Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint for a 150-Year Life: Is It Worth It?

Was it cooler to take psilocybin than to fall in love with Kate? They're both magnificent. You know, like they're different. I think there's a correct answer to this question, Brian. Brian Johnson, welcome to interesting times. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm very glad to have you and you have the dubious distinction, or maybe the extreme honor of being the guest for my last episode as host of this show. And I think this conversation I'm hoping is a fitting finale, because one thing we've been trying to do on interesting times is exploring how I think what seemed to a lot of people like strange and radical ideas have been entering more into the mainstream of American politics and culture and technology and more. And one of those radical ideas that's come up more than once in this show's run is the hope of dramatic life extension. Immortality was that was part of the project of early modernity. In the next 10 years, we're going to see breakthroughs also in life expectancy, so try to be alive. Life extension is a miracle and I don't think you're in favor of this. Especially when it comes to my life. It's part of the pitch for artificial intelligence, potential benefits, and it is now your life's work. It's very explicitly don't die. And you have made yourself a personal guinea pig, in fact, for all kinds of potentially life-extending treatments. And even taking what some, though certainly not me, might call a TMI approach to everything that's happening with your own body. And you've taken a certain, like, you're an internet character, right? There's some mockery out there, maybe, but I take you to be extremely sincere about this. And so I just wanted to start with your motivation. Why do you, Brian Johnson, want to fight and maybe abolish death? You know, I was building my brain interface company a couple of years back and we were, I was working with this esteem professor and we were trying to define intelligence. And he had a definition, which I thought was really interesting. And that is that intelligence is to know what to do next. And right now in this moment, it's a tectonic shift in terms of what will become of the human race, what will become of each of us individually, what do we aspire to? And that's the question I'm really trying to tackle is in this moment, as we remap our imagination as a species, what do we do next? And my conclusion on that is we, we are now at the peak human knowledge, also, we're potentially at peak ignorance with what AI will unleash. Like, it's never been a time where there's been a stronger juxtaposition between what we know and what we may not know. And in all that contemplation, I say, the only thing I can truly trust in this moment is I don't want to die right now. So this is not about immortality, it's not about trying to live a million years, it's to say the one thing I can say with certainty is I don't want to die right now. And I think that's true for almost everybody. I want to get into some of the philosophical ramifications of this view. But can we talk biographically for a minute? I think most people would say, of course, I don't want to die, right? But there's a difference between having that sense or sensibility, right? And taking the sort of study and remaking of the human body as or your own body in this case as a mission. So what was going on in your life when you decided that this should be your mission? Yeah, when I was, I guess it goes back to when I was 21 years old, I returned from serving as a working as a missionary in Ecuador. I had lived in mudhuts on dirt floors and I understood the depths of poverty and they just was, I was struck by the opulence of the United States and the conditions where I was at in Ecuador. And so in that moment, I said, I don't know what I want to do with my life other than I want to do something useful for mankind. And so I said, I'll become an entrepreneur. I'll make a whole bunch of money by age 30. Then with money, I'll do something interesting. You know, a very common thing people here. And so I did that. I sold my company, Brain Tree Venmo for $800 million. I made a few hundred million dollars. And at that point, it was, okay, like now I've done that. What do I do? And the irony was I was absolutely broken. I had burned myself out. I had three, I was raising three young kids. I was separating from my religion. I was chronically depressed. I was getting a divorce. And then I just sold my company and lost my identity as a professional. And my world, even though I had, you know, $300 million in my bank account, it didn't matter. I was just absolutely broken as a person. And so I had to rebuild myself. And so I set out to say, I ask all the basic questions. Who am I? What do I care about? What do I want to do? And then I read this book called Zero, a dangerous idea. And I learned about the history of zero, how it's disrupted everything in history, physics and math and art and religion and philosophy. And I wondered what is the zero in this moment? What is the thing that is hiding in plain sight that is so obvious? But that no one's doing. And I thought about that question for several years. And then I just second thought experiment, which really did it for me. I imagine being present in the year 2,500. And there I am, like conversing with whoever that is, whether it's human AI, some combination of human AI, and they're reflecting on their early 21st century. And they say we're so grateful for homo sapiens that existed in 21st century because they did blank. Because in a few hundred years, they will compress our century into two or three or four sentences. And so I thought that compression will be about podcasting. I'm constantly unquestionably. I thought they'd say two things. One is that's when homo sapiens gave birth to superintelligence. And that's when they figured out they'd no longer die. And I thought that's it. I mean, it is that's the moment where it flips where humans go from inevitability of death to don't die. And that's going to become my purpose for existence. You were a missionary. So you remember of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right? That's right. Why did you lose your religious faith? I read a book, a rough stone rolling. I learned the biography of Joseph Smith. Yep. That's right. And I learned about the history of the church. And when you're raised in the church, you're given a version of events that are obviously are very favorable to the church's disposition. Then when you learn the true history, you need to square with the new reality. And like all things, humans are messy, history is messy. And once I started learning more, I thought I just can't quite make sense of this. And so in my mid-20s, I read that book and it just broke for me. And so I still