#631 - Bryan Johnson - The $2M Anti-Ageing Protocol For Longevity

25:55And step number one, don't die. Stay alive. Well, that's the problem with alignment, right? You know, that's the case. And everybody has as soon as you get a self -aware, recurring improvement, AGI. Okay. So, um, Daniel Kahneman often talks about this idea of, of two levers that you can use to encourage behavior change. One of them being try harder and one of them be sort of stop doing the things that are stopping you from doing the thing more. So press on the accelerator further or release the brake. And I think what I like about your approach is that your first priority as far as I can see is stopping pressing the brake before starting to press the accelerator.

26:38Stop doing the self -destructive behavior. What is your framework for identifying self -destructive behaviors and overcoming them. It's a complicated question and I've tried to simplify the thinking of it. Anything that increases my speed of aging, I label as self -destructive. Anything that slows my speed of aging is regenerative. So I try to just make it very clean left to right. And what about overcoming it? How do you do that? You've got the many Brian's coming in. And you know, I've heard you talk previously about the fact that it's not about what 5 p .m. Brian wants to do. He's a dick. It's what the plan says that he's supposed to do and then when 5 p .m.

27:30Brian comes around, I have a friend who uses the term I'm just working for the boss. So when it's his time to do something to get up and start writing a book or whatever it is it needs to do. I'm just working for the boss. I don't make the decision. The boss already made the decision previously. I'm working for the boss. The boss also happens to be you, but it's not as simple as I have made a prescribed set of rules that I'm supposed to follow therefore at 5 p .m. when my felt sense changes. Oh, I remember the protocol. There's motivation and there's a felt sense of what we're supposed to do. So like take me through or what are the lessons that people can take away for improving that adherence, for not having to rely on motivation as much for improving their discipline, if that's even what you refer to it as.

28:17Yeah. Yeah, I, I'm currently putting together a team of behavioral change experts and I wanted to do this as a public experiment. I'm going to invite who ever wants to participate in a 30 -day challenge to try to get their self -aided destruction scores to zero. And so the easy ones we target would be eating too much food, eating junk food, skipping exercise, not meeting your bedtime, just some really basic ones. Not getting to the nuanced ones where, you know, is gaming good or bad under what circumstances, is, you know, like, let's leave those complicated ones out. Just can you stop the blatant self -aider destruction behaviors?

29:01And then to have five behavioral change experts represent their school of thought. Like, here's our protocol. Here's how you go about doing it, CBT or whatever. And then have people choose the school of thought that they resonate with. And then just have the team's compete for who can lower their self, you know, their sad scores the most. So I'm in no way an expert in this area on behavioral change. And I just thought it'd be a cool thing to try to popularize sad that we've normalized sad in society so much so that you can do it out in the open with friends and everyone's cool with it. No one calls it out and it's all expected.

29:44And if you don't participate in sad, you get called out and ostracized from the group. You're the one who's meant to feel like you you don't belong. And so for me personally, it was food is a gateway for bad behavior for me. And that was really where the dam was breaking. And so doing this protocol of blueprint was a way to arrest the most violent destructive behaviors I had. And then the other ones have just been baby steps on top. Once I got control there, that kind of discipline has been naturally extending everywhere else in my life. But this is, I guess this is why I get excited about the future of being human, is if this algorithm legitimately can arrest my worst proclivities that I'm helpless to get to arrest, you know, can't do other things for me too, including can you get into my mind one day of stopping all the self -destructing harm to myself with my own mind.

30:42And so this just takes a remapping of what it means to be human, but I've never been happier and more fulfilled. And it's funny because people, when they observe my behaviors, their assumption is that I'm sad, which is weird, which is ironic. Meanwhile, they're drowning in their own sad behaviors. And I'm the one that should be ostracized. So it's a really funny self -defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they're doing. What would the steps that you found most effective at stopping yourself from binge eating? It was separating myself into multiple. I'm not one person. I am many.

31:26And then it was identifying the specific most egregious version of myself, which was evening Brian. He showed up at 7pm every night. So identified who he was. I gave him a name. I listed out his persuasion tactics. Like, you know, it's been a long day. You deserve it. You did really well with this. You worked out really hard. You probably already burned the calories off. Tomorrow we start all the persuasion tactics. And then when he shows up, I treat him as other hybrid, high evening Brian. I see you're here. I see what you're trying to do with your persuasion techniques and you're not like you have been unauthorized to make decisions on how to you know You can't eat food like period you have no authorization And so it's like this this game of going about doing it and in my mind when I do that I can see evening Brian throw a tantrum You know that the fact that his authority has been revoked and how offended he is and how out outraged he is and how he's just if he could be violent he would be.

32:30But it's his phenomena that's psychologically so interesting to watch how I myself play within myself on these dialogues. And at first it was really, it was contentious. You feel that tension and you're so close to breaking for him overpowering. But it was really personalizing these aspects of myself and making them other. And then I could work on them one at a time. That's interesting. So othering yourself, creating a distance between you and the things that you tell yourself, understanding that that it is you, but it's, it's a malignant version of you. It's like an evil alter ego or some conjoined twin that keeps on coming in and talking to you about things that you kind of, they're born out of your desires, but they're not your highest desires.

