and do whatever it wants? Why does your body not get a say in this? Why can't your heart speak and your lungs? Why do you, as a tyrant, ru uh, rule and reign with terror on yourself? This is the thing. This is the unthinkable, most offensive revolution that could happen as a species. Our entire existence, we've assumed our mind is the ultimate authority on all things.

Even in this conversation, nothing gets past your mind as having authority. What if our minds? What if it didn't matter what our minds thought? What if they were not the authority? What if there are other authorities there? And why do we even trust your mind to be the the thing that can decide on your best interest?

Is that where you are in your life? You're, you've removed the authority from your mind. So when you talked about your being upset and I could see the the emotion in you, uh, when people were attacking your father, is that not giving your mind authority?

uh, I don't feel like I have control of those things. There, it's an emotional response that I,

Based on thoughts?

yeah, based upon a reaction that I have these this relationship with my father, and so the it's complicated, right? In terms of like. The thing I've isolated with blueprint is, can I take my self-violence to zero? You know, there's another layer of like, how do I feel about my father? And what is that relationship? Different complexities. This whole thing is incredibly complex, but the the simplest thing to do is, can I do this within the control systems that I have?

Can I take my life to zero violence? And if I can do it as 35 trillion cell organization, can we use this little teeny example and map it to a species and say, can we take this multi-trillion agent, intelligent agent? Uh, computational problem? Can we solve this cooperation problem for everyone?

Can we? Are you optimistic, Bryan? And I want the honest answer here, because, you know, people often have grand plans, but the most important question is, do you think it's possible? You think it's possible? Do unquestionably, you think it will happen?

I do, I do, and here's why. I think that if it were just the human mind in play right now, I would not, how I would not feel bullish, I would be pretty forlorn. I'd probably give up. And humans are no longer alpha on this planet. And whether you realize that, whether someone realizes that or not, there's a new alpha on this planet, and it's artificial intelligence. When going back to this conversation of the biographies, this is inevitable.

Artificial intelligence will run us, it will run this planet, and it will run all forms of comp of cooperation. It's inevitable, and we're gonna be superseded in our intelligence on a timescale that is surprising to us. We think we have potentially more time than we do. I don't think we do, and that's why Blueprint to me is so urgent. Is of the urgent problems we're looking at of how do you? Uh, how do you get society to not kill each other with nukes?

How do you get, um, AI to not kill us? How do you get us to not die, uh, die individually? How do you avoid the earth's environment, uh, biosphere, from collapsing and not supporting our existence here anymore? Like, how do you stop existential threats? And the thought processes people have been spinning up is we need legislation, we need new laws, we are going to protest, we're going to make a big thing. And what I've tried to say is I'm going to actually do the thing no one else is doing.

I'm gonna point itself. I'm gonna say, can I solve all of these problems within me? Can I solve climate change within me? Can I solve AI alignment within me? Can I solve cooperation within me? And that's what I've been trying to do is a end of one example of how to solve a complicated system. Now, blueprint is like an analog version, like it's 1st version, right? It's like, it's, but philosophically, it's an interesting model. How do you take a complicated system of intelligence like me, with all these inversions, with proneness for self-destruction?

I mean, like, if you say, what are the risks of AI? like AI? Uh, are you? Just like all the things AI does that scare us? That is exactly the same list that I'm scared of for myself.

And that you're doing to the 35 million cells,

Yeah, like, I am AI, and I am my own res, my own worst risk. Like, it's just the risk profile is the same. I'm runaway intelligence doing things that is causing self-destruction.

and that's what AI will do if it's allowed to run away.

So that's the thing. It's so funny. If we look at AI and we and we're scared of it, we just look in the mirror. It's the same thing, it's the same risk profile.

Intelligence is s self-destructive if uncontrolled, or

And so how, how do you build intelligence that's actually sustainable? How do you build it so it's not self-destructive?

how long do you think we've got? You said? We've got less time than we think.

I don't know why we wouldn't spin on a dime right now and look at every existential threat and go after it right now. Like, why wait one more day? And why even? Uh, why even try to calculate the absolute last moment we can do something before everything becomes catastrophic? We don't know the 2nd and 3rd and 4th order consequences of the the biosphere changing. We don't know when AI is going to emerge and what level, we don't know what systems are going to, we don't know.

