Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint for a 150-Year Life: Is It Worth It?

22:45Exactly. And I need to be very clear. I am not doing this to make money. I started this project and I needed to - Can I raise an eyebrow at that?

22:53Ross Douthat:Please. And have one note of skepticism? You can raise two if you like. Okay. Okay. But really, you're not trying to make money. Absolutely not. I mean, my premise on this, I already have plenty of money. I don't need any more money. And in fact, if I wanted to make money, there's probably 10 to 20 businesses I would start way before this one. The business that I'm in sucks. Low margin, pain in the ass, terrible logistics. It just is not the business I would build. And sometimes I really regret having done it. My life would be so much simpler by not having to spend time on this business. But I basically, it's whether you believe me or not, I'm genuinely trying to do people a favor in doing this.

23:38Ross Douthat:Do you pull products? Like, are you constantly pulling things in and out, taking things for a while and saying, oh, that didn't have any effect on the biomarker and so I'll stop taking it? Like, what are you adding and subtracting? Mostly therapies. So when you measure the body and you say, okay, the biological age is blank. Can you reverse it? Then what therapies can you do? And so we went down the list of the best therapies with the best evidence of showing age reversal. And we've done those. So we did a hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We've done sauna. We did IHHT. We've done. What's the what's the best?

24:18Ross Douthat:Again, let's say I'm the person who says, yeah, Brian, I can only do one thing out of your list of therapies. I'm a busy man. I got a lot of kids. I have a podcast. I'm changing jobs. What do I do? Sauna. I would do dry sauna at, that's not wet, not infrared, dry sauna at 200, well, between 175 Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. And I'd do it about four to five times per week. For you, because you're a man, I would suggest you put ice on your boys because otherwise it has negative effects on your fertility. So be sure they're cold. I have five children, honestly. Brian, I'm not super worried about that specific issue.

25:07Ross Douthat:So what about the reversal? You talked about the idea that you're looking for things that actually reverse the age of an organ or a part of your body. What's something that you've done that you think has the most promise for that? We've seen several. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was one of the most efficacious therapies we've ever done. The difficulty is that you need to be in this chamber for 90 minutes for 60 sessions in 90 days. So it's a huge time commitment. That's a commitment. It's a huge one. And so it's just not practical for people to do it. But we saw benefits in skin health, telomeres, microbiome, brain.

25:51Yeah. So we saw across the board.

25:53Ross Douthat:So and again, in any of these cases, right, you're one, you're one person, right? So are you assuming that somewhere in your fan base, there are people who are saying, oh, this is really interesting that Brian Johnson got these results. We're going to set up a big controlled trial based on this. Because I mean, that's again, Again, to take this beyond your own experience, you need that kind of thing, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I'll give you an example where that's bridged is we did this experiment looking at psilocybin. And so people think about psilocybin either as an ancient ceremony, medicine ceremony, or recently for trials looking at PTSD and anxiety, things like that.

26:36So we asked the question, is psilocybin a longevity medicine? And so we did the most quantified psychedelic psilocybin experience in history. We measured 250 biomarkers. And one of the things we found was there was this unique metabolic reset of my blood glucose. And we couldn't, you know, that was not in the literature before. So in that sense, yes, there are several groups now who have petitioned trying to get funding for a rigorous study to look at psilocybin more robustly as a longevity therapy. It'd be a very big shift in how people think about this. So we've had several wins like that of reframing given topics in what we do.

27:15And again, it doesn't answer it definitively, but it points in the direction of, is this worthy of the study?

27:19Ross Douthat:And aspirationally, based on your knowledge right now, without some, you know, further dramatic breakthrough, just to put yourself in the hands of your haters for a minute, like how many years of your life do you think you're getting through this kind of regimen? Yeah, let's actually amplify their argument and say the better argument for them is I'm shortening my life. Not only am I not doing myself good, let's say I'm actually doing myself harm by intermingling with my body. And you know what? I'm open to the criticism. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's better to just let my body do its thing without meddling.