33:24They're not your truest desires. They're not the things that tomorrow you would have wanted yourself to have done. Yes. You're creating that distance. I like that. I like anything that involves having a mindfulness gap, you know, a break in between stimulus and response. I think more of that is very, very good. What is it? Some insane number of our decisions we've made the day before. Some insane number of the thoughts that we have today. We had yesterday. Some insane same number of, I mean, here's a really, really great insight from a friend, Alex Hormozzi, and he says that when people talk about changing their diet to improve the things that they eat, they often get lost in the weeds around conceptualizing what the diet consists of.

34:03But he said, you probably eat maybe 80 % of your calories from the same 10 meals. There are 10 meals that you have that probably consist of almost the entire lion's share of your diet. Like I'm not a chef, I have maybe five good recipes in my back pocket. Okay, so all that you actually need to do is just change those things, right? You're actually focusing on those small number of decisions and it's kind of the same with this. So yeah, I mean, I think that for me, I've realized that the most self -destructive behaviors that I have to is probably evening eating. I've had this long day and I mean, I live in Austin, Texas now and everybody goes for barbecue, everybody goes for whatever.

34:44And they, oh, well, there's dessert and then there's home and then there's snacks and then so on. And you're like, yeah, it's 10 p .m. and I stopped eating half an hour ago. Yeah. So that's why I'm particularly interested in your approach for it. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to be human. And I think if we are, if we can all be honest just for a minute and to confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self -destruction all the time as a starting point and not try to spin up these pretty little stories about that's what it means to live, or this is what brings me happiness, their lies. But we've done such a phenomenal job of making them pretty stories and protecting them because we don't want to face this uncomfortable reality.

35:47But we are a species addicted to self -destructive behavior. And I don't think this is the form of intelligence that we want to be walking in as we engineer AI. I think we are again, we have this tendency to point our finger at everything in the world, except for ourselves as the thing that needs to change. To play devil's advocate for the other side, I think that much of the behavior that people do could be classed as self -destructive, especially using the parameters that you set out earlier on, but people can't know what they don't know. And for somebody who doesn't understand that the behavior that they, that doesn't understand that binge eating isn't actually good for them because it helps them to relax.

36:32For those people, we're getting into a philosophical sort of linguistic lexical question here, but I don't know if it is quite the same. It's the Pandora's Box or Plato's Cave thing here, right? Like, if you don't know that the thing that you're doing is destructive, is it fair to say that those people have the same sort of obligation to be aware of their self -destructive behavior? You can't know what you don't know.

36:57Talking about training, that was one of the other levers, binge eating, skipping training sessions. What has the data said to you about the optimal setup for a training protocol for yourself? What does it consist of? How often do you do it? What time of the day, etc? Yeah, I work out an hour a day and Cardi, it's a bit I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body and And we've worked back through the science of what is cardio zones to be in. And we also look at this in terms of measurements of my VO2 max, of my flexibility, of my tendon, ligament strength, of my, we measure my muscle with ultrasound.

37:41We do whole body fat on MRI. So we're, we're using these quantitative endpoints. We probably do a hundred different markers that quantifies my exercise protocol. And they're all markers that we can map to optimal clinical outcome ranges. So again, the goal I'm a problem I'm working on is my 35 trillion cells having less entropy. So I'm not trying to engage in a marathon. I'm not trying to achieve some athletic record. And so really it's that one goal. And so, yeah, so it's just a bunch of weights, cardio, flexibility, strength training. I noticed looking at your routine that you've got a good bit of knees over toes and Patrick's stuff in there.

38:34And that's been born out in the data as something which is very effective. Yeah, as we measure my tendons and ligaments specifically, they've all dramatically improved. And this is a good bit of backwards sled drag, some of the ATG, these overtoses, lungey stuff. What were you most surprised by? What are the exercises or the contributing routines that you do where you're like? I wouldn't have thought that that would have been in there. I wouldn't have thought that the data would have been happy with me doing this. Hmm.

39:11I suppose overall I'm surprised by how robust I feel. I've actually never felt this robust in my entire life, even when I was 18 years old and an athlete in high school. And I don't have a single ache in pain on my body. I've never been more flexible. I've never had better cardiovascular capacity. I guess I'm just surprised that at the chronological age of 45, I would be peaking in my life of ability. And I don't feel like I'm entirely, I think there's more I could gain. But I suppose I didn't, I previously viewed this as trying to stop and it ever will downward trend, but it's actually dramatically improved and maintained.

39:59Are you adding in walks each day on top of this, you know, an hour a day for me, if I was to think about it, doesn't seem like much to optimize the absolute optimal amount. I would have presumed it would have been two and a half hours and it would have included all a manner of high -intensity interval training in a shitload of zone two and then there would have been a 45 minutes of yin yoga stretching with right walking. I would have thought it would have been more, but why isn't it more? Why aren't you training more? There's a tricky puzzle we're trying to solve. I mean, so we, I'm on a caloric restriction diet.

