The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: The Man That’s Ageing Backward: “I Use My Son’s Blood To Reverse My Age! I’m Now 18!” Bryan Johnson

Those are all the pills you take in one day.

111, because that's what the data led me.

This is how you don't die.

Brian Johnson.

The man who spends $2 million a year to slow down his age.

He's managed to reverse his biological age already.

To an 18-year-old.

Projected to live to 200.

The only objective we have is don't die.

I've opted into an algorithm that takes better care of me

than I can myself.

It sounds overwhelming in the beginning,

but trust me on this.

So my bedtime is at 8.30.

And you had 100% sleep.

Four months straight now.

What about hanky-panky?

Not after 8.30.

Alcohol.

Three ounces every morning with breakfast.

For breakfast?

For breakfast.

My last meal of the day is at 11 AM.

And every calorie has to fight for its life.

You were very kind in bringing me some food.

Presumably this is what you eat.

That's right.

If you ask the body, what do you want to eat to be an ideal health?

This is the answer at a gym route.

That is a mushroom covered in chocolate.

How fun.

Why is Brian doing this?

I was thinking about what your father went through.

And I was wondering if there's some kind of link there.

It was always on my mind.

I mean, he's in pain.

And he's stuck.

And he can't overcome this terrible thing that's

ruining his life.

And I'm like, maybe I've always felt like a protector

of my dad, maybe.

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

You're very, very clearly mission driven.

The ultimate question becomes, are you happy?

Quick one before this episode starts.

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Thank you and enjoy this conversation.

Brian, what mission are you on?

And why does that mission matter to you,

but also to everybody else listening to this right now?

My mission is for the human race to survive and thrive.

And it's figuring out what we do that creates the highest

probability of that being possible.

And why specifically have you taken on that mission

versus any other mission you could have committed your life

and time to?

Why you?

And I want the long answer to this.

All the context going right back to the beginning.

I had this transformative experience when I was 19 years

old, I went to Ecuador and I was a missionary.

And I lived among extreme poverty, dirt floors, mud huts,

people not knowing how they're going to make ends meet,

day to day.

And I came back to the United States and my family was poor

growing up, but it was opulent compared to Ecuador.

I couldn't believe that I had lived in a bubble my entire

life, unaware of circumstances of other realities,

like where I was at in Ecuador.

And I was facing decisions in college, what to study,

what to become, who I was going to be.

You start creating these identities.

All I could identify was this fire that had lit within me,

that I wanted to spend my life trying to improve

me in the human race at a global scale.

I don't know where it came from, but just coming back from

Ecuador, it seemed like that was what I wanted to spend my

life on.

I didn't know what to do.

I was 21 years old.

I didn't have any ideas.

And so I thought I would become an entrepreneur, make a

whole bunch of money by the age of 30, and then with that

money, try to figure out a plan to do it.

And so lucky me, I sold Braintree Venmo at 34 and made

a few hundred million dollars.

It sold for $800 million, right?

And then I set my mind to this question of what one thing

in existence could I do that would be relevant in the

25th century?

I grew up on biographies.

And so I'm accustomed to thinking about things on

centuries timescale.

So doing things that not that matter in the news cycle

tomorrow, but that intelligence in the 25th century would

say, you know what?

We appreciate what happened in the early 21st century.

Take me a couple of years further backwards in the

timeline.

I want to understand, before the age of 16, how

would you describe the personality of that young man?

If you walked in here now and you sat down, how would you

characterize that young man?

Friendly and fun.

So I think that the event that maybe that defines me the

best is I was in seventh grade, going into eighth grade.

And the kids started breaking out into different groups of

identities, donors, jocks, you know, nerds.

And it saddened me because I wanted to be friends with

everybody and people started creating these groups.

And there was this conflict between which groups can

hang out with which groups.

And so I made a map of the social structure of the

entire school of what people were and what groups and then

where they're at within that group.

So were they the alpha in the group?

And then you had the second tiers and third tiers.

And then I systematically went about and I became friends

with everyone in the entire school, every single group.

And it didn't matter who you were, I was friends with you.

And so I really enjoyed connecting with people.

I enjoyed the friendships.

I enjoyed the interactions.

I enjoyed different people for different reasons.

And I guess that's kind of stuck with me, where the idea

of group structure and hindering, it's the same with

ideas, like if you're in a certain idea and you can't

bridge another idea.

The outcome wasn't the most telling part of that story.

The most telling part of the story was the process.

The process, if you made a physical, like a physical

diagram of the school, you didn't just do it in your head.

You went home as a 16-year-old or something?

Yeah, so I was like 13, 12 or 13, yeah.

You must be able to say objectively that that's

unusual behavior for a 12-year-old to be that analytical

about problem solving.

For a 12-year-old, that's not what I was doing when I was

talking about kicking a plastic ball against a fence.

And you're dissecting the social structure of the school

and then manipulating it to make friends with everybody.

Yeah, that's how information presents itself.

Like when I meet somebody in the movie, A Beautiful Mind,

with John Nash, who did equilibrium, Nash equilibrium,

there's a scene where you go into his garage and he has this

big wall and it has like pictures and then it has pins

and it has threads, everything connected.

It's like this madman's wall.

That's how my mind understands information, is when I meet

somebody or look at a given problem, I instantaneously go

to creating a map of all information, like one of the

centerpieces, what's connecting to what?

How is it structured?

What's the dimensions of it?

And so even if I meet someone new and they tell me a story,

like, you know, I was at the coffee shop and you're like,

what details do they include in this conversation?

What is their assessment of the person they're telling me

about?

What about the reaction of other people?

What elements do they identify?

And that then enables me to create this structure of their

mind and how they package information.

And so yeah, my mind just naturally hangs onto every

single word and creates a scaffolding of how the person

understands reality.

That sounds exhausting to someone whose mind does not

work in that way.

It's exhilarating.

So 19 years old, you go from this Mormon mission to Ecuador.

This ultimately culminates in a challenge in your faith.

Happened to me at the same age, in fact.

I was very religious when I was younger.

And then 18, 19 years old, that's all starts to fall apart.

What was your process like?

It was torture.

And I think I'm not sure what religion you were in.

Christianity, whatever.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Yeah, this was not a whatever for me.

Yeah.

When you're a raised Mormon, it is your singular reality and

identity of existence.

It's not like you're casually involved.

It's everything you are as a human.

And so when you are, like when you're born into it and then

force fed that and your entire community is built upon that,

it creates structures in your mind that you're not even aware

of.

And so as I began breaking from it, I would rationally be able

to walk through the conclusions.

They logically, I don't understand the situation.

But then emotionally, the brain was like, hold tight.

You know, like we feel the following things.

We can't quite structure in a logical format.

And it creates this bizarre conundrum in the brain.

And so I had that difficulty.

Then that got caught up in my depression where in my early

twenties, my brain, I got into this chronic depression where

the brain was like, life is awful.

You know, everything is hopeless.

Life is not worth living.

You should kill yourself.

And so in that moment, I learned that I could observe my

brain dropping these thoughts on me and that I wasn't my

thoughts.

The depression was, the depression was speaking, but it

wasn't me.

And when I learned that, I thought, wait a second, if I am

observing depression and action here, what can I trust for my

brain in the first place?

So when a thought drops in my awareness, where did that come

from?

And can I trust it?

Under what circumstances?

And then I realized if my brain is doing this to me, other

brains are doing this to other people, how can I trust their

brains?

And so it's like this authority collapse where in religion, all

the people who I trusted tell me to give me wise advice about

life, that fell apart.

My brain fell apart.

Other people's brains fell apart.

And I began arriving to this observation, who in reality can

I trust and under what circumstances?

And that really started, that kickstarted the process of me

trying to reconstruct my reality in a way that I felt was

stable versus like ping-ponging around to like this wild emotion

and this random thought from my brain.

How long did your depression last and when did it start?

Age 24.

I remember I was in the parking lot one day with my brother.

We were working on a startup.

And something just broke in my brain.

I remember telling him like, hey, something just happened.

I feel it.

It's weird.

And he was just powered through it.

And I'm like, OK.

But I physically felt something happen one day.

And then I just got this funk for 10 years and I couldn't get

out of it.

10 years?

And what did that funk look like practically day to day?

Week by week?

It was like all these different layers of problems.

So I was married.

We had our first baby at the age of 25.

So I've got a baby at home.

I'm not sleeping.

We're taking care of the first one.

Then I'm building startups on top of that.

And then I'm also working my way out of Mormonism.

But then that's a conflict because my wife is also

Mormonism and the kid, like the communities around us

and all my entire world is this community.

And so then we don't have any money to pay our bills.

I'm in a startup.

I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the religion thing,

trying to keep my marriage together and just

create this disaster of a circumstance

where I just am paralyzed and stuck in the depression,

in the relationship, in the religion, not sleeping,

depressed, trying to survive in a startup world.

And that was kind of my state for about 10 years,

trying to navigate all those competing complexities.

When you look back and try and you diagnose the fact

is that cause that depression?

Is it that pressure from all different sides

that you think cause the depression?

I do.

And so during that 10 years, I pursued solving my depression

with equal rigor as I have anything else.

I tried everything known to humans to solve depression.

Nothing worked.

The thing that worked is my relationship ended

and I left the Mormon church and it just lifted.

And that was the most remarkable experience in my life.

I just thought it was like this permanent state

I couldn't exit.

But those two modifications just lifted the cloud.

And what did that teach you about the nature

of your depression?

I was paralyzed.

And those decisions felt unthinkable to me.

Even though I could logically conclude

this religion was not something I was going to follow

and the relationship wasn't working out,

the idea of becoming a divorced father

and being in that circumstance, the idea

of leaving my entire community of going out and sticking out

a new existential reality, it paralyzed me.

And I couldn't get over the idea that it

would be better on the other side.

And once I got myself there, that it's actually

better for the kids, that was the key thing for me

is there was one experience I was in Turkey with some friends

late at night and it snapped in my brain.

The kids are better off with these decisions.

And that's all I needed.

And then the next day, I put everything into motion.

And why did that matter to you so much, do you think?

I suppose that, for whatever reason,

I have been an intensely devoted father.

I cared deeply about being there for my children.

For whatever reason?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know why.

It's maybe it's part of my identity.

Maybe I'm trying to compensate for something.

I don't know.

But I invested very, very heavily into my children.

And the idea of being a divorced father

with some kind of split custody situation

with some kind of weird thing between mom and me

and that whole thing, I couldn't sign up for it.

And so I stayed in the bad relationship.

I stayed in the religion trying to thinking

that my kids were better off because of it.

And I really, they weren't.

So what links to your own childhood,

doesn't it, where your parents separated

when you were super young?

Yeah, so much is going on in my mind

when I'm three years old and my dad is no longer present.

And then my mom's three, married at eight.

My father goes through a bunch of problems.

And like, I remember my father,

I give credit to my father for owning up to his life.

I remember I knew my father was on drugs

at the age of seven or eight.

And I would call him when I knew he was high.

I'd say, hey, dad, like, how's it going?

And, you know, like, I just knew it.

I'd write him letters and like he, you know,

yeah, we just worked through it together.

But it was always on my mind.

Makes you visibly emotional to say that.

Yeah.

I mean, he's in pain and he's stuck

and he can't overcome this terrible thing

that's ruining his life.

And he's not a father to me.

And, you know, he, he can't pick me up

when he says he's gonna pick me up

and he can't do the things he wants to do.

So it's still life from him

and it's still life from me.

And it's something that dominated his life for a long time.

You make that decision to separate

and to leave the community of Mormonism.

What's life like from then onwards?

I mean, so it was, I sold brain tree.

So within one year's time,

I sold brain tree, got a divorce, left the church

and overcame my depression.

