The $2M Longevity Protocol: Bryan Johnson’s Biohacking Blueprint

26:23What do you do? And that's what I just spent 10 years trying to figure out. To go from the Mormon church with its doctrine around the afterlife to a place of making data and numbers your Godhead is quite a transition, right? Like I can't help but wonder Like, what is the nature of your relationship with spirituality? Is that a thing? Because I think for all of your fidelity to data sets, you are a deeply emotional person. You wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you didn't have this connection to the future of humanity. And if you thought nothing else matters except what is happening right now, then why would you devote your life towards advancing something that perhaps you're not going to reap the benefit from?

27:24Yeah, I guess school never really made sense to me because the class was so slow. The teacher's monologue was so slow. The idea of memorizing information and regurgitation just didn't appeal to me. I hated school. It was just the worst. I would have rather be home and read a dozen books in the same time frame. And once I freed myself from school, I set out and I just read every biography I could get my hands on. I enjoyed the process of looking back through the centuries and looking at individuals in their time and place, the 14th century, the 15th, 16th, you know, even before AD, and trying to evaluate what did they do in their time and place?

28:04What did they see that no one else could see? And how did they do it? Like, what was the dominant cultural trends in their time? What were the ideas that were novel? What were the ideas being rejected? And I built this relationship with historical figures where I cared more about being friends with them than I cared about being friends with people in the present. Because most people in the present were playing games that I didn't really care about. You know, it's largely about social signaling and status, everything that plays in this moment. But 99 % of what happens right now is going to be lost to history.

28:40That's true for the past. When you look at the 15th century, our history books only capture, you know, less than 1 % of all the events that happened. Everything else is washed away. I liked the idea of doing something that would contribute to this continuous stream of contribution for the human race. And so I built this relationship along this time span. And so even looking forward, I feel more committed to or connected with intelligence of the 25th century than I do right now. I care more about what they're going to say of me than what people say of me now. Because it takes time for history to kind of distill what happens.

29:19To me, that's the game I want to play. Those are the people I think about when contemplating what to do. It's more than first principles thinking. You have this proclivity for having a bird's eye 10 ,000 foot view. Like your timeline is longer. Your altitude is higher. And that requires not only a deeper way of thinking, but also perhaps a divergent way of thinking, right? Like you do think differently. There is something maybe slightly neurodivergent about how you view the world. Do you have awareness around that? Is that fair? Is that accurate, do you think? It's such a fun question. My experience of reality is when I engage with other people, I observe like what you're doing is nuts.

30:08It's like insane to me. And then their perception of me is like, hey, are you maybe aware you may be a bit neurodivergent? And so there's this swapping of perception. And there's this default where when you use the word neurodivergent, it encumbers that person to be like, that person is odd. Therefore, maybe slightly like they get discounted a little bit versus the norm. And so there's this perception game going on where I view the world as literally insane. But I know people view me as like, huh, that's a bit different. I'm not quite sure what to think about that. I don't mean the word neurodivergent in a pejorative way.

30:50I truly mean it in the purest sense of somebody who is seeing things differently and thinking about them differently. And I think you do. And I think the world is insane. But we're so inoculated, we're so indoctrinated into these norms that it's very difficult to even identify them, let alone challenge them. Yeah, so my comment was nothing about the way you were using the term. I'm saying generally, when I hear people talking about neurodivergence, it's always with just a slightly pejorative tinge. Yeah, I understand. Right. It's always like it's just a slight knock of like, you know, but we'll be nice to them anyways.

31:29It just has this cultural phenomenon in conversation. So, yes, I'm absolutely aware of this. I have full self-awareness of the situation. I go to dinner with friends. Right. And I hear everyone talking and I'm like, whoa, I really am so different in how I think. So definitely have the self-awareness. Also, I think that this is the attribute that I see most common in the biographies I read. These individuals throughout history, they were able to structure their ways of thought in ways that were unique. They were able to see the world differently, able to act differently, able to rise above the norms and status quo and expectations of their time and place.

32:13And this is why I say I feel so much more connected to people of the past and my imaginations of people in the future. I feel at home on this spectra and why I feel almost alien in this time and place. Because when I do my things, we've seen this, it creates this vitriol where it's like, we're not sure if we want to welcome you to our polite society. Like, we're not sure. Like, we actually want to dunk on you. We want to push you away and we want to criticize you. We want to lower your status by saying the meanest things we can. That's really what's been happening is if you look at the volume of trash talk of me, it's meaningful.

32:47And people are having fun with it, which is great. I'm having fun with it too. But it's also, as humans play power games, they're trying to take me down a notch. They're trying to reduce my power.

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36:26anytime anybody's taking a bold step to do something different they're going to be across purposes with social norms so for you that's just affirmation right that you're on a trajectory towards you know the aspiration of being one of those historical figures and when you think about those people or those biographies that were most impactful like who are the people that that stand out? It's such a great variety. I just finished up Magellan, you know, first person to circumnavigate the globe. And if you read about it, it's like the world was going crazy on this idea of trade routes and spices and all the things.

37:03It's just like every boom cycle we have right now. Like humanity just plays this game over and over and over again. It's the same thing. We think we're playing this new novel game. It's not. It's been played for thousands of years. So Magellan is really fun. I finished up a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a religious person in Hitler's World War II Germany, and he was trying to assassinate Hitler. So in that moment, I was so curious, because you can read about World War II, about this army doing that thing, and Churchill doing this, and like those moves. But I wanted to understand, if you're in World War II Germany, and Hitler's rising to power, what's happening?

37:38Like, how do you discern, is this person good for Germany or bad for Germany? Do you understand what he's suggesting for the Jews or do you not understand? Do you hear secrets about it? Like I want to understand real time and place what was happening and his account of how he was basically scheming to assassinate Hitler and all the maneuvering thereabouts. That was just fascinating for him because that's a very cloudy time in my mind. How does Hitler rise to power? How does that thing happen? How does the world know or not know and do something about it? So those kinds of things, I really enjoy reading about that to understand it in detail.

38:11Right. The frog in the water that slowly boils, you're in a situation that's creeping in a certain direction, but because you're a participant in it, you don't have the adequate awareness to understand what's truly happening. Exactly. This is the most exciting thing for me. So if we play this game right now and you and I ask this question, in this moment, what is really going on? Like really, really going on. What's happening? What's really going on? And now to do this, the first 20 thoughts we have, we probably have to just push aside because they're probably garbage. We have to like really sit in this thing.

38:50And that's the only chance you have a clarity of thought. After I sold Braintree Venmo, I organized a dozen or so dinners around the country. I got my friends together, their friends of friends, and just wanted to bring together ambitious people. And I gave them this thought experiment. Let's imagine we're in 2050. At the time it was 2017. We arrive at 2050. We are thriving as a species. Like it's just this magical existence. What did we focus on in 2017 to make that a reality? And I wanted to tease out, like what are the intuitions? And probably predictably, you would imagine that you basically hear clusters of thought that represent the modern zeitgeist.

39:24It was very, very rare for someone to come up with something contrarian. or like something that someone wouldn't just pull out of the zeitgeist. But it was really helpful nonetheless to just kind of find like where are people's minds at right now? Where do they think trajectories are heading? Because I really wanted to seed, I wanted to seed my own thoughts on like what is happening now? Where do people think things are going? And then you have to put to the hard work of now what is no one seeing? And what is no one seeing? What did you extrapolate from that experience? It was a single thought experiment, which led me to what I'm doing now.

39:57Whether I'm right or wrong, we'll see. but a conviction to move forward. It's I'm present with intelligence of the 25th century. I can't say they're talking because I don't know how that communication works, but just there's this essence of intelligence and they're observing what happened in the early 21st century to make intelligent existence thrive in this part of the galaxy. What do they observe? So in the same way we look at the 16th century and we kind of compress the entire century and down to like four things or five things. It's a very intense compression. And the observation I thought they said is Homo sapiens figured out on the eve of the creation of superintelligence that the only foe was death.

40:43They figured out to turn all their attention to not dying. Don't die individually. Don't kill each other. Don't destroy the planet and build AI in a way that enables all intelligence to thrive. That's the biggest revolution in the history of the human race because it challenges that death has always been inevitable. So it challenges that fundamental thing. And two, it challenges every game of status and power we've ever played. If you wanted to rise above your peers before you'd raise an army, go kill people and acquire their territory. It's always been rooted in this violence and acquisition at one person's gain and another person's loss.

41:25You have to transition the entirety of the species to say, we're going after different games. And that's when I, yeah, when I started doing Blueprint, I thought, so philosophically you can say this, but it doesn't matter. You actually have to be it for people to understand it. There's so much in what you just shared. I want to tease out a few things that came up for me. The first of which is the presumption, which is increasingly becoming more and more real with every single day, that artificial intelligence is going to become not just an overarching kind of aspect of how we live our lives, but in your case, almost an all-powerful entity that is benevolent by nature to which we then outsource.

42:15all of our decision-making that our brains, we've relied on our brains since the dawn of humanity so that the artificial intelligence can make better decisions in our best interest and in the best interest of the collective and the planet as a whole. That requires a very optimistic view of this emerging technology amidst a lot of discourse around its perils and its potentiality to actually do the opposite of what you're projecting. So a few examples. I just did this AI art to retell the story of Adam and Eve. So I wanted to pose the question, if we retold our origin story right now, instead of thousands of years ago, right now in 2023, what would the origin story of Adam and Eve be like and how would we project ourselves out?

43:03And I thought that was an interesting thought experiment because it gets at exactly what you talked about, which is if you look at the precedents where the first time a message was sent with a telegraph, the Pony Express was dead. Nobody wanted to run Melanie more with horses. It was so much better. The first time you could navigate with GPS, a paper map on your lap is dead. It's just inevitable. Like we don't do these things because it's more efficient. when you can wash your clothing in a washing machine versus down at the river. So you look at these hundreds of examples of where technology becomes sufficiently good at doing a given task.

43:42It's more efficient or cost-effective or whatever the case may be. We humans adopt it extremely fast. I'm arguing with My Health and Wellness that my team and I have built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. It is able to look at all the data in my body. It's looking at scientific evidence. It creates an algorithm. so it creates superior cognitive ability, superior metabolic ability, superior physical ability, all above I am a superior human because of this algorithm. So I have two options. Do I say I'm going to do things as I did and go peruse my pantry? Am I going to make decisions on the menu?

44:17No, like I'm going to choose the algorithm just like I use GPS, like a washing machine and like I use autopilot on an airplane. And so it's inevitable that when these things cross the technological threshold and they allow each of us to achieve our goals, we adopt them instantaneously. Up until that point, we kick and scream. We talk about lost jobs. We talk about the fear. Like it's a process every single time it happens, but we ruthlessly adopt them. And so that's just what's going to happen. It's absolutely inevitable. The picture also paints a very authoritarian view that obviates human choice, right?

44:54Like you're lobbying for a world in which there's an AI that has your best interests at heart. It's going to tell you exactly what to eat, when to go to bed. All of your decision-making is outsourced to this thing that will produce better outcomes for you. But with that becomes a relinquishment of some level of liberty that many people would counter-argue undermines the beauty of living, right? So your response to that is? Yeah, this is the dinner I invited you to. Oh, it was. Who else was there? I'm sorry I missed that. It's been remarkable. So I've had this dinner over a dozen times. And so I posed this thought experiment.

