 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds, one reason. Can Brian Johnson live forever? Just Asking Questions. I'm Zach Weismiller, Senior Producer for Reason. My co-host is Liz Wolfe, Associate Editor at Reason. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. Sitting between us will be a man who wants to do the impossible, not die. There is no more audacious goal, depending on who you ask, the prospect of using technology to radically increase lifespan is either an act of unbelievable hubris destined for a flame-out of mythical proportions not seen since Icarus, or a heroic venture that will push humanity to finally conquer nature's final boss, death itself. Brian Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself, and he's plowed about $2 million a year into creating a system to reverse his metabolic biological age. He's 46 chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself biologically following a program he's branded the Blueprint. Brian Johnson, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Sure, and my first question for you is it's a little bit past noon Pacific time right now. What did you do today? I woke up at 4.30, and I did a few things. I'll give you the specifics. I walked into my bathroom, and I did some UV exposure, 10,000 lux light into my eyes for two to three minutes. I measured my internal body temperature through my ear. I weighed myself, looking at weight, fat, hydration. I did HRV therapy on my left ear. I did some meditation. I went downstairs. I consumed about 20 pills and drank a concoction of various nutrients and minerals. I then worked out for an hour, including VO2 max training, which is trying to boost my cardiovascular capacity. I then got ready for the day and I began working. What is your blasting 10,000 lux into your eyes? What does that do? It stabilizes my circadian rhythm. I wake up before the sun rises, and so it's there to tell my body we are awake. The day has started. Start the clock so that you can be on time and be ready to go to bed at 8.30. I logged what is potentially the best sleep score in human history. I achieved 100% sleep quality for eight straight months, and I wanted to demonstrate that humans can in fact achieve predictable high quality sleep for eight months in a row. I do these things because it has been helpful in me achieving these sleep scores. The vast majority of people don't have high quality sleep at all. What are the implications of that? Why do you prioritize this to the degree that you do? When someone is sleep deprived, they are essentially inebriated. It's the same as being drunk. I know personally I feel grumpy. I feel cloudy. I'm irritable. I'm half or a quarter of a human, as I otherwise would be when I'm rested. I know that I've tested this. I mean, even in the past week, we did a health rave in New York. This is phase two of Blueprint, and I went to bed at 2 a.m. The next day was a wonderful reminder of what it feels like to not get 100% sleep. You design your day to the minute, almost it seems. What is the purpose of doing this, the early bird? You were getting up at 4.30 a.m. That's not early snack. I wake up at 5 a.m. every single day. Brian and Benjamin Franklin are all early risers. You're in good company. What's your reasoning for waking up so early by most people's standards? I tested it. My answers typically have data behind them. For a couple of years, I tried to hone in my algorithm on how would you achieve a 100% sleep score every single night. Within sleep, there are a few metrics that you can determine someone's biological age. For example, wake after sleep onset, which is called WASO, is a marker for age. The older you get, the more time you spend up at night. You go to sleep and you wake up, and sometimes people will be up one, two, three, maybe even four hours a night, or even just get up and all the sleep they'll get. Having a WASO less than 30 minutes is my target. Once you go to sleep, you want to stay asleep. If you do wake up, you want to be able to go back to sleep as one example of a marker. There are characteristics within sleep of what is ideal sleep. These, of course, are representations of how your body is functioning. If you're sleeping very poorly, you've got some kind of issue somewhere. We've tried to basically iron these out. All these things probably don't make sense to people, and they probably understand them to be erratic, eccentric, and weird, and all sorts of things like that. Unless you understand the context, which is I set out to pose this question, could I build an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself? And the observation was that technology has done that in several areas. Technology, for example, is better at flying airplanes than we humans can. It is better at navigating us on the road. It is better at doing certain kind of language processing. And so when algorithms achieve a certain point that they achieve human ability, we adopt those algorithms and we allow them to do them in our lives. And I was posing the question of something that we consider to be quite sacred, which is a person's decisions about what they eat and when they go to bed is something that we typically have said that's the human domain of free will and preference, that I'll choose when I want to go to bed based upon these considerations, including whether my favorite show just dropped or whether I'm doing this or that. And I wanted to pose the question in this technological age we're in, can an algorithm paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself? And so that's what the result of this entire protocol is, is that probing that question. I think on one hand, this type of thing does sound eccentric, but on the other hand, if you flip the burden of proof for a moment and consider what we deem to be the norm in America in 2024, that actually seems awfully bizarre. The fact that it is seen as sort of standard to essentially poison your body with sugar to be overnourished by getting far too many calories to have very sedentary lifestyles and then to be completely dropping the ball on sleep and sleep quality. You mean on an evolutionary time scale, this is the outlier. Exactly. We are the outlier. What is seen is the standard American diet and the standard American way of living and in much of the world too. Mexico is no better than we are. Tons of countries are no better than we are, but it's odd that Brian's routine would be seen as the eccentric outlier when in reality what we are currently doing en masse, what we consider to be standard and normal is highly disturbing. Liz, I've done a lot of interviews. You are the first person to say that. Really? That's surprising to me. I mean, I agree with you. I think that norms are insane. Yeah. Liz is ready to get on the blueprint, it sounds like. I read through some of your book. This is reminding me of a passage from your book which is called, Don't Die. The passage that I have highlighted here, you say we're about to experience an evolutionary transition on a scale rarely seen. A transition whose closest approximation is the changes written by evolution from early hominids 2 million years ago all the way to humanity today. What is that evolutionary transition you're alluding to and what is driving it? We now have the ability to engineer existence, including atoms and molecules and organisms, biological systems, our digital reality, computers. We have the ability to engineer almost every layer of existence from the physical world to our digital world. Now we haven't yet gotten our