Wow.

And...

What a year.

What a year.

And I think maybe the moment that captures it the most is,

I was, I was in Virginia at the time

and I was looking at where I was going to live next.

And so I spent some time in New York

and for the first time I went to a party in Brooklyn,

a warehouse party or they started like at midnight or one.

And I'd go there with some friends

and I would dance for six, seven hours.

And it was, I think, one of the most joyful experiences

of my entire life.

I had never danced before,

but for some reason this moment of eliminating all this weight

that had been on me for all this time, I just felt free.

And I can move my body like I never had before.

My friends would, they would be,

they were in disbelief that after five, six, seven hours,

I'm like, let's go, let's find something else.

But it was, I think it was probably an outpouring

of desire that I'd had for all these years

that it just was bottled up.

And it was also the time that I was starting

to reconstruct, I mean, I had the money.

I didn't care about spending the money on anything.

Like I didn't, like money has no value to me outside

of the objective to do something meaningful for the world.

And so I really started spending an enormous amount

of time thinking about through this question.

If you apply this filter, what matters in the 25th century?

Like you go back and look what matters in the 15th century

and 16th and 17th.

And you find that 99% of all things that happen

and making up a number is gone.

And we're left with these teeny little nuggets

of information.

Now there's more to recapture more than we ever had before,

but time has a way to filter out non-essential relevance.

And so if you say that now, if we say what we're doing

in 2023 and you look at your life and you map out

what's gonna be left of your existence in 10 years,

100 years, 200 years, 300 years,

and that's what I wanna focus on is only those things.

Everything else is to me, it's not for everyone.

For me, it's a waste of my capacity as a person.

When you describe dancing in Brooklyn,

I mean, I lived in Brooklyn for three years,

so I had the warehouse parties,

I know the vibe, the very low unsuperficial nature

of the place and the energy.

You describe it almost therapeutically

as being able to kind of shake out.

Yeah.

Wait, that you were holding.

Specifically, what is that weight you were holding?

You've sold brain tree, you're dancing in Brooklyn,

what is the weight you're shaking out?

My entire life, I have been told by authority structures,

whether it be a religion or society

or a relationship or community,

you can do these things, you can think these things,

you can say these things and you can become these things.

Everyone wanted to put limiters and after that, none.

It was no longer a game of what you can't do,

it was a game of what I can do and it just exploded.

And now my entire life is what I can do.

Potential is terrifying.

And the moment somebody starts creeping on that,

that they want to superimpose a label on me

or superimpose a norm or superimpose any tool,

humans have to say, oh, you stepped out of line,

you need to be punished, I can feel it.

Like I know where people try to create those guardrails

and everyone does it because it's like,

oh, if you're doing something that's not normal,

I feel uncomfortable, I want to bring you back into the herd

because that's gonna make me feel a lot better.

And so I'm attuned to the constant attempts

at people trying to normalize everyone else.

We do that in language, right?

We say someone is weird.

And I think of moments where I broke out of my community.

When I say my community, I mean,

you have a group of friends and then you say,

I'm gonna start business, I'm gonna be this guy.

And they use words to pull you back in,

they use facial expressions.

Little subtle, you know?

Exactly.

The little, telling you you're weird and stupid

and ridiculous without saying it with words.

People think you're weird, don't they?

They do, don't they?

That's one word they use, yeah.

Yeah.

Now it makes sense to me, now it makes sense to me.

With the context of your religion

and how imprisoned you say you felt

in the context of that religion,

I can now understand your resilience

and your resistance to falling in line.

Yeah.

And not only that, it's plain now for me, right?

It's like a mousetrap.

I wanna push the part of the mousetrap

that makes it snap and pull my finger out

before my finger gets trapped.

And it's just like this whole little thing

is a set of mousetraps, I'm like this one today.

And then by doing that, you really get a feel

for all these invisible layers we have in society.

So what you just said is, I loved your comment.

It's just like the smallest facial feature

and audio captures the whole thing, right?

I disapprove of your behavior, of your thought process.

If you do this, I'm going to penalize you

by not offering you my friendship and approval.

And you put them in the penalty box.

And it's like half of a second of a gesture,

but it collapses the entirety on your shoulders

where you're like, oh man,

I don't wanna be part of the out group.

I wanna be part of the group.

I wonder how much potential is trapped

behind those little facial expressions

and that little social conformity pressure.

You know, like human potential

of creativity and ingenuity and thinking for yourself,

you know, must be a, Jesus Christ,

most of human potential must be trapped behind that.

Yeah.

So this is the thing.

This is what I'm saying when you build this wall

and you have images, you have strings attached to each one,

you're trying to scaffold it.

How is information scaffolded?

You can use this, you can poke a system

and get the response back and then get,

it fill in the contours.

Like, oh, like this is what people think and feel

in this moment of what the norms are.

Otherwise, they're invisible.

So that's why when someone tells you a story

about their behavior at the coffee shop

and how some person was rude or somewhat or whatever,

they're revealing to them, to everyone else

in the conversation, all the norm structures they have.

And so you listen carefully,

you understand how they have scaffolded information,

what norms they've accepted, which things are rejecting

and where they play in that hierarchy.

Are there any correlations between

the most successful people you've met

or happy people you've met

and their ability to embody and take

on these social constructs?

Do you know what you're saying?

Yeah, my mother is one of the happiest people

I've ever met in my life

and she plays exactly in the norm structure

of the religion.

She's deeply religious, she's still Mormon,

she thrives in the Mormon community,

everyone loves her, she's delightfully happy.

And so my mother does not need to push boundaries,

she doesn't need to explore other possibilities,

she has a singular reality, it works for her,

she's happy, she's joyful, she's a fantastic mother.

So I guess there's like all these different archetypes

of people who play in different spaces,

for me that wasn't where I thrive.

You thrive.

My education has come from biographies

and I've read, I don't know, over a hundred,

all throughout history.

And I love learning about people in their time and place

who identify something impossibly hard to see

and do, and they did both.

And when you do that, the algorithm of human behavior

is so predictable, of defiance and hate and vitriol,

it just goes through the same cycle every single time.

And so I have all these models in my mind

of people who've done these things.

And so I know when I do this myself,

I know what models to anticipate,

I know how that naturally winds its way through society.

And also I had a fingerprint, what things are inevitable?

So you find a given thing, you say,

what are the characteristics around this idea

or invention or whatever?

And then once you have it,

you know its societal adoption is inevitable.

It does not matter what humans say,

doesn't matter if they revolt,

doesn't matter if they bring the pitchforks out,

doesn't matter, it's gonna find its way through,

push all the way through humanity.

And that's the thing is like,

what are the ideas you can't see,

what characteristics do they have,

and when they become inevitable?

And do you consider yourself to be

an instigator of new ideas?

If I were to make a whimsical and flimsy statement,

I would say I was born to introduce

these new ideas into society.

And what is that new idea?

It's that in the 21st century,

the only objective we have is don't die.

Don't die.

It's that simple.

But we're all gonna die, no?

You don't think so?

This is the thing.

So this is why it sounds silly.

Because I was told everybody dies,

the only thing inevitable in life is death.

We were driving past a graveyard the other day

and I pointed and said, great business that.

Because you know, I think it was like a graveyard,

it was like a funeral home and I was like,

great business, they'll never have a customer shortage.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so if you, let's think about the structure

of why that statement may be the rallying cry

of the 21st century, those two words.

So we may think, we're inclined to think that

genius or sophistication or whatever's

in this much broader complexity of statement,

it may be two words, don't die.

So galaxy's 13.8 years old, earth is 4.5, right?

Something like that.

Where baby steps away from creating superintelligence.

We cannot, we cannot model out what the future

is going to be like in any way, shape or form.

We do not have the intellectual capacity to predict,

to model, to anticipate, we're blind.

It's an intelligence far superior than us.

In that situation, the only thing we can play

is don't die, don't kill each other,

don't ruin our biosphere, don't ruin planet earth

and don't underestimate aligning with AI.

The only objective of the future of our existence,

we have to figure out how all intelligence

on this planet cooperates.

Humans and the planet, artificial intelligence,

it's this big tapestry of goal alignment, of cooperation.

That is the only task humanity has ahead of us.

Okay, let's start with number one then.

Yeah.

So the first one is don't die.

So I guess, yes or no question,

do you think it's possible for us in the short future

to live forever?

Yes.

Okay, right.

I'm gonna go one step further back.

Your health journey before you came to that realization,

what did that look like in terms of,

were you a healthy young man?

Were you drinking alcohol?

Yeah.

I mean, as a kid, my mother did the best she could

under the circumstances.

We were pretty poor.

She ground wheat, she made bread for us.

We also ate sugar cereal.

We put sugar on our sugar cereal.

We were in the sun constantly with no sunscreens.

We had excessive skin, sun exposure.

We ate processed foods.

Like it was just, it was the United States

cultural environment in the 1980s.

Like we just were cemented in that cultural norm.

So I'd say, you know, not terribly healthy.

Then 20 years of entrepreneurship, depression,

bad relationship, trying to leave a religion.

I kind of destroyed myself, body and mind for 20 years.

And how do you feel about that now?

Because I remember reading a quote where you said,

it pains me to think about the damage you've done

to your body up until now.

It pains me.

Really?

It pains me to see all the damage I did to myself.

Really pains you.

It does.

Do you, when I, you know, that's a phrase, right?

But is there reality to that pain?

I feel like I have a relationship to my former self

as though my former self were present.

I don't view it as a, it's gone by.

Because in many ways, when I'm reversing my aging,

when I'm becoming more healthy, I'm moving back in time.

I'm moving back to a younger biological state.

So I'm occupying the person that formerly occupied me.

And so I have this relationship with time that is atypical

where typically I would normally say like,

well, that just happened.

And now I just have to go forward.

But given where the science and technology is at,

I do believe we can travel back in time.

Now it's, you know, we're blueprint is showing

the possibilities.

We're not there yet on doing this, these dramatic things.

But I think it's coming.

And so yeah, I literally feel pain

because I'm moving into that space.

You feel pain because you're moving into that space.

Okay, yeah, that is, yeah.

Most of us consider the past to be gone.

Exactly.

I don't.

I feel like it's recoverable and that I experienced it.

So take me forward from that point then.

I wanna know when things started to change

in terms of your health perspective and let's do not die.

Yeah.

Well, I started taking care of myself

after I sold brain tree and the divorce

and all that kind of stuff.

I started paying attention to my health more so

than I ever had in my entire life.

And it came back to this question,

you know, what one thing do I do in existence

that would be meaningful, not five things or six things

like one thing that matters in the 25th century.

And I worked on, I came up with this idea

that basically the core of it is

I can't trust myself to act in my best interest.

And it stemmed from depression.

I knew my mind, my mind was encouraging me

to commit suicide on a nonstop basis.

And I, yes.

That's what chronic depression feels like

is you desperately wanna commit suicide

every moment of every day.

You just want relief from the awfulness

and you can't, you cannot imagine feeling not depressed.

And so I knew that I couldn't trust my mind

when it was doing these things.

And so then also I had this problem with food

where I would feel so depressed

and I would feel stressed from the day,

from work with my kids.

And so it was my inability to stop myself

from overeating every single night

and walking myself into an early grave.

So then I paired those two things together

and I go, okay, first of all,

my brain's like, hey, why don't you commit suicide?

And two, my body's like,

why don't you just eat yourself into oblivion?

And I couldn't stop myself.

And I thought this is really weird

that we humans are the most intelligent species

on the planet, yet I'm doing these behaviors

that are not in my best interest.

This is really weird and I can't stop it.

I'm totally helpless in doing it.

I started piecing together this philosophy of like,

okay, this is interesting.

