Bryan Johnson: Five Habits for Longer Living

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/396577b333b1d7ea

Okay, phase one is like do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. Okay, so we've seen this throughout history.
Phase two
is people come with pitchforks.
Phase three is you've gotta survive a whole bunch of attacks.
Yeah, like the p like powers of bee are gonna want to start taking you down.
If you get past фейс твое фейс три.
you get to open up a little bit and you kinda have some open horizon.
And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the the major dunk, you know, where people tried to cancel me in society.
I've survived
Several attempts at take downs.
And now I'm still at it.
And so I'm really happy I'm on to stage four now, and now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay.
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Today my guest is Brian Johnson.
In 2007, Brian founded the payment processing company Braintree, which almost killed him through depression. He sold the company in 2013 for I think about 800 million.
In 2021, he decided to dedicate his significant resources to Blueprint, an algorithmic approach to optimal health and living.
Brian turned his decision rights over to an algorithm and now lives in accordance with its guidelines.
In this conversation we talk about Blueprint, the diet and sleep routine you need to reverse aging.
How to overcome depression, how he stopped binge eating, the automatic rules he uses, lessons he wish he knew earlier about money, his daily schedule for anti-aging.
Why posture matters, overcoming hair loss, the relationship between sexual health and biological health.
hot and cold exposure, sunscreen, frying pans, and so much more.
What I love about Brian is that he's living life on his own terms and he's not harming anybody else.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
Mm-hmm.
I was thinking about where to start and I think we'll start with your love of biographies. Where did this start and what are the
What are a few of the lessons that you've learned from them?
May I I suppose I approach this question
With
the contemplation, how do you understand reality?
There's a few ways of doing it. We're we're born into this world.
And were given a narrative about existence.
And and that narrative depends upon
when you're born and where you're born and to whom you're born.
But you're told certain things about
yourself and why you exist and what to care about and
How society works and what ethics are and norms.
And there's never been
universals if you look at the thousands of different societies that have emerged on earth.
It's extremely variety uh varied.
If you if you're posing if you're poking at this situation, you're saying, Okay
I know that I am born into a given system.
And this system is not a universal truth system, just where I'm at in time and place.
And it's going to change in time.
Then
Yeah, you can go about poking out a few ways. Like you can try to say I'm gonna take a quantitative approach and say
I'm going to learn the world through mathematics or through physics or through
some scientific engine uh discipline or I'm going to understand it through behavioral psychology and and
So you you kind of have to approach
systems understanding and and biographies for me
Was something that
always intuitively helped me
Make sense because I was able to transport myself in time.
And be in different times and places.
Instantaneously.
And understand with a pretty decent level of detail.
What was happening at that point?
You know, how people thought, what they cared about.
How it contrast with my time and place.
And so I'd say biographies have been the most useful thing I've ever invested my time in.
Та с тепли.
With various dimensions and perspectives.
At any given moment.
Are there a few that stand out to you that you reread time and time again?
Probed the biography of zero.
by Charles Seif.
The
The number zero.
It was not common sense to me that the number zero has not always been around.
But it took humanity
a long time, thousands of years to discover the number of zero
And even when you do discover it.
uh to really understand the potential you know so
From Cartesian geometry if from Euclid elements to Cartesian geometry.
Or the function that zero plays in the vanishing point in art.
Or how zero enables the modern world in computation.
And
It took a long time. So I'd say
Zero is probably my favorite one because
It's
An entity, an idea, it's a concept, it's a number.
That has revolutionized almost every part of society.
I was listening in previous interviews and you said I think it was age twenty four, you got depressed.
What happened?
Yeah, I think it was the onset was circumstantial. I had my first baby.
And
He was colicky, so he just cried nonstop.
And I don't think his mother and I got a night.
A sleep of good rest for for six months.
Meanwhile I was building a startup.
And I was grinding at that with all the stresses of
not having income and trying to make something work that was new.
And then I was in a new marriage.
And then I was also dealing with some internal term turmoil.
related to
my religious situation where I wanted to leave my religion, but I was
pretty stuck in the system with my community and the family and
All the societal
Like all of all my community structure.
And it was just a chaotic time in life.
And yeah, one day
Yeah.
It
I remember it as the day my brain snapped.
I just felt like something broke.
And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it just felt something felt different.
Yeah, yeah, and I was in that hole for ten years.
Did you know you were depressed?
Yes. Unquestionably.
Yeah.
It it strikes me was somebody who takes such a scientific approach to things that you would do the same with depression. What was the process of
after you recognized you were depressed, w what was the process to sort of get out of that depression?
You know, I was raised in this
small rural community
That was really
The existence was religion.
And so I was
Tot.
to understand reality through story.
Not through mathematical
Methods, not the scientific methods.
In fact, I didn't meet
An engineer.
Until I was in my early twenties.
And so I just hadn't yet developed the cognitive abilities to think like a scientist or engineer.
It's always hard. It's always complex looking at your past, but
I I do c re you know, I do reflect like what would it have been like if I would have had some awareness and some training early in life of how to think about the world
Quantitatively.
And it was one of the most significant moments of my life when I read this book by Gary Becker.
A Nobel Prize Laureate from the University of Chicago.
And in this he was writing essays excuse me for Newsweek.
And he would take a given topic.
uh like poverty for example and he wouldn't describe it
in qualitative terms, in story terms, you would
Talk about it in numerical terms and
It was, I think, one of the most joyous moments of my life.
To understand that reality could be
Understood.
And
Mathematical terms.
And I did go to the University of Chicago and I got a master's degree there.
But I do wonder in that decade of depression if
You know, if storytelling wasn't my primary skill set for problem solving.
What would have happened in my life?
What advice would you have?
Today for somebody who might feel depressed.
Having been through that yourself.
Uh first I understand you.
uh the the mind is relentless
And so when people feel suicidal, I am deeply empathetic. It is it is irrational to want to kill oneself.
uh it's reasonable so when you're in that moment
It's
It feels lonely.
when you try to explain to somebody
how you feel and how life is not worth it.
And a response is something like get over it or just feel better or like go outside.
It it's hard, it makes you feel very isolated.
And
not able to reach out and get the help you need.
And so one is I would say I understand you.
uh deeply and I may I empathize with you deeply.
And then I'd say there's
Some basic things you can do
to increase
Your circumstances one would be sleep.
I would make sleep your number one life priority, like the most important thing you do on any given day.
is high quality sleep.
And I would build your life around it because when you have good sleep
So many of the things in life are
Much better.
And then if you get good sleep, you can start doing some baby steps into exercise, even going on a walk every day, doing something small.
And then starting to
Add a few
Good foods and a few
fewer bad foods.
but just baby stepping your way,'cause when you're depressed, you don't have the ambition and energy to do big stuff.
And so the really it's the winds are in the baby steps and it starts with sleep because once you
Can sleep well.
Your energy goes up and your motivation goes up and your discipline and willpower increases.
So try to get the flywheel moving in a positive direction where every day you have just a little bit more energy.
to make one more positive baby step.
It it's almost odd.
Auto catalytic.
For the negative.
Right, like you because you're depressed, you become more depressed.
Like it feeds into itself.
It does. And it sometimes
I suppose in a dark humor of
Sort of way.
We humans kind of got stuck.
in this really weird level of consciousness, you know, like
A dog seems to be optimal in its level of happiness about existence.
And we humans are smart enough to do the remarkable things we've done, but yet our mental existence can be extraordinarily challenging.
And it seems to be we share many of these challenging traits.
That it's not
uh often that we're given a default mental state that is just nice all the time. It's a pretty brutal place.
in our minds, most of our minds.
And I wonder if in how we're moving as a species if we can evolve past this.
