My body's aging extremely slowly. I have 50 biomarkers. The things you would normally expect, like cholesterol and triglycerides and things like that, that are in the perfect optimal clinical oxygen range. I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age.
Several fitness tests where I test out as an elite 18 year old. My body runs three degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal. So no matter how you're looking at it, where it's my DNA methylation, my fitness test, my biomarkers, my phenotypic markers, whatever you're looking at, the data says the same thing. I'm in near perfect health.
Brian Johnson, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Do you feel death? No, I love life.
Is there a distinction between those two? I do not have a... I know what fear feels like and I don't experience that emotion when contemplating death. I spent a good bit of time looking at the longevity subreddit many, many years ago when Davidson Clefos came on the scene.
And one of the things that I kind of realized, or I thought I might have realized was it seemed like a little bit of a rehabilitated denial of death in a way. It seems like there are certain elements of the longevity community that do see that. But based on what I've looked at from what you're doing, it seems like a very enjoyable fun experiment where you're trying to see how far you can push your body. But I'm trying to work out, you know, is there deeper down in the recesses?
Is there something... is there a denial of death? Is there a fear from what's coming in the future? Driving you at all?
My main source of inspiration is having read hundreds of biographies. I love learning about people and their time and place that we're able to work on impossibly hard things. So talent is the ability to hit the target no one else can. Genius hits the target no one else can see.
And the majority of us in life, we play the games that society gives us. So that's hitting the target. So currently, you know, it's social media followers and this and that. So people like to play games where points can be kept and you can be compared to people and ranked.
Genius is a different game. It's trying to find things that don't exist. And you need to have this stamina and fortitude to go out and pave your own path and do things that are not recognized, appreciated, valued, even in your lifetime. And so to me, reading biographies is about people who do that.
Is they really try to survey all of existence. They are somehow immune to their time and place and are able to see these things. That's really... In my understanding of my reality, I seek to be like those people.
And with that, it means disregarding current wisdom around approaches for health, fitness, sleep, diet, nutrition, training, everything. Everything. The reason why we exist, what we do with our existence, everything. Okay, so in your view, what is the reason why we exist?
Lucky us we exist. I mean, I do not recall asking to exist. It just happened. And I really enjoy existing and I would like to continue to exist.
And these questions, for example, like what is the meaning of life? I think that is an example of what it means to exist. I don't think there is an answer. It just is a person's answer is reflective of the time and place.
Like, basically it's a mirror of the social and cultural norms. And the person trying to express themselves within those norm structures. And again, trying to hit targets. But to me, it's...
We live at this really special time. No human before us, no generation before us, has ever been in the situation we're in. Where we're on this precipice of potentially radically extending and altering what it means to be conscious being. And it's just, it's delicious beyond words.
And I think the faster we can fully embrace this opportunity, the better off we are. But I think we're still a little bit zombified. Like we just haven't quite seen it. And we better off if we can try to catch these waves.
I like the idea of the meaning of life being basically dependent on the local ecology in the local time. So if it was Britain in 1100 AD, it would be instead of it as a god. You know, it would be hoeing the garden and the sun beating down on your back. But you're doing it because you need to praise the Lord.
And if it's pick your time, pick whatever it is that people desire. I've just wanted to... I mean, just building on your comment. Like if you basically look throughout thousands of years of human history, and if you look at the emergent spiritual practices and religions that have emerged, and you put a wall in between the technology that time and place and the ideologies that emerged.
So just not even including the personalities who gave birth to these ideologies. There's simply a reflection of what was technologically capable in that time and place. That's it. Human guru narrative aside, that's just a mirror on what the practical extent to which human is going to aspire.
Okay, so in this regard, does technology unlock our ability to think about our meaning and our place in the world? Yeah, I mean, behind Blueprint, I mean, a lot of people observe the Blueprint. They think the Blueprint is about health and wellness and anti-aging. It is really a contemplation about the future of our existence.
And what I think we've demonstrated is that we've built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can. And we know what happens when algorithms get better at us doing things. Flying airplanes, calculators, digital navigation, you name it. We embrace them because they do a given thing better and they help us achieve our goals better than we could ourselves.
So we can free our minds up and do other things. With Blueprint, I think I'm showing following Nietzsche of God as dead. I think the mind is dead. That if the algorithmic ability, if I can measure the 35 trillion cells in my body, their algorithm can better manage entropy than I can.
Of course, I'm going to opt into it and free myself up to do other things. And I think that's where we're at as a society. So yes, does technology unlock it? Yes.
I think at the most fundamental level and the most meaningful philosophical revolution to happen in a long time, the mind is dead. It's here. It just arrived. I think a lot of speculation about artificial intelligence, maybe five years to 10 years ago, was that, yes, you'll be able to automate certain things.
You'll be able to do normal forward thinking processes. But you can't do creativity. You can't do art. You can't do writing.
You can't do music. And then it turns out that it probably can and given enough time, it's going to be able to do it better than us. One of the interesting things to reflect on from your point there was that navigation system. Everybody uses Google Maps or Apple Maps or some equivalent now, right?
Why? We used to navigate by our favorite roads. We would look at a map and have an A to Z out and go through all of the different routes. And there would be a co-pilot that would be giving you the wrong directions.
Why is it that we were so quickly prepared to switch from this personal orienteering approach to using a GPS? Well, it's because no one has existentially connected to their ability to do wayfinding. I think that there is a difference in kind in terms of how people see that own regulation of their physiology, that there is some sacred sense that I shouldn't go in and tinker with what nature has already done, that it is able to regulate itself. It can optimize so on and so forth.
