#1054 - Bryan Johnson - The 2026 Immortality Protocol

31:32And what they don't realize in doing that is like the reason why that's hard is because they're not sleeping. Not sleeping well just destroys your willpower. And they're not sleeping well because, you know, like five other preceding things are the case. So I try to help people understand, like, here's a five-step process to nail your sleep. When you nail your sleep, your willpower boosts. When your willpower boosts, you can tackle Skittles. That's your therapy. Okay. So it's sleep numero uno? By far. Okay. Okay, give me, after all of the experimentation, what's the 30 ,000 foot view on how to get perfect sleep?

32:06You want to lower your resting heart rate before bed. It's the highest value biomarker you can track on a daily basis. So you'll find that everything that increases your heart rate before bed, besides sex, is bad for you. And everything that lowers your heart rate before bed is good for you. And so, for example, food, timing of food is really important. So if your bedtime is at 10 p.m., you want to have your final meal of the day at 6 p.m. so four hours i personally do like 10 to 12 hours because i really like that digestion time it lowers my heart rate to like 39 to 40 beats per minute so food uh four hours before uh 60 minutes before bed screens off so that's very hard because we're all addicted to our phones but hard cut phones off uh because you want to avoid scrolling texting working and that's very arousing for the body um red light amber light in the house so whites blue lights uh are really bad for melatonin release.

32:58You want to have a 60-minute wind down. So when screens are off, you want to use that 60 minutes to just calm yourself down. So this is very hard because people have, we create these habits where we're glued to our phones. And if we're not on our phones, we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so it creates this panic. So the 60-minute time window before bed is really precious in that you just need to kind of be with yourself. Now you can hang out with a friend, a family member, you can go for a walk, like your breath work, meditation, a hobby, like puzzle, journal, like whatever. But you just need to learn how to be with yourself without stimulation.

33:33And that will naturally allow you to calm yourself down. I do this process where I talk to myself. So like I talk to my various Bryans. So like Sleep Brian comes on duty at 7.30 PM because my bedtime's at 8.30 PM. And then all the Bryans line up and they want to talk to me. How many are there? Oh man, there's like probably a dozen, like probably loud. It's like a Bonnie Blue meetup, okay. Yeah, so the first one's Ambitious Brian. Ambitious Brian is by far the loudest, right? He's always like, he shows up and he's like, I got a banger idea. Brand new idea. It's fucking amazing. And Sleep Brian says, I love you, Ambitious Brian, right?

34:06Doing us a real solid, like doing great out there. Also, we're in sleep mode. So I'm going to write down your idea and tomorrow we'll talk about this. And the next one is Anxious Brian. He's like doing all the checks. Like today, did you make any big errors? Did you like, you know, do anything? I've said anyone. Do anything stupid? you say anything you regret and so like doing that internal reconciliation of like do you have good self-awareness and they all just line up but if you don't talk to them then when your head hits the pillow they show up and they're like we're here and we want to talk about our stuff and then you go to bed finally you wake up at 2 a.m they're like we're back and so you've got to have some kind of reconciliation process to calm those voices so like those are the big ones like Food, light, wind down routine, screens off.

34:54Yeah, like, and then caffeine. So you want to have your final caffeine around noon each day. So it has a six hour half-life. Those are the real big ones. So, but what you want is like for a man, you want to be like 50-ish heart rate. Same with the female. If you're in that zone, you're doing pretty well. If you can bump down a bit more. And once you get that nighttime routine knocked down, then you can start exercising very well. If you sleep really well, your willpower skyrockets. If you sleep poorly, it knocks your prefrontal cortex offline. You can't really have much willpower. So that's number one.

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36:35Yeah. People, um, people try to, uh, they come back, they come argument. That's great. Like, um, the body loves routine. Now it does not mean that you have to always be in a routine, but the body is built for routine. So for example, if your bedtime is 10 PM, your circadian rhythm rhythm is locked in to 10 PM and your body expects sleep to happen at 10 PM. This is what jet lag is. Yes, exactly. And so like you have a garbage truck that rolls through your body at around 10 30 p.m and it's there to pick up all the trash what is that it's your your basically your cleansing system of like your your lymphatic system is cleaning all the trash from your body and if you're not asleep at 10 30 p.m and in your deep sleep mode it's gonna it's gonna not come so you've got trash built up like new york you've got the trash bags all over the place and so people think if i'm not in bed by 10 i'm gonna go to bed at one that's okay i'll sleep tomorrow morning makeup it doesn't work that way and so the body has very specific rhythms that it wants to be on and so when you lock in it's good and so when someone makes the argument like i'm gonna give my body some problematic stress right i'm gonna like push it to one and then i move back the body hates it like inconsistent sleep is as bad as little sleep i was gonna say do you when it comes to prioritization is duration more important than regularity or are they equal regularity by far is the best one yeah more than duration uh oh so i'm sorry you said duration um i don't know uh i'm not sure on that one it's kind of like picking your favorite child yeah yeah because you kind of need both yeah like the lesson here is uh because these are bad habits people have you need to be on time you can't make it up you can't uh skip during the week and then make it up the weekend it doesn't work that way so you miss a garbage truck every day it doesn't come back like sure maybe the weekend but then you're you're so off on your circadian rhythm that like now is the garbage truck even in service okay um so i understand what you mean with regards to the timing but the 60 minute window what if you don't get it what if this you're out to dinner you're doing something with friends you're hanging out you don't get to you're around some bright light i've got a great a great story from a friend when he was in his hyper hyper optimizer zone which everybody goes through where it's like the stress of trying to be perfect kills you more quickly than your imperfections do and uh he had this 60 minute wind down routine which was blue light blockers on and the mouth tape and the nose strip and the magnesium by glycinate and everything else.

39:22And he'd been sort of winding down for 60 minutes. And his girlfriend at the time had been downstairs and he was brushing his teeth in the dark so that he wouldn't have any light on. And she just comes like tinkering in, hits the light in the bathroom, lights come on. He's like, ah, he's blinded. He hasn't looked at light for an hour, goes to bed and he's raging. He's like, ah, it's my entire routine's been messed up. And I laid there sort of staring at the ceiling, doesn't sleep. And she drops off within five minutes, having just come in from I'm like, you know, scrolling TikTok or whatever. The example is about the fragility of reliance on that and the fear that without it, what does that create?

40:01Oh, I mean, how am I going to be able to write my book today? I didn't get my, you know, like, as you said, like what were the stupid things that I said today? That's anxious, Brian. But another type of anxiety is, oh, I didn't get my routine done. Therefore, I can't sleep, which becomes self-fulfilling. Sleep's one of the very few things that trying harder around it makes it worse yeah yeah i mean people can find their happy balance i think if you look at the uh various archetypes of people some people love that kind of regimen they love to be um regimented they like structure they like process procedure order and that's just their personality type other people like the girlfriend in the story she's not and so the i think the thing here is for people to recognize their kind of archetype of where they naturally gravitate to where they feel good about themselves.

40:51If you're not naturally orderly and structured, like don't be that, right? If you're, so it's just like find your gem, but understand there are principles at play, which you can't just override, right? Regardless of whether you like structure or don't, like if you have a three hour swing between bedtimes across a week. Yeah. Yeah, your body doesn't work in that way. Okay. um what are what are the things that people focus on for sleep that don't move the needle

41:24i i really uh i guess i take 300 mcgs of magnesium of um melatonin just like so a third of a gram microgram milligram yes okay yeah yeah people people fucking way way way overcooked like one milligram, five milligrams, like. There's 30 and 50 milligrams. Yeah, exactly. I do a very tiny dose of melatonin. It's to offset the calcification that happens in my pineal gland. Like as you age, your pineal gland calcifies, you produce less melatonin. So it's like a little offset, teeny bit. So in 10 years time, maybe you'll take 500 micrograms. Yeah, exactly. And so it's a very small touch. Otherwise I don't take anything for sleep.

