The $2M Plan To Age In Reverse - Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson is a founder of Braintree and Kernel, a futurist, biohacker and an author. What does it take to achieve immortality? This is the frontier that Bryan Johnson is beginning to pioneer. Armed with a team of the world’s top researchers and an unlimited budget, he is using cutting edge science and technology to see just how long he can live for. Expect to learn why Bryan chooses to be on a fully plant based diet, what Bryan Johnson’s full morning routine looks like, the optimal body fat percentage for living longer, why humans are addicted to self-destructive behaviour, why Bryan doesn’t fear death, why Bryan doesn’t use saunas or cold plunges for increasing his lifespan, what his training plan looks like and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Bon Charge’s red light therapy devices at https://boncharge.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Check out Bryan's website - https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.co/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #longevity #bryanjohnson #biohacking - 00:00 Intro 00:40 Does Bryan Fear Death? 06:11 Technology’s Role in the Meaning of Life 12:52 The Most Compelling Data from Bryan’s Work 17:50 Why Bryan is Vegan 26:01 How to Identify & Overcome Self-Destructive Behaviours 36:52 Data-Based Optimal Training Regime 46:34 Why Having Less Body Fat is Good for Longevity 53:04 Is It Better to Have Fewer Goals? 58:47 How Bryan Deals with Negative, Unwanted Emotions 1:09:56 How Important is Sunlight Exposure to Appearing Youthful 1:14:48 Does Bryan Regret Not Starting Earlier? 1:24:52 Where to Find Bryan - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 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 3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal. So no matter how you're looking at it, whether it's my DNA methylation, my fitness test, my biomarkers, my phenotyp markers, whatever you're looking at, the data says the same thing. I'm in near perfect health.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Brian Johnson, welcome to the show.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  Do you fear death?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  No, I love life.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  Is there a distinction between those two?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  I

• 0:56Speaker 00

  I do not have a, I know what fear feels like and I don't experience that emotion when contemplating death.

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  I spent a good bit of time looking at the longevity subreddit many, many years ago, when David Sinclair first 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 the deeper down in the recesses, is there something, is there a denial of death? Is there a fear from, from what's coming in the future driving you at all?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  My, my main source of inspiration is having read hundreds of biographies. I love learning about people and their time and place that were 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 you know, this and that. So people like to play games where points can be kept and you can be compared to people and ranked.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Genius is a different game. It's trying to find things that don't exist. And you need to have the stamina and fortitude to go out and pave your own path and do things that are not recognized, appreciated or valued even in your lifetime. And so to me, that 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 so in my, in my understanding of my reality, I seek to be like those people.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  And with that, it means disregarding current wisdom around approaches for health, fitness, sleep, diet, nutrition, training, everything.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Everything. The reason why we exist, what we do with our existence, everything.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so in your view, what is the reason why we exist?

• 3:33Speaker 00

  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, of the time and place. Like you, you basically, it's a mirror of the social and cultural norms. And the person's 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.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  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 a 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, we're still a little bit zombified. Like, we just haven't quite seen it. And we'll be better off if we can try to catch these, these waves.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of the meaning of life being basically dependent on the local ecology and the local time. So if it was Britain in 1100 AD, it would be in service of God, you know? It would, 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, you know, pick your time, pick whatever it is that people desire.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  That's well said. I mean, just, 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 Chinese, you know, 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. They're simply a reflection of what was technologically capable in that time and place. That's it. You know, human guru narrative aside, that's just it. It's just a mirror on what, on the practical extent to which humans can aspire.

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so in this regard, does technology unlock our ability to think about our meaning and our place in the world?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the

• 6:24Speaker 00

  behind Blueprint, I mean, a lot of people observe that Blueprint, they think that Blueprint is about health and wellness and anti-aging.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  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 at 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,

• 7:11Speaker 00

  I think I'm showing

• 7:14Speaker 00

  following Nietzsche of God is dead. I think the mind is dead. That if, if the algorithmic ability, if I can measure, you know, the 35 trillion cells in my body, and an 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 mean, I think at the most fundamental level and the most meaningful philosophical

• 7:51Speaker 00

  revolution to happen in a long time, the mind is dead is here, like it just arrived.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of speculation about artificial intelligence, maybe five years to 10 years ago, was that, yeah, sure, we'll be able to automate certain things. It'll be able to do kind of normal forward-thinking processes, but it can't do creativity. It can't do art. It can't do writing. It 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