We kind of treat planet Earth like we treat our bodies.

My behavior's not too dissimilar from what society's doing.

And I thought, what is the larger implication

of the situation?

We humans have a problem of acting in our best interest.

Is there an alternative structure of authority

that could do a better job?

And that's when I really came up with the core

of what blueprint is, which is I said, okay,

instead of my mind doing this on a regular basis,

I'm going to measure every organ of my body.

I'm going to ask it what it needs to be in its best space.

So my kidney and liver and heart and lungs,

I'm going to take the data, look at scientific evidence,

and then create an algorithm.

And then I'm going to follow that algorithm perfectly.

And so my body is going to call the shots, not my mind.

And that was when it all kind of came together

with trying to piece together AI,

of maybe the revolution is we humans

have done a wonderful job to arrive at this point.

Maybe it's time for us to pass the reins

to other control systems that manage

our long-term interests better.

And what are those long-term control systems

that you believe can manage our interest better?

I mean, for example, now like my mind

is not authorized to look at a menu and order.

It's not authorized to have a pizza party.

It's not authorized to just on the whim,

decide I want to have a cookie.

My body is in charge.

My body reports this data.

It looks at scientific evidence and algorithm runs.

So I have opted into an algorithm

that takes better care of me than I can myself.

My mind can chirp and can heckle from the bleachers,

but it does not have the authority to make the decision.

But you must understand the mind is doing that for a reason.

The mind is also concerned with survival.

It's not that cause harm to you.

That's not it's objective.

You know, it wasn't, that makes no sense

from a survival perspective

that you'd have this enemy in your head.

So how do you reason why the mind

is telling you to do these things?

If we just let the data speak.

So let's just say we're looking at DNA methylation patterns.

And it's, these are, this is data

that shows how fast the body is aging.

It shows your speed of aging.

So I take my former self and say, what is the data show?

How fast am I aging?

And how fast is disease progressing?

And what's my, what's my likelihood of dying?

Then and now.

And you compare the two, there's no comparison.

The system that's running me now,

so far outcompetes the other version, it's ridiculous.

And so just from a, from a, so let's just,

I'll go one layer deeper on this.

What I did is I asked this broader question.

So we have AI, we have superintelligence being created.

We have to figure out alignment.

How do we use AI so that we humans

continue to exist so we don't kill each other

so that AI doesn't destroy everything?

Like, so we're just trying to survive, right?

Society to survive.

How would you possibly go about doing that problem?

And so I started thinking about this alignment problem

within me.

So I'm 35 trillion cells, thereabouts, maybe more.

How could I, as an entity,

align my 35 trillion cells to cooperate?

And we're trying to do that with society, right?

You're trying to get this huge number of things

to cooperate.

And then I wanted to measure it and say, okay,

what is perfect cooperation on the objective

of me slowing my speed of aging?

And then I did hundreds of measurements and we said,

okay, here's actually what science can do in this moment

with everything, with diet and sleep and exercise

all being perfect.

Here's the maximum amount of slowing the speed of aging

for my 35 trillion cells to do.

Anything above that, I consider to be an act of violence.

Now we use violence in society to,

we typically associate people beating each other

like physical acts of violence.

I expanded the term to capture my own behavior.

So if I did, if I ate something or did something

that would increase my speed of aging,

that was an act of violence against self.

Because my 35 trillion cells were no longer aligned.

It was like this one aberration and be like,

hey, I want to do this thing,

but it ruins 35 trillion cells.

I wanted to pose a question.

We as a species are trying to figure out how to cooperate.

Can I do that with me as a single entity?

And that's what I've been trying to do.

Goal alignment within Brian Johnson,

35 trillion cells to a single objective exist.

So why is the brain our adversary?

Why is it being uncooperative

with the longevity of the 35 million cells?

I mean, let's just say like, let's just remove all story.

Let's just say if we categorized as violence,

anything we did as a species that brought death closer to us,

whether it be our personal death

or whether it be the earth's death,

and we quantified that and we said,

how much violence do we do in a self-destructive way?

What is that number?

Huge.

So when you look at that frame,

we are a self-destructive species.

Now it goes back to this idea of death.

Of like, if you say death is inevitable for everybody,

it doesn't matter if I commit these self-destructive acts.

Like I'm gonna die anyway.

So like, why do I care?

If it's 10 years earlier than normal, whatever.

I'm 35 now, and when I'm 70,

I don't care if I live to 80.

Like that's how you think.

So that's why this whole death idea

feeds the self-destruction because no one cares.

If death is not inevitable,

you immediately come back to the thing

that threatens the thing you care about the very most,

which is anything that threatens existence.

And so the society we have right now,

the majority of the philosophies say,

be, you know, play by these rules

and you get this afterlife, right?

They said death is inevitable,

but we're all playing for this later game.

And so everyone feels fine

in this colossal self-destruction.

If you take that away,

and then you say you can live in this life,

it's an entirely different game.

And that's why the 21st century,

the singular revolution could be, don't die.

Because it flips the philosophical structure

of society on its head.

And this all led you to Project Blueprint, which is what?

Project Blueprint is an attempt

at, don't die, at every layer of society individually,

collectively with AI and the planet.

So are you trying to reverse your age

or are you trying not to die or are you trying both?

Both.

And so the same thing is true,

like just like I've done Blueprint with me,

planet Earth is the body.

So you'd approach the same problem.

You'd measure Earth with millions of measurements

at some interval.

You'd use scientific evidence to say,

what is the appropriate sustainable biosphere

of coral reef, of temperature in the world,

of ocean acidity, of all the different parts

of our biosphere?

And you apply the scientific evidence

and that creates the closed loop system to say,

this is how you don't die.

Okay, so let's focusing again on do not die,

which was actually the only rule in my first company.

Now it feels like it has new meaning.

We wrote it on the wall

that when we first moved into the office,

we just wrote one rule here and we just wrote do not die.

That's great.

We said it as a joke, but you know, maybe-

You were onto something.

Yeah.

I was ahead of my time.

Yeah.

When you think about do not die,

what are the things that stand the greatest chance

of killing us in order of priority?

Like there's basic things on a day-to-day basis.

Driving is among the highest risk factors we do,

all of us do on a day-to-day basis.

So every time I get into a car,

I have a ritual where I say driving.

I say it out loud.

Driving is the most dangerous thing I do.

As a reminder, every time I get in the car,

don't text, don't be on your phone,

like pay attention to the road,

because like you forget every time you jump in the car,

you're so tempted to like do all these things

that imperil your life.

So you say that out loud?

Every time.

I'd love to watch you drive.

Well, you can drive me whenever as well,

because I feel like I trust you to focus on the road.

So driving is number one of things

that pose a really statistically high threat of mortality.

What else?

Yeah, I mean, there are,

so people have built nice statistical models

that show like risk of death.

Like insurance companies, of course, like they do that.

I'm really after the cultural norms

that we have built a society addicted to addiction.

We're all addicted.

So you just think about this

from a 25th century perspective.

You put a human like us in an environment

and you encircle them with dozens of fast food chains,

dozens of stores selling sugary drinks,

of junk food, of porn, of infinite scroll,

of Netflix, binging, alcohol, smoking.

Gambling.

Nicotine, right?

Like, you like-

Masturbation.

Yeah, like, there you go.

Like your list is, and then you say like,

okay, human, on your own, with your own willpower,

resist this.

And then around them, you've got the power

of our God-like powers pointing at the individual

with the only objective is to getting the person addicted

to their thing, their app, their food, their show,

their whatever.

Everything's pointing to the individual.

The individual's like, I'm overwhelmed.

I can't sleep.

You know, like, I don't feel well.

I can't exercise at all anytime.

We were just sick as a society.

And it's because we've structurally built this

around this, yeah, it's kind of a disaster for us

in the moment where we're trying to muster up

soberness of thought of how do we navigate

these simultaneous existential risks we face?

How do we not destroy our biosphere?

How do we align with AI?

How do we humans not engage in nuclear war

or bio warfare or whatever?

We're just, we have really serious challenges to solve

and we're all impaired.

It makes you have a great deal of empathy

for the human experience when you frame it as,

we've taken a human being, you know, baby is born,

and then we surround them with fast food chains

and sugar and all of these things

that are highly, highly addictive.

And then we say to them, be healthy, do your best.

You know, don't kill yourself and, you know, good luck.

Good luck, it's sad.

And then it's, I say empathy because you have,

when you frame it like that, I go,

no wonder people are struggling, you know,

with sleepless nights, obesity, cardiovascular diseases,

porn addiction, drug addictions, you know,

because we've manipulated the,

I'm not gonna try and pretend I'm a neuroscientist,

but we've manipulated the chemicals in their brain.

To control them, often for, you know,

corporate greed and other things.

That's right.

You mentioned sleep, and you pointed this

as being really foundational to health.

When I sit here with these, you know, psychologists

and health experts and doctors and heart surgeons

and brain surgeons, they always point at sleep,

they all point at sleep as being foundational.

The other day you did a tweet about your sleep.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Screenshot of, I think it was whoop, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And it showed that you'd had 100% sleep

for six months straight.

Four months straight now.

Four months straight.

Yeah, 99%, so yes.

100% for four months, 99% for the other two months.

I'm going for a six month, 100% streak.

Why is sleep so important?

Cause you cite it in your work as being

one of the most foundational things.

I think you actually called it the most important

in one interview.

Yeah, I mean, if you and I were going to make a list

of the things that are most influential in our lives

in how we think about and feel about life,

I would put number one as sleep.

Nothing changes my conscious existence more

than a poor night's sleep or a bad night's sleep.

I agree.

I've become incredibly obsessed with my sleep.

Some people's obsessions,

they become a little bit unhealthy,

but mine I think is healthy

because it's certainly moved my life forward

in every metric or area that I care about.

Let's go on and go in and sleep then.

So what do you do to achieve this month over month

perfect sleep?

Cause when I saw that, I thought, oh my fucking God,

like I use whoop as well as you can see.

And if I contrast your data to mine,

you know, sometimes I'm having like 24% recovery,

50% recovery.

If I go to a hotel room, then it's even worse.

When I flew out here to LA, I had the first three days,

my sleep was awful.

The fourth day it was fine.

What are you doing?

Yeah, I'm so glad you have that shared experience.

For those who do try to track it,

and even those with whoop,

many don't realize how hard it is.

The most important thing is I've built my life around sleep.

Now that is the exact opposite of cultural norms

where sleep is the thing that gets pushed around.

So if you want to go out with friends,

delay your bedtime.

If you want, if you need to finish a work project

or a school project, if you want to hang out

and watch your new show just dropped,

you want to watch a few other episodes,

we push sleep around from our earliest of days.

Like it's always the thing that can be compromised.

And I made a rule that sleep happens every single night

at the same time, no exceptions ever.

I mean, that must come at a cost.

It does come at a cost.

What is the cost?

I mean, that cost is substantially less now

because I've made the hard decisions.

And so it's no longer, getting there is hard.

But once you do that, and it's the norm,

it becomes much easier.

You just have to make the life changes.

So that's the first big one.

Then I did like a bunch of small things.

Like for example, my last meal of the day is at 11 a.m.

Sorry, what?

Your last meal of the day is at 11 a.m.

Yeah, so I eat between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Okay.

And so then by the time I go to bed at 8.30,

I've got eight plus hours of digestion.

So I sleep best on an empty stomach.

Now some people don't like that.

They feel pain.

They do much better sleeping towards night.

But I ran a few hundred experiments of a time to eat,

how much to eat, what kinds of foods to eat,

what kind of exercise protocols.

I've trialed hundreds of times

and I found a protocol that worked for me

where when I do this and I lay down before bed,

my resting heart rate is around 45.