There's, you know, even see this around vaccines as well, that the difference between somebody taking a pill versus getting an injection, there's just, there are certain relatively arbitrary sort of rules that we place on what feels sacred, what we should tinker with, what doesn't, what we're prepared to relinquish control of, and outsource to a computer and what we're not. And given that we've, as we just said, we thought that AI could do certain things and there was a limit, and it seems like that limit has been pushed through. It seems quite timely that you are trying to break through another frontier of assumption, not creativity, but I guess self-regulation of the body, also using technology. Very well said.
Yeah. I'll give you, yeah, you absolutely synthesize that beautifully. I'll give you two thought experiments, which I think capture the essence of this. I hold these blueprint brunches at my house.
I call them the first supper. And to prepare people, I explained to them, I'm going to introduce a few ideas to you that are most likely going to break your brain. They're going to, basically, you're going to experience one or multiple existential crises in this two and a half hour dinner. So here's a few thought exercises to get your brain prepared.
I do those three and then I give them a thought experiment and I say, let's imagine a scenario where an algorithm is built specifically for you, your personalized algorithm, and it takes better care of your wellness than you can yourself, but as far as superior physical and mental spiritual living. You can have this algorithm. The catch is you have to be willing to accept its recommendations and follow its protocol. Would you be willing to do it?
And about a third of the participants say, yes, like anything to free any from myself? Yes. A third say, sure, but I want to change a few things. It's like, well, that's not the thought experiment.
And then a third group gets deeply offended. You know, just what you're saying, you touch upon if they can't decide what to eat and what to drink and when to do it, they don't understand their existence. So that is the first thought experiment. The second thought experiment I lay on top of that is when you and I, if we say how good is technology going to be in 20 years time without questioning it, you and I are going to agree it's better.
Now, are we going to say there's nanobots in our bloodstream, repairing our DNA in real time? Or is it AGI, whatever our speculations are, it has this dramatic assumption that's better. If you and I say, what are you and I going to be like in 20 years from now, we don't even question it. It's worse.
We just don't know how slow or how fast the decay is going to be. But what if in the 25th century people were talking about what humans in the early 21st century changed that fundamentally altered the future of human existence? It was that humans figured out how to attach themselves to the speed, the compounded rate of improvement that we see in our technology today. So when you and I go to that second thought experiment, we say, what are you and I going to be like in 20 years, we don't know but better.
Unquestionably, we believe that. It's like the human Moore's law affiliation. I like to mean things. Okay.
So we've flirted around what it is that you're doing at the moment. What are the headlines of what you've managed to achieve with your protocol so far? I think the most compelling data is that I've using a state of the art and DNA methylation algorithm. I have slowed my speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.
My body now accumulates aging damage at the speed better than the average 10 year old and better than 88% of 18 year olds, which means people at 10 years old are accumulating aging damage. Most don't realize that. Just as you get older, you accumulate damage faster in compounds. And so my body's aging extremely slowly.
Number two is I have 50 biomarkers that the things you would normally expect like cholesterol and triglycerides and things like that that are in the perfect optimal clinical outcome range. I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age, several fitness tests where I test out as an elite 18 year old. My body runs three degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal. So no matter how you're looking at it was my DNA methylation, my fitness test, my biomarkers, my phenotype markers, whatever you're looking at, the data says the same thing.
I'm in near perfect health. Pretty impressive, pretty useful. What is the projection, presuming that you don't get into a car accident at some point, what is the projection of your age, your potential longevity? People are a familiar frame of reference would be what is the return of investment on this company?
An investor typically want like a three x return or a five x return or a 10 x return will be out of the park. Think about that on lifespan. If you can be around for the future of these technologies coming, your return on life investment could be five x 10 x 100 x 1000 x. No one knows.
You could have a massive return in life. And so the goal is be around. It's worth doing the hard work right now to dramatically slow your speed of aging. What I've been trying to do with blueprint is when people talk about aging, it's always this always coming and always exciting and wouldn't it be amazing if but no one had in my estimation said, okay, let's take all of the current scientific evidence.
Let's put it in one person and let's see where we're at. Let's just give it a go. Let's see what the data says is the fountain of you here right now. If not, how close, how far where are we at?
And that's what I've been trying to do is to say, actually, you know what, it's pretty compelling what's available right now. Are you familiar with the concept of longevity, escape velocity? I am. Yeah, so it sounds like you're referring to that basically, the longer that you stick about, the better the technology will be down the line, which means that it will be able to extend your life longer.
And if there is a point at which the technology is able to bypass or the technology gets stronger than the rate at which we age, you go, okay, my point is to stick about until that and that would be longevity, escape velocity. So I've had a ton of people on the show talking about longevity, health and fitness. And it seems that the conception, the overarching principles aren't necessarily as universal, especially when we add your approach into the mix. What is the overarching principles that guide your approach for longevity?
Yeah, this is this has been a fun learning for me. You can have four anti-aging scientists read the same five papers and then ask them to design an anti-aging protocol and you'll get five different anti-aging protocols. There's just no agreement and there's not a way of settling the agreement. That's why I've endeavored to do this is I do it and then I share my data.
And yes, there's limitations of its N of one, but it's better than N of zero. Okay, given your mark is given what you have learned, what does the framework look like? Or what are the principles and the longest levers that you're looking at? It's a process of measuring extensively.
I think I'm potentially the most measured human in all of history that is taking that data and it's trying to assess the very best evidence. Now that's that's an art because again, you're going to have scientists look at the same data and they come with different conclusions. So looking at the evidence, then it's implemented protocol in a subject like myself where I'm trying to be perfect in protocol adherence and then it's repeating data, evidence, protocol and do it again and again and again. Why are you vegan?
What's the thinking behind that? By choice. So it blueprint does not express opinions about anything. It doesn't say whether veganism is good or bad or meat is good or bad.
It just is a process to say measurement, evidence, protocol. And so I basically just ask my team is it possible for us to do a vegan protocol and be within the targets of the optimal clinical outcome ranges. So the only exception is I take college and peptides. I'm trying to find a vegan source for that.