ability to do things like complex systems like the weather. We don't have the ability to control that yet. So we're working our way up the stack in terms of the complexity we can tackle and the body is still not entirely known. We're still trying to figure our way out. We have the basic admin access. We have root level access to the controls of reality. And when you have that and you have on the flip side, intelligence that is improving at speeds that are incomprehensible to us. You have the making of a rewrite of existence. And so to put this into slightly technical terms, Homo sapiens for the past 200,000 years have been a first principles thinking species. So we acquire knowledge. We are the stewards of knowledge. We individually and we collectively own knowledge. We do so in books. We do so in our brains. We do so in conversation. And AI is going to become the steward of knowledge. It will be better at acquiring knowledge and generating new knowledge than we can. It will do so at a speed that won't allow anyone to keep up with the pace of it. So we humans are transitioning from a first principle to a zero principle species. And zero principle means it's the unknown unknown. So for example, a zero principle discovery is Einstein's discovery of special theory relativity. You can't get there through Newtonian physics. You pull it from another dimension. And so we as a species are going from knowing things to not knowing things. And so that's why it's the biggest transformation in the history of our species. It fundamentally turns on its head the primary thing that has allowed our intelligence to thrive. So when you say that you're already following a sort of algorithm that you've put together, but it's what you're imagining an algorithm that we don't even fully understand. We just know that it works. So this is what you should follow if you want to live to be 500 years old or something like that. Exactly. You can think of the parallel like the stock market. And so right now we are in the early days of our bodies. We say, eat this kind of food. Take this kind of supplement, you know, just do this kind of exercise and sleep this much. As we mature in the technology, internally we'll have technology treating our body like a stock market. It will be doing real time transactions on genes and proteins and this biological process. And it will be doing these things at a speed that are incomprehensible to us. We won't know exactly what's happening. You're just applying AI to it. At that point, it exceeds our ability. We cannot control things at the genetic level. We have other instruments to do that. So yes, it's going to basically surpass our level of abstraction and reach. And that's, it's happening right now. It will just be much more robust. And so what Blueprint is, is an analog version of an algorithm running me with the tools we have today, but fast forward in some duration of time and it's a high speed transaction engine. Everybody will be. And it's maintaining a pristine state at all times. Wow. So you're trying to bootstrap this kind of advanced intelligence that it's unclear what the exact relationship to humanity will be and what it will mean to be human in that world. But I want to, before we kind of ruminate on that a little bit more, let's look at the mechanics of what you are doing right now and what you call the analog version with your Blueprint. You mentioned at the top there that you took about 20 pills this morning. Here's a slide from your Blueprint, your supplement stack, which shows a list of all the different supplements that you're taking. Some of them seem to be a bunch of supplements combined into a singular pill. So if you didn't have that, it would be even more pills that you would be downing. I'm not going to ask you to go through every supplement you're taking, but could you talk a little bit about the process of this? Like how did you reach this kind of final number on your Blueprint or maybe it's not so final a number? Yeah. The unique thing we did is I imagined the question if Magellan were alive today or Lewis and Clark or Ernest Shackleton or Armstrong or Amelia Earhart and you're contemplating what is the most epic adventure we can do in this moment. My observation was let's see where we're at with the Fountain of Youth. This story that's been around since the beginning of Intelligence. And so what we did is we combed through all of the scientific literature on health span and lifespan. We then ranked all the studies according to effect size, the best ones, and then we graded the evidence and then we found the power laws. We said, what if you apply all the power laws of all the science into one person? What happens? And we did that with me and I became the most measured person in human history. And then we said, here's the data. So here's the process, here's data, and we shared the entire thing for free with the entire world. And that's what we've done over the past three years and it's pretty persuasive. I mean, the outcome is that you can meaningfully change your speed of aging and even change the age of certain parts of the body by doing this process. We're not there yet. We can't arrest aging and there's still some limitations, but still the conclusion is we're a pretty good spot to start this. Why do you want to live forever? Why do you like it so much? Living forever breaks the human brain. Our brains cannot compute the concept of forever. The concept we can understand is living tomorrow. And those two ideas are basically the same. There's no difference. And so you probably have things you want to do tomorrow. I do too. And when tomorrow arrives, I'm imagining I'm going to have things the next day I'm going to want to do. And so it's really the framework I use. I don't say I want to live forever. I say I want to live tomorrow. But you are putting out books called Don't Die. And at least floating this idea that we could have radically longer life spans. Is there anything that makes you believe, like, you know, you're taking all these supplements. That's the sort of first step and also diet, which we'll get into in a little while. So I'm going to start with that, but also diet, which we'll get into and sleep. But my understanding for, like, longevity is that it's really highly genetic that the best predictor of if you're going to live over 100 is do you have a relative who lived over 100. So is all this sort of lifestyle stuff likely to move the needle in terms of radical life extension, or is it ultimately going to be some sort of genetic engineering that's, you know, kind of merging our bodies with machines to make them more durable. Yeah, there's a quote I really like of if you want to build a ship, don't organize the tasks and tell them what to do. Teach them to yearn for the sea. Hmm. And, you know, Don't Die is very different than Live Forever. Don't Die is the most played game by every human planet Earth every second of every day. Don't Die is played more than Capitalism. It's played more than any religion. It's played more than any other construct on this planet. More so than sex. So every few seconds we breathe, we look before we cross the street, we throw out moldy food, humans don't want to die. Most, I mean there are circumstances where you find people who are suicidal, but they're really the anomaly. Humans don't want to die. They're simply getting really, really good and not dying, just like we have been over the past few centuries. So if you think about it in the terms of economics, there's the die economy, things that people do that