stayed in there with the gym because I was married to someone who's in there. My children were in there with the gym. My entire family was. So it took me a while to get out. But yeah, my faith broke in my mid-20s. Did it make you an atheist or just a non-mormon? A non-mormon. What's your just for my guidance? What's your current position on God? I'm excitedly undecided. Okay. Okay. Good. Well, we'll see where we end up at the end of the conversation. So let's talk then about what you actually decided to do once you realized that this was going to be the hinge of the 21st century. Your project is called Project Blueprint. And Blueprints, they show you how something should be built or structured. So what are you trying to show with this project, with the work that you undertake? After that thought experiment of the 25th century, it was clear to me that we basically needed to build a new philosophy, a new value system, new ethics, new morals, new incentive systems. And so my co-founder and I Kate Tollo decided to make this a project. And we said, we will make my body the philosophy. And so if you look throughout time, the first story ever written was Gilgamesh, a story about basically life and death and eternal life. And over the centuries, there's been different archetypes that represent the grappling of the human race of what doesn't mean to live and die and is there an afterlife. And a new archetype needs to exist that represents the quest to try and continue existence in this physical body through the means of science and technology. And there wasn't an archetype that filled that role. And so what we designed is first from a scientific perspective, I'm a cluster of trillions of cells. So we're going to measure every one of those cells as possible, including like we're going to do blood draws and imaging. And we're going to measure my body every way possible. And then we're going to use scientific evidence and say, how do we either slow down my speed of aging and or reverse it? And so we basically we have done a robust scientific project. We are a performance artists trying to convey a new philosophy. Brian Johnson is the first, don't die homo sapien prototype. The first homo sapien that I tried to incorporate that. But by archetype, you mean a positive archetype, right? Like immortality is associated with with anyone from Dracula to Dorian Gray, let's say. So you're trying to make yourself an admirable archetype, right? Someone who people look at and say, this is not a bargain with the devil or something where I'm gonna have a portrait in my, a portrait in my attic that ages while I stay young, right? Like this is something that I would wanna identify with. - Yeah, you know, not necessarily. - Okay. I am willing to shave off good and bad, desirable and desirable. And so people make these connections all the time. It's, you know, it's Dorian Gray, it's Dracula, it's Prometheus. Basically, I say yes to all of it. And I think the play here is, this is a fun game for everyone. You have people who are watching me wanting to learn from me. You have people who want me to fail and they want to laugh. You have, you have this whole mixture and so it's-- - People betting against you. - Yep, and there's an intense interest in me failing. And you know what, that's great. I support their viewpoints. I understand their viewpoints. I think irony is in their favor, but I think it's a, the value, it's a group conversation and a group journey. For those who hate me, those who love me, it's all the same. - How is your cause advanced through the haters? Whether it's love or hate, it's raw energy. - Okay. Tell me about the process then. For listeners and viewers who are not fully familiar with the Brian Johnson experience, like we're speaking, I guess it's 11 a.m.ish, Pacific time, right? So in a typical day, what are you doing to defeat death? - Okay. I'll give a couple of quick examples. So I went to bed at eight o'clock a.m. on the dot and I'm extremely precise about my sleep because it's the number one thing I focus on. I've built my entire life around sleep. Last night, I nearly got five hours of restorative sleep. My arrested heart rate was 40 beats per minute. My HRV was, it was 13% higher. So my body got full restoration and I cleaned out the garbage and to rebuild my body. I woke up at 4 a.m. I then spent five hours. In the first hour, I get light in my eyes, right when I wake up to say, "Hey, body, I'm waking up." I then eat breakfast, which is protein powder. It's hemp and pea protein. Berry is not seeds, extra virgin olive oil. I then work out for an hour. I'm currently training to dunk a basketball. I then do 20 minutes of sauna. I then do some intermittent hypoxia, hypoxia training. Then I have my first meal of the day. That's every single day I do some version. The powder doesn't count as a meal. It does. I guess that's like my-- Yeah, your first meal of the day. Yeah. But every calorie fights for its life, I have an extremely precise nutrition like every calorie gets in there. That's how my entire life is built. I'm doing this with you now. I've got some doctor appointments later this afternoon. I'll do more measurements. But my entire life is regimented structure. This gives rise to people saying, I live in a cage. That's partially true. Also, I'm a living experiment. I'll give you some quick examples for those who are unfamiliar. We try to measure everything. For example, I'm 48 years old. But my left ear is age 64. Based upon some hearing loss, I had as a kid listening to music too loud and shooting guns. So I've gotten hearing aids to try to correct for the deficiencies. But if you're looking at what is-- we age the gums in my mouth. What was the recession, et cetera. Some data sets are very robust. Some are emergent. We just take what I did in my lower gums are ancient. I won't show them to you. But do you know the measurements? No, no. I just can see them in the mirror. And they clearly aged more rapidly than the rest of my mouth. I'm just-- this is just a rough estimate based on church to the bathroom. Yeah. So we spent several months rejuvenating my gums because I have broxism, which means I grind my teeth. And I did that for about 20 years before I had a dentist being like, hey, this is a problem. You need a mouthguard of this type. And so the grinding caused my gums to recede and my pocket depth to increase. So we did a bunch of therapies where we restored my gums to roughly early 20s age. My left ear, we've made zero progress. So sometimes you find your deficiency where you're older than your chronological age. And you can do something about it. Sometimes you can't do anything about it. So yeah, that's why it matters so much to measures. You're trying to find the oldest, highest risk part of your body that creates the highest risk of all-cause mortality. You mentioned superintelligence earlier. And