41:59And so I'd so much rather build habits. And this is the same thing, like Americans, just like we are, we take more antidepressants than any country in the world. Quick fix. We love pills. We love pills to solve fundamental problems. A gummy or a powder. Yeah. Habits are the strongest ones. So that's why I focus on just build your sturdy habits. In the archetype you are, that's the tried and true thing that delivers the best. Now, if you want to try to amplify with whatever you take, cool. But generally speaking, it's really about habits. Okay. Give me your formula for behavior change. Behavior change is so important.

42:35Let's assume someone's taken the first red pill which is sleep and I now have access to the amount of willpower that I'm supposed to have as opposed to however much is diminished when I'm a shit sleep from the night before. I've arrived look at behold my litany of shitty habits. Exactly. Like a guy in a side alley going would you care to peruse my wares of shitty habits? someone has a shitty habit maybe it's the skittles maybe it's whatever pick whichever you think is a good one talk me through your james clear approach to the brian johnson's james clear okay so actually i'll show you mine but i wonder if this resonates or not with people but i had this issue where at 7 p.m i would overeat every night yeah evening eating for me is the only time and no one ever over eats in a breakfast oh yeah it was just 9 a.m and i gorged myself on snickers yeah exactly yeah like maybe like in a weekend brunch where you order you know pancakes you're like oh my god it's a one-off yeah that was a bad idea i don't want to do that yeah i feel awful yeah so like your willpower goes down all day it makes sense like 7 p.m like you have stress you're worn down like you just want to like whatever so that was my issue i over ate at 7 p.m and so i did it every day for years and every night was the same battle right like I'm not going to do it.

43:56I'm not going to do it. I do it. And then like, you know, my, the top button of my pants, I can't be buttoned up. And I'm like, fucking hate myself. Like this is so tight. I'm so uncomfortable. So I tried so many things to stop that. And I couldn't. And so the one thing that I did is one day I just kind of said in jest evening, Brian, you're fired. Like you, Brian, who occupy me from 5 p.m. to 7 to 10 p.m., you're an unreliable thing. Like every day. Yeah, steward. Like you basically come up with these rationalizations like tonight's the last night. Tomorrow morning we're going to exercise really hard.

44:34It's one bite. Like whatever your specific entry point is, you always convince me to do it. You're a slippery motherfucker. Exactly. And you basically make morning Brian miserable. You make dad Brian less good, less good dad. Like ambitious Brian is hurting because of you. And so I said, you're fired. And so that means from 5 PM to 10 PM, you do not have authority to eat food. No matter what, like, I don't care what's happening. You cannot eat food because you're so shifty. And so I just made that rule. And so I gave him a name. I wrote down his arguments. And so he would come into my mind and be like, Hey, I'm here.

45:10And I'm like, Hey, evening, Brian. Like, how you doing, man? Fuck you. Yeah. And like, Oh, you're going to use that. we're going to work out hard tomorrow morning argument or like tonight's last night like i see you and i know what that is and i've done this a hundred times i've never my entire life felt satisfied with myself after doing this ever i've never felt proud of myself i've never felt good yeah you're selling yourself a lie about how you're going to feel after doing exactly and so yeah that was just it was just a rule and so i guess the rule is something like none is better than some.

45:41That we do like to rationalize that, oh, just like every once in a while is fine. Moderation is a principle of life I want to play by. We have all these very clever catchphrases to justify our inability to actually do what we want. And so, yeah, that was a really clean hook for me. That's cool. And the reason that I like it is because of this most recent iteration of the over-optimizing. Can we not just fucking like, how lame how like you know the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections um moderation man and there is a kernel of truth in it and this is why like a slower more gentle approach to i see you i think there's something there that i see you i think there's something there is hey man um your focus on these habits is a kind of fragility uh and it is destroying the enjoyment of life by obsessing over how you live it right so i get the angle on that the problem is that nobody scrutinizes the just live by vibes man approach yeah with the same like level of uh resolution because by design they're living by fucking vibes so nothing's being tracked yeah yeah but you've i've never even thought of it before but you've fucking nailed it which is the, I just live by moderation, dude, is not living by moderation.

47:07It's living by extremis. Like you end up, the moderation, you put, I always use this example because I like biscuits, cookies. I like biscuits. If you tell me pack of Oreos, there's one outside, you can eat none of them or you can eat all of them. I'm like, done. Exactly, right? But you can eat two of them. I'm like, I'm fucking Superman. No, I can't eat two of them. No, give me a start. Maybe, I don't know, maybe some people aren't like this. Yeah. I'm a eat all of them or eat none of them kind of guy. Yeah. So you're what on the surface, like first order looks like the very bureaucratic dictatorial Nazi policy.

47:45Like, how can you do this to yourself? Like, ah, you're not balancing life. Like, it'd be much better if you just allowed yourself to treat like every so often. It's like, okay, show me how every so often your every so often is. Yeah, exactly. It's not that every so often. It's actually most of the time. Yeah. uh you know i just like i'm a bit more flexible with my sleep you know sometimes i let myself sleep in sometimes i give myself i go to bed a little bit later like it's like okay let me just look at when you're going to bed it just keeps on shifting later and later and there is no trend over time it's just what and sometimes it's getting wider yeah um so yeah i think i've never thought of it before but the um everything in moderation is not done in moderation exactly right yeah so this is like again memetic moral philosophy warfare so the person who's arguing for moderation is attempting to take uh a a drive towards health and uh make that low status and make their moderation high status so this if you if you really if you look at the world through this lens you realize everybody at all times is trying to take their position and they're like assessing the battlefield and they're saying anything that makes me feel low status i'm going to invert and make that high status thing low status and my thing high status because i inherently want to feel superior to people at all times and that is like literally everything that's happening at any moment in society ever it's just like humans want to feel superior and high status okay do you know uh the inner citadel idea by isaiah berlin i don't allow me to teach you i I think this may be useful to you.

49:24Isaiah Berlin says, when the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The different way to look at it is if your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg.

49:58And if you can't, then you cut off the leg and denounce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. That's right. Yeah. I mean, that's it. I mean, basically, that's the exact articulation of what we've been discussing. Yeah. It's the medic and moral philosophy of warfare to feel superiority. Because nobody wants to feel inferior. Yeah. It's like... You looked at Adlerian stuff much? Yeah. And a lot of that is driven by this, I can't be inferior. This is why getting into a relationship with too much of a power imbalance, one person is significantly busier than the other. One person is significantly better looking the other.

50:32One person has significantly more attention than the other. The power imbalance is so great that unless the second person is happy to only ever sing harmony and never sing lead, and is there like in service and the service becomes their reward. if you have two people, you can't have two people singing lead. Like one person has to sing harmony. And if your lead singing and their lead singing and theirs is fucking way ahead or yours is way ahead, there's going to be tension. And I think about, um, I think about those bridges that you see during earthquakes and they sort of do this, they like flex like that.

51:07And I think about that kind of visual, it's this sort of flexing intention. It's not even necessarily a pulling apart it's i'm going this way and you're going that way and yeah yeah exactly right yeah i mean like 100 like what what is society i mean i guess like there's two macro games happening in society like in that tension is um what is what is high status and then within that game of who is high status right that's it and then you've got everyone else playing to try to take the high status make it low status but like right now the highest status game is wealth right capitalism and this came from adam smith a couple hundred so i'm saying like we look is the highest status game raw wealth what about uh a renowned popularity recognition because you look at uh at somebody who already has lots of wealth and a lot of the time they continue to pursue status.