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  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 was existentially connected to their ability to do wayfinding. I think that there is a difference in kind in terms of how people see their own regulation of their physiology, right? 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. You know, even see this around vaccines as well, that the difference between somebody taking a pill versus getting an injection, there's

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  just, there are certain relatively arbitrary sort of rules that we place on what feels sacred, what doesn't, 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, 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.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Very well said. Yeah, I would give you, yeah, you absolutely synthesized 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 explain 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. It's like, I do those three, and then I give them a thought experiment. And I say, let's,

• 10:38Speaker 00

  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, as far superior, physical and mental, spiritual well-being.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  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 me from myself. Yes. A third say, sure, but I want to change a few things. It's like lol, that's not the thought experiment. And then a third group gets deeply offended. You know, just what you were 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.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  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

• 12:19Speaker 00

  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 through 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.

• 12:45Chris Williamson?

  It's like the human Moore's Law affiliation.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  I like to meme, I like to meme 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?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  I think the most compelling data is that I've, using a state of the art 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, you know, people at 10 years old are accumulating aging damage. Most don't realize that. Just as you get older, you accumulate damage faster and it compounds. And so my body's aging extremely slowly. Number two is I have 50 biomarkers, the things you would normally expect, like cholesterol and triglycerides

• 13:45Speaker 00

  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, whether it's my DNA methylation, my fitness test, my biomarkers, my phenotyp markers, whatever you're looking at, the data says the same thing. I'm in near perfect health.

• 14:14Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, people are, a familiar frame of reference would be, what is the return of investment on this company? And investors typically want like a 3X return or a 5X return or a 10X return will be out of the park.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Think about that on lifespan. If you can be around for the future of these technologies coming, your return on life investment could be 5X, 10X, 100X, 1,000X. 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, oh, it's coming, and oh, it's 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

• 15:28Speaker 00

  says. Is the fountain of youth 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.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with the concept of longevity escape velocity?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  I am.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it sounds like you're kind of referring to that, basically, that 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?

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  There's just no agreement, and there's not a way of settling the agreement. And 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 1, but it's better than N of 0.

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Given your markers, given what you have learned, what does the framework look like? Or what does the, or what are the principles and the longest levers that you're looking at?

• 17:18Speaker 00

  It's a process of measuring extensively. I think I'm potentially the most measured human in all of history. Then it's taking that data and it's trying to assess the very best evidence. Now that's, that's an art. Because again, you're gonna have scientists look at the same data and they come with, come with different conclusions. So it's 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.

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  Why are you vegan? What's the thinking behind that?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  By choice. So it blueprint does not express a 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 asked 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 collagen peptides. I'm trying to find a vegan source for that. But yeah, it's a preference, not a necessity.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Why do you prefer it?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Because I would like to.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  I hope that a scale, a scaling law of technology, that the more intelligent a system gets, the more compassion that it has.

• 19:02Chris Williamson?

  So this is an ethical veganism substrate, a little foundation that you're playing on top of reducing animal suffering, I'm gonna guess.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  It's a

• 19:15Speaker 00

  it's a contemplation that

• 19:19Speaker 00

  the the problem that humanity, the only problem we have to solve as a species, really, is goal alignment.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  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, trillions and trillions and trillions of agents of intelligence, whether they're cells, 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 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

• 20:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  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 at which you'll say, let's do a six-month test where fish comes in, or seafood comes in, or red meat comes in?

• 20:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:11Chris Williamson?

  Right, I understand.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know, large, I mean, the, my, if you just look at the evidence and you say, my, I'm trying to goal align 35 trillion cells that make up me. And the objective function is to reduce entropy.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm running this, this massive computational model with 35 trillion cells on goal alignment with myself. And I 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 eight billion humans? Can we get 160 some odd nation states to cooperate on planet Earth? Like, we're always thinking about these big cooperation problems. But the, 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.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 22:53Chris Williamson?

  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, we don't have a metric that says, I want, 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?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if, uh, this is fun talking to you.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  This is the exact problem I've been trying to solve. And this is why I say the mind is dead. So when I approached 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 like the like the personal problem I was trying to solve, which mapped like some other ambitions I had. But when I look at myself and I'm trying to distill

• 24:27Speaker 00

  those kinds of questions like, who am I? What do I want? What are my goals? There's thousands of Bryans chiming in like right now. It's, you know, it's 10:30 a.m. Brian speaking. 5:30 p.m. 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.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  And that's why, you know, 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 could 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. And that's why I followed the algorithm. It's freed me from this insanity, which used to be me.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  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, or whatever it might be. There was a point at which you had to go through a process of stepping back and saying, what do I want to want?