increase the speed of aging and death, fast food, junk food, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption. Then there's the Don't Die economy, seatbelts, smoke detectors, clean water supply. So we're already playing Don't Die. This is not a novel concept and we're playing it with increasingly more amount of money. So to put this in a proper context, imagine we go back a million years and we hang out at Homo erectus. And we say Homo erectus, worse food, the Homo erectus has an axe in their hand. We say worse food, worse shelter, worse danger. We listen to those three answers. That person has information, we don't. And then we say Homo erectus, tell us about the future of the species. And we laugh. We do not expect Homo erectus to tell us about anything about the modern world. That would be insane. And now in this moment, we are looking at intelligence in the form of AI that is very, very, very soon going to be a million if not a billion times smarter than we are. We're essentially Homo erectus in this situation. We can say absolutely nothing about the future. The only thing I can say about the future is I don't want to die. I'm willing to play the game of what's going to come. Now it may be terrible, it may be great, I don't know, but I want to be around for it. It could be very tactical or existence in this part of the galaxy. And so whether the things I do actually extend life beyond some number, it really doesn't matter. The thing that matters is as a species we are sober and wise enough to realize this moment we're in. We're going to probably experience the equivalent of a million years of evolution in a decade or two. One thing I'm curious about, I was surfing this past weekend in a pretty rocky area. Obviously it didn't get me. I'm still kicking. But what is like accident risk? How risk averse must one be to be part of don't die or how do you factor that in? What did it feel like at a certain point if I live for another 150 years yet I continue to surf at this rate in the types of places that I would want to at a certain point like an accident is going to get me. How is that sort of looked at via your frameworks? Or not surfing in particular but any sort of risky things that make life worth living. I do childbirth. I surf, I rock. At some point either childbirth or surfing or a subway brawl is going to get me. I have a feeling you're not hopping on motorcycles without a helmet. Or maybe at all. Yeah. So we are in this weird in between state where when death is inevitable you can say excuse me you can come up with clever concepts like live fast die young or you can say I'm going to achieve immortality through my work or I'm going to have children and they are going to be my immortality. I mean humans have immortality for all time and eternity. Religion is immortality work accomplishment is immortality children are immortality humans want immortality in any way they can get it. So when you do that you play certain games and those certain games carry certain risks in a future where one can radically extend health span and life span and we're not there yet we're just at the beginning it washes over every preconceived notion of what risk is and so we're in this weird state where for example I still drive a car to go to various appointments and see doctors and do my things that's going to be insane. The risk that we take getting into a car is wild. And so it's already a huge I'm a big hypocrite in what I'm trying to do like the amount of effort I put towards not dying. And the fact that I go get into my car and drive is crazy. But it's one of those things I can't really reconcile right now because I still need to go see doctors and do my thing and so I don't have an ability to reconcile that right now. All I can acknowledge is the friction between where I think we're going to be at and where we're at now and the irrationality of me doing these things. How do you think about risk as it pertains to what you are doing because you are experimenting on yourself you're the first person to do this. You're not the first person to take a bunch of vitamins and supplements but that is you know outside of the medical establishment and so we hasn't been heavily studied what happens when someone takes this many supplements every day. How do you balance those sorts of risks because you're doing a little bit of renegade science here. I mean you could frame this one of two ways. One is you could say I'm actually more safe than everyone else because we do things based upon the scientific evidence and I'm the most measured person in history. So in that way in that regard we have more guard safety guard wells set up than anyone else. If something bad is going to happen we're going to catch it and we're also doing all the good things that science has ever shown to be the case. Now on the flip side no one's ever done as much as I'm doing and so you know I'm on some level of unknown and so I think it is both. I'm both the safest person in the world and also I'm taking some risk but it's definitely not clean cut that there's just one answer on this. It's nuanced. Do you like being measured? I do. Okay so you're deriving some sort of additional value that like I wouldn't get as somebody who dislikes being measured. I mean I'm not like afraid of stepping on the scale like many women are but like you know devoting a significant chunk of my day to having my blood drawn or having my bicep or my waist measured and stuff like just just going through this entire system I think would be unpalatable to most people but if you derive some sort of additional gain from it you know your behavior seems more rational right? Yeah I mean my reward system is I am trying to impress the 25th century. Gotcha. And so when I when I try to find motivation on what I do on a daily basis I specifically do not care what people in the early 21st century think of me. It's noise and so in that regard I view myself on a mission to do something that could change the course of intelligence in this part of the galaxy. Let's look at some of the measurements that you've taken of yourself. This is Brian Johnson's biological age measurement. You've got a bunch of different categories here. NAD levels you say are of a 16 year old heart of a 37 year old again your biological age is 46 right? White blood cell count 33 it goes on and on or there's one that's here where it's like the inflammation of a 10 year old is that what I'm saying? Wow. You're really inflamed. You don't know, Zach. So this is your you're comparing your you're like looking at the averages like this is what the average 10 year olds inflammation levels would be and saying that Brian Johnson's are equivalent. I'm reading that correctly. Yes. That's right. Yeah, we did that. That specific graphic is I think two years old now we were in the process of trying to educate people what is the difference between a chronological age and biological age and a lot of people don't know how to discern the difference that a 10 year old heart is different than an 80 year old heart it looks different it functions different you're not going to mistake the two if you see them and so what we're trying to say is we tease out these indicators that the anatomical and functional elements of all the body's organs and biological processes and you can age them some organs have good age markers good data other things are emergent but we try to put a number to everyone and it helps people build intuitions to understand that the body everyone experiences age differently and the organs do as well