52:04I spoke about this with Naval and his, I think this is true. You're interested to get your perspective. Money is evolutionarily novel and yet it's a proxy for status and it gives you things that status can't, but we should have raw status for status's sake, prestige, dominance, access, like recognition. That should be more deeply rooted and therefore less easy to satiate than money. Because money is more novel. And money is not direct access to the thing that you need, right? Money without status can make you live, and status without money can make you fucking miserable and kind of on the street in a way.

52:41But it seems like people who get lots of status rarely continue to pursue money, whereas people who get the fucking infinity money do always continue to pursue status. Do you see an asymmetry here? I'm interested with your perspective on money and status absolutely right i mean i think uh basically i think that's correct i think uh money has more raw power just from a transactional just just raw power like the ability to to do things in the world like to move the world money is in this current context now behind that so again like you remember two games one is what is high status and then two is who's winning within status.

53:25And so my comment on money is that that is within context of that as high status. But if you look at broader status of what is high status, religion has played status. You look at Christianity where Jesus is like, look guys, I've got a new status game for you. And it's not what you're being told. I'm going to tell you a whole new rule set. And so any religion's done that. And so this is the game I'm trying to play. I'm trying to basically say like right now, capitalism is status. Like it is, if we said like, this is the thing and I'm trying to say, this is the thing that might lead us to make a terrible error in judgment on what we do in this moment.

54:09And that the flip is existence itself is high status. Interesting. And never to the exchange of anything else. It's never worth trading existence for anything else. wealth, power, or status. Existence itself is the highest virtue. In other news, if you're feeling tired, you might not need more sleep, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated. And proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's about having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to properly absorb those fluids. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio, sodium, potassium, and magnesium, with no color, no sugar, no artificial ingredients, or any other BS.

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55:34I usually care about the box more than that. Drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I do understand. And I think what I like is that you are not trying to upend the game of status itself. Yeah. That's locked in. It's like saying, uh well you know rather than trying to work out a more efficient rocket to get us off this launch pad we can just defeat gravity and you go no yeah yeah there are physics within the system and one of the physics is one of the physical laws is yeah yeah yeah so really the master game in society like the ultimate game is determining what is status like what is highest status and then of course you have billions and billions of humans will play within the game they'll just be like oh this is the this is the game and the function and the reward system like i'm playing they won't think about it then they won't realize that the game's been set up for them they'll just play it that's interesting yeah so rather than trying to uh convince people not to play the game you just change what the game is pointing exactly and they'll play they'll have the same fundamentals they'll apply to the new game so when you when you say existence is the highest virtue that the same human behaviors that are stamped out throughout time same archetypes same players direction same stuff every single time just get the game right and that's what i'm saying like if this moment is so simple just get the objective function correct it's like a i don't know some sort of judo throw that uses your opponent's momentum against them yeah exactly so to speak yeah yeah that's right that's right okay tell me about your sauna experiments yeah i was watching those unfold with intrigue so we really did we discovered quite a few things that i didn't i shouldn't say discover um we found out a lot of quite quite a few things so one is for those who are new to sauna um dry sauna has the most evidence because you're trying to get your core body temperature up and so infrared does not get hot enough and wet sauna uh will basically burn you at the temperatures you need so dry sauna is the right traditional dry sauna yep yep uh 20 minutes a day at 200 degrees fahrenheit 83 is that 83 celsius 93 celsius all right 200 fahrenheit um so three things we found one is i was in la during the la wildfires when like 20 yeah that'll you up if you go close so yeah so i was measuring my toxins in my body uh when before the fires happened and then after the fires happened and i was absolutely baked in toxins so i was in like the 99th percentile as i'm sure other people in la were too of toxins you could like go down the list be like this chemical is used in pvc pipe for for housing this this chemical is like a a countertop this chemical is like you gotta you literally see the burned houses breathing in teflon and yeah whatever else and you could like down the list you could look at the industrial solvent as a key of sorento yes exactly so my body was full of all these houses and cars were burnt and the sauna annihilated the toxins it was remarkable so that was cool okay two is we have been trying to get my microplastics down because microplastics live in the body and the brain.

58:37And we were measuring microplastics in my blood and also my semen. And so microplastics hang out in the testicles. And that has all sorts of negative effects on testosterone, on fertility. You just don't want them hanging out there. So I have over a 90 % reduction in my blood and my semen of microplastics. And that was a first in world demonstration of no one had ever done that before. It's because the microplastics test is actually kind of hard to do, right? Exactly. The test is hard and no one had done semen before. No one had ever repaired blood and semen. Yeah. Yeah. Just hold, this is fascinating, but you know why kitchen detergents, say 99.

59:18Kills 99.999 % of bacteria? It's not because they don't, they're unable to kill more bacteria. to the testing tolerance only goes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then this kind of feels like it's not too dissimilar of the same. So one is we showed that sauna is a really efficacious detox protocol. Number two is we showed, well, we think sauna was the reason why my microplastics went down so dramatically. We relatively controlled across everything else. Exactly. It was very controlled. Like we didn't do any of the therapies in that timeframe that were meaningful. um and then three is um i had really great changes improvements in my vascular markers so it actually improved even though i'm in really good health it still had a measurable increase in my vascular markers it increased my veg f this is uh like you want veg f in your body because it helps produce more capillaries and and blood vessels like you want a higher level it increased by 400 percent which was amazing um i had a dramatic drop of p-tal which is a a protein in the brain that leads to Alzheimer's.

1:00:22So that dropped dramatically. We also, I did a test on looking at when you're in that kind of environment, you want to put ice packs on your testicles because otherwise it annihilates your fertility markers. It'll take down your count, your morphology, all the above. And even men who say like, I don't care, I'm not trying to have a baby. There's really negative feedback loops. So if you have smashed fertility markers, then it has negative effects on your health overall so i did uh three weeks with ice then i went two weeks without ice in that two-week window i got smashed so my fertility markers went down by 50 the prices that you pay to uncover this stuff for the rest of us but you know so i went back on ice and i've been back on ice for six weeks now and i got these results on my drive here okay cool yeah so um i'm gonna go by memory um so it's the highest sperm count i've had ever right it's the highest motility count i've ever had it's the highest morphology i've ever had so like they bounce not only do they bounce back it's the highest i've ever been and if you look at these are like off the chart numbers like six to ten times the level of like normal fertility so what do you think's going on there is that just straight vascular changes we're not sure i need what do you think's going on come on ball park the mechanism for me.

1:01:40Have a play around. Yeah, I mean...