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  That was the first step. That had to be the first step.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  And step number one, don't die, stay alive.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the problem with alignment, right? You know, that's the concern that everybody has as soon as you get a self-aware, recurrent improvement AGI. Okay, so 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 brake. And I think what I like about your approach is that you, your first priority, as far as I can see, is stopping pressing the brake before starting to press the accelerator. Stop doing the self-destructive behavior. What is

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  your framework for identifying self-destructive behaviors and overcoming them?

• 26:48Speaker 00

  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. So I try to just make it very clean, left or right.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  And what about overcoming it? How do you do that? You've got the many Bryans coming in. And, you know, 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 that 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 happens 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

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  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 like, take me through, or what are 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?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I 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, like just some really basic ones, not get into the nuanced ones where, you know, is gaming good or bad, under what circumstances, you know, like, let's leave those complicated ones out. Just can you stop the blatant self aided destruction behaviors?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And then to have five behavioral change experts represent, you know, present their school of thought, like, here's our protocol, here's how you go about doing it, CBT versus 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, you know, 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,

• 29:42Speaker 00

  no one calls it out, and it's all expected. And if you don't participate in sad, you get called out and ostracized from the group. You're the one who's meant to feel like you 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

• 30:23Speaker 00

  I get excited about the future of being human, is if this algorithm legitimately can arrest my worst proclivities that I'm helpless to to get to arrest, you know, can it do other things for me too, including can it get into my mind one day of stopping all the self destructive harm I do to myself with my own mind? And so this just takes a remapping of what it means to be human. But I've never been happier or 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, you know, they're drowning in their own sad behaviors.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  And I'm the one that should be ostracized. So it's a really funny self-defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they're doing.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  What would the steps that you found most effective at stopping yourself from binge eating?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  It was separating myself into multiple. I'm not one person. I am many. And then it was identifying the specific, most egregious version of myself, which was Evening Brian. He showed up at 7:00 PM every night. So I 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. You know, tomorrow we start all the persuasion tactics. And then when he shows up, I, I treat him as other. Hi, Evening Brian. I see you're here. I see what you're trying to do with your persuasion techniques.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  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, 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 this phenomena that's psychologically so interesting to watch how I myself play within myself on these, in these dialogues. And at first it was really, is contentious, you know, and like you feel that tension and you're so close to breaking for him overpowering.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  But it was really personalizing these aspects of myself and making them other. And then I could work on them one at a time.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  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 have done.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  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 Hormozzi, and he says that when people talk about changing their diet to improve the things that they eat, they often get lost in the weeds around 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

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  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've realized the most self-destructive behaviors that I have too, is probably evening 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're like, it's 10pm, and I stopped eating half an hour ago. So that's why I'm particularly interested in in your in your approach for it.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to be human. And I think if if we are, if we can all be honest, just for a minute, and

• 35:15Speaker 00

  To confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self destruction all the time

• 35:25Speaker 00

  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. They're 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.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  To play devil's advocate for the other side, I think that much of the behavior that people do could be classed as self destructive, especially using the parameters that you set out earlier on. But people can't know what they don't know. And for somebody who doesn't understand that the behavior that they're doesn't understand that binge eating isn't actually good for them because it helps them to relax for those people.

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  It 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.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  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, etc?

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I work out an hour a day. It's a cardio, it's basically I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. And we've worked back through the science of what is cardio zones to be in. And 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, whole body fat on MRI. So we're, we're using these quantitative endpoints. We probably do a hundred different markers that quantifies my exercise protocol. And they're all markers that we can map to optimal clinical outcome ranges.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  So again, the, the goal I'm a problem I'm working on is my 35 trillion cells having less entropy. So I'm not trying to engage in a marathon. I'm not trying to, right, achieve some athletic record. And so really it's just that one goal. And so, um, yeah, so it's just a bunch of weights, cardio flexibility, strength training.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  I noticed, looking at your routine, that you've got a good bit of knees over toes Ben Patrick's stuff in there. And that's been borne out in the data as something which is very effective.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, as we measure my, my tendons and ligaments specifically, they've all dramatically improved.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  And this is a good bit of backward sled drag, some of the ATG knees over toes is lungey stuff. What were you most surprised by? What are the exercises or the contributing routines that you do where you're like, fuck, 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.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  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 and an athlete in high school. And 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. So I guess I'm just surprised that at the chronological age of 45, I would be peaking in my life of ability. And I don't feel like I'm entirely, I mean, I think I could, there's more I could gain. But I suppose I didn't, I previously viewed this as trying to stop an inevitable downward

• 39:54Speaker 00

  trend, but it's actually dramatically improved and maintained.