And if we do look back and like, yeah, we we got stuck in that narrow band that was pretty uncomfortable.
When did you start to overeat or binge eat as you you
mentioned before.
It was a soothing mechanism for my depression.
I
I wanted to feel some form of stimulation. I was so dead inside.
Something some sort of arousal, some sort of pleasure.
And my life was just devoid of pleasure. I mean in in the religion I was in.
It's like you you don't do caffeine, you don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't go to clubs, you don't you know like you don't look at porn, uh you're basically just devoid of those kinds of pleasures and you're you're supposed to derive pleasure from
Yeah, uh being in service of others and
obeying God's commandments and like those are your rewards.
generate. Now of course those things do generate rewards and you we all
And uh understand that when we do help off someone else, we do feel that.
Uh, but you know, when you're grinding twenty four seven on a startup, startups are just pure pain. Like you don't feel joy.
For years.
And when you're raising babies, you have these glimpses of joy, but most of it's just really hard work with a little with a newborn.
And so my think my life is just devoid of pleasure and I was
trying to find a vector
Where I can fill something.
And that's what it would do for me.
Th those patterns of self destructive behavior get in the way of so many of us. I guess the question is, how do we stop
the patterns of self destructive behavior.
Yeah. You know
Uh
This is the essence.
of my entire life's mission.
This single question.
what I did is, you know, after failing for a few years and a few hundred times of saying
Tomorrow I'll start.
Tomorrow is the day.
One last time.
Just this one last time.
And failing a few hundred times to stop that.
One day I jokingly said, Evening Brian, you're fired.
That you make my life miserable.
And
Evening Brian was the version of me that occupied my consciousness from five PM to ten PM.
He was tired from the day, he was fighting multiple fires.
He was trying to re um
like deal with the emotional upset of like all the things that happened during the day.
Like, you know, very common human experience. And then in those
in that window of time when he's beat down
That's when he goes. I don't
think evening Bryan's a bad guy. I just think he
was just trying to find relief of
Hid the burden that he felt in that role.
And I fired him.
And so the past few years has basically been trying to re
imagine my reality.
Oh
Who's in charge of me? Who makes decisions at what point.
what is a sacrifice and what's appropriate. And what I've come down to is with blueprint
I wanted to demonstrate.
that an algorithm
Takes better care of me than I can myself.
And to do that, I became the most measured person in human history. I wanted to show that
If you ask the body's seventy plus organs to speak.
And you consult scientific evidence, and then you let the algorithm run.
So it tells me what time to go to bed, it tells me what to eat. It gives me all these nudges on what to do.
And if I just simply say I can't deviate, my mind can't impromptu saying, you know what?
We're gonna add a brownie to the lunch session here.
Uh
So
The removing that.
And
I basically am arguing
This is the core of it.
I'm arguing that the species
This is the most important question facing the human race.
Hands down.
as algorithms improve.
And they increasingly become better at us at a variety of tasks, including taking care of ourselves on planet Earth.
What do we do?
It's I think it's the defining question and contemplation.
Of our existence.
W what percentage of people do you think if if
And you have this, right? You have a blueprint and the algorithm can take care of you better than you.
We can use self driving cars as an example, right? Which we know statistically they're better at driving.
Uh than we are as individuals.
Or col collectively, maybe not individually.
H what percentage of people are comfortable
handing over the reins to an algorithm which is
sort of like a purely scientific process, right? Which it assumes nothing, measures everything.
And adapts as it it gets input and Yeah.
This topic is
Sufficiently rich
And nuanced, I wrote an entire book about it.
titled Don't Die.
And in the book I break myself out into multiple characters, like evening Brian's present.
Depression, you know.
This guy Scribe, Dark Humor Brian, like all these
People are there.
And they have this discussion.
On what does it mean?
to have individual individual choice. What does it mean to be run by an algorithm?
What does uh an ideal existence even mean? What does it mean to have choice?
So it's a really nuanced conversation.
But I'd say I've been I've been hosting dinners at my house for the past few years.
And having two and a half hour long conversations about this topic, and it does take
about two and a half hours to get people warmed up.
I can abbreviate it for you though, and I can tell you the five big emotional swings that happen.
So one is I say I pose the question
If you could have access to an algorithm that can take better care of you than you can yourself.
Would you say yes.
Now immediately people are like, but what about? So it branches into a thousand
Yeah, questions. Can I just say just like
Assume what you want, let's just keep it high level and abstract.
Yes or no?
And then people go through this process where
the majority of people are vomiting distaste like this is the worst idea. I hate it for all these reasons.
a teeny number of people are like
Please save me from myself.
And the others are like, Yeah, but I want to make the following exceptions, which really is no. So like there's a lot of resistance. And the next turn is I say
На твенти фіфт центрі'вінь ус right now.
And they're observing
Through our comments on this question.
what our norms and ethics are and how we understand ourselves in time and place in the same way
We would look at the sixteenth century
with cold detached
perspective on what they thought.
And then you flip it. So now people are looking at looking at themselves in the mirror. So no longer
Are they defending their knee jerk reactions?
They're invited to be reflective, like how did I behave in this moment? What am I really saying I care about?
And then the the next turn is you say
Uh what
things about our current reality may change
That would make
our current reality unintelligible to us.
So now you're in this creative space where it's like, Okay
We assume all these things to be unquestionable truths.
About our existence.
But we know from history none of these things ever really hang out.
For very long society moves into new truths and new norms. So
Wherever we're at we're at now, it's a temporary state.
And once you're there, like now you've swung from like no way to
I'm kind of being reflective on myself to how might things change.
And then the next step is about the philosophy of this change, which is zero principle thinking.
And then full circle back to the thought experiment.
But
You can see through those beats with about twelve
People.
Uh it takes each person the ability to cycle through these ideas and emotions and hear how other people respond.
But the very end.
Uh, the majority of people who attend my dinners are like
I gotta say I get it. I understand the situation.
W when you say it, and I want to go through some of the details of blueprint.
To me, it sounds like an algorithm for living.
And the algorithm's in charge of you. And the algorithm is basically just creating a bunch of automatic rules for success or a recipe to follow.
You follow the the
The rules.
The algorithm.
you create an output, which is sort of your biomarkers and your indicators that feeds back into the system and it adjusts.
It strikes me that
That's sort of easy and sort of really hard to like do you have
I'm imagining your house and walking through it.
And like do you have bags of chips? Do you have ice cream and you just don't do it because the algorithm told you? Or how important is the role of environment?
And how important is the other stuff going on here?
to actually shape that behavior.
Yeah, you you know, if you're here at the house and you're hanging out with me.
There's not a lot of trouble we're going to get into with what I have in stock.
If we want to get wild and down some extra virgin olive oil.
Or but no, it's
I I basically don't trust myself.
Still.
Th that strikes me as really interesting, right? Because it's sort of like okay, we can have this thing and what we want to do, but now we gotta create an environment or a reality.
Uh and it can be an artificial environment, which the algorithm kind of is an artificial environment for you. Yeah.
And then you have to follow that. So you have to have multiple things in in line. Like I'll give you an example so a few years ago
I was w I was um trying to work out three days a week.
And I ended up going to the gym because I was like, Am I actually working out three days a week? And I was like, Can you give me a list of like all the times that I swiped in?
And they gave me this list and it, you know, it's like once he was going like one one and a half times a week. And so I was talking with Daniel Conman a little later that year
And he had this phone call and he was talking to this this gentleman on the phone and at the end of the call he said
I have a rule. I never say yes on the phone. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow.
Uh-huh.
And he hung up and I was like, Well tell me about this. What is this rule? And he's like, Well
I found I was saying yes to please other people. I want other people to like me. I'm a human. I'm a social. So I end up doing these things that aren't really good for me.