you've sort of undertaken this project over a period where AI has become the focus of so much hope and fear and sort of interest about measurement and analysis and everything else. How are you using AI right now? This project would be stalled without AI because we've acquired 1.5 billion data points. It's impossible for any doctor to keep that in their memory. And so we have built an AI system where we ingest all my data. My genome and my proteome and every measurement we do, all my wearables, you name it, we do it. And then we're trying to make sense of it. And so the AI has been phenomenal in terms of identifying patterns we can't pick up through manual processes. The idea behind what I'm trying to do is cars drive themselves. Software now writes itself to a certain degree. The next is health. Health is going to write itself, which means if I can measure my body and feed data to AI, AI will know better what to do than me or my doctors. And so what I'm building is my autonomous self. So I'm building like a self-driving body. So it just automatically takes care of itself more robustly than I can. OK, but just to push on that analogy for a minute, like as you describe your day, your body is not just taking care of itself while you go about your daily business. Your daily business is this project. And you are a wealthy entrepreneur who can-- and you're getting to this in a minute-- you're also making money from this project. But this is your business. And so it's not a passive thing where you've just trained your body to drive itself the way that a way mo might drive you around San Francisco. So what's the takeaway for someone who works a nine to five job in which maybe they can eat the protein powder or something. But otherwise, they're not going to be dunking a basketball at 2 p.m. Pacific. Yeah. So I have two things on this. One is there are some parts of the project which are autonomous. So for example, the bed I sleep in automatically adjust temperature according to my body. So it changes my temperature profile about 32 times a night, making sure I stay in deep sleep and REM sleep. And I avoid wake events. So yes, there's some advanced features where I get real time data, real time measurement, and real time adjustment. But you're right that I'm basically in analog world. That as much as I want AI to run my life, I have to physically take those actions. I have to buy food. So I totally agreed to you. And we're trying to-- I mean, you can have-- You can get door dash. But yeah, you have to. Yeah. I'm also interested watching you because I spend a certain period of my own life treating myself as a guinea pig. I had a very severe chronic illness that had basically totally ruined my life for a period of a couple of years. And let's just say there was insufficient medical data on how you would ideally treat this. And so I treated myself as to use the language of studies. I was an end of one. And I was just trying things. Things that people had recommended, things that had some science behind them. But this was an all-consuming process at a lot of times. But first of all, I was always treating it as a provisional thing to get me back to health. That was sort of how I understood it. And the end, it got me there or close enough to there that I no longer live like that. And secondly, I didn't imagine that the things I was doing were going to be generalizable. Like, yeah, I would-- if other people had the same illness, I would give them advice and compare notes and so on. But it just seemed so clear that whatever was going on in my own body was very, very idiosyncratic. And so when I look at what you're doing, I'm curious both about sort of-- this is an open-ended thing, right? Like, there's no point where you're like, OK, now I can relax and stop trying all these things because you're not trying to attain health. You're trying not to die. And that's an ongoing process. Second, I really don't completely understand how you think you can reasonably generalize from, again, one body, one set of measurements and monitoring and so on to a wider population. This is not something we do with the scientific studies are not based on one person's experience and so on. So you can take either one of those questions or you can react in any way to that that you want. Yeah. You can think of this in the idea of-- Capitalism means you learn how to make money. You learn the skill sets of how to make money. And people do that in a variety of ways. But you're choosing, I'm going to choose to devote 10 hours of my day to make money. Or I'm gonna choose to spend blank hours of my day trying not to die. And so it's really the exact same thing. And people don't quite understand that. Right now, we know how much coffee costs and we know what it means when the bank account balance gets a blow $100. But we have no accounting ledger for life and death. You don't know what it costs you to stay up all night. You don't know what it costs you to be 40 pounds of overweight. You can look at some rough data tables, but we don't have an accounting system. You don't see your bank account balance change that frequently. And so what I'm trying to do is be a prototype, an archetype to say there's a new way of thinking and a new way of being that has it. And so the way I try to compress this for people is I say, look, I understand health is complicated. Your life is complicated, right? Like everything is going on, it's stressful. And so I try to say focus on one thing. That is your resting heart rate for bed. If somebody focuses on that single biomarker, it helps them wrestle the bad cultural habits we have as a society, which means we go to bed, way too late, inconsistently, we have our screens on our faces up into the bed time, we eat way too late, we have snacks. So that one thing really wrestles the majority of bad habits. And once a person can wrestle their sleep, then all of these positive things happen. So I do try to say, of course, I'm the outlier, but I can simplify this into basics. So you're doing 100 things, and you're saying that the person who watches you can do two of those things. That's right. But you're also selling products, right? That's right. What do you sell? Everything I put into my body, I make available to other people can do if they choose. And is everything you're putting into your body chosen based on some kind of scientific research or back ground? Exactly. So you're basically selling products. You're not saying, "I, Brian Johnson, have run studies on these things." But you're saying, "I, Brian Johnson, have looked at studies on these things." And they've persuaded me that I should be willing to ingest them. Exactly. And I need to be very clear, I am not doing this to make money. Well, I started this project, and I needed to raise an eyebrow at that. Please, I want to know the skepticism. You can raise too if