If I get that, I know I'm gonna have

a near-perfect night sleep.

If it's elevated at like 53 or 54

because of like a few events that could trigger it to go higher,

I know I'm gonna have a,

I'm gonna struggle to hit like deep and ram goals

and I might be a little more restless.

I'll still hit my 100% objective,

but it's not gonna be as the same level of quality

as if I hit something else.

So I know all the little teeny tiny tweaks

to get this to be perfect every night.

I asked you a second ago,

I wanna make sure I get an answer to this.

I said, this must come at a cost.

Yeah.

So my bedtime is at 8.30

because that's where the data led me.

I tried 11, 10, 39,

I tried all the different variations

since this just worked.

So anything that happens past 8.30, I don't participate in.

And so sometimes my friends are doing things

past 8.30 that I want to do, but I don't do them.

So I miss out on certain social events.

Now my friends have been cool enough

where they'll do things to accommodate my time frame.

So they'll do something in the late afternoon

where I can do things with them

and hang out and have fun and still make my bedtime.

And so my friends and family have been great to adapt

to allow me to participate in community

while still doing this.

So I've been experimenting as well.

I mean, to tell you I've been experimenting feels like,

I'm not gonna say my experiments,

but I've got a bunch of hypotheses around my sleep.

One of the big ones as well is the room temperature.

So during summer in the UK,

because most houses in the UK don't have air conditioning

because we don't expect the sun, so it's a surprise.

Through those four weeks where we have sunshine,

I don't, my sleep is awful.

I'm sweating in bed.

What would you say about temperature

and also got a broken blind in the room?

So at 6 a.m. or whatever, the light starts pouring in.

What would you say about all those factors?

I agree.

Temperature plays a significant role.

Light does sound.

Yeah, whether you have a partner in bed with you or not.

Yeah, I wanna talk about this.

Cause I actually was speaking to Simon Sinek last night

about this, that we went to dinner

and I was talking to him about having sat with Matthew Walker

and we discussed, I think Matthew Walker,

Donna Crote, it quotes him inaccurately,

but he said, when there's divorce and couples break up,

15% of the reason is attributed to sleep,

i.e. them compromising each other's sleep.

What do you think about sleeping in bed with somebody else?

It's a hard topic

because a lot of people don't have the luxury

of sleeping in different rooms.

Yeah.

When somebody wants to have good sleep,

there are some things they can control.

Like trying to go to bed at a certain time

is something they have some control over.

They need to adjust lifestyles and family and stuff like that.

But sometimes that relationship,

but so people who do have the fortunate circumstances

to be in separate rooms,

it is substantially better

because trying to negotiate with another person,

their bedtime, their sleep hygiene is really difficult.

And wake events are very costly.

Once you get woken up,

and then going back to sleep is very hard.

So it's just extremely challenging

when you've got to coordinate with another human.

So do you ever sleep in bed with someone else?

No.

What about hanky-panky?

No.

You have no sex?

Not after 8.30.

So you've got to do like morning glory.

Yeah.

I mean, so these are the kinds of things like,

so I'm single.

In circumstances where I've tried to date,

the first thing I do is I give them a list of 10 things.

Like here's all the things you're gonna hate about me.

And it's gonna make me an impossible partner for you.

And like, you know, those are like, it's a big deal.

What is on the list?

Give me the list.

I mean, so sleep is one thing.

You know, I go to bed at 8.30.

My food regimen is another.

Now I do compromise on food.

So like if we go out with friends

and we'll have a dinner time,

then I will save up, you know, a certain number of calories

and I'll eat something at the restaurant,

some steamed vegetables or something like that.

So I do try to be normal.

And also when I'm out with people,

nothing makes people feel more uncomfortable

than an empty plate.

You know, it's like, wow, what are you doing?

And are you on a fast protocol?

Are you on a juice cleanse?

And so I just try to blend into the environment.

So like, there's no questions.

Everyone can enjoy being present.

So I try to do those things.

But other things, for example, like my desire to speak,

I am not a talkative person.

I don't do small talk.

So my son and I have a protocol at the house

where there's no exchange of like, good morning.

How are you?

You know, like I'm deep in thought.

Like my morning, I go to bed early.

I wake up early and I have these four or five hours

of concentrated thought

where I can think about these really big pictures

and try to pull myself out of my situation

and just be as sober as possible.

Like what is really happening to the best of my abilities?

And I actually probe myself to these deep levels.

And you can get knocked off so fast.

Just like a little teeny interaction.

Hey, how are you doing?

How was your sleep?

You have to activate this mode of like,

I'm gonna be a nice person.

I'm going to engage with you.

I'm going to listen to you.

And just shifting that knocks me off.

And so there's, with the path that I've chosen

that I really care about achieving these objectives,

I break all these social norms.

And it's offensive to a lot of people.

It's just not an acceptable situation for a lot of people.

That's another instance though

where someone would say, oh, he's weird.

Yeah, exactly right.

And when you, so when I was just saying this,

I absolutely am apt to everyone listening to this

being like, that dude, it was awful.

I would never want to be with him.

Oh, what a bore.

Or like, I just imagined,

I can see all the comments on social media now,

like dozens and dozens of people ripping me to be like,

oh, that dude, and like making their meanest comment.

I know that's going to trigger it.

And so I threw out this whole thing, of course,

like people are going to grab what I say

and they're going to try to just dissect me

and rip me apart for all the things I violate

that they don't want to exist.

So it's a constrained romantic relationship

we're going to have if we're in me and you together, Brian,

because you can't speak to in the morning.

Can't speak to in the morning.

Can't really do any hanky-panky after it 30.

So, I mean, there's kind of a small window

for our relationship to exist.

We're going to have to get a lot done

in that like three or four hours.

We're going to have to have sex

and then we're going to have to resolve all of our problems

and then I'm going to have to offload.

Yeah.

What else is important there?

Tell me about your sleep regime.

So the things you do just before sleep,

we know you don't eat near sleep.

Anything else that's really important?

Let me take them off.

It's go to bed same time every night, no exceptions.

Temperature controlled, room and or mattress.

What temperature?

I currently am at I think 71.

I go to bed at 78 and then Fahrenheit

and then I sleep at 71 thereabouts.

Then I come up for REM at 73.

So temperature and then sound.

Sound.

Yep.

So I aware of potential sources of noise

that could wake you up.

So if you're in a noisy environment of sirens,

like a big city environment or a dogs barking or something,

being aware cause sound will wake you up.

And so you're really trying to minimize

the number of times you wake up.

If you need to do something to limit

what gets into your ears or doing white noise

or whatever you're doing,

then identifying when you eat and what you eat.

For example, I know from my experience

in trying these things, if I were to,

sometimes I would try an almond crust piece of pizza.

Like this is years ago

when I'm really trying to start figuring stuff out.

That would wreck my sleep.

Flour of any type wrecks my sleep.

It elevates my resting heart rate into the high fifties.

And I know I'm going to have about 50% less deep sleep.

And it's all these little teeny tiny understandings

of how a particular kind of food

is going to guarantee direct my sleep

or even three ounces of red wine.

Anytime after noon, guarantee to devastate my deep sleep.

And so understanding how food intake affects that.

And then I know I try to have an hour

while a wind down time every night.

If I go to bed, if I work right up to when I go to bed,

I will ruminate all night long on that topic.

And so it will feel like I never actually go to sleep

because I'm always just in that light sleep

ruminating on this problem.

But weirdly, I've found that if I follow my entire protocol

right before I go to bed now,

I'll assign my brain a problem every night

before I go to bed.

And I now have my very best thoughts in life in my sleep.

My brain figures things out much more efficiently

in my sleep than I do when I'm awake.

So now it's become an asset to me

versus before it was just a terrible experience.

And if I, you know, sometimes I've got to be honest,

sometimes I have snacks before bed, you know?

We're amongst friends here, I can be honest.

Sometimes, you know, sometimes it just gets,

because I feel that, because I work quite late into the night

and then I get to nine or 10 PM

and I'll be sat there thinking, I've not eaten yet

and I've got this pain in my stomach.

So getting, just going to bed with the pain in my stomach

feels quite difficult.

So I'll just, you know,

water something on one of these little apps.

Yeah, I do.

Don't tell anybody because, you know.

But then I eat it and you're right, 10 seconds,

it feels great.

And then after that, I feel like crap.

Yeah, you have to pay the price the whole next day.

Is there anything that you can eat later in the day

or you can eat at dinnertime

that has a smaller negative adverse consequence

in your sleep?

Is it just like vegetables and stuff without sugar?

Vegetables are fine.

Vegetables are fine.

And this is for me, I need to clarify.

What I do is for me, other people thrive on other things.

So this is just a data point people can use in their mind

that you fine tune all these different things.

But I think the data is interesting.

I've never seen anyone with a four month streak

of perfect sleep.

I'm in the 99.6 percentile of recovery too.

So it's not just my sleep quality,

which people often say, oh, you can just gain that,

not a big deal.

People who know really know, that's not true.

But then also optimizing for your HRV

and your respiration rate,

my recovery is also 99.6 percentile.

So I'm hitting all the markers

on the highest quality possible performance in sleep.

And my body is recovering at the maximum capacity.

And so it's good data that I'm not just making stuff up.

The data shows I'm potentially best in world

on this measurement profile or among.

And so it's interesting that it's a reasonable way

for someone to contemplate what they might do in their life.

Do you think there's anyone better in the world

that's sleeping than you?

Probably, there's probably, some people may,

I wonder if all the years of ruining myself,

if it has a carryover effect,

like I just can't make up entirely for all the things I did.

I wonder if that's the case.

And I wonder if people who haven't done that

naturally sleep better than me.

And that I have to try extra hard now

because I'm compensating for all the damage I did to myself.

I don't know.

For those in my certain circumstances,

I don't think anyone tries harder at sleep than me.

Hey, Charvi, you mentioned that.

Why is that important and what is it?

Yeah, it's a heart rate variability

and it's a representation of your nervous system.

There's two parts, your parasympathetic nervous system

and your auto knock nervous system.

And you're trying to basically tether between being chill

and being in fight or flight.

And so when you're stressed,

your body is like, all right, we're ramped up,

we've called all the resources to do this job,

but you can't be in that high state long.

You need to be in a relaxed state as well.

So you're trying to bring the parasympathetic nervous system

on in time and to relax the sympathetic nervous system.

And so the HRV is a representation of,

are you chill or are you stressed?

Having a high HRV is better than having a low HRV.

I worked very hard at it.

It's been one of the hardest markers we've had to move.

I had a meaningful increase in my HRV

over the past 500 days.

I started, I was believe in the mid-30s range

and I'm now up in the low 60s on average.

So good gains, but still not anywhere close

where I wanna be, where I thought we'd be at this point.

It's been really, really hard to move.

And you hate heart rate variability, right?

Yes. Is that what it's called?

And what is that?

As in, is the gaps between your heartbeats or something?

Exactly, yeah, it's the interval between, yeah.

So it measures the interval between your heartbeats

and how much that varies or?

That's right.

Okay, so you want high, you want,

so for my high rate of variability is like 120, I think.

Great.

It's definitely above 100, depending on,

you know, what I've done that day.

I'm jealous.

Well, yeah, maybe that's one thing I can teach you about.

But what is that?

120 what?

I've always wondered, I see it,

and I know that high is better.

Oh, milliseconds.

So 120 milliseconds variance between the heartbeats.

And there's a whole bunch of ways.

If you get into the actual math, you can measure them.

You can actually do this calculation

in a number of different ways.

It gets really technical and sophisticated.

But the general understanding is you want a higher number.

You want a bigger number.

You do some things before bedtime

to improve your heart rate of variability.

I do.

I've tried several devices.