1:01:45I really need to deep dive into this more. yeah i i don't know it's it's a really big jump and i've been doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy we've been doing the sauna um we haven't done really any other meaningful therapy that could boost it okay so let's go through the protocol for the sauna you said 200 degrees dry minutes yeah dry the traditional sauna ice pack on the balls yeah uh does time of day matter okay um does what did you go for as a solution for ice pack on the balls yeah so you can buy these from amazon they're like eight bucks bpa free uh no toxins reusable so uh yeah they're blue uh you get a pack of like four and then you want them on the balls in the sauna so put on cotton underwear and then cotton shorts and then slide them underneath the shorts in between the to exactly yeah and then like so just have two of them in there but yeah if you keep them chilled like we wonder whether the chilling actually has an improvement like we we can't that could be so interesting yeah it's got nothing to do with the sauna should you put an ice pack on your balls for 20 minutes we know sauna destroys but we wonder like is is the icing because we saw get out of the sauna put the ice pack so like yeah if you're if you're working now like so we actually were going to do another experiment after this completed i was going to start icing the testicles during the day like just when i work like because we saw a like a 30 jump in my fertility markers in the first three weeks of doing ice and we're trying to figure out like why did the sauna increase it and then the ice just protect the protected the increase or so we're still trying to figure out what the cause is collaboration of the two okay um what else have i got to ask are you taking any binders like a charcoal a cholestyramine uh a nac flush type scenario something to capture the heavy metals that are coming out of you none right no so it was just two pairs of cotton shorts an ice pack yep and like a cotton towel wipe yourself off and you know as you're sweating jump in the shower why the wipe yourself off i'll just if if the if the toxins are being excreted via sweat just snag it when it's like hanging out your skin so it doesn't dry and uh shower straight after yep that's it that's the entirety of the protocol cool um i'm going to guess you were doing that seven days yeah every day right yeah i do it after working out so i go work out for an hour i immediately jump into the sauna and so i'm already really warmed up as opposed to spending the first seven minutes getting up to exactly temperature also this seems to be from ronda patrick there seems to be some pretty good evidence about well you're kind of extending the session's benefits somewhat so you're stacking a few things together exactly right but i do like the idea of um that's talking about behavior change earlier on stacking habits yes it's very strong exactly like look if i'm going to train and i know that when i get home from training my training session is an hour but i'm actually going to book an hour and 40 in and that gives me 10 minutes to get home and then i'm going to get in the sauna for 20 minutes or wherever i'm going to go to maybe the sauna is the gym or whatever yeah and then it's going to give me 10 minutes for my shower and then i'm done and i've done both of these things and i've done them in the right order yeah i've done them like together yeah in that format um anything else on sauna anything else initially i did sauna in the morning so in the first like two weeks it absolutely wrecked my sleep i destroyed it from doing it in the morning well i think just doing it period like it's it's like 200 degrees is a lot like it's really really warm i had never done sauna before so i think it was just the adaptation time period i'm fine now but just like note that there's initially an adaptation time period and then two is i tried at night initially it wrecked my sleep but then i tried it after i had the adaptation period and it boosted my sleep so i found that there is some virtue in doing it before bed so you just have to run the experiment you have to see for you if it's going to improve sleep or not yeah that also means that you're going to have to be training later in the day which is not always necessarily yeah exactly if you pair those two things exactly because you don't want to exercise within four hours before bedtime yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay hbot talked to me about that i was messaging you the day that i started my hbot yeah was the day that you put your video out and i'm in there and you're like i can't remember what the fuck you replied with uh uh uh 20 25 20 and 5 yeah uh 83 percent with natural blah blah blah just because i'm in this big fucking metal dildo and the guy that's there vance from beam hyper barracks in austin if anyone wants to go to a great hyper barracks place it's fucking sick you can book it by the hour vance is great and i'm knocking on this tiny little portal out of my submarine.

1:06:30And he comes in and I just showed my phone. I'm like, what's that? I couldn't be bothered to use the radio to get outside. I'm like, Brian messaged, are we doing this? And he sort of went. That's so funny. Yeah, put his thumb up like that. So hyperbaric red pill me. When you messaged me, I was worried about you because a week before somebody had blown up in Arizona. so yeah so what does that look like well so in in hyperbaric the idea is you pressurize so you're actually so at atmosphere at sea level we're about 15 pounds per square inch of of concentration of oxygen at two atmospheres you're at 30 so you pressurize and some hyperbaric chambers they pressurize and then they just push 100 oxygen into the chamber so you're just hanging out and breathing the oxygen but if you're doing that you're sitting in a pressurized chamber and you're basically a flammable by a candle way if you're your bomb like so if something if if there's a spark of any type yeah you just blow up your phone or yeah some device that you've got with you or whatever the fuck okay so no no no no no i would this was i was not i was i had the i was breathing the mask i was cool great okay cool yeah so um yes hyperbaric oxygen therapy I think to date it's fair to say has been the single best performing therapy we've ever done.

1:07:59And this is both good news and bad news because the bad news is that it's expensive, it's inaccessible, it's time-consuming. Super inconvenient. So it sucks because I hate sharing this because people, it's very exciting, but then it sucks because people can't do it. I mean, if you're ready to say, I've got to find a sauna to use and most people don't have a sauna in the house. Oh God, now you're telling me I need to produce my own oxygen. This thing weighs fucking two tons. Where does it fit? Totally. Yeah. And like who has 90 minutes in a day to go do this thing? So I would just say for people who have a serious condition, and there's a variety of conditions that this could address, like even cognitive decline or, you know, wounds for diabetes.

1:08:46What would be on the list? So there's a lot of emergent evidence for cognitive decline, that if you're entering the latter parts of your life and you're really struggling, this could have a meaningful impact on that. It is used for diabetics who can't heal very well. It's used for healing, so people who've had surgeries to accelerate the healing process. If you have some kind of injury you're really trying to overcome, that can be great. So there are some - That's just telling me that some athletes post-surgery are in 90 minutes three times a day. Exactly. They're trying to hit that 90 session number within weeks.

1:09:16Yes. So like there are some specialized applications where, and people where it makes sense for the person to do, but I just want to be very sensitive. I understand like it sucks to hear something's really efficacious and you can't get out of exclusion. Yeah. It makes sense. So like, uh, but yeah, we, we, we basically like we do with all things we measure, we had this, we cast this really wide net. We measured everything we could in my brain, my microbiome, um, a full blood panel, um, saliva, stool, metabolomics, proteomics, like you name it, we measured it. And we just found improvements across the board.

1:09:48It was really because most therapies will improve like this particular marker or that marker, but rarely do they have this broad spectrum improvement. So we saw like the cognitive decline marker, PTAL 217 drop. We saw my microbiome. I had zero dysbiosis in my microbiome, like no signatures at all of dysbiosis. We saw I had no detectable inflammation in my body. So like when my HSCRP came back zero. The 99.99, like he's beaten the test. Exactly. It was really remarkable across the board. And so it was really efficacious. I did 60 sessions over 90 days and I've continued to do it. I've now done something like 200 sessions over the past year or something like that.

1:10:30So I just have it as part of my routine. I do it. You want to be careful not to do it too much because you're, you'll have oxygen toxicity. Yes. You want to have some, but that's why the five minute break is so important, right? Yeah. And I also take a like a week-long break. I'll do a sprint then a week-long break. So you just need to be careful because you can overdo it and cause harm. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. 8sleep just released their brand new Pod 5 Ultra, which includes the world's first temperature-regulating duvet.

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1:12:05It can be very relaxing to want to pressurize, but you can't sleep. Yeah. Because. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're busy. Got to put this, to take this thing on and off. One of the things that I really enjoyed doing was HRV resonance breathing. Yeah. While I was in there. Have you got into resonance breathing yet? Have you been doing it in the HBOT? Yes. So much fun. Yeah, it is. So much fun. There's a product that I got sent, I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got it. It's this little lamp. I wouldn't be able to take it in. It would all fucking hell would break loose. But it's basically a resonance breathing stone.

1:12:40Yeah. And you pick it up and it's got an FDA approved thing in it. And the lamp goes up and down. You put it back and it's done. So you don't need your phone. You don't need anything else. That's brilliant. But Elite HRV is what I was using with the strap. I'm going to guess you'll have seen. One thing that I noticed about that niche, niche issue. The strap that came with the Elite HRV thing, which you put on so that it can detect like real high fidelity, high hertz heart rate thing. The button that you use to press to turn it on has a tiny little air pocket. around it so i got into the fucking h-bot and by the time i'd pressurized to get down there the button had been smashed it and i couldn't press there was no air to press the button yeah and then i came i was like trying to press it and it's just yeah yeah yeah exactly spongebob when he gets outside of the water yeah um so anyway h-bot uh so i mean a couple of questions on this 60 sessions as quickly as possible basically yeah with uh to start to accumulate because it's not like a one and done type thing.