you'd like. Okay, okay. But really, you're not trying to make money. Absolutely not. I mean, so my premise on this, I already have plenty of money. I don't need any more money. And in fact, if I wanted to make money, there's probably 10 to 20 businesses. I would start way before this one. The business that I'm in sucks. Low margin, pain in the ass, terrible logistics. Just is not the business I would build. And sometimes I really regret having done it. You know, like, my life would be so much simpler by not having to spend time on this business. But I basically, it's, whether you believe me or not, I'm genuinely trying to do people a favor in doing this. Do you pull products? Like, like, are you constantly pulling things in and out, taking things for a while and saying, "Oh, that didn't have any effect on the biomarker and so I'll stop taking it?" Like, what are you adding and subtracting? Mostly therapies. So when we, when you measure the body, you say, okay, the biological age is blank, right, can you reverse it? Then what therapies can you do? And so we've done the list of the best therapies with the best evidence of showing age reversal. And we've done those. So we did a hyperburetcoxidant therapy. We've done sauna. We did IHHT. We've done what's the best? Again, let's say I'm the person who says, Brian, I can only do one thing out of your list of therapies. I'm a busy man. I've got a lot of kids. I have a podcast. I'm changing jobs. What do I do? - sauna. I would do dry sauna at, that's not wet, not infrared. Dry sauna at 200, well, between 175 Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. And I'd do it about four to five times per week for you because you're a man, I would suggest you put ice on your boys because otherwise has negative effects on your fertility. So be sure they're cooled. - I have five children, honestly. Brian, I'm not super worried about that specific issue. So what about the reversal? You talked about the idea that you're looking for things that actually reverse the age of an organ or a part of your body. What's something that you've done that you think has the most promise for that? - We've seen several hyperbaric oxygen therapy was one of the most efficacious therapies we've ever done. The difficulty is that you need to be in this chamber for 90 minutes, for 60 sessions in 90 days. So it's a huge time. - That's a commitment. - It's a huge one. So it's just not practical for people to do it. But we saw benefits in skin health, telemers, microbiome, brain, yeah, so we saw across the board. - And again, in any of these cases, right? You're one, you're one person, right? So are you assuming that somewhere in your fan base there are people who are saying, oh, this is really interesting that Brian Johnson got these results. We're going to set up a big controlled trial based on this. - Because I mean, that's, again, to take this beyond your own experience, you need that kind of thing, right? - Absolutely. - Yeah, okay. - I'll give you an example where that's bridged is, we did this experiment looking at psilocybin. And so people think about psilocybin, either as an ancient ceremony, medicine ceremony, or recently for trials looking at PTSD and anxiety, things like that. So we asked the question, is psilocybin a longevity medicine? And so we did the most quantified psychedelic psilocybin experience in history. We measured 250 biomarkers. And one of the things we found was there was this unique metabolic reset of my blood glucose. And we couldn't, that was not in the literature before. So in that sense, yes, there are several groups now who have petitioned, trying to get funding for a rigorous study to look at psilocybin more robustly as a longevity therapy. It would be a very big shift in how people think about this. So we've had several wins like that of reframing given topics in what we do. And again, it doesn't answer definitively, but it points in the direction of, is this worthy of a study? - And aspirationally, based on your knowledge right now, without some further dramatic breakthrough, just to put yourself in the hands of your haters for a minute. Like how many years of your life do you think you're getting through this kind of regimen? - Yeah, let's actually amplify their argument and say the better argument for them is I'm shortening my life. Right, not only am I not doing myself good, let's say I'm actually doing myself harm, right? By minute, intermingling with my body. And you know what, like I'm open to the criticism. You know, like maybe that's true. Maybe it's better to just let my body do a thing without meddling. We measure things as best we can. We try to look at all the data. We say like how have my body doing? We look at hundreds of markers every month, trying to say is it good or bad, but ultimately we don't know. You know, so I think it's really an open-ended question. This is like early, early stages of science. - But I guess what I'm driving at is there's the best case scenario where you do everything right and the end result is you're healthier in your 80s than you otherwise would be. And you avoid some disease, you otherwise would get. And in the end, you get an extra one to seven years of life and that's a win for you and for everyone who ever watched you on a video, right? But that's not defeating death. That's not, don't die, right? Whereas actually defeating or more realistically I think postponing death, some people would say, is gonna come from some big breakthrough that has nothing to do with the protein powder you take or anything and everything that you do is gonna look sort of like, you know, like dieting advice before ozampic, right? What do you make of that argument and how does your work, does your work actually connect is what I'm saying to, the people who wanna add not one to three but 50 to 75 years to human life spans, let's say. - Yeah, I'm under no illusion that we don't have, you know, the longevity drug that just makes death, you know, go away, but health is forgotten until it's the only thing that matters. And so I think your case is a good example that when you do have something wrong with you, it wrecks your life. And when you choose to do things that put you at risk of your life being wrecked, that's bad. And so there's rarely is there harm in getting good sleep, exercising, deciding not to do bad things. And so I'm presenting the case that in this moment, this is more of a philosophical stance of, you want to treat your body well, you want to be in a good condition, but under no illusion how we arrived yet. Also, if we think that AI is going to progress at the speed is going to move in the coming years, on the time scale of 30 years, it's a different reality 10 times over. And so I don't think that we need to see the life extending drug right now. We just need to see as the coming years progress. That's when I think