But yeah, it's a preference, not a necessity. Why do you prefer it? Because I would like to, I hope, that a scaling law of technology that the more intelligent a system gets, the more compassion that it has. So this is an ethical veganism substrate, a little foundation that you're playing on top of reducing animal suffering.
I'm going to guess. It's a contemplation that the problem that humanity, the only problem we have to solve this species really is goal alignment. We have these godlike powers now. We just simply need to figure out, not simply, we need to figure out how to cooperate.
And that means not just humans, but humans and planet earth and humans and AI, like trillions and trillions and trillions of agents of intelligence, whether they're sales or whether they're bots or whether it's plants or whatever it is. We have this gigantic tapestry of computational goal alignment. And it's a problem of a size and scale that just baffles the mind. It's so far exceeds anything we're capable of.
And so when I think about the real game we're playing here, at the largest possible scale of this mathematical model, I hope that we trend towards compassion. Because while we are alpha on this planet right now, that's not, I don't think we're alpha anymore. And I think that we are going to want the attribute of compassion to exist in this broad tapestry of intelligence. Would it potentially be easier, simpler, more efficient, more effective for you to add animal products in?
Have you ever considered trying to do that? Is there a point in the future which you'll say let's do a six month test where fish comes in or seafood comes in or red meat comes in? Yeah. I've shared everything.
I've shared the entire blueprint protocol so people can do it. And they can share their data. I personally don't want to do it. Right.
I understand. In order to get the nutrients that you need without touching on animal products, I imagine that that's a very large amount of vegetables that you need to eat. I mean, I don't know large. If you just look at the evidence and you say, I'm trying to goal line 35 trillion sales that make up me and the objective function is to reduce entropy.
So I'm running this massive computational model with 35 trillion sales on goal alignment with myself. And I'm basically saying can everything inside of me try to go after one goal which is less entropy. And we're looking at all the evidence. We're looking at all the different data.
But to me, it's a really interesting quandary because we think about goal alignment and cooperation of can we get AI to align with 8 billion humans? Can we get 160 some odd nation states to cooperate on planet Earth? We're always thinking about these big cooperation problems. But the cooperation problem, the goal alignment problem almost never is asked of each one of us.
We get to always point our finger at everyone else and blame everyone else and ask everyone else to align their goals with ours. We're not being asked to do the tough work to say, hey, you know what? Inside of each of one of us is an absolute war. It's a Balkanized war with our various selves.
And so to me, the mastery of self is the ultimate challenge for anyone to go after. It's harder than going to the moon. It's harder than going to Mars. And that's I think where if we're going to succeed as a species, that's the hard work we need to do.
We do not have complete control over ourselves though, right? We don't even know what ourselves are. We are self deceptive. We often have contradictory and destructive behaviors and desires that we want to engage in.
And how do we know we don't have a metric that says, I want a relationship, but I also want to be good at business, but I also want status, but I also want to have fun with my friends, but I also want to sleep well and I also want to be healthy. You know, for us to be able to pull all of these together is challenging. And I want to get on to self-destructive behaviors. But before we even get to that, how can someone work out what it is that they want to want in life?
Yeah, so if this is fun talking to you, this is the exact problem I've been trying to solve. And this is why I say the mind is dead. So when I approach this problem with myself, the difficulty I had was I myself was out of control. I would overeat.
I would engage in all kinds of self-destructive behaviors. I was 50 pounds heavier than my healthy weight. I was marching myself into the grave and I couldn't stop myself no matter what. And so that was the personal problem I was trying to solve, which is the map to some other ambitions I had.
But when I look at myself and I'm trying to distill those kinds of questions, like, who am I? What do I want? What are my goals? There's thousands of Brian's chiming in.
Like right now it's 10, 30 AM Brian speaking. 5, 30 PM is going to have a different, Brian's going to have a different answer. Saturday Brian's going to have a different answer. With friends Brian's going to have a different answer.
Like there's thousands of different ways I'm going to answer it based upon my biochemical state. I trust none of them. And that's why I don't know how to tackle this complexity. So what I said is like, what is the most basic and simplest possible thing I can do?
That would actually wrestle my chaos into some order and, you know, like, try to eliminate the unruliness of my existence. And that's what Blueprint has done. That's why I follow the algorithm. It's freed me from this insanity, which used to be me.
But you had to make a value judgment at some point, right? You had to say that the goal that I'm going for isn't to maximize status. It's not even within the world of health and fitness to maximize muscle mass, to compete in a bodybuilding show, to maximize my endurance or my HRV or my VO2 max, there was a point at which you had to go through a process of stepping back and saying, what do I want to want? That was the first step.
That had to be the first step. Yeah. And step number one, don't die. Stay alive.
Well, that's the problem with alignment, right? You know, that's the, and everybody has as soon as you get a self-aware, recurrent improvement, AGI. Daniel Kahneman often talks about this idea of two levers that you can use to encourage behavior change. One of them being try harder and one of them be sort of stop doing the things that are stopping you from doing the thing more.
So, press on the accelerator further or release the break. And I think what I like about your approach is that your first priority, as far as I can see, is stopping pressing the break before starting to press the accelerator. Stop doing the self-destructive behavior. What is your framework for identifying self-destructive behaviors and overcoming them?
It's a complicated question and I've tried to simplify the thinking of it. Anything that increases my speed of aging, I label as self-destructive. Anything that slows my speed of aging is rejuvenative. I try to make it very clean, left or right.
And what about overcoming it? How do you do that? You've got the many Brian's coming in. Yeah.
And I've heard you talk previously about the fact that it's not about what 5PM Brian wants to do. He's a dick. It's what the plan says that he's supposed to do. And then when 5PM Brian comes around, I have a friend who uses the term, I'm just working for the boss.