within the body. One of the most amusing measurements that you put out there the other day was this one it was you tweeted my nighttime erections are now better than the average 18 year old and this is we've put up a lot of graphs on this show over the years and this is just a special one this is your two-mesance over time I guess you have some sort of device that you're measuring your nighttime erections and showing that you've got the two-mesance of an 18 year old what's I mean first of all congratulations thank you secondly what does that result how did you achieve that result and what is it what does it mean to you to have the dick of an 18 year old thank you the boner is an 18 year old actually it's substantially better than an 18 year old the graph in there shows that it's like a 15 year old from 20 to 29 which is the age bracket average nighttime erection is 145 minutes so my time was 179 so I crushed the 2029 age group impressive thank you when we first started we would take organs for example like my heart and we would say your heart you can do blood you can do ultrasound you can do MRI you can do all these different measurements and then use that data to determine the age of the heart you can do physical exercise, faint stress and so when it came to sexual health reproductive health I posed the question to the team what could we do so that I would have the most measured penis in human history how do you measure a penis that's just typical Monday in your household dude you're really out here being like how do I measure my penis using ever more metrics than before this is like every man regardless of their age is obsessed with measuring it and you've just managed to add a few additional dimensions to it yes yeah and so what's interesting about this is obviously it's culturally common for people to say it's a dick measuring contest you know that's like there's so much embedded in that statement but you know sexual health is a really important function of being human and when a man cannot get an erection then it's very problematic for all kinds of reasons it affects their self confidence their psychological wellness and so we basically did these baseline measurements where I did about a dozen different measurements on my penis and my sexual function and those were the baseline and then we said okay given that we have these baseline measurements how would you go about doing therapies that improve the penis health and we did those therapies including shockwave therapy and botox and these are therapies you shocked and injected your penis with botox correct your penis has gotten more botox than my face ever will and you saw you feel like you saw did one of those work, did they both work what were the outcomes yeah they both, they were additive in effect and so yeah it took my my previous baseline measurements with night time erections were 132 minutes from 132 to 179 and the company that built this device Adam Health in the UK in all their data sets they had never seen anyone improve erection both duration and strength as much as me and so essentially we exceeded all of the data examples but I think what's interesting is like I had a lot of my friends message me so I mean right now I'm basically erect for three hours a night to put that into context and so a lot of my friends would privately message me and say I don't think I'm ever erect like I think they're just gone and what's interesting is a lack of sleep eliminates night time boners and that's a significant representation of one's psychological, cardiovascular and sexual health it's a really bad thing so I realize this topic is just endlessly ripe for people to riff on because it's hilarious it's also one of the most important things about being human how would you do the same type of measurement for like ladies and who is doing that like how could one investigate this? we've been talking to someone about this so women apparently have arousal in sleep as well it's harder to measure women's not as accessible as men we've been poking around and trying to figure out how could we do this for females yeah but what's the answer like do you have any like clues? we don't no we just apparently it's just not well studied yeah we have yet to shatter the glass ceiling of measuring our night time arousal yeah let's get on that this is I mean one of the fascinating thing to me about this is it a it just shows you know what you are willing to try you're willing to try shock therapy or botox just to see it I mean you're not just flying blind but a lot of most men I'll venture to say not be willing to even try that and then secondly just you know when you put this out on social media you've got a lot of people quote tweeting it dunking on it making fun of you but you don't seem to really care or like have or even you seem to like revel in a way is that part of your personality that enables you to be this guy that puts himself out there you just don't really care what people say about you I mean not it's not that I don't care I actually love it yeah I got that sense yeah it's my favorite and so like I absolutely 100% I'm genuinely trying to make intelligence thrive in this part of the galaxy there's nothing that is part of me that is doing this for attention that is doing this to make money like I really am sober about this time and place that we are babies steps away from superintelligence and it's going to I mean people would be skeptical of the money aspect of that because you do have a product line right so you are I have no problem with you making money I think that's great if you have a product people want but people would I just want to raise that so people aren't like well he's just doing this completely altruistically yeah I mean the thing is again I could care less when anyone says whether they're skeptical of me like it genuinely doesn't matter I mean I when I did blueprint I made it free for the entire world on day one it's remain free for the entire world on day one and then it went viral and everyone said make this accessible it's way too hard so I made it accessible and then people are like you're such a dick why'd you make it accessible and selling it so like there's just there's no way you're going to ever going to win with with Homo sapiens like they're going to criticize you for everything you do all the time no matter what so the only way to live within it is love it and so you know Liz seems interested in it so I want to play this meal I'm very at peace I'm like I'm very memento more about everything I'm frankly looking forward to old age I think it's going to be awesome we have this video of one of your day your your daily staples I take it this is from Brian has a very entertaining YouTube channel anyone listening to this can you know check those out he's he's very good at you know put it putting his ideas in a presentable form on on YouTube and I took a clip from one of his meal plans because Liz and I were looking at this earlier and I want to play that so that people get a sense of you know this is how you structure you know every every aspect of your life is structured including of course your meals so let's play that to see like what does it take to start living this kind of lifestyle to start weigh and chop your raw vegetables first take cauliflower for anti-inflammatory and fiber do the same with your broccoli broccoli is for antioxidants bowel health and fiber measure out 50 grams of either shiitake or mitake mushrooms for immune system health one peeled clove of garlic for heart and immune health and three grams