1:13:43I think I asked you this at the time. I'm interested if there's any more information. Going from state change to trait change, like is this the sort of thing that locks in? I'm aware you haven't then tested coming off and seeing what the tale of this is. But the same thing goes for sauna. Are you just fighting entropy with this? Is it something that you just need to do? Or is there anything? because I think there's a, I certainly know in me, if I look at a therapy or a modality or whatever, and I find that there's no carryover. Yeah. I feel despondent. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, fucking hell, like I've just found this new thing.

1:14:22Here's another thing I have to do. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's because both you and I are on the other side of the entropy curve. You know, like the deal you want is youth, right? Like when you're 12, you just keep on getting better. but once you cross over into your slow down exactly like they just every day they get up and like shit's just better you know so like but yeah you and I are both on the other side where we're on this irreversible decline and so yes you've got to keep it up but like one thing people are not aware of with HBOT is it's the best skin rejuvenation therapy in the world so a lot of people better than red light, better than microneedling everything, like better than the vampire facial, better than any laser it is because if you look at the data on the biopsies of it rebuilding collagen, elastin, and reducing senescent cell, it basically remodels your entire skin.

1:15:13It's not just face. Like every layer of skin you're remodeling is really remarkable. Like if you look at people, like if I see people now, I can tell a signature of HBOT skin. It's very, very clear to me what it looks like. And so it just happens. So yeah, that's the other thing is like a lot of women who really care a lot about skin, hbot getting the fucking h yeah i mean then you if you pair like the best banger protocol is to if your first skin is to pair the best devices with hbot so you basically you do like a surface level like a 1550 nanometer to resurface the skin for for spots wrinkles like that then you do hbot and you can accelerate the healing is that microneedling is that what you're referring no it's a laser like a 1550 nanometer laser where it's like uh it's a very uh very benign laser uh If you do it right, it has lower risk of like pigmentation issues for wrinkles, spots, just like for texture.

1:16:11And then you can do a deeper device like a soft wave, S-O-F-W-A-V-E, where it's ultrasound, where it's 1.5 millimeters below the dermis. So you hit top layer and underneath the dermis. So you're rebuilding collagen and the entire scaffolding the skin. And then you do H-Bot and then you accelerate the healing. So you basically do more sessions in this. yeah so that's like you're doing a cute like skin rejuvenation thing and then fuck up that's are you still here she's outside i think i did software because i went to your dermatologist in which one uh fuck i can't remember the lady's name it was in that was why i had a mustache i grew a mustache because i needed to get rid of my facial hair because they needed to do that in order to be able to i'm pretty i'm almost certain it was software yeah yeah yeah was it like um it felt like a cigarette burn that never actually got to a burn exactly yeah like you're like you're being singed by like a hot metal iron yeah but it never actually peaks to the yeah it was a really interesting lesson in uh and the yeah blowing the cold shit yeah yeah yeah um it was a really interesting lesson in pain uh that because what you realize is you ride this crescendo for the people that haven't seen it literally as if someone was to put something really hot out on you and when that happens there is a swelling there is a crescendo yeah but it usually peaks that you can almost hear it yeah right if you ever put alcohol on an open wound that yeah yeah like goes like that yeah but it doesn't ever get above a six yeah or so so if if she did uh if she set the settings to 3.5 joules which is the lowest setting then it gets pretty tolerable if she goes to 4.2 top end because basically it's a it's a total energy per area i think i had it at around about three point i think she had it at 3.6 3.7 so i was being a weenie okay yeah so like if you have the 4.2 where it's basically like it cuts down the number of pulses by 30 if you want to like zip through it god damn that that is so painful no thank you oh man it does it just feels like uh a like red hot iron i'm all right no more thank you uh you mentioned there about sort of vascular health and blood flow.

1:18:25Obviously, we started talking off about erectile, nighttime erectile stuff. For guys to improve blood pressure, vascular health, and then I guess downstream from that, the impact on erections, erectile dysfunction, beyond like nighttime stuff. What have you come to learn about that? What's the protocol for a guy to improve that? Yes, I guess I would say to people listening, Um, like maybe the thing I, that's most interesting is when I started this, when I was 42, I was pretty beat up. Like I had eaten sugar cereal as a kid, soda, like, you know, downed 70 grams of sugar, like daily, uh, canned foods.

1:19:06Uh, I was, I did the entrepreneurial grind, right. Didn't sleep. I was depressed for 10 years. I was overweight. Like I did all the starting behind the eight ball, like all the bad things. Right. And so I'm 42. I'm pretty beat up. my my aches hurt losing my hair and so i didn't really know what could be done i'm i'm really shocked by how efficacious this entire thing has been like i'm just really stunned that the body really has this capacity to bounce back no matter how bad things are and so one for anyone listening to like who needs hope in their life it really like the body is too far gone totally like i just It's like, don't give up.

1:19:48The smallest of things can have the biggest yields. And so have hope. And then two is I've been jamming on this for five years now. My markers keep on getting better. And so we still like, I've aged, you know, past five years in time, but I'm still hitting new record highs in, in like nighttime erections, in fertility markers, in my speed of aging, in my DNA, in my telomeres, like all these things are improving as age, as time doesn't seem to be a ceiling. So, I mean, on the grand scale of things, I suspect these are like, this is not going to get me to 200 years, right? Like, it's not on that kind of scale, but still like in how I feel as a person, like I do feel extremely energetic.

1:20:30I feel very clear-headed. I feel my mood is very stable. I don't get irritated. Like, I'm just kind of cool with existence, which is like, for me, that's the marker of health, you know, like that. So, one, hope. Two is, I think it's really worth the investment of this stuff. like just paying your, you're like paying the discipline to do it consistency. And then the last thing is you don't need to do what I do. Like you don't need to chase these expensive therapies. You don't need to do HBOT. Like the basic stuff has the dividends. And so I don't want, I want people to feel hope and not discouraged.

1:21:05I want them to feel empowered, not like, damn it, that's out of reach. Cause it really is like, it's within people's reach. And I hope they - Intimidated. Yeah. I hope they walk away feeling like, damn it, I can do that. Like I'm going to do it. I can't do that. What are the big moves? We've already said sleep and you've given a good breakdown there. If there was a top three, top five, however many you need for, okay, the Pareto, 80 % of the results come from these things. What are those things? Yeah, so first I would frame this in a moral philosophy. So I'd say if - Believe. I guess. First, your most prized possession is agency.

1:21:45Nothing values more than your agency. And right now, most people's agency is compromised. That they are not the architects of their life because they compulsively scroll. They compulsively eat fast food. They compulsively do all these addictive behaviors. And then when pressed on it, they rationalize it as virtue because they're trapped. And so I would challenge everyone here to say, like, reclaim yourself. Don't do anything you don't want to do. And that the enemy is the motherfucker who's trying to get you to do something that is not in your best interest. Fuck them. That is the enemy. And so like that gives you real moral power.

1:22:28Don't be puppeted. now once you have that principle like i'm going to set my bedtime i'm not going to doom scroll i'm not gonna eat that fucking bag of skittles right like i'm not gonna eat the fast food that's it's poison they're gonna trick me into thinking it's a treat or something you're like but like that's i think for me the boundary conditions of like how you create the kind of um energy state of like i can do this and i have a moral will to do it not just because of self-help but i'm like fighting an enemy. I'm overcoming adversity. I'm a man standing on my agency or woman. That to me gives it the juice too.

1:23:06I have the willpower to do it. Okay. Now that we've got the moral framework, what are the tactical things? Yeah. So once you have agency, you want to reclaim your willpower. You need to have juice in the tank to say, I can make decisions that I can do it. So one is you want to master sleep. You want to build your entire life around sleep. That's very counterintuitive, but you want to plan when you go to bed, when your windover team is, you want to set strict rules. you want to um plan your lighting like again like you can choose your archetype whether you're really regimented whether you're like more flexible like whatever your thing is but just build your entire life around sleep and if you need uh justification realize those not doing that are 10 to 12 points stupider than you like they're actually dumb so they're they take a retardation exercise for them you're actually gonna be smart once you do that exercise because that also is going to boost your willpower so boost it with sleep boost it with exercise and then once you the most complicated.