Like there there, you can't model it, you can't predict it, so creating timeframes is ridiculous. Like,

You, you're emotional about this

I want to exist, I really don't want to die. Like it is like, it's really fun to exist, and I don't know what death is like. But I've had moments in my life where I get these small glimpses into this expansive of consciousness. And it could be the case that we are Homo erectus, that we are, we are so primitive, it's just unimaginable. And that if we can step into this future, we could have this expanse of consciousness that is mind-bending.

Like, so far out, like, so far beyond our imaginations, we just can't even comprehend it. Like, we could be right there on that cusp. To me, it seems like we are like, why? Why would anyth any other imagination be practical to assume right now? If super intelligence is in the game here and we're within that that mesh of intelligence, why couldn't we reasonably imagine that we might be along the ride in some capacity?

are. Are you scared?

No, I don't have an emotion of feeling scared, I don't experience that emotion. Ever? Fear I, I don't. I mean, as people describe it to me, I don't really feel it.

very logical and analytical in the way that you see things, right? You think differently, right? And obviously people that think different, like people like Elon Musk, et cetera, he's, he's neurodivergent in some capacity. You've got a divergence to your, your neuro neurology, if that's even a word, um, which is very unique. And are you aware of that?

It's, uh, it's hard for me to see that. I there are there are moments where I was at a dinner a few weeks ago. And people were going around and talking about stuff and. Uh, the contrast are like, whoa, I'm really different than, like, what's happening here? So there are these moments with a sharp contrast. Uh, but I. I generally view the world as crazy. I view everything else. I'm like, this is nuts. What's even happening here?

Everyone is weird.

This makes no sense to me. What the world is doing and how people are behaving makes no sense to me at all. So I know that. If you flip it, people view me in the same way, but god damn, the world seems crazy to me.

people look at you, they think, oh, he's a bit weird, and you look at them, think God, he's a bit weird.

I think people, I think the world is crazy. Just insane.

Someone's right, it's either you or the world. Time will tell, right? Time will tell. What is the most important thing, Bryan? I imagine, I would guess. I reckon 5 million people listen to this, that's my estimate. Based on the conversation, what is the most important thing that we haven't discussed? That those 5 million people need to know before we close up?

Hm. That now is our opportunity to band, get together and experience the most extraordinary existence that we are aware of in the galaxy. And that this opportunity is going to invite us to divorce ourselves from every sacred idea we have about ourselves and society and each other. It's going to require more sacrifice than any generation, and it's going to be incredibly painful. And it's going to test our fortitude on whether or not we choose to exist.

The fate of intelligence in this corner of the universe may depend upon us right now, creating this bridge to this next evolution of being human and of the fabric of intelligence. It is our opportunity to seize equally to lose if we don't recognize the moment and step up.

And step one in stepping up is fundamentally stopping the war against ourselves.

It's it's in daily acts of revolting of revolution against the status quo, which is harming us and lessening our chances every day. People are accustomed to seeing revolutions happen by storming places and using weapons. The weapons at our disposal are to go to bed on time, to eat healthy, to not watch porn, to not get addicted to things. And it sounds weird and weak and different. But revolting against the culture of death and a self-destruction with self with planet earth and how we engage with artificial intelligence.

And these foundations map the future of our existence, and it begins with self. It's not blaming someone else, it's not pointing at someone and telling them how they have to change. It's looking at self and building the revolution within each one of us.

What would you do if you found out you were going to die next week in a time? Illness, how would you feel?

I would feel satisfied that I spent my entire adult life searching for the singular thing I could try to do to create value for the human race. And I found it just in time and articulated the ideas just in time, barely well enough to kick start this revolution.

Are you misunderstood? Because the perception of you that I had before I met you is different to the perception I have of you now, specifically the perception I have of why you're doing what you're doing. Because when I heard the tale of this Bryan Johnson guy, he's trying to be eighteen years old, he's a narcissist. He's just he was struggling with the concept of death. He's got so much money now, he's fighting life, so you know, he's doing this for himself.

He probably wants to, uh, date someone young, and that's why he's doing what he's doing. It's all sort of self-centered. The p the proposition you've given me today is very much more about humanity than it is Bryan Johnson. It seems like the picture painted of you, and I know how the press works, right? Is, so things like, it's clicks, right? Versus the person that sits in front of me today feel like two completely different people.

I'm not understood. I would almost prefer to be misunderstood because that assumes some level of understanding. And it's not even a close approximation. Like you're saying, the it's so far off from what is really, what I'm really trying to achieve.