So when it's his time to do something to get up and start writing a book or whatever it is he needs to do, I'm just working for the boss. I don't make the decision. The boss already made the decision previously. I'm working for the boss.
The boss also has to be you. But it's not as simple as I have made a prescribed set of rules that I'm supposed to follow. Therefore at 5PM when my felt sense changes, oh, I remember the protocol, there's motivation and there's a felt sense of what we're supposed to do. So take me through or one of the lessons that people can take away for improving that adherence, for not having to rely on motivation as much, for improving their discipline, if that's even what you refer to it as.
Yeah. I'm currently putting together a team of behavioral change experts. And I wanted to do this as a public experiment. I'm going to invite whoever wants to participate in a 30 day challenge to try to get their self-aided destruction scores to zero.
And so the easy ones we target would be eating too much food, eating junk food, skipping exercise, not meeting your bedtime, just some really basic ones, not getting to the nuanced ones where is gaming good or bad, under what circumstances, let's leave those complicated ones out. Just can you stop the blatant self-aided destruction behaviors? And then to have five behavioral change experts present their school of thought. Here's our protocol.
Here's how you go about doing it, CBT or whatever. And then have people choose the school of thought that they resonate with. And then just have the teams compete for who can lower their self, their sad scores the most. So I'm in no way an expert in this area on behavioral change.
And I just thought it'd be a cool thing to try to popularize sad that we've normalized sad in society so much so that you can do it out in the open with friends and everyone's cool with it. No one calls it out and it's all expected. And if you don't participate in sad, you get called out and ostracize from the group. You're the one who's meant to feel like you don't belong.
And so for me personally, it was food is a gateway for bad behavior for me. And that was really where the dam was breaking. And so doing this protocol with blueprint was a way to arrest the most violent destructive behaviors I had. And then the other ones have just been baby steps on top.
Once I got control there, that kind of discipline has been naturally extending everywhere else in my life. But this is, I guess this is why I get excited about the future of being human is if this algorithm legitimately can arrest my worst proclivities that I'm helpless to get to arrest, you know, can't do other things for me to including can I get into my mind one day, I'll stop being all the self-destructive harm I do to myself with my mind. And so this just takes a remapping of what it means to be human. But I've never been happier and more fulfilled.
And it's funny because people when they observe my behaviors, their assumption is that I'm sad, which is weird, which is ironic. Meanwhile, they're drowning in their own sad behaviors. And I'm the one who's to be ostracized. So it's a really funny self-defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they're doing.
What were the steps that you found most effective at stopping yourself from binge eating? It was separating myself into multiple I'm not one person, I'm many. And then it was identifying the specific most egregious version of myself, which was evening Brian. He showed up at 7pm every night.
So identified who he was, I gave him a name, I listed out his persuasion tactics like, you know, it's been a long day, you deserve it, you did really well at this, you worked out really hard, you probably already burned the calories off. Tomorrow we start all the persuasion tactics. And then when he shows up, I treat him as other. Hi, Brian.
I see you're here. I see what you're trying to do with your persuasion techniques. And you're not like you have been unauthorized to make decisions on how to, you know, you can't eat food, like period, you have no authorization. And so it's like this game of going about doing it.
And in my mind, when I do that, I can see evening Brian throw a tantrum, you know, that the fact that his authority has been revoked and how offended he is and how outraged he is and how he's just if he could be violent, he would be. But it's phenomena that's psychologically so interesting to watch how I myself play within myself on these these dialogues. And at first, it was really, uh, it was contentious. You know, like you feel that tension, you're so close to breaking it for him overpowering, but it was really a personalizing these aspects of myself and making them other.
And then I could work on them one at a time. That's interesting. So othering yourself, creating a distance between you and the things that you tell yourself, understanding that that it is you, but it's, it's a malignant version of you. It's like an evil alter ego or some conjoined twin that keeps on coming in and talking to you about things that you kind of, they're born out of your desires, but they're not your highest desires.
They're not your truest desires. They're not the things that tomorrow you would have wanted yourself to with them. Yes. You're creating that distance.
I like that. I like anything that involves having a mindfulness gap, you know, a break in between stimulus and response. I think more of that is very, very good. What is it?
Some insane number of our decisions we've made the day before, some insane number of the thoughts that we have today, we had yesterday, some insane number of, I mean, here's a really, really great insight from a friend Alex Somosian. He says that, um, when people talk about changing their diet to improve the things that they eat, they often get lost in the weeds around, uh, conceptualizing what the diet consists of. But he said, you probably eat maybe 80% of your calories from the same 10 meals. There are 10 meals that you have that probably consist of like almost the entire lion's share of your diet.
Like I'm not a chef. I have maybe five good recipes in my back pocket. Okay. So all that you actually need to do is just change those things.
Right? You're actually focusing on those small number of decisions and it's kind of the same with this. So yeah, I mean, I think that, for me, I realize the most self-destructive behaviors I have too is probably even eating. I've had this long day and I mean, I live in Austin, Texas now and everybody goes for barbecue, everybody goes for whatever and they, oh, well, there's dessert and then there's home and then there's snacks and then so on.
And you have 10 PM and I stopped eating half an hour ago. So that's why I'm particularly interested in your approach for it. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's hard to be human.
And I think if, if we are, um, if we can all be honest just for a minute and to confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self-destruction all the time as a starting point and not try to spin up these pretty little stories about that's what it means to live or this is what brings me happiness their lies. But we've done such a phenomenal job of making them pretty stories and protecting them because we don't want to face this uncomfortable reality. But we are a species addicted to self-destructive behavior and I don't think this is the form of intelligence that we want to be walking in as we engineer AI. I think we, again, we have this tendency to point our finger at everything in the world except for ourselves as the thing that needs to change.