1:23:58Food is where we go to like soothe ourselves to do like the self-therapy. So only tackle then try to start just having a bit more good things for you. And a few less bad things, like slowly walk your way into it. Radical change is hard for a lot of people, but it's like slow walk into. And then if you begin to have that in the back of your mind, like a rule, you will never, ever eat fast food ever again. Like none is better than some. So there's no moderation. there's no once a day like the cheat the idea of a cheat meal is the worst idea in history like don't do cheat days don't do cheat meals don't do cheat weeks don't do cheat anything don't cheat when it comes to exercise well for longevity most people are already doing almost everybody that's listening is going to have some sort of training regime i would imagine yeah the vast majority of them are going to be something like a push-pull-leg split and maybe other people are runner boys and runner girls um if you were to design the minimum effective dose this is where i think the blind spots are for people what would you say exercise wise yeah i mean i because everyone's got their jam with this pilates weights whatever just do it like just be active for roughly an hour a day do cardio to strength to balance to flexibility everyone's got their own preferences but i think uh i don't go after the details here because there's like endless material to go after just be active and commit to some people like chicken some people like salmon some people like kale some people like spinach exactly like just and then i same thing with food like i don't uh get into the game of carnivore versus vegan versus paleo versus whatever they're abstractions which are irrelevant eat what you want measure your body, make sure you're good and then fine tune yourself.

1:25:47Like I have a don't die food guide. We tried to look through all the scientific evidence and say, what are the very best foods in existence with the highest value evidence that you can put into your body? So we just said by a power law perspective, here's what I'd put on. So I can share that as a plate outside of that, like do your thing, like just eat what you want. Just measure your body, make sure you're good. Right. Okay. Bethelene blue. How'd you get on with that? You know, I stopped it because I started 25 milligrams a day and then, oh, it was conflicting with we started a therapy doing uh altitude training so you take your blood oxygenation down to 80 we did it and the two have conflicting mechanisms of action and we realized it on day three so like we better stop methylene blue to do some therapy so okay is methylene blue it's like nicotine derivative right or it's something to do with nicotine i mean it's a synthetic synthetic diet initially it was built because the surgeons wanted to see like where they're actually in the surgical body.

1:26:36But it was actually FDA approved for, what was it? I forget to know. Yeah, it was FDA approved quite a while ago. But overall, we don't think it's worth it as a therapy. It's more for like mitochondrial health. Okay. Testosterone. Testosterone, the fucking hormone of the 21st century. It is. What have you come to learn about testosterone? around yeah um so i'm in like the 700s naturally so just by doing all the basic stuff what were you when you started do you know um i i guess like when i was 42 i don't know right you look at my data um yeah but if if if a man is low on testosterone and the natural approaches are not addressing it it probably makes sense to do something about it like being low testosterone just has really negative consequences so yeah good one to watch after what are the ways to intervene naturally well what are the biggest needle movers that you yeah i mean all the basics right like sleep like i think poor sleep uh four hours of sleep a night uh will knock you down something like 10 to 20 percent on testosterone uh so like really big drop less of a man again again yeah like high status status so then sleep exercise nutrition like all the basics uh there's i don't think there's a lot of proven um supplementation that can move the needle i Without getting into pharmacology.

1:28:03Yeah, I think people have played a bunch of stuff. I don't, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not sure the clinical evidence is very strong there. I need to look at it. I guess I have never had low testosterone, so I've never had to look at supplementation as a means to do it. So I guess I would be cautious and my knowledge is limited in terms of like the true evidence for clinical interventions. The thing that's interesting around sort of male hormone, and I imagine it's the same for women, but I don't know anything about them. The relationship between, between it's such a fucking like balance beam of lh fsh testosterone free t yeah yeah shgb it is there is no it seems to me total fucking white belt it seems to me like one intervention is not one intervention it's it starts to roll away into this domino effect yeah so talking about i want my testosterone higher it's like well do you yeah yeah do you maybe your fsh needs to i mean people that go on enclomiphene or hcg chronically yeah uh what is it like 20 percent or some big percent of them talk about that inducing depression yeah you go okay so you're worried that you had low energy because of your low testosterone and you tried to take a non like exogenous solution to create that so i'm going to kickstart my own production by using these compounds and in the process of doing that i've made myself have depression which almost certainly made your a fucking low, forget low energy, you've got low mood now.

1:29:31And so, yeah, be careful how you intervene with that, I think. Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. I guess the way we thought about it is we approached this holistically. We just said, our frame entirely is scientific evidence, just like what does the body of evidence say to do? And we took the most powerful molecules in the form of foods, supplements, and then lifestyle, sleep, diet, exercise, and then therapies, sauna, HBOT. And we just said like, take the very best high-performer ones, put it all into one package and do the entire package. And it makes sense. Like if you're taking care of the entire body on every level, you have these systematic effects.

1:30:14They'll come online. Exactly. So I think people approach these things very narrowly, but like our hormones, like is a very, like you see like microplastics, right? Like microplastic in the testicles has a negative feedback loop for fertility and hormones, right? The same is true with toxins. So like that's, when we talk about testosterone, we don't talk about microplastic intervention, which then leans back to sauna, which then leads back to. So like we try to just be holistic, like give me the whole thing and let me build that into one daily practice. So I don't have to then try to figure out like this and that thing.

1:30:50talking of daily practices what's this 15 second phone call thing you're doing oh yeah with my friends yeah so um a friend of mine introduces to me so he i became friends with this person and he is he's very powerful and uh he would call me and he'd be like brian like blank statement i say something to him and like all right man i love you see you that's it and i was like that is amazing it was so clean it feels so good and we just did that through like a couple months and we built this amazing friendship and um 15 second friendship 50 and it was like it but it was like this deep um and i guess i i imagine in my mind like i imagine what his day must be like uh like he's juggling all kinds of crazy things he clearly does not have time for like sit down hang out do this and that but yet he does such a great job of maintaining really meaningful like deep relationships so when he says he loves you it's like you feel it it's like he's not like just saying it and so i appreciated his model of friendship so much because i before i was stuck in this idea like hey chris you want to hang out you know it's a big deal let's give a fucking airbnb i'll book a week off work yeah it's like a four-hour thing right versus calling you like hey man like what's up how you doing and like you you can answer because you know i'm not going to be on the phone for 20 minutes yeah right i mean the uh i did this series life hacks on the show when i first started and we do one every year now at christmas and uh back in the day when that was one of the big thrusts of the show we'd often get asked okay what of 500 or 1000 life hacks that you yeah what are the highest impact ones the first one is always sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom yeah um yeah but it's an instant 10 to 15 improvement in quality of life and that one thing uh so that's actually before sleep let's take the charging cable outside of your bedroom put it in the kitchen uh but the second one was text your friends when you think of them yes and this is my equivalent of the 15 second friendship um yeah and it's just hey man like thinking of you hope you're well like whatever uh or a photo that you think about your friend and you find an old photo and you send it and um it really speed runs uh friendship you become tighter friends with people who you've known for less long than people that you've known longer that you don't do that with or don't do it with you.