28:00We measure things as best we can. We try to look at all the data. We say, like, how is my body doing? We look at hundreds of markers every month trying to say, is it good or bad? But ultimately, we don't know. You know, so I think it's really an open-ended question. This is like early, early stages of science.

28:17Ross Douthat:But I guess what I'm driving at is there's a best case scenario where you do everything right and the end result is you're healthier in your 80s than you otherwise would be. and you avoid some disease you otherwise would get. And in the end, you get an extra one to seven years of life. And that's a win for you and for everyone who ever watched you on a video, right? But that's not defeating death. That's not don't die, right? Whereas actually defeating or more realistically, I think postponing death, some people would say, is going to come from some big breakthrough that has nothing to do with the protein powder you take or anything.

28:56Ross Douthat:And everything that you do is going to look sort of like, you know, like dieting advice before Ozempic, right? What do you make of that argument? And how does your work, does your work actually connect is what I'm saying to the people who want to add not one to three, but 50 to 75 years to human lifespans, let's say. Yeah. I'm under no illusion that we don't have, you know, the longevity drug that just makes death, you know, go away. But health is forgotten until it's the only thing that matters. And so I think your case is a good example that when you do have something wrong with you, it wrecks your life.

29:34And when you choose to do things that put you at risk of your life being wrecked, that's bad. And so there's rarely is there harm in getting good sleep, exercising, deciding not to do bad things. And so I'm presenting the case that in this moment, this is more of a philosophical stance of you want to treat your body well, you want to be in a good condition, but under no illusion have we arrived yet. But also, if we think that AI is going to progress at the speed it's going to move in the coming years, on the timescale of 30 years, it's a different reality 10 times over. And so I don't think that we need to see the life-extending drug right now.

30:18We just need to see as the coming years progress, that's when I think the real drugs will come about. But right now, it's choosing the lifestyle.

30:25Ross Douthat:Okay, right. Right. But there's a little bit of a what they call a Mott and Bailey argument here. Right. Where, yeah, everyone wants to be healthier. Nobody wants to, you know, have a preventable disease. But that's different from don't die. And you are, in fact, at the same time talking about the vantage point of the 25th century and the idea that death itself can be vanquished. Right. Right. And which which is more important to you, the actual goal of defeating death or just the goal of, you know, adding three years to some people's lives? I mean, it depends. You know, my my parents are in their 70s.

31:07And so for them, the way I think about their care and I spend a lot of time caring for my parents, those three year three years matter a lot. right so i i need progress in ai to move forward very fast for them for me you know if my life expectancy is you know 80 um 33 years uh is a very long time right now for things to advance okay and so it's less urgent for me more urgent for my parents and then for people who have certain

31:36Ross Douthat:conditions yep right okay so the everyday the everyday health stuff is in a way targeted towards people who are already on the downslope of life, perhaps like myself. Right. But, you know, I'm young yet, but for people your age and younger, it's sort of a building block towards a potentially deathless future. Two things have happened to you fairly recently. You were diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and you fell in love. How did those change your perspective, if at all, on the life you've chosen? I'll start with love first. Always a good idea. You know what? This is the happiest I have ever been in my entire life in a relationship.

32:27It is spectacular. I didn't know to aspire to this. When I was a kid, I had in my mind a practical, functional relationship is about as much as you can aspire to. Never at this. And so I am so grateful that she chose me and I can be with her. We have a fantastic time in life. I just can't imagine doing life any other way. So, yes, I'm deeply in love. I feel deep companionship. And I've changed the way I speak to my children about encouraging them what to aspire to in a relationship.

33:05Ross Douthat:Has it made you any less physically healthy? I noticed you flew to Australia to visit her family. And I know this maybe was a little bit tongue in cheek, but I think you published basically something about how much damage that air travel did to your body. And look, I've flown a bunch in the last few months and been to Europe and the West Coast. And, you know, without having your biological monitoring on my body, I believe it. Right. Yeah. So you sacrificed you sacrificed a tiny bit of your own potential immortality to fly to Australia to meet her parents. I'm just curious if there's any more of that.