of ginger for a variety of benefits including liver pancreas liver health and digestion boil the broccoli cauliflower and mushrooms together for seven to nine minutes until fairly soft the base of your super veggie will be 150 grams of cooked black lentils for protein and fiber add one tablespoon of cumin for inflammation liver and pancreas health one tablespoon of hemp seeds for healthy omega six and three add the chopped ginger and garlic you put aside earlier add one tablespoon apple cider vinegar for blood sugar and taste I also add one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil to every meal I eat for its incredible whole body benefits you've now completed super veggie good job eating this can take me up to 34 minutes I know I've timed it so sometimes I do a blended version it's just as delicious and takes less time to eat I love that I love the like how many minutes did you shave off that but do you shave off that by the way when you blend it and eat it 21 wait so you shave off 21 minutes so you eat it in 13 minutes yeah that's a huge time saver Liz are you ready are you on board with this no I mean this looks disgusting frankly like how is it like is this is it good and like you know is are you just the type of person where the trade-offs like to me eating you know the vast majority of meals like that sounds unappealing to the point where I probably would stop looking forward to tomorrow but you seem to be you know is there is there a personality difference where like I'm a hedonist in pursuit of different things playing a different game but you find you know eating the mitake mushroom cauliflower broccoli combo to be much less awful than I would find it it's a it's a highly predictable observation and I'd say when I see people go through this process they eat it and their initial reaction is huh not that bad actually it's kind of good and then day 2 I feel amazing and then day 7 comes around and they say I can't imagine going back to what I was eating before and I'd say 95% of people I interact with go through this identical process they initially considered to be unfathomable that they would actually enjoy vegetables I feel like well I mean I love vegetables I cook a ton but I almost think that maybe I in the grand scheme of things fall more into like the Tim Ferriss territory where like he's very cute and you know measures so many different components of what he's eating and tries to make sure that there's you know ample protein and has a whole supplement routine and all of these things but then there's like very cute little exceptions for the 4 hour body where it's like you can have like a dry red wine maybe like 2 glasses of like a Malbec or whatever and it's a little bit like I don't know if there's actually as much scientific backing behind this as Ferriss perhaps wants people to believe it's more that like he really likes Malbec and it's hard for him to sort of stay on that type of thing like what do you make of do you find that more people can be successful with that type of approach or is this approach really like does it just take a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs the difference is that no human has seriously attempted to defy death that's my objective it's with the 25th century to say in the early 24th century there was a legitimate scientific approach to not only defy death but prepare all of intelligence for super intelligence so I'm not trying to influence and make friends I'm not trying to be cute I'm not trying to I'm trying to change the trajectory of the species and the thing that I've tried to do is be true to the scientific evidence that makes a lot of sense I mean to put this in go ahead well the thing that I'm just curious about is like aren't people so you know in some ways people are rational actors acting in their own self-interest but in other ways where these pleasure-seeking animals who love to self-sabotage and so you know how does this play out where like perhaps we you know per your research and experimentation do stumble upon a pretty solid formula for how to really really extend your lifespan and health span but we're still these like McDonald's cravings craving creatures at the end of the day having sex and cigarettes I'm like how do you look at that the compliance thing I'm trying to make the observation that when there were 13 colonies they were torn between continuing under the monarch and going down the path of this new weird idea of democracy and Thomas Paine kind of put things over the edge with his common sense pamphlet 500,000 copies were sold and democracy ended up being a better system of intelligence management for a large collection of people the monarch was actually pretty inefficient and pretty poor at creating wealth and what I'm proposing in the same way that my mind is a monarch and my body is the democracy and so what I did is I said I'm going to ask my organs what they need to be their best selves and so I measured every single one and said how are you doing we looked at the scientific evidence and so this is the algorithm the algorithm works in conjunction with my body's biological processes and determines what I eat when I go to bed and what I'm proposing this transition is inevitable we are it doesn't matter what humans say about this this is happening as we speak right in front of our eyes and in every regard yes we are pleasure seeking self-sabotage animals but that's only because we don't have the tools and technology to get ourselves out of that you take one example where that solves like ozembik and humans consume more of it than the manufacturer can produce it not even with the side effects of ozembik ozembik is an algorithm that turns off your hunger receptors are humans willing to adapt technology to modify their pleasure seeking sabotage itself yes how fast and so what I'm trying to show is an algorithm that does this towards the goal of tomorrow but our time horizon for ozembik adoption is admittedly small right in what regard well we've only just started to see people like we have no idea whether the demand will majorly slow whether the side effects as they present themselves will end up lessening demand we just kind of we're still in the first what two or three years of this really being adopted and so I'm curious about what it'll look like 15 years from now yeah I mean and I'm not even suggesting ozembik is a good idea I'm not even suggesting that it's worth it I mean I think the side effect profile is interesting but what I'm saying is I'm making the observation we humans love to shit on new ideas that challenge our understanding of reality or challenge our preferences for our own vices and the moment we get a chance to relieve ourselves from that burden we run away with it and so what I'm suggesting to you is it doesn't matter what any of us say about reality our preferences our wants or our needs it's all a smoke screen it's interesting well I just want to stay on this for one second what's the future of sex in that same vein like if you say the future of eating is not the Liz path but the Brian path what is the future of sex in the 25th century how will people find that pleasure for themselves yeah if you truly sit into this thought experiment and you genuinely contemplate whether we are in fact homo erectus and it could entirely be the case the only rational response is to say I don't know the intelligence disparity between us and an insect is some orders of magnitude and the intelligence difference between us and AI is an equally if not greater level of orders of