To play double-sap We're getting into a philosophical sort of linguistic, lexical question here. But I don't know if it is quite the same. It's the Pandora's box or Plato's cave thing here, right? Like if you don't know that the thing that you're doing is destructive, is it fair to say that those people have the same sort of obligation to be aware of their self-destructive behavior?
You can't know what you don't know. Talking about training, that was one of the other levers. Binge eating, skipping training sessions. What has the data said to you about the optimal setup for a training protocol for yourself?
What does it consist of? How often do you do it? What time of the day? Et cetera.
Yeah, I work out an hour a day. It's basically I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. We've worked back through the science of what the cardio zones should be in. We also look at this in terms of measurements of my VO2 max, of my flexibility, of my tendon, ligament strength, of my, we measure my muscle with ultrasound.
We do whole body fat on MRI. We're using these quantitative endpoints. We probably do 100 different markers that quantify my exercise protocol. They're all markers that we can map to optimal clinical outcome ranges.
Again, the goal I'm a problem I'm working on is my 35 trillion cells having less entropy. I'm not trying to engage in a marathon. I'm not trying to achieve some athletic record. Really, it's just that one goal.
It's just a bunch of weights, cardio, flexibility, strength training. I noticed looking at your routine that you've got a good bit of knees-over-tose and Patrick stuff in there. That's been borne out in the data as something which is very effective. As we measure my tendons and ligaments, specifically, they've all dramatically improved.
This is a good bit of a backwards sled drag, some of the ATG knees-over-tose and lungi stuff. What were you most surprised by? What are the exercises or the contributing routines that you do where you're like, I wouldn't have thought that that would have been in there. I wouldn't have thought that the data would have been happy with me doing this.
I suppose overall, I'm surprised by how robust I feel. I've actually never felt this robust in my entire life, even when I was 18 years old. An athlete in high school. I don't have a single ache and pain in my body.
I've never been more flexible. I've never had better cardiovascular capacity. I guess I'm just surprised that at the chronological age of 45, I would be peaking in my life of ability. I don't feel like I'm entirely—I think there's more I could gain.
I suppose I previously viewed this as trying to stop an inevitable downward trend, but it's actually dramatically improved and maintained. Are you adding in walks each day on top of this? An hour a day, for me, if I was to think about it, it doesn't seem like much to optimize the absolute optimal amount. I would have presumed it would have been two and a half hours and it would have included all manner of high intensity interval training and a shitload of zone two, and then there would have been 45 minutes of yoga stretching with brain work.
I would have thought it would have been more. Why isn't it more? Why aren't you training more? It's a tricky puzzle we're trying to solve.
I'm on a caloric restriction diet, so it's 2,000 calories, and I take 100 pills a day. The scientific question we're trying to solve is, if in the year 2023 someone like myself wants to be an explorer like Shackleton or Magellan or Lewis and Clark, and I want to say, all right, I want to go to the absolute limits of what's possible in the form of slowing my speed of aging, then we're trying to optimize for caloric input, cardiovascular activity, heart rate variability. When you do too much exercise, there's a U-shaped curve where you start inflicting harm on the system. You're trying to tune all of these things.
With caloric restriction, it has a side effect of lowering testosterone. I need to supplement testosterone and get myself in the normal level. We're just playing this really tricky trade-off space all across the board, and we're always making minor adjustments here and there, trying to maximize for this very narrow goal of slowing entropy in my body. Interesting.
Because if you're RDA of cows with what, 2625? Sorry? What would be your recommended maintenance for you would be 25 or 26? Yeah, 2655.
Yeah. Right. Okay. And you're at 1980 or something like that, basically 2000.
If you were to train more, because that's not, I mean, you're quite light, right? You're about 160 pounds, I think? Yes. Yeah.
So you are quite light, but still maintenance at 26, given that you train for an hour a day, and it's not like you're not doing other stuff throughout the day too. Exactly. Isn't a massive amount. So I understand now, if you were to really start to push that, if you go from 60 minutes to 90 minutes to two hours, your maintenance cows then get up into the sort of 3000 range and then you're okay, do we want to be in a 1000 calorie deficit every day?
Well, no. Okay. Therefore, we need to bump calories up. Yeah.
What, because G-Flux theory, which you may or may not be familiar with, something we've spoken about in the show before, what's the problem with increasing your caloric output and then increasing the amount of food you can eat? This means that you can eat more foods throughout the day. This would mean maybe you're more satiated. There will be a sweet spot.
How come you guys haven't decided to do that? Yeah, exactly right. Really well said. So we are, the combination we're doing is not common.
So it's caloric restriction, it's intense exercise, it's vegan, which a lot of people haven't really combined robustly and we're trying to do that all to maximize speed of aging. And so we have not covered all the variations. For example, like I don't know what my markers would be like with meat. I don't know what my markers would be like with 90 more minutes of cardiovascular exercise and more calories.
So we haven't covered all the iterations and the reason why I've been trying to share all my data is to say, here's the process we're going through to trial this thing. You can do this yourself and you can do different iterations yourself. So add meat, add more exercise, do this or that, and then share your data too. But let's try to accelerate the speed in which we can structurally advance the field, even if it's end of one, it's getting better than end of zero.
Yeah, but the evidence of my team's looked at, their current hypothesis is what we're doing does optimize. And I guess there's some interesting data where using DNA methylation patterns, looking at the Newton-Pace algorithm over this longitudinal study of nearly 2000 people who have been measuring their speed of aging over several years time, I rank number one as the most reduced speed of aging out of the entire group. And so it's interesting. I hope others take that spot from me.
That's the goal. If somebody someone might come in and do that, would you consider switching protocols if somebody did do that? Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole goal.
I want someone to beat me for that same purpose, like build the field and share with everyone what you're doing. And so that's why I share freedom with everyone what I'm doing is I want them to do it and then apply their own betterment and everyone improves. Crowdsourcing longevity research. Yeah.