40:37So it's 2 ,000 calories. And I take 100 pills a day. And so the scientific question we're trying to solve is if in the year 2023, someone like myself wants to be an explorer like Shackleton or Magellan or Lewis and Clark. And I want to say, all right. I want to go to the absolute limits of what's possible in the form of slowing my speed of aging. Then we're trying to optimize for caloric input, cardiovascular activity, heart rate variability. When you do too much exercise, there's a U -shaped curve where you start inflicting harm on the system. And so you're trying to tune all of these things.

41:17With caloric restriction, it has a side effect of lowering testosterone. So I need to supplement testosterone to get myself in the normal levels. And so we're just playing this really tricky playoff, tradeoff space all across the board. And we're always making minor adjustments here and there, trying to maximize for this very narrow goal of slowing entropy in my body. Interesting. Yeah, because if your RDA of of cows is what, 2625.

41:47Sorry. What would be your recommended? Oh, yeah, yeah. maintenance for you would be two five or two six. Yeah, two six, yeah, two six five. Yeah. Right. Okay. And you're at 19 80 or something like that, basically 2000. If you were to train more because that's not, I mean, you're quite light, right? You're about 160 pounds, I think. Yes. Yeah. So you are quite light. But still, like maintenance at two six, given that you train for an hour a day, and it's not like you're not doing other stuff throughout the day too. exactly. Isn't isn't a massive amount. So I understand now if you were to really start to push that if you go from 60 minutes to 90 minutes to two hours your maintenance cows then get up into the sort of 3000 range and then you're okay do we want to be in a 1000 calorie deficit every day?

42:32Well no okay therefore we need to bump calories up. Yeah what because G -flux theory which you may I may not be familiar with something we've spoken about in the show before. What's the problem with increasing your caloric output and then increasing the amount of food you could eat. This means that you can eat more food throughout the day. This would mean maybe that you're more satiated. There will be a sweet spot. How come you guys haven't decided to do that? Yeah, exactly right. Really well said. So we are... The combination we're doing is not common. So it's caloric restriction, it's intense exercise, it's vegan, which a lot of people haven't really combined robustly and we're trying to do that all to maximize speed of aging.

43:19And so we have not covered all the variations. For example, like I don't know what my markers would be like with meat. I don't know what my markers would be like with 90 more minutes of cardiovascular exercise and more calories. So we haven't covered all the iterations and the reason why I've been trying to share all my data is to say here's the process we're going through to trial this thing. You can do this yourself and you can do different iterations yourself. So add meat, add more exercise, do this or that, and then share your data too. But let's try to accelerate the speed in which we can structurally advance the field, even if it's N of 1.

44:01It's getting better than N of 0. The evidence that my teams looked at, their current hypothesis is what we're doing does optimize. And I guess there's some interesting data where using DNA methylation patterns, looking at this denutin pace algorithm of this longitudinal study of nearly 2 ,000 people who have been measuring their speed of aging over several years time, I rank number one as the most reduced speed of aging out of the entire group. And so it's interesting. I hope others take that spot from me. That's the goal of me. What if somebody someone might come in and do that, would you consider switching protocols if somebody did do that?

44:45Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole goal, right? I mean, I want someone to beat me for that same purpose, like build the field and share with everyone what you're doing. And so that's why I share free with everyone what I'm doing is I want them to do it and then apply their own betterment and everyone improves. And so crowdsourcing longevity research. Yeah, and me and just like it's, I mean, the intensity of competition, which this has triggered has been incredibly inspiring. Like, I mean, people, it's a big deal. And so I, I'm in private conversation with a ton of people about how they can beat me.

45:25And I rise in, I sincerely hope they do. What would your testosterone be at without the supplementation? Have you got any idea? because you're walking around at 5 % body fat, heavy caloric restriction, etc. Yeah, I don't know. We hover around 800. Wow. We hover around the, we hover around normal. But that's with, I think it's nine units a day of testosterone. It's not true. It's two MG patch. I think each one converts into like nine, something like that. I feel that's a dermal patch of testosterone. I've never heard of that being a delivery mechanism for testosterone before. Is that common? It works.

46:13Yeah, so I mean, it keeps my levels steady. It's a dermal patch. Yep. Fuck yeah. That's, I mean, it's much cooler than having to, you know, pin I am every three days or whatever, two and a half times a week or something, throw the patch on, go about your day, Pay the patch off, put the second one on, go about your day. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. So you mentioned there that, we both mentioned there that you're running a quite low body fat percentage. Why is that the optimal position for somebody to be in? You would have thought, well, and cestrally the average body fat for somebody that was moving around a lot would have probably been significantly higher.

46:57How is it, or what's your thinking behind the fact that in the fives range, which is like ridiculously lean? Why do you think that that seems to be optimal as opposed to having high level of body fat? Yeah. I mean, in questions like this, I would always defer to my team. I can echo what I've heard them say, but I mean, I learned this is a pilot. that I trained, I got certified to fly in several airplanes, it got typed, but I had a rule for myself that I always flew with someone else who was a professional. Because when I was in the cockpit, even though I knew what I was doing, I was never as fluid and as competent as them.

