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If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, Bryan is a person who has given his life—and his body—over to the science of longevity. That means that he has essentially turned himself into a human lab rat, undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human marker imaginable in order to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging. What he’s found is unconventional, to say the least: He eats dinner at 11 a.m., he has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, and he measures his nighttime erection lengths—just to name a few of the hundreds of things that you probably have never heard of a person doing in the name of health and longevity. But it’s not just that Bryan wants to reverse aging and live forever. He also thinks we’re at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality. He believes he’s akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he’s on the frontier of something big—something that will change everything about humanity as we know it. In that way, this conversation is not just about wacky exercise routines and unusual supplements. It’s a philosophical discussion about the meaning and purpose of life, and what we’re all doing here on this planet. Today on Honestly, Bryan Johnson tells us about why and how he’s not going to die. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. I've never quite had a conversation like the one I had today. Do you think that you're going to die?
No.
Really?
Yeah.
You think you're going to live forever?
Forever is not a concept the human mind can contemplate. But will we be able to radically extend life beyond our preconceived imaginations? Yes.
And that's with tech founder, centimillionaire, and the king of longevity, Brian Johnson.
Brian Johnson is a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur and probably the world's most famous biohacker.
I'm Brian Johnson, that crazy tech guy who's asking if we could be the first generation to not die.
Brian Johnson is a tech entrepreneur. He once owned Venmo and sold it for nearly a billion dollars. Now he's spending that money to stay young.
Often called a vampire for doing the first multi-generational plasma transfusion with his father and son, he spends $2 million a year attempting to reverse the aging process.
I have been spending millions of dollars for the past three years working to slow my speed of aging. Today I'm going to show you one of my favorite meals called Super Veggie. It's a delicious- I take around 30 pills for breakfast and around 20 pills for lunch. My diaphragm is 18, my heart's 37, my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% in 18 year olds.
As a species, we accept our inevitable decay, decline, and death. I want to argue that the opposite should be true.
Now, going into it, I knew it was going to be an unusual conversation. If you haven't heard of Brian or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, it's called Don't Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. Brian is a person who has given over his whole life and his body to the science of longevity. It means he's essentially turned himself into a human lab rat.
undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human biomarker imaginable to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging, or maybe even to age in reverse. What he does is unconventional, to say the least. He eats dinner at 11 a.m. He has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, just to name two of the hundreds of things that I had never heard of a person doing before.
So I knew it was going to be one of the weirder conversations I've ever had on this show. What I didn't anticipate was that it was going to be challenging in a deeper way. What do you think I think the idea of being human is?
So this is a very common disposition where most people respond to these questions and say, if I don't have my autonomy and authority and free will, I don't know if I want to exist. That's a very common reaction.
Brian, do you think being human is a social construct?
I think our ideas of being human and consciousness are going to change beyond our ability to comprehend in just a very short period of time. I think it will change so dramatically, we will be unrecognizable from our current state. So I am unattached to any conceptions of what I have right now as a conscious being.
That we'd get to talking about the fundamental meaning and purpose of life. And that I'd feel challenged about what I know and believe to be true. Because it's not just that Brian wants to live forever. It's that he believes, agree with it or not, that we're at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality.
He thinks he's akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he's on the frontier of something big, something that will change everything about humanity as we know it. Today on Honestly, Brian Johnson tells us about why he's not going to die. Stay with us. Are you ready to make better sleep your New Year's resolution? Cozy Earth can help you do that.
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If you get their post-purchase survey, mention that you heard about Cozy Earth from Honestly with Barry Weiss. Brian Johnson, welcome to Honestly.
Thanks for having me here.
Brian Johnson, you are definitely the only person I've ever interviewed for this show where there's a betting page on Polymarket for your nighttime erection lengths. That is a first for me. And that's just sort of one of the hundreds, maybe more, of markers that you measure every day, from your urination speed to brain plaque, and that you've reportedly spent millions of dollars on the process.
All in your quest to, as you put it and as your shirt puts it and as the name of your new Netflix documentary puts it, not to die or don't die. So let's start there. You are the first person I've talked to that's literally given your life over to not dying. Why are you trying so hard not to die?
Don't die is actually the oldest and most played game of human history. If you think about most religions, they're selling a version of don't die. It's obey these commandments and don't die. It's do these things, don't die. In the professional world, it's achieve accomplishments so you're not forgotten. And, you know, you have kids so you can pass on your lineage.
Like don't die is like the most fundamental of all human desires. And what I'm suggesting is right now may be the first time that legitimate don't die is here. Whereas before we've had to make up stories, now it's technically potentially possible.
Okay, so before we get into sort of the more existential questions about whether or not death is something fundamental and core to being human, let's establish for people just how differently you live your life in the pursuit of not dying than most of the rest of us do. I take vitamin D, if I'm lucky, maybe twice a week. How many pills and supplements would you say you take every single day?
Around 50. 50.
Okay. And give us a range and a sense of what these pills are and the variety of what they're doing.
Yeah. Maybe it's helpful to explain the methodology we use. In any given day, every one of us ages and dies just a little bit. So if your lifespan, let's say particular lifespan in the U.S. in California, let's say is 79 years. then you can do a daily calculation and determine how much you die every single day towards that 70-year mark, so 79-year mark.
And then you can say, okay, now I have that number, what kinds of things are going to accelerate that rate of death? You can say smoking would, drinking a lot of alcohol would, not sleeping properly would, having a lot of environmental toxins like pollution and contaminants in the water. So there are certain things that accelerate death. And then there are things that slow death down.
So you could extend your lifespan. You could get good sleep. You could exercise. You could eat nutritionally. And so what I've done as a project is I've said, can I slow down my speed of aging to the greatest degree possible out of any human on the planet? And can I then eliminate all the sources of death? Can I become the most don't die person in human history?
So when I say, you know, 50 supplements, All these things are meticulously measured in my body. And we determine like what things are actually slowing down my speed of aging. So they're not random. It's not like I went to a certain blog and was like, you know, eight pills you should take for health and wellness.
This is like on the cutting edge of science and technology of how you actually isolate what is causing death in the body and how you neutralize it. What is your exercise routine? Yeah, one hour a day. I don't take any rest days. And it's a combination of strength, cardio, balance, and flexibility. But it's the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning.
Exercise is a huge part of it. We see you doing a lot of it in this documentary. And then eating. And this is maybe the most hard to fathom for most people. You know, I eat three meals a day plus a few snacks. I think I'm pretty normal in what I do. What do you eat? I mean, we're talking at 1230 EST. So by my schedule, if you're on EST, you've already eaten your dinner.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I've had my last meal of the day. And the reason I do that is I've built my life around sleep. And my last meal of the day, I usually have about nine hours before bedtime. And I do that because my body then finishes digestion and it will lower my resting heart rate.
And so if my resting heart rate's around 44 beats per minute when I go to bed, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. But in terms of food, like the way we thought about it is we have this mantra where we say, when I say we, I have a team of about 30 medical professionals that we specialize in looking at all the different science and protocols.
