Transcript

Most Replayed Moment: This Longevity Protocol Actually Works! - Biohacker Bryan Johnson

0:00 Uh 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.

0:16 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?

0:29 Why you? Mm. And I want the long answer to this. Yeah. The con all the context going right back to the beginning. Um I had this transformative experience when I was nineteen years old. I went to Ecuador.

0:42 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 did.

0:52 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.

1:03 unaware of circumstances of other realities like where I was out 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 improve in the human race at a global scale. I don't know where it came from, but it it just

1:24 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.

1:34 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 hundred million dollars. Sold for eight hundred million dollars, right? Mm-hmm. And then I set my mind to this question of What one thing in existence

1:50 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 time scale.

2:01 So doing things that not that matter in the news cycle tomorrow. But the intelligence in the twenty fifth century would say, You know what? We appreciate what happened in the early twenty first century. You've only really been

2:13 F been following this protocol for A couple of years now, right? Yeah. We might I guess I I really do understand myself.

2:22 As On a singular mission. For intelligent existence to thrive. That is what I am.

2:34 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, you just said all these people are gonna say I'm weird or whatever else. It's his ultimate question because you're very, very clearly mission driven.

2:50 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 start this podcast is because We we that's called the diary of a CO is'cause we see the CO 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.

3:18 Um The ultimate question becomes Are you happy? Never more so in my entire life. Unquestionably.

3:33 And what does that mean? I've never felt More fulfilled. I've never felt more stable. I've never felt

3:41 A more expansive Consciousness. Never felt more free. I've never felt more bold. I've never in my entire life.

3:50 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. Mm-hmm. You knew what that felt like. I do. The voices in your head that were telling you to do things. The unthinkable actions of

4:11 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.

4:24 M 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 uh what I'm doing now. I'm not doing this for anyone's expectations. I'm not doing this to achieve anyone's acceptance.

4:45 This is the game I've selected to play. I don't care what anyone says about it. Sincerely. I just feel free. Um I

4:56 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.

5:08 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.

5:23 I did. Just for anyone that's looking on 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

5:34 Two Little buckets of Hells yeah. And there's the drink here. What is what is this food?

5:43 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 generated.

5:55 So this is not to say that it's the only food you could eat. It is a version where you could eat. And so the my daily caloric intake is Uh Two thousand. Two hundred fifty calories a day. Mm-hmm.

6:06 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.

6:16 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 seventy pounds of vegetables per month.

6:31 Seventy pounds of vegetables per month. Wow. Well And I think We also have in there extra virgin olive oil.

6:40 And chocolate. Yeah, I can taste like cacao, like dark chocolate. So we I pair the chocolate 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.

6:56 the more precise way of thinking about it is you want Dark chocolate unduch. Test for heavy metals. and has a high polyphenol count. If you don't do all five layers to qualif the value of the chocolate

7:09 you have an inferior chocolate and nutritional value for your body. 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

7:22 Maximum way. That is A mushroom covered in chocolate. Have fun. So interesting.

7:34 Yeah, those oh those are Mataki mushrooms. Mataki mushrooms. This is a normal broccoli, isn't it? That's right. Did you put anything on it? No.

7:42 I use potassium chloride. Uh New salt. And we've got some broccoli in there. So is that is that that dish explained? That's explained.

7:51 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, flaxseed, sunflower lichin. Pomegranate juice, berries, and pea protein. And is this the entire

8:07 meal you have in one day. There's one more dish which we don't have which varies day to day. Okay. But this is really it. I have three tablespoons of uh extra virgin olive oil. One's in here. and have an avocado and a third miliday.

8:21 And this drink here. Yeah, make sure you stir that up. That's the green giant. So the way that that it works. is I wake up in the morning First thing I'll do is drink the green giant, take sixty pills.

8:31 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 will you take in one day? Currently one hundred and eleven. Wow.

8:44 And you take sixty of them in the morning. Wow. Wow. That's an interesting taste. It doesn't taste amazing.

8:54 Yeah, it's not like something I I'm finding a Okay. Ju juice bar or something. There's a little bit of a

9:01 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. It's not like a chocolate It's not milk chocolate or a mask. Right. It's um

9:15 A very, very dark bitter. Taste. Which is a strange thing to add to a mushroom. Yeah. You can also put the dark chocolate in the nutty pudding, or you can have it independently. I find it's fun because it's a new experience for people to try.

9:30 So it's really an optional thing. This nasty pudding is really nice. Mm. That's really nice. That's really, really nice. Um so what are your principles for eating then?

9:42 Clark, you talked about Um calorific restriction. How important is that? Because I'm I eat a lot. Mm. And I don't count. I just

9:50 Just eat. Yeah, and I'm like fi you know My heaviest on fifteen stone fives, which is what About a hundred kilograms or something? Mm-hmm. So I'm I'm quite heavy.