And so I created this rule to do this. And I was like, Well, this is amazing, right? This is the most powerful thing I think you've done. And you've got a Nobel Prize. So like this is really interesting because you rewire your brain in the moment.
to think in a certain way, which your automatic response becomes that. And so I was like, I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna go to the gym every day. I'm gonna work out every day. And the duration or scope can change, but I'm gonna exercise every day.
And the conversation went from should I work out today
Which in my head is like, Oh, I have a really busy day. I didn't sleep well. I'm not gonna work out today, I'll do extra tomorrow. You negotiate with yourself.
Two I'm going to do exercise every day, and it completely changed.
My approach to exercise and my health.
And it sounds like the blueprint is very much an automatic set of rules.
Where you have multiple things aligned, but you're trying to follow this pattern. I'm wondering what your response to that is, and specifically around.
How we can correct
our self destructive behaviors.
your ex your experiences exactly
Mine.
To say yes, Anne, to what you said.
If our conversation is about a practical topic of how do you achieve better health or how to increase
Crop yield.
Or how to run a more efficient
Driving route.
Those are interesting questions. The backdrop of
This thought experiment is
Aza species
Are we facing an existential
Outcome.
I mean, what are the stakes?
Is it we'll make a little bit less money or we'll have maybe four pack instead of six pack on our abs.
Or are we really talking about life and death?
And my premise is that we are in existential moment as a species.
on a variety of fronts.
And then it invites a contemplation of if that is the case.
What do you do? And so that
That question itself.
Primes
The response like how do you stop self-destructive behavior because
If I say how do I stop self-destructive behaviors?
Without
Identifying these things
A person has a given willingness to change their behavior.
But if then there's a it'll stop.
Uh if it's like it's a nice to have.
But if it's life or death
The behavioural change
uh profile may be very different.
And so really I think it depends on where the person's coming from.
You know, like uh someone mentioned to me recently, I haven't verified this that
The only way to
Get someone to change is to tell them they're pregnant.
Or the you know, diagnose them with a certain condition.
Otherwise no change will happen.
That's interesting. A friend of mine had a
Yeah.
It brings to mind
this story. A friend of mine had uh
Heart surgery.
a while back and I went to visit him in the hospital.
And I was talking to the surgeon.
And you know, the surgeon sort of had said all the typical things about changing your diet and changing your lifestyle.
Yeah. And when I was talking to the surgeon, he goes
You know, odds are
About ten percent.
That he's gonna do this.
And I said, Well that's interesting and he's like
He he's like, I've been a surgeon for thirty years.
And he's like people used to change all the time because I used to have to break ribs. I used to have to like there was a physical pain, a big scar.
a visual reminder and he's like now the incision's like, you know, half a centimeter.
And
You know, you're in and out of the hospital and there isn't a lot of pain and so he's like people
People change a lot less than they used to.
And I thought that that that
Sort of related to what you were talking about.
I'm wondering if you can walk me through at a high level
sort of the overarching day of blueprint.
And w what does it mean to live
Like Brian Johnson.
The premise on this is
I
I was posing the question
In the early twenty first century, is it the case?
that we have achieved longevity escape velocity, which means that for every
one year of chronological time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically?
And if not, where are we at?
And so that's
the backdrop on what my daily routine is.
And so what we did to
establish this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication that's ever been done on health span and lifespan.
We then graded the evidence of these papers and we then stack ranked them according to effect size.
And then we've systematically been implementing each one of these these protocols.
So
becoming the most measured person in history and then using using all the scientific evidence.
I wake up so my day begins really the night before. I go to bed currently at nine thirty PM. I just change my bedtime from eight thirty.
But it's eight it's nine thirty on the dot.
So it's it's not uh I don't have a two hour window of time.
And I I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable.
Which no human in history had ever done. So I wanted to demonstrate
that you can get reliable high quality sleep for this extended period of time.
And then I wake up naturally, I never wake up with an alarm.
Uh roughly four thirty, five thirty in the morning.
And
I will
I'll weigh myself, do body composition, like weight.
Hydration.
Fat.
Et cetera.
I'll take my inner ear temperature.
I'll take two pills.
I'll do a few minutes of UV.
Uh light therapy.
to start my circadian rhythm.
It's still dark in the morning. I'll go downstairs. I'll make myself a a morning concoction. I'll take sixty pills.
I'll do light therapy on my hair.
Like once a meet once a week I'll do my blood my blood pressure.
I'll then work out for about an hour.
In a specific protocol.
I'll come in, I will make breakfast, which is a few pounds of vegetables.
I'll shower, uh do a skincare routine.
And get ready for work. I'll eat my second meal the day.
And then I worked for the day.
And then I have a evening, and then throughout the day I'll do various doctors appointments.
uh medical procedures and measurement, and then I have a wind down routine that I follow r uh ritually.
And
What we've done is we've tried to stack
hundreds of protocols into my daily routine.
Because we do so many things and we're trying to follow the evidence.
I'm not able to just randomly do things. It has to be highly structured in order for us to control this experiment.
With the rigor we need for the results.
And so we've just done this for several years and fine tuned it and
We go through the process of measure me measure myself, look at the evidence, we do the protocol.
measurement evidence protocol again and again and again.
And uh I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal. So so for example
My cardiovascular capacity.
is in the top one point five percent of eighteen year olds.
My bone mineral density is in the top point zero two percent of thirty year olds, which is age minute for that test.
And you know, my my uh my strength tests, same thing, like top one point five and ten percent of eighteen year olds. So
the biomarkers across my entire body, whether it's my cardiovascular ability, my strength.
uh my muscle my my muscle and body fat are the top ninety nine point five percentile. So
It's produced.
a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I'm in pretty good health.
I thought your workouts were like twenty five reps of exercise and stuff. Are are you is that giving you the the incredible strength?
Uh yes, so it's about an hour a day and it you're right. It's like uh you know, twenty plus
And so mostly I try to flex and stretch.
Every muscle of my body.
So
I don't do heavyweights.
That are
uh hard in the joints.
But yes, even doing these things, I do it every single day. I don't take any rest days.
And yeah, I'm on my bench press.
It it's uh top ten percent of eighteen year olds.
And we use eighteen year olds, a lot of people I mean, the with ninety-nine percent certainty when I say this, people are like, but wait a second, why not a thirty year old?
It's because
You max out your weight.
to uh rep ratio.
At age eighteen.
So even though you can lift more in your twenties and maybe even your thirties
Your ratio peaks at eight.
The same is true with your VO two max, your cardiovascular fitness.
And so we do a reference to an eighteen year old not because it's an easy way to pick off a number, we do it because according to these age these biological age standards.
You're looking at when the human when I when a male
peak perfor peak performance.
And I think your last meal is at like eleven thirty AM?
That's right. So I have roughly, you know, ten hours or so of fasting before I go to bed.
Do you feel hungry when you go to bed?
I used to, I'm now normalized to it.
And does that help your sleep? Like what happens if you eat later?
I assume this was all like sort of measured and I eat my last meal the day.
At eleven AM.
for the objectives of good sleep.
Because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting. I think the evidence is still
Maybe
Developing
So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I
Have all my digestion finished.
So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around forty six beats per minute.
And if it's a forty six, I'm gonna have a perfect night's sleep.
If I eat at five PM or six PM.
then my resting heart rate's gonna be fifty six.
And when I do that, I'm going to
uh knock off about fifty percent of my rem and fifty percent of my deep.
And I'll increase my wait time by about thirty five minutes.
And so if I've done these ex I've done so many experiments now, it is algorithmic.
And I know exactly what happens when I eat what at what time and how it affects my sleep.