And we had this idea that every calorie that enters my body has to fight for its life. And so we went through all the medical literature and we said, what are the superfoods among superfoods? And then we didn't stop there. We began testing every food source we had, every supplement, every food. And we would look at the nutritional label and say, is it accurate? We would test it for heavy metals.
We test it for pesticides and herbicides. And we found out that the global food supply chain is atrociously contaminated. And so then we started sourcing our own foods and doing our own tests with our own labs. And so basically it's every calorie fights for its life. It's superfood among superfoods and everything is sourced and tested.
And so we've really taken this to the absolute extent of like, how could you eat as clean as possible with every calorie?
So just so listeners understand, you eat all of your meals between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m.?
Yes.
Okay. And what are the foods that you eat and don't eat? When I hear superfoods, I think blueberries and kale, meat, no meat, cheese, eggs. Tell us what you eat in a day.
Yeah, so my morning breakfast is a dish called super veggie, and it's broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, ginger, garlic, and hemp seeds. The second meal of the day is called nutty pudding, and it's macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, sunflower lecithin, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, pea protein. and some collagen.
And then the final meal of the day is some combination of vegetables, legumes, berries, nuts, seeds. So I'm plant-based. Those meals are good placeholders, but I vary them day to day, but they're roughly in the same categories. I get around 30 grams of plant fiber per day. The typical American gets less than 10. I don't eat any sugar. I don't eat any junk food.
I don't eat any like really just those primary food groups. And then I have a lot of extra virgin olive oil. I have three tablespoons per day of high quality extra virgin olive oil.
But that just seems like a very, very aesthetic meal plan for someone that's exercising the amount you do and a man of your size. I would really been thinking about this. Are you hungry most of the time? Are you hungry right now?
Yeah, I'm typically in a light state of hunger constantly. Yes.
Is that painful or pleasurable to you?
Initially, it was uncomfortable. And I've really grown to appreciate it. I mean, the feeling of having overeaten and having too much food is really terrible. And being satiated is nice, but a slight hunger is really nice. I feel more alert. You know, when people fast, they oftentimes report that initially it's uncomfortable, but then they enter into this...
stage where they feel a lot of mental clarity and a lot of energy. So my energy has boosted. So it's the benefits. A lot of people will make observations about what I'm doing. They'll say, I can't imagine doing your lifestyle because of blank, blank, blank. What they don't see is we all know what it feels like after a phenomenal night's sleep, after exercising really well, after eating very well.
You just feel lucid and clear and energetic and all the amazing things about consciousness. And that's what I feel all the time. And so my mood is stable and robust. I don't get really beaten down. So yeah, there's just so many benefits to this way of living.
Is there a specific aspect to that sort of low level of hunger, frankly, that I think most people listening will never have experienced in their life that is good for longevity?
Yeah.
Explain that.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, maybe to put this in context, like this is why I think a lot of people are so confused by me. So when this first became viral, people would not know how to categorize me. And so they would just fumble words out of their mouth. And they'd say things like billionaire, eccentric, weirdo, vampire, fuck boy. They're just trying to string words together.
They don't know what to say, but it's like insult direction. And what they don't understand is I've actually created a a new professional sport out of longevity, out of health. Because when you think about health, people oftentimes say, well, first they say eat eggs, don't eat eggs, cholesterol is good, then cholesterol is bad. And then most people say, I give up.
I don't know how to determine and they're just going to change But there's actually a much more methodical and rigorous way to approach health where you can, in fact, find stable ground. We know that being obese is not good for health. Great. You can take those basic principles and walk in. And I'd say I have the best comprehensive biomarkers of anybody on this planet.
I am quantitatively the healthiest person alive. I am the Olympic gold medal champion of health. I'm number one in the world. Now, when you put it in that kind of framework, people are like, oh, and I publish all my data.
So I say here, all my markers, like, you know, when you have a hundred meter dash in the Olympic race, like, you know what the rules are, the starting line, the finish line, the times. So I've tried to say health and rejuvenation and longevity is now an official sport. And here are the markers, right?
Well, one thing about sports is there's sort of a way to judge them. And I want to get to that in a little bit because obviously there's been criticisms from some scientists, including in the documentary itself, which I appreciated, about the scientific nature of what you're doing. Before we get there, I just want to establish a little bit more about your daily habits.
I probably, if I'm lucky, drink two glasses of water a day. It's very bad. I'm constantly dehydrated. How much water do you drink?
So as all things Blueprint, we measure all the time. And so I measure my level of hydration. And so there's obviously there's rule of thumbs, which are great. And then there's also measurements. I just want to clarify that you can answer questions like these with precision.
Of course.
Generally speaking, I drink between 60 and 80 ounces a day of water.
Okay. And I go to sleep around. Well, we have two kids under the age of three. So I'm waking up last night, 3 a.m., 6 a.m. So very, very bad sleep habits. But generally, I go to sleep around midnight, wake up around 7. When do you go to sleep? 8.30 p.m. So why did you discover this 830 to 430 routine? Why is that optimal or optimal for you?
In many ways, I guess I've thought about this project in a way where, you know, when Amelia Earhart flew an airplane across the Atlantic. she demonstrated something that never had been done. And when the first person summited Everest, they also demonstrated something that had been done, the four minute mile.
And I wanted to, with sleep, I wanted to demonstrate something that no one had ever done, which is I wanted to demonstrate the world's best sleep score. So I did eight months of perfect sleep with a wearable. And so I basically just systematically went about doing hundreds of experiments, what produces perfect sleep. And I distilled it, and I had eight months of perfect sleep.
Now, for context, there are people who have these wearables. There are millions of people who have these wearables.
You're talking about like an Oura ring or something like that.
Many people have had these, and they haven't had a 100% score in their entire life. And so to get eight months continuously was a remarkable achievement. And so, yeah, after all these experimentations, I learned my chronotype. The time I do best at going to bed is 8.30 p.m., So other people do better at different times. You can do 8.30, 9.30, 10.30, 12, you know, choose your time.
It's not really important when, other than it's just consistent and you have certain life habits that precede that. So mine, I'm an early riser. I always have been. So my best time to go to bed is 8.30, but others do equally as well at 10 or 11.
Brian, we obviously we just went through a holiday season where a lot of us were indulging or sleeping at odd hours, definitely eating things that are not good for us. Like, do you ever indulge?
I don't.
Do you ever indulge or go off of the routine?
I don't. And, you know, here's the funny thing is it's so painful to indulge. I just hate the thought. And so it has gone from a temptation to an abhorrence. I just can't even imagine doing it.
You can't imagine having a piece of chocolate.
No. I mean, one, I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars testing food. I know that chocolate is packed with heavy metals. I know that it has sugar. I know that it has some junk ingredients. I know when it goes into my body, it's going to accelerate my aging. I know it's going to negatively affect my sleep.
I know tomorrow I'm going to feel the deficiency in my sleep of having not slept as well. I just know the stream of consequences. No.