45:39And I say, okay, so imagine you have an algorithm at your disposal. It creates the best health and wellness of your life, spiritually, mentally, physically, all of the above. You can say yes to that. The tradeoff is you eat when it says it will. You go to bed when it says it will. You follow the instructions. And you can't opt out. Once you're in, that's it. Well, I mean, so I don't even make that parameter. I don't get that specific. It's just very general. So I create the thought experiment and we go around the table. There's like 12 of us. At this point, like we're pretty intimate. We understand each other.

46:05And so it's mathematically, it's almost identical every time. So a third of the people say, yes, anything to save me for myself. Like I can't stop myself from doing blank, blank, blank. So like, yes. Or another 30%, yeah. Or like, hey, yes, but I want to make a few modifications. And I'm like, lol, that's not the thought experiment. The human desire for the a la carte version of the new part is undefeated. Yeah, exactly. And then the remaining, you know, let's just call it 40%. I kind of like fuck off. And so you gave me a pretty soft fuck off because you were basically raising like, look. I'm just raising the argument that I'm sure you hear a million times to hear how you respond to that.

46:46But like, it's legit because you're basically like, look, I've got human agency. This is the thing I understand. I want to choose to live life a certain way. I've got certain ideals and what it means to live life. I've got plans. It just trips every wire in the human brain where it's so offensive. That's why people are like, they don't even know. Some response would be like, is this a cult? It just generates these really strong responses. And so I'm not lobbying for this. I'm arguing it's inevitable. It's already here. We're wasting time on these debates. This is not a situation where we're like, we're in full control and we're going to decide how this thing works.

47:26It's not, like it's gone. And so what I'm suggesting is if we can reconcile philosophically with what's happening, we are going to be in a better place of the species. We increase the probabilities of our survival. Right now, we're in la-la land thinking that we're somehow in control of the whole situation. I can't decide whether I'm excited or terrified. Exactly. I'll fast forward two hours for you. So at the end of the conversation, we go around and everyone's able to basically be like, okay, so like, here's my emotional state. Here's my concern. Here's my philosophical position. And like the same 20 or 30 arguments are presented every time we go back and forth.

48:04We look at all the different angles. So then, and then people have like three or four existential crises, you know, they drop down. It's like, I don't know why I exist. And they come back up at the end. Gladly everyone hugs. It's like, this is one of the best experiences of my life. I'm so happy. We got to do this together. They're exchanging numbers. So it ends up being this incredibly emotionally productive thing where we all get to reconcile our various views of reality. Not that we agree, but just like we can reconcile with like, here's maybe the situation. What is the thing that helps the most resistant person come to terms with what you're forecasting as the inevitable reality?

48:39So I'm usually the most unrelatable person at the table. I'm not surprised. What I say doesn't really matter and resonate. So it's like when someone else is able to like take these ideas and maybe they get their head around a little bit. They're like, I think this. And they say it in some relatable way. The person's like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But it's like never me that delivers up the relatable thing that people are like, okay, I'm actually okay with that thing. It's a slow walk to just understand the basics of they perceive themselves as having full control right now. In reality, they live in several AI bubbles.

49:18The content they see on YouTube, the music they listen to, what they see on Netflix, the books they read, they're recommended to them. We have all this algorithmic influence around us already. And we just don't talk about it. But it's dramatically influenced what we see on social media. And we understand that, one, we're already in the whole bunch of these webs. And two is as technology progresses, we do adopt them in our lives, like unquestionably, because it helps us achieve the things we care about. And once we do that adoption, we feel empowered. And so if you just look at the landscape of our lives today, we already say yes to this.

49:54We have said yes to this. Our lives are evidence of that. And so it's not a big jump to what I'm saying. It's just really, it's trying to bring it out to the open and say, can we have a discussion about this? And if we are open about it, we may actually build a more robust system. Part of that involves popping the balloon, the delusion of agency that I think we, We believe we have more agency in our decision-making and our opinions and our beliefs and our sense of what is true and what is real, right? So you're challenging that cogently by disabusing people of that notion. And I think on top of that, like, look, I'm deeply aware of and connected to the fact that like, my brain doesn't have my self-interest at heart.

50:43Like I'm a recovering alcoholic. Oh, that's amazing. Jump food addict. I've been, you know, in the gutter. I've been, you know, overweight and out of shape and left to my own devices. Like I'm going to bury my head in that bag of chips like every single time and I'm going to make the wrong choices. And I've had to create incredibly stringent rules for myself, guardrails, to avoid the temptations that are overpowering for me and perhaps, you know, maybe more overpowering for me than they are for an average person or somebody else. And I've been successful in that regard, but I'm highly flawed and I'm not always great at doing this and I'll mess up.

51:23And so, my life has become regimented, not to the extent that yours is, like I'm a poor man's version of your experiment, but it's all been informed by my experiences with the limitations of my brain, which don't have my best interest at heart. And that has to be overridden by not allowing myself to have an opinion about certain things. So the rules are very binary, and that makes them easier to follow. I'm not outsourcing them to an artificial intelligence, but by making that choice and that declaration, it is easier to kind of adhere to those guardrails, I suppose. You've just taken this, you know, a thousand degrees further.

52:05Yeah, and I would pause and say, I really enjoy being here with you. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I really am misunderstood. And it is extraordinarily challenging to get to this level of conversation. And so I appreciate you going here with me. I just really appreciate the back and forth. and especially your acknowledgement of your own limitations. It is so rare for someone to observe in themselves the disastrous situation it is to be human. And like we're all just barely on a thread. So yeah, I guess I'm just really appreciative that we have a chance to talk about this. Thank you. That's meaningful. I appreciate that.

52:47Yeah, listen, we delude ourselves into thinking that we're our own best friend. And most often, at least in my case, I'm my own worst enemy. Like constantly, even with the kind of narratives that loop in my mind about who I am and what I'm capable of. Like it's terrible. I wouldn't do that to anybody else. And I think having an appreciation for that or a really kind of mature understanding of that allows me to be more compassionate and less judgmental of other people because it's fucking hard to be human. It is very hard. Every single day we're faced with temptation. I mean, our modern world has perfected through science and experimentation and psychology to create a landscape of material goods, foods, you name it.

53:33Every single thing is specifically designed with gigantic resources behind it to entice and addict you for reasons that have nothing to do with your well-being at all. Right. And in fact, is quite often in opposition to that. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So you're sort of staking, you're putting a flag in the ground and saying, I will not adhere. Like I am not living in accordance with these rules. I'm stepping outside of it. I'm going to let a team of very smart people study me and study what's best for me. And I'm going to let them make those decisions for myself. Now, certain people would say, well, you've created a gilded cage for yourself.

54:13But I know through other interviews that I've watched with you that you're like the happiest that you've ever been. And I think I want to hear a little bit more about that. And I will just say in prefatory to that, that I think we over-index or over-emphasize a sense of happiness that comes with choice. Like I have liberty, so I'm happy. And we underappreciate or don't appreciate at all that with certain restrictions or guardrails to kind of rein us in and prevent us from indulging in our behaviors that don't serve us, there is a certain underappreciated freedom that brings a certain happiness that, at least in my life, I haven't experienced in any other way.

54:58Yeah. Amazing. So I'm going to take this opening you've created. Thank you. I've never been able to talk about this on a podcast. It's always about like, what are you eating? What's your exercise protocol? What time do you go to bed? I'm arguing for basically three things. In the early 13 colonies of America, there was a big debate on whether they should be ruled by the monarch of England or whether they should adopt a democracy. And Thomas Paine wrote this pamphlet. and he argued that the colonies should adopt democracy because they would be better at ruling their own interests than having the monarch.

55:40And he talked about all the shortcomings of the monarch. And we now look back and we think, okay, democracy is actually one of the biggest advancements in the history of the human race where you had this new way of governing away from monarchs. At the time, it was not clear. And this is an example of history of what is really cloudy in that moment. How do people see clarity? His pamphlet was the best-selling of the early American colony days, and democracy prevailed. And in that moment, democracy ended up being a more powerful system of managing human thriving. One individual as a monarch was inferior to this democratic system.

56:21I did the same thing with my body. My mind is a monarch. In the same way you just spoke about your mind, your mind is acting contrary to your best interest. My mind is a drunken sailor. Exactly. It is. It's an absolute disaster. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. I did the same with my body. I said, who should really be in charge? The monarch or should we have a democratic rule? And then we started with Blueprint. We started measuring every organ of my body. And we said, okay, heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, cardiovascular function. What do you need to be your best self? And I let them speak.

56:59And so I shifted the power from my monarch mind, that's a disaster, to my body to be in charge. And that's what the algorithm works with. The algorithm works directly with my body. What I'm arguing here for the human race is I'm suggesting we have always treated our mind as the ultimate authority on all things. It decides on, in any circumstance, what it wants, when it wants, How it thinks, what it's going to prioritize, it has ultimate authority like the monarch. I'm arguing in this next phase of the human race that that is an antiquated model of management of human life. There are more powerful and more capable systems of intelligence that are emergent, specifically what I've done with Blueprint, empowering my body and artificial intelligence to manage itself.

57:46Now, do I still have free will? I feel like I do. Do I still have my same agency? I feel like I do. Am I happier? I feel like I am. But it's this paired with the challenging of death is the most significant revolution in the history of homo sapiens. And it is almost impossible for somebody to get their head around it. It takes hours to sit down and have a conversation to understand. In this conversation, your mind is like immediately chirping, but wait. I still bristle at the idea of outsourcing everything to a super intelligence. Yeah, yeah. In the same way that when we have a GPS on our phone or on our car dashboard, we suddenly are paying less attention to the topography of our natural environment because we've outsourced having to really understand that.

58:40When we begin to outsource more and more of our decisions to something outside of ourselves, to play that to its ultimate conclusion is to play out the paperclip thought experiment, except instead of paperclips, it's people. So this could go very wrong in the most dystopian way. What you're arguing for requires a level of trust and faith in our ability to craft this superintelligence in a way that is truly benevolent, but does that not overlook the fact that perhaps it might have its own ideas about how that might go? I'm suggesting that we have no choice. We think we have choice. We think we have optionality.

59:38We don't. We are up against survival. I understand your emotion of bristling. That's what happens every single time. And it does. It takes a long time to get past the bristle. This is the same as the monarch. It's the same revolution. Your mind is a monarch that does a terrible job managing your best interests. You know this. and even knowing this, even telling me in this conversation, you still bristle with the idea that this thing wouldn't be in charge of you, that you don't trust at all. You know it's bad for you and you bristle still. The enemy you know. It's so complicated. So if you take yourself out of the situation and you're observing someone else, isn't it curious that the enemy you do know is working towards your demise and you're basically powerless against it.

1:00:32and there's another technology, another way of doing this that saves you from yourself, would you be open to that? It sounds like an invitation to join the matrix. Like, just like, I want to have a nice steak and make me a movie star, you know, plug me in. You're like, it's happening. I mean, so just let's look at the past thousand years. we live day to day so time seems slower to us but if you look at the speed of technological progress the rate is a line straight up it's astronomical right now it's straight up so like whether we're talking about one year or five years or 10 years 20 whatever it's absolutely in a blink of an eye on any time scale that is longer than our two-hour conversation it's here right now This is why I don't die.

1:01:29When I do the thought experiment of all the things we could be contemplating about our existence, if we're trying to avoid a situation where we annihilate each other with nukes or bioweapons or anything else, and we're trying to say, can we agree on one thing, one thing so we don't destroy the species and continue to exist, what can we agree upon? It's don't die. It's the game every single human on this planet plays every second of every day. it's the only thing we can agree upon. But outside of the don't die, we branch into thousands and thousands of disagreements. As a species, we have this wild range of disagreements about everything.