33:48Ross Douthat:Like, do you feel like maybe you're monitoring your body a tiny bit less intensely? I know that she is now involved in your work and there are some, again, not safe for work sort of things that you have monitored that people can Google if they're interested in. But has it changed your approach to your sort of everyday monitoring at all to be over the moon in love with someone? She, to her credit, she unabashedly supports me. and it is not a situation where she tries to um encourage me to lessen what i'm doing or become less intense you know if anything like my bedtime comes up and she's like baby it's time to go to bed it's 7 50 you got it going and i'm on the couch i'm like i can't move so you know and it means like okay that is all right that's love then i'm not i'm not i i can't deny it um tell Tell me about your illness.

34:42Yep. So getting an incurable diagnosis is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I am so excited about this. And so over the past couple of years, we've really tried to master the basics. Like how do you sleep well and how do you eat well and all those kinds of things. And now I get to work on something incredibly exciting, which is, you know, in modern society, when you get a diagnosis, it's usually you have to just live with it. You have to concede to the disease and deal with the downward spiral of things getting worse. And medicine can't do anything about it. And now, just over the past 12 months, that has shifted.

35:23Individuals are now using AI and biotech to address their own diagnoses. And so Kate got diagnosed with endometriosis. I had my autoimmune gastritis. So the beautiful irony, and as a gift to my haters, Netflix did a documentary on us, Don't Die. We came out gusto, you know, with like all this ambition. And one year later, we both have incurable disease. It's like diagnosed, right? So what great irony. And we are going to cure both of them. And we are down this path. And so if I believe in don't die, and if I want don't die to be real, I must go through the gauntlet of getting diagnosed with an incurable disease or more.

36:06And so it's just a right of passage. It was going to happen eventually. Right, so why not now? Exactly. Rite of passage. I have to do it. I'm ready to do it. I've never felt more ready to do it. So I want this. I'm excited about it. It was a good gift of timing.

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37:28Ross Douthat:Now I do want to get back into the philosophical a little bit. And, you know, again, there is, I think, a pretty clear distinction between the pursuit of cures for existing diseases and the quest to defeat death. And obviously those blur into one another. But I still think there's also there's also a real philosophical distinction. And you are on the we're defeating death side of that distinction. I just want to sort of talk a little bit about what that means, again, to you, right? So, you know, AI has the potential to revolutionize human health and not just cure diseases, right, but extend lifespans by 50 or 75 years.

38:14Ross Douthat:So just let's say that happens and you have the option, and presumably lots and lots of people take it, of living that long. what do you get from the extra 50 to 100 years what's the case for it

38:34it's a similar scenario of us traveling back in time and asking that same question to homo erectus a million years ago they have an axe in their hand and you ask them tell me about the future of the species and they say well you're going to forage and hunt and do this they're not going to talk about the invisible world of molecular or the invisible wavelengths in the air or magic devices in our hand or white pills you swallow that cure disease, make antibody, that cure infections. And I think that's potentially the case right now that we may be the equivalent of Homo erectus. We may be absolute cavemen in our understanding of reality and our ability to experience reality.

39:21And so I don't think any idea that I have of reality right now is a basis to think about that question. I am wide open and curious about a frontier of possibility that is beyond my ability to imagine and articulate. Okay.

39:37Ross Douthat:But I still would like you to articulate a little bit because, you know, you are evangelizing on behalf of this, not as, you know, as a hypothetical, but as a goal that human civilization should have, right? And saying, like, well, I can't tell you what will happen then, but it'll just blow your mind. I think it's an insufficient sales pitch. So I just want you to, just as an example, right? Sure. What happens, like right now, we have seasons of life as human beings. We have childhood, we have you know youth and young adulthood we have a phase where lots of people become parents as you and i both have uh we have the stress of middle age where some people start podcasts and other people you know turn themselves into living living experiments and immortality right and then you have sort of a transition to old age retirement and so on like when you imagine this unimaginable world of extra life?