But I'm thinking of you on Thanksgiving or Christmas, right? How does this affect your ability? I'll give you an example. When you're at a meal with people and there's someone there that claims to be gluten-free either because they're trying to diet, that's a lot of women I think who claim to be gluten-free, or they're genuinely celiac, people roll their eyes and they get annoyed.
People are annoyed when people don't go along with the flow of what everyone else is doing. You don't even eat at a meal. So how does it work when you're Sitting down with loved ones at 6 p.m. for a holiday feast, how does that actually work for you in a social way?
Yeah, so what I do actually is I try to be as least disruptive as possible. And so if I'm going to a guest's home, they'll typically be very thoughtful and say, what can I prepare for you? And I know they're thinking like, okay, this guy is super extra. Yeah. And I just say, don't worry about it. It's all good. Whatever you're eating, I will eat.
And so I'll go there, and whatever they have, I'll just pick out what I can. I'll pick out some fruits and vegetables, whatever. I'll put it on my plate, and I'll just nibble. Whatever time of day. So I'll eat at 5, 6, or 7. I'll just have a few small bites. So I have food on my plate. I'm putting food in my mouth. The conversation can flow. So I really try to not be disruptive.
I try not to say anything about anything. Like whatever they have is great. So I don't want to step on social norms and I don't want to create a big thing.
So you'll put something on your plate so you're not there as the extra guy not doing anything. Yeah, exactly. But presumably you'll leave in time to get in bed by 830.
I do. Yeah.
Wow. OK, Brian, this is we got to discuss your dating. How can you go on a date?
You're right. I mean, so, yeah, it's pretty challenging. I mean, what I've been doing is when I've gone on dates, I will go and say, hey, just a heads up. You know, like there's this social ritual where people get together, they put on their best face. They're like, hey, I'm like this amazing person. And then over time, their true you comes out.
And then by month six or month 12, it's like, ah, okay, this is who you are.
Yeah.
So I kind of say like, hey, like this is who I am. And here's 10 reasons why you're probably going to hate me. in some duration of time. And how does that go over, Brian? The very common response is, thank you. I really appreciate the transparency and honesty. This is so refreshingly upfront. And some will say, you're right. It just doesn't work with me. I really like this other lifestyle.
And others will be like, honestly, kind of cool, kind of badass. So I think it really does work because we all want this transparency in our lives. We all know it's going to come out at some point anyways. So why waste the time and pretend? So I think most people really appreciate it.
Okay. I want to just kind of list some of the other things you do that don't fit neatly into the buckets of diet, exercise, or sleep. Yeah. You do hair growth therapy.
Yes.
You do red light therapy, audiotherapy, body fat scans, routine hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber. That sounds kind of amazing to me. You do MRIs, blood and stool sample tests. Stop me if I get any of these wrong. You experiment with drugs like Acrobose. I've never heard of some of these until researching you.
You had 300 million young Swedish bone marrow stem cells injected into your shoulders, hips, and joints. You received phallostatin gene therapy in Honduras. You did a total plasma exchange, removing the plasma in your body and replacing it with, you tell me, something that begins with an A. Albumin?
Albumin, yep, yep.
Never heard of it. You inject yourself for brain health. You get these bloody facials. What's the point of all of this, right? Because some of these things, sleeping consistently, I get it. Eating superfoods, Even that, I get, sounds miserable, but I get it. Exercising the way you do, the results speak for themselves.
But there's these extra things that seem kind of, as you put it, extra or even intensely risky. Tell me about these experimental treatments.
The reason we do these things is we pose this question that if the goal is to not die, how would one approach that problem as an engineering challenge? And so we said, okay, well, the body is, you know, 70 plus organs. You have your heart, brain, lungs, you know, kidney, liver, and all these different organ systems. So first you have to measure the biological age of every organ.
And so I'm chronologically 47 years old, but biologically my left ear is 64 years old. My heart is 37. My diaphragm is age 18. So organs age at different speeds. And so for example, my left ear is very old because I shot a lot of guns as a kid, exposing my left ear. I would tuck in my right ear and expose my left ear and I also listened to a lot of loud music.
And so between 4,000 and 12,000 Hertz, I'm basically deaf.
so once you have a baseline of the biological age of every organ in your body you can then say okay what is the scientific literature about reducing the age like can i make my left ear not 64 but 63 or 62 or 42 or 41 and so we've taken that approach across my entire body so everything you've listed listed off is a scientific evidence-based approach on how to reduce the
the biological age of the organs of my body. And so we're trying to get my body to be age 18 across the entire body, which right now is a really crazy endeavor. We're just not there yet, but that's what we're trying to systematically engineer.
It seems to me, and this is a little bit of a crude way to put it, but I think it's pretty accurate, that there's sort of like two competing schools of thought among, and forgive the phrase, alternative health people. There's the people that want to sort of embrace the practices of the past, right?
Paleo carnivore diets, people that are sewing and hand-dyeing their own clothes because they don't want any polyester or plastics, people that are like, let's go back in time sort of pre-industrial age for purity, right? And by going backwards in times, we can get healthier again.
And then there's people like you that are embracing sort of every technological, futuristic tool at our disposal, whether it's supplements or injections or biohacking tools, and sort of believing that the way to health is by embracing these sort of tools of the future, things sort of at the bleeding edge of technology.
Can you contend with that tension a little bit for me because I feel like it's kind of one or the other and you embody the – you're like the embodiment of the latter school of thinking about this.
Philosophically, I'm indifferent to where the idea comes from. It can be an ancient practice. It can be a new scientific study. It can come from anywhere. The only thing we care about is that it works and that we can measure it. So health is really built on folklore, antidotes, storytelling. I mean, that's how it's really been built. And what we're saying is that the power is a measurement.
Like, for example, if you look at a smartphone, a smartphone can't be built by storytelling. It's got to be built by rigorous precision in engineering and measurement. If you couldn't measure and you couldn't go through this quantitative process, there's no way you can build a smartphone that works. And the same approach is true with the body.
You can't go through a rigorous process in trying to de-age the entire body by telling pretty stories. You have to actually measure the cellular function. You have to look at the actual organ function. You have to see the biological systems. So the breakthrough with what we've done is I've become the most measured person in human history. Like we measure- That I think is true.
Yeah, we measure everything. And so if someone says, you know, like I have the following theory, we say, great, we're going to test the theory out and we're going to generate all the data. And so it's really very few things for life are going to survive without quantitative measurement.
Storytelling will always be a nice layer on society, but fundamentally powering society on a day-to-day basis, measurement is the workhorse.
So all of these things we've been talking about, and anyone who's seen the documentary will know or has read about you, you call this protocol Blueprint. How long have you been doing Blueprint?
Four years.
Four years. Okay. And you say the goal is not just – your critics would say – Have fun, Brian Johnson. This is your life. Be a lab rat. You say that you're being sort of a human lab rat, not just for yourself, but in order to produce results that are hopefully adaptable for others. What are some of the big takeaways that are accessible already from this four-year experiment for other people?