• 39:59Chris Williamson?

  Are you adding in walks each day on top of this? You know, an hour a day for me, if I was to think about it, doesn't seem like much to optimize, you know, 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 in a shitload of zone two. And then there would have been 45 minutes of yin yoga stretching with breath work. Do you know what I mean? I would have thought it would have been more, but why isn't it more? Why aren't you training more?

• 40:28Speaker 00

  There's a, it's a, it's a tricky puzzle we're trying to solve. I mean, so we, I'm on a caloric restriction diet, so it's 2,000 calories and I take 100 pills a day. And so 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.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  When you do too much exercise, there's a U-shaped curve where you start inflicting harm on the system. And so you're trying to tune all of these things with caloric restriction. It has a side effect of lowering testosterone. So I need to supplement testosterone to get myself in the normal levels. And so we're just playing this really tricky playoff 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.

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Yeah. Because if your RDA of of cows is what 26, 25?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Sorry?

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  What would be your recommended?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  Maintenance for you would be 25 or 26 ish?

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, 26, yeah, 26,55. Yeah.

• 41:55Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So you are quite light. But still, like, 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.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Isn't 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 3,000 range. And then you go, okay, do we want to be in a 1,000 calorie deficit every day? Well, no. Okay. Therefore, we need to bump calories up.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  What? Because G flux theory, which you may or may not be familiar with, something we've spoken about on the show before. What's the problem with increasing your caloric output and then increasing the amount of food you could eat? This means that you can eat more food throughout the day. This would mean maybe that you're more satiated. There will be a sweet spot. How come you guys haven't decided to do that?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Yep, exactly right. Really well said. So we are.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  So add meat, add more exercise, do this or that. And then share your data too. But let's do that. Let's try to accelerate the speed in which we can structurally advance the field. Even if it's N of one, right? It's again, better than N of zero. Yeah, but, but the evidence of my, that my teams looked at, they, 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 this denudant pace algorithm of this longitudinal study of nearly 2,000 people who have been measuring their speed of aging over several years time.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, what if somebody, someone might come in and, and do that? Would you consider switching protocols if somebody did do that?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole goal, right? I mean, I want someone to beat me for that same purpose. Like build the field and, and share with everyone what you're doing. And so that's why I share freely with every, everyone what I'm doing is I want them to do it and then apply their own betterment. And everyone improves.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  And so crowdsourcing longevity research.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And yeah, it's just like, it's, I mean, the intensity of competition, which this has triggered, has been incredibly inspiring. Like, I mean, people, it's a big deal. And so I, I'm in private conversation with a ton of people about how they can beat me. And I, I sincerely hope they do.

• 45:28Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. We hover around 800.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  So we hover around the, we hover around normal, but that's with,

• 45:52Speaker 00

  I think it's nine units a day of testosterone. Is that true? It's two MG patch. I think each one converts into like nine, something like that.

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  That's a dermal patch of testosterone?

• 46:06Chris Williamson?

  I've never heard of that being a delivery mechanism for testosterone before. Is that common?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  It works. Yeah, so I mean, it keeps my levels steady. It's a dermal patch.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fuck yeah. That's cool. I mean, it's much cooler than having to, you know, pin IM every three days or whatever, two and a half times a week or something. Throw the patch on, go about your day, peel a patch off, put the second one on, go about your day. That's pretty cool.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. So you mentioned there that, we both mentioned there 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? Or what's your thinking behind the fact that in the fives range, which is like ridiculously lean?

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that that seems to be optimal as opposed to having high level of body fat?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, in questions like this, I would always defer to my team. You know, I can, 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, that's all they did every day, all day is thinking about that versus me jumping in and out. And so, and then also just knowing that if you have five longevity experts doing this, doing this, they're all going to disagree. But yeah, we've just been following the evidence of your caloric restriction has some

• 47:57Speaker 00

  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 5% body fat is a target of more of where the body has settled out at.