I've used Sense8, which is a vibrational thing on the chest.

I've used Pulsetto, which is a vibration

on the Vegas nerve here.

I've used Neurosim, which is on the left tragus here.

Anything, any of them work?

A little bit here and there.

None sustain.

I mean, I, given the amount of effort I put

into my health and wellness, I would like to think

that I'd be over a hundred in my HRV.

I can't, it doesn't move.

It's just a really hard marker.

I wonder if all the decades where I was depressed

out of my mind and really stressed out of everything,

if I just ruined myself two degrees

that are hard to come back from.

So we've been trying to find something more advanced

that would do something outside of diet

and exercise and routine and sleep.

We haven't found it yet.

It's crazy that one of the most pivotal moments

in my life was when I put my whoop on

and the founder told me about this,

how important that HRV marker is,

how much of an indicator it is of overall health.

You know, crack on with my life,

had a glass of wine one day.

I wake up the next morning.

Yeah.

And it's flashing red and I click on it

and it's like, did you have some alcohol last night?

And I'm thinking, oh my God.

Yeah.

Like genuinely that moment was when I realized

that these choices I make, however small

I think they might be, especially with alcohol,

have my heart notices and it's saying to me,

it said you're either stressed,

you're either sick or you had some alcohol last night.

I thought, I don't like those three things

being in a category together.

Alcohol, what do you think of it?

I used to drink three ounces every morning with breakfast.

You used to drink three ounces of alcohol

every morning with breakfast.

I enjoyed drinking alcohol.

I enjoyed drinking the wine.

For breakfast.

Because I had to create the longest time period

between my sleep to avoid it negatively affecting my sleep.

Okay.

But then I got rid of it because it was too expensive

from a color work perspective.

It was 72 calories for the three ounces

and I couldn't fit it in with my calorie budget.

So what do you think of it in terms of longevity?

I think the science says in moderation is fine.

I just, I don't drink it at all ever anymore.

And you've only really been following this protocol

for a couple of years now, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess I really do understand myself

as on a singular mission

for intelligent existence to thrive.

That is what I am.

That is what I'm doing.

That's what I'm pursuing.

Nothing else matters to me.

The question, the ultimate question, I think,

in, you know, you just said all these people are gonna say,

I'm weird or whatever else.

There's this ultimate question

because you're very, very clearly mission driven.

And there's always a cost.

Much of what I do here when I meet extraordinary people

is to understand the cost.

In fact, the reason I start this podcast

is because we, that's called the Diary of a CO

is because we see the CO stuff, but we don't see the diary.

That's why it's called what it is.

And it started as me just showing my diary

and I shared everything from masturbation,

my mental struggles, everything, my issues with my family.

I shared it all to put the cost out there to the world.

Cost of my mission, my calling my pursuit,

the thing that was dragging me.

The ultimate question becomes, are you happy?

Never more so in my entire life.

Unquestionably.

And what does that mean?

I've never felt more fulfilled.

I've never felt more stable.

I've never felt a more expansive consciousness.

I've never felt more free.

I've never felt more bold.

I've never in my entire life been this alive.

And you experienced the antithesis of happiness, right?

You experienced, I mean,

maybe some people would argue that it's something else,

but you experienced the bottom of the crevice of depression.

You know what that felt like.

I do.

The voices in your head that were telling you to do things,

the unthinkable actions of suicide.

What goes on in your head now?

What are the same voices saying?

It's all play.

I've never had more fun.

Most of my life has just been a grind.

It's like doing the things to achieve the objective

because that's what the societal role play says to do.

And what I'm doing now,

I'm not doing this for anyone's expectations.

I'm not doing this to achieve anyone's acceptance.

This is the game I've selected to play.

I don't care what anyone says about it, sincerely.

I just feel free.

When was your last dark day?

It was about something I can't yet talk about.

I wish I could.

I will be able to soon.

Okay, I respect that.

Yeah, but I guess my answer is genuine.

In time, this will be a good story.

But outside of that, what are the things that,

and are there things that get you down these days?

Yeah, I was recently, I was pretty bothered.

The hate that comes my way is energizing to me.

It's thrilling.

When my father did something with me publicly

with his plasma transfusions,

the internet kind of had their way with him,

making fun of him and saying rude things and mean things.

That really got to me.

Like hurl up my way, cool.

But my father was courageous enough to do this thing.

Publicly, and put himself out there.

And he just got torn to shreds.

And it made me feel very sad and ashamed of humanity.

Like my 70-year-old dad, you know?

Like, he's not the picket of fight with somebody, you know?

Why does that hurt so much?

I don't know.

I guess maybe I've always felt like a protector of my dad,

maybe.

Why?

Just kind of how our roles developed, I suppose.

You know, when he was in a state of need,

I was in a state of ability to give.

Started off when we were young, when I was young.

You talked about plasma.

I saw the image on your Instagram,

when I was waiting for you in there,

I was going through your Instagram

and looking at all the captions on your posts and stuff

and looking, and there was that photo of you,

your son, who looks very much like you, by the way.

And your father, beautiful photo of you,

all of you wearing vests.

And this was one of the sort of experiments you did.

You had a hypothesis, the hypothesis was,

I don't know, what was the hypothesis?

Yeah, we, as a team,

we have scoured every scientific study ever done

on longevity and lifespan.

And we've ranked, prioritized all of them.

And we filtered out which animal models, human models,

and we tried to decide which things to do and why.

And plasma exchanges surfaced as a potential option.

And people were doing it for cognitive decline.

And so it came up where I was talking to my dad

and he said, hey, Brian, I want you to know something

that when you begin experiencing cognitive decline,

which I have, you don't know.

I always thought that if I'm starting to lose my mind,

I'm gonna pick it up and be like,

oh, I'm not as sharp as I used to be,

but you don't know, it's invisible to you, which makes sense.

And so he said, I've been on blueprint for a couple of months,

it's come back.

So I'm aware of how fast I was losing my mental acuity.

I'm back.

So in that conversation, I said, dad,

you know, I've been looking at these plasma exchanges

and there's some interesting studies going on right now

with cognitive decline, Alzheimer's and the things like that,

that are showing interesting results.

Now it's the science is still emergent,

we're not sure it's gonna work.

But if you were interested in doing this,

I'd be more than happy to donate my plasma to you.

That's how it happened.

And so then I tell my plasma is,

oh yeah, so we have blood in our body and plasma.

So you take the blood out, we're half blood, half plasma.

You take blood out, you spin it up,

it separates into yellow stuff, which is plasma

and the red stuff, which is blood.

And so they're just different things in the plasma.

So it's basically taking plasma with the body.

And so I gave my father a leader of my plasma,

but I was talking to my, about this to my son,

like, hey, I may give up a leader of plasma to my dad.

And so my son is like, cool, can I be involved?

It's like, all right.

So it was like this really organic thing around my father.

And so it was, a lot of people learn about this.

And then they immediately imagine like,

I'm in a dungeon drinking my son's blood

and I'm like harvesting his organs.

And the reality was it was a very,

is a whimsical, fun, you know,

heartwarming thing that our family was discussing.

And so we did it.

And there was some sort of efficacy

shown in mice or something, wasn't there?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's, so this, the evidence is like, not bad.

It's not terribly persuasive.

It's emergent.

So it's not like we were going in there

and realized thinking that we had a slam dunk.

It's like, it's interesting.

It's safe.

So let's give it a shot.

And it didn't really work.

So you've-

On me.

On you.

Yeah, which makes sense.

I mean, so I'm chronologically 45.

Many of my phenotypic markers are in their 20s.

Right, of course.

So my donor was 19.

And so it makes sense, the age differential,

given I'm so tuned,

it would make sense that you would see a big change.

But for my father, maybe,

because there's a much bigger difference

between his health status and my status

and the different age range too.

Was there a difference in your father or did you not measure?

We're still waiting for the results.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

His subjective reporting was that he felt phenomenal.

But we really want to see the data.

And you also need to probably do more of these, right?

One is not enough.

You probably need to do it successively.

So it ended up being,

even though we approached it as my father's cognitive decline

and we were looking at it through a medical perspective,

it ended up being a family bonding experience.

Where we, my father left the church when I was young.

He was ostracized.

I left the church.

I was ostracized by my children and their family.

So in my estimation,

it was we were divided by the mind, united by biology.

This goes back to blueprint,

which is are there control systems that help us cooperate?

Not the mind.

Now our mind, we want to create tribes.

We want to fight with each other

and we want to find good and evil

and all that sort of thing.

Biology doesn't, I mean,

biology maybe is a different control system.

And so we were just trying to optimize health.

And so you go back to that system.

What are the control systems running humanity,

running our family, running you and me, running society?

I thought it was beautiful

because it was an experience my father and son and I

never would have imagined we'd have in our entire lives.

And it ended up being a spectacular experience

for the family that we really appreciated.

As you were speaking,

I was thinking about something I've just written

in the book that I've been writing.

One of the pages is when I discovered my father's cigarettes.

And it was this like earth shattering moment in my life

because I was suddenly haunted by this feeling

that my father was going to die.

You know, cause as a kid, you know, cigarettes are bad.

Everyone tells you that.

And then when you find out your father is smoking them,

when I was like 14 years old,

it was this kind of crisis in me

that my father's going to die.

I was thinking about what your father went through

and how that might have introduced the concept of death

to you at a young age.

Then I was also observing how much he means to you

in every word you say about him

and your protectiveness over him.

And I was wondering if there's some kind of link there.

How did you reconcile with it?

Trying to get him to stop smoking.

Yeah, yeah.

There you go.

At all costs.

What'd you do?

I think I cried about it a few times,

but I think I just made him feel bad about it.

It's not possible.

Right, yeah.

That's like the best tool you can use when you're 14.

What about you?

I'd write him letters.

Really?

Yeah, every week.

I'd write him a letter, tell him how much he means to me.

I'm thinking about him.

Yeah.

In the hope that?

That he, it would give him the power he needed

to overcome his addiction.

Did you think about him dying at that age?

Had the concept of death crossed your mind?

I just wanted a dad.

Yeah, I wanted him to be a part of my life.

That explains why being a dad matters so much to you now.

Probably, yeah.

I noticed there's something on the chair over there.

And I'm actually starving.

It's just gone for a clock and I haven't eaten today,

but you were very kind in bringing me some food.

So I want to talk about food.

Jack, could you bring me the food, please?

And you can tell me what you've brought me to eat.

Presumably, this is what you eat.

That's right.

Good.

Thank you.

Okay, so you've brought me a meal today.

I did.

Just for anyone that's looking,

I'll try and tilt it up so people can see.

If anyone's watching on YouTube or Spotify

where you can get the video,

you can see what's in these bowls.

And you've brought me two little buckets of pills here

and there's a drink here.

What is this food?

This is the answer if you ask the body,

what do you want to eat to be an ideal health?

This is the answer that I generated.

So this is not to say that is the only food you could eat.

It is a version where you could eat.

So my daily caloric intake is 2,250 calories a day.

Every calorie has to fight for its life.

There's not a single calorie in my entire life protocol

that exists for any reason other than serving an objective

in the body.

So dish number one is called super veggie.

It's broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils,

garlic, ginger, hemp seeds.

And over a month, if you were to do this with me,

you would eat around 70 pounds of vegetables per month.

70 pounds of vegetables per month.

Wow.

Wow.

And I think we also have in there

extra virgin olive oil and chocolate.

Yeah, I can taste like cacao, like dark chocolate.

So I pair the chocolate in here.

It's an unexpected pairing.

The way we think about this is,

you could say chocolate is good for you,

which might lead you to eat a Snickers bar.

The more precise way of thinking about it

is you want dark chocolate, undutched,

tests for heavy metals,

and has a high polyphenol count.