I view myself more as an explorer, not a lab rat. I mean, so more in the vein of Ernest Shackleton or Magellan or Lewis and Clark or Armstrong. So I'm a person on the frontier trying to demonstrate a new possibility of human potential.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is at the core of what it means to be human.
My question is, you know, if the goal is not just to elongate your own life and not die, but through the experiment of your life, working with this very strict discipline protocol to produce... actionable behavior, really, that are accessible to other people that don't have, you know, an MRI in their bathroom?
Like, what are those things that are already takeaways after four years that you would advise people? I mean, there are some obvious ones, of course, like consistent sleep. But are there any other things that you've sort of already learned from this experiment that are usable for other people listening?
so many more and a lot of people think this is unachievable and i want to say it is achievable and i'll give you some really simple ones you can do at home so this is not just a voyeuristic project of like some rich guy doing something that's inaccessible so that the best thing you can do in your life the number one most powerful drug is sleep and so it's not just you know get more sleep but i'll tell you the five things i would do for sleep
So one is remapping your identity that you are a professional sleeper, that you take sleep as seriously as you do your profession. It's that important, like same level. Number two is that your final meal of the day is at least two hours before bedtime, if not three, four, five, I do nine, 10 hours before bed. If you move your last meal a day back, you'll see your sleep scores soar.
So eat earlier and lighter. Number three is light in your environment matters a lot. So try to eliminate blues, like turn your screens off, turn, yeah, lights in the house that are blue. You want reds and amber lights. Four is consistency. The body loves routine. If you can give the body routine, it will perform really well. And so I try to go to bed within like five minutes of my bedtime.
Like 30 minutes is okay. Hours getting to be a bit too long, but try to be very precise. Four or five is have a wind down routine.
Your body needs to settle down at the end of the day when at the end of the day, you're processing all the things you're mad at, all the things you're anxious about, all the things you want to do, you're excited about, like you're processing through all these complicated emotions. And so I go for a walk or meditate, read a book.
But I have this internal dialogue with myself while I'll walk through the various things I'm thinking about. Like, hi, ambitious Brian. Like, what new ideas do you have for me? Hi, anxious Brian. Like, what are you worried about today? And, you know, yes, you're right. I probably did offend that person. They probably hate me because I said that thing. You know, what a poor judgment on my part.
But you need to calm yourself down. And then six is aware of stimulants. So caffeine has a half-life of six hours, which means if you have a cup of coffee at 6 p.m., at midnight, half a cup of coffee is still in you. And so you really need to be mindful of how much caffeine and other stimulants.
Now, if you can do those five habits, you will achieve the best sleep of your entire life, and it will change everything else about your life. But it's not just get more sleep. It's build your life around sleep.
I assume that the idea of even having a smartphone in your bedroom is, like, disgusting to you.
No, my smartphone's in my bedroom. I just turn it off.
Okay, you turn it off.
I turn off Wi-Fi. I turn off Bluetooth. But no, it's in my room.
Well, I think for most people just encountering you, they're probably going and Googling you right now and finding some incredible photos and lots of pieces that have been written about you, including by the wonderful journalist Ashley Vance. And they'll discover when they do that that, A, you didn't always look like this, and B— This was not the life at all that you were born into.
And I want to ask you a little bit about sort of the journey that led you to this point. You know, before you started Blueprint, you were a startup bro, right? You were a tech bro. You probably hate the word bro, but that's what you did. You founded a payments processing company called Braintree, which was very successful. It ultimately acquired Venmo. Tell me about that time in your life.
You know, I'm doing a startup now. I find that it is extraordinarily stressful. I've basically turned gray over the past two years. Tell me about how that period sort of affected your health and ultimately led you to want to change the way, not just that you live, but I think also the way that you think about the nature of your brain and your mind and your body. So let's go back there a
The Brian Before Blueprint.
I mean, I guess like being an entrepreneur, you're kind of answering the meaning of life question. Like when you're, I was born into a religious environment and it was like, hey, your responsibility in life is to obey God's commandments so that you get heaven in the afterlife. And when you become an entrepreneur and you're in that community and professional success is your objective,
that becomes your only life objective and you're willing to do anything for it. And then you also, just by default, by being in the entrepreneurship community, you accept the habits and cultural norms in that community. And so when you hear people say things like, so-and-so worked all night long for two, worked for 48 hours straight and coded something and they're brilliant.
You're like, oh, wow, well, maybe I should stay up two nights in a row and do something brilliant because I want people to say good things about me too. And so there's this folklore that beats or like, you know, they sleep under their desk or like, and so there's like these hero war stories of people celebrating something this debaucherous lifestyle where you're ruining your health.
It's like, oh my God, we just can't believe how great they are. And so it's very hard to not become that. And so I fell prey to that. When I was in the cultural mindset, I too would grind. Like I wouldn't exercise. I didn't eat well. I got fat. I wouldn't sleep. And you kind of have this trademark haggard look as an entrepreneur, right? You're You just are beat up.
And that's kind of like the brand. And so I sold my company and I was like, oh my God, that just absolutely destroyed me. And it was, I mean, it was in service of another goal, but still like, and entrepreneurs know what I'm talking about, right? This is so common. It's almost like you walk in and you just behave a certain way. You're not even sure why.
Well, not to get too galaxy brain here, but isn't it just that human beings are incredibly memetic and imitative creatures and we – the thing that makes us compete is our sameness and wanting to – I mean, Elon obviously is the embodiment of what you're talking about. I think the thing that struck me is your description of grinding 80 or 100 hours a week as debaucherous.
I don't think most people that are running startups think of that kind of behavior as debaucherous. I think they think of it as, you know, self-sacrificial and necessary. And you're just saying it's not.
Yeah, I'm saying that it cuts on two levels. I'm saying that before the 21st century started, it was very reasonable to say, live fast, die young, right? It was guaranteed you're gonna die. So like go to war and be a hero, like and die young, great. Be an epic entrepreneur, die young, be an epic politician, die young and let your memory live on, great. Like compete for don't die in memory.
And what's happened over the past couple of years is now there's this legitimate question, are we the first generation that won't die? Now, if that's the case, then the game of existence changes. It changes from live fast, die young, and martyr yourself for a certain cause to don't die. And so if you look at this from the vantage point of the 25th century, right?
So just like we look back to the 16th century and we compress the entire century into one or two things, the 25th century is going to look at us and compress our time and place into one or two things. And I think they're going to say two things happened in the early 21st century. They'll remember two things.
The internet.
We gave birth to superintelligence, and we figured out how to not die.
I think most people are going to be with you on the former, but I think a lot of people, frankly, me included, will say, Brian, it's awesome that your organs are the age of an 18-year-old, but the idea that not dying is within our grasp in the way that AI is seems totally implausible to me. What evidence is there of that other than what you are doing?
I don't see that as a movement in the way that I see superintelligence.
Talent is the ability to hit the target no one else can. Genius is the ability to hit the target no one can see. If you go back through history and you look at the improbable things that people said that are now normalized and accomplished, you realize that everything at one point was improbable. Everything at one point was impossible.