40:38Ross Douthat:Is it a world where youth extends itself? And people sort of think of themselves as having, instead of, you know, you have 15 years to find your vocation and find a mate, you have 50 years to do it. Is it a world of incredibly long retirements? Is it a world like what is the optimal vision of what people just in their own lives are doing with that extra time? I'm curious. So I'll say two things. One is that the reason why I give the homo erectus example is that I think it's actually more intelligent to sit in the unknown and the comfort of not knowing than it is to try to suppress the hyperventilation of not knowing.

41:33Like when the, when a topic of the future comes up and a person can't immediately answer what they will do, how they would do it and how it will give them meaning, they begin hyperventilating. And I understand that instinct. And so I give that example to say, I understand it's challenging that it really does create tension internally. Also, you can breathe through and sit with the tension and be okay with not knowing. It's okay.

42:02Ross Douthat:So you're saying I should take my question to the sauna. Yeah. With ice on the boys. With ice on the boys. Yep. I got that part. The second thing I would say is that as my – I've traveled 48 years being a conscious person, and I've experienced what it's like to be a child, to be a teenager, to fall in love, to have children, to get intoxicated with alcohol, to have a heartbreaking experience in life, to be betrayed, to have jealousy. I have this collection of experiences. I've also done some psychedelics. I did the psilocybin. I've done 5-MEO-DMT. I've both live streamed both those things. I've done ketamine.

42:46I measured my brain with my brain interface company, Kernel. Never, ever in my past would I have been able to say based upon my 40 plus years of experience what reality would be like using a psychedelic ever. And so the observation here is that I don't know and I'm really curious to understand what is my conscious brain capable of that I'm unaware of. And that question has me so excited about the future, so much more so than like trying to map I'm going through the same things we've done for thousands of years just in different iterations. And maybe the case, but that's what I find compelling.

43:28Ross Douthat:Was it cooler to take psilocybin than to fall in love with Kate? they're both magnificent you know like they're they're different and you know and i would love to listen to this podcast she's listening to it right now she's in the other room i'm gonna ask that question again for you which was better brian taking psilocybin or falling in love with kate you have another chance at that answer kate coming here as i can see your face um you know what um um one more try on the question yeah i think i think there's a correct answer to this question brian i i'm i'm looking at her right now and she's uh god she's so beautiful and she's so sweet and she's amazing and um i would say um they're they're equal that and kate will kate will support me kate is an amazing woman number one that's my first comment your love for brian is a very very impressive commitment to me second i just think like look there is a dystopian view of life extension, right?

44:33Ross Douthat:And I agree that certainly it can be based on a kind of freaked out hyperventilation about the future, but it can also be based, right, on sort of extending from the world as we observe it today. So just to take an example from this very podcast, a couple of weeks ago, I had Sam Moyne on, who is a law professor at Yale, who's written a book called Gerontocracy in America. This is a book about how as people have lived longer and often been healthier late into life, they have ended up effectively sort of maintaining power and influence and wealth in ways that have stunted the prospects for the next generation.

45:16Ross Douthat:Right. And again, that's not a case of like just sort of projecting something out of our imaginations. that's something that is concretely happening now. And let's say that your regimen enables you to live to 125, right? What would be your approach to your relationship with your children and grandchildren in terms of resources, inheritance, anything like that? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a question of what I would do personally, then there's a question for society. We're seeing the imbalances is detrimental to societal health, and it needs to be corrected for. And, you know, I don't know. There's a whole bunch of means and ways to do that.

45:56But over time, these imbalances have worked their way out. I personally am not of the mentality where I'm trying to create super wealth for me and my generation. I'm not trying to hoard value. I don't, that's not my goal in life. Right, but neither is it the goal of who,

46:13Ross Douthat:the people who are in Professor Moyne's telling are hoarding wealth now don't see themselves as hoarders. They're just people who have gotten extra years of their lives and they feel good and don't see why they shouldn't stay in charge, right? I mean, this is a very, very human impulse, right? And it just seems like it's one that would become more powerful if people were given an extra 30 or 40 years of life. I 100 % agree. It's a risk. Also, I'm confident that society was sorted out.