It sounds like blueprint.
is optimized for the sole variable of sleep. Is that correct?
I mean, so sleep is an important one. It's it's it's the the number one priority because everything else rests, you know, hinges upon that.
But it also
We are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every organ of the body.
So we have seventy plus organs, and we've tried to quantify and rejuvenate.
Every organ of my body.
We just try to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your
Your uh chest here responsible for your immune system.
And so you you know if I can say I'm chronologically forty six years old.
But the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart.
And of my lungs.
And of my liver.
And that's really the
the more powerful predictor
than uh a chronological number.
And where were you when you started Blueprint? Were you basically your your biological age for your
Like was everything the same? No. I was I was coming from a pretty bad place. I after being depressed for a decade and running
you know, being a start up entrepreneur my entire life.
And having just gone through a bunch of stuff.
Uh, I was pretty beat up.
and I was in a bad state. So I definitely subscribe to grind culture.
Where
Yeah, you do things in society to try to earn people's respect.
and have a position of a status in a social group.
to when you conform with these social norms.
And so like the when you hear a story about a colleague who
worked on a program uh a problem for two days straight and didn't sleep. It's like wow, they're so awesome and amazing.
You know, like that it's very hard to not to be induced to think that that's an emulation worthy behavior.
So I had to
Peel myself out of grind culture and find out that
This is the thing is we we are accustomed
Death.
Is the enabler of all things immortality. You know, if you love country, die for your country.
If you want to s if you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life.
Yeah, like it if you um want to achieve immortality in your professional endeavor.
Have your works live beyond your death. Everything we we think about existence is around death.
And I was calling
question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in human history.
Where death is no longer inevitable. And if that is true.
Everything about our reality changes.
Do you think we'll see a quantum leap in average age?
In the next fifteen years.
Like average uh average life expectancy.
So not people so yes, there's people who will uh learn from what you're doing, they'll change their habits and they'll extend their personal life expectancy. But do you think we're gonna see a collective
big leap. I mean like you have sort of Jeff Bezos and
Patrick and John Collison and people pouring money into
billions of dollars into research on this topic.
To me, the most compelling contemplation
Is
trying to
Predict.
How fast інteligance
is improving.
The we humans have been the dominant force of intelligence on this planet for two hundred thousand years.
And we've been able to increase our abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation in our society.
with language and all kinds of organizational methodologies, we've increased our ability to
Utiliz our intelligence with technological tools.
We've now created intelligence in AI.
That is creating better intelligence.
And if you say what is the speed at which intelligence is improving.
It's fast.
Faster than we can comprehend.
And so when you
When we make these uh when we model out the fe the future and we say
What's going to happen on a ten year time span.
Виарквалифід.
To answer that question.
Because that time that time frame
Exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine.
So it's the first time in human history
Where we the superior form of intelligence are up against a wall.
of not knowing what to predict what comes next because
It will it's gonna supersede us so fast.
And so this is the thing, this is why I come down to
The only thing I know to be true in the year twenty twenty four.
Is don't die.
That's it.
I don't know.
Anything else.
Other than I want to be around
For what could be the most spectacular existence in this part of the galaxy.
Yeah, th there's a part of me that's really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right now and we don't die.
We're gonna get a lot of advantage from technology that
Thinks about things in a way that we couldn't even comprehend.
I mean to you take the for inspiration, if you say, Okay, well, point me to an example of where intelligence has been used.
that would give me any sort of uh bearings on what I might imagine.
Okay, so take alpha fold.
Uh it was
Many people thought
solving the protein folding problem.
was unsolvable or would take us some unknown
Duration of time.
And Deep Mind allocated their attention to that thing and solved it faster than anyone ever thought possible.
The same thing with Go.
And so when
These
groups of people that are very talented focus on a very narrow problem.
They solve stunningly hard problems.
Faster than anyone thought.
And as these systems get better.
and uh use more broadly and is these systems create better systems
This is why w we are at this launch point.
Uh and you know, is it going to happen in two years, one years, five years, ten years? I don't know.
But it's basically if you zoom out far enough, it's in the blink of an eye at this point.
And so don't die is don't die individually, don't kill each other.
Don't kill planet earth.
And when you're building AI
The objective function of AI is just don't die audiology.
So if you I mean, what I'm trying to say is like so we've we've never been in the situation before where we're baby steps away from creating super intelligence.
And
When you're at this in this moment.
We have this
This incredibly practical question to ask.
What do we do?
Like how do we think about reality? What do we care about? What are our ideals? What are our objectives?
And then if you start surveying the world of like, hey.
Who can tell us how to practically think about reality?
And you pro religions and capitalism and communism and socialism and
Like any other group.
Who can pull up and say, Here's a playbook, here's an instruction
on how you actually think about reality.
And that's what I've been trying to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack.
That informs humanity on what to do on a daily basis, for example.
What to eat for breakfast.
all the way through the most complicated question of how do you begin thinking about
A philosophical alignment with AI.
I have some specific questions about blueprint. So like how much water are you consuming a day?
Between sixty and eighty ounces.
Is that the only beverage that you really consume?
It is. I I drink miner mineralized water, so it's always tea or has some electrolytes in it.
Is that tap water? Is it filtered? Is it out of a glass or plastic?
It's filtered, it's ceramic.
How do you think about things like Teflon and things that can
sort of like get into your body or things that are widely sort of
um thought to get into your body like mic microplastics and Teflon and
Yeah, I mean I I try to avoid uh plastic bottles. I use uh
Stainless steel cookware.
Uh filtered water. I don't
Eat out.
I don't use uh take out uh materials.
So I try to avoid
The
The things that are more polluting.
Why vegan? I think that's a that's a personal choice, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
Is there anybody doing this who's an omnivore?
Yeah, my son.
And are the ha are his results sort of similar to yours?
Yeah, pretty similar. I think that diet is a special kind of provocative. Like people break out into warring tribes instantaneously and
The intensity around this topic is
A lot.
And so I've really just stayed out of it. I I'm I'm impartial. I don't want to get into the war.
And so I just say you do you.
I do think that there's
Everyday.
There's more evidence coming out suggesting plant based diets.
are um more conducive for longevity.
So I think the evidence in time will speak for itself, but right now it like it's of all the
battlefields I could choose, this is not the one I want.
That's a really interesting way to put it. I I think it's really interesting too. People aren't convinced by data. I mean, you can show them all the data in the world and it's not gonna change their mind. How do we take blueprint?
And
Build habits with it.
So it's one thing to know, okay, here's this manual.
Follow this manual and this manual is gonna be
better at running your life than you are.
You can take your evening brine, you can put them away and just follow the instructions, but how do we actually turn that into habits?
That we follow.
Every person is different in how they go about
change and there's
many ways that people go about have
you know, uh behavioral change with very habit formation techniques.
Formi
It's
really helpful to
understand my own behavioral change in a larger context, where I say
I'm endeavoring to maintain
My health?
so that I don't die, so that I can participate in what may be the most spectacular existence in the galaxy.
На фіта'срика.
I have a goal, and I have a reason to live, and I have something to look forward to.
Now, a side effect of that is my body feels great and it looks great and you know I can do all sorts of things.
But for me it's the bigger goal that motivates me for other people.
They may have
much, you know, different goals of like they they want to fit into a certain
Uh
pair of of clothing, or they want to look good for a certain event.
or they want to achieve a certain physical uh outcome.
So like the end goal, I think the I think the motivation is is really important.
And then
I go through the process as you heard me say is I like to break myself out.
into my various selves because
I am, you know, dozens of different kinds of people. I'm morning Brian. I'm evening Brian. I'm after work out Brian. I'm
Yeah, Dad, Brian, like I'm
And every one of those situations
I'm biochemically a different human.
