Bryan Johnson: "Healthiest Man on Earth", Founder of Braintree & The Blueprint Protocol – Longevity, Superintelligence, Radical Health, & Redefining Human Potential

0:03When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Hi, Brian. Hey. Thank you so much for having me and having us in your home today. This is surreal after having watched you do a couple of interviews with interview words that I admire and a couple of my friends, Mike and Logan, whose podcast I actually broke character on for the first time.

0:47I felt like you were doing the same with them as well. You were like showing a different side of yourself and just hanging out with the guys. It was very cool to see. Yeah, yeah. Logan became a friend a couple years ago and I guess like a year ago. And so we've been messing around with stuff. So yeah, we had a lot of familiarity going into the conversation. He's in this complicated situation because his profession, he's basically getting traumatic brain injuries. You know, he's being body slammed. Yes. And he's also trying to be very healthy. So I was telling him like, hey man, be careful. I saw he's done like 50 MRIs, but you've done similar.

1:21Yeah. Yeah. So he definitely is probably doing the best job out of all the wrestlers in terms of proactively taking care of his health and monitoring the health effects. But I don't know. I'd like to see if wrestlers have a similar kind of profile as professional football players, you know, successive concussions. And like when they – I went to a WME event recently, and they get after it. So I don't know what the whole body damage is, but it's pretty significant. For Logan's sake, I hope he's okay. Yeah. Around the world with your host, the Stardguy, We welcome you back to the Stad Guy podcast, sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just know.

2:09Again, thank you so much for having us in your home. I know that this is around the end of your day typically. So this would be the equivalent of having an interview on my side at 10 or 11 p.m. Yeah, that's right. So I really appreciate you welcoming us into your home today. I assume the audience knows you very well, but for those who don't know, welcome to the Shtad Guy podcast. Brian Johnson is the man trying to live the best and longest on earth. You are the healthiest man in the world. You have achieved the perfect sleep score and you are changing what it means to live long and live well. I have a lot of friends who are big fans of yours and who try to live as close as possible to the blueprint method.

2:53and many of them happen to share similar outcomes of their work and success as you do and having exited companies and reached a point in their lives and careers where they have the luxury of time and resources to really go all out. And I have other friends as well who may not have the same resources and actually focus on the basics of sleep, exercise and eat that you you talk about very often. But I'd love to start our conversation by going back in time to what your life was like when you were a founder before you exited your startup, Braintree to PayPal. What was old Brian like? Yeah, I mean, I remember the bargain I did with myself.

3:39I, at the age of I was trying to imagine how much money would I need by the age 30 to stop working. And so I just pulled out a spreadsheet. I started doing some math. I assumed a 7 % interest rate. And at the time I assumed my monthly consumption would be something like$10 ,000 a month. That would be adequate for a family. I had, I planned on having a few kids. And so if I'm not mistaken, I believe the number I came up with was something like$7 million. If I got that, and we lived in a frugal way, it was enough money to basically never work again. And so I thought that's like the low end of the possibility, then of course, you can go up from there.

4:25And the contemplation was that if you were willing to devote yourself on that kind of journey, you could come up with zero, or get, you know, 7 million or more, but you basically were making that bargain. And so I remember the mentality in doing that was, I'm willing to sacrifice myself for this bargain, which means I know as an entrepreneur, you're going to have to work very hard, probably seven days a week, all day, every day. You probably are not going to take very many vacations. It's going to be on your mind all the time. Like it's going to be an all consuming thing. And I remember that was the mentality I had in going into it.

5:04So I knew it was a sacrifice. I knew it was a bargain and I knew I was going to have to pay a price. And so I just didn't even question what the price was. I just assumed that doing it would be somehow worth it because then you'd have this sometime horizon where you didn't need to play. So I guess that really my starting assumption baked in the fact that I was already willing to sacrifice myself for this objective. Fine. And I assume by sacrifice yourself, you mean not sleeping as well as you could have, not eating as well as you could have. Yeah. I mean, that's the bargain. So if you what I've learned is that when I share ideas about health and wellness and about, for example, like when I was speaking to a group on Saturday and I was trying to persuade them to make sleep their number one life priority.