If you don't do all five layers

to qualify the value of the chocolate,

you have an inferior chocolate,

a nutritional value for your body.

So everything we do at Blueprint

uses that frame of reference of understanding

everything a full stack way of how do you serve

the body's objectives in the maximal way.

That is a mushroom covered in chocolate.

How fun.

So interesting.

Yeah, those are mataki mushrooms.

Mataki mushrooms.

This is a normal broccoli, isn't it?

That's right.

You didn't put anything on it?

No. No salt?

I use potassium chloride, new salt.

And we've got some broccoli in there.

So is that that dish explained?

That's explained.

Okay, and then this looks like dessert to me.

Nutty pudding.

It is, many people consider it to be a dessert.

It's macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed,

sunflower, lechin, pomegranate juice,

berries, and pea protein.

And is this the entire meal you'd have in one day?

There's one more dish which we don't have,

which varies day to day.

Okay.

But this is really it.

I have three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil,

one's in here, then I have an avocado,

and a third meal a day.

And this drink here that you've given me, what's that?

Yeah, make sure you stir that up.

Okay.

That's the green giant.

So the way that it works is I'll wake up in the morning,

first thing I'll do is drink the green giant,

take 60 pills, work out for an hour,

then eat super veggie, wait for an hour, eat nutty pudding,

wait for one more hour, and eat my third meal of the day,

and then I'm finished for the day.

How many pills will you take in one day?

Currently 111.

Wow.

And you take 60 of them in the morning?

That's right.

Wow.

Wow.

That's an interesting taste.

I've got to say, it doesn't taste amazing.

You know, it's not like something I'd find

in like a juice bar or something.

There's a little bit of an aftertaste to it,

that's not fantastic.

And I mean, I like vegetables,

so I like most of this stuff.

The chocolate, I think, is a bit of a spanner in the works

because it's not like a chocolate that you'd get,

it's not a milk chocolate or a Mars bar, right?

It's a very, very dark, bitter taste,

which is a strange thing to add to a mushroom.

Yeah, you can also put the dark chocolate

in the nutty pudding, or you can have it independently.

I find it's fun because it's a new experience for people

to try, so it's really an optional thing.

Oh, this is nice.

This nutty pudding is really nice.

That's really nice.

That's really, really nice.

So what are your principles for eating then?

You talked about calorific restriction.

How important is that?

Because I eat a lot, and I don't count, I just...

Just eat.

Yeah, and I'm like, you know,

I'm my heaviest, I'm 15 stone fives,

which is about 100 kilograms or something.

So I'm quite heavy, and I eat,

and I go to the gym every day,

but I eat a lot, kind of out of control.

It has compelling evidence.

Chloric restriction has compelling evidence

that it's one of the most effective longevity interventions

that can be done.

And what are your sort of wider nutritional principles

that people can very easily introduce into their lives?

It's...

I had this experience where I learned how to fly

an airplane, I became a pilot,

and we get up at altitude, and I would use my hands

and try to fly the airplane.

And I'd go left, right, up, down,

and I'd try to be perfectly on the attitude indicator

of maintaining exactly the altitude

which I was pegged at and the direction.

And then I would engage autopilot,

and this plane would just sit up straight,

and it would be perfectly pegged.

It was so far superior to my ability to do it.

And that's kind of how I think about my diet,

is if I use my mind, I kind of ping-pong around life,

eating this and that,

and I hear this thing there,

and I hear this thing there,

and I kind of do whatever's available to me.

If you think about putting your body on autopilot,

I call it my autonomous self.

But the body report out, evidence, algorithm in,

and it just runs.

This is the result.

This is autopilot for my body.

And so every single thing we do is tracked in the body.

Every pill has to justify its existence.

If it can't be measured and quantified, we don't do it.

And so it's a system, a closed loop system

that has an algorithm running me,

which is so far superior to my mind,

which is going to do,

it's going to add the cookie to the order,

and it's going to eat blank because of whatever.

I'm presuming you're not going to take these back.

So.

Okay, so this.

Those are all the pills you take in one day.

That's right.

120 odd pills in a day, almost.

Yeah, 111, yeah.

That big one right there.

Can you see that guy right there?

This one here?

Jesus, Lord Jesus.

What is in these pills?

A lot of things you would expect basics like vitamin D and C.

More advanced things like alpha ketoglutarate

or metformin or a carbose or other things like that.

It spans from basic and common to some more advanced drugs.

Well, one of my friends in particular,

when he knew that I was speaking to you,

he asked me about NAD+.

That's obviously something that's become quite popular

in the longevity culture.

What's your perspective on NAD+.

Yeah, he's trying to modulate those levels in his body,

and there's nice age graphs.

So people, to enter this into an understandable frame,

people, it's not commonly understood

what a biological age is versus a chronological age.

Somebody can be chronologically, I'm 45,

but I can biologically be different.

I could be either 30 or 35 or 55 or 70,

according to the markers.

So in levels of NAD, intracellular NAD in particular,

there are certain levels that would peg you at age 18,

age 30, age 50, because they reliably go down with age.

And so when you supplement to try to change these,

you're trying to peg yourself to a more useful state

because it's a energy the body runs on.

And so what I did is I, people in the longevity community

do have a lot of questions about how you increase

your intracellular NAD levels,

and there's a big debate, do you do NR or NMN?

I think there's this big debate,

and everyone's always wants to fight about it.

And so I trialed both.

I did 90 days on NR, I did 90 days on NMN,

and I measured my intracellular blood levels throughout.

And I showed that both were basically effective

in doing the objective.

So I was able to peg my intracellular NAD

at the 18-year-old mark on both supplements.

Oh, wow.

So it basically doesn't matter, just get it measured,

and just titrate your dose

to make sure you're getting what you need.

Nice.

And I really wanna make sure,

because I feel like if I'm never gonna meet someone

who I feel like is so well versed in

how the things I put in my mouth

have an impact on my biological age,

so what advice would you give to me

about say that you could, I'm a blank canvas,

and I'm gonna believe everything you say.

My objective is to increase my health span

and to not age poorly.

Yeah.

What would you say about the things

that I put in my mouth?

Give me some rules.

Do exactly what I've published.

Okay.

I'm gonna make it dead simple for you.

I say tongue-in-cheek that Blueprint

is the best health protocol ever developed.

Prove me wrong with your data.

If someone has a better,

if someone can achieve better biomarkers with their protocol,

it's gonna be amazing for me and everyone else,

because now we have a comparison.

But right now, the tricky thing for someone like yourself

is if you go out into the world

and you try to figure this out,

you've gotta sort through 100 gurus.

Yeah.

Everyone's saying a different thing.

And even now, if you give five anti-age experts

the same scientific papers

and ask them to develop a protocol for you,

you'll get a different protocol from every single one.

They're not going to agree.

There's no way to go out there

and get consensus in the world.

So you need to pick a path and then measure,

and I've done exactly that.

So I've basically tried to punch through all the noise

and say, is there actually something I can do

which has some believability?

That's what I've done.

So I've published all my data.

And so Blueprint provides people a starting point

to say, I'm going to do something that I can see works

and I measure myself and iterate and improve upon it.

And so health and wellness is all like religion,

where the King James version of the Bible

supports a hundred different denominations.

They all say that God's one and true only.

Same with health and wellness.

Everyone claims are God's true health and wellness program.

And I've tried to punch through the whole thing

to say it doesn't matter what guru status is,

share the data.

Eat in the mornings?

If I was a blank canvas.

I'd say trial.

I'd say follow my protocol exactly, see how you feel,

and then try and experiment what you do later in the day

and then compare the two.

Sugar.

Zero.

Zero sugar.

Zero sugar.

Why?

It does nothing useful for your body.

Now, our body needs sugar to run.

So if you eat sugar in berries, which you're having now,

that's great, but highly processed white sugar or cane sugar,

there's no value for your body.

There's other things of much higher value for your body.

God, it's hard to exist in this world without sugar, isn't it?

Do you do anything with your testosterone levels?

Yeah, I do a testosterone patch.

I supplement with a patch.

I supplement because I'm on a caloric restriction diet.

And when you do that,

your testosterone naturally goes down.

So I keep my testosterone pegged in the normal range

between six and 800.

I'm about 850 right now.

So I'm not trying to get above it.

I'm just trying to be normal.

One of the reasons why I said to you before when you sat down

that men of my age start thinking about longevity

is we noticed that our hairlines have started to recede.

I mean, getting the third with a receding hairline

is actually quite good.

Some of my friends started a little bit earlier.

And then we started noticing these gray hairs in our heads.

You have fantastic hair.

And in fact, a lot of the comments I saw

were, what's he doing with his hair?

There was one particular comment.

Someone asked him, this was online.

Someone asked him how he's got that hair.

What advice would you give to me?

Listen, I'm at that age now where I've got to make a decision.

Do I let this thing go back?

Or do I fight it?

Don't do it, yeah.

Fight.

Fight with everything you've got in you.

Really?

Yeah.

Trust me on this.

I will, trust me.

You don't want to clean up.

You don't want to clean up aging damage

that you can prevent right now.

And I can prevent my hairline receding?

Yes.

How?

I started losing my hair in my early 30s.

Yeah.

And it's been a grind to try to keep it.

And so my hair protocol, here's what I do.

I have a custom formulation that we've built.

It basically has metoxyl and a few other things.

So people can get that easily.

I have a red light therapy cap.

I wear every morning for six minutes in my morning routine.

I do PRF.

So I inject, I get blood drawn, spun up,

and then re-injected into my scalp once every,

maybe a month or three.

And then I take a few supplements

that are listed online for the Blueprint website.

So basically like four things,

helps prevent hair loss and encourages hair growth.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all of that

and walk with my dog.

So I'm like, is there like a silver bullet

that I could?

So here's how it works is I know it sounds overwhelming.

If you build habits that just make these things

so you don't think about it,

it sounds overwhelming in the beginning.

But if you just get into a routine

where every morning you do your thing

and when you're doing that thing,

you just throw a cap on your head

and it just is on for six minutes.

And then at night, before you go to bed,

you put a little liquid on your scalp and you rub it in.

And then you take a few pills every day with your routine.

It's entirely about building systems

so you don't think about it ever.

So it's never burden on you.

My friends are taking different approaches

to keeping their hairline.

And the side effects are the reason,

the proposed side effects are the reasons

why I've always been scared to do it.

One of the clear side effects that people talk about

is loss of libido.

I haven't had that.

So we do the dosage.

So if they're taking finasteride,

which is an oral,

then it does have sexual side effects.

But I have not yet encountered any intervention

that has compromised my libido anywhere

and anything we're doing.

How do you measure your libido

or is that just kind of anecdotal?

Yeah, I mean, so I,

this historically became known

about measuring nighttime erections.

So I didn't know, I was talking to a reporter about this

and he had just done an article on Blueprint

and he read it and he came back and he was like,

hey, my editors are asking about penis health.

And I was like, when do you ask?

I gotta tell you something.

And so I had just bought this

high frequency electromagnetic stimulation device

working on, basically I sit on this little thing.

It stimulates my pelvic floor

and I was trying to strengthen my bladder.

So I wouldn't get up to go to bed at night.

It had this side effect of every time I woke up,

I was erect.

And I was like, this is like what happened to me

when I was 10.

Like when you're 10 years old, you're always erect.

And I was like, I haven't experienced that

for quite some time.

I'm always erect.

And so I was telling him about this thing

and then I didn't realize it was going into the article.

And so then it came out, I was like, oh no.

And so this guy, then it's like, this dude is so weird

that he measures his nighttime erections

and he drinks his son's blood

and he just started stacking

and people are like, this guy is nuts.