I'm with you on all of that. But I see rockets from SpaceX going to space and getting caught by chopstick arms. And I think, hey, maybe this thing of getting to Mars, which 10 years ago seemed like, you know, as crazy as believing that aliens were going to march through New Jersey, maybe that's within reach. I could be convinced of the, if not dying, incredibly elongated lifespans.
But where is the either social movement or other than... You and a number of other people that are, frankly, like people in Silicon Valley that have resources that are at the bleeding edge of this. Like, am I missing some broader sort of cultural shift or some broader, huge scientific breakthrough that I should be made aware of?
So if you say, what are the foundational tools needed for? to build a smartphone, right? You go through from silicon manufacturing to all the various layers. If you then go through the same exercise and say, what layers would we need to solve aging? Genomics and single-cell manipulation and epigenetic reprogramming and gene therapy and gene. So if you go through and make that list,
We basically have all of the primary tools needed to substantially slow down the speed of aging, regenerate organs, and reverse age. Now, those things are in the maturation process now. We don't have them as clinical therapies. But if you just basically say, what theoretically would we need to have mastered as the basic tool set so that with advanced technological ability, we could solve it?
It's there. Like that's, this is what, when I sold Braintree Venmo, that was my thesis is that we have the ability to engineer reality at the level of atoms and molecules and organisms. So I started investing in synthetic biology, genomics, nanotech, synthetic or computational therapeutics, like at this base layer.
If you look at the advances over the past couple of years, like AlphaFold, you know, they just showed they can model out the molecular interaction across all molecules or protein folding. And so, yes, all the pieces are falling into place. It's not obvious. You have to kind of squint to see it. But the statement here is not that we're going to move faster than the speed of light.
That's not known how to accomplish that in physics. But we have an adjacency. There's a jellyfish that is immortal. We know that biology has solved for immortality. So it can be done in biology. It's a different species. But all the pieces are there for this to happen.
I think it's really interesting that don't die is the promise, if not explicitly, but implicitly. It's the subtext of kind of every meaningful movement that people are a part of. How do you achieve immortality in some way?
You grew up Mormon, and I've been thinking about that because I don't want to be stereotypical here, but I think Mormons are just like highly, highly productive, disciplined people in a way that I really admire. And I wonder how much do you attribute growing up in that kind of structure to your ability to be so disciplined with something like Blueprint?
Yeah, I mean, I certainly appreciate my upbringing a lot. Yeah, I was taught to skip classes. temporary pleasure for long-term gain. So definitely had that advantage of building those muscles when I was young. And that doesn't mean I've not been without my vices. Like when I was building as an entrepreneur, my willpower, when you don't get good sleep, your willpower craters.
Like your ability to resist eating a cookie goes to very low. And so I certainly had my own challenges with willpower and self-control. But yeah, I mean, at some point in my life, I did have at least some training in the idea of foregoing short-term pleasure for long-term gain.
One thing that you say sort of in many different ways is that the mind is the enemy and we can stop aging by giving control to our bodies and not our mind. I have to tell you, I don't fully understand that. And I want you to explain it a little bit more to me because I see those things as so integrated.
Yes.
Tell us what you mean by giving control to the body.
Yeah, I mean, in the same way that, you know, if you were to travel somewhere right now, you would probably enter an address in a navigation app and you would probably follow the streets it tells you to follow. Even if you know how to get there, because the algorithm may know where there's construction, it may know where there's traffic, it has a greater awareness than you do.
And so in some ways, that system is better than you at knowing what route to take. And so we see it through this general principle that when enough data can be gathered, when an algorithm can be run, it surpasses human ability at achieving an endpoint that the person wants. Like the person wants the shortest possible route to the destination or, you know, the most scenic route.
Like take your algorithm, your choice. And so I was making, and we've done this throughout society. Like when you pick up your phone and you're scrolling through social media, you're saying, hey, algorithm, entertain me. But you're not looking through all the posts and you're selecting, like you're just being fed with the algorithm, right?
And so like, whether that's good or not, like, so we, we defer to algorithms to do things on our behalf because they are better, faster, stronger in many ways. And so I was making the observation that given that I'm generating all this data from my body, wouldn't I want to give this to an algorithm? and the algorithm determines better than me what to eat, how to exercise, when to go to sleep.
I want the power of an AI system taking care of my health because I know as an individual, if I wake up in the morning and say, I'm not going to eat the croissant for breakfast, and then I do, I'm not going to eat the brownie for lunch, and then I do, I'm not going to stay up late and drink, and then I do.
Every day, humans make these decisions that accelerate their speed of aging, and humans can't stop their self-destructive behaviors. They can't. They're just pinned down by it. And what I'm saying is the mind is this uncontrollable self-destruction machine. We've normalized it to make ourselves feel better, but it is what it is.
And what I was trying to say is if you take this situation, give the algorithm my health data, it's going to do a substantially better job. Now, This is like on the bleeding edge. But inevitably over time, AI will become better at you, at being you in every way. It'll be better at you at giving interviews. It'll be better at you at writing posts.
It'll be better at you in having a conversation with your partner on how to resolve a dispute. It will be better than us in every way imaginable. And so it's just a matter of time. And so I'm trying to suggest on the cutting edge here, I'm trying to view this time and place from the perspective of the 20th century, what is obvious from the perspective of a few hundred years from now?
Not now, like I don't want the constraint of the two or three or four or five years, but what is obvious from a few hundred years from now?
I mean, the idea of outsourcing fights to AI with my wife seems like a good idea, but I guess I'm left wondering, and maybe we'll wind up here, but if any of that is a life worth living, if AI is doing everything for me,
So I experienced this a lot where I do these don't die dinners in my home. I've been doing them for several years. And it's a conversation that runs on five thought experiments. And in a similar emotion, you just had people
will have an existential crisis multiple times with the same thought process you just expressed, where they say, if I can no longer choose what I'm going to eat, I don't know why I'm going to exist. And so humans, they walk themselves into a corner where they say, I can't compute reality because this idea is foreign to me. Meanwhile, we already live in that world.
When you're looking for content on Netflix, you're not picking your content. The algorithm is picking your content for you. So it's already happening in all these different ways. So we already don't have free will anymore. We don't, we're already enmeshed in this system of algorithms and we can't see it. So the irony is we are already the dystopia that we think is happening.
We already have the same reasons to not exist, but yet we normalize to it. So it's just a new idea, but it's important to create self-awareness that we humans go to existential despair within 500 milliseconds of having a thought that is new to us. Instead of this other contemplation of, oh my God, wouldn't it be amazing if I didn't commit all these self-destructive behaviors?
Wouldn't it be amazing if I would actually fit and slept well and I felt my best? It's a normal psychological process that people go through.
But I think what I'm responding to, and maybe I am having exactly the response you're saying, but I think maybe the deeper read of it, or another read of it, rather, is that the idea of being free to choose is the thing that makes us human. And if what you're saying is we can just outsource everything to a super intelligent machine...