5:55and I got people to raise their hands like who you know after this is like after 10 minutes of explaining the benefits and also the damage that your body incurs when not sleeping well and I would say like raise your hand who's willing to commit and I got quite a few people but then there's probably like 30 percent of people who are being intellectually honest they're like I can't and so I'd say okay what's what's your objection to this and so one one woman said well my children, they can't do it. They just, I said, why? And she said, they have too much to do, like too much homework, too much, you know, the sports activities after school, like how are they going to compete?

6:33And I was trying to figure out a way to articulate this, that in society, we've just assumed that if there's too much going on, sleep must be sacrificed. Instead of saying sleep is the non-negotiable and everything else must be planned around it. And then somebody who was a student at USC also raised his hand. He said, I can't because I'm a student and I'm trying to get my grades to compete. And so I guess in both those examples, people, they treat sleep as a variable that can be pushed around according to other fixed goals. And what I was suggesting to them is they need to fix sleep and other things, other variables they need to push around.

7:17And so as an entrepreneur at 21 years of age, I was basically accepting that societal assumption that I was willing to accept that sleep was a variable that I could push around because my goal was fixed. But it takes a long time for people to really think this through because it's so ingrained in us that we don't need sleep. It's not really important that it takes like several cycles to go through for someone to realize what they're actually doing. Absolutely. I mean, I'm incredibly curious about your transition from sacrificing your health for the sake of work to once you had accomplished your goal and exited your business and you were finally able to shift your priorities and realign your sacrifices.

8:00Was that an immediate change? I think it was gradual in its intensity. So a few things. One, we're all motivated to have good health because feeling crummy sucks and feeling great is something you cherish. But in between those two observations, it's not clear whether you like. So let's just say you make money and now you are evaluating your life. what's more important is it to have a great time with friends and party or is it to go to bed on time you have to weigh those two things and if the person says actually i'd rather have a good time with my friends and like i'm healthy all week long and then i want to party really hard because this is something i'm enjoying and if it somehow negatively affects my life uh like it takes a few years off my tail end of my life i don't care and so they use these thought patterns of like I can pay this price now because I don't care about my future self at some point in time.

9:07And so this is a second example where there's all these layers of cultural education we have, which blind us to this reality that actually those things don't make you happy. And so in my situation, I was going from depressed to not wanting to be depressed. That's a good one. but then going from there to where i'm at now is another really big leap and so i was just trying to say i don't want to be i don't want to hurt and suffer so once you get to some kind of neutral state then that's a contemplation of um what trade-offs are you willing to make and that's when the reason i got where i'm at now is that was the observation we are the first generation who won't die and once you get there then it's real then it's like this isn't some game we're playing And this is like the biggest game in the galaxy of like, we may not die, which means that I understand reality in a very different way.

10:08I definitely want to dive into that. But before we get there, I want to talk about this prioritizing health coolness and that shift that has happened recently where I'm privileged to know a few people that have exited and made a lot of money from selling their businesses, as you have. and five or ten years ago the natural next step after selling a business that i always saw was just maximum indulgence yes you know just party and eat and travel and do this whole thing right yeah and i see that changing where a lot of people are actually indulging less and caring for themselves more and that's what's cool yes and a whoop is a lot cooler than a lot of watches today and caring for yourself and caring about the quality and length of your life is one of the greatest luxuries.

11:03I think you're a part of that trend growth for sure. But why now? And why is it such a cool thing now, particularly for people who have the luxuries of time and money? Yeah. I mean, ultimately, humans respond to incentives. and it is currently not cool to be obese. It is not cool to drink alcohol. It's seen as it's not cool to, I guess in some circles, maybe to smoke, but generally speaking, it's not cool to smoke. And I'd say it is cool to flex biomarkers. It is cool to talk about what you're doing for your health. so i think humans are responding to cultural signals that you are higher status in your social group and your higher status in society if you can speak the language of longevity and you actually you embody it you know your skin looks great you have muscle you're fit it does really generate power and status and i think people respond to that and do you think anything has happened at a macro level to encourage that anything technologically yeah i think that uh what what's transpired is that um health has become measurable and so if someone's outwardly obese you know that's a uh that's a knock on them you know like They can't control their own eating habits.