1:02:07That's why I compress it and say, what does the 21st century say about the 21st century? It's the rallying cry for the 21st century. It's the only way to build AI. The only ethics and morals is don't die, anything across the planet. Now, of course, it branches into all kinds of complexity, but still, you can start with some agreement. Basically, how do you stitch together this moment in time? What is really going on? How do you punch through all the noise and all the chaos and really figure out what's going on right now?

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1:04:18I still can't shake this idea that within you is some profound or deep fear of death that is not unrelated to your break with a church that you have been a life that you have been a life of death. This mission has supplanted or replaced what used to be provided by the church. Is there any truth in that? I mean, possibly. As far as my self-awareness goes, Camus, the famous French philosopher, he went to the existential edges of philosophy, of existentialism. And he basically came to the conclusion, you know, existence is meaningless. So the only relevant question is whether you commit suicide. There's nothing else that matters.

1:05:17And once you decide whether you commit suicide or not, if you don't, then you just play. In my thought experiment, whether I'm influenced by my past or my upbringing, like, I don't know, it's very hard for me to comment. The only thing I'm trying to do is distill the most basic essence of reality to know one thing. It's not just be wandering about in the confusion of existence. I'm trying to say one thing is distillation of essence. There's something inescapably Buddhist in what you're doing, though, because this quest to see how far you can push the boundaries of Hellspan is an experiment in not just self-preservation, but it's a very kind of singularly focused experiment on self, right?

1:06:06So you could make the argument that this is the most self-obsessed person and experiment of all time. But the overlying kind of mission is to do this for the benefit of humanity. And so it goes to that Buddhist idea of the best way of improving the world is to improve yourself. And if you can be a model for what is possible, that becomes a template for others to modify or copy, right? Yeah. I tried to become the problem that I'm trying to solve in society. So we hear a lot of discussion about AI goal alignment. So the idea is AI is powerful. We want it to want what humans want. We don't want it to go rogue and hurt us.

1:06:55And so like the paperclip outcomes, like avoid that stuff. We want nation states to get along and not nuke each other. We want each other to get along and not kill each other. So society is basically trying to goal align, right? We're trying to get on the same page with so many things. And that's hard to do. We do a lot of things to do that. I wanted to say, can I become the goal alignment problem? So I'm 35 trillion cells, Brian Johnson. Can I goal align my 35 trillion cells? Because none of my cells want the same thing. My brain's like, hey, let's have a drink and stay up late and party. And so that's what this endeavor has been is I'm trying to say, can I take 35 trillion cells, 35 intelligent agents, align it towards a singular objective of don't die?

1:07:36Because we have no hope of getting the whole planet to align on anything if we can't figure out how to align ourselves. Exactly. And if I do that, then the same model is applied to planet Earth. Okay. So planet Earth is an amazing place. We currently don't have a backup. So how do we make the planet not die? The same concept. You take millions of measurements of planet Earth, the soil and the atmosphere. You look at scientific evidence of what is a thriving biosphere of coral and oceans and air. You implement the protocol, and then we humans deal with it. Because we currently treat planet Earth the same way we treat our bodies.

1:08:12We do whatever we want. We pollute it how much we want. Like if the oceans become more acidic, whatever. If we lose coral reef, whatever. If we lose the ice cap, whatever. We just destroy it. And this protocol will be dictated by an all-seeing, all-knowing, authoritative AI. that will rule the planet and create the protocol. Us as humans, our job is to carry the protocol out. It's built on just like a step-by-step process and how we build everything else in society. So the authoritarianism will just creep up on us. I wouldn't say it's authoritarianism. So is democracy authoritarianism? No. It's the same system.

1:08:47You're taking intelligent agents that are all acting in some methodology towards goal alignment with this tapestry of rules And democracy has outperformed monarchy. My system has outperformed almost all human systems. We're just simply trying to elevate the quality of the system towards don't die. It's this very gradual step function. Do you believe that there's a possibility that you won't die? Yes. unquestionably. That you will live in perpetuity, short of getting into a car accident or something like that. Yeah. You're not going skydiving anytime soon. We try to sober ourselves when we say, how smart is superintelligence?

1:09:43In what way is it smart? And how smart? How different is it from us? And if we say, okay, let's just try to do a few thought experiments that maybe are relatable to us. So we're a million years ago talking to Homo erectus. Homo erectus barely has language, hasn't innovated upon the axe for a million years. And we say, Homo erectus, we trust you so much. We think you're so amazing. Go wild and tell us your vision about the future of the species. Is Homo erectus going to be able to wax poetic about quantum mechanics and thermodynamics and computers and internet and markets and money? No way. So if Homo erectus is like, you know, what do I want to live for?

1:10:25Like, life is so hard. I go out and hunt food all day and I have to battle all these wild things. And Homo erectus has absolutely nothing valuable to say about the future of its existence. The only thing it can say is, I don't want to die because I want to be around for the optionality. In this moment where we exist, I don't think our opinions matter at all. Nothing I think, nothing I want, nothing I hope for, nothing I presume matters at all. We're up against this wall with intelligence that is just unimaginable to us. So I give zero credence to my opinions. I'm homo erectus. I'm so primitive, it's laughable.

1:11:03So why would I even try to enter into this situation? The only thing I want to say is I want an option to the future. Is it going to be good or bad? I have no idea. Well, I like it or not. I have no idea. I have no idea. I just want to say yes to it because it's happening. And so I want to be along for the ride. I want to get into the actual protocol of what you're doing. But before we do that, I want to have a sense of what the data is currently telling you and how that plays into this idea or this belief that you have that the possibility of persisting exists for you. Yeah. Since I sold Braintree Venmo, I invested tens of millions of dollars in companies that are programming physical reality.

1:11:45So genomics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, computational therapeutics. One of my companies, for example, structures molecule by molecule like Legos to do novel things in the world. We now have the ability to program the physical world with atoms and molecules and organisms like we can program computer software. We can program, reliably program reality in every way possible. It's the most unbelievable situation in the whole world. And we're doing this now with these computational tools that are more powerful. What would be an example of that? That feels very abstract. Like, let's say you want to produce rose oil as a fragrance.

1:12:22So typically you would go plant the plants in the field, you would fertilize it, you'd water it, you'd harvest it, then you'd get the rose oil. The alternative is to take a yeast, an organism, and program the yeast to manufacture rose oil. Or the way we build houses now is we grow a tree, we cut it down, we then put it in a certain place and we build a house. you would just grow a house out of a tree. You'd program it. And so you can program biology to do the things that we otherwise would do other ways. And that's how powerful our ability is to engineer biology and reality. And so we have this root level access to program these things.

1:13:03That's what my company's been doing for the past 10 years. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's like, it's so amazing that it's happening and it's like no one knows about it, that we have these abilities to do it. It's, yeah, it's really cool. So if you say, okay, we now have the ability to basically engineer existence at every level, molecules and organisms and atoms, and now you have these new computational tools and we understand the mechanism of aging, you have all the pieces together to solve it. Like you don't need to believe a whole lot. You just give it some time. There's like some outstanding question that's like, no, this is going to break the laws of physics and there's just no, like the speed of light, like how are we going to get faster than the speed of light?

1:13:43We're not sure. This is not the same problem. It's all the pieces are there. And the fact that it's biological systems makes it no different than 3D printing a treehouse or a rose oil. Yeah. Nature does this already. There are several examples in nature, certain types of jellyfish and others, where they have these remarkable rejuvenation abilities. So like biology has already demonstrated it's capable of doing this. So we're in a really good place. And that's why this is such an exciting moment to be alive. And if we could just take a sober stock of the situation, it's silly to be killing each other.

1:14:21It's silly to be going to war. It's silly to be killing our planet. It's silly to commit self-destructive behavior and increase death. This is why the 25th century thought experiment to me is so helpful. They would look at us and be like, of course, you don't die. Of course. But we're so caught up in this moment. We come up with all these arguments on this and that, and we're scared. And like, no, like, of course you do that one thing. You're not the first person to come on the podcast and have, you know, a somewhat Pollyanna perspective of longevity and what the future might hold. I've had Peter Diamandis on here, Sergey Young.

1:15:01But I think all of this, you know, for me, ends up in a situation where we haven't quite delivered on the promise yet. Like we've kind of inched our way up to a certain kind of edge. But when it comes to the big breakthrough or the thing that's going to change everything, there's a lot of talk but not a lot of evidence or proof yet. And then amongst this sort of culture of people who are really focused on longevity and health span extension, there's a lot of disagreement. Like they don't agree on a lot and they're quibbling over whether it's NMN or NAD. and like rapamycin and all, you know, these tiny little details within that world that I can't help but think we're still kind of a ways off from what you're talking about.

1:15:49Yeah. If you extrapolate what's happening right now with how fast artificial intelligence is improving, I don't need any evidence at all to have a bullish outlook that aging is going to be solved in some near future. If you just do some rough math, let's just say if humans were in charge of aging research, let's just say it would take us 200 years to try to solve aging, right? Like something long and like we look at our rates of progress. When you include artificial intelligence, it works at speeds that are orders of magnitudes faster than humans. and so if you say okay it's a trillion times faster than what humans can do or whatever the number is let's discount that number and say 90 of that compute capacity is like not really human intellect it's like wasted on other stuff and so you apply some level to that when you apply that number to the future over the next 10 years with the aid of self of superintelligence you have the equivalent of millions of years of human effort on aging.

1:17:01Right. So like what can we accomplish into almost no time at all? Because you're adding to the intelligence equation trillions of, you know, compute into that equation. So this is why, again, we can't trust our minds to be making these forecasts. We're in a situation where the power of this intelligence so far outstrips our ability to model it. any forecast we make is silly. Then how can we trust our minds to craft the artificial intelligence or the supercomputer with the adequate safety measures to ensure that its priority is the survival of the human race? If we can't trust our minds with our own daily habits, how can we trust that we even have the capacity to foresee what might go awry with the birth that we're giving to something that has a level of intelligence we can't even comprehend.

1:17:59Don't die. Okay. I mean, right? It's circular in that regard. Now, of course, it's more nuanced because what does don't die mean? And it means hundreds of different things and there's trade-offs. So it's really complicated. But again, if you have to take this incredibly complicated question, how do we agree on one thing? And right now, we don't agree on don't die. we kill ourselves we kill each other we kill the planet we are a violent species killing everything around us and that's why this is such a relevant revolution it's so simple it's like right in front of our face for those who are building AI I would feel much better if they're not actively killing themselves if they're sufficiently self-aware that they're not proactively moving themselves towards disease and death that inside of them, they have the philosophy, this is the thing that underpins everything we're building together in society.

1:19:03It's not about dominance. It's not about wealth accumulation. It's not about conquering territory. It is a fundamental change of our existence. You know, my bullish about aging, all I can say is I look at the models and like, I want to be around for the possibility, but it seems interesting that like, yeah, we could be around for it. So how old are you? 46. 46. And you've been actively engaged in this protocol and its refinements for three years? How long at this point? Yeah, almost three years. So explain what the blueprint protocol is. We're an hour and a half into this. We haven't even gotten into what it is that you actually do.

1:19:44Which you can find in a million other interviews you've done and you've made a zillion videos about. Yeah. Really simply stated is, I do what everyone does every day, which is I try not to die. And so I just simply said, what if I tried to become the best in history at not dying? And so the way we did that is we said, I'm going to become the most measured person in human history. The world champion of not dying. Yeah, exactly. So we're going to measure every single thing about my body, everything we can, thousands of data points. We're going to look at scientific literature. We're going to say, okay, how is the body dying?