I have
have a different way of understanding reality and I'll make decisions that are different in each one of those circumstances. Like you said with Daniel
Well, he doesn't say yes on the phone because that in that moment he's
please others, Daniel. And he wants to be a different version that to let him earn his life. So I do the same approach. I break myself out into different persons.
And I decide which versions of me have authorization and when.
Because you know, like
W who's in charge uh
ten PMU who sets the alarm for six AM
Or six AMU who wants a few more minutes.
Uh with the snooze button.
And so you need to make those decisions on who is in charge.
Because if you just let it roll out.
Yeah, that
The present you is always going to win and always get what they want at the expense.
of other versions of you that have your better interests at heart.
And then the third is once you get to the the structural where you have a goal.
And you've separated yourself out and you know who's making decisions on when, then you can do these hyper focus things on behavioral change like
You can pair a habit. So every time you see a given thing, you do a certain action.
And so that's really in my estimation how
I've tried to stack my life.
Well, basically I've tried
To build a life.
Where I make zero decisions.
of doing things I don't really want to do.
And I've almost got it. Like I'm it's actually I'm surprised I've gotten this close to achieving it. I just don't behave in ways that I regret anymore.
And that's phenomenal because I was just like walking regret before.
What I love about you is that you're
Living life on your own terms and you're not hurting anybody.
And yet what you're doing
Is so outside of what we consider
Normal.
That you get so much hate and vitriol.
How do you handle that?
I love it.
I I have such a positive relationship with the hate.
Uh it energizes me
I am endlessly amused by it.
I think it's
Just fun.
To engage with.
And you know I
Depression was a much better troll.
than anyone online.
Yeah, like my my depression could eat me up pretty efficiently. Get new
the zingers and the dunks.
Everyone else
Uh
You know, like it's just play for me.
I guess like you know, like you you can think about these two phases like
Okay, phase one is like do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. Okay, so we've seen this throughout history.
Phase two
is people come with pitchforks.
Like we know this.
Phase three is you've gotta survive a whole bunch of attacks.
Yeah, like the p like powers of bee are gonna want to start taking you down.
And then phase if you get past phase two and phase three.
you get to open up a little bit and you kinda have some open horizon.
And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the the major dunk, you know, where people tried to cancel me in society.
I've survived.
Several attempts at take downs.
And now I'm still at it.
And so I'm really happy I'm on to stage four now, and now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay.
Yeah, I was amazed at some of the the stuff that I read online and some of the stuff that you've been through, and I don't know if you want to share some of that or not.
What's been the hardest moments for you?
I'm so happy to be alive.
I appreciate existence.
uh with an intensity
That I've never felt before.
I know what it feels like to want to end your life.
You know, like I desperately wanted to kill myself for ten years.
And
I'm grateful I didn't.
And I'm grateful I'm alive.
So you know, when
When people come and dunk on me, or when they're trying to attack attack me, or when they're saying things about me.
It's okay.
Like
It's fine.
Um
Everyone's just trying to do their thing and deal with themselves, so
It's not really worth getting caught up in.
I think it's possible
That um
Yeah.
We'll look back at ourselves right now and we'll say
Oh man, like
Can you believe how hard it was to be human?
Thank you
Can you I do you remember how bad it was, like the anxiety and the depression and the jealousy and the
angst and the FOMO and the like you know all the things we felt like
God, that was just so hard. Like can you imagine going back to doing that? In the same way we imagine
you know, previous areas not having the technology we do today.
I think it's possible that we're just in this moment in time of a conscious existence. It's really brutal. And so
I guess I don't really expect anything different if if people's internal experiences are are beating them up.
They're gonna try to beat other people up too. It's just
It's like kind of the situation. It's it's okay.
Do you think you have that confidence?
to sort of face that because
You've been to a really dark place.
And come out of it.
Yes.
I think it's also'cause I get great sleep.
But you honestly but you've also like it's it's one thing like I get this, you know, it's one thing when it's an anonymous person online.
uh saying, you know, something about you. It really mostly says something about them.
But you've also had people close to you.
uh come after you. And that's a whole different kind of vulnerability and feeling.
I I was poor my entire life.
My mom made my clothes for school.
I um
I work in third grade.
I worked the school tables at lunch.
to pay for leftover food so my mom wouldn't have to pay my twenty five dollars a month of cafeteria money.
Like I knew we were poor.
And
I was in on my family's uh circumstances.
And I didn't make money until I was thirty four years old, until I sold Brain Tree.
And I've had money for ten years now, for twelve years.
And I've learned a lot of lessons about the complexity of money.
I really wish that
I would have
spent more time
haven't made money and say
Can I talk to somebody who who's had wealth.
and can tell me how to how this game works.
But I will tell you
Um
Of the people close to me over the past.
You know.
Twelve years.
A very large number, like almost like fifty percent
Have ended up doing something
To me.
That is um
That is unambiguous.
Bad behavior.
In some cases illegal behavior.
And um
This is not to say they're bad and I'm good.
It's meant to say
That
When you're around these circumstances
It's often times very hard.
To keep your bearings.
And sometimes you lose your reality.
And you become so lost in it, you can no longer tell what's going on.
But money is extraordinarily complicated, and it drives people to do crazy things.
And I've seen this pattern now repeat itself so many times in my personal life, like those who are the closest people to me.
And to see what they would do when money was at stake.
They'll do anything.
And it they
Lose
Touch with reality.
In the pursuit of that objective.
I have a friend who is incredibly wealthy.
And we've been friends for a number of years now. And one thing
That struck me a few years ago was his circle.
kept getting smaller and smaller. Yeah.
And I I remember asking him about this and I was like, you know, like we're hanging out
last year and I'm just making this up, but there's like thirty people here and now there's like fifteen.
And you you see it shrink over time. And he said, Yeah, you know
Because people
Do these things that
Yeah.
Um, they ask me for something or they do things, and then I can't really trust them. And then everybody who's trying to be my friend.
And I'm paraphrasing here and I'm not gonna reveal who it is, but everybody who's trying to be my friend wants something from me, or that's how I think about it. So it's really hard for me to like
Open up.
To new people because I all like I've become skeptical of motivations and intentions and that's been
What I have s when I've
shared my problems.
They are almost identical to the life experiences other people have had.
Uh, it's just algorithmic. Like this is why I'm saying I wish I could go back in time and talk to somebody because
It is so predictable how people will behave in these circumstances.
That you can do
So many things to try to
lessen the negative outcomes.
But I'm inherently a very trusting person.
And I am hands off, right to just kinda let people do their own thing.
And that's just not a
Uh
Good recipe. Most people can't thrive in that environment. Most people
will really struggle.
to
play by the rules that we as society have
have agreed that would constitute fairness and honesty and legality.
So again, it's fine. This is not a critique of people, it's just it's the human condition.
It is what it is, and this is the same reason like I
I don't trust myself.
Yeah, like I this is why I don't have suites in my house.
It's not like I think I'm the best person in the whole world.
I know
uh that I will cheat.
I will do things uh I don't want to do.
If I put myself in those circumstances. So
This is coming from a place of distrust of myself and all things that we humans do.
If I inherited or you know, suddenly came into five hundred million dollars tomorrow and I came to you and said, Brian
I just got this big chunk of money.
Give me the lessons that you've learned over the last twelve years.
That I should put in place today, what would they be?
One
Is
I would suggest you not change anything in your life.
For six to twelve months.
Keep on with your same habits and have the money.
So you can distinguish between
your preferred lifestyle and what money would otherwise alter.
your perception of what you want.
Because once you start acquiring things
You start losing your perspective.
on where your baseline is.
So it
And the shock of going from zero to five hundred million.
is so s so sudden
That it scrambles your reality.