And so it just creates this pattern

where people are like, yeah, yeah, he's just out there.

One of the things that's really distinctive about you

is you have the best posture of any guest

that's ever sat here ever.

Like it's the point where I was like, slumped.

And I looked over and I was like, fuck.

There must be a reason why he sat like that.

So I corrected my posture,

but I keep sliding back down.

Why does that matter to you posture?

I wish somebody would have taught me this when I was a kid.

It matters a lot with blood flow.

I found out because I have these internal jugular veins,

which blood from your brain, brain flows out.

And I was born with narrow jugular veins.

And so when I have bad posture like this,

it stops the blood flow and it builds up my brain

which causes intracranial pressure,

which is bad for your brain.

I didn't realize I had that

until I found in a normal MRI scan,

we found that I had some bad things happening in my brain.

Like, why is that happening?

And we found these internal jugular veins.

So then it focused me on posture

of how do I actually situate myself

to have the proper flow from my brain down into my body

and it became a whole thing.

And so we started doing a bunch of measurements,

trying to look at my intracranial pressure,

looking at my white matter hypertensives in my brain,

like basically how bad is it?

And it was bad.

My team kind of went on red alert for three months.

Am I gonna have a stroke?

Am I gonna have a seizure?

We were trying to figure this out.

And so one of the ways we fix this,

or we've made positive progress

when my symptoms have lessened is this posture.

So I became obsessed with posture

to avoid having some catastrophic event with my brain.

And it's been useful and helpful.

And so I just got into posture and I learned how to do it.

But it was really hard.

I never realized how many muscles have to be strong

to have a good posture.

I'd wake up in the morning and it could barely move.

I was like, oh my God, everything hurts.

Did you think there's a correlation

between our health outcomes and our posture?

The gentleman I work with on this strongly thinks that.

There's not evidence yet,

but he thinks that it's a significant influence on it.

Yeah.

Quick one.

If you've been listening to this podcast for some time,

one of the recurring messages you've heard

over and over and over again,

especially when we first had that conversation

with Tim Spector is about the importance

of greens in our diet.

And a while ago, I started pressing my friends at Huell

to come out with a product that did exactly that,

allowed you to have all those greens,

the vitamins and minerals you need in a drink.

And after several, several, several months

of iterations and processes,

they released this product called Huell Daily Greens,

which is now one of my favorite products from Huell

because it tastes great

and it fills that very important nutritional gap

that I had in my diet.

The problem is it launched in the US

and it sold out straight away

and became a smash hit for Huell

for the very reasons I've described.

It's now back in stock in the United States,

but it's not here in the UK yet.

So if you're a UK listener, which I know a lot of you are,

it's not yet available.

So let's all attack Huell.

Let's DM them everywhere we can

and tell them to bring Huell Daily Greens to the UK.

This is the product.

When it is available in the UK,

I'm gonna let you know first,

but until then, let's spam their DMs.

For those of you that don't know,

this podcast is sponsored by Woop,

a company that I'm a shareholder in

and I'm obsessed with my Woop.

It's glued to my wrist 24 seven.

And for those of you that don't know,

it's essentially a personalized wearable health

and fitness coach that helps me

to have the best possible health.

My Woop has literally changed my life.

Woop is doing something this month,

which I'd highly suggest checking out.

It's a global community challenge

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Essentially, they guide you through a set of four activities

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and I can't wait to see the impact it has on me

and I highly recommend you to join me with that.

So if you're not on Woop here,

there is no better time to start.

If you're a friend of mine,

I have high probability that I've already given you a Woop

because I'm that obsessed with it.

It is the thing that I check

when I wake up in the morning.

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I want the information on my sleep

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So if you haven't joined Woop yet,

head to join.woop.com slash CEO

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Send me a DM.

It was quite surprising to see that you've connected AI

to the work that you're doing.

The fourth principle you said about

not underestimating the necessity to align with AI.

Why?

Why does AI come into this?

To me, it's helpful to think about

these kinds of questions by doing a thought experiment

and time traveling to the 25th century.

Imagine whatever form of intelligence

exists in the 25th century,

they're observing the early 21st century.

What clarity of insight do they have

looking back at us that we can't see right now?

That helps me spin up certain frames of mind.

And it could be that there was this revolution

in the human race where we said, don't die.

And then two is the only thing we have to do

to figure that out is to figure out cooperation

on how not to die.

Now, when you say that, you have to figure out

how to get every single agent of intelligence

on earth and maybe beyond to cooperate.

Cool so far?

Kind of.

Thanks for checking.

So we want the 25th century AI

to look back and see that one of the principles

of our humanity was do not die

in the hope that it won't kill us.

Okay, yeah, so let me start building this up.

So the first take me as a first example,

I'm 35 trillion cells, how do I figure out how to not die?

I go through this process to build an algorithm

that maximizes existence.

We do this between you and me,

where we have a cooperation algorithm,

not figuring out how you and I cooperate and we don't die.

We have the same kind of thing with planet earth.

So for example, in my scenario, we say,

can the organs talk and can they run me?

And they can they keep my rascal brain at bay

so it doesn't ruin the show?

Could the oceans run planet earth?

We plug into the oceans with measurement

and we say you run the biosphere.

Kind of a weird idea, but not outlandish.

Now you have to basically think about the earth speaks,

our bodies speak, we speak with each other.

Now you have trillions of artificial intelligence agents

around all agents of intelligence have to cooperate.

If any one of these agents or any group of them

violates the cooperation, it could be the end of you

or me or the planet or everyone.

We have to figure out coexistence.

In this huge tapestry of goal alignment.

It's currently framed of AI engineers need to figure out

how to stop AI from killing everyone.

That's part of the problem, but it's not the entire problem.

So that's the only objective we have as a species.

Like there's nothing else that matters right now.

It's don't die from every vector of potential death.

And you think by us doing that on our level

and then at a earthly level,

that this will just want to make sure I'm clear

that this will somehow feed into the artificial intelligence

or will create artificial intelligence

with one of its principles at its core to be cooperative.

Yeah, I mean, so that you take the AI problem

and it's so high level, you'd say we don't want AI

to be misaligned with human goals.

What are human goals?

And then you start breaking yourself apart, me apart

and we realize we are a disaster set of goals.

We want everything all the time and always contradicts.

We don't have a line goal.

And this is what I was trying to align with myself.

Can I answer that question and say,

I have a singular goal to exist.

Now, if I'm lining with AI

and if my singular goal is to get to zero self-violence,

like maximum life existence ability,

I now have a starting point to talk to AI about.

All of us do.

And if we say Earth,

it's maximum sustainability of this planet we're on.

We have a starting point for discussion,

but it has to begin with existence.

And we have to overcome the biggest psychological barrier

in our current culture,

which is we perceive inevitable death.

And so therefore anything that happens like whatever,

we don't care.

And so we have to overcome.

And this is why I've been playfully challenging

the status and authority of Jesus Christ.

I made a joke that Jesus fed wine and bread,

accelerating aging and inebriating

and I will feed nutrients that will nourish and create life

that why is Jesus the continued representation

of a philosophical group of a billion plus people?

Why can't someone challenge that status and authority

and say, no, it's not the resurrection,

it's not the afterlife.

It's this life, it's don't die.

You're not a martyr for some higher objective

of some rules to be completed.

This is the boundary conditions that people create.

They say, this is a philosophical thing,

it's sacred, you can't talk about it, you can't challenge it.

Why not?

I sat here with one of the founders of,

Mustafa, one of the founders of DeepMind

and we were trying to find solutions

to this issue of AI and containment.

And I wanna make sure I'm clear that you're saying

if we change our goals on a human level

from being less self-destructive

and more focused on do not die in our existence,

then we have something that we can align with AI on,

which will preserve our existence as well.

But we can't align with AI

because currently we're self-destructive.

So for an AI to align with us,

it would be self-destructive as well.

Exactly, and if you peel back these layers,

now this conversation is,

if we actually got into the technical details,

it'd be much more nuanced.

So I'm gonna make an oversimplification of a statement.

Thank you.

Ha ha ha ha.

Humans have this broad set of goals.

It's to make money, it's to acquire powers,

to have influence, it's to change the world they want.

And that's when you talk about containment,

you talk about corporations, governments,

individuals, ideological groups,

everyone's gunning for their own thing.

And this is why I took myself as an example.

If I look at me as the same structure of the world,

I've got evening Brian, morning Brian,

ambition Brian, entrepreneur Brian, lover Brian,

all these different versions of me

want different things at different times

and they're all competing to achieve their objective.

And I understand these different versions of me.

I had to basically say, hey everybody,

like we've got a really, really big problem.

We're all fighting each other

after these different things.

And meanwhile, we're accelerating death.

And I had to basically say,

we're gonna compress this space

and we're going to acknowledge I,

as a, my mind cannot act in my best interest.

And so what I'm really saying in the most extreme version,

I'm saying humanity, if we want to exist,

has to contemplate handing over the reins of control

to algorithms.

We cannot act in our best interest.

Individually, collectively, corporations, nation states,

we can't do it.

We need new control systems of power

that acts in our long-term interests.

We're playing an existential game right now

with existence.

We started playing that in the sixties with nukes.

And we're now playing it with AI.

We're playing it with our biosphere,

potentially being an unsustainable place for us.

They were just gonna be fine, not fine for us.

We're playing Russian roulette with our existence.

So are we lethargic as a species?

Yeah, we all think we're gonna die anyways.

And this is why if we flipped it and it's like, maybe not,

and maybe we're walking into

the most extraordinary existence,

any form of intelligence has ever had in the galaxy,

we may get our act together and say,

you know what, let's think through this thing

from these basic principles, like really easy,

let's not die.

We don't wanna ruin this chance we have

to exist in this amazing future.

A rebuttal you must have had is that

in the pursuit of not dying, I don't want to not live.

Do you see what I'm saying there?

Because when I think about the sacrifices

I would have to make to my life to not die

in the same way that you've reversed your age.

I think, well, then there's no point

because I'm not gonna get to live.

And I want you to discreet that as like a rebuttal.

How would you respond to someone that thinks that?

Cause I imagine a lot of people have heard the protocol,

they've heard about the blueprint and they're thinking,

well, you know, and I actually saw it.

I think I saw it on Rogan or something

where the guy was saying like, you know,

I'd rather just die at 90,

but having lived a fun life or whatever.

Who cares what your mind thinks?

Why is your mind the unquestioned authority

that gets to say and do whatever it wants?

Why does your body not get to say in this?

Why can't your heart speak and your lungs?

Why do you as a tyrant rule and reign

with terror on yourself?

This is the thing.

This is the unthinkable,

most offensive revolution that could happen as a species.

Our entire existence, we've assumed our mind

is the ultimate authority on all things.

Even in this conversation,

nothing gets past your mind as having authority.

What if our minds, what if it didn't matter

what our minds thought?

What if they were not the authority?

What if there are other authorities there?

And then why do we even trust your mind

to be the thing that can decide on your best interest?

Is that where you are in your life?

You've removed the authority from your mind.

Yes.

So when you talked about your being upset,

and I could see the emotion in you

when people were attacking your father,

is that not giving your mind authority?

I don't feel like I have control of those things.

It's an emotional response that I...

Based on thoughts?

Yeah, based upon a reaction

that I have this relationship with my father.

And so it's complicated.

In terms of the thing I've isolated with Blueprint is,

can I take my self-violence to zero?

There's another layer of how do I feel about my father

and what is that relationship, different complexities.

This whole thing is incredibly complex.

But the simplest thing to do

is can I do this within the control systems that I have?

Can I take my life to zero violence?

And if I can do it as a 35 trillion sale organization,

can we use this little teeny example

and map it to a species and say,

can we take this multi-trillion agent,

intelligent agent, computational problem?