1:20:20And then we're going to say, what can we do to stop the body from dying? And that's what we've done. We've just tried to become best in the world and not dying. To do this, you have deployed copious resources. I think something like$2 million a year. I don't know, you know, whatever. A lot of money, right? Like you're all in. Yeah. And of course you're not doing this alone. You have a team of people who are advising you. So before we even get into the practices and the protocol itself, how did you go about identifying the experts and recruiting them to be participants in this? Yeah. Like, who are these people and why did you pick them over others?

1:20:59Yeah. Your point is correct that you said that every anti-aging specialist disagrees. Right. That's why I'm asking this question. Everyone disagrees with everyone. And so what we were trying to do is to say, how would you potentially punch through the noise? Because while everyone's debating these topics like NR versus NMN, cold plunge or not, like whatever you're trying, Like my mom and my dad want to know what to eat for breakfast. And there's like, everyone's kind of in that space. And so we said, okay, the way we're going to do this is we're just going to do me as N of one. And you can criticize it and say, well, that's not a population level study.

1:21:35It's only one, not applicable, whatever. Still, I'd rather do this than I would hang out in never ending debate land. It also gives people who are observing what you're doing like an emotional connection to it and a way in rather than just reading a study or a report because you're so transparent in sharing everything you're doing every single day, what's working, what's not working, what we decided to abandon, the new thing that you're playing around with, that it's storytelling. And that's what gets people engaged. And so they have, you're like a locus. Like we can just look at what Brian's doing.

1:22:11Maybe it's N of one. Maybe there are things that we can extract from his experiences. But I think, you know, saying, I'm going to be this living experiment is the best way to create interest in what's happening. Yeah, okay. I would say Blueprint is the best health protocol developed in history. Prove me wrong with your data. We can now say that. I know you've said that many times. Has anybody come back to you with a bunch of data and challenged you? No one in the world has done it. No one has measured themselves like me. No one's come with a competing model. I'm three years in, I'm still all by myself.

1:22:50people maybe reading papers and saying, do this thing and that thing, no one. And it's hard. It's expensive. So there's barriers to do it. But still, I mean, and if someone beat this, it would be the best thing ever. I would absolutely celebrate it. Because that would just level up what you're doing. Exactly. It's not a threat. It's like, it's an ad. Exactly. And I work with people extensively to help them try to beat me. So I really want others to come up and improve better ways of doing it. That's how we lift everyone. The objective here is not to be number one. The objective here is to be a zero.

1:23:24That's a concept I guess I haven't played. Like it really is, this is about thriving as a species. This is not about being me trying to be ranked number one. Being ranked number one is like an old fashioned idea. It's just a former version of being a homo sapien. It's not relevant going forward. Back to the experts. Who are these people and why did you select them? Yeah. So the principal architect on the project is Oliver Zolman. He's 29 years old, and I was interviewing a bunch of people, and he stood out to me. We connected, and we instantaneously just kind of got locked in for life. It was a really great meeting of minds.

1:24:02And he had this approach where he said, basically, you can't understand and treat aging unless you do it at the organ level. You have to focus on the heart and understand what is the anatomical nature of the heart and what is the function of the heart. You have to age it out. And you have to do the same for the lungs, the same for the kidney and the pancreas. Unless you're doing things on an organ-by-organ basis, you really can't structurally solve aging. And I loved his methodical approach. It was mathematical in nature. It was rigorous. It was quantified. And then he and I have built out a team of people all over the world that specialize in the various organs.

1:24:35So we'll find world experts in every organ area or biological process, and we work with them and we just refine these things continually. So he's like your chief of staff, chief medical officer. Yeah, he's the chief architect. Yeah. So let's get into the various practices. Obviously, it breaks down into sleep, nutrition, exercise, supplements, some pharmacology, some medical interventions, lots of testing. You talk about skin care, hair care, dental care. It's basically everything, right? But I want to begin with sleep because that is the most important thing. I think you would agree with that.

1:25:13And I think that sleep is really a Trojan horse here. So talk a little bit about the importance of sleep and how you practice sleep hygiene. Yeah. I know when I'm not well-rested, I feel half dead. I feel inebriated. I feel compromised. I'm ornery. I feel snippy. So the difference between a good night's sleep and a bad night's sleep is just nothing changes my conscious existence more. It's unbelievable the difference. When you have an extraordinary night of sleep, problems seem to get solved without stress. Your creative capacity is through the roof. Your ability to navigate obstacles, like everything is easier.

1:25:57It is like a superpower. And I've had so many occasions where I'm having one of those days and I think I would literally pay any amount of money to be able to replicate this and feel this way every day. And I have gone to great lengths, Brian. Not as far as you, but my sleep hygiene routine is pretty fucking extensive. I sleep outside in a tent. Like I do things that you don't even do. And my sleep score on the WHOOP is pretty good. Like I'll hit 100, you know, once or twice a week and I'm in the 90s on average or at the high 80s, which is probably good in the context of the Western world. Yeah.

1:26:40But it is very rare that I would hit 100 % even two days in a row. But you have hit 100 % for over six months. Eight months now. Eight months. Without a single day? I think I've missed like three or four days, yeah. I cannot even imagine being able to do that or what it must feel like to feel that good every single day. Yeah, I love it. Yes, it's everything you said. Here's the thing. People think sleep hygiene begins with, you know, when it starts to get dark and you're thinking about going to bed. Sleep hygiene begins as soon as you open up your eyes in the morning, you have to start getting ready for that evening experience.

1:27:25And despite all of the things that I've done, I have not oriented my life with the rigor that you have. Every single thing that you do every day, all the choices you make about the food, when you eat, what you're eating, the type of exercise that you're doing, et cetera, really is all a function of trying to get you prepared for the best night of sleep possible. Yes, my entire life is about sleep. So when people say like, if I could just do the sleep part of Blueprint, This is why I say it's a Trojan horse, because in order to get 100 % sleep score every single day, you actually have to do every other thing in the blueprint protocol to achieve that.

1:28:01Exactly. You're exactly right. There was this reporter that wrote an article recently for GQ. I was at this anti-aging conference, and this person who interviewed me said, you know, like, what is the number one thing you do for, you know, anti-aging? and this reporter, she told the story like, so people are there like listening, like what's Brian Johnson going to say about this thing? Is he going to say like some peptide or, you know, Sano or whatever protocol? And then he says, sleep. And she said, then like the crowd just has this collective sigh of disappointment. Right, because it's much sexier to talk about rapamycin.

1:28:37Yeah, whether that was true or not, but she was just like, everyone is so disappointed with my response. But, you know, like I don't know how to communicate more that everything revolves around sleep. Nothing changes existence more than sleep. You have more willpower. You have more zest for life. You have more energy. Yeah. I just, everything falls apart without sleep. I don't know how to communicate any better. Yeah. And when people want to hear you elaborate on that, the focus tends to be on the blackout curtains and the type of sheets and the air purifier that you have in the room and the temperature of the room and those are all fine and well and important and play their part but to really appreciate it you have to you have to actually embrace the entirety of the program yeah yeah exactly right i mean i think we're all competing for status and power in society you know like in all of our own little circles and places and there's so much mythology caught up in the hero being sleep deprived and sleeping under the desk and going days without sleeping it's so built into the psychology that people are trying to signal to others i'm worthy of being respected i'm worthy of this status i'm worthy of being admired i'm worthy of this mythology so they're doing things to play the script because they think it generates the respect of others and in their mind they may believe it too like this is how genius is achieved i can think of so many examples of people who've done this and so it's so deep in our psychology that sleep deprivation is somehow positive, that that's what stops most people from adopting it.

1:30:12That hustle porn culture and notion of sleep is in its twilight. Like I feel like we've really gone a long way towards raising awareness around that. Like that's shifted a lot, even in the last couple of years, I think. I concur. Yeah, just even like when I talk to my friends, like they'll come to me and say like, I want this so badly. We have to engage in a therapy session where I'm like, what's up? How's it going? And then we dig into the deep into their psychology and they uncover and unravel that they really are trying to be on mythology level with their levels of accomplishment. Now it takes a lot of vulnerability for the person to be that honest.

1:30:48But like once we do that in private and they're like, oh my God, this is totally unnecessary. I can achieve my objectives of ambition and status and power and wealth and success. And I don't have to do this sleep deprivation thing. And it's so liberating for them. They actually become better earth or craft. But it's not obvious. On the surface, it's very, very hard to see that you're playing out scripts, which goes back to the first thing we talked about. What fishbowl are you in right now? We're all in fishbowls. Which one are you in? You're playing out the scripts of other people. You don't realize it, but that you're owned by it.

1:31:21Whatever I'm trying to create and share with the world is only as valuable as the extent to which I suffered to create it, which leads to unhealthy choices around rest and recovery and self-care. And it's very difficult to break that delusion. Yeah. You acknowledge this in yourself. Sure. Interesting. But as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, self-awareness will avail you nothing. Like having a self-awareness around it doesn't necessarily mean you're making a modification to that behavior. I could really benefit from outsourcing a lot of what my mind is telling me what to do. And I do. I just do it with other humans.

1:32:02My super intelligence is a panel of people who keep me on track, right? And there's a democratic aspect to that. Like, I don't want my brain to be a monarch. I create a Congress of people who are smarter than I in various areas of life, from relationships to athletics, to diet, nutrition, whatever it is. And this podcast is also an experiment of that. Like I invite people on who know things that I don't and I learn from them and they become people in my life that I can call upon to run my decisions by. But it's really through pain and suffering that I got to a place of willingness to submit to that, to disabuse myself of the notion that my instincts are guiding me appropriately and to develop the humility to allow other people to weigh in on my decisions.

1:32:58It's amazing. Like you basically, you're doing this in your life already. You're building systems of intelligence that are superior to native abilities. So if another human is better at doing a given thing, then you adopt that. Or if you run that decision by a panel of people and there's a consensus, then that's probably a good metric. Yeah. So like we're all playing this game today already. Like we're already continually in this game of up-leveling our systems of intelligence. Everyone's trying to be their best self. And that's just, we're just going to do more of the same in the future. So when we talk about AI, it does seem very jarring and new and different, but it's actually no different than what we do already today.

1:33:41We're just taking these baby steps. When you're in the panel of getting opinions, if you find a superior way of reasoning through a problem, you adopt it, right? It overrides your conscious mind. Your mind's like, actually, it's better. So you're already doing it. Sometimes. Not always. Yeah. Yeah. Not always. It's like, yeah, I know I should do that, but I'm going to do it this way. Yeah. How many times are you going to bang your head against the wall? Yeah. Which is why pain can be such a powerful signal. Yeah. Because sometimes you have to be in pain to see another way. Yeah. So like me individually, I view my current self not living for me right now.

1:34:22I view me as in service of my future self. So I imagine like Brian who lives in, who exists in the year 2050, where super intelligence is omnipresent, whatever that thing is, I am in service of that Brian. I want that Brian to have that experience more than anything else, more than me having a temporary pleasure right now, more than me acquiring something. thing, I really view myself in service to my future self because now, if we didn't exist in this time and age, I lived in the 1800s, I wouldn't have thought like that. I would have been like the omnipresent, this is the only moment that matters.

1:34:57But this is the first time it's ever happened in history. Like basically things are changing so fast that our future self could be unrecognizable from our current selves. That's never been the case. That's a practice though that is counter to human intuition. Like humans are not very good about thinking about or forecasting into the future. I mean, if we were, listen, heart disease kills most people, right? That's the number one killer. So if we really thought about our heart health or we cared about what we would be experiencing in our 70s, when we are in our teens and our 20s, we would not be eating foods that are bad for our heart.