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47:39Ross Douthat:Do you want to go back to earlier stages of your life?

47:48yes interesting say more when i did 5-meo dmt i live streamed it that you want to go back you want to go back to that live streaming no sorry that that following morning i woke up i had butterflies in my stomach like i had when i was 10 years old i was excited about the the hotel room i was in i was excited about getting coffee for Kate, ran down the hallway and knocked on her door. She's like, what is going on? I'm like, I am so happy to see you. Here's your coffee. And then I ran up and down the hallway because I was so energized and I wanted to get some, I wanted to get a workout in before we had to take a flight.

48:28I felt like a kid and oh man, like when you wake up as an adult, you wake up, you just have clouds over your head. Like you've got all these problems to deal with and this drama and like, it's just heavy. I just like the clouds parted and I had blue sky and it was unbelievable. And then over the weeks it faded and like, you know, like the barnacle started accumulating again and I felt like an adult and I had the same weighty things on me, but I have not felt like a kid for 35 years, you know, but more. And I had that brief moment in time. It was spectacular. And, you know, as adults, we forget about it.

49:04It's very hard to go back in time and really remember what it felt like to be a kid or to fall in love for the first time. And so it's just, life is so spectacular and all the different stages we have. But yeah, that moment was really, I mean, it really brought me back to my senses of like, life is amazing. And so much of how we view it is the configuration of our brain. Like how big is the barnacle load? Like how much trauma do you have built up? Like how way down are you in your brain? I guess, yeah.

49:32Ross Douthat:I mean, I can appreciate what you're saying. obviously as I wake up you know as a middle-aged man with many barnacles on my brain at the same time like it seems like some of this also sort of depends on how you feel about how your 20s went right or your 30s in your own self-narration right you worked yourself into the ground making money and your marriage failed and your religious connections failed and so on And so now you're doing a reset and you're in love and you want to feel youthful again. And that makes sense to me completely. But I'm just, I'm curious, again, looking into the future, how many times you can do that and have it feel like sort of a new thing that's worth doing versus something where, you know, I mean, there's a lot of people who blow up their lives, right?

50:30Ross Douthat:Right. In pursuit of that feeling, people who betray spouses and betray children and so on. Right. Like the pursuit of that feeling can obviously be a spur to very, very bad human behavior as well. And again, I apologize for being sort of incomplete in my imaginings. Right. But I'm it's just very easy for me to imagine how people given this extra time, you know, get stuck in cycles. Right. And don't advance and don't progress. I also, you know, a vision of a future where everybody gets an extra 50 years and they spend it blowing their minds on, you know, hallucinogenic drugs sounds really stupid to me, if I'm going to be totally honest with you.

51:14Ross Douthat:Right. Like and I say this, I have never taken hallucinogenic drugs. So it may be that this is this is, again, a failure of my own imagination. But it seems to me that the things that like like I am much more impressed. And I mean this sincerely when you tell me about the insane regimen that you've built for yourself in the real world than when you tell me about the mind blowing things that you experience taking taking hallucinogens, I guess. Yeah. I mean, if you – using a point you made earlier on dietary protocols, like what was available to somebody who was obese before? What could you do? And then imagine telling them about GLP-1s.

51:56Like you're going to take an injection or a pill. It's going to basically just take you to normal. That's a miracle. That's a modern-day miracle. It's biblical. and there's you and i could do a brainstorming exercise and say in five years with the power of ai is it possible you take a pill and it it cleans your brain up to where you feel like you're in your early 20s the speed of your brain processing your disposition on on your life like you know bright-eyed bushy-tailed that it you know and like and then the way you would be on a podcast like maybe your questions would be very different. The way you approach your guests may be different.

52:37These are not unimaginable scenarios.