47:41When they, all they did, every day, all days, thinking about that versus me jumping in and out. And so, and then also just knowing that if you have five longevity experts doing this, they're all going to disagree. But yeah, we've just been following the evidence of your caloric restriction has some meaningful evidence. And you're like, we're looking at these, made these lifespan and health span studies and we try to follow it. And so I don't know if a 5 % body fat is a target of more of where the body has settled out at. It's a byproduct of the fact that you're doing this caloric restriction and that is why your particular body ends up sitting at somebody else would be at three and a half, someone else would be at seven and a half on the exact same protocol.

48:22Okay, interesting. One of the things that I haven't heard you talk about is heat and cold exposure. This is the current most popular bro science approach for longevity routine. Are you using ice baths? Are you using stoner exposure? Do you consider it a whole meastist stressor? Have you tested with it?

48:45We kind of don't do anything that's popular right now. And we've looked pretty carefully at a cold and hot exposure. We've looked at hyperbaric. And it's not to say that these things don't have benefit. It's that they don't have benefit in the ways where we have objectives. And so I mean, there's an unlimited number of things I can do in a given day that would potentially be useful to me. But we have an extremely specific goal of slowing my speed of aging. And when you have that narrow of a goal, it just creates a really clean workspace to say, does this thing have inclusion or does it not? And so no, we don't do any colder or heat exposure.

49:31That's interesting. I'm starting to kind of get a conception about this single ordinating principle slowed down the speed of aging. That means that there are other things that other people who have slightly different ordinating principles might need to add in. Well, let's say that it was your goal to optimize dopamine throughout the day. Okay, well, maybe you would look at adding in cold exposure. Maybe you would even look at adding in cold exposure multiple times throughout the day and maybe you would do some research to look at whatever the equivalent of a circadian rhythm for dopamine is. And well, maybe we can bring it up on flat points and maybe we can boost it on other points and maybe we'll be taking a bunch of supplements.

50:08And that would be the ordinating principle if we want to maximize dopamine throughout the day. It's interesting that slowing the speed of aging and you would have done it had it have been something that you think would have contributed to it hasn't folded heat and cold exposure in. You said we're not doing the things that other people are doing, but you're not doing them because other people, you're not doing them because other people do them, you're not doing them because presumably the data doesn't suggest that it's something that's really worthwhile. Yeah, again, very well said. It's strange that it's not looking at the data.

50:38The data isn't screaming at you, get in a fucking colter, or like go in a sauna. Like it's strange that that's not happened, I think. Yeah, yeah, and it's hard. I really, we get asked about, I get asked about colics, but I think more than anything.

50:56And my objective is not to rain on anyone's parade. It's not to discourage anyone who's trying to do good for themselves. is not to try to be a know -it -all. I've just really not wanted to engage in the conversation. It's not part of my protocol, fine, whatever. I don't need to go out and trumpet it. If other people are excited about it, that's wonderful. But really, this is trying to move the entire field forward. I think there's a certain disposition that helps people feel encouraged. Maybe we'll find the evidence, and maybe it'll be something we do in the future. I never know. I know, every time I've expressed an opinion, I've come back to think, I'm never expressing an opinion again, so you just never know where it's gonna go.

51:40But I will say that, you know, with what are we doing now with sleep and diet and exercise, maybe it solves my dopamine for me. I don't know. I don't currently have a dopamine problem, I think, you know, like my mood, it's never been more stable in my entire life. I've never felt more motivated in my entire life. So it's just different ways of saying it, But I think what you said really was a nice construction where if you don't have the clarification of endpoint Then it really gets in this fuzzy space where you don't really know where to put that piece of the puzzle and then people can misinterpret how to think about it I remember I heard stories about both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and during his time at Amazon Bezos had one one -ordinating principle that every single decision went through and it was, does this improve customer experience?

52:28Does this improve customer experience? Every single decision and Musk's apparently made it still be, was, does this get us closer to Mars? Every single thing, every single question, does this get us closer to Mars? Do I go to the party this evening or do I go to bed? Do I decide to hire this person or do I decide to hire this person? Do I decide to start this new company or invest here or buy Twitter or sell Twitter or tweets or do whatever does this get as close to Mars. There's maybe an argument to be made some of the tweets that he's put out, probably don't get as close to Mars. But I think it taught me the value of a single -ordinating principle.

53:07Ryan Holidays' book from last year, Discipline is Destiny. The biggest takeaway that I took from that conversation was that without a goal, without an ordinating principle, there can be no discipline before that because the discipline is in service of the outcome. What are you being disciplined for? Like what is discipline? And given the fact that we are these multi -factorial, multi -variant creatures with all conflicting goals and self -deception and 5 p .m. Brian and 7 p .m. Brian and tired Brian and hungry Brian, if you don't have a very, very clear goal, it's almost impossible to be disciplined in the service of it.

53:43And okay, in your opinion then, is it more difficult to live a life with more than one goal? Or the more goals you have, does life become exponentially more difficult, working back on that? Yeah.

54:10After doing this for a while, this is why I arrive at the mind is dead. So if it's the, so let's just walk through the process. Like if I say an algorithm now takes care of me better than I can myself with the goal of minimizing aging. So it's all a singular objective that simplifies all the decisions around it. But what I'm really trying to demonstrate is this is a system of goal alignment. So it doesn't matter what you choose of your goal. When you can take 35 trillion agents and goal align them around a singular thing, you've built the tapestry of goal alignment. So blueprint can scale to anything.