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  It's a byproduct of the fact that you're doing this caloric restriction, and that is why your particular body ends up sitting at 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 that 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 baths? Are you using sauna exposure? Do you consider it a hormesis stressor? Have you tested with it?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  We, we kind of don't do anything that's popular right now. And we we've looked pretty carefully at cold and hot exposure. We've looked at a 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.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I'm starting to kind of get a conception about this 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. Well, let's say that it was your goal to optimize dopamine throughout the day. Okay, well, maybe you would look at adding in cold exposure. Maybe you would 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 a 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'd 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.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  And you would have done it had it had been something that you think would have contributed to it, hasn't folded heat and cold exposure in. 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 would be worthwhile.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yep. Again, very well said.

• 50:35Chris Williamson?

  But it's strange that it's not looking at the data. The data isn't screaming at you, get in a fucking cold tub or like go in a sauna. Like, it's strange that that's not happened, I think.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard. And I really, we, 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

• 51:29Speaker 00

  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, 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 has never been more stable in my entire life. I've never felt more motivated in my entire life. So it's 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 of where you don't really know where to put that piece of the

• 52:12Speaker 00

  puzzle. And then people can misinterpret how to think about it.

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  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 may still be was, does this get us closer to Mars? Every single thing, every single 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 hire this person? Or do I decide to fire 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 get 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.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  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 multifactorial, multivariate creatures with all conflicting goals and self deception and 5pm Brian and 7pm 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.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  And, okay, in your opinion then,

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  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 from that?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  After doing this for a while, this is why.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  I arrive at the mind is dead.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  So if it's the, so let's just walk through this, the process. Like 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, it's a singular objective.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  That simplifies all the decisions around it.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  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 to climate change. Right. The, 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 in the oceans and all the above. You apply a protocol and you repeat data, evidence, protocol. The same is true for everything else.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  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 our biosphere. We have to do that so we don't have dystopic 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, this system with myself, the one thing I have control over.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  I would maybe be tempted, when you say the mind is dead.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  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 is dead 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.

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  How does that play a role? How have you learned to optimize that? What are your frameworks and perspectives on it?

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're right that the sitting beneath the abstract layer of the mind is dead. There's all this nuance of like, 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, you know, it's nice to know I've got that when I'm flying. And so, but 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,

• 57:27Speaker 00

  my objective is to destroy my nemesis before my nemesis destroys me. And my mind is my most powerful nemesis. And so as we, as we start breaking out the complexities and the 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?

• 58:10Speaker 00

  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 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, you know, once we have the free space to do so. But we're not in a safe, 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 the things that are most pressing that threaten our very existence and survival. So we can get to this play space.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  What about when you face negative unwanted emotions throughout the day? They're going to arise, that the sort of things that you have significantly less control over than what goes in your mouth, than how you train, than the time that you go to sleep, than the temperature of your cooled and heated mattress. Yeah, you know, these are unknown unknowns in some regard. So how have you learned to deal with emotional regulation in an effective way? And what strategies can people take away from that?

• 59:25Speaker 00

  I mean, I I was chronically depressed for a decade, likely the result of being an entrepreneur and working my tail end off, building a brain tree Venmo, having three little babies in a bad relationship. You know, like all the stuff that you go through hard, hard times 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 at now, relatively speaking, the amount of negativity in my mind.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  There's like zero. So getting these basic things right in my mind, in my, in my life, like sleep and diet, eliminating these self-destructive behaviors, I almost rarely ever now have a genuinely, what do I call it, a genuinely self-destructive thought. Now, I may contemplate and say, boy, 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. Like, sure, those are all little mind, you know, we all do that with our self-introspection. It helps us improve. But I would say, generally speaking, I've eliminated

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  the most hurtful and self-destructive things that plagued me to the point of suicide. And I just never thought that would be possible.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Huberman, the first things that he said on a podcast episode I did with him was, "You do not control the mind with 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 inbuilt base programming outcome, the state that humans are supposed to be in is minor dissatisfaction. There's the, life is, life is suffering from the Buddha, right? The word for suffering is dukkha, D U K K H A, I think.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  And then some scholars contest that that word doesn't mean suffering, it means unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. You know, the holiday that you plan to go on, the steak that you intended to eat, there is always something, the sand 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, as somebody that is trying to optimize the body as much as possible, downstream from that, has found a very large amount of peace in the mind as well, given what my assumptions would have been about what unperturbed human mentality would have been.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  I mean, thinking about your frame, if 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 of unpleasantness, hunger, or, you know, 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 this is this is existence. And the only

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  way to deal with existence is to eliminate this permanently. But to me, that's really what we're we're just walking around, trying to deal with our conscious selves. And what I like about where we're at as a species is, yes, that's been the case, but it may not be the case. If we have the the ability in the form of computational intelligence, and we now can physically predictably engineer atoms, molecules, and organisms, we're in uncharted territory. And this is why I think the zero, the future is like a zeroth principal future. We have no ability whatsoever to model out what's going to happen. And that's never been

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  true with human society. Yeah, so sure, that may be the state now we're running from constant displeasure. But this is why I have this computational goal alignment system because it leads us to the future. We can't model out or predict. And it may be the most extraordinary thing humans have ever experienced.