12:39And so that's kind of like a source of shame. But if you're fit, like if you're relatively healthy, but you're unhealthy internally, no one sees that. And the fact that health can now be measured so robustly, it reveals your inner unhealth. And so I think that basically I would guess that there's been an accounting of health, that if you don't know your health markers, you're not viewed as intelligent as you could be if you knew your health markers. And if you do know your health markers and they're bad, that's kind of like being obese. Now if you have health markers and you're good, so my guess is that when people can hide something, that they'll scoot along and do it.

13:33You can still play the games of power and status just by faking it. But right now, it's harder to fake good health because the technology behind measurement is so much better. So you're about to make a trade based on a friend's text. But which you do you listen to? Is it, we could buy a house in Tulum. Get optioning those options. We could lose everything. or let's do a little research get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you learn more at finra.org slash trade smart and is that where your journey started you start that self-reflection and examination of your body to fix things entirely Yeah, I mean, the premise was that, like most humans, I ran my existence by my mind.

14:32You know, like, what does my mind want? When it looks at the menu at the restaurant, what does it want to eat? And when I think about whether I'm going to do this debaucherous thing, what does my mind tell me about my philosophies of life? And I said, the mind is not a good steward of the body. My mind is actually a really bad boss of my body. So I said, all right, body, you're in charge. So I'm going to ask you what you want to do by getting data from you, and you're going to tell me on a daily basis what to do and what not to do. And so I thought that the body is God in many ways. Before, you imagine this supernatural thing, and now the thing that houses our existence is our body.

15:19If we don't have our body, we have nothing. And so I think the body's been in this weird,

15:28like almost dismissed thing in our reality where it's like it's the flesh, it decays, and over time you can't stop it. But I think if we elevate it and imagine it to be sacred and a work of art and beautiful and like this magnificent creation that it is, it just changes how we think about it. So yeah, for me, it was putting my body in charge and realizing that my mind is a menace. I like that you said perfect the body. Because I think that longevity as a title and as a brand for this category is often misinterpreted. And people assume it means to live longer no matter the quality of life. Yes.

16:11and like like most old people who end up decaying and not not being in great shape before they pass they sure i'd rather not go through this another year than than be in the suffering i think people think about that when they assume what living longer in a bad way could look like versus living well so with your desires for this perfect body is it about added years or increased quality of life for the years that exist yeah it's about be sexy okay right be strong uh do what you want so even even these concepts lie that we use like longevity and no one cares right they just want to be attractive they want others to think they're attractive they want to have you know a good looking body they want to feel great they want to sleep great they want beautiful skin so like that's the language like that's what humans want now longevity is a byproduct of those things but just be sexy is what most people want and i know the fundamentals are the most important by far eat sleep exercise well and the enhancements that can be added on beyond the list is long and you are the leader of the pack with all the things you can do.

17:37If you were to stop everything except for the basics today, do you think that would have a significant negative impact on your biomarkers? I mean, probably. Yeah, so there's several big camps to health and wellness. And there's a big camp that believes in natural remedies. Like the idea is that it's been around for tens of thousands of years. Therefore, it's still the test of time. And therefore, we should do something like that. And then there's groups, there's people like me who we lean into medications, you know, any kind of technology we can get access to. Food plus exercise plus pharma kind of stuff we embrace.

18:24And so we have said that we don't judge any intervention by any modality. If it works, it works. And so for us, the goal is trying to basically establish a new world record, a new singular accomplishment on what can be done. and therefore we just pull out all the stops. So it's not like we're trying to be generally healthy or roughly healthy. It's like we want to have perfect health. And that's a pretty bold endeavor because we still probably are in the very early days of understanding biology and longevity. But yeah, so that's what we've done in doing that because we wanted to, a lot of people,

19:12in encountering this, a lot of people don't know where to find the motivation. So if like looking great is what, you know, the objective a lot of people align with, outside of that, they're not quite sure why do you try? Because if they're going to age and die anyways, is it really worth all the hassle? And I'm trying to give people a motivation to say, it's really worth it. You can meaningfully change how you feel like significantly. And that's why I want to create this contrast where people are like, okay, before I thought like maybe worth a little bit, but now I'm into it because you really can make big gains.