And then number two is it is
Um
reasonable
That
A a large majority of people
are going to want something from you at all times.
And
It's it will be small things like, you know, a
A niece or a nephew?
When you're invited to their wedding.
most people will give a gift, you know, a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars or
twenty dollars, whatever the number is in that cultural norm for that family.
They're going to expect you to give something for five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars.
Because you have so much money.
And so people just assume
Uh that
Because you have so much money.
That you have more obligation.
uh to them.
So there's like this this uh a cyclical relationship.
And then
Three.
Is I'd say
Identify
What?
You want the money to achieve.
And that really needs to come from you on what your objectives are.
Because if you don't
determine your objectives in life.
Money will run you.
And so it creates this really
uh inverse relationship where you wanted the money so you could you could uh achieve your objectives, but now running money's running new and you've lost yourself.
And if you don't follow those three things
pretty soon you're in a situation where you don't know what is up and what's what's down, you don't know who you can trust.
You've got people on the inside who are
Yeah.
Engage in in potentially compromising behavior without you knowing and
So it just creates a real challenging environment and then you become your your internal world becomes destabilized where
Like your friend said, you just don't know who you can trust.
And it becomes a really isolating experience.
Does that ever make you feel lonely?
It's a challenge, you know, like anything, like I mean like in
In life
It's like all of our problems are equal. It's not like
If you're rich, you have fewer problems. It's not like if you're poor, you've got I mean like so so there are like there's like
There are some clear differences. Like if if you're poor and you've got a very serious medical condition, you don't have the resources to address that, that's a very big difference.
But
Overall.
Every person I know who's wealthy has just as many problems and it feels to them
Their problems are just as intense as everyone else at every other
class of wealth.
uh excluding in you know like the extreme situations
where like a person does not have the ability to pay for basic nutrition or does not have the ability to pay for medical bills or is suffering from some other like on the on the disparities, but
What I'm trying to say is
uh human suffering is pretty
Universal.
And there's a lot of
Um
Misperception that somehow money lessens problems.
Yeah, it's not a panacea.
It has its own problems.
And many people with money wish they didn't have the money.
Uh, but of course that's also hypocritical because if they did, just give it away. Like like talk the talk. So it's complicated and nuanced.
And it's just a very hard question to parse.
Uh, because it's hard to imagine those circumstances.
It it it's hard for society to talk about to
Hm.
I feel like it's a exceptionally hard for
My wealthier friends to talk about money.
uh than it is for other people.
because they they risk um
getting slapped on the hand for saying anything that is just insensitive. Um, right. So like
Oh.
Because their experiences is complex.
Right, that that it causes very serious problems in our life, it creates loneliness.
It uh
Puts them in very challenging situations.
And then the natural response is like boo hoo. Like go complain to someone. Um, and I understand that.
Uh, it's also just like I think it misses a little bit because
We all live together in society.
And we share classes of problems.
And so to me it's like it's the bigger
observation about how all of us struggle all the time.
And
How it's worthwhile to contemplate.
How we can all struggle less.
Yeah, we're more similar than we we
tend to think that we are, I think across
Not only cultures, but
um socioeconomic statuses too.
Mm-hmm. Uh I wanna come back to Blueprint for a second. I wanna go through
specific things. So I want to go through nine things. I want to go through
behavioral interventions i want to go through diet interventions and supplement interventions
And I want you to give me your top three
behavioral interventions.
Top three diet interventions and top three supplements that people listening to this, if they're
Looking to sort of like
play around with blueprint, but maybe they don't want to go all in.
that they can do and they'll get a noticeable sort of like bang for the buck out of.
Yeah, I I can tell you.
Uh I would
uh structure that just a little bit differently.
I can tell you the top five
Power laws. Okay.
Yeah, let's do that.
And so y you by doing these five things, you could achieve a life expectancy of ninety two.
So one, don't smoke.
Yeah.
Two is exercise six hours a week.
And that's a combination of strength and flexibility and cardiovascular.
Three is eat a blueprint like diet.
Or like Mediterranean diet.
Four is maintain a BMI between eighteen point five and twenty two point five.
And then five is
Uh
Limit.
Alcohol consumption.
And those five things are the power laws.
Sleep is a contender.
for being a power law of health.
I think the evidence is emerging now that we've got much better measurement around it.
Talk to me about the alcohol consumption, because that one is is sort of a bit vague in a sense of
You didn't offer specifics like BMI or like this range. What's what what what is a limited alcohol consumption? Is that like
Two ounces a week, is it six? Is it like we're best with none, but up until this point it doesn't hurt us.
If I remember correctly, it's something like between one and three.
glasses of wine a week equivalent.
So it yeah, it's limited.
Uh, I do zero alcohol intake.
You used to drink alcohol, though.
Yeah, I drink three ounces of red wine for breakfast daily, yeah.
Yeah, what was the thinking behind that? You gave it up, I think, I remember, if I if I remember correctly, it's'cause you couldn't afford the eighty calories in your diet.
Correct. Yeah.
But you you liked red wine.
It was delicious. It was such a wonderful experience.
Yeah, it increased the joy of food a lot.
Do you ever
have wine now or it's just like a rule that you don't have it because once you go down that path it's like a slippery slope.
I don't now because even small amounts negatively affect my sleep.
Even if I drink them, drink it around noon or even if I do three ounces at noon.
I still sometimes see effects in sleep.
And
Nothing.
is worth trading high quality sleep to me.
That's fascinating. Yeah, are there certain foods that like
If you ate even at eleven thirty would disrupt your sleep that you know about? Uh carbohydrates.
So breads.
Pastas.
Even rice.
uh is hard for my body to digest.
Is that your body or most bodies?
uh my body. And maybe it's because I don't eat rice very often. So you know that the one time occurrence. But yeah, when I eat anything of that variety
My resting heart rate will be fifty five plus.
you know, probably the fifty six, fifty seven range.
Uh, then of course anything fried, but I never eat fried, but if I
Did it would definitely do it.
Uh
Flowers of all types.
Even like almond flour?
Yeah.
Oh interesting. I tried I tried a bunch of different flowers. I wanted to find, you know, like
Uh I wanted to find if some variety of foods that would do it and that
That did and then also sugar.
So if if um I
You know, on occasion I've tried like a a fun drink, like someone someone
Took me and got a Bobo or something. Bobo or something like that.
Tapioca.
Um, but yeah, that will do it for me, that will increase my so I know now the list of foods that
increase my rescue heart rate. This is the cool thing. Yeah, before
I would say
I would be confronted with a situation of like I really want to eat this cookie.
But I know I don't I really shouldn't.
Then I did it anyways, you know, and I probably did that like in my life a thousand of times, maybe.
And
for the first time in my life, I've gotten to a point where I can look at the cookie and have it in my hand and say, you know what?
The pain
of eating this thing so far exceeds the momentary pleasure from eating it, there's no way I'm going to do it.
And I can fill that with such confidence I'm not even tempted to eat the cookie.
Whereas before I was just desperate in its face to just be
You know, there's no way I was gonna win in that situation. I was gonna eat the cookie, and then after that, I was gonna eat the five more in the pack. You know, like I couldn't stop myself.
And so now it it my I finally, finally, finally, finally got to a place where
I can model out the pain and that's so unpleasant.
But I just don't want to do it.
And the pain in this case is you know it's gonna impact your sleep and therefore you know it. How much of that relates to
The fact that you've had eight months of perfect sleep.
Like if last night was like oh the streak ended and now you've got the cookie in your hand, are you still thinking with the same logic?
Well that's what I m actually measured my brain at my brain interface company kernel.
I looked at my brain based upon sleep patterns and I saw we saw my brain
I had less
Willpower.