And yeah, it's just like it's the intensity of competition which this has triggered has been incredibly inspiring. I mean, people, it's a big deal. And so I'm in private conversation with a ton of people about how they can beat me and I sincerely hope they do. What would your testosterone be at without the supplementation?
Have you got any idea because you're walking around at 5% body fat, heavy caloric restriction, et cetera? Yeah, I don't know. We hover around 800. Wow.
We hover around normal. But that's with I think it's nine units a day of testosterone. That's true. It's 2mg patch.
I think each one converts into like nine. I feel like that's a dermal patch of testosterone. I've never heard of that being a delivery mechanism for testosterone before. Is that common?
Works. Yeah. So I mean, it keeps my levels steady. It's a dermal patch.
Yeah. Fuck yeah. I mean, it's much cooler than having to pin I am every three days or whatever two and a half times a week or something, throw the patch on, go about your day, peel the patch off, put the second one on, go about your day. That's pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. So you mentioned there that we both mentioned that you're running a quite low body fat percentage.
Why is that the optimal position for somebody to be in? You would have thought, well, ancestrally, the average body fat for somebody that was moving around a lot would have probably been significantly higher. How is it? What's your thinking behind the fact that in the five's range, which is like ridiculously lean?
Why do you think that that seems to be optimal as opposed to having high levels body fat? Yeah. I mean, in questions like this, I would always defer to my team. I can echo what I've heard them say, but I mean, I learned this as a pilot.
I trained, I got certified to fly in several airplanes that got typed, but I had a rule for myself that I always flew with someone else who was a professional. Because when I was in the cockpit, even though I knew what I was doing, I was never as fluid and as competent as them. When they, it's all they did every day, all days thinking about that versus me jumping in and out. And so, and also just knowing that if you have five longevity experts doing this, they're all going to disagree.
But yeah, we've just been following the evidence of your caloric restriction has some meaningful evidence. And like we're looking at these, made these lifespan and health span studies and we try to follow it. And so I don't know if a five percent body fat is a target of more of where the body has settled out at. It's a byproduct of the fact that you're doing this caloric restriction.
And that is where your particular body ends up sending out somebody else would be at three and a half, someone else would be at seven and a half on the exact same protocol. Okay, interesting. One of the things I haven't heard you talk about is heat and cold exposure. This is the current most popular bro science approach for a longevity routine.
Are you using ice bands using stoner exposure? Do you consider it a home assist stress or have you tested with it? We, we kind of don't do anything that's popular right now. And we we've looked pretty carefully at a cold and hot exposure.
We've looked at hyperbaric and it's not to say that these things don't have benefit. It's that they don't have benefit in the ways where we have objectives. And so I mean, there's an unlimited number of things I can do in a given day that would potentially be useful to me, but we have an extremely specific goal of slowing my speed of aging. And when you have that narrow of a goal, it just creates a really clean workspace to say, does this thing have inclusion or does it not?
And so no, we don't do any colder or heat exposure. That's interesting. I'm starting to kind of get a conception about this single ordinating principle slow down the speed of aging. That means that there are other things that other people who have slightly different ordinating principles might need to add in.
But let's say that it was your goal to optimize dopamine throughout the day. Okay, well, you maybe would look at adding in cold exposure. Maybe we'd even look at adding in cold exposure multiple times throughout the day. And maybe you would do some research to look at whatever the equivalent of the circadian rhythm for dopamine is.
And well, maybe we can bring it up on flat points and maybe we can boost it on other points. And maybe we'll be taking a bunch of supplements. And that would be the ordinating principle if we want to maximize dopamine throughout the day. It's interesting that slowing the speed of aging and you would have done it had it has been something that you think would have contributed to it hasn't folded heat and cold exposure.
And you said we're not doing the things that other people are doing, but you're not doing them because other people, you're not not doing them because other people do them. You're not doing them because presumably the data doesn't suggest that it's something that you worthwhile. Yeah, again, very well said. But strangely, it's not looking at the data, the data isn't screaming at you getting a fucking cold tip or like going to sort it like it's strange that that's not happened.
I think. Yeah, yeah, it's hard. I really, we get asked about I get asked about cold exposure, I think more than anything. And my objective is not to rain on anyone's parade.
It's not to discourage anyone who's trying to do good for themselves. It's not to try to be a know it all. I've just really not wanted to engage in the conversation. You know, it's not part of my protocol, fine, whatever, you know, like I don't need to go out and trumpet it.
And I don't want if other people are excited about it, that's wonderful. But really, this is trying to move the entire field forward. And, you know, I think there's a certain disposition that helps people feel encouraged. And so maybe we'll find the evidence and maybe it'll be something we do in the future.
Like I never know like I every time I've expressed an opinion, I've come back to think I'm never expressing an opinion again. So you just never know where it's going to go. But I will say that, you know, with what we're doing now with sleep and diet and exercise, maybe it solves my dopamine for me. I don't know.
I mean, I don't currently have a dopamine problem. I think, you know, like my mood is never been more stable in my entire life. I've never felt more motivated in my entire life. So just different ways of saying it.
But I think what you said really was a nice construction where if you don't have the clarification of endpoint, then it really gets in this fuzzy space where you don't really know where to put that piece of the puzzle and then people can misinterpret how to think about it. I remember I heard stories about both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And during his time at Amazon Bezos had one ordinating principle that every single decision went through. And it was does this improve customer experience?
Does this improve customer experience? Every single decision. And Musk's apparently made still be was does this get us closer to Mars? Every single thing.
Every question does this get us close to Mars? Do I go to the party this evening or do I go to bed? Do I decide to hide this person or do I satisfy this person? Do I decide to start this new company or invest here or buy Twitter or sell Twitter or tweet or do whatever does this gets us closer to Mars?