52:40Ross Douthat:But in that scenario, you would have to be assuming that this magical pill strips away the barnacles, but leaves whatever accumulation of wisdom that you found. There's a lot of ways in which I would never say that I want to roll the clock back because I think there's sets of things that I've learned and experienced that have changed me and yes, made me older biologically and mentally. But I would certainly, when you handed me that pill, right, I would want to read the fine print. I wouldn't want to become my 24-year-old self in this body. Although I certainly would like, actually, I get a lot of sleep.

53:21Ross Douthat:I sleep well. But there are other aspects of being 24, obviously, that would be desirable. The body itself, Let's take a couple more sort of speculative points and then end. So among AI people who I talk to, there are people who are into the idea that AI is going to cure disease and lead to radical life extension. And then there's a lot of people who are committed to the idea that the point is to get the mind to escape the body. Right. And these are different varieties of transhumanism, I guess. But the idea of the singularity that people talk about starts in a way with the idea that eventually we're going to merge mind with machine and escape embodiment.

54:13Ross Douthat:And I'm curious if that appeals to you as someone whose quest for long life is very, very embodied, right? Like you're in, you know, whatever someone might say in criticism of you, they can't say that your head is in the clouds, right? You're in your body. You're thinking about your body. What do you make about the aspiration to have immortality without the body? Yeah. I mean, first, the founders of all the big AI companies are our personal friends. and they see that big things are coming. And what I'm trying to say, and I'm answering your question just in an indirect path. I'm saying that in this moment, whether you're imagining we are going to live in our bodies forever, whether we're going to upload ourselves, whether there's some kind of hybrid, what I'm saying is the only conversation happening right now on a planetary scale is a value question.

55:13And right now, the ultimate values we have as a species is power, wealth, status. We will pursue those three objectives at any cost, including our own life. We will trade our conscious existence to achieve those three things. We are willing to trade our earth's health for those three things. And so the don't die philosophy is don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill the earth, and align AI with don't die. And so this is a philosophy not trying to solve for human needs. It's trying to solve for intelligence itself on planet earth in this moment, where if you believe in this, the Fermi paradox, like are we at a self-destructive stage as a species?

56:02Will we survive this moment? Will the human race go forward, I'm trying to say the ultimate, the pinnacle of existence, like the absolute highest expression of virtue is that intelligent life chooses to preserve intelligent life above all

56:22Ross Douthat:other objectives. Somebody once said, greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends. I feel like there's a big part of human existence on this planet that is not devoted to optimizing power, wealth, and money, but is devoted to sacrifice for others. And historically, the central part of that sacrifice has been a willingness to not always die, but take risks of death so that others might live. And we do that, you know, even in our cosseted upper middle class existence or my cosseted upper middle class existence, we do that. we do that all the time, right? And that's what women do when they bear children.

57:07Ross Douthat:It's what men do when they go to war. Women go to war now too, obviously, but that, you know, that once was a division of labor. And why would you risk, why would you take the risk of pregnancy if, you know, there's, you're trying to never die, right? Well, maybe we'll have artificial wombs, right? I know, you know, I know there can be a technological answer to all these things, but But it just seems to me like don't die as a centering philosophy risks, very strongly risks, losing all of the benefits that human beings have gained from being willing to die, like a willingness to die. Like what are you willing to die for, Brian?

57:47I mean, it's no surprise that the inevitability of death is the hardest existential question that humanity has always faced. And it makes sense that if you have that exist for tens of thousands of years, humans are going to create elegant explanations on why death is a virtue, why it is something that one should justify. I don't think death – I want to be clear.

58:15Ross Douthat:Like, I don't think that death is good. I'm against death. But I think being willing to die is good. Exactly. And what I'm saying is that is a philosophy that is built in reaction to addressing this uncomfortable reality that death is inevitable. This is a reconfiguration of our psyche at the deepest possible level. And it's unimaginable that every value we've come to hold in esteem is now in question. And so what I'm saying is there is a future where don't die is intuitive and natural and common sense. And we look back at our stage and be like, those guys were barbarians coming up with these stories about why, you know, sacrificial death was good for society.