1:35:35But that's not the way that our society is oriented. And it's not really the way our minds work. Like tell a teenager that he needs to be concerned about something that's going to happen to him when he or she is 70 years old and they will dismiss you immediately. Exactly. Talk about your approach to nutrition calorically and, you know, how you make all of this work. Yeah. I brought you some food. Oh, you did? Good. I did. Do we want to do that? Yeah. Should we bring that up? Yeah. Let's get you some food and I'll tell you how it came about. Cool. Okay, cool. This is the Just Nutty, right? Yeah.

1:36:09Yes. we have strawberries raspberries raspberries and macadamia nuts macadamia nuts and walnuts flax seeds that's some pea protein make sure you stir it up a little bit it can get caught in the throat otherwise pomegranate juice sunflower lichen yeah it's quite good

1:36:30and is this what you would eat as your first meal or is this more like a dessert that's number two number two yeah I eat vegetables for breakfast that's great the origin of this we we pose the question if the body could speak what would it ask for and that's what we've done so this is this diet is 2250 calories and every calorie has had to fight for its life everything we have has a clinical endpoint we measure it if it's doing its job great if it's not it's replaced we try to justify the presence of every single thing. Well, if you think longevity experts disagree, the world of nutrition, if it's anything, it's a shitstorm of people arguing with each other about what's in our best interest from a health perspective.

1:37:21So good luck trying to find consensus there. But the truth is, if you really look at the science, there's more agreement than it would appear if you're like in the kind of nutrition ecosystem of social media. How did you arrive at these meals and these recipes and these types of foods as the things that are going to advance your goals? All of it's based upon gold standard scientific evidence. We looked at every single lifespan and health span study ever done. We prioritized each one according to its effect size. We looked at each one using 15 biostatistical criteria. And so we tried to assess what evidence can we trust the most.

1:38:02and then we start implementing it and then we would measure my body simultaneously. Here's my starting point. Here's after a month of adherence, three months, six months and we just repeat that loop again and again. And so the most compelling thing about Blueprint is I now have my three-year results. I have hundreds of biomarkers. Like for example, my speed of aging is slower than 97 % of 46-year-olds, slower than I think 88 % of 18-year-olds. My cardiovascular capacity is the top 1.5 % of 18-year-olds. My bone mineral density, total bone mineral density is in the top 0.02 % of 30-year-olds. And there's like dozens more of those markers.

1:38:41So even if a critic wants to say, I don't believe in total bone mineral density because of blank by blank, you still have to knock off the chart a few other dozen markers. The aggregation or the accumulation of all of these markers taken together. It is the most robust outcome in history. No one has ever put together this level of measurement, this level of rigor, and this level of evidence. Never. And so let's just say in a few years' time, we blow past this and we have far superior models, which would be the best thing. This is still in the world right now where no one can agree on anything and people just want to be the simple answer, what do I have for breakfast or what can I eat for lunch?

1:39:23I've given them an answer. the first time in human history where someone can say, here you go. So you eat three meals a day. The final meal, dinner time, is at 11 a.m. 11 a.m. is the last food that you intake for the day. Yeah. Why so early? Sleep. See, if I am hungry at night, I have a hard time sleeping. Yeah. This is my big problem, Brian. Yeah. Okay, so cool. So I always try to be very cautious and say, okay, I do this, but like you do you. And like maybe I want to get into the N of one versus what is universal here. Yeah, exactly. So I always try to be like, look, for me, I tried that out.

1:40:03This is the result of hundreds of different trials, but like you do you, maybe you're different. Everybody around me that has tried this has come back to the earlier they eat, the better they sleep. I don't have a single example of someone who eats late and still nails their sleep. Wow. You may be the first person that does it. I doubt it. It's discomfort. It's just like anything. When you break a bad habit, it's uncomfortable, and you fight against it, and you resist it, and then you acclimate to it, and then you're glad you did, and life is better. Yeah. My son, so my 17-year-old, my 16-year-old started this.

1:40:40He went through a year of trialing this. When you're 16, your metabolism is just jamming. Sure. And so he experiences intense hunger pains. and so he really struggled because six or seven were all around he'd be like just dying and so he has been working on that and lo and behold he's found out the earlier he pushes that the better his sleep gets so he's just had to negotiate it but again like I'm totally open to other people having different routines it's just everyone around me has slowly migrated back and it's really my resting heart rate okay a few things like if I right before I go to bed if my resting heart rate is about 46 I'm almost guaranteed a perfect night's sleep like really strong rim, really strong deep very little light, no alcohol and I've had 30 to 60 minutes to wind down I can't go straight from hard charging work to hitting the pillow I have to have some separation to get my nervous system calmed down if I can get a few of those things in place like clockwork, perfect sleep it's amazing do you ever just lay in bed starving now?

1:41:45no, I'm pretty accustomed to it now I think in the early days I really had to wrestle with that discomfort. And yeah, I've normalized to it. 2 ,250 calories a day. That number was identified because it is an adequate amount of calories while running a 10 % caloric deficit every single day. So you're eating 10 % less than your body's physical needs every single day. So what is the thinking behind that? Yeah. So there's reasonable evidence around caloric restriction. It's not a solved topic. It's suggestive that it may be good for you and may stand life and health span. So we do adopt it. Initially, it was on 20%.

1:42:28I got too skinny. I lost too much weight. So we bumped it up. I've seen some of those videos. Yeah. You were looking pretty gaunt for a minute there. Yeah. It's pretty fun to look back now. I mean, I've been like five different humans. Yeah. In this three years, I look back. You had the long hair with the braid. You had like, you know, yeah. Yeah, it's like interview with a vampire. That's the clickbait YouTube title for this podcast. Yeah, even I look at myself, I'm like, who is that guy? You know, it's like I'm so different than I was before. Yeah, but so the 2250, what we found, interestingly, is we have my speed of aging measured almost monthly for the past two years.

1:43:07And the speed of aging clocks are just getting better and better. We now have a 16-organ clock, which just outperformed a bunch of others. but we saw that when I changed from 20 % caloric restriction to 10, it didn't change my speed of aging. So we didn't achieve benefits on that marker. Now, that's not to say that we had benefits we didn't get for the heart and the lungs because we're looking at the whole body, but we think that 10 % caloric restriction is basically we get the best of it without having to go too far. You're confident in the accuracy of these biological clocks because I've heard a lot of kind of grousing around around whether these are reliable indicators of anything.

1:43:47The skepticism is absolutely valid. Phenotypic markers are much better. They're gold standard. These clocks are still silver standard. Absolutely true. We trust them increasingly more because the patterns we see there match with other phenotypic markers. So we're building our internal models. But on their own, I agree out of the gate, skepticism is warranted. With these new generation clocks coming out now, they're getting better and better. So we make sense of our protocol when we put together imaging, MRI, ultrasound, fitness tests, phenotypic markers, DNA methylation, you know, microbiome. We put them all together and we piece the puzzle together, then we trust it.

1:44:26But we don't have over-reliance on one test. The most reliable clock then says you are how old? All in. Yeah. We don't trust the age ones. We trust the speed of aging more than the others. In other words, looking at a certain system and saying this is operating in the way that a 20-year-old system would operate. Yeah. Engaging age based upon data sets from people of varying ages. That's right. Yeah. If you look at my blood markers, my blood markers and my 18-year-old blood marker, my 18-year-old, we're about identical. You can't really tell the difference between us. if you put him in an MRI and me in an MRI, his heart is definitely 18 and my heart is definitely not 18.

1:45:09So some things are very obvious in the difference in the comparisons. And so this is why measurement has been the most important part of Blueprint is when you don't have measurement, anybody's opinion is equally weighted. When you have ground truth with measurement, it dramatically simplifies the conversation to say, well, here's the data. But you have to have repeated measurement over certain durations of time. You have to have the rigor for certain controls. And that's what we've tried to do is structure this in a way where we can punch through the endless debate and say, like, here's a starting point for us to have a discussion.

1:45:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in whether you're in a place where you feel like you can extrapolate upon the data that you've accumulated with respect to yourself to speak more broadly about how it might be universally understood. Because I have this like internal dialogue around the protocol, which is on the one hand, like I should do this. I can do this. Like, look what's happening here. Like, why wouldn't you do this? And then on the other hand, this other story that loops in my mind, which is you might be past the point of no repair. Like I was very hard on my body for a very long time. I treated my body very poorly.

1:46:25Substances, terrible lifestyle habits, you name it. Like I've done it. And then even as a healthier person, as an athlete, like I've pushed my body really hard and I've done great things as an athlete, but that training and that racing was not consistent with longevity, you know, kind of priorities, right? Like I may have harmed myself beyond the point of no repair. At what point in terms of arresting the aging process, slowing it, we're not even talking about reversing it, do you have a sense of when it's too late? Obviously, if somebody who's 90 is adopting the blueprint protocol, it's unlikely to be successful in preventing them from dying, of course, but even maybe at aging because that ship has sailed.

1:47:18I am racing for my parents to stay alive. So they both joke with me where a new package from me arrives at their house every day. And it's a new thing to do or a new thing to implement. You know, my mom would be like, Brian, I just, I can only do so many things. So you need to tell me what to do. But I think we should fight for our lives. All of us. And my dad is 70. He went on Blueprint and he called me one day. He said, Brian, I want you to know something really important. When you start experiencing cognitive decline, you don't know it. I thought I would know it. Like, hey, I'm slipping. You don't.

1:47:56He said, since I've been doing Blueprint, I've come back and I'm aware of some loss. I will do anything to keep my mind. As a 46-year-old, I don't understand that. I can imagine what it might be like to be on the situation where you're potentially losing your mind. But we did a plasma exchange. My son gave me one liter of plasma. I gave my dad one liter of plasma. Yeah, a lot of people had a lot of things to say about that. Page six, no tabloid refused the opportunity to put some ink to that story. So I did five one liter infusions myself from a 20-year-old donor, then one from my 17-year-old.

1:48:39So I got six total. And we've yet to be able to identify the benefit of doing that. maybe with better tools we'll be able to tease it out we just can't see it now however when my father took out 600 milliliters of his plasma and took in one liter of mine his speed of aging lowered by 13 percent what and it stayed that way for it stayed that way for six months his last measurement was done just two weeks ago so we're doing a more comprehensive analysis on this but it was one of the most significant intervention outcomes that this company had seen. One time of my super plasma. One plasma transfusion.

1:49:18Yeah. So like, it's an open question. How many liters? One liter. One liter. Yeah. One liter of my super plasma. But like, okay, so, but there's a question. Was it because he took 600 milliliters of his out? Or was it because he had one liter of mine in? We don't know. We haven't done the experiment. So there's a lot of questions still, though. The results are solid. Like he's done multiple measurements before, multiple measurements afterwards, over a six-month period of time. So we trust the data at this point. And so for me, are you past the point of no return? No. No one is, no matter where you're at.

1:49:53If you look at the time span and like this line straight up on how fast we're moving on intelligence, I don't think there's any reason anybody should give up hope. All of us. I have this thing that like, I'm going to decline or die right on the precipice of all these breakthroughs that are going to extend healthspan, you know, by decades. Yeah. Like the last generation to do it old school. Yeah. I just wrote a book and then my author's bio, I wrote that I died in the year 2478 by the last bus in operation on planet Earth weeks before. Or Brian, it would be such a shame if like some accident happens to you with all of the effort that's going into this.