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  You know, the optionality is so vast that basically any prediction goes out of the window and the unknown unknown 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.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  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 you've managed to have the, uh, someone else was paying for all of these things to be done for you, right? So like, you know, you materially were able to make it happen.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is, this is a question which my brain just registered as, I just, I just flagged a few alerts in my brain when you asked me this question. Because it said to me, um, hey, this person's asking you your opinion, your un, uh, basically, there's no data involved. There's no reference set, there's no evidence, just your free from, free form, freestyle opinion.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  Terrifying.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Dangerous, because I can make any fucking answer my brain comes up with. 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.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So do you, let's say that you want to play around with ideas. You're at dinner or 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?

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  This is a, this is one of the thought experiments I do at my dinners, my, the blueprint brunches. So I say, okay, let's, let's do a thought experiment. We're at a social gathering, we're playfully having conversation. I turn to someone and I say, hey, I'm interested in hydration. I want to be better hydrated. How much water should I drink? And so a 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 Suzie, she has one too. Her mom thinks it's really weird. She carries 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.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  They're having dinner and they go on thing, right? And then they finally come back and they're like, okay, so yeah. And so I say, okay, great. So your answer is like eight, 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. So I'm sorry, 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 you have seen it somewhere. Okay. So do the thought experiment again. How do you, you know, how much water should I drink? And if they're paying attention, the person says, I don't know.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  If not, they'll do the eight cups of water. But it really is meant to demonstrate the majority of our social interactions.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Serve the function of social cohesion, not truth seeking. And as a result, we pass on these, 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, 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.

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  You muddy the sense-making landscape with people doing performative conversation masquerading as truth-seeking.

• 1:08:46Chris Williamson?

  That's really, that's really, really interesting.

• 1:08:50Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  I suppose it depends on who the conversations with and what the objectives are.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  You know, if you're just there to have fun, if you're actually trying to solve a problem. You know, these blueprint brunches, I put, I bring people together and no one knows each other. So it's, it's a set of accomplished people, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, astronauts, educators. So everyone's kind of doing the dance of feeling each other out. They're trying to figure out ranking and priority and status. They're trying to like, you do all the social stuff. And so people are playing those different games. I, yeah, I just say that my personal participation varies according to the group I'm in and what we're trying to achieve.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Um, 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 onto the skin, also onto the face? Not just from a youthful perspective, but also from a health and physiology perspective?

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  There we are.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  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, see all these dots all over my neck?

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. What's that?

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Uh, from laser. So my, I had, we just, we just bought another laser and my face is still healing from this. Uh, so my, I'm, my skin is sensitive to the sun because it's in these healing conditions. So generally speaking, I'm always aware of the UV index when I go outside. I do wear sunscreen and we measure my skin health robustly. We use multi-spectral imaging where it looks at UV and red and browns and pore size. We use autofluorescence, we use MERS scores, we do biopsies. So we're looking quantitatively at the skin from every angle so that we can say with some degree of confidence how my skin protocol is doing with all the treatments we're doing.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  But yeah, generally speaking, as I understand it, UV exposure has a negative effects on the skin of a certain type with a certain duration with a certain exposure rate. So just generally, I don't get a lot of sun exposure.

• 1:11:46Chris Williamson?

  Are you aware of the brand of sunscreen that you've ended up zeroing in on? Presumably, it's very well researched with a bunch of chemicals that aren't going to make you die sooner.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we use CeraVe AM, which is a 35 UVA, UVB, and then also ELTA MD, which is also UVA, B, AMV.

• 1:12:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, are they regularly available? Or is this some Vietnamese pharmacy website?

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, regularly.

• 1:12:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, cool. Okay, that's good. Um, yeah, it's again, I think that it's very interesting to see what what's showing up in the data. You know, a ton of my friends, very, very big into earthing, into spending time outside in nature, rejuvenative practices, and a big chunk of that involves sunlight exposure.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Chris Williamson?