1:33:13And I really loved it and it really brightened my day and it felt like I was doing something good for someone at a very low cost. It was like high impact, high leverage friendship, right? It's like very, very low investment, very, very high impact, a little bit of a giggle and it keeps it going. And the other thing it does, which is, I guess, a hack from my world of running nightclubs, it's an idea of assume familiarity. So assuming familiarity in this context is most people that don't know each other particularly well have this sense that any text has to be super verbose yeah hello dear brian i hope that you are in the family are well i must congratulate you on the as opposed to like funny meme yeah or whatever hey man thinking of you hope all's good whatever right like not even you can take get a little bit too far and it sounds a bit entitled or a bit like brusque or or like um sharp uh expectant but if i'm like dude love the youtube video by the way i'm an age but how long am i supposed to breathe it for like that's oh thank you for fucking consuming my shit and for the respect by the way here's a thing i don't need to we don't need foreplay yeah right let's get let's get into it yeah i mean since we hung out in prospera we've been doing that right like and And it's - Bullshit.

1:34:29No talk for three months and then a - Totally. And I feel as fluid with you as I feel with any friend I've had for any duration of time. Like we get each other, like we're on the same wavelength, we decide to have each other's lives. It's like most of my friends, I'm actually, I'm really surprised. Most of my friends who are powerful and successful and famous are lonely, right? Like they, they work all the time. they have work relationships but the amount of time they have to be down and hanging out is so small and so if you don't have some mechanism to create deep friendships and time is not your you can't use time yeah you have to use something else yeah it needs to be a longer lever to exactly and so i just i've just been surprised that people have this perception that uh they always perceive others like they must have it all but loneliness is a real thing and so i guess again i say this for those who are listening uh if you feel lonely right understand like your pattern is pretty similar to other people's patterns independent of resources or position or power status people at the top of the tree are struggling with the loneliness exactly and so i mean and this is the cool thing is like when i've talked to my friends and like they'll disclose that and like it's a really yes we it's a it's a scary thing shameful thing yeah it is to to actually disclose that's like i don't have any friends like i i had a a friend of mine connected me with a celebrity the day like one of the a-list celebrities in in hollywood i said talked to this person i said once you come over to my house we'll do a don't die dinner get 10 or 15 of your favorite people come on over and like i'll do this whole thing and explained it and they said i don't really have any friends and yeah it was like just such a shocking moment because like they are epicenter celebrity and uh one it was cool they just said that and two i was like amazing so like i will put the group together for you come on over we'll have a great time but yeah just like so people realize it's a very common thing in our modern society so nothing to feel ashamed about or feel bad about like you can make these corrective actions by doing like small things like voice notes quick calls and also by by making the bar so low if you swing and whiff it and this person doesn't actually really want to be friends.

1:36:48Yeah, exactly. Whatever. It doesn't think you're cool or they're too busy or whatever the fuck they're not on. They're not ready to be friends. Yeah. Um, you haven't invested anything. No. You know, you sent, you tried to, you met somebody, you sent them a few texts, like whatever, like it doesn't matter. Um, I would just want to loop back to that thing I said about the emotions piece before. So I, I understand what you mean, uh, with regards to sort of creating a philosophy. Um, but I am still interested in what the practices are and how you look to prioritize the emotional well-being the social element if there is a spiritual element to this too um and how you come to think about how to say it um off spreadsheet markers yeah of of longevity and well-being yeah so in 2025 we did five Don't Die Summits.

1:37:43We have 1 ,500 people. They were all sold out. We brought people together and we did, we experimented with different formats, but we brought them together. We did education courses. We did raves like at seven in the morning. It was amazing. We had so much fun. We did group exercises. We did group therapy stuff. So I think 2026, so we learned a lot by doing this. We're going to do this in 2026 where I've been actually piloting a Don't Die FAM in my neighborhood. So I've got several friends and we had this format where we get together every week. First, we take a shot of olive oil. Ritualistic. And then we each go around and we apologize to our body for something we did that week.

1:38:26And so it's kind of funny. I'm perilously close to a religion here. It's kind of funny. It's kind of fun. And then we go around and each person talks about what's on their mind or what they're struggling with. And so it's a very open floor, supportive. alcoholics anonymous it's like ypo aa it's like it's a very similar format that's kind of stamped out through various organizations but it's basically like small intimate trusted group where you can be vulnerable and there's a specific approach where you're you're focusing on don't die but really it's about human connection it's about sharing and what you're struggling with so whether it's that or something else we're trying to figure out how how if don't die is to become the fastest growing ideology in history.

1:39:06We're trying to figure out what is the path for that to happen. And so it can happen in small clusters around the world. We could even have physical locations. We could have something like a sovereign fund where we have, we pool our capital and we start funding things together. So we're sorting on community connection, emotional, social in 2026. The past couple of years have been like, how do you create something novel, sticky, distinct, and create a structure around it? And now we're going to create the wrapper. So it's just like the next stage of where we're at. Very cool. When we first ever spoke, however long ago that was, I asked you a question about, I didn't use this word, but the grief of not starting earlier.

1:39:55the potential resentment that you can uh place at your caregivers and your friends and your culture of this didn't happen earlier and the entropy you you started on the other side of the roller coaster right you're like oh fuck like i'm fighting against it as opposed to improving it you know like i can't get younger in the same way as i could have gotten you or at least slowed it out or whatever. I'm interested in your relationship with that dynamic now, a few years hence, more time to think what could have been, but also to think, well, I can't, by focusing on that, I'm losing the very time which I'm claiming is now being more limited.

1:40:35That seems like a very stupid way to spend my life. Where have you come into land with, you said before, and I think it's a really good point, it's not too late, you can reverse or slow down, you can really, really make great progress no matter where you are but the emotional connection to what could have been had i've started earlier what i've done to my body the grief yeah that stuff what's your relationship with that like now yeah i mean as you might guess you know i now i view this question through the moral frameworks right like basically the premise of the question is that um i'm in a low status position because of these preceding events.

1:41:15I didn't have parents that knew health and wellness when I was a kid. I didn't understand health and wellness myself in my 20s. I fell prey to cultural norms that said, destroy yourself. And so the way I'd evaluate any person answering your question is how skilled are they in taking a low status position and converting it to high status? Like, how do you flip the question for me to find virtue in my place and attribute, you know, charity to what's, what's preceded? Because really it never makes sense for a person to wallow in grief. Like, yes, it makes sense to reconcile, like, be honest, like we can acknowledge that may have been a mistake.

1:41:59You know, we can contemplate, you know, we wish it wouldn't have happened, but really you don't want to sit in negative emotions. It's just not good for you. You don't want to beat yourself up. And so you can either take a step where you say, I'm reconciled, I'm neutral, I'm fine with it. Or you can say, I'm going to invert it. But that's what I've really learned more than anything in my life. This is what I try to agency and be subject to pain that is self-induced. You can choose how you feel. This is kind of like Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, right? He's in the concentration camp and he's like, I'm not going to let these conditions determine my state of mind.

1:42:48I'm going to choose that state of mind myself. But that's really ultimate agency. And so I'd take your question and I would invert it and be like, this is the most interesting time in the history of four point whatever billion years that we've been on this planet, I am so fortunate to be alive right now. And I'm like in my forties where I'm still like in my prime and I can have a meaningful impact on what happens to the human race. Like that is a possibility. So I wouldn't trade anything under any circumstance to trade the position I'm in right now, because it's the coolest moment in the history of the human race.

1:43:24And so like quick inversion and now I'm like, damn, pretty cool. I'm pumped about the situation. My shoulders relaxed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember you tweeting a while ago. Do you think you're going to die in a super ironic way? Of course, guaranteed. Yeah. How's that not possible? It's for sure. I mean, so this morning when I was coming here, I was opening a glass jar of sauerkraut, fermented sauerkraut. I popped it and it sliced my fingers in three places, bleeding all over the place. And I was like, you know, what if I die from like a glass bottle of fermented sauerkraut like wouldn't that be just like beautifully ironic so yes like uh i hope it's spectacular i hope it's really something epic and not something lame sauerkraut would be a cool way to go i mean i guess like uh you tell me what would be like an epic like oh wow what hits the timeline would you're like okay like ready to go with that that would be cool i mean sort of car action a 70s action movie rolling down a huge cliff would be that that seems like a pretty cool way to go uh certainly not being the passenger of a a plane where the pilot decides that he's sick and he just wants to crash it into a right into a mountainside that would suck something something that's just me something i don't want to take anybody else with me if it's if i'm going to go up in flames like you know hit by a bus but the bus goes on yeah like uh yeah Yeah, yeah, like caught in the action, caught in the act of adventure, right?