Like, at least in my worldview, that choosing and that discerning and that even the ability to fail miserably is like at the very, very core of our humanity. But maybe that's just an old idea and a different worldview.
Yeah, it's a great point. So if we were to go back in time and ask humans from the year of zero, what is the purpose of being human? And ask that same question every year for 2024 years, you would see a very different idea of being human through all those different years and throughout different cultures. So there's the idea of what it means to be human is not true. It's not like math or physics.
The idea is just a social cultural phenomena. And so in 2030, there's going to be a different idea on what it means to be human. And so the response you're feeling is it's your idea in 2024, which is really the 2024 Zeitgeist idea, which you are mimetically responding to of the idea of being human.
What do you think I think the idea of being human is?
So this is a very common disposition where most people respond to these questions and say, if I don't have my autonomy and authority and free will, I don't know if I want to exist. That's a very common reaction.
What do you think the idea of being human is?
So I think that's a wonderful idea for others to pontificate on. I'm going to secure that you're alive so that you can ask this idea. And what I'm saying is the beauty of existence is that we can ask questions about existence. If you're dead, you can't ask questions. And so I'm saying don't die is the zeroth order priority for existence. Once you exist, the most important goal is to still exist.
Brian, do you think being human is a social construct?
I think our ideas of being human and consciousness are going to change beyond our ability to comprehend in just a very short period of time. I think it will change so dramatically we will be unrecognizable from our current state. So I am unattached to any conception of what I have right now as a conscious being.
More with Brian Johnson after the break. Stay with us. Brian, we're in a really interesting moment where I think people understand at a more broad level than they did certainly 10 years ago that whatever is going on right now with health in America and maybe the West more broadly is bad.
And they're open to pretty wacky or alternative or unconventional ideas because they see whatever our habits are, whatever's going on, they're leading to widespread obesity and heart disease and cancer and sickness.
And one of the core manifestations of that openness to alternative health ideas showed itself very powerfully in this last election cycle with the Maha movement, with the Make America Healthy Again movement. And I wanted to ask you what you think about it.
Yeah, there's probably two layers here. One is that I think there's some anger in that, you know, when you're out and about in the world, whether you're traveling in an airport, whether you're driving down the road, whether you're in a grocery store. The proximity to bad food is just, you can't avoid it.
And when you look at the food system and characterize it, it's contaminated with terrible ingredients, with microtoxins, with heavy metals. Like the food system's broken and our culture is broken. And that makes it very hard for people to navigate the world where I know way too much. I cannot go to the grocery store anymore. I just know.
I know too well because I've tested maybe more than anyone else in the entire world. And so the food system is broken. And so I think people feel that, that they are victim to a broken food system.
Just to draw a line under it, there was a guy, I'm blanking on his name, but who did a study of microplastics in like all foods. This came out in the past week. And I think it made people feel very betrayed that like the Whole Foods grass-raised beef had the most microplastics.
Yes.
And so it was like even the people that are spending so much money to get the healthy meat felt betrayed. So it's kind of like everywhere. It feels like nothing is safe.
Exactly. So we, in the next few weeks, I'm going to start the world's biggest consortium on microplastics.
Wow. What does that mean?
So I'm in the food business. So when Blueprint went viral, people said, I love this. I want to do it, but it's so hard. Please make it easy. And so I've done that. We've got out, we found our own suppliers. We do our own testing. The problem in food production is that the microplastics problem is an entire industry's problem.
It goes into the water that is used for the grass to grow has microplastics, which means the cow's getting microplastics in the grass they consume. When it goes through the manufacturing process, when it goes through distribution, when it goes through traveling, when it goes through packaging, it's on every single layer across the entire food supply chain.
If you're Whole Foods and you're buying grass-fed beef, You're trying to do your customers a solid, like you're trying to give them good food, but whole foods does not control that entire process. And when, if you're. a farmer and you're trying to grow, you know, trying to raise meat, you don't have control of your entire process. Like you have used fertilizers and use water.
So like people are just stuck in a system where nobody has control and no one even knows what's even up. Like nobody can measure microplastics. No one knows where they're at. So it's just this colossal problem and there's no one solve. And so we're going to get everyone together and say, we are going to work together. And we're going to bring light to this problem of where are they coming from?
Where's it at? How do you remove them? And just share best practices among the entire community, because it is a problem we have to solve together. That's number one. And number two, of where people, I think, are like Maha, is there's this thing of the systems suck, but then there's also this other thing where people feel powerless to make change in their personal life.
Because no matter whatever, you can regulate something, but if the person still doesn't exercise and eat well, So I think in many ways, people are crying for help that the culture that we live in is suffocating from a health perspective, like these expectations that sleep, that sleep debauchery is a good thing or that, you know, eating bad food is like living life.
Like, you know, aren't you having fun? Like, you know, so I think there's just like people are crying for help that they feel awful and they can't get out because everything's broken, including culture.
Maha, I would say, is particularly focused on a few things. And I'm curious just your quick takes on them. We hit on microplastics. Obviously, you think that's an enormous priority, given what you just told us. Seed oils overstated in their badness or as bad as people are saying?
I just published a long thread on X looking at the seed oil debate. And I think that the general zeitgeist has been incorrect. I think putting the bowl, I don't consume any seed oils. So I have no dog in this fight. When you look at the evidence, we couldn't find any evidence that seed oils are bad. What we found is it's the way people cook with seed oils and specifically heating them up.
So like most infamously in the cultural debate is that McDonald's uses seed oils. RFK wants to bring tallow back. This is like a whole micro debate. But you're saying seed oils themselves aren't that bad. It's the way they're used.
Exactly. Yeah. And that's when you look at the evidence, like we cannot see. And even people who fire back at us, we just can't see any evidence that just says seed oils are bad. It really got taken out of context. There's no evidence base for that. Fluoride. Yeah, taking fluoride out of the water is a good idea.
We did a comprehensive review on that as well, that it is a good idea to take fluoride out of water.
Vaccines.
That's such a complicated topic. You would need to be narrowly specific on which vaccine for whom when to speak with precision.
Are you fully vaccinated?
On what?
On everything other than COVID.
I mean, so I have a, so again, like with vaccines, they're such a fire point. It's almost like, so I'm plant-based, but I don't say anything about meat. If people want to eat meat, great, like do your thing. So I just don't want to step into a holy war and vaccines are a holy war. Like no one is engaged on vaccines in a scientific method. It is just like a political fight mechanism.
So I don't gauge a holy war.
So let me make it personal. Do you get a flu shot every year?
No.
Did you get vaccinated for COVID?
I did.
Do you regret getting vaccinated for COVID?
I do.
Why?
I want to trust the systems that produce science. Their role is to not sway my opinion. Their role is to give me data. And they didn't. They swayed my opinion. And that is an improper use of power.