19:52So I'm trying to change more than anything the perception around health and why it's worth doing to a meaningful degree. Not just, I'm not arguing for a lackadaisical approach. I'm arguing a very robust, energetic disposition towards health, that it really is worth it at every layer. And how much stronger is the prioritization of prevention than fixing the problem once someone gets there and hoping for the progression of technology to come so far? Yeah. Because I know you are a technological optimist. you believe that a lot of the world's problems will be solved by super intelligence. What if this is one of those problems that could be solved?

20:36Yeah. So you see, like, actually, I think the most interesting pattern here is in your questions, you're correctly identifying the thought patterns people have that are the barrier for them to be, to make good health decisions. So this latest question you asked, the way people process that, and I have friends who say this, like certain friends who said, I've stopped doing things for my health because AI is going to solve it when it's here. One person said I stopped wearing sunscreen because when AI comes, it's going to fix all my sun damage. And that may be true. And the point I'm trying to make though is that the psychology behind that is actually the root of our problem as a species.

21:23Is if we apply that same theory of like, I'm going to pollute the earth because AI is just going to fix it. Or we're going to allow nation states to go to war with each other and kill each other because AI is going to come and fix it. If that becomes the way of managing our problems, we make our situation worse. And I'm trying to suggest the more healthy disposition is for us to say we are going to solve it right now, not just because it actually is beneficial for you now, but that is part of this larger philosophy of where we're at as a species in this moment. But you can see that the biggest foe I personally have in this endeavor is all the baked in ideas that humanity has accepted for their entire lifetimes.

22:11And these ideas challenge them and they can't see that they're actual blockers. Yeah. Where are we as a species in this moment? I think if we can survive this moment and future generations are writing the equivalent of history books about this moment, I think it's possible that they say that this was the most spectacular moment in all of intelligent existence on this planet. that when you're transitioning from human-based intelligence to digital intelligence, and there's this transition moment to something new, and it's perilous. It's not clear whether we're going to make it through this. And so I think that it's exciting beyond our ability to see that if we saw ourselves in this historical moment, we would behave with such different energy.

23:16Then right now, we kind of know something's going on, like a lot of people know something's going on, but it feels very much like we bring status quo-like energy to it, where it's like, it's going to happen and I'm going to observe it versus a very active approach engaging with it. As I look around your home, I see that it's actually a lot more analog, I mean that fully respectfully, than I expected from someone who's so AI and so much of a tech futurist. Is that a clear decision for your health and your routine? The way this house is organized is everything that causes death, we try to control.

24:05So the water you drink is filtered in a special way that produces, and we measure it every month to monitor those parameters. The air we're breathing is finely purified and measured in every room. these windows have UV 99 % protection from UVA, UVB so you can't see these things but these are the invisible forces that are affecting your biology in any given moment whereas the technology I could have in this house does very little to actually change my biology and in fact it might even make it worse more screens, more this, more that so I don't use a lot of technology outside of specific, in my clinic, for example, I have a lot of technology, but if it doesn't have the objective of extending lifespan, it lowers, increasing my health.

25:00Let me say that. It lowers in its likelihood of being in the house. Fine. So how bad is sun exposure for us in UVA and UVB? It's not bad. It's just that the sun is a trade-off. So the sun is good for you. It has all kinds of positive health benefits. It just is that it has a cost. It causes damage to the skin. And you can measure this. You can actually use this technology called multispectral imaging. And you can measure it and look at UV damage. So it's very clear what happens. So you're just in, I get a lot of flack because I don't spend a lot of time in the sun. and because of that people hate me because they have such a firm belief that the sun is the most important thing in existence and if they do, that's great.

25:53I encourage them to be in the sun and that's wonderful. I'm saying that the flip side of the argument which they don't acknowledge is that the sun causes damage and I don't want to make that trade-off. So this is the same thing as if you drink alcohol you're accepting that damage. If you smoke, you're accepting the damage. So it's a similar damage assessment and trade-off space. And so I'm just saying that I'm aware of the damage that it caused me. I can practically measure it. And therefore I choose not to make that trade-off. For sure. How much of an edge do you think people can have by optimizing for the place they live on a national level or even on an urban level?