the real drugs will come about. But right now it's choosing the lifestyle. - Okay, right, but there's a little bit of a, what they call a mountain Bailey argument. here, right, where yeah, everyone wants to be healthier. Nobody wants to, you know, have a preventable disease, but that's different from don't die. And you are, in fact, at the same time, talking about the vantage point of the 25th century, and the idea that death itself can be vanquished, right? And which is more important to you, the actual goal of defeating death, or just the goal of adding three years to some people's lives. - I mean, it depends, you know, my parents are in their 70s. And so for them, the way I think about their care, and I spend a lot of time caring for my parents, those three years matter a lot, right? So I need progress in AI to move forward very fast for them. For me, you know, if my life expectancy is, you know, 80, 33 years is all very long time right now for things to advance. - Okay. - And so it's less urgent for me, more urgent for my parents, and then for people with certain conditions. - Yep. - Right. - Okay, so the everyday health stuff is in a way targeted towards people who are already on the downslope of life, perhaps like myself, right? But, you know, I'm young yet, but for people your age and younger, it's sort of a building block towards a potentially deathless future. Two things have happened to you fairly recently. You were diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and you fell in love. How did those change your perspective, if at all, on the life you've chosen? - I'll start with love first. - Always a good idea. - You know what? This is the happiest I have ever been in my entire life in a relationship. It is spectacular. I didn't know to aspire to this. You know, when I was a kid, I had in my mind a practical, functional relationship is about as much as you can aspire to. Never at this. And so I am so grateful that she chose me and I can be with her. We have a fantastic time in life. I just can't imagine doing life any of the way. So yes, I'm deeply in love. I feel deep companionship and I've changed the way I speak to my children about encouraging them what to aspire to in a relationship. - Has it made you any less physically healthy? - I noticed you flew to Australia to visit her family. And I know this maybe was a little bit tongue in cheek, but I think you published basically something about how much damage that air travel did to your body. And look, I've flown a bunch in the last few months and you've been to Europe and the West Coast. And without having your biological monitoring on my body, I believe it, right? - Yeah. - So you sacrificed a tiny bit of your own potential immortality to fly to Australia to meet her parents. I'm just curious if there's any more of that. Like do you feel like maybe you're monitoring your body a tiny bit less intensely? I know that she is now involved in your work. And there are some, again, not safe for work, sort of things that you have monitored that people can Google if they're interested in. But has it changed your approach to your everyday monitoring at all to be over the moon and love with someone? - To her credit, she unabashedly supports me. And it is not a situation where she tries to encourage me to lessen what I'm doing or become less intense. If anything, my bedtime comes up and she's like, maybe it's seven. - Time to get a bed. - It's seven, 50, you gotta go in and I'm gonna catch up. I can't move. - All right, that's love then. I can't deny it. Tell me about your illness. - Yep, so I, getting an incurable diagnosis is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I am so excited about this. And so over the past couple of years, we've really tried to master the basics. Like how do you sleep well? And how do you eat well and all those kind of things? And now I get to work on something incredibly exciting, which is, you know, in modern society, when you get a diagnosis, it's usually, you have to just live with it. You have to concede to the disease and deal with the downrolled spiral of things getting worse. And medicine can't do anything about it. And now just over the past 12 months, that has shifted. Individuals are now using AI and biotech to address their own diagnosis. And so Kate got diagnosed with endometriosis. I had my autoimmune gastritis. So the beautiful irony and the, as a gift to my haters, Netflix did a documentary on us, don't die. We came out gusto, you know, with like all this ambition. In one year later, we both have incurable disease. And it is diagnosed, right? So what great irony. And we are going to cure both of them. And we are down this path. And so if I believe and don't die, and if I want don't die to be real, I must go through the gauntlet of getting diagnosed with an incurable disease or more. And so it's just a reddit. It was going to happen eventually. Exactly why not now. Exactly. I have to do it. I'm ready to do it. I've never felt more ready to do it. So I want this. I'm excited about it. It was a good gift of timing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now I do want to get back into the philosophical a little bit. And again, there is I think a pretty clear distinction between the pursuit of hewers for existing diseases and the quest to defeat death. And obviously, those blur into one another. But I still think there's also a real philosophical distinction. And you are on the, we're defeating death side of that distinction. I just want to sort of talk a little bit about what that means. Again, to you. So AI has the potential to revolutionize human health and not just cure diseases, right? But extend life spans by 50 or 75 years. So just let's say that happens. And you have the option-- and presumably, lots and lots of people take it of living that long. What do you get from the extra 50 to 100 years? What's the case for it? Mm-hmm. It's a similar scenario of us traveling back in time and asking that same question to homeorectus. A million years ago, they have an accident or a hand. And you ask them, tell me about the future of the species. And they say, well, you're going to forage and hunt. And do this. They're not going to talk about the invisible world of molecular or the invisible wave lanes in the air where magic devices in our hand or white pills just follow the cure disease, make antibody, cure infections. And I think that's potentially the case right now that we may be the equivalent of homeorectus. We may be absolute cavemen in our understanding of reality and our ability to experience reality. And so I don't think any idea that I have of reality right now is a basis to think about that question. I am wide-open and curious about a frontier of possibility that is beyond my ability to imagine and articulate. OK. But I still would like you to articulate a little bit. Because