There's maybe an argument to be made that some of the tweets that he's put out probably don't get us closer to Mars. But I think it taught me the value of a single ordinating principle. Ryan Holiday's book from last year, Discipline is Destiny. The biggest takeaway that I took from that conversation was that without a goal, without an ordinating principle, there can be no discipline before that because the discipline is in service of the outcome.
What are you being disciplined for? Like what is discipline? And given the fact that we are these multi-factorial, multi-variate creatures with all conflicting goals and self-deception and 5 p.m. Brian and 7 p.m.
Brian and Tired Brian and Hungry Brian, if you don't have a very, very clear goal, it's almost impossible to be disciplined in the service of it. And okay, in your opinion then, is it more difficult to live a life with more than one goal or the more goals you have does life become exponentially more difficult working back on that? Yeah. After doing this for a while, this is why I arrive at the mind is dead.
So if it's so let's just walk through this process. If I say an algorithm now takes care of me better than I can myself with the goal of minimizing aging, so it's all a singular objective that simplifies all the decisions around it. But what I'm really trying to demonstrate is this is a system of goal alignment. So it doesn't matter what you choose of your goal.
When you can take 35 trillion agents and goal align them around a singular thing, you've built a tapestry of goal alignment. So blueprint can scale to anything. Blueprint can scale the climate change. Right?
The earth is the body. You take millions of measurements, you look at the evidence of what is a proper biosphere for the coral reef and the city and the oceans and all the above, you apply a protocol and you repeat data evidence protocol. The same is true for everything else. And what I'm really trying to say is if we are thinking about the future of existence, the problem we have to solve is goal alignment.
And that we have to do that so we don't destroy a biosphere. We have to do that so we don't have just topic outcomes with AI. We have to do that so we don't annihilate each other because we're of our propensity towards violence. It is the singular goal we have as a species.
And so I'm trying to prove this system with myself, the one thing I have control over. I would maybe be tempted when you say the mind is dead. It's nice because it's like playing off that god is dead thing. But you must have throughout your day thoughts that you enjoy, creative insights that reflect on your life, introspection about memories, dreams and hopes for the future.
So there is still a very real role for the mind. It seems it's a little bit more like decision making instead in that regard. But yeah, I think you've spoken a couple of times about where your emotions are at, regulating emotions. You even said earlier on that spirituality or like being spiritual is a component of this.
Fold in your protocol for emotional health and spiritual health as well. How does that play a role? How have you learned to optimize that? What are your frameworks and perspectives on it?
Yeah, you're right that the sitting beneath the abstract layer of the mind is dead. There's all this nuance of even when autopilot flies the airplane, I'm still landing the airplane and taxiing the airplane. So my mind is still engaged in some of these activities. But the bulk of the autopilot, it's nice to know I've got that when I'm flying.
And so what it is really trying to convey is the only tool we've ever had in existence to manage ourselves is our mind. And when I look at myself, my objective is to destroy my nemesis before my nemesis destroys me. And my mind is my most powerful nemesis. And so as we start breaking out the complexities and nuances of what role do our minds have in society going forward?
And if we are trying to look at this large computational problem of goal alignment, what is that role? And to me, it's a legitimate question. But the very first thing that I can say confidently about myself is who inflicts the most self-destruction upon me of anything in existence? It's myself.
If we say as we as a species, who inflicts more pain upon us than anything else? It's ourselves. If I say probabilistically, who's a bigger worry to me, AI or humans? Humans.
Like, I'm trying to get to the root of where is the threat coming from? And what might we do to try to offset that? Now, what spawns after that in terms of what kind of spiritual practices we have and how do we find meaning? Those are all really cool and fun questions we can play with on once we have the free space to do so.
But we're not in a safe place right now as a species at all. Like, we're under extreme threat. And so what I'm really trying to do is address the things that are most pressing, that threaten our very existence and survival. So we can get to this play space.
What about when you face negative unwanted emotions throughout the day? They're going to rise? That the sort of things that you have significantly less control over than what goes in your mouth, than how you train them, the time that you go to sleep, the temperature of your cooled and heated mattress. These are unknown unknowns in some regards.
So how have you learned to deal with emotional regulation in an effective way and what strategies can people take away from that? I mean, I was chronically depressed for a decade. Likely the result of being an entrepreneur and working my talent off, building a brain tree, then having three little babies in a bad relationship, like all the stuff that you go through a hard time in life. And so if I look at that time and I look at the avalanche of negativity that buried me every second of every day, it absolutely pinned me to the ground and I was suffocating.
I couldn't breathe. If I look now relatively speaking to the amount of negativity in my mind, there's like zero. So getting these basic things right in my mind, in my life, like sleep and diet, eliminating self-destructive behaviors, I almost rarely ever now have a genuinely self-destructive thought. Now I may contemplate and say, oh, I wish I wouldn't have said that thing or I wish I would have said this thing differently or I wasn't as nice as I wanted to be or I feel a little ashamed about this kind of thing.
I'm like, sure, those are all little mine. We all do that with our self-transspection. It helped us improve. But I would say, generally speaking, I'd be eliminated the most hurtful and self-destructive things that plagued me to the point of suicide.
And I just never thought that would be possible. Andrew Huberman, the first thing that he said on a podcast episode I did with him was, you do not control the mind or the mind, you control it with the body. And it seems to me like your mind is downstream from what you've been doing with your body. But I have a pet obsession for evolutionary psychology.
And it seems to me that almost every animal, humans included, aren't meant to be satisfied. The in-built base programming outcome that the state that humans are supposed to be in is minor dissatisfaction. Life is suffering from the Buddha, right? The word for suffering is dukkah, d-u-k-k-h-a, I think.
And then some scholars can test that that word doesn't mean suffering. It means unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. The holiday that you plan to go on, the steak that you intended to eat, there's always something to stand between your toes.