One of the things that we cover a lot in the free press and on this show is the way that our institutions that are meant to sort of be in the public interest have betrayed public trust. And the thing that's been described as sort of a crisis of trust in the public is actually a crisis of trustworthiness in those institutions. Like they have betrayed people.
And yet I don't think either of us wants to live in a world in which we have no institution. We have no public health institutions because we do need some shared reality in a country with 330 million people.
Are there, in the same way that you had your five rules for how to get back to better health for those of us that don't want to do the full blueprint, are there things you feel that the CDC and other organizations can be doing to win back the trust that felt so demolished during the pandemic?
With my endeavor, I am trying to become the authority of trust and health. That's why I say I'm the healthiest person on planet Earth. And I'm trying to say, I've gone through this process of looking at scientific evidence, doing therapies and reporting out to you, giving you data. I'm not trying to persuade people. I'm just giving you data.
So I'm trying to be that source of authority, knowing that our institutions have failed us. And then I publish everything I do openly. So the entire thing is open source to the public. So I see the same thing. They have failed us. I'm trying to step in and say, you can trust me. This is the process we're going about. And so I started with me, now we're expanding.
So for example, how do you solve for microplastics? I'm going to solve it. I'm going to get in the game, get the consortium together, get all the people together, and we're going to solve it as an industry. My foods at Blueprint, we are probably the most tested foods out there. And so I'm trying to basically be the solution to the failings of our institutions.
But this gets to something I think about almost every day. Do you think individuals can actually replace institutions? Because individuals are flawed. You know, I'm trying to do that in my own way, I guess, in the media.
But the reason I decided not to be a sort of singular, you know, writer in the world, which would have been much more lucrative for me in trying to build a new institution instead, is I felt I am limited. I am flawed. It is much more sort of anti-fragile to create, I guess, a consortium or an institution of lots of journalists who share the same sort of old school journalistic values as me.
And also there's a much greater chance of scale. And frankly, if I get hit by a truck, it continuing. So like what are the limits of it being sort of the Brian Johnson show? And do you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, entirely. I mean, this is what my entire endeavor is about. So if you say, what is the most powerful technology in existence? It's storytelling. And we've seen that religious institutions are the most durable we've seen in society. Companies come and go on the order of months, years, decades, and centuries. Religions go for millennia. And we as a species live and die by our stories.
And right now, the reason why storytelling is so powerful is it's driving what we do with AI as we give birth to superintelligence. And so that's what Don't Die is. My ultimate endeavor is that Don't Die becomes the world's most influential ideology by 2027. That is the most impactful thing to work on because that then feeds all other things. And so it's not about Brian Johnson.
It's not about my biomarkers. It's about as a species from the perspective of a few hundred years into the future, what is the correct move in this moment in this part of the galaxy? And that's what I'm suggesting is that The correct move is to acknowledge that existence is the highest virtue, that we are coming to this point from live fast, die young.
And we realize that our entire existence is built upon this concept. We YOLO our way to all these other decisions and we just forget we ever accepted that as a norm. And we're now entering this new phase, even though we can't see it. It's not like right there in front of our face.
we're arriving don't die is the new religion it's the new ideology it's the new economic system it's a new political system it's new morals ethics and social norms it is the new os of reality and so that's my goal is that it's not about me individually it's about a system of existence of like what does all intelligence what does intelligence do in this moment in this part of the galaxy
Okay, let's talk about some of the criticisms you've received briefly. In the new Netflix documentary about you and Blueprint, there are some longevity scientists who are interviewed who say, this is a really neat way to do your life. They're very curious about you. But the idea that this is scientific, they say, is bogus. What do you say to that criticism?
They don't understand what I'm trying to do. Okay. So practically speaking, all of us understand intuitively that if your knee hurts— you need to do something to fix your knee. And the way you do that is you try to measure. You get an MRI or ultrasound, but you try to identify what's happening, then you come up with a solution. So that is a very practical thing we do every day. So is that science?
I don't know, but it's certainly useful. So there's this very practical thing we do every day, all day. They're trying to identify that there's a limitation to an N equals one from a large double placebo-controlled trial. Sure, that's obvious.
Mm-hmm.
But then what they really don't understand is that I'm trying to solve for human existence and intelligence in the galaxy in this moment. I'm not trying to solve for a nature paper. I'm not trying to solve a certain drug to be on trial. I'm not. I'm trying to say we are on this ball in space. What do we do in this moment? And so they just simply don't understand what I'm after.
And so I'm after a cultural change. I'm after the norm shifting that sleeping under your desk is cool to it's stupid. That's what I'm after.
Okay, that's really interesting because if the goal is shifting the cultural norm, how much do you worry about some of the really experimental things that you're doing? In other words, you're saying, I want people to watch what I'm doing so they imitate it in the same way they once imitated sleeping under the desk. Right.
So you do things, for example, like taking rapamycin, this organ transplant drug, please correct me if I'm wrong, that suppresses your immune system. You decided to stop because of the harsh side effects of it that you said didn't justify the benefits. Knowing that you're trying to be sort of a beacon for people to ask themselves, wait, I can live a different life.
How does that affect your decision of whether or not to do or not do certain things and whether or not to, you've been very transparent, to not share all of them given the risk of some of the things you might personally want to try?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, every human performs the same number of experiments every day. Like you just took a drink of something. What are you drinking?
iced coffee and I know that you're going to judge that.
Okay. So you just conducted an experiment, right? So you got your coffee from somewhere. You have it in some kind of material.
It's a Yeti. It's a Yeti full of microplastics probably.
Okay. So like, there you go. So you're conducting an experiment right now, right? You're putting something into your body and that coffee is not measured. The material is not measured. You're not even sure what you're putting in your body. I'm now going to take a drink of my water and This is in ceramic. My water has been tested with over 100 different variables. I know it's absolutely perfect.
I know every single contaminant in my water and everything that it should be. People, they create this default mindset that my risk profile must somehow be higher because I'm doing things that are different than theirs. But when they have fast food, they're conducting an experiment. When they go to bed late, they're conducting an experiment.
And what I'm saying is that my manner of experimentation using scientific evidence creates a much lower risk profile than theirs. And so I'm actually lower risk than other people who are not doing this. Hmm.
The New York Times asked you at one point if you were building a religion and you said yes. Others have described the Don't Die movement as a cult. What's the difference between a cult and a religion if there is one? And what would the world look like if we all signed up for the Don't Die, I'll call it a movement?
So people are currently pledging citizenship to don't die. I just created that as a permissionless NFT that you can pledge citizenship to don't die, to practice the don't die ethos. And the pledge is that we are at war with death and its causes. We are pursuing an infinite horizon, the right to choose to exist as long as one chooses to exist. And it's a new ethos.
And so whether you want to call it a religion, a cult, economic incentives, whether you're a don't-die entrepreneur, whether you're a don't-die politician, whether you're a don't-die community builder, whether you're a don't-die parent, the ethos is applicable throughout society. Don't die.
is the most robust ideology in the world because it's equally economic and equally political and moral and ethical and all things. It's equally computational. This is a framework that AI can adopt. Where AI, it's hard to adopt democracy because democracy is a subjective art of human decision-making. Don't die as quantitative and based upon math and physics.