  A non-insignificant cohort of them are ones that have massive problems with putting sunscreen on their body, on their skin, because of what's going to happen dermally. Is it going to get absorbed and cause me to, full of estrogens? I think that stress testing a lot of these assumptions as you are doing is very interesting. I think that it's helping to see where the rubber meets the road.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, to your point is, it is funny. Every time I say anything about anything,

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  I get these predictable responses. But what about cold exposure, heat exposure, sun exposure? You know,

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. I've hit all the basic bitch questions. Is that what you're trying to tell me, Brian?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  No, I mean, like, you know, was I, you know, did I get my bare skin exposed to the grass exposure? Did I, like, everyone has their frame of, you know, or have I practiced some eastern?

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  You know, meditative blink. Everyone comes to me with their thing of like, but what about? And I, I don't know what to say. We haven't tested every permeation that's ever existed. We've run, we've looked at the data, we look at the evidence, we do the thing and we report back. But that's it. But it is so predictable and it's so funny. That I put something out and I tried to provide something of useful insight. But then people, you know, their questions just smother it into like, it's not viable to them at all. Because all these other variables confound it, which I understand. I mean, but it is funny that sometimes it feels like it's one step forward and four steps back. When people parse these things through all the filters.

• 1:14:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you should have a page on your website of like FSRs, frequently stated rebuttals. And just, what about cold exposure? I, it, it does not seem that we have any evidence to say that we're going to introduce it. What about heat exposure? It does not seem that we have any of it. What about sunlight? That would be maybe time saving. One of the things to consider, you, you mentioned that you're 45. You mentioned that you'd spent, you know, a decade of your life very aggressively building a company. During that time, you were aging it significantly, probably quicker than your biological age was. Does that mean from an internal body clock?

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Perspective that up until somebody really starts to take this stuff seriously or, or happens upon it just by chance, because they end up having a really perfect lifestyle naturally. You're always going to be running ahead of your, of your current age. Therefore, is there a part of you that regrets the fact that you didn't do this 20 years ago?

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, entirely.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  My parents didn't know any better because they were following social norms, but I ate sugar cereal for breakfast, sodas, I was in the sun constantly with no sunscreen. I mean, I shot guns with no air protection. You know, I mean, I just did everything I could have done that would hurt my health. I did and aggressively like I, you know, I was like I'm full of life and I certainly had a lot of fun. I'm sure also it's very hard to correct damage that has happened. So with my children, for example, my 17 year old who is with me right

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  now, he's almost entirely on blueprint and you know, he, to his credit, he fully realizes and he's so grateful for starting this at his age. And so, I mean, it's exciting for him, you know, at this age to be on this protocol. And while, I mean, his friends at school, they, he just got accepted to a prestigious institution for college. He went there for this and yeah, I mean, he did a wonderful job. I mean, he worked his talent off in school and he went to this orientation and he sent me

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  this video. And here are like some of the most talented humans on planet earth and they're downing sugar, junk food, drinking, not sleeping. And I was like, oh my God, this is just, I'm so sad. This is the future of humans. And like we've normalized these behaviors so much and they're sitting within this edifice of intellectual aspiration, doing these things. And I thought, what a disconnect between what we're trying to birth intellectually and what they're doing physically. And I I'm glad that he had the wherewithal to be like, you know, Dad, I'm glad I'm not doing these things. I know how badly poor sleep affects my cognition. I know how badly junk food, you know, affects my, my mood. So.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  But I don't know, it's been on my mind ever since I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

• 1:17:45Chris Williamson?

  There are trade offs, though, you know, there will be a time where your son needs to pull an all nighter before some sort of project gets put in like we inevitably, given the fact that not he right now doesn't just have live as long as possible or reduce the speed of aging, sorry, as his single ordinating principle. It's also don't flunk university, you know, it's also probably make my time at university sufficiently enjoyable that I have memories that I'm fond of when I look back. I maybe get a get a girlfriend, it's maybe play a sport, it's maybe do a bunch of other things. So again, we've mentioned this earlier on, the single ordinating principle is great because it creates a very easy filter through which every decision needs to be made.

• 1:18:28Chris Williamson?

  There will end up being compromises that will need to be made during everybody's life, right? Even during yours, at some point, you will have an opportunity which is so good that you think this is for the greater good of blueprint, but it is going to mean that for this next week of traveling and blah, blah, or I am actually going to speed up my aging, so on and so forth. The difference is there are, there is much lower hanging fruit that some of his peers could pick up on like maybe put the full fat Dr. Pepper down, like maybe Domino's isn't the best way to fuel yourself the night before an exam, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:19:07Chris Williamson?