It could have been a tiny little bit more salted. It could have been a little bit less well done. It seems pleasantly surprising to me that you were somebody that is trying to optimise the body as much as possible. Downstring from that has found a very large amount of peace in the mind as well, given what my assumptions would have been about what an unperturbed human mentality would have been.
I mean, thinking about your frame, if I were to try to oversimplify our existence, you know, it's like we become conscious and we become aware that we're in some sort of unpleasantness, hunger or need for status or ambition, like whatever, but we just spend our entire existence trying to address our unpleasantness. That's it. That's all we're doing. And then we make up all these stories and games and the, like the Buddha was saying, like, hey, like, this is, yes, this is existence and the only way to deal with existence is to eliminate this permanently.
But to me, that's really what we're walking around trying to deal with our conscious selves. And what I like about what we're at as a species is, yes, that's been the case, but it may not be the case. If we have the ability in the form of computational intelligence, and we now can physically predictably engineer Adam's molecules and organisms, we're in uncharted territory. And this is why I think the future is like a zero principal future.
We have no ability whatsoever to model out what's going to happen. And that's never been true with human society. You know, so sure that maybe the state now we're running from constant displeasure. But this is why I have this computational goal alignment system that leads us to this future.
We can't model our predict and maybe the most extraordinary thing humans have ever experienced. You know, the optionality is so vast that basically any prediction goes out with the window and the unknown and known start to get exponential. Naval has a quote which you'll be familiar with. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Given that you sold a company for $800 million, which has permitted you, aside from the conversation about you need the physical resources, monetary time, etc, to be able to focus on what it is that you're doing. Naval also has a really great insight, which is it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. And what you're talking about previously is the unsatisfactoriness, the inherent unsatisfactoriness or displeasure that people feel on a daily basis is something that you have largely been able to dispense with. If you hadn't had such success monetarily, you know, achieving the status that you needed, do you think that open loop would be intruding still on your life?
Even if let's say somehow you've managed to have the someone else was paying for all of these things to be done for you, right? So like, you know, materially were able to make it happen. Would that open loop do you think I haven't achieved the ridiculous success within business? Would that still perturb your thoughts?
Is that a loop that needed closing? This is a question which my brain just registered as I just flagged a few alerts in my brain when you asked me this question because it said to me, hey, this person's asking you your opinion. You're un... Basically, there's no data involved.
There's no reference that. There's no evidence. Just your free form, free style opinion. Terrifying.
Dangerous. Because I can make a fucking answer. My brain comes up with it. It's like, but you know what?
It's all bullshit. So like, whatever words come out of my mouth are absolutely fabricated, have zero basis in reality, and are a disservice to everyone, including myself. Interesting. So do you...
Let's say that you want to play around with ideas. You're a dinner at the first supper, and somebody asks you a question that you don't have an answer for. How do you venture into the realm of things that you don't know if you're never prepared to venture into the realm of things that you don't know? This is one of the thought experiments I do at my dinners, my blueprint branches.
So I say, okay, let's do a thought experiment. We're playfully having conversation. I turn to someone and say, hey, I'm interested in hydration. I want to be better hydrated.
How much water should I drink? And so volunteer will be like, you know, I'll play along with you. And typically they'll say, well, I think it's like, you know, roughly eight ounces or eight cups of water a day. I have this flask.
It's pink. I take it with me everywhere I go. I'm always in the bathroom. It's kind of annoying.
My friend Susie, she has one too. Her mom thinks that she really wears it with her. Her mom's kind of not doing very well. She's sick.
She has this other friend who flew in from LA the weekend. They're having dinner and they go on and they go on and they finally come back and they're like, okay, so yeah. Okay, great. So your answer is like, eight cups of water a day.
Yes. And then I do the thought experiment again. And I say, how much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, though, I'm sorry.
At the end of the previous discussion, I say, how do you know eight cups of water a day? And they say, well, I read it somewhere like on some website or, you know, something like, well, have you seen the data? Do you know? No, but I don't have seen it somewhere.
Okay. So do the thought experiment again. How do you know how much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, the person says, I don't know.
If not, they'll do the eight cups of water. But it really is meant to demonstrate the majority of our social interactions serve the function of social cohesion, not truth-seeking. And as a result, we pass on this lore, which is not true, but we can't distinguish between the social cohesion dance and what we're passing on as knowledge. And so it's this clear distinction to try to discern.
And so if you're really in a truth-seeking discussion, great, like have that. But if you're in a social-soothing situation, don't mistake the two because it really compromises everyone's shared ability to understand reality and make good decisions. You muddy the sense-making landscape with people doing performative conversation, masquerading is truth-seeking. That's really fun.
That's really, really interesting. In your opinion, then, should nobody speak on things that they don't have data for? And what is the role of playing with ideas that are more difficult to be analytical with? I suppose it depends on who the conversations with and what the objectives are.
If you're just there to have fun, if you're actually trying to solve a problem, you know, these blueprint branches, I bring people together and no one knows each other. So it's a set of accomplished people, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, astronauts, educators. So everyone's kind of doing the dance, of filling each other out, they're trying to figure out ranking and priority and status, they're trying to do all the social stuff. And so people are playing the different games.
I just say my personal participation varies according to the group I'm in and what we're trying to achieve. Interesting. One of the other things that you've looked at and that you're optimizing is a youthfulness on the outside, not just on the inside, the way that you look. What is your perspective on sunlight exposure, on to the skin, also, on to the face, not just from a youthful perspective, but also from a health and physiology perspective?
I don't know. There we are. I'll tell you that I typically avoid the sun because my skin is almost always healing from some kind of laser. You can see here on the screen, you can see these dots all over my neck.
What's that? From laser. So I had, we just bought another laser and my face is still healing from this. So my skin is sensitive to the sun because it's in these healing conditions.