you are evangelizing on behalf of this not as a hypothetical, but as a goal that human civilization should have. And saying, well, I can't tell you what will happen then, but it'll just blow your mind. I think it's an insufficient sales pitch. So I just want you to just as an example. Right? What happens right now, we have seasons of life as human beings. We have childhood. We have youth and young adulthood. We have a phase where lots of people become parents. As you and I both have, we have the stress of middle age where some people start podcasts and other people turn themselves into living experiments and immortality. And then you have a transition to old age retirement and so on. Like when you imagine this unimaginable world of extra life, is it a world where youth extends itself? And people think of themselves as having-- instead of you have 15 years to find your vocation and find a mate, you have 50 years to do it. Is it a world of incredibly long retirements? Is it a world-- what is the optimal vision of what people-- just in their own lives are doing with that extra time. I'm curious. So first, I'll say two things. One is that the reason why I give the homo-- the homo erectus example is that I think it's actually more intelligent to see. it in the unknown and the comfort of not knowing. Then it is to try to suppress the hyperventilation of not knowing. When a topic of the future comes up and a person can immediately answer what they will do, how they would do it, and how they will give the meaning, they begin hyperventilating. I understand that instinct. So I give that example to say, I understand it's challenging that it does create tension internally. Also, you can breathe through and sit with the tension and be okay with not knowing. It's okay. So you're saying I should take my question to the sauna. Yeah, with ice on the boys. With ice on the boys. Yep. But the second thing I would say is that as my, I've traveled 48 years being a conscious person. I've experienced what it's like to be a child, to be a teenager, to fall in love, to have children, to get intoxicated with alcohol, to have heartbreaking experiences life, to be betrayed, to have jealousy. I have this collection of experiences. I've also done some psychedelics. I did the civil cyber. I've done five Mio DMT. I both live streamed both those things. I've been ketamine. I measured my brain with my brain or face company kernel. Never, ever in my past, what I have been able to say based upon my 40 plus years of experience, what reality would be like, use it as psychedelic, ever. And so the observation here is that I don't know. And I'm really curious to understand what is my conscious brain capable of that I'm not aware of. And that question has me so excited about the future, so much more. So then like trying to map, I'm going to the same things we've done for thousands of years, just in different iterations. Maybe the case. And I would love to listen to this podcast. She's listening to right now. She can't hate. I'm going to ask that question again for you, which was better, Brian, taking psilocybin or falling in love with Kate. You have another chance at that answer. Kate, come here. I can see your face. You know what? One more try on the question. Yeah. I'm looking at her right now. And she's, a guy she's so beautiful and she's so sweet. It's amazing. And I would say they're equal. And Kate will, Kate will support me. Kate is an amazing woman. Number one, that's my first comment. Your love for Brian is a very, very impressive commitment to me. Second, I just think like, look, there is a dystopian view of life extension, right? And yes. And I agree that certainly it can be based on a kind of freaked out hyperventilation about the future. But it can also be based, right, on sort of extending from the world as we observe it today. So just to take an example from this very podcast a couple weeks ago, I had Sam Moyne on who is a law professor at Yale who's written a book called Gerontocracy in America. This is a book about how as people have lived longer and often been healthier, laid into life, they have ended up effectively sort of maintaining power and influence and wealth in ways that have stunted the prospects for the next generation, right? And again, that's not a case of like just sort of projecting something out of our imagination. That's something that is concretely happening now. And let's say that your regimen enables you to live to 125, right? What would be your approach to your relationship with your children and grandchildren in terms of resources and heritins, anything like that? Yeah. I mean, I think the there's a question of what I would do personally, there's a question for society. We're seeing the imbalances is detrimental to societal health. And it needs to be corrected for. And you know, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of means on how to waste and do that. But over time, these imbalances support them way out. I personally am not of the mentality where I'm trying to create super wealth for me and my generation. I'm not trying to hoard value. I don't that's not my goal. Right. Right. But neither is it the goal of the people who are in Professor Moines telling our hoarding wealth now, don't see themselves as hoarders. They're just people who have gotten extra years of their lives and they feel good and don't see why they shouldn't stay in charge. Right. I mean, this is this is a very, very human impulse. Right. And it just seems like it's one that would become more powerful if people were given an extra 30 or 40 years of life. I had a sense of gray. It's a risk. Also, I'm confident that society was sorted out. Do you want to go back to earlier stages of your life? Yes. Interesting. Same more. When I did five Miodium Ti live streamed it. That you want to go back. You want to go back to that live streaming. No, sorry. That following morning, I woke up. I had butterflies in my stomach, like I had when I was 10 years old. I was excited about the hotel room I was in. I was excited about getting coffee for Kate. Randown the hallway and knocked on her door. She's like, what is going on? I'm like, I am so happy to see you. Here's your coffee. And then I ran up and down the hallway because I was so energized and I wanted to get some, I wanted to get a workout in before we had to take a flight. I felt like a kid. Oh man. When you wake up as an adult, you wake up. You just have clouds over your head. You've got all these problems to deal with in this drama. It's just heavy. I just like the clouds parted and I had blue sky. It was unbelievable. Then over the weeks, it faded. The barnacles started to accumulate again. I felt like an adult and I had the same weighty things on me. But I have not felt like a kid for 35 years. I had that brief moment of time. It was spectacular. As adults, we forget about