So it is elegantly and most powerfully the best memetic and best ideology in the world that bridges humans and biology, the planet, and AI. And so that's what I'm trying to do. It's an ideology that fuses all interests on planet Earth in a single thing we can all agree upon, that nobody wants to die right now.
We're having a crisis of meaning in the West right now, as you know, that's making a lot of people depressed, a lot of people addicted to things, a lot of people amazingly lonely. How does this solve it?
Yeah, this is the new rallying cry for the West. Like you can make it tangible. Like, for example, the U.S. can say we are going to be number one in the world in life expectancy. That's a very real goal. You can say right now, kids, what we feed our kids at school, piece of pizza, chocolate milk in a plastic lined canister. And what else they have? It's like a die score.
So we know smoking a cigarette costs you 11 minutes of life. So what is the die score for a kid's school lunch? Let's say three minutes. We don't allow our kids to die, to just smoke, but we're feeding our kids die at their school. And so don't die taken on as a meaning making game is let's clean up school lunches so that we're not feeding our kids die.
So don't die is, I mean, it's just everywhere. You can say don't die applies to the coral reef. A healthy marine environment is a good idea. So when coral dies, that's kind of bad. So don't die is applicable everywhere. Economic systems, political, environmental, social, parenting, all the above.
When people say, life wouldn't have meaning if we didn't die, is that just a cope?
Yeah, people string words together. It doesn't actually matter what they say. They're just basically acknowledging, I don't understand this new idea. So when they say, I don't know what life means without death, what it means is they're currently having a hard time compute information in their mind. It's the same reason people call me a tech bro, vampire, Patrick Bateman, Dorian Gray.
They don't understand, and so therefore they just spit out words.
Does it hurt you when people say that about you?
No, I love it. You love it? I love it.
Are you a disagreeable person by nature?
No. I yes and everybody. I mean, that's what I've done with all my critics. I welcome it. It's great.
Do you think that you're going to die?
No. Really? Yeah.
You think you're going to live forever?
Forever is not a concept the human mind can contemplate. But will we be able to radically extend life beyond our preconceived imaginations? Yes. Will it happen before my natural limit right now? My life expectancy is probably like 80, 90, something like that if I maintain my health.
But the technology is moving so quickly that the species is going to either survive or die in this moment much sooner than my life expectancy would turn up.
What do you say to that?
Let's just imagine we're doing a thought experiment. We're hanging out with Homo erectus. They existed one million years ago. And we say to Homo erectus, Homo erectus, tell us, what is the purpose of life? And they're going to grunt and be like, well, it's about hunting and gathering and we're going to move our tribe. We're going to have more war.
They wouldn't be able to tell you about quantum mechanics or about smartphones or antibiotics or about the electromagnetic spectra or about this new form of AI art. They're not concepts that they understand. And so they wouldn't be able to speak intelligently about what a beautiful life is, right? They're just so primitive in their thought processes.
We are as primitive as Homo erectus as we are to AI. Like we are equally as primitive. We cannot say anything intelligent about the future anymore. And so the idea that we somehow have mastered existence and that we know what the purpose of existence is is so silly of a notion.
So to me, the most powerful thing for each of us to do is to be incredibly humble and say, in this moment, we may not know anything and it may be in our best interest to try to dissolve all of our preconceived notions of what it means and step into this frontier because it may be the most extraordinary existence in this part of the galaxy.
Okay, in the last three minutes we have, Brian, I want to do a quick lightning round, okay?
Yeah.
Okay, when is the last time you ate cake?
Years.
When's the last time you had a cold?
Never. I mean, years.
Do you think depression and anxiety can be cured with lifestyle choices and without pharmaceutical intervention?
It's very powerful. What's the point of being rich? To create maximum value for the human race.
How much credence do you give to alternative medicines like Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine?
Measure it.
I'm going to list a few health trends and tell me your one sentence or one word opinion on each, okay? Or a ring.
Great tracker.
EMF blockers.
I want to see data.
Reverse osmosis water filters.
I want to see data.
Ozempic.
I'm on Ozempic. I'm on a micro, micro dose. Really? I'm on terzapatide.
When did you get on that?
A month ago. Yep. I'm on 2.5 units once a week. And the benefits for longevity are actually really compelling. So we're monitoring, you know, 50 different biomarkers in doing this. But we're interested. There's a lot of potential benefit from these drugs.
Blue light blockers.
Good.
UV filters on windows.
Great.
Barefoot shoes. Great. Multi-wave oscillator therapy.
I want to see data.
Sensory deprivation tank.
Unfamiliar, I want to see data. Sauna? All the studies are observational. I want to see interventional data. Cold plunge? I metabolically cold plunge. My body temperature has declined five degrees Fahrenheit since I've been doing this.
My body temp is now 93 in the morning when my basal body temp is a result of having no inflammation, caloric restriction, time-restricted eating, where my metabolism is now so much more efficient that my body temp has dropped. There's a lot of evidence showing that lower body temp drops is associated with increased lifespan.
So as context, you'd have to swim in ice for a mile to achieve the same body type that I have. The birth control pill. That's complicated. That is a hormone disrupting intervention. It's complicated.
Talk therapy.
Great.
Meditation.
Great. A lot of data.
Do you still believe in God?
I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us. And I think the reality is that we are creating God.
What do you mean by that?
We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you just say, what have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that human storytelling got it exactly right.
in reverse, that we are the creators of God, that we will create God in our own image, which is why we should probably be equal to this moment and level up our game and be an improved species.
Other people have tried to create God or utopias, and that's not turned out very well.
So it's not utopia. I'm saying that we are engineering an intelligence that exceeds our capacity in all things, even our capacity to understand and comprehend. We don't have evidence of any of the gods that we've imagined to be the case if they're out there. Great.
But for those who have to make decisions on a moment-to-moment basis, we need to have some kind of methodical approach on how to answer that.
You said you don't think you're going to die. How long do you want to live?
I think of it like this. I'm very happy I'm alive today. And tomorrow, Saturday, I have things to do tomorrow that I'm excited about. When Saturday arrives, I know I have things to do on Sunday I'm pretty excited about. And so day by day, living for tomorrow and living forever are identical concepts.
It seems weird to ask someone who's already so disciplined what your goals are for 2025. Do you have any? Do you have any resolutions?
Yeah, it's to build Don't Die into the world's most influential ideology. And it's for my endeavor blueprint to be the world's best health protocol. And it's to build the world's largest consortium to clean up our global food supply chain.
Well, Brian, what are you off to next?
The day is full of like, I do six hours of health every day. I go to a few doctor's appointments. I'm a CEO of three companies and I've got a family. I've never been busier in my entire life. Also have the best biomarkers. So all of you entrepreneurs out there, you can take care of your health.
All right, Brian, I consider that a personal challenge or an admonishment. I'm not sure which. Brian Johnson, thank you so much for making the time.
Thanks.
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