magnitude how would we dare say anything about the future and this is why I come back to don't die every single time for the first time in human history the only thing we can utter which makes any sense whatsoever we don't want to die we don't know if we want happiness we don't know if we want sadness we don't know if we want depression we don't know if we want hunger we don't know anything because we're going into this new phase of existence where we have the controls over reality so sex is a biochemical state just remove for a moment the physical act it is a biochemical state of stimulation we don't know what is the future of arousal to me it is interesting if you go back a few hundred years and you say how big is reality you would say well I can use my five senses and fill out existence I can smell certain things I can understand the texture but you would have an answer a couple hundred years and you figure out the electromagnetic spectrum we experience a trillions of the actual electromagnetic spectrum of reality there's a microscopic world beyond the resolution of our eyes which is near infinite the galaxy is almost so big we can't even understand it and so if you say what is the state of consciousness like how big could consciousness be what could we actually experience we have feelings like happiness and sadness we know what it's like to fall in love and to break up and be in pain we know what it's like to skin our knee we have a certain set of experiences of what it actually feels like to be human but we have no clue if the future of conscious existence is going to be the same difference in order of magnitude as we've experienced a physical reality why not and this again is why in this moment it's an invitation for soberness and humility we've never had before I appreciate that call for just extreme epistemic humility and what you're seem to be saying is that the one thing that is consistent across all biological creatures is the drive to not die and to keep propagating the genes and that maybe that's the drive to follow in this I don't know in Teregnum we're in right now and I mean it struck me when you were saying okay my brain is the monarch and now it's listening to my organs and this is like the democracy of the body it's like this was you're reversing historically there was this group called the physiocrats who took the functions of the body and then tried to extend that as a metaphor to look at the idea political system and now you're folding the politics back into the body which is pretty fascinating what would it what would it look like if our society, our culture started taking that idea seriously what would, how would politics, government, society look different from if that change would happen I mean if what I'm basically playing for is AI progress is going to create existential crisis in society it's going to do simple things like it's going to take our jobs we're not going to know what identity means anymore to have a profession or we're going to whip sod so much it's going to be very hard to retrain ourselves at that speed it's going to do things like potentially be better at governance it's going to potentially do things better like telling the truth it's going to be better at you know and the list goes on and on when that happens we're going to face these really imminent practical questions who do we trust for governance who do we trust as a politician who do we trust to tell us the correct answer what do I do for a job how does economics work who pays taxes so all these basic questions are solved in our society we really have a functional society with a lot of basic questions answered about our existence they're all going to be called into question and in that moment of existential crisis we will have these basic questions to play then what do we do what's our game do we all buckle down on religion that we just think the afterlife is a game to play for do we say capitalism is the answer let's keep on trying to make money what do we trust what do we do and what I'm suggesting is there is no philosophical political practical economic model that slides in there that adapts for the existential threats we have as a species and the potential that we have with superintelligence I'm trying to build the guiding ideology for the 21st century that comes next it's not just about me individually don't die is practically relevant don't die individually don't kill each other don't kill the planet and align AI with don't die you have this practical question like you build superintelligence and then what do you do with it do you become better at war do you conquer more territory do you make more money in the stock market do you get more social media followers with this new superpower if you walk AI into the old games that homo sapiens have played for 200,000 years we're probably going to annihilate ourselves and not too long and what I'm suggesting is no no please finish what I'm suggesting is in any other time of existence we'd say well we're all gonna die anyway so what does it matter and that so easily justifies a martyrdom kind of mentality and what I'm calling into question is that may not be true for the first time in history and if that's not true every single observation we have about reality right now is probably dead is probably on its way out what you're saying is that a lot of what the beliefs or systems we have are like a giant cope for the fact that we don't know what to do about the fact that we all die and I just wonder like I know a little bit of your biography we're not going to go deep into that I know that you used to be religious your yeah your Mormon used to have relationships but is it like you're leaving all that behind to pursue this and think in like 25th century terms is that lonely like for you personally or is there something again about your personality you don't really mind because it's going to be hard to get someone else to go on this journey with you because it's so extreme yeah my I always found myself bored in school I hated the speed of learning and how they structured knowledge in this rigid way and I had to regurgitate it I would just go home and read biographies and I've read a lot of them and so when I dialogue with myself or others and try to solve problems I'll spin up these historical figures and talk to them people who in their time and place were able to identify an impossibly hard problem the world hated them and then their ideas prevailed inevitably and that's who I primarily converse with in my own mind and then I also you know spin up these these thought experiments with the 25th century but for me the game I personally in plain is trying to muster the most coherent thought possible of a human that exists in the early 21st century trying to eliminate all the noise and see right through it and this is why sleep matters this is why nutrition matters when you don't sleep you're cloudy you're minimized to your basic necessities of existence and I really am trying to optimize for clarity of mind can we see this moment for what it is and be wise enough to act accordingly are you worried about on one hand you just you know advised epistemic humility which I think makes a lot of sense but then also to some degree reading between the lines you are comparing yourself to the great men of history which is possibly one of the least humble possible comparisons do you feel attention there I mean what why would I respect the concept of humility why would that why is that any game I would care to play who created the idea of humility why is