it. It's very hard to go back in time and really remember what it felt like to be a kid or to fall in love for the first time. Life is so spectacular. All the different stages we have. But yeah, that moment was really, I mean, it really brought me back to my senses of life is amazing. So much of how we view it is the configuration of our brain. How big is the barnacle load? How much trauma do you have built up? How way down are you in your brain? I guess, yeah. I mean, I can appreciate what you're saying. Obviously, as I wake up, as a middle-aged man with many barnacles on my brain. At the same time, it seems like some of this also depends on how you feel about how your 20s went. In your own self-neuration, you worked yourself into the ground, making money, and your marriage failed, and your religious connections failed, and so on. And so now you're doing a reset and you're in love and you want to feel youthful again. And that makes sense to me completely. But I'm just, I'm curious, again, looking into the future, how many times you can do that and have it feel like sort of a new thing that's worth doing versus something where, you know, I mean, there's a lot of people who blow up their lives, right? In pursuit of that feeling. People who betray spouses and betray children and so on, right? Like the pursuit of that feeling can obviously be a spur to very, very bad human behavior as well. And again, I apologize for being sort of incomplete in my imaginings, right? But I'm, it's just very easy for me to imagine how people given this extra time, you know, get stuck in cycles, right? And don't advance and don't progress. I also, you know, a vision of a future where everybody gets an extra 50 years and they spend it blowing their minds on, you know, hallucinogenic drugs. Sounds really stupid to me. If I'm going to be totally honest with you, right? Like, and I say this, I have never taken hallucinogenic drugs. So it may be that this is, this is again, a failure of my own imagination. But it seems to me that the things that like, like I am much more impressed, and I mean, this sincerely, when you tell me about the insane regimen that you've built for yourself in the real world, then when you tell me about the mind blowing things that you experience taking, taking hallucinogens, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you, using a point you made earlier on dietary protocols, you know, like what was available to somebody who was a beast before? What could you do? And then imagine telling them about GLP once, like, you know, you're going to take an injection or a pill. It's going to like basically just take you to normal. That's, that's a miracle. That's a modern day miracle. It's biblical. And there's, you and I could do a brainstorming exercise and say in five years with the power of AI, is it possible you take a pill and it cleans your brain up to where you feel like you're in your early 20s? The speed of your brain processing, your disposition on your life, bright, I bush you tell, then, and then the way you would be on a podcast, maybe your questions would be very different, the way you approach your guests, maybe different. Like, these are not unimaginable scenarios. And so I don't, I don't think this is-- - But in that scenario, you would have to be assuming, that this magical pill strips away the barnacles, but leaves whatever accumulation of wisdom that you found, right? Like, there's a lot of ways in which I would never say that I want to roll the clock back, because I think there's sets of things that I've learned and experienced that have changed me and yes, made me older, biologically and mentally, but I would certainly, before you handed me that pill, right? I would wanna read the fine print. I wouldn't wanna become my 24 year old self in this body, although I certainly would like, actually I get a lot of sleep. - You got a bad face. - I sleep well, but there are other aspects of being 24, obviously, that would be desirable. The body itself, let's take a couple more sort of speculative points and then end. So among AI people who I talk to, there are people who are into the idea that AI is going to cure disease and lead to radical life extension. And then there's a lot of people who are committed to the idea that the point is to get the mind to escape the body, right? And these are different varieties of transhumanism, I guess, but the idea of the singularity that people talk about starts in a way with the idea that eventually we're going to merge mind with machine and escape embodiment. I'm curious if that appeals to you as someone whose quest for long life is very, very embodied, right? Like you're in, you know, whatever someone might say in criticism of you, they can't say that your head isn't the class. Right? You're in your body. You're thinking about your body. What do you make about the aspiration to have immortality without the body? Yeah. First, the founders of all the big AI companies are our personal friends and they see the big things are coming. And what I'm trying to say, and I'm answering a question just in the indirect path, I'm saying that in this moment, whether you're imagining we are going to live in our bodies forever, whether we're going to upload ourselves, whether there's some kind of hybrid, what I'm saying is the only conversation happening right now on a planetary scale is a value question. And right now, the ultimate values we have as a species is power, wealth, status. We will pursue those three objectives at any cost, including our own life. We will trade our conscious existence to achieve those three things. We're willing to trade our earth's health for those three things. And so the don't die philosophy is don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill the earth, and align AI with don't die. And so this is a philosophy not trying to solve for human needs, it's trying to solve for intelligence itself on planet earth in this moment, where if you believe in this deferming paradox, like are we at a self-destructive stage as a species? Will we survive this moment with the human race go forward? I'm trying to say the ultimate, the pinnacle of existence, like the absolute highest expression of virtue is that intelligent life chooses to preserve intelligent life above all other objectives. Somebody once said greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends. I feel like there's a big part of human existence on this planet that is not devoted to optimizing power, wealth, and money, but is devoted to sacrifice for others. And historically, the central part of that sacrifice has been a willingness to not always die, but take risks of death so that others might live. And we do that even in our costeted upper-middle class existence or my costeted upper-middle class existence, we do that all the time, right? And that's what women do when they