Can we solve this cooperation problem for everyone?

Can we?

Are you optimistic, Brian?

And I want the honest answer here

because people often have ground plans,

but the most important question is,

do you think it's possible?

Yes.

You think it's possible?

Unquestionably.

Do you think it will happen?

I do. And here's why.

I think that if it were just the human mind

in play right now, I would not,

I would not feel bullish.

I would be pretty forlorn.

I'd probably give up.

In humans are no longer alpha on this planet.

And whether you realize that,

whether someone realizes that or not,

there's a new alpha on this planet

and it's artificial intelligence.

When we're going back to this conversation of the biographies,

this is inevitable.

Artificial intelligence will run us.

It will run this planet

and it will run all forms of cooperation.

It's inevitable.

And we're gonna be superseded in our intelligence

on a time scale that is surprising to us.

We think we have potentially more time than we do.

I don't think we do.

And that's why blueprint to me is so urgent

is of the urgent problems we're looking at,

of how do you get society to not kill each other with nukes?

How do you get AI to not kill us?

How do you get us to not die individually?

How do you avoid the Earth's environment biosphere

from collapsing and not supporting our existence here anymore?

How do you stop existential threats?

And the thought processes people have been spinning up is,

we need legislation.

We need new laws.

We are going to protest.

We're going to make a big thing.

And what I've tried to say is,

I'm going to actually do the thing no one else is doing.

I'm gonna point itself.

I'm gonna say, can I solve all of these problems within me?

Can I solve climate change within me?

Can I solve AI alignment within me?

Can I solve cooperation within me?

And that's what I've been trying to do is a end of one example

of how to solve a complicated system.

Now, blueprint is like an analog version.

Like it's first version, right?

It's like, but philosophically, it's an interesting model.

How do you take a complicated system of intelligence like me

with all these different versions

with proneness for self-destruction?

I mean, like if you say, what are the risks of AI?

AI, are you just like all the things AI does that scare us?

That is exactly the same list

that I'm scared of for myself.

And that you're doing to the 35 million cells.

Yeah, like I am AI and I am my own worst risk.

Like the risk profile is the same.

I'm runaway intelligence doing things

that is causing self-destruction.

And that's what AI will do if it's allowed to run away.

So that's the thing, it's so funny.

If we look at AI and we're scared of it,

we just look in the mirror, it's the same thing.

It's the same risk profile.

Intelligence is self-destructive if uncontrolled or...

And so how do you build intelligence

that's actually sustainable?

How do you build so it's not self-destructive?

How long do you think we've got?

You said we've got less time than we think.

I don't know why we wouldn't spin on a dime right now

and look at every existential threat and go after it right now.

Like why wait one more day?

And why even try to calculate the absolute last moment

we can do something before everything becomes catastrophic?

We don't know the second and third and fourth order

consequences of the biosphere changing.

We don't know when AI is going to emerge and what level.

We don't know what systems are going to, we don't know.

Like you can't model it, you can't predict it.

So creating time frames is ridiculous.

Like you're emotional about this.

I want to exist.

I really don't want to die.

Like it's like, it's really fun to exist.

And I don't know what death is like,

but I've had moments in my life where I get these small

glimpses into this expansive of consciousness.

And it could be the case that we are homo erectus,

that we are so primitive, it's just unimaginable.

And that if we can step into this future,

we could have this expansive consciousness

that is mind bending.

Like so far out, like so far beyond our imaginations,

we just can't even comprehend it.

Like we could be right there on that cusp.

To me, it seems like we are.

Like why, why would any other imagination

be practical to assume right now?

If super intelligence is in the game here

and we're within that mesh of intelligence,

why couldn't we reasonably imagine

that we might be along the ride in some capacity?

Are you scared?

No, I don't have an emotion of feeling scared.

I don't experience that emotion.

Ever.

Fear?

I mean, as people describe it to me, I don't really feel it.

Very logical and analytical

in the way that you see things, right?

You think differently, right?

And obviously people that think differently,

like people like Elon Musk, et cetera,

he's neurodivergent in some capacity.

You've got a divergence to your neurology,

if that's even a word, which is very unique.

And are you aware of that?

It's hard for me to see that.

There are moments where I was at a dinner a few weeks ago

and people were going around and talking about stuff.

And in contrast, I was like, whoa, I'm really different.

And like what's happening here?

So there are these moments of the sharp contrast,

but I generally view the world as crazy.

I view everything else and I'm like, this is nuts.

What's even happening here?

Everyone is weird to me.

This makes no sense.

What the world is doing and how people are behaving

makes no sense to me at all.

And so I know that if you flip it,

people view me in the same way,

but goddamn, the world seems crazy to me.

People look at you, they think, oh, he's a bit weird.

And you look at them, think, God, he's a bit weird.

I think people, I think the world is crazy.

Just insane.

Someone's right.

It's either you or the world.

Time will tell, right?

Time will tell.

What is the most important thing, Brian?

I imagine, I guess, I reckon

five million people listen to this.

That's my estimate based on the conversation.

What is the most important thing that we haven't discussed?

What about those five million people need to know

before we close out?

That now is our opportunity to band together

and experience the most extraordinary existence

that we are aware of in the galaxy.

And that this opportunity is going to invite us

to divorce ourselves from every sacred idea

we have about ourselves and society, each other.

It's going to require more sacrifice than any generation

and it's going to be incredibly painful.

And it's going to test our fortitude

on whether or not we choose to exist.

The fate of intelligence in this corner of the universe

may depend upon us right now creating this bridge

to this next evolution of being human

and of the fabric of intelligence.

It is our opportunity to seize, equally to lose

if we don't recognize the moment and step up.

And step one in stepping up is fundamentally

stopping the war against ourselves?

It's in daily acts of revolting

against the status quo, which is harming us

and lessening our chances every day.

People are accustomed to seeing revolutions happen

by storming places and using weapons.

The weapons at our disposal are to go to bed on time,

to eat healthy, to not watch porn,

to not get addicted to things.

And it sounds weird and weak and different,

but revolting against the culture of death

and a self-destruction with self, with planet Earth

and how we engage with artificial intelligence.

And these foundations map the future of our existence

and it begins with self.

It's not blaming someone else.

It's not pointing at someone and telling them

how they have to change.

It's looking itself and building the revolution

within each one of us.

What would you do if you found out you were going to die next week

in a time of illness?

How would you feel?

I would feel satisfied that I spent my entire adult life

searching for the singular thing I could try to do

to create value for the human race.

And I found it just in time and articulated the ideas

just in time, barely well enough to kickstart this revolution.

Are you misunderstood?

Because the perception of you that I had before I met you

is different to the perception I have of you now,

specifically the perception I have of why you're doing what you're doing.

Because when I heard the tale of this Brian Johnson guy,

he was trying to be 18 years old, he's a narcissist,

he's struggling with the concept of death.

He's got so much money now he's fighting life.

So he's doing this for himself.

He probably wants to date someone young.

And that's why he's doing what he's doing.

It's all sort of self-centered.

The proposition you've given me today is very much more about

humanity than it is Brian Johnson.

It seems like the picture painted of you,

and I know how the press works, right?

It's the things that get the clicks, right?

Versus the person that sits in front of me today

feel like two completely different people.

I'm not understood.

I would almost prefer to be misunderstood

because that assumes some level of understanding.

And it's not even a close approximation.

Like you're saying, it's so far off from what I'm really trying to achieve.

Your father, 75 years old,

he's not going to live forever, or is he?

How do you contend with that?

A man you clearly love a lot,

but you understand that there's an inevitability to life

for most people who aren't revolting against life

in the way that you are with your longevity routines

and your anti-aging protocols.

It's impossibly hard for me to reconcile.

One time, I couldn't get a hold of him for a couple of days,

which is uncommon,

and I spiraled in concluding that he had died.

And not being able to call him and hear his voice

was beyond devastating.

Death is a terrible thing.

We've all experienced it,

and it would be wonderful if we could bring an end to it.

Are you trying to keep him alive?

I am.

How?

My parents joke that they get a package that seems like every single day.

I'm sending them everything I can,

and do this, do that,

and sometimes it's too much,

whether I, Brian, I can only take so many pills a day

and I can only do so many things a day.

It's a fun relationship,

but I am trying very hard to take care of my parents and my children

and my family.

I care deeply about those around me,

and I work very, very hard for their well-being.

I believe you, Brian.

I believe your intentions.

I think what you're doing comes from a very, very good place.

I think you're wide in a way which is unusual,

and that's not to pass judgment on whether we're all unusual in our own ways, right?

But you're wide in a way that's unusual,

but because of your wiring, it's very useful.

You know, I think that when we think about tribes and chronotypes

and the differences within tribes,

it's useful to have people that think differently within the tribe,

because it kind of covers all of our bases,

and you present a new perspective about humanity,

about the path forward and about the way to live,

and you think any new perspective,

anyone who is humble and is searching for truth

would welcome a new perspective,

especially when it's not harming others, right?

You would want a new perspective if you are in the search of truth,

not in the search of confirmation of your existing ideas

or the alleviation of the cognitive dissonance we experience,

and that's what I want to experience to you.

That's exactly what I think. I'm open.

I'm open to your perspective.

I don't have to accept it all into my daily life,

but having open to listen,

I think is something we should expect of ourselves

at a very fundamental level,

and I just wish there was more people that would just, you know,

have the fearlessness to present a new perspective,

because as I think we said earlier in this conversation,

there's so much potential trapped behind the fear of looking weird in life.

So we stifle opinions and innovations and creativity

because we don't want to look weird,

because there's a cost to that in our society.

You get smashed, right?

And for whatever reason you've made the decision that that matters less

than the mission that you're on.

So I respect you and I commend you for that.

Am I going to have the 120 pills?

Can't make you a promise there.

I'm sure I'll take a couple of them.

This was nice.

Can't imagine putting the chocolate on my broccoli.

But you know, there's a lot to learn here,

and I hope to make the sort of incremental steps

in some of those areas of my health that we can all agree upon.

I would thank you for the conversation today.

As hard as I try to be impervious to judgment in conversations,

it's hard to fully go through the expression of ideas

when the other person even is making the most subtle of judgments

or setting boundary conditions.

And I love talking to you because you did none.

You just rolled with me and you embraced it

and I felt welcomed to express all of it.

So I appreciate that very much.

Really means a lot to me to the point that I just got goosebumps

because I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews

with people and their judgments.

I'm actually getting emotional thinking about it.

I can't imagine what you've gone through in interviews

because of people's like their closed-mindedness

when they came to have a conversation with you

and what a waste of conversation and discourse and progress that is

when we come with a closed mind.

And so I'm so happy you felt that way

because it really mattered to me that you did.

And because you did, you were able to share in such a way,

which I actually think is incredibly beneficial to me

and I think everyone that's listened.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

That's one of the best compliments I've ever received.

So it really means a lot to me.

Thank you for that.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast.

Okay.

Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest,

not knowing who they're going to leave it for in the diary of a CEO.

The question left for you.

I mean, maybe you've answered this.

Is it how many night-time erections I have?

I actually just have a question.

What was the cost of you coming and doing this interview today to your routine?

I thought, you know, I'm going to sit with him for two hours, which we've done.

There's going to be a cost to your routine.

None.

None?

None.

Because of the timing?

Good.

Appreciate that.

We'll get you home before 8.

Yeah.

For your curfew.

The question left for you is if all, I think it says, if all you could change is one thing

about the world, what would it be?

I want to exist.

A unwavering, unconditional, maniacal want to exist.

Brian, thank you.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure it'll be the first of many because I've got a lot to learn.

So I appreciate your time today.

Thank you.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.