1:50:35And you just walk out onto, I don't know, Lincoln or something like that and get hit by a car. If we're being sober about this, isn't that inevitable? If that didn't happen, would the universe be true? Do all things not end in irony? And so am I destined for some silly death? Most likely. Probably. Most likely. Right, yeah. Is it going to be the most humorous version? Probably. Is it going to give people endless thrills on the internet? Most likely. That is the most likely outcome. Yeah. But to like already embrace that, like makes it less ironic, I suppose. I mean, it just is. Like we look at history, it's just life is irony.

1:51:16Yeah. Back to the food for a minute. So one thing about your protocol is it's entirely plant-based. You've done this by choice, but what is your reason for being 100 % plant-based? I hope that compassion is a scaling law of intelligence. So evolution created us. We are creating superintelligence. And as we do that, I hope that compassion is a fundamental tenet of this intelligence for our own sake. I hope that that compassion's sake. I think that if we can figure out how to achieve our objectives with greater compassion, we all win a much bigger prize. Yeah. Obviate the unnecessary suffering and for you to be thriving and doing what you're doing in your gym and displaying the biomarkers and the blood markers that are demonstrating transparently how your body is responding to these types of foods.

1:52:18I think that's a really powerful message to the person who believes or is deluded into the idea that if you want to be strong and vital, that you have to eat animal products. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, I guess what I really believe is we need to be what we want AI to become. And we will build AI with all of our biases. If we're basically living a life of accelerated disease, decay, and death, we're going to build that into AI, whether we realize it or not. It goes back to what you're saying of like, are we going to build a dystopic future? We really need to be that thing before we build it. And that's why I want this don't die revolution to become a global revolution that consumes the earth in like six months, like not a 10 year timeframe that we as a species, it just snaps and we're like, it's time, it's going to move.

1:53:16And it happens faster than anyone thinks is even possible. And I think that there's a possibility that could happen. We currently think of like a revolution like this, like so far away and there's so many barriers. As you see AI advance and it starts posing these really tricky problems of who are we, what do we do? How do we structure society? Like, what does it mean to exist anymore? It's going to force us to find new games to play, new status, new power, right? All these new things. And if we can redirect it towards something positive, like don't die, we still get to play our games. And that's what I'm hoping happens is you've got this inversely related structure.

1:53:53And I hope it loops back into humans. For the meat thing, I really don't get into the war of meat. Like I don't get into the war of anything. I'm basically just trying to say we need to build a new system of intelligence. And let's just follow the evidence and the data. And if we can do so with compassion, we're all going to win in this new world we're building. Hmm. Of course, the other piece here is all the supplements you take. Yeah. 110-ish capsules a day. Yeah. Some of them are things we've all heard of. Some of them are things we haven't. I'm interested in what you've played around with that you found that you thought would work that didn't work and how you came up with this incredibly elaborate long list of things that you take every single day.

1:54:43Let me think. I guess a way into that is to ask what percentage of all of these supplements are safety gaps because you're running a caloric deficit and your kind of profile of nutrition is relatively limited that you're making sure you're meeting all of your needs versus supplements that are oriented around, you know, kind of progressing this health span aspect of what you're doing. Yeah, we've tried to build the perfect diet. Again, if you just ask the body, like, hey, body, speak, tell us what you need to be your best self. Give us your recipe list. That's what we've tried to do with diet and supplements.

1:55:23And we've really taken a hands-off approach, just like measure the whole body. Okay, so how are you doing liver? Like, where are your enzymes? Let's image you. How are you doing this with fat, iron, stiffness? We look at all these parameters and say, okay, what does the evidence say on iron and stiffness and enzymes? And we take the evidence, We say, well, here's the following panel that makes sense for the liver to be optimal. We do the same thing for the heart and for the lungs and everything else. And then that's what generates the list. And so we implement the protocol. We measure again and again and again.

1:55:49And we're like, well, like, okay, liver enzymes on point, cardiovascular ability on point. So every single thing. And so sometimes there's a multifaceted approach, like, you know, garlic, like, you know, does a bunch of things for inflammation and other things like that. So it's hard to pinpoint one thing for a one-to-one relationship. It's really multifaceted. but every single thing has a destination. Every single thing is measured and if it doesn't justify its existence, it's out. In the measuring process and in the testing process though, you have to really be careful about the variables that you're introducing, right?

1:56:22Because you're doing so many different things. You get a test result. How are you supposed to know what that is correlated to? It could be a new supplement that you're taking. It could be the fact that you tried a new exercise in the gym or you put a red light helmet on for a little bit longer. You know, you're doing a lot of things. So how do you track that? Yeah, you're exactly right. We've stacked several things. Like going back to the speed of aging, what we saw recently is, so we did a distatinib and quercetin cycle. That's a combo to get rid of senescent cells. So it's 50 milligrams of distatinib, which is a drug used for leukemia, and then 500 milligrams of quercetin.

1:56:59And you do it three days in a row for three months. And the tools to measure senescent cells are not great. So we have some primitive ways of doing it, but we're not really happy with it. But one thing we did see was it dramatically increased my speed of aging. So the therapy, even though you're trying to clear senescent cells in that clock, there was an increase in speed of aging. And the same thing happened when we were trying to regenerate my thymus. And so I was doing HGH, 0.6 milligrams five days a week. We did achieve a seven-year age reduction in my thymus looking at fat fraction. We did three different MRIs, which we feel okay about.

1:57:33we're not terribly confident it's a kind of new area but still interesting that also dramatically increased my speed of aging and so I use those two examples to say that we are trying many things but what's cool is when we're doing HGH or the dystatinib and quercetin they are isolated in the therapy windows and we can see what happens to phenotypic markers we can see what happens to measurement markers we can see what happens to speed of aging the measurement robustness gives multiple angles to slice it up and say interesting same thing with plasma And so this is why I think the data we have on me is so interesting is it's a more comprehensive view of any human in history.

1:58:10And even though it's not perfect, definitely some limitations and definitely some crossover and definitely some compound and confounds like sure, true, also better than anything in history. As this continues to develop and you add and subtract from this equation, there must be situations where there are compromises that you have to make because, yes, you could take this supplement and it has this positive benefit, but it also has a slight negative benefit on this other thing. But if you combine it with this, it makes it better or worse. These things, they don't function in isolation, right? They all have like sort of – they're all dependent upon each other and how they interact with each other.

1:58:55And what might be good for one system has a deleterious impact on some other system. So it's really about how they all work together and what the net effect of that is. And that's got to be a very complicated computation. What a fantastic question. Amazing. So there's like a pretty large segment of society that observes this thing and they'll be like – Let me just do what he's doing. Well, they'll say like, you're so white, you must be unhealthy. You know, it's like, you're so pasty, you must be unhealthy. Or they'll say like, your facial fat volume is not high enough, you must be unhealthy. So there's like this general perception of like, I don't know, they use their eyes, they're trying to do it.

1:59:35That's like one layer. Another layer is you start looking at all the data and you get in there. I think what's interesting is aging is a game of whack-a-mole. So we do the dystatinib and quercetin to get rid of my zombie cells, and it raises my speed of aging. It increases it, right? Bad situation. We do the HGH to try to regenerate my thymus. It does it, but it raises my speed of aging. So exactly what you said is it's a whack-a-mole. So what is so cool about what we've accomplished is even in this game of whack-a-mole where you do one positive thing and then a negative thing happens, we've been able to achieve elite level of muscle and fat and cardiovascular and speed of aging and and and and and it just goes on and on like we've optimized for like 20 things that compete with each other because it's not like you just do one thing and the whole body is like great it's a trade-off space and it's very complicated and that's what i think like almost no one gives us props for having optimized for all those variables at the same time it's really the conversations like he looks pasty, therefore this must be a bad situation.

2:00:43And so it just doesn't translate, not yet. And I think it would be cool if those who can't observe it would speak up because people are trying to make sense of it. They have no idea if this is legitimate or not or like if we should talk about it. But I think it's the most impressive thing you've ever done. Have you had some of these longevity doctors reach out to you to solicit their input or to be criticized? Like what has that been like? Yeah, recently a Time Magazine article that was written interviewed several longevity experts, and they all dunked on me. And their argument was? Yeah, so Nir Barzelli, he made the comment.

2:01:24I went to a conference and he said, Brian showed up. He didn't look very healthy. We were all kind of concerned about him. Then another Eric Verdon said something like this idea of going after the aging being something we can go after. I forget the exact quote, but like a little bit of a dunk on the endeavor. And then the other gentleman who runs the USC School of Gerontology. I forget his name right now. You have to think this in context because the reporter wants to create the conflict. So she's trying to drum up the conflict. So it's not entirely fair to say that they only said these things.

2:01:59It's probably only true to say that she took the things that they said that created the sharpest contrast and most conflict. So it's not entirely fair to say these things, but still they said enough to dunk on me, which is interesting. And it's totally expected in a field that is like this, you're going to have a variety of different opinions. Expected, and that's their job is to be skeptical. It's their job to raise questions others haven't. So it's fine. It's to point out that it's definitely not like we're riding into the world of anti-Asian and people are like, amazing. It's met with quite a lot of resistance because it's their domain of expertise.

2:02:35And so – and it's fruitful and it's productive. That's a very healthy relationship to criticism, I think, and a mature one. I think the difference is you are not only using yourself as the guinea pig, you're approaching this holistically by exploring every aspect of what it means to live in the world and what would need to be done to kind of take out this insurance policy on extending your life versus slides under a microscope in a lab. Yeah. Studying sirtuins and certain physiological pathways, all of which is great and fine, but I think within the scientific community, there's a sense that the solution will be found in solving a very particular biochemical pathway as opposed to reorienting not only every lifestyle habit, but also your whole mindset around how you interface.

2:03:38with the world, think about yourself and think about the future of the planet and humanity, which is kind of like what you're doing, right? It's a different way into the same field, I guess. You're exactly right. We are actually working on different problems. Blueprint appears as if we're trying to solve aging. It's not true. I'm trying to solve for don't die as a species. I'm trying to solve for at the highest possible level. like if we just take stock of where we're at, we're in a dicey situation with our biosphere, right? Like how serious is our climate situation right now? We don't know. We have no clue.

2:04:21We don't know what the compounded effects are going to be. We don't know how catastrophic it could become and how fast. We saw COVID leveled us as a species and we're walking into this catastrophic climate situation like, I don't know. This is like a level of insanity. So we have that going on. We have weapons that we can annihilate each other with. Our fingers are on the trigger. Kind of scary. and we're building AI of like this total unknown of what this thing could be. We have really, really significant challenges in front of us. And I'm trying to say, if we size up the situation that after 13.8 billion years, we're conscious and we're here and we have a chance to create this remarkable existence, let's try to get our stuff together a little bit, sober up in this moment and actually create something spectacular.

2:05:05And so that's the game I'm trying to play and it all hinges upon this one philosophical thing of don't die. If I can demonstrate with Blueprint that maybe there's a chance that we could radically extend our lifespans, it might be enough to shift the zeitgeist and snap it and say, you know what? We're in. We're going to play the game don't die. Because if death is no longer inevitable, everything about our reality is going to change. Everything about how we think is going to change. Everything is going to change about our existence. And it can happen so fast. How do you scale this N of one into a broader movement?

2:05:41I assume that's why you put yourself out there and you're doing podcasts, et cetera. Because, you know, driving all the way over here and driving back, it's not an ideal way to be living your blueprint protocol lifestyle. Yeah, a few things. Over the past few months, we've taken blueprint and we've made it into a product. And so when I first started this thing, it was really explore the scientific frontiers. I did it for two years. No one cared. Then there was this article in Bloomberg. It kind of blew up and it's just kind of taken on a life of its own. And the most common response I hear is make it easy to do.