55:02Blueprint can scale to climate change. The Earth is the body. You take millions of measurements. You look at the evidence of what is a proper biosphere for the coral reef and the city and the oceans and all the above. you apply a protocol and you repeat data evidence protocol. The same is true for everything else and what I'm really trying to say is if we are thinking about the future of existence the problem we have to solve is goal alignment and that we have to do that so we don't destroy our biosphere we have to do that so we don't have just topic outcomes with AI we have to do that so we don't annihilate each other because we're of our propensity towards violence.

55:46It is the singular goal we have as a species. And so I'm trying to prove this system with myself, the one thing I have control over. I would maybe be tempted when you say the mind is dead. It's nice because it's like playing off that God is dead thing. But you must have throughout your day thought that you enjoy creative insights that reflect on your life introspection about memories, dreams and hopes for the future. So there is still a very real role for the mind. It seems it's a little bit more like decision -making is dead in that regard. But yeah, I think you've spoken a a couple of times about where your emotions are at, regulating emotions.

56:36You even said earlier on that spirituality or like being spiritual is a component of this. Fold in your protocol for emotional health and spiritual health as well. How does that play a role? How have you learned to optimize that? What are your frameworks and perspective on it? Yeah, you're right that the sitting beneath the abstract layer of the mind is dead. There's all this nuance of, like even when autopilot flies the airplane, I'm still landing the airplane and taxiing the airplane. So my mind is still engaged in some of these activities, but the bulk of the autopilot, it's nice to know I've got that when I'm flying.

57:15And so, but what it is really trying to convey is the only tool we've ever had in existence to manage ourselves is our mind. And when I look at myself, my objective is to destroy my nemesis before my nemesis destroys me, And my mind is my most powerful nemesis. And so as we start breaking out the complexities and the nuances of what role do our minds have in society going forward? And if we are trying to look at this large computational problem of goal alignment, what is that role? And to me, it's a legitimate question. But the very first thing that I can say confidently about myself is who inflicts the most self -destruction upon me of anything in existence.

58:02It's myself. If we say as we as a species, who inflicts more pain upon us than anything else? It's ourselves. If I say, probably, who's a bigger worry to me, AI or humans? Humans. Like I'm trying to get to the root of where is the threat coming from? and what might we do to try to offset that? Now, what spawns after that in terms of what kind of spiritual practice we have and how do we find meaning? Those are all really cool and fun questions we can play with on, you know, once we have the free space to do so, but we're not in a safe place right now as a species at all, like we're under extreme threat.

58:46And so what I'm really trying to do is address the things that are most pressing that threat in our very existence and survival so we can get to this play space. What about when you face negative unwanted emotions throughout the day? They're going to arise. They're the sort of things that you have significantly less control over than what goes in your mouth than how you train, than the time that you go to sleep, than the temperature of your cooled and heated mattress. You know, these are unknown unknowns in some regards. So how have you learned to deal with emotional regulation in an effective way and what strategies can people take away from that?

59:25I mean, I was chronically depressed for a decade likely the result of being an entrepreneur and working my talent off building a brain -treatment Mo having three little babies in a bad relationship, you know like all the stuff That you go through a hard time in life And so if I look at that time and I look at the avalanche Of negativity that buried me every second of every day It absolutely pinned me to the ground and I was suffocating. I couldn't breathe. If I look at now, relatively speaking, the amount of negativity in my mind, there's like zero. So getting these basic things right in my life, like sleep and diet, eliminating these self -destructed behaviors, I almost rarely ever now have a genuinely, what I call it, a genuinely self -destructive thought.

1:00:17Now, I may contemplate and say, boy, I wish I wouldn't have said that thing or I wish I would have said this thing differently, or I wasn't as nice as I wanted to be, or I feel a little ashamed about this kind of thing, like sure, those are all little mind. We all do that with our self -interspection that helped us improve, but I would say, generally speaking, I be eliminated, the most hurtful and self -destructive things that plagued me to the point of suicide. And I just never thought that would be possible. Andrew Hubemann, the first things that he said on a podcast episode I did with him was, you do not control the mind with the mind, you control it with the body.

1:00:54And it seems to me like your mind is downstream from what you've been doing with your body. But I have a pet obsession for evolutionary psychology. And it seems to me that almost every animal Humans included aren't meant to be satisfied. Where the inbuilt base programming outcome, the state that humans are supposed to be in is minor dissatisfaction. The life is suffering from the Buddha, right? The word for suffering is duke, duke, kk, h, a, I think. And then some scholars contest that that word doesn't mean suffering, it means unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. You know, the holiday that you plan to go on, the steak that you intended to eat, there's always something, the sand between your toes, it could have been a tiny little bit more salted, it could have been a little bit less well done.

1:01:51It seems pleasantly surprising to me that you was somebody that is trying to optimize the body as much as possible. Downstream from that has found a very large amount of peace in the mind as well, given what my assumptions would have been about what unperturbed human mentality would have been. I mean, thinking about your frame, if I were to try to oversimplify our existence, you and we become aware that we're in some sort of unpleasantness, hunger or you know need for status or ambition like whatever, but we just spend our entire existence trying to address our unpleasantness. That's it. That's all we're doing.