  But I think that that displays quite nicely the level of a lack of wisdom around what actually makes people operate effectively.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, if we, I, I understand practically what you're saying, right? The trade off space you've represented.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  What I would think would be worthwhile for us to think about is you just pulled out of your pocket, all of the favorite things we humans like to pull out of our pockets. Right? Create enduring memories. We want this experience, you know, like we're justifying the trade off space and in the in doing that, what we're saying is we always have the override switch to do this at all times.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  And what I want to pose is, and this is how we currently think about ourselves as a species. When we walk into this future, we bring those assumptions that remain hidden to our own awareness. And so I like working with this concept of Gen Zero, of this idea that we, a group of humans walking into the future that is willing to divorce themselves from all human norms and customs. Because if you look at this and you say, okay, how powerful is artificial intelligence? How fast is it going to move? And what is our relationship in power going to be in relation to this thing?

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  We don't know. And so I understand what you're saying on the trade offs, but it comes at the question from this position of luxury that we can always choose under any circumstance and make those trade offs. And I want to say I'm open minded to the future of our existence may be more wild and weird and different than we can ever contemplate. And if you, again, if you, if you just look at the mathematical, if you look at the curves of improvement, I think we're closer to that situation than we realize. And this is what I'm really trying to get across with Blueprint is, is the mind really dead? Like, are we genuinely in a situation where algorithms better care for us?

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  And we're no longer pulling the funny business of like, oh, well, here's a cool story. I'm gonna deviate from the algorithm because of it. And this just generates like violent responses inside of people because it steps on their sacredness. But I think this is a relevant conversation for us to have.

• 1:21:49Chris Williamson?

  I think it's, I think that you're right. I understand the point that you mean. I think what

• 1:21:55Chris Williamson?

  What it does presuppose is that axiomatically, everybody else's single ordinating principle would also be slow down aging as much as possible. There are people out there for whom they would say, I have taken it from first principles. That say that they have all of the insight that you do and more. And they say, my life wants to be something which is not that. My goal is to see as many different countries on the planet as possible. I don't care about how long I live, or maybe I do care, but it's third thing down the list.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  As soon as you fold that in, as soon as you fold in any other goal. This is when the trade offs come. And I understand that as soon as you say, there is, there are trade offs that need to be made. You open the door to the executive function of you making a decision, not being outsourced to the blueprint or the boss that made the choice. I understand that that's a very dangerous game to play. And I, from your perspective and with your goals at the moment, I think it makes complete sense. But that does presuppose that everybody else's goal also should be to live as long. As soon as you open the door to that not being the case, I think that the trade offs has to come in.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so it's not even, I'm not even presupposing that everyone needs to have my goal. I'm saying that if you look at the, the drivers of our existence, where artificial intelligence is a force that needs to be reconciled with, that our biosphere and planet earth needs to be sustainable. And that needs to be negotiated with, and that we humans need to not kill each other. That needs to be negotiated with. So what I'm saying is, we currently do this in society, like we say, you can't kill someone. That's against the rules. You can't run someone over with your car. That's against the rules. Like we, we do this in many ways today. We're already doing this massive goal alignment thing in society. It's just going to get much more computational in nature.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Because right now, we see that when humans do whatever they want, whenever they want, it has negative effects on the biosphere that make it unsustainable. So one of those things has to give. Either the biosphere has to give and become sustainable by itself, or humans have to be negotiated with on what their behaviors are allowed to do. And this is what I'm saying, when you look at the large scale goal alignment problem. The presumption that we all have this, we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, may not be true. It's a different set of considerations we're walking into. And so I bring up this as really not to predict the future, but as a thought experiment to say,

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  if we are serious about creating a future that we're going to enjoy, I would much rather have an honest conversation about the potential things we need to be thinking about and the changes in our life. Because everything that, you know, society is so delicately balanced where we don't ask anything of the individual. It's always blaming someone else and expecting someone else to change. We're never pointing itself. And it's always the presumption is always, I can do whatever I want because it's me. But again, I think we need to call into question all these primary assumptions.

• 1:24:59Chris Williamson?

  Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Instagram and Twitter.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Dude, I find you very, very interesting and very, very enjoy this.

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  Very much enjoy this kind of a conversation, one that ranges from principles to philosophy to enacting strategies as well. It's very, very cool. I appreciate the stuff that you do.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me on.