2:06:18Like right now it's so unapproachable. It's not doable. It's too extreme. I can't do it. So it just doesn't feel like it's actually doable by anybody. Some people do it, but like, you know, it's tough. So people have said, make it easy. So we spent the past eight months now building out this product. And we're going to launch it in 60 days. So it's going to compete for the calorie for calorie, dollar for dollar, the most nutritious food program ever built in history. So pre-packaged meals, food delivery, what is it? There'll be extra virgin olive oil. It will be pills, powders, drinks, foods. So basically all in one, just we'll ship it to you and you just eat this and consume these things.

2:07:01Exactly. We're going to say like, we're going to pack your lunch. Don't trade with the other kids. Right. But like, you know, like we're trying to like, we got you. And so the starter kit, we have about 1 ,000 to 1 ,200 calories a day, which we take care of. The person's left with having to solve for about 1 ,000 a day. We have some fast follow-on products afterwards that we'll solve for the whole day. And what we're trying to say is, we've got you and we're going to give you the most nutritious thing you could ever possibly imagine. And we're going to do so at a cost that's going to be cheaper than what you're doing right now.

2:07:34We can actually save you money. And so I think I love this because if you look at technological progress over the past few decades, all the focus has been on computers and the internet and the marvel of all this stuff. Meanwhile, we've been marchers for this progress. Meanwhile, we've continued to age and die as we've always have. We get worse, in fact. Like the situation is not great with our mental health. Where are the societal scale human improvement projects? And I think this is one. This is like we are full on going to change the landscape of how we deal with nutrition. Getting nutrition done right is a great first step.

2:08:10But we want to revolt against this culture of self-destruction that's fast food and junk food and all these self-destruction behaviors. So we're excited about that. We think it really is like the revolution is in these daily things we do, what we put on our body. And there's nothing more intimate than what you put in your body. Right. That's a good way of scaling. Because I think it does speak to the average person who maybe watched a YouTube video or two of yours and is overwhelmed. It's just like, look, I just, you know, just tell me what to eat. And that gets into the problem, however, of what is N of one versus what is responsibly extrapolated from this protocol.

2:08:52And there's only so much, right? And so maybe it is in the three meals a day that, you know, there's some universality to that, but then it gets dicey in terms of supplementation and all these other things that you go into. But one thing I would say, which I should have said at the outset, is that in furtherance of this discussion around transparency, like the Blueprint website, it's all there. Like, and you've organized it in a way that makes it very easy to kind of understand what you're doing. You just list it all out. Here's everything I do every single day. Here are the recipes. This is the caloric breakdown.

2:09:29Here's every single supplement, and they're hyperlinked to Amazon, so you can just get them. And here's my exercise routine, and here's the video where I go through all of it. Here's my nighttime routine. Here's my dental, like my hair rejuvenation routine, my skincare routine. It's all there. Yeah. So we don't have to canvas all of that in today's conversation. That would actually be kind of a boring podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is more philosophical, which gives you a context for the why, which I think is really important because the what doesn't really mean anything unless you really understand the why.

2:10:03Yeah. But this is all a long-winded way of saying that I just, you know, I appreciate the transparency of it and the fact that it's all listed out there. And as I said to you at the beginning of the podcast, our Ellis Tyler is 28. He's been having a few health things that have challenged him. And he's found a lot of solace and guidance in what you've shared. And it's interesting because, like, I'm kind of a thing in the health world, right? Like, you can't hear it. You know, it's like sometimes you can't hear it from your parents. You know what I mean? And not for nothing, you're doing it next level anyway.

2:10:37So you're a better role model to him than I am by a long shot. but he's really been positively impacted by what you shared. And we've started preparing Blueprint meals and we've made a lot of changes in our home for which you've been responsible. So I just wanted to kind of publicly acknowledge that. And I think that it's really cool what you're doing. Like as resistant as I was initially when I was watching what was going on with you, I was like, who is this guy? He's a little bit weird. I don't understand this. like my whole tune has changed. I'm like, thank God he's doing it. Like you're sort of this modern day explorer, like an astronaut, you know, out there, like going places, you know, no one else is going and then reporting back like this worked, this didn't work.

2:11:24Oh, this is exciting, you know, and we can all join in and follow along in real time. And I think that that is like a laudable investment of your time and resources for humanity. Thank you very much. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that kindness. Yeah, it is really cool. And I guess, you know, I'm not quite done. It sounded like I was finishing the podcast. I have a couple more things I want to ask you. I guess I'd be remiss in letting you go before asking, you know, what's on the horizon or what's the test that you're excited about that either doesn't exist yet or you're about to do or, you know, So what is the kind of future, near future horizon that you're inching towards that you think might make a difference in how you're interfacing with all of this?

2:12:11Yeah, I really have moved on from the basics of the Blueprint Protocol. I think we've done a pretty good job mastering diet, sleep exercise. And I really want to go after culture. It's like, for example, last Saturday I posted on social media, I'm doing a trail run. I'm doing a trail run. Yeah, I saw that. Come join me. Yeah. And 11 people joined me. And we had a fantastic time. We became friends. We had a great conversation. It was really wonderful. We're all strangers to each other, but it was such a wonderful experience. And having done that, I posted again on Wednesday. And instead of capping it, because I capped it to a pretty small group, we have like 150 people who've responded.

2:12:52And so tomorrow morning on this little teeny trail, we're going to go run together. And I've been thinking all week of like, what is the ritual we do together? Like I'm playing with this idea, like, you know, what coordinated movements we do together to feel bonded? How do we feel like we're in sync? How do we feel like we're a tribe? How do we feel like we're really into this? And like this don't die thing is like it's real and like we feel each other's energy. But I'm really trying to go after being healthy is very hard. The pressures to do the self-destructive behaviors are so strong and you are at risk of losing friendships.

2:13:22You're at risk of being made fun of. You're at risk, like it's really painful to not do these things, to like not comply with them. There is a social cost. Huge. You're living your life at cross purposes with cultural norms. And it's like nothing stings more than not being part of a tribe. Nothing hurts more than your friends rejecting you. Like it's awful. And so I'm wondering if I can start doing some cultural events, like some parties and some runs and some things and convening people to say, you know what? You're not alone. We can do this together. We can derive strength from each other. I've written a book, Don't Die, which walks through this philosophical conversation.

2:13:57So it's almost like we had dinner together. I broke myself out into multiple characters. And it's a dialogue between the characters about all these ideas. One character makes the argument of like, no way, free will is absolutely the way to go about doing things. I'm never going to relinquish the power of my mind. It's an awful idea. And the next character is like, just hold tight. Just like listen to this idea just for a minute and breathe through it. And it just swings back and forth to try to capture the various perspectives of how people think about these ideas. is most people presume that large-scale societal change happens over some longer time horizon.

2:14:32I think it's really possible that this could happen faster than any of us imagined. And so I want to start laying the groundwork to say we can do this, because as a species, we're kind of beat down. Do we really trust our institutions? Like, we're at war with each other. Like, social media is kind of awful. Like, people are really ugly to each other. We say a lot of mean things. It's really hard to be healthy. I don't feel great. Like, it's just really hard right now in society. And like in the same way we imagine unadulterated ambition for our technology, can we start having that same aspiration for ourselves?

2:15:06Can we start feeling bullish about the future of being human versus like succumbing to AI and where it's going to be on universal basic income, but we're all useless? Like, how do we create some grand vision for ourselves and motivate ourselves to build a spectacular future? We don't know what's in store for us, but why put our tail between our legs and why just mope into the future? And it's really missing. Like, where's the gusto of being human? Where's our gusto of doing this? We love our technology. We worship our technology. We're willing to die for our technology. But where is it on the human side?

2:15:36That's where I want to focus because diet gets you so far and sleep gets you so far. But like, we need a game to play. We need to have a want to exist, like an absolute burning desire to exist. That definitely feels like it's lacking right now. And I think it speaks to just a general malaise fueled by a growing sense of disempowerment in our lives. And perhaps that speaks to the social constraints that we're unaware of that just drive us on trajectories that feel like were never our choice to begin with, but which we've sort of been lured into. And with that, the creeping increase in mental health issues and the like.

2:16:20Like, you know, you mentioned earlier when you compare humanity to technology and we see all these advances in what we're able to do with tech and then you look at humans and it's like a lot of mental health disorders, a lot of, you know, increase in unhappiness and, you know, people dying of all these chronic lifestyle ailments. And we're treating symptoms, we're basically medicating people, but we're not really getting at the root cause of what's causing these diseases, let alone exploring the antithesis of that, which is optimizing health. In large part, that's because we don't have a system set up that incentivizes that.

2:17:04So it requires not only outside thinking, but really breaking the paradigm and creating a new paradigm. And that's a lonely path that you're on. So it's not surprising that you're like, please come run with me on the trail because I don't want to be the only person doing this. And if there's anyone else out there that's doing it, they probably feel quite alone because you have a lot of support and resources that most people don't have. The framework that I like in understanding this is a concept called zeroism. And so first principle thinking is something a lot of people know about. You try to assume the fewest number of things in a given time frame.

2:17:43Sherlock Holmes is a first principle thinker. Dirk Gently, he's a detective by Douglas Adams. He's a zero principle thinker where he arrives at the crime scene and he basically is trying to find what's impossible. So he's trying to find the unknown unknowns. And so if you look throughout the history, the biggest discoveries that we've had, many of the most significant ones have been zeroth principle discoveries. For example, like the earth is not the center of the universe or special theory of relativity or the germs are the cause of infection or the vanishing point to allow 2D art and 3D perception.

2:18:22They're discoveries of unknown unknowns. So first principles thinking would be knowing the knowns. Yeah. And zeroism is figuring out how to know an unknown. First principles is you've got puzzle pieces in front of you, and you're trying to figure out if there's a way to assemble this puzzle together in some cohesive, interesting way. You're trying to avoid any assumption on top of that. Zeroism, you're trying to question, is there another dimension here I don't see? The application of zeroism to the notion of health span is what? First principles thinking is only so helpful in thinking about the future because we're up against this wall of fog with superintelligence.

2:19:07we can't see. We can't see past it. We can't predict how it's going to happen. Like when artificial intelligence played the game of AlphaGo and beat the world champion, Lisa et al., it played moves in that game that stunned human genius. So human genius has been playing that game for thousands of years. You give that game to AI, and in a matter of days, it stuns human genius. It just breaks their brain. The moment you apply this superintelligence, the computational intelligence, even its current form, not even future forms, it breaks humans' brains of what is actually genius, what is possible.

2:19:44And so our future is basically going to be a continuous stream of breaking our reality. Our realities have been broken in the past. Like, Earth is not the center of the universe. There's little tiny microbes cause infection. Einstein says, actually, Newtonian physics only talks about these dimensions. There's another dimension. Whoa. But these breakthroughs are separated by decades and centuries. Right. Whereas the accelerating rapidity of what is to come is staggering. Staggering. So I call this Gen Zero. And this is basically to say like, hey, everybody, we're right now in a moment where the last moment where things kind of have been how they have been, but they're about to change radically.

2:20:27And in this new future, we can't predict what's going to happen. We no longer have that ability. And so we're living in a zeroth world. And so Gen Zero is a group of multi-ethnic, multinational people who rise up and they say, we are willing to courageously step into the future. And we're willing to divorce or open to divorce from ourselves all human norms, all human customs, all human thought. And we're willing to say we're wide open about everything. Absolute blank slate. Now, that is impossibly hard to think about because we have the things we care about. We have our preferences. We have our beliefs.