1:44:54Like you're doing your thing, you're pushing the boundaries, you're in your happy state. Eating fermented foods. Yeah, you know, like I think of Shackleton, you know, and I think of his going through the Antarctic and their survival to that whole, like, you know, they were all ready to have a noble death. Like we wouldn't have found out about it, it would have been gone to history, but still, you know, they were, I like that kind of courage. I love those stories. There's a book that you may love if you like Alfred Lansing's Endurance, which is the best retelling of Shackleton's Crossing, I think.

1:45:26There's a wonderful one called The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart, a British soldier, Scottish, captured by the Japanese, bridge over the river Kwai, forced labor, Hiroshima bomb blasts, everything, everything, everything, everything. And then I read Unbroken, unbroken louis zamparini so i only i never even know because i'm not american yeah right so i would get shackleton and i would get alistair rickard yeah but i'd never get zamparini yeah i didn't even know he existed and he like meets hitler at the fucking olympics and he goes through all of this stuff so if you like unbroken yeah dude yeah uh the forgotten highlander will take your head off yeah unbroken that broke me i mean like he's like on his raft getting shot at from the japanese airplanes underneath the raft getting eaten by sharks back on the raft of bullet holes like and that's like on day 142 of not eating food like yeah yeah the dude's eating all the chocolate and you're like your best mate yeah still all the chocolate fucking chocolate yeah dude i'm those stories to me are wonderful i ruptured in achilles 2020 uh playing cricket fully british and um i asked a couple of friends that had been through some sort of similarly traumatic injuries, you know, big fuck off severe thing.

1:46:44And, uh, they said the obstacle is the way by Ryan holiday, uh, uh, forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart. Um, uh, uh, Ross Edgley's book, the art of resilience, which is about his swim around the, he's the first person to swim around the UK. Oh yeah. Six, six, six hours on, six hours off. Um, and then, uh, Amazon prime documentary called resurfaced with Andy Murray, Andy Murray's tennis player, Scottish tennis player, and he gets a hip replacement. That lateral movement means that hips really get tested in tennis players and he's aging out a little and they try and do rehab. They try and do surgery.

1:47:27They try and do surgery. It's just not working. And really the only solution I think is maybe ceramic socket with a steel joint, but it's not meant for high impact sport. It's very smooth and very reliable and the outcomes are great, but not if you're pushing it to the sort of steel up against ceramic, like fucking porcelain or whatever it is, not going to last that. Or maybe it's not. And it's just this journey of him going through it and he's working in his house, just obsessive, just so like unrelenting. And those sorts of stories I think are really empowering and really enlightening and very inspiring.

1:48:11And it's the ability, what I'm really interested in playing with now is the ability to take that kind of inspiration and be like, fuck, like I've been kicked in the nuts a good bit this year. All right, you got this. Like you can lean in, you can do this thing. And then being able to, I switch it off. I need to be able to switch it off if I can't switch it off then I am pressing the accelerator driving downhill I'm giving myself more of the thing that I already have too much of so playing with that tolerance like a dose dependent inspiration in that way it's a U shaped curve you need just too little you're not doing anything too much you're wide but tired it's probably the skill set society needs the most help on right now because everyone is right up to the red, actually in the red zone, and just there constantly.

1:49:03I think it's probably like a chronic thing of our society. Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're great. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship. What can people expect next however long of years, months, what's coming up? Well, this is my prediction. AI is center stage already for society. It will continue to be center stage. I'm not talking about timeframes of six months or 12 months, but like over the next few years, it's going to just continually to be evolved to be the primary thing of our attention. And as that happens, we are going to want the stability to understand the world in ways that makes us feel safe, that we have meaning and purpose, that things are stable.

1:49:49And I think this is where Don't Die will step in. It will be a structurally sound, coherent, emotionally resident ideology and moral philosophy that actually answers the most important questions for us as a species. Individually, collectively, with AI, with the planet, we're just due for a revolution. So yeah, in the coming years, that's what I hope to bring to the world is like that we actually can find coherence in our existence and realize the spectacular nature of this moment, the most precious thing that's ever existed. And it's like really ours. So we, I guess, an invitation to sober up, realize how special this is.

1:50:29And for us, like we need to prove ourselves worthy of the future. We oftentimes don't think about it. We want to demonstrate our value to our peers, to our coworkers, to our family, to our partners. I think that same relationship exists to the future, that it really does ask us to rise up. and so i hope um above all i hope i'm a positive influence of people's lives that um when they find themselves in moments of struggle or weakness they've got somebody in their court saying like you can do this and um yeah so i'm just uh really excited about what's happening i feel like i've been working my entire life at this moment and i'm excited to play the game i'm excited to see what happens man just don't do the fucking don't start wearing white robes grow your hair out like I don't want to see the cult leader pivot, but, uh, what I do think is cool is the, um, like sanguine self-awareness thing.

1:51:25I think that's really important to like, yeah, just read it out. You mentioned a couple of resources, like a, a, a food guide or something. Is there any, are there any cool lead magnetly bits that people can snag that? Yeah. So I'll give you, I'll give you the food guide. Um, I'm also, I'm publishing, I have a website protocol that Brian Johnson.co, um, at com and hopefully in the next couple weeks, I'll repost all my updated stuff. So if you want to just see my journey and what I'm doing now and why, I'll have it there for you. So like a free guide. Yep. And I'm also writing a book. So don't die.

1:51:59So I'm halfway through and it's basically going to be like, hopefully a guide. And then, yeah, I'm trying to make this easy. I know it's a lot. And then also we just raised 60 million for Blueprint. And so - Oh yeah. What's going on with that? What is that? Yeah. So basically Blueprint is don't die in action. And so in the same way where you say, if I want to go to this destination, I put in an address, go, and it tells me what streets to go down or where's the construction, where's the crashes. Blueprint is going to be basically like AI for your health. It's like you say, I want to be healthy.

1:52:32And we say, come on in, we got you. And so it will take us some time to build that. But that's what I have today with my team of doctors. Like I just follow a practice where we measure me, we get the data, we look at evidence and we say, do this, do this, do this, do this. You're doing this at scale. Exactly. So I don't have to chase all these esoteric hard things. So Blueprint is basically like autonomous health for humans where I just say like, I want to be healthy and you get into a system and now we just run the data, evidence, repeat again. So hopefully like that's like the - Siding time.

1:52:59So it feels like, I know you're going back to where you started back into founder mode. I hope that you don't take your eye off what the ball is supposed to be with regards to that, like the temptation man to be, ooh, we could build it more. This is time it's good. This time it's for humanity. You go, well, yeah, service is good, but so is looking after, like serving you first. Yeah, you know, like the one thing I care to accomplish in life, like everything else can go by the wayside. The one thing is what is high status? That's the only game I care to play. And so from specifically from the frame of, from the perspective of the year 2500, 500 when they look back at this moment and they're looking at moments to say uh plato aristotle renaissance and like they'll say a new era was born of a new status seeking thing and like that's otherwise like the entrepreneurship stuff like i really enjoy it it's been my jam but that's not where i want this to work i want to be successful it's actually a practical manifestation but i have one objective in existence is that fuck yeah ryan i appreciate you man until next time Thanks, man.

1:54:35Thank you.