1:02:49And then we make up all these stories and gains and like the Buddha was saying like, hey, like this is the essence. This is existence and the only way to a deal with existence is to eliminate this permanently. But to me, that's really what we're just walking around trying to deal with our conscious selves. And what I like about what we're at as a species is, yes, that's been the case, but it may not be the case. If we have the ability in the form of computational intelligence and we now can physically, predictably, engineer atoms, molecules, and organisms, we're an uncharted territory. And this is why I think the future is like a zero -ath principal future.

1:03:32We have no ability whatsoever to model out what's going to happen. And that's never been true with human society. Yeah, it's so sure that maybe the state now we're running from constant displeasure But this is why I thought of this computational goal -limit system because it leads us to this future We can't model or predict and it may be the most extraordinary thing humans have ever experienced You know the optionality is so vast that basically any prediction goes out of the window and the unknown and known start to get Exponential yeah, Navale has a quote which you'll be familiar with, desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

1:04:10Given that you sold a company for $800 million, which has permitted you, aside from the conversation about, you need the physical resources, monetary time, etc, to be able to focus on what it is that you're doing, Navale also has a really great insight, which is it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. And what you're talking about previously is the unsatisfactoriness, the inherent unsatisfactoriness or displeasure that people feel on a daily basis is something that you have largely been able to dispense with. If you hadn't had such success, monetarily, you know, achieving the status that you needed, do you think that open loop would be intruding still on your life, even if let's say somehow you manage to have the, someone else was paying for all of these things to be done for you, right?

1:05:07So like, you know, you, you, you, materially, were able to make it happen. Um, would that open loop? Do you think I haven't achieved the ridiculous success within business? Would that still perturbed your thoughts? Is that a loop that needed closing. Yeah, so this is a question which my brain just registered as I just I just flagged a few alerts in my brain when you ask me this question because it said to me, hey, this person's asking you your opinion, you're un, basically there's no data involved. There's no reference set. There's no evidence. Just your free from free form freestyle opinion terrifying, dangerous.

1:05:52because I can verify any fucking answer my brain comes up with. It's like, but you know what? It's all bullshit. So like whatever words come out of my mouth are Absolutely fabricated have zero basis in reality and are a disservice to everyone including myself Interesting. So do you Let's say that you want to play around with ideas. You're at dinner at the first supper and somebody asks you a question that you don't have an answer for So how do you venture into the realm of things that you don't know if you're never prepared to venture into the realm of things that you don't know? This is one of the thought experiments I do at my dinners, my blueprint branches.

1:06:34So I say, okay, let's do a thought experiment where the social gathering, we're playfully having conversation. I turn to someone and I say, hey, I'm interested in hydration. I want to be better hydrated. How much water should I drink? And so a volunteer will be like, you know, I'll play along with you. And typically they'll say, well, I think it's like, you know, roughly eight ounces or eight cups of water a day. I have this flask. It's pink. I take it with me everywhere I go. I'm always in the bathroom. It's kind of annoying. My friend Suzie, she has one too. Her mom thinks it's really weird she carries it with her.

1:07:09Her mom's kind of not doing very well. She's sick. She has this other friend who flew in from LA that weekend. They're having dinner and they go on thing, right? And then they finally come back and they're like, okay, so yeah. And so I say, okay, great. So your answer is like eight, eight cups of water a day. Yes. And then I do the thought experiment again. And I say, how much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, the, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. At the end of the previous discussion, I say, how do you know eight cups of water a day? And they say, well, I read it somewhere like on some website or, you know, something like, well, have you seen the data?

1:07:42Do you know? No, but I don't have seen it somewhere. Okay, so I do the thought experiment again. How do you know how much water should I drink and if they're paying attention the person says I Don't know If not they'll do the eight cup of the water, but it really is meant to demonstrate the majority of our social interactions Serve the function of social cohesion Not truth seeking and as a result we pass on these this lore which is not true, but we can't distinguish between the social cohesion, dance, and what we're passing on is knowledge. And so it's this clear distinction to try to discern.

1:08:24And so if you're really in a truth seeking discussion, great, like have that. But if you're in a social soothing situation, don't mistake the two, because it really compromises everyone's shared ability to understand reality and make good decisions. You muddy the sense -making landscape with people doing performative conversation, masquerading is truth -seeking. That's really, really interesting. In your opinion then, should nobody speak on things that they don't have data for and what is the role of playing with ideas that are more difficult to be analytical with

1:09:19I suppose it depends on who the conversations with and what the objectives are. If you're just there to have fun, if you're actually trying to solve a problem, these blueprint brunches I put, I bring people together and no one knows each other. So it's, it's a set of accomplished people, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, astronauts, educators. So everyone's kind of doing the dance of filling each other out. They're trying to figure out ranking and priority and status. They're trying to like, you know, do all the social stuff. And so people are playing the different games. Yeah, I just say that my personal participation varies according to the group by men and what we're trying to achieve.