2:21:11We have our wants. And to basically say we're open to this being a blank slate of existence is the most challenging thing one could ever do. I think this is why, on some degrees, I get so much flack. I think people kind of see this where I'm proposing something that is so fundamentally offensive. at every single layer of what it means to be human today. You take every single thing we consider to be sacred, and I'm challenging that head on. And I'm saying the reality may be the exact opposite. Like the idea that one could possibly transcend every bias and every idea they have about the world and themselves is, again on some level it it goes back to this buddhist idea of oneness and and of no mind right there is like are psychedelics a part of this because it sounds like in order to inhabit yeah a space of creating distance between yourself and your assumptions and your biases requires you know some kind of fracture process to even approximate yeah yeah so i think buddhism is a really interesting example.

2:22:28If you look at ideologies that have emerged throughout history, you could almost look at the time and place the person emerged. Let's just take Buddhism. And if you look on the other side, what was the technology of the time and place? You could almost predict the ideological thing that would emerge. So in the time of Buddha, they didn't really have any technological abilities. The only thing you could do would be to close your eyes and meditate. You had no other abilities. and then we look at the rise of Islam and Christianity, you find this really compelling storytelling. Like, hey, there's this omnipotent being.

2:23:03We have these rules. If we follow these rules, we get this prize. And that storytelling prevails for a few thousand years. But that was really the technology at the time. If you say right now, what is the technological ability and what does that mean for an ideology? You could almost map the ideology. And the ideology is zeroism. It's so predictable because no existing ideology in the world has anything meaningfully to say about this moment in time. Where are the major religions in offering us practical things about this moment on how to solve our biggest problems? Even with capitalism, like, hey, capitalism, what should we do with our major problems?

2:23:42How do you solve this? Even that, it just is too shallow. So where do we look for inspiration and structure to do it? and this is what I've been trying to fill with zeroism, like build out a philosophical structure. We can say, okay, like we can understand where we're at. These are practical steps we can follow. We can all cooperate around these core ideas, but I'm trying to create the stableness of a foundation of how we think about and act in this highly uncertain situation we're in and build something as much as we can predict and control in the future of a world where it's built around this, don't die and thriving.

2:24:21To what extent are you actually participating in the building of that? Like we've been talking about AI, you're an entrepreneur and you have a variety of companies that you've founded or are heavily invested in. Like are you directly invested in this aspect of this future casting that we've been talking about? So I made a couple hundred million from Braintree Venmo. I've put everything into this. I've sunk all my money into it. and it would have been very easy to take that money and make a lot more money. You know, if I could have just done just a normal business, you know, like it's so easy to make money with money.

2:25:00And I really didn't think that was the right move. The objective was to change the trajectory of intelligence in this part of the galaxy and do something that matters a few hundred years from now, which says a lot with how much we're going to change. Like to be valued in the 25th century, like you've got to do something spectacular. And so this is really all poured into that singular objective of trying to do the one or two or three things in the century that moves the needle for the species. And I've been obsessed about this problem. It just has absolutely consumed me. I think about it nonstop.

2:25:37I feel like you should come up with a blueprint, like a literal blueprint for a home where the home is designed in a way that's conducive to everything that you're talking about. Yeah, the systems I've been trying to build is putting myself in someone else's situation. I just want the food to arrive and I want instructions on what to do. And I want that to be solved. And then if I can start making small decisions on prioritizing my sleep and I start banging out 100 % nights, I feel amazing about existence. Like if I can get those two things right, and then we can then add on some exercise, which is great.

2:26:19And, you know, something else, but just get people in a mindset where we say, we want this. Like we're up for it. We're down for it. Let's go. Like, this is the thing. Like when I was depressed, you know, I really did want to end my life. Like desperately wanted to commit suicide. I would have done it had it not been for my kids. and so there's deep inside of me this imagination that we want to exist no matter what unconditionally we want to exist when i've tried to talk about this i'm surprised at how much pushback i get where people are like well and there's so many things they tell me of like why they don't want to exist.

2:27:04Like I would be bored or I don't want to be blank or blank. There's so much resistance to living. And I wonder in the moment, again, if we're like homo erectus, like if we really understood what it meant to exist in 20 years time, would we be like losing our minds of like, please exist. Like no matter what you do, please stay alive. Like, do we have any wisdom at all in this moment to speak for ourselves. And I don't think I do. And this is why I feel like I'm really in the service of my future self is I have no clue what I'm talking about. I just know I need to not die because this future thing is like, is the most remarkable thing to happen in history.

2:27:46It must be hard for you to date.

2:27:53Yeah. Yeah. Would somebody have to be on the blueprint protocol? It would be too hard if they weren't. Yeah, I'm single. I really do want to partner. And I guess I have to be like impossibly hard. Like, I don't know. I just can't imagine anybody putting up with me. I just feel like I'm like intolerable on every front. Oh, that makes me sad to hear you say that. It's kind of true, right? You take me as like most people have expectations for what's reasonable in a relationship. And I think I just break almost everything. And so I don't know. It's just like I've yet to find a situation where somebody would genuinely be happy with me.

2:28:40Yeah. So it's a pretty complicated situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a long list of things that somebody would have to be on board with. Yeah. I don't eat after 11 and I'm in bed at 8.30. And there's no way you're sharing a bed with anyone. Too big of a threat to the 100 % streak. There's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot going on. And so when you think of it in those terms and you're saying, hey, look, look how happy I am and here's what I'm doing. You're never saying you should do this too. You're doing what we say in AA is attraction rather than promotion. Like you're trying to create an attractive model for what this might look like, but the ask is huge.

2:29:21It has to be, yeah. And I think the social aspect of it looms much larger than, you know, the practical implications of the food that you're eating and the supplements you're taking and what time you have to go to bed. And that's really what comes into play in terms of mass adoption. Yeah. Maybe that's why we need to scale this because you need to find somebody to date, right? We've got to grow the population for you for selfish reasons. I wonder, I really, I spend almost zero time on dating. I wonder if I actually did spend time if what would come of it. But yeah, I genuinely want to be in a relationship.

2:30:00My 18 year old and I are like best friends. It's the best relationship. Does he date? He does, yeah. See, he can be the model for you. It's the best relationship I've ever had in my life. Until you become 18. Yeah. He's showing you how to be 18, right? So when you become 18 again, you can do what he's doing. Honestly, there's so much about that. Like I hang out with he and his friends and we have so much fun together. We just do, we play like kids. It's never ending fun. It's like, I love all my children. Obviously, we have that complication with our past, with religion, where like two of my children and are kind of like, yes, dad, we do love each other.

2:30:39Also kind of complex. And we openly acknowledge it and have that conversation. But my son and I, we just pile around. We're just best friends. We do everything together. It's so fluid. We're just like one thing all the time. And it is the best relationship I've had in my entire life. And it is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. And so I guess I know what it feels like to be in this wonderfully beautiful relationship. And I do want it. It's complicated to be human. and it's complicated to be in a relationship. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to hear that you have that relationship with him, but I'm sorry to hear about the constraints with your other kids.

2:31:13That can't be easy. And as you know, it will change. Like kids change so fast. Yeah. It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time will tell. In seeing you, in watching videos with you interacting with Talmadge, I have to ask this question, but I have to know, I have to know if you've watched the TV series Foundation or if you read the book. Yeah. Because you realize, of course, that you are empire. Yeah, yeah. That you and your son are the same person. Yeah. And that on some level, I have to think, like even if it's unconscious, that you are striving to adopt the Lee Pace physiology because that dude is ripped in that show and looks fantastic.

2:31:54Yeah. And it's just a series of him at various ages. Yeah. Absolutely aware. Totally on board. Yeah. Am I the first person to point that out or has that been pointed out? It's pretty common, yeah. I'm equally Patrick Bateman. Uh-huh. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. I get Dorian Gray a lot. I get Elf, colon from Vampire, Edward colon. Prometheus. Yeah, so that's a smattering of characters. Right. You should make a video about that. I know you did the Mean Tweets video, but all those sort of blueprint role models out there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want to do a Patrick Bateman morning routine.

2:32:37That's pretty funny. Last thing before I let you go. You know, I feel like you've already kind of offered up some pretty profound closing statements. But I think I just want to leave you with the opportunity to maybe share what we haven't covered today that you want to leave people with in terms of how to think about this. And, you know, feel free to correct the record on how you think you're misperceived in the media. Yeah. And really just the message that you want to speak to broadly about what you're trying to do and the world that you would like to see be created out of the seeds of your efforts.

2:33:17Yeah, so I guess first is I do keep my son in a dungeon in my basement. Yeah. Unlike what media has reported. Just you guys in IV bags, you know, sucking each other's blood all day long in the dark. But unlike what media has reported, his room is not 10 by 10. It's 8 by 8. So correct that first. But then thank you very much for having me. This was one of my most favorite conversations I've ever had. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I feel like you really went there emotionally with me. Like you did it all. Like you experienced the emotional arousal of being fundamentally challenged so deeply about everything who you are.

2:34:00and you were open to roll through it and you were open to consider other ideas and perspectives. And I feel like this was basically the same effect of us having dinner together. We're after this, we're going to hug. And it's like, you know what, man? Like, we're good. We're friends. We're going to do life together. Like, I feel like we really connected, which was amazing. And that's not always the case. These are very hard conversations to have. So thank you for being such a generous host. You're welcome. And thank you. So hi, friends. I hope this was useful. I would love to hear your perspective in the comments.

2:34:35I do read the comments. I love to hear what you perceive. I also am always trying to get better. You can see that I really am trying my very best to convey these complicated ideas. I know that sometimes I can do a lot better. So I'd love to hear your suggestions on how I can do it. But I'd say above all, I hope that we as a species, let me just make this more individual, that each one of you, so you and I can rise up and choose an existence that is potentially more spectacular than we can imagine. Like this moment is so special. It is no previous generation has ever had this opportunity. And I hope that we can be sober enough to capture it.

2:35:21and it's real. It's here right now and we are not powerless against the world and all the things going on. We can rise up and so I hope we can build a community on this and I hope we can take advantage of the opportunity. I think it really is the most spectacular thing to ever have happened to the human race. Beautiful, man. I really appreciate what you're trying to do. It takes a lot of courage and gumption, especially to so boldly live kind of outside the structures of social expectations. And you've sacrificed a lot to do this. So I think that speaks to, you know, the authenticity of what you're trying to achieve.

2:36:04And I think beyond all the talk about super intelligence and AI, as I said earlier, like I really do think that you feel deeply, you know? I think that maybe you don't even appreciate the extent to which the emotional piece of this is motivating you. And I would go so far as to suggest that it's not the data and the numbers and the superintelligence and the AI, but it's truly your emotional connection to what you're doing that is perhaps the underappreciated superpower here that's operating. And I think it's profound, and I'm really glad that you're doing it. And I just wanted to thank you for coming here today.

2:36:48I appreciate it. Thank you. Very much. Yeah. And we're definitely going to hug it out. Yeah. And I want to come to your house and see the whole deal. Yeah, you're welcome. I hope you come by. And I think we should put together a dinner. I think we should get a group of people. Are we doing it at 10 a.m.? What time is dinner? Why don't we do it on a Saturday? We'll do it like at noon. Maybe we can do an activity before or after. Cool. But let's put together an amazing group and we'll make new lifelong friends. Absolutely. I'd love to do it. Yeah. Thank you, Brian. Yeah. I mean that. I appreciate it.

2:37:17Thanks. Peace. than Lance.

2:37:27That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

2:38:12Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake.

2:38:50Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.