26:34Because you live in Los Angeles. Yeah. Which I find to be a choice I wouldn't expect because of the air quality and maybe the water quality and different things. Do you think people can have a significant edge by moving to somewhere like Switzerland? Yeah, possibly. Yeah, I chose to live in LA for a few reasons. It was actually a decision I made seven years ago. So I had sold my company, Braintreeve Emo, and I built that company in Chicago. We had offices in San Francisco. I then lived in Virginia for a year or two. I lived in New York and then San Francisco and then LA. And at the time I was trying to optimize for two things.

27:16One is I was building a brain implant interface company. And so I was trying to figure out whether to do invasive, to implant a chip in the brain or to do something non-invasive. And I didn't know which path we were going to take and I needed some flexibility. And so in doing that in 2017, there were only really four markets in the U.S. that had the talent and the density of institutions to do this. It was Boston, New York, San Francisco, or L.A. It was hard to find. You couldn't go. It's harder to go to a second tier or third tier market and find the density of engineers because you need engineers that are very specialized in a whole bunch of different areas.

27:58And so that's why I was going through those different markets. I lived in New York for a while. Same with San Francisco and the same with Los Angeles. And then the second thing I was trying to optimize for is that I was really, while I had done this venture investing into deep tech, like synthetic biology and genomics, and then I was doing this kernel company, I was also pursuing this idea that I wanted to try to find an idea that would be relevant in the eyes of those that exist in the 25th century. I wanted to kind of try to play reality on a few hundred year timescale. And to do that, I imagined I need to find something very novel.

28:42And in sampling New York and Boston, and Boston's also a market could have built a brain interface company, which is way too cold though. And also, well, the other dropouts there. But I realized, so I was trying to analyze these areas and in each one of these areas, there's a very strong social zeitgeist on how people think and what they're into. And I basically concluded that Los Angeles was the most open of all possible places I could live. That would be the least intrusive on my own thoughts and give me the most space to play. And that's why I chose LA. I didn't choose LA. I wasn't into longevity at that time.

29:25so I didn't decide it. And then now I've kind of built a home here. We have a lot of friends. So it's a different calculation. If I would choose him based upon longevity alone, it would be a different calculation. So yeah, I'm open to it, but I'm here because of a previous thought pattern. Fine. And as part of that thought pattern, you mentioned hanging out with friends. I try my best to sleep as early as I can. Some of my friends call that antisocial behavior because I can't hang out with them when they're free to hang out. How does that look for you? Yeah, this is again, this is like number seven thought pattern that is in between us and health.

30:02So the assumption that friends are making is that life cannot somehow be organized. Like it's a impossibility to hang out at times that are not late. evening yeah but it's actually not true like we do things in life all the time at different times of the day it is entirely possible it's just that it's sometimes not aligned with mass societal cultural things and so it really is a lack of priority and not an insurmountable problem and this is why we build the don't die community is that a lot of people do want to choose health and they don't feel supported by their friends. And they sometimes get a really, they get a lot of trouble for it.

30:53All the little nuances of if they take pills, for example, or they choose to work out or they do cold plunge or sauna or like take whatever thing the person's doing, they get ribbed for it a little bit. And if they, you know, they're mindful of what they eat at the restaurant. Yeah, so there's just so many vectors for people too. I think what's happening is most people know what kinds of decisions they need to have to have good health. And when someone deviates from that approach, it makes them feel uncomfortable because they know that's the correct decision, but they don't want to reconcile with that.

31:34And the friend calls them out on the behavior, and then they feel very uncomfortable. And so the best way they can deal with it is by trying to get you to stop that health forward behavior because it's uncomfortable for them to exist in deciding to choose bad health over good health. Like the peer pressure of why is the sober guy not drinking? Yeah, exactly. It makes everyone feel uncomfortable. I think that's why I generate so much intense hate is I think that my decisions are in contrast to the social norms and it makes people feel very uncomfortable. I try to do the same thing online intentionally.