1:10:05Interesting. One of the other things that you've looked at and that you're optimizing is youthfulness on the outside, not just on the inside, the way that you look. What is your perspective on sunlight exposure onto the skin also onto the face, not just from a youthful perspective, but also from a health and physiology perspective?

1:10:29I don't know.

1:10:34I'll tell you that I typically avoid the sun because my skin is almost always healing from some kind of laser. You can see here on the screen, see all these dots all over my neck. What's that? From laser. So I had, we just bought another laser and my face is still healing from this. So my skin is sensitive to the sun because it's in these healing conditions. So generally speaking, I'm always aware of the UV index. When I go outside, I do wear sunscreen and we measure my skin health robustly. We use multispetral imaging where it looks at UV and red and browns and porcise. We use autofluorescence, we use merscores, we do biopsies.

1:11:20So we're looking quantitatively at the skin from every angle so that we can say with some degree of confidence How my skin protocols doing with all the treatments are doing but yeah Generally speaking as I understand it UV exposure has Negative effects on the skin of a certain type with a certain duration with a certain exposure rate So just generally I don't get a lot of some exposure Are you aware of the brand of sunscreen that you've ended up zeroing in on presumably it's very well researched with a bunch of chemicals that aren't going to make you die sooner Yeah, we use Cerevae AM which is a 35 UVA UVB and then also LTMD which is also UVA BA EMB Okay, are they Regularly available or is this some Vietnamese pharmacy website?

1:12:16Regularly oh cool. Okay, that's good Yeah, it's again, I think that it's very interesting to see what's showing up in the data. You know, a ton of my friends very, very big into earthing, into spending time outside in nature, rejuvenative practices, and a big chunk of that involves sunlight exposure. Yeah, a non -insignificant cohort of them, ones that have massive problems with putting sunscreen on their body, on their skin, because of what's going to happen. and dermally is it going to get absorbed and caused me to follow East Rigeons? I think that stress testing a lot of these assumptions as you are doing is very interesting.

1:12:59I think that it's helping to see where the rubber meets the road. Yeah, I mean to your point is it is funny every time I say anything about anything, I get these predictable responses. But what about cold exposure, heat exposure, sun exposure? Oh, wow, I've had a basic bitch question today. That we just tried to tell me, Ryan. And nobody, was I, did I get my bare skin exposed to the grass exposure? Did I, like everyone has their frame of, you know, or have I practiced some Eastern, you know, meditative blank? And so everyone comes to me with their thing of like, but what about? And I don't know what to say.

1:13:51Like we haven't tested every permeation that's ever existed. We've run, we've looked at the data, we look at the evidence, we do the thing, and we report back, but that's it. But it is so predictable and it's so funny that I put something out and I try like, provide something of useful insight, but then people, you know, their questions just smother it into like, it's not valuable to them at all because all these are the variables confounded, which I understand, I mean, but it is funny that sometimes it feels like it's one step forward and four steps back when people parse these things through all their filters.

1:14:27Yeah, you should have a page on your website of like, like FSRs, frequently stated rebuttals. And just, what about cold exposure? It does not seem that we have any evidence to say that we're going to introduce it. What about heat exposure? It does not seem that we have any evidence. What about sunlight? That would be maybe time saving. One of the things to consider, you mentioned that you're 45, you mentioned that you'd spent a decade of your life very aggressively building a company. during that time you were aging it significantly probably quicker than your biological age was. Does that mean from an internal body clock perspective that up until somebody really starts to take this stuff seriously or happens upon it just by chance because they end up having a really perfect lifestyle naturally, you're always going to be running ahead of your of your current age therefore, is there a part of you that regrets the fact that you didn't do this 20 years ago?

1:15:30Yeah. Uh, entirely. Yeah, I... My parents didn't know any better because they were following social norms, but I ate sugar cereal for breakfast. So does I was in the sun constantly with no sunscreen. I mean, I shot guns with no air protection. I mean, I just did everything I could have done that would hurt my health I did. And aggressively, like I was like, I have full of life. And I certainly had a lot of fun. I'm sure it's also, it's very hard to correct damage that has happened. So with my children, for example, my 17 year old who is with me right now, he's almost entirely on blueprint. And, you know, he, to his credit, he fully realizes and he's so grateful for starting this at his age.

1:16:31And so, I mean, it's exciting for him, you know, at this age to be on this protocol. And while, I mean, his friends at school, they, he just got accepted to a prestigious institution for college. He went there for this. Yeah. I mean, he did a wonderful job, I mean, he worked as talent off the school and he went to this orientation and he sent me this video and here are like some of the most talented humans on planet earth and they're downing sugar, junk food, drinking, not sleeping and I was like, oh my god, this is just, I'm so sad. This is the future humans and like we've normalized these behaviors so much and they're sitting within in this edifice of intellectual aspiration, doing these things, and I thought, what a disconnect between what we're trying to birth intellectually and what they're doing physically.

1:17:27And I'm glad that he had the wherewithal to be like, you know, dad, I'm glad I'm not doing these things. I know how badly poor sleep affects my cognition. I know how badly junk food affects my mood. So, but I don't know, it's been on my mind ever since, like, haven't been able to stop thinking about it. There are trade -offs though. There will be a time where your son needs to pull an all -nighter before some sort of project gets put in. Like we inevitably, given the fact that he right now doesn't just have livers as long as possible or reduce the speed of aging, as his single -ordinating principle, it's also, don't flunk university.