bear children. That's what men do when they go to war, women go to war now too, obviously, but that once was a division of labor. And why would you take the risk of pregnancy if you're trying to never die? Well, maybe we'll have artificial wounds, right? I know there can be a technological answer to all these things, but it just seems to me like don't die as a centering philosophy risks. Very strongly risks losing all of the benefits that human beings have gained from being willing to die, like a willingness to die. Like what are you willing to die for, Brian? I mean, it's no surprise that the inevitability of death is the hardest existential question that humanity has always faced. And it makes sense that if you have that exist for tens of thousands of years, humans are going to create elegant explanations on why death is a virtue, why it is something a bunch should justify it. I don't think death, I want to be clear. Like I don't think that death is good. I'm against death, but I think being willing to die is good. Exactly. And what I'm saying is that is a philosophy that is built in reaction to addressing this uncomfortable reality that death is inevitable. This is a reconfiguration of our psyche at the deepest possible level. And it's unimaginable that every value we've come to hold as an esteem is now in question. And so I want I'm saying is there is a future where don't die is intuitive and natural and common sense and we look back at our stage and be like, those guys were barbarians coming up with these stories about why sacrificial death was good for society. So it takes a leap in imagination to imagine this. But you look at through history, like that's always been the case that these ideas are wacky and they run counter to all the common norms and intuitions and status quo. Don't die as a gigantic leap as a philosophical statement of we value existence above all of their virtues. Right. But okay, I'm just gonna end with, and you can respond however you see fit. And there's a line in, see as Lewis's Narnia books to the effect that this is, in the same zone as Dracula and Dorian Gray and all the others that you're trying to either offer an alternative to or not, right? So someone reaches out and claims immortality in that story and Lewis says they find their hearts desire and find despair. And I have sympathy for your hearts desire, right? I am a Christian, I believe in God, I want to live forever too in some form. And the Christian promise is itself, it's a little bit like the singularity, right? Spirit surviving bodies and it's a little bit like physical life extension, right? People, Christians believe in the resurrection. So they believe that you'll be reunited with embodied existence. But really crucial to the Christian vision is the idea that this includes a kind of purification, right, a transformation, purgation. So that the self that lives forever is also set free of all the things that make us unhappy here and now, like the personal hells that we can create. And again, forgive me the psychoanalysis, but you started out by saying you got into this because your life was destroyed, right? You were depressed and miserable and unhappy, right? And so you found a purpose. But I just want to know, suppose this purpose was fulfilled, I give you, I give you bodily immortality and you don't have to monitor your glucose levels to get it. Would you want to live forever alone with yourself? I'll go back to this experience I had with the psychedelic five-emiodium tea. - Okay. - It was without question the most potent experience of my existence. And I did a very large dose, 27 milligrams. And my experience in doing that was, it basically takes you on a journey to understand the ink. incomprehensible preciousness of existence. And you're met with a decision. You can either say yes, and journey into that, and get incomprehensible state, or you can panic and say, I don't know, or I don't have control. And if you say no and you panic, it's a bad outcome. It is a very, like it is a excruciating experience to be trapped in that state when you're panicking and want to claw back control. I said yes, and I think it was the first time in my life. I was physically, spiritually, mentally ready for that. And I said yes to existence in a deeper, more comprehensive way than I ever thought possible. And I, even though that experience has now been several months over, it will not leave my mind that the truth, the greatest truth is an uncompromising, never ending, non-qualified, yes to existence. Good. But what if the message of that, and the reason that it has stayed with you, is that your current life is lived in an everyday, constant quest for what? Control. You've given, I mean, this is your, your project is about controlling the body. What if the psychedelic was trying to tell you that the uncompromising yes to existence also includes accepting not only suffering, but death and not pretending that you're going to micromanage your way through it. Isn't that a possible interpretation? I think what's going to happen is AI has built autonomous driving cars, self driving software. We will have autonomous health, our health, whether we, you know, eventually we'll have little nanobots running through our bloodstream, these connections to genes, like you won't have to, you won't have to have, you can, you can let go at that point, you just have to hang on a little, a little while. We are inevitably headed towards that where it will be autonomous. We, it will happen at, at speeds and scales, which are beyond our capacities. Now, I don't know when this is going to happen, but it is inevitable to happen if we hang out as a species and we continue to have an ordinary society. And in that moment, you know, everything changes. But yes, this is a, you have to, to, to roll with my thought experiments, you do have to accept the few basic premises on the speed of technological development on what we're actually capable of. But yes, I believe we're walking towards that. You have to accept, right? You have to accept the premise that eventually we can have this kind of control without having the downsides of obsessive control. And that in that moment, you release control. Yeah, you let go, I have to, it's a, it's a job to do this now. But eventually it won't become, and to be clear, you know, I don't die as friendly towards Christians and Muslims and Jews and every religion. Don't die does not say anybody is wrong. You know, and being a Christian, great, we're both in agreement. Neither you nor I want to die right now. Respectfully, Brian, I mean, the affirmation is appreciated, but you know, in the end, yeah, in the end, we'll find out. Brian Johnson, thank you for joining me. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been part of this show's audience. It's been an honor to share these interesting times with you. [Music]