it beneficial why would I even care to play that game well no I was but you would just counseled sort of epistemic humility you know what you said a few minutes ago sure the the humility is in knowing what you don't know exactly it's not in the bravery or the courage to try to strike at something that supersedes a person's time and place and this is the thing I admire I do I I openly I openly share with centuries respect which means I view myself as someone who could potentially be remembered by the 25th century now if people want to try to criticize me and say I'm an egomaniac or that's fine they're using frameworks that people understand in the early 21st century I don't respect those if it's something that we consider to be something that people use to diminish the social standing of somebody I could care less which frameworks of the 21st century do you value if any or morals or principles like do you have any morals or principles that sort of ground you that are 21st century morals yeah I I really genuinely am entirely open to a rewrite of my absolute existence I really am genuinely and I again I'm stuck in between I still do irrational things like drive my car so I fully recognize that I am a ridiculous person I am hypocritical I am irrational I have blind spots I also realize I'm probably gonna die in the most ironic way possible I'm probably gonna hit by a bus I'm probably gonna choke on a pill like I it's probably unquestionable that I'm going to die with irony so I'm fully aware of all those things yet despite those things I'm genuinely trying to do my best to just like the people I admire of old who are able to punch through in their time and place they're the people they're my heroes that's who I really care to be like the reason I mean it's we're in an age now where a lot of our institutions seem to be failing us and that may be one reason why outsiders self-experimenters are becoming more relevant first of all you have a medium to directly reach people without any intermediaries which is interesting and you you're transparent in publishing the data but it's very useful like it's very cool that there's this very democratizing platform that allows you hopefully without any sort of censorship sometimes the YouTube censors rain down their terror on us all but allows you to transmit these things directly to an audience without any need for any gatekeeping really like the gatekeeping as someone who has followed biotech policy for a while I always cringe at this chart this is known as e-rooms law which is the inverse of Moore's law which Moore's law is kind of the increasing computing power with falling cost this is the new drugs per billion in R&D spent and you see like as FDA titans regulations it's a kind of downward trajectory that it's kind of gone flat in recent years because of the existence of targeted or orphan drugs you know I wonder like how do you view the role of self experimentation in like breaking this sort of stagnation like one example that I want to pull up that might be relevant is this Dr. Barry Marshall won a Nobel prize for discovering that ulcers were caused by bacterial infection not stress or whatever the other conventional explanations for the time and the way he discovered it was by infecting himself with the bacteria so there is clearly a role for self experimentation the problem seems to be finding a proper control because you know you're kind of like throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it I know it's not that half hazard but it can be when you're not in the clinical trial setting it can be difficult to pick apart exactly what is working and what's not working so what realms is self experimentation useful and when is it not so useful? If you think about pre-COVID imagining that the world would shut down within weeks and the world would redesign itself entirely around a given phenomena was almost unthinkable to all of us yet it happened and it was stunning now you take a situation where AI is progressing it's doing things I think the effect is going to be that if not greater and so these questions you know like under what circumstances do we do what things now before the mRNA vaccine was widely done with COVID they had a few decades of research I think the first time they did it was like 1987 or something like that it's quite a while but then all of a sudden you had mass adoption of a gene therapy in like months and so we humans are terrible at planning to prevent crisis we're pretty good at responding to crisis not in terms of our efficacy like we really mess it up but we certainly step it up we're a pretty tenacious species and what I'm arguing here go ahead well I mean so one thing I'm trying to get at here is your process like the actual scientific process for how you decide something works or doesn't work and I've actually pulled another video clip that we can show I think that will help put a finer point on this it is when you decided that you and your father would share plasma with each other because the theory was that plasma transfusions would help with de-aging if you get it from a younger person and it's a very touching clip and it's in its own way it has some emotional resonance so let's roll that for a minute and then I'll ask you a question about this you ever done a multi-generational exchange? well one leader out one leader in for me one leader out for me leader in to dad so I guess it's with Talmadge he's been on Blueprint for two years now with me and we do all of our blood work together and you're right if you look at the results of our blood work we're almost indistinguishable I could be a part of a blueprint therapy at the same stage all at the same time and so I was ecstatic to have that opportunity to be a part of that before I ask the process question there that must have felt good to hear your son saying that he wants to be part of what you're doing the genesis of that was I was talking to my father one day and he was freaking out because he's in the legal profession he's written something in a brief he walked away from his work and came back and saw that it was a jumbled mess and he freaked out because he was experiencing some kind of cognitive lapse and he was unaware of it he was in the process of losing his mind and it was terrifying to him because he had this idea that if he started losing his mind he would notice it but it had happened without his awareness and he called me in a panic and I said dad we've been looking at these plasma exchanges that have been used in studies for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's if you're interested I'd be happy to give you a leader of my plasma and my son overheard that conversation he said I'm in the whole family let's go and so it was like this playful response but it was in response to my father and like I I'm on a mission to keep him alive and he explains in great detail to me the ravages of aging you know like very basic things like if he's going downstairs he's not going to have things in his hand because if he's concentrating on holding things in his hand he's got to watch step by step the walks and like the list is so long of the awfulness of aging it's just an absolutely brutal situation and there's just like nothing charming about it as he does this and so I've been trying to help him with the best I can but yeah our process to answer your question is we rank the science according to power rankings so that's primarily what blueprint is is the nutrition and the exercise and the sleep are all according to the best science in existence