1:18:07It's also probably make my time at university sufficiently enjoyable that I have memories that I am fond of when I look back. Maybe get a girlfriend, it's maybe play a sport, it's maybe do a bunch of other things. So, again, we mentioned this earlier on, the single -ordinating principle is great because it creates a very easy filter through which every decision needs to be made. There will end up being compromises that will need to be made during everybody's life, right? Even during yours at some point, you will have an opportunity which is so good that you think this is for the greater good of blueprint, but it is going to mean that for this next week of traveling and blah blah, I am actually going to speed up my aging son suffer.

1:18:46The difference is there is much lower hanging fruit that some of his peers could pick up on, like maybe put the full fat doctor pepper down, like maybe dominoes isn't the best way to fuel yourself the night before an exam, etc, etc. But I think that that displays quite nicely the level of a lack of wisdom around what actually makes people operate effectively. I mean, if we, I understand practically what you're saying, right, the trade -off space you've represented, what I would think would be worthwhile for us to think about is you just pull that out of your pocket, all of the favorite things we humans like to pull out of our pockets, right?

1:19:42Create enduring memories. We want this experience, you know, like we're just define the trade -off space and in doing that, what we're saying is we always have the override switch to do this at all times. And what I want to pose is, and this is how we currently think about ourselves as a species, when we walk into this future, we bring those assumptions that remain hidden to our own awareness. And so I like working with this concept of Gen 0 of this idea that we, a group of humans walking into the future that is willing to divorce themselves from all human norms and customs. Because if you look at this and you say, okay, how powerful is artificial intelligence?

1:20:39How fast is it going to move? And what is our relationship in power going to be in relation to this thing? We don't know. And so I understand what you're saying on trade -offs, but it comes at the question from this position of luxury that we can always choose under any circumstance and make those trade -offs. And I want to say I'm open -minded to the future of our existence may be more wild and weird and different than we can ever contemplate. And again, if you just look at the mathematical, if you look at the curves of improvement, I think we're we're closer to that situation than we realize.

1:21:22And this is what I'm really trying to get across with Blueprint is the mind really dead. Like are we genuinely in a situation where algorithms better care for us and we're no longer pulling the funny business of like, oh, well, here's a cool story. I'm gonna ediviate from now with it because of it. And this just generates like violent responses inside of people because it steps on their sacredness. But I think this is a relevant conversation for us to have. I think it's, I think you're right. I understand the point that you mean. I think what it does presuppose is that, axiomatically, everybody else's single -ordinating principle would also be slow down aging as much as possible.

1:22:05There are people out there for whom they would say, I have taken it from first principles that say that they have all of the insight that you do and more. and they say, my life wants to be something which is not that. My goal is to see as many different countries on the planet as possible. I don't care about how long I live. Or maybe I do care, but it's third thing down the list. Yeah. As soon as you fold that in, as soon as you fold in any other goal, this is when the trade -offs come. And I understand that as soon as you say, there are trade -offs that need to be made, you open the door to the executive function of you making a decision, not being outsourced to the blueprint or the boss that made the choice.

1:22:44I understand that that's a very dangerous game to play. And I, from your perspective, and with your goals at the moment, I think it makes complete sense. But that does presuppose that everybody else's goal also should be to live as long. As soon as you open the door to that not being the case, I think that the trade -offs has to come in. Yeah. Also, it's not even, I'm not even presupposing that everyone needs to have my goal. I'm saying that if you look at the, the drivers of our existence where artificial intelligence is a force that needs to be reconciled with that our biosphere and planet earth needs to be sustainable and that needs to be negotiated with and that we humans need to not kill each other, that needs to be negotiated with.

1:23:28So what I'm saying is we currently do this in society like we say you can't kill someone, that's against the rules, you can't run someone over to your car, that's against the rules, like we do this in many ways today, we're already doing this massive goal alignment thing in society is just if you're going to get much more computational in nature. Because right now we see that when humans do whatever they want, whenever they want, it has negative effects on the biosphere that make it unsustainable. So one of those things has to give either the biosphere has to give and becomes sustainable by itself or humans have to be negotiated with on what their behaviors are allowed to do.

1:24:05And this is what I'm saying. When you look at the large scale goal alignment problem, the presumption that we all have this we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, may not be true. It's a different set of considerations we're walking into. And so I bring up this is really not to predict the future, but as a thought experiment to say, if we are serious about creating a future that we're going to enjoy, I would much rather have an honest conversation about the potential things we need to be thinking about and the changes in our life because everything that society is so delicately balanced where we don't ask anything of the individual.

1:24:45It's always blaming someone else and expecting someone else to change we're never pointing itself and the presumption is always I can do whatever I want because me but again I think we need to call into question all these primary assumptions. Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you do, where should they go? Instagram and Twitter. I love it, man. Dude, I find you very, very interesting. I very, very enjoy this, very much enjoyed this kind of a conversation, one that ranges from principles to philosophy, to enacting strategies as well.

1:25:23It's very, very cool. I appreciate the stuff that you do. Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me on.