When I had a poor night's sleep, when I had less ram and less deep.
And so yes, when you have bad sleep.
you have substantially less willpower. Well the it's so interesting because I talked to my kids about this and I talk about it in the context of positioning an easy mode or hard mode.
Yeah. And I'm like, when you go to sleep, it doesn't mean you're not going like when you sleep well
Doesn't mean somebody's gonna do something to you, not gonna do something to you tomorrow that makes you angry or upset. It means your ability to regulate your emotions and have a healthy response is gonna be much easier than if you have a poor night's sleep. So you can like you're playing on easy mode or hard mode, and I think sleep is one of the prime indicators of that.
Great job.
Why does posture matter? You have like the best posture of I've I'm like conscious of this and like I'm actually having better posture during this interview because of you.
You know, like I
I realize that I
present complexity
In people's lives that
You know if someone sees an article about me or a video or something
And if they're not in the same place as me
Uh, it can have a net negative reaction where the person's like, damn it.
I'm never going to be able to do what he does.
So that makes me feel bad about myself, and so why even try?
And
I'm deeply empathetic about that, and I
I wish that wasn't the outcome. And so I really try to be
Thoughtful.
And
Me
Everyone where they're at. Where I hope that
When someone think about me
And you know if they view my posture or they view my eating habits.
that they can think of me like an angel on their shoulder of like, I'm I'm there, I'm there with you, friend. Like I I want you to be your best self and I understand you.
And there's no judgment coming from me, and it's fine if you make mistakes, it's cool.
Um
But it's it's it's complicated, and I understand.
That
It's difficult.
And so posture I do work extraordinarily hard.
I'm also mindful that it potentially has this boomerang effect.
Uh where
People get discouraged.
But yeah, I mean I I maintain a posture because I discovered I've got
genetically narrow internal jugular veins, these two pipes on the side of the neck, and so I've
have restricted blood flow out of my brain when I have bad posture.
So like it kinks.
My veins.
And so I
We did a whole bunch of measurement with MRI and ultrasound and then I worked did a bunch of physical therapy to strengthen certain muscles that maintain
Proper posture.
And so I've just built it as a habit now.
But it took me.
Months and months.
Uh like for example as a family we have a habit
Where one day one of my eldest son made fun of me, he's like, Dad's like an AI.
And he was like, She's like this.
Like, you know, be in this AI move and so
His impersonation of me
was reduced to zip.
So now every time
Anyone in the family has
Improper posture.
That means if if you're holding a phone directly down, you're looking at it, your head's hanging over
Or your

You'll hear it zip and everyone in the family just like right like straight up.
And so we're now a family where we support each other in proper posture.
But it took us a while to get there.
That's awesome. What's the relationship between our biological health and our sexual health?
Well
Yeah, if you're male.
And you're not getting
enough sleep, your nighttime erections are eliminated.
And nighttime erections are an important biomarker for sexual health.
psychological health and cardiovascular health.
And you know, I've measured my nighttime directions extensively.
as uh it we basically we try to measure everything we can measure. I know it's atypical and so this is
not a common measurement people are familiar with.
But that's true for the entirety blueprint. We're doing things that are new.
But uh I guess I say that because
People oftentimes associate the cost of not getting good sleep with feeling a little bit grumpy the next day.
Yeah, or a little bit more irritable.
But they don't really understand the
whole body consequences where basically your sexual function goes to zero.
Uh, it's not that you can't still have intercourse, Jack. You you can, but
I I point it out it's a pretty devastating
Cost.
On on uh
Not getting good sleep.
So
Um, yeah, it all these things are deeply connected. And this is why coming back to grind culture.
Grind culture.
assumes
Death is inevitable.
So you're trying to achieve immortality through the means that you have.
And so once you go back down to the stack and you start questioning these things.
About our reality.
It leads you down this path of like
Do I really believe in this culture moment of this thing.
Or is there something else really bigger going on?
One of my friends who was in the special forces for a long time.
uh used to be deployed often and he said one of the things that they looked for in the troops and they asked them about regularly was their
Uh the poop.
And whether they had a morning erection.
I love that. That's fantastic. I mean that's the first time I've heard of anyone else.
measuring night uh erections. It's it's so important. And I know it's taboo and funny and people like to dunk on it, but
It's really important.
Uh, I'm asking this as a
Uh
Dude, but can you prevent your hairline from receding? I mean, I imagine it's way too late for me now, but
Okay.
Do you do that? Like can you?
Yeah, hair loss is an enormous amount of work. The technology is really not great. So what I do currently
Is
In the morning I
I put a top application on my hair.
That is
It was based upon my genetics.
of what things I do and don't respond to and metabolize.
And then I put a red light cap on my head and activate certain things.
I then work out, eat breakfast, and I'll shower and I'll use a s a certain shampoo.
That
Basically creates the right environment on the scalp.
And then
I'll do um once a month. I just started this new therapy where I'll use
Just laser.
Um
across the scalp and then I'll apply exosomes.
And that's a combo therapy to help
hair grow uh stronger and faster.
And then I used to do PRP, which is you draw blood out, you pull the plasma, you reinject the growth factors. I stopped doing that because we're now doing this laser exosome treatment.
Yeah, that's it. So basically it's a topical application which
You've probably heard Monoxidil is the most common thing. So it's Monoxidil plus a few little goodies.
Plus red light cap therapy, plus just laser and excessome treatment.
Yeah, I mean I I should be bald at this point. I started losing my hair in my late twenties.
And the men in my family are
Bald, basically.
So
I'm grateful I have some hair.
I started losing mine in my like mid twenties and then it sort of stopped. Like it it it receded.
And then thinned out massively and then just
All of a sudden stopped.
Yeah. I mean the the technology that uh is very close is exciting. There's uh cloning therapies that are being developed.
So if you had a few follicles you can include it and then imp do basically like implantation.
So
Uh I I think it's a a possibility that in like five
Years time.
That
you would be able to restore hair yourself.
Is there any biological
longevity reason why hair matters. I mean, there's probably a sexual attractiveness angle to it. There's probably a confidence angle to it. There's probably a lot of internal ones, but is there any biological sort of like longevity reasons why it matters?
If there is, I'm not aware of it.
What do you think of
Hot and cold exposure. Do you do that?
I don't.
Uh it's it's not that they don't potentially have benefits for right applications.
The hot and cold therapy didn't make our cut.
Because it doesn't increase life span.
health bad rather
The evidence was not strong enough for my team.
To recommend it to be cut into the protocol.
So if you go back to how we think about this, we've looked at all the scientific evidence
through the the specific lens.
of increasing life span health span
And then we've ranked them according to power laws.
And so this is not to say we may we we won't ever you know we won't do it at some point in time. Like we're very open minded and we'll always change our minds following the evidence.
It's just right now we don't think the evidence supports it to incorporate as a habit.
for longevity purposes, which is our aim.
Now, if somebody's doing it for recovery and other objectives, like that's an entirely different question. So it has nothing to say about
The technologies uh for those.
Just for my
uh highly focused objective.
If you think of Blueprint as like a hunter piece of Lego.
And each one of those pieces of Lego is an intervention based on scientific evidence. What's the last piece of Lego you took out and put in a new piece of Lego because you're like, oh, this is better than that piece of Lego?
I recently started taking oral monoxidyl. So there's there's the liquid monoxidal for hair growth.
Yeah, for or for other hair loss prevention and
Uh I took an oral version, which initially that drug was approved for
uh high blood pressure, but was then repurposed for
I hair growth'cause it it made hair grow all over the body.
But I started experiencing some side effects. I stopped that.
So uh
We do stuff like that, like every few days we'll try something new like that. So that will stop.