and then we go outside and we explore on the frontier and we say these therapies the evidence is not quite there yet they're not power laws but they're interesting and we can do it so we will do it but transfusion fell into that category exactly and there's a few million done in the US every year they're safe they're done all the time it's just a routine procedure so we felt like the safety protocol was very easily yes the only question was would it have an efficacious outcome so we really do play very safe with the therapies we're not doing wild things that are not tested and not known we're very very good at safety and evidence based approaches and the reason I brought that up is because in this case you concluded it wasn't worth it right that you don't do the blood transfusions anymore me personally but only because my biomarkers are already pretty competitive with an 18 year old whereas with my father the results in him were dramatic it slowed his speed of aging by the equivalent of 25 years so he was aging at the speed of a 71 year old which is his chronological age after one therapy it was 46 years of age and that's maintained for 6 months and so the effect size was pretty similar to what you see in the animal models and so we were pretty stunned at how efficacious it was now like there's a lot of questions was it because he received one leader of my plasma or because he donated a leader of his plasma we don't know so there's more questions but still I mean it changed his life his co-workers were like what the hell this does not make any sense the performance was so dramatic this is a defense of blood boys then we always hear about the Silicon Valley blood boys where you it was famously satirized in the show Silicon Valley but you're kind of making the case that that's a good idea everyone should have their own blood boys the thing that's the hardest to picture is a whole bunch of American boomers embracing the blood boys right I know to be sure it's that boomers are like the exact stereotypically and notoriously the exact opposite of what you're describing right like extremely stubborn people I don't think 25th century mindset yeah no but legitimately come on no but I do want to ask I mean you know your larger project aside it does you know what you're talking about with watching your dad age I mean I have some some old people you know I'm in a caretaking role toward now in my family and that's definitely something that's so you know constantly present on my mind this idea of where did we go astray where did we where did we go wrong with our with our approach societally to old age because from the old people that I see around me I see huge issues with bone density huge issues with extreme loss of muscle mass really failing to anticipate the type of muscle mass that one would need earlier in age in order to continue to have you know the ability to live an active life and you know their 70s and 80s you know you see so many issues with osteoporosis you see you know old people not really eating enough protein and all of these issues then you have you know poor sleep quality they really compound and it seems like we're in kind of a crisis of aging where we're now able to extend lifespans by an awful lot by basically you know relegating people to endless hospital appointments and doctors appointments in their 70s and 80s but we're really not improving their health span what are ways that you see this realistically changing yeah that's what blueprint is so back to your question Liz you know does this meal belong with a couple glasses of wine and does it I'm trying to make the case that we are in a different era like you do those things when death is inevitable we're on the cusp of not knowing how long how well we can live it's a different game and it's a different game of the body running the show not the monarch mind which is the self sabotaging you know entity so yeah I mean there's a unlimited number of people in the world who are going to write recipe books and talk about this health and wellness I'm the only one in the world saying don't die and so my protocol is very different my approach is very different but I'm trying to say this is next level for all of us but I agree with you and my dad it's unbearable it's just it's so frightening and to my father's credit he rages against death he wants to be conscious so badly and he's such a bright light and I see this you know when in people around him they just kind of give up and I understand like it's a daunting situation and what are you going to do you know eat more vegetables that's going to change your outcome like you really need to get out in front of this a long time ahead of that so I'm with you it's really problematic it's right in front of our face and it may be the case that we don't need to feel hopeless anymore hmm let me ask you to wrap this up we've laid out the basics of what it is you do you told us about your day it might be daunting to a lot of people to consider changing their lifestyles this dramatically but you know if it sparked anyone's interest what would what do you recommend as just a starting point for someone you know that that you've learned is a good starting point for someone who wants to improve their health and their health span yeah I say hi friend it's nice to see you and please do not feel intimidated by any of this because what I do you don't need to do there's a few simple power laws that will get you the majority the benefits that I get and they're easy so one is don't smoke two get six hours of week six hours of exercise per week if you're at zero even one is great just get some exercise three eat a blueprint and or Mediterranean like diet four have a BMI between 18.5 and 22.5 five watch the alcohol consumption I do zero which is the best and then finally I get good sleep now if you can do those basic things you get the majority of the benefits of the routine and then the last one I guess I'll say which is the kicker which is really try to identify your worst vice for me it was evening Brian who would be uncontrollably to solve the pain of the day and the vices are oftentimes the hardest things to kick they're also causing the most damage potentially so but yeah you don't worry about you don't need blood transfusions you don't need to take all the pills every day all my all the stuff I'm doing you can absolutely be in a great position just by doing the basics this evening Brian ever come back or any version of that you know that we all have you know the devil on the shoulder who is telling us you know take that take that extra drink smoke it do you still have that that battle that demon or if you completely crushed him with your super strong grip strength like all things it's both so one is I've mastered him where now when I size up a potential vice I feel more pain than I do pleasure like it's absolutely not worth it to me it just sounds awful it's gonna ruin my sleep I'm gonna feel grumpy the next day I'm gonna hate life no way at the same time I don't have anything in my house that I could you know binge on because I do not trust myself at all nice well well well Liz and I'll both work on that all cut down on the drinking Liz is gonna stop smoking right I don't smoke very frequently Zach don't wrap me out we'll work our way up to the veggie blend I think I could do the 34 minute version but I don't think I'm gonna do the blended 20 11 minute version Brian Johnson thank you very much for joining us today this was a great conversation and thank you all who tuned in we'll see you next week