Your father, seventy five years old, he's not gonna live forever, or is he? How do you contend with that? A man you clearly love a lot, but you understand that the. There's an inevitability to life for most people who aren't revolting against life in the way that you are with your longevity routines and your anti-aging protocols.

Yeah, it's, um, it's impossibly hard for me to reconcile. You know, like, yeah, one time he, um, I couldn't get ahold of him for a couple days and which is uncommon, and I spiraled in concluding that he had died. And, you know, not being able to call him and hear his voice, uh, was beyond devastating. And death is a terrible thing. We've all experienced it and it would be wonderful if we could bring an end to it.

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

How?

They, my both, my, my parents, joke that, you know, they, they get a package. It seems like every single day I'm sending them everything I can. And, you know, like, do this, do that, and, uh, sometimes it's too much. Whether I, Bryan, I can only take so many pills a day and I can only do so many things a day. It's a fun relationship, but I, I am trying very hard to take care of my parents and my children and, um, my family.

I, I care deeply about those around me and I work very, very hard for their well being.

I believe you, Bryan, I believe your intentions, I think what you're doing comes from a very, very good place. Um, I I think you're wired in a way which is unusual, and that's not to pass judgment on whether we're all unusual in our own ways, right? But you're wired in a very, in a way that's unusual. But because of your wiring, it's very useful, you know? I think that when we think about tribes and chronotypes and the differences within tribes, it's useful to have people that think differently within the tribe.

Because it kind of covers all of our bases and you present a new perspective. Um, about humanity, about the path forward and about the way to live. And I think any new perspective, anyone who is um, humble and under, you know, is searching for truth, would welcome a new perspective. Especially when it's not harming others, right? You would want a new perspective if you are in the search of truth, not in the in the search of confirmation of your existing ideas or.

Um, the alleviation of the cognitive dissonance we experience, and that's what I, when I experience you, that's exactly what I think. I'm open, I'm open to your perspective. I don't have to accept it all into my daily life, but being open to listen, I think, is something we should expect of ourselves at a very fundamental level. And I would just wish there was more people that would just, you know, have the fearlessness to present a new perspective.

Cause, as I think we said earlier in this conversation, there's so much potential trap behind the the fear of looking weird in life. So we, we stifle opinions and innovations and creativity because we don't want to look weird, cause there's a cost to that in our society. You get smashed, right? And for whatever reason, you've made the decision that that matters less than the mission that you're on. So I, I respect you, and I commend you for that.

Am I gonna have the 120 pills? Can't make you a promise there. I'm sure I'll take a couple of them. Um, this was nice. Can't imagine putting the chocolate on my broccoli, but, you know, there's a lot to learn here and I hope to make this sort of incremental steps. Um, in some of those areas of my health that we we can all agree upon.

yeah, I, uh, I would thank you for the conversation today. Ev the as hard as I try to be impervious to judgment, you know, in conversations, it's hard to fully go through the expression of ideas when the other person even is making the most subtle of judgments or setting boundary conditions. And I love talking to you because you did none.

Yeah, that was good.

You, you just rolled with me and you embraced it, and I felt, uh, welcomed to express all of it. So I appreciate that very much.

Really means a lot to me. To the point I just got goosebumps, because, um, I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews with people and their judgments. When I'm actually getting emotional thinking about it, I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews because of people's like, their closed-mindedness when they came to have a conversation with you. And how, like, what a waste of of conversation and discourse and progress that is when we come with a closed mind.

And so I'm so happy you felt that way, because it really mattered to me that you did. Um, and because you did, you were able to share in such a way, which I actually think is incredibly beneficial to me and I think everyone that's listened. So thank you for that. Thank Um, that's the one of the best compliments I've ever received, so it really means a lot to me. Thank you for we have a closing tradition on this podcast.

all right.

Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. In the diary of a C E O, the question left for you, huh, I mean, huh, maybe you've answered this. Um,

Is it how many nightmare elections I have?

yeah, um, I actually did have a question, what was the cost of you coming and doing this interview today to your routine? I thought, you know, I'm gonna sit with him for two hours, which we've done. There's gonna be a cost to your routine. Yeah, None, none, none. because of the timing. Or, okay, good, appreciate that. We'll get you home before eight thirty, yeah, for your curfew. Um, the question left for you is, if all, I think it says, if all you could change is one thing about the world, what would it be?

hm, I want to exist a unwavering, unconditional, maniacal want to exist.

Bryan, thank you. Really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure it'll be the first of many because I got a lot to learn, so appreciate your time today.