59:13And so it takes a leap in imagination to imagine this. But you look back through history, like that's always been the case that these ideas are wacky and they run counter to all the common norms and intuitions and status quo. Don't die is a gigantic leap as a philosophical statement of we value existence above all other virtues. Right.

59:33Ross Douthat:but okay, I'm just going to end with, and you can respond however you see fit. And there's a line in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books to the effect that this is, you know, in the same zone as Dracula and Dorian Gray and all the others that you're trying to either offer an alternative to or not, right? So someone reaches out and claims immortality in that story, Lewis says, they find their heart's desire and find despair. And I have sympathy for your heart's desire, right? I am a Christian. I believe in God. I want to live forever, too, in some form. And the Christian promise is itself. It's a little bit like the singularity, right?

1:00:27Ross Douthat:spirit surviving bodies and it's a little bit like physical life extension people, Christians believe in the resurrection so they believe that you'll be reunited with embodied existence but really crucial to the Christian vision is the idea that this includes a kind of purification a transformation, purgation so that the self that lives forever is also set free of all the things that make us unhappy here and now, like the personal hells that we can create. And again, forgive me the psychoanalysis, but you started out by saying you got into this because your life was destroyed, right? You were depressed and miserable and unhappy, right?

1:01:09Ross Douthat:And so you found a purpose. But I just want to know, suppose this purpose was fulfilled. I give you bodily immortality and you don't have to monitor your glucose levels to get it. Would you want to live forever alone with yourself? I'll go back to this experience I had with the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT. Okay. It was, without question, the most potent experience of my existence. And I did a very large dose, 27 milligrams. And my experience in doing that was it basically takes you on a journey to understand the incomprehensible preciousness of existence. And you're met with a decision. you can either say yes and journey into that incomprehensible state or you can panic and say i don't know or i don't have control and if you say no and you panic it's a bad outcome it is a very like it is a excruciating experience to be trapped in that state when you're panicking and want to claw back control?

1:02:40I said yes. And I think it was the first time in my life I was physically, spiritually, mentally ready for that. And I said yes to existence in a deeper, more comprehensive way than I ever thought possible. And even though that that experience has now been several months over, it will not leave my mind that the truth, the greatest truth is an uncompromising, never ending, non qualified, yes to existence. Good.

1:03:18Ross Douthat:But what if the message of that, and the reason that it has stayed with you, is that your current life is lived in an everyday constant quest for what? control. You've given, I mean, this is your project is about controlling the body. What if the psychedelic was trying to tell you that the uncompromising yes to existence also includes accepting not only suffering, but death and not pretending that you're going to micromanage your way through it? Isn't that a possible interpretation? I think what's going to happen is AI has built autonomous self-driving cars, self-driving software. We will have autonomous health.

1:04:08Eventually, we'll have little nanobots running through our bloodstream, making corrections to genes.

1:04:14Ross Douthat:So you won't have to have, you can let go at that point. You just have to hang on a little while. We are inevitably headed towards that where it will be autonomous. It will happen at speeds and scales which are beyond our capacities. Now, I don't know when this is going to happen, but it is inevitable to happen if we hang out as a species and we continue to have an orderly society. And in that moment, everything changes. But yes, this is a, you have to roll with my thought experiments. You do have to accept a few basic premises on the speed of technological development on what we're actually capable of.

1:04:50But yes, I believe we're walking toward autonomous health.

1:04:52Ross Douthat:You have to accept the premise that eventually we can have this kind of control without having the downsides of obsessive control. And in that moment, you release control. Yeah, you let go. It's a job to do this now, but eventually it won't be coming. To be clear, don't die is friendly towards Christians and Muslims and Jews and every religion. Don't die does not say anybody is wrong. Being a Christian, great. we're both in agreement neither you nor I want to die right now respectfully Brian I mean the affirmation is appreciated but you know in the end yeah in the end we'll find out Brian Johnson thank you for joining me thank you for having me

1:06:00Ross Douthat:I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been part of this show's audience. It's been an honor to share these interesting times with you.

1:06:22Thank you.