9:59 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. Coloque restriction has compelling evidence that it's one of the most Uh effective

10:10 Longevity. Interventions that can be done. And what are your sort of wider nutritional principles that people can very easily introduced into their lives. Uh it's

10:21 I had this ex I had this experience where I I learned how to fly an airplane. I became a pilot. And we get up at altitude and I would use my hands and try to fly the airplane. And I'd go left, right, up, down, I'd try to be perfectly on the attitude indicator of maintaining exactly the altitude which I was pegged at and the direction. And then I would engage autopilot. And it would j this plane would just sit up straight and it would be

10:41 Perfectly pegged. It it it was so far superior to my ability to do it. That's kinda w how I think about my diet. is if I use my mind, I kinda ping pong around life, eating this and that, and like I hear this thing that there and I hear this thing there. I kinda do whatever's available to me. If you think about putting your body on autopilot, I call it my autonomous self.

11:00 Let the body report out. evidence algorithm in and it just runs. This is the result. This is the 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 up system.

11:16 That has an algorithm running me. Which is so far superior to my mind, which is the going to do it's gonna add the cookie to the order and it's going to Blink because of whatever. I'm pr presuming you're not gonna take these back. Okay. So this

11:33 Ha ha ha Those are all the pills you take in one day. That's right. A hundred and a hundred and twenty odd pills. In a day, almost.

11:44 Yeah. Hundred eleven, yeah. That big one right there. Can see that guy right there. This one here. Yeah. Jesus, Lord Jesus. What is in these pills? A lot of things you would expect.

11:54 Basics like vitamin D and C. uh more advanced things like alpha ketoglutarate or metformin or carbose. Or other things like that. It it spans from Uh basic and common to some more advanced

12:08 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 N A D plus That's obviously s something that's become quite popular in the in the longevity culture. perspective on N A D plus Yeah, he's trying to uh modulate those levels in his body and there's nice age graphs.

12:27 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 forty five.

12:39 But I can biologically be different. I could be either thirty or thirty five or fifty five or seventy according to the marker. So in levels of N A D, intracellular N A D in particular there are certain levels that would peg you at age eighteen, age thirty, age fifty,'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.

13:01 And so what I did is I Ta ca people in the longevity community do have a lot of questions. about how you increase your intracellular energy levels And there's a big debate do you do N R or N M N I think this big this big debate and everyone's always worth the fight about it.

13:16 And so I trialed both. I did Uh ninety days on N R I did ninety 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 intercellular N A D At the eighteen year old mark on both supplements.

13:34 Oh wow. So it basically doesn't matter, just to 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 is so well versed in

13:47 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

13:56 Say that you could I'm a blank canvas and I'm gonna I'm gonna believe everything you say. My objective. Is to h increase my health span. And to not age poorly. Yeah. What would you say about the things that I put in my mouth? Give me some rules.

14:08 Do exactly what I've published. Okay. I'm gonna make it dead simple for you. I say tongue in cheek the blueprint is the best Health protocol.

14:18 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 now we have a comparison. Right now.

14:32 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. Yeah.

14:40 Everyone's saying a different thing. And even now if you give Five anti AG experts. the same s 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.

14:51 There's no way to go out there and get consensus in the world. is 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

15:04 believability. That's what I've done, so I've published all my data. It's a Blueprint provides people a starter a starting point. To say I'm going to do something that I see works.

15:15 And I measure myself, then iterate and improve upon it. So Health and wellness is all like a religion, where the King James version of the Bible supports a hundred different denominations. They all say they're Gods 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 the whole thing to say it doesn't matter what guru status is, share the data.

15:33 E in the mornings? Uh if you wa if 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.

15:46 Sugar. Zero. Zero sure. Zero sure. Why? it does nothing useful for your body. Now you like our body needs sugar to run. So if you eat sugar in berries, which you you're having now.

16:01 That's great. uh proly processed white sugar or cane sugar. There's no value. For your body. There's other things of much higher value for your body.

16:12 Mm, 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 sus 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 six and eight hundred.

16:30 I'm about eight fifty right now. So it's I'm not trying to get above it, I'm just trying to be normal. 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. I mean getting the third with a receding hairline is actually quite good. Some of my friends started a little bit earlier.

16:49 And then we kn start noticing these grey 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 was like someone ask him this was on online. Someone ask 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? Yeah.

17:08 Or do I fight it? Don't do it. Yeah. Fight. Fight with everything you've got in you. Really? Yeah.

17:15 Trust me on this. I will, trust me. Um You don't want to Clean up.

17:24 of uh you don't want to clean up aging damage. that you can prevent right now. And I can prevent my hell on receding? Yes. How?

17:33 I I started losing my hair in my early thirties. Yeah. Yeah. And

17:38 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.

17:49 It basically has monoxidyl and a few other things. So people can get that easily. I have a red light therapy cap I wear every morning for six minutes in my morning routine. I do uh PRF. So I inject I get blood. Drawn.

18:03 spun up and then reinject into my scalp. Once every maybe a month or three. And then I take a few supplements. that that are are listed online for the Blueprint website. So basically like four things.

18:16 Help. Prevent hair loss? And encourage 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 a that I could So h here's how it works is um

18:31 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.

18:46 And it just is on for six minutes. And then at night before you go to bed, you put a little Uh liquid on your scalp when you rub it in.

18:55 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. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.