And then let me think before that.
Uh you know, I did those uh blood transfusions. So my son gave me his plasma and I gave my dad
My plasma?
And I did six of those one a month for six months, and we saw no effect in me.
Uh, but when I gave my father plasma
My father's speed of aging.
slowed by the equivalent of twenty five years. So from a seventy one year old to a forty six year old
And those results remained uh the stable for six months, which is the last measurement we did.
So in that case, the plasma therapy was promising.
And it didn't work in me, la probably because my biomarkers are already pretty competitive with an eighteen year old.
Whereas my father benefited significantly because his biomarkers as a seventy one year old
Are pretty different than my biomarkers.
And so in that case we discontinue the therapy for me, but
He could continue if he wanted.
That's fascinating. That seems like a really easy
ish intervention that you can do to extend the longevity of your parents.
From the outside looking in, it can sound wild and creepy and weird and everything.
on a personal level, you know, to be able to
do something like that for a parent.
Is
A special experience. It's not too dissimilar than donating an organ.
you know, that's very commonplace and we don't think of organ transplants as weird or organ donation as weird.
So it's just
Uh it's a new idea and some people think it's weird, but it's actually
identical to what we already do in life and we
Actually applaud people who make those kinds of sacrifices.
And and and I should I should clarify it's not a sacrifice. Giving plasma is not a sacrifice.
If our goal is not to die
W how do you think about the the things like sunscreen and sort of like the other things that are sort of proximate to us, especially I'm thinking especially about things we put on or in our bodies, right? So we talked earlier about plastic bottles and
And sort of trying to avoid that. Uh, do you have a particular sunscreen you use? Like I imagine you've thought about this more than any other human.
We do try to be thoughtful. Uh we're not perfect.
Yeah, there's so many things we're looking at at any given time.
But yeah, we have we use a sunscreen
Alta?
M D
E L T A M D.
And it's a good one that has less
Bad stuff in it.
Uh I generally uh try to avoid the sun when the UV index is above four.
So I get sun exposure in the morning and in the night.
And this is also another contentious part in society where
I
Get a lot of flack for the paleness of my skin.
And you know, it's a cultural norm that
Uh tan skin.
is somehow a signifier of health and and wellness and beauty.
But you know, the sun
da ages and damages the skin and creates cancer risk.
So it's it's not
This culture of uh tan skin is not going to survive much longer.
uh because it will just naturally push in the direction where
Um
We d we generally over a long enough time horizon move towards more positive habits for society.
Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I think this is one of them that
uh our current ideas around sun exposure
Um will change.
I'm not suggesting we will avoid the sun altogether.
I'm suggesting we will be more mindful.
Yeah, it it won't be a case where
Because currently.
our s general dispositions are pretty brazen towards the sun.
It it's like um
It's not a careful balance of
you know, get sun exposure, but only so much.
It's like
Yeah, unadulterated sun exposure is kind of like this. It's it kind of is like around like like
certain dietary preferences where
Um it's really
A much bigger social thing than it is a data thing or science thing.
And um
That's fine. I guess is how people kind of
break out into camps, but if we
We measure my skin age using uh multi spectral imaging and using a whole bunch of other
uh technologies. So
We see exactly what happens when.
And
by looking at the data it's just very hard to
It's very hard to
go do something that's going to actively accelerate my speed of aging when the objective of this project is to try to slow it as much as possible.
And then I I wanna ask, uh, just before we sort of wrap up here, how do you
envision and I know we don't have a long window in terms of what we can see.
But if you zoom out, how do you see AI helping us?
I actually I tried
to embody
The problem of AI.
I tried to become
The species
As a problem.
And so I did that with a thought experiment where I said, Okay, I'm a collection of thirty five trillion cells.
And that's a lot of intelligent agents all doing their own thing with different objectives. The body doesn't have a singular objective.
The body has
All kinds of conflicting objectives at all moments.
And I wanted to see
Could I achieve goal alignment?
Within me, Brian Johnson.
And that's what I've been trying to do. And so first I had to say, okay
In order to understand these thirty five trillion cells, I need to get a read.
uh of as as many of them as possible.
Then I need to find the evidence to tell me how I align the cells
And then I need to implement it with exactitude.
Now this is a problem that is identical to AI.
So we're s we're building the superintelligence.
And we then are going to give it objective functions that say, All right, AI, do this, you know, like solve this math problem or
Help me write this thing or
Have this conversation with me, whatever the thing we're asking it to do.
It has goals and it has goals we've we've programmed into it. It has goals that it emerges from the system itself.
So we're basically trying to say what are our goals, under what circumstances, and for whom.
So it's it's a giant goal alignment problem.
So my situation I had to say, okay
It has ten PM Bryan in charge who sets the alarm.
Or six A. M. Brian, who wants to hit the snoo button?
Who's in charge and under what circumstance.
That's the same kind of goal. I'm a problem you have with AI.
And it's the same kind of problem we have with planet Earth.
So Earth needs to be a home where we can thrive. If we kill Earth, we're in a bad situation.
And so when I say don't die, it's don't die individually.
Don't kill each other.
Don't let the planet die. Don't kill it.
and align AI with Don't Die.
Don't die is
Deceptively simple and
Endlessly expansive.
It is a heuristic.
It is a computational model. It is a mathematical framework.
It is a biological system, it is a close up algorithm.
All those things in two words.
And this is what I'm putting forward as a species is
If we
care to be around for the future.
We need to be able to figure out
how to cooperate at the most.
Basic level.
And don't die.
is the most played game in in every single minute of every single day.
on planet earth.
There's not a game, even capitalism.
Is not played more than don't die.
Every two seconds you and I breathe.
To not die.
We look both ways before we cross the street.
We throw out multi food.
It is the most played game in existence. Now, the moment you stand up above don't die.
You break out into a billion different directions of what people want, how they understand the world, what they care about.
What they'll do and why, all the rules and justifications. So you really have to say if we're trying to goal align a superintelligence around something and not kill the earth and not kill each other and not die ourselves.
How do you do it? And that's what I've tried to put forward is
This is an actual plan, а практика план.
that spans what to eat for breakfast and how to align a super intelligent system with with uh all of our interests.
That's beautiful. We always ask the same question to end, which is
What is success for you, but I have a feeling it's gonna be two words.
I would say
It's the courage.
To believe.
That I don't know.
That's a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. Thanks a lot for your time.
Thanks for having me.
Alright, it's time for a few of my reflections after that conversation.
Uh that went pretty amazing, I thought. I I really
And so you know, I try to get into these things. Like I've been eating um Brian's diet for the last week.
uh with a few exceptions here and there, but uh generally speaking, the pudding and the bowls are are pretty good. They're awesome. They're missing a little bit of salt for my taste, but um the reason behind that, I talked to him after
Uh, and the reason behind that is that the lentils and stuff have enough salt in them that if you consume the quantities that he's talking about on his website.
you actually get the daily amount of salt that you need.
I loved exploring
A little bit of different angles to it. I think the most surprising part of this conversation for me was the lessons on money.
uh that he wish he knew earlier. And I haven't heard him talk about that anywhere else. Uh I really enjoyed that. The posture thing, I I find myself sitting up straight right now, even uh noticing it. And I think that that's a really good
uh sort of angle to it.
I love the idea.
that you know we can
improve our sleep as the one critical variable and everything else falls in line. Sleep is a lead domino to so many other things and sleep positions you to play the next day on easy mode. It doesn't change the day that's coming at you, but it does change how you handle it.
And I think one of the things that I'm gonna try is just experimenting eating dinner a little earlier and seeing how that affects my resting heart rate.
Uh while I sleep.
Um
Thanks and learning with me.
Until next time.
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