Bryan Johnson: Five Habits for Longer Living

What can you do (or avoid) tomorrow to guarantee you can live longer? In this episode, Bryan Johnson reveals the five simple disciplines you can start doing to live healthier and longer. Johnson shares what his daily routine looks like, the ins and outs of his experimentation process, and why he gave his father plasma. Johnson also opens up about the constant hate he receives from people online, how he deals with it all, and what he wishes he'd known when he sold his company. Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. Johnson sold his company to PayPal in 2013. Through Project Blueprint, Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5% of 18 year olds, inflammation 66% lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years. Johnson is also the founder of Kernel, creator of the world’s first mainstream non-invasive neuroimaging system; and OS Fund, where he invested in the predictable engineering of atoms, molecules, and organisms. Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos Newsletter - Each week I share timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ My New Book! Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results is out now - https://fs.blog/clear/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/shaneparrish Join our membership: https://fs.blog/membership/ Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Sleep to power a whole new you. https://www.eightsleep.com/farnamstreet Timecodes: (00:00:00) Intro (00:03:45) On biographies (00:08:03) On depression and coping mechanisms (00:14:18) Self-destructive behavior and how to pitch Blueprint to someone (00:26:50) What a day looks like on Blueprint (exercise and what to eat) (00:42:06) How to turn Blueprint protocols into habits (00:45:17) Embracing the hate (00:49:07) The downsides and lessons of making money (00:59:22) The five habits (01:05:09) Why does posture matter? (01:07:48) Relationship between biological health and sexual health (01:09:50) Hair-loss prevention (01:15:46) Sunscreen, plastics, and other miscellaneous impacts on aging (01:18:30) How will AI help us? (01:22:10) On success Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Okay, phase one is like, do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. Okay, so we've seen this throughout history. Phase two is people come with pitchforks. Phase three is you've got to survive a whole bunch of attacks. You know, like the powers that be are going to want to start taking you down. If you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little bit and you kind of have some open horizon. And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the major dunk, you know, where people tried to cancel me in society. I've survived several attempts at takedowns and now I'm still at it. And so I'm really happy I'm on to stage four now and now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay.

• 1:02Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Every Sunday, I send out the Brain Food Newsletter to over 600,000 people. People call it noise-canceling headphones for the internet because it's full of wisdom you can apply to life and work. Sign up for free at fs.blog/newsletter. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear in the feed, hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link.

• 1:46Shane Parrish?

  Today, my guest is Brian Johnson. In 2007, Brian founded the payment processing company Bryan Tree, which almost killed him through depression. He sold the company in 2013 for, I think, about 800 million. In 2021, he decided to dedicate his significant resources to Blueprint, an algorithmic approach to optimal health and living. Brian turned his decision... Decision writes over to an algorithm and now lives in accordance with its guidelines. In this conversation, we talk about blueprint, the diet and sleep routine you need to reverse aging, how to overcome depression, how he stopped binge eating, the automatic rules he uses,

• 2:26Shane Parrish?

  lessons he wished he knew earlier about money, his daily schedule for anti-aging, why posture matters, overcoming hair loss, the relationship between sexual health and biological health, hot and cold exposure, sunscreen, frying pans, and so much more. What I love about Brian is that he's living life on his own terms and he's not harming anybody else.

• 2:51Shane Parrish?

  It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:59Shane Parrish?

  I was thinking about where to start and I think we'll start with your love of biographies. Where did this start and what are the, what are a few of the lessons that you've learned from them?

• 3:10Speaker 00

  I suppose I approached this question with the contemplation, how do you understand reality? There's a few ways of doing it. We're born into this world and we're given a narrative about existence. And that narrative depends upon when you're born and where you're born and to whom you're born. But you're told certain things about yourself and why you exist and what to care about and how society works and what ethics are norms. And there's never been universals. If you look at the thousands of different societies that have emerged on earth, it's extremely varied. If you, if you're posing, if you're poking at this situation or you're saying, okay,

• 3:53Speaker 00

  I know that I am born into a given system and this system is not a universal truth system. It's just where I'm at in time and place and it's going to change in time. Then you can go about poking at a few ways. Like you can try to say, I'm going to take a quantitative approach and say, I'm going to learn the world through mathematics or through physics or through some scientific discipline. Or I'm going to understand it through behavioral psychology. And so you, you kind of have to approach systems, understanding and biographies for me.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Was something that always intuitively helped me make sense because I was able to transport myself in time and be in different times and places instantaneously and understand with a pretty decent level of detail what was happening at that point, you know, how people thought, what they cared about, how it contrasted with my time and place. And so I'd say biographies have been the most useful thing I've ever invested my time in that has helped me understand reality with various dimensions and perspectives at any given moment.

• 5:02Shane Parrish?

  Are there a few that stand out to you that you reread time and time again?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Probably the biography of zero by Charles Sief, The Number Zero. It was not common sense to me that the number zero has not always been around, but it took humanity a long time, thousands of years to discover the number of zero. And even when you do discover it, to really understand the potential, you know, so from Cartesian geometry, from Euclid elements to Cartesian geometry, or the function that zero plays in The Vanishing Point in art, or how zero enables the modern world in computation. And it took a long time. And so I'd say zero is probably my favorite one because it's an entity, it's

• 5:52Speaker 00

  an idea, it's a concept, it's a number that has revolutionized almost every part of society.

• 5:58Shane Parrish?

  I was listening in previous interviews and you said, I think it was age 24, you got depressed. What happened?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it was the onset was circumstantial. I had my first baby and he was colicky, so he just cried nonstop. And I don't think his mother and I got a night of sleep of good rest for for six months. Meanwhile, I was building a startup and I was grinding at that with all the stresses of not having income and trying to make something work that was new. And then I was in a new marriage. And then I was also dealing with some internal turmoil related to my religious situation where I wanted to leave my religion, but I was pretty stuck in the system, my community and the family and all the societal,

• 6:46Speaker 00

  like all of all my community structure. And it was just a chaotic time in life. And yeah, one day. It it I remember it as the day my brain snapped. I just felt like something broke. And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it just felt something felt different. Yeah, and I was in that hole for 10 years.

• 7:06Shane Parrish?

  Did you know you were depressed?

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Yes, unquestionably. Yeah.

• 7:12Shane Parrish?

  It it strikes me with somebody who takes such a scientific approach to things that you would do the same with depression. What was the process of after you recognized you were depressed? What was the process to sort of get out of that depression?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  You know, I was raised in this small rural community that was really the existence was religion. And so I was taught to understand reality through story, not through mathematical methods, not through scientific methods. In fact, I didn't meet an engineer until I was in my early twenties.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And so I just hadn't yet developed the cognitive abilities to think like a scientist or engineer. It's always hard. It's always complex looking at your past, but I I do, you know, I do reflect like, what would it have been like if I would have had some awareness and some training early in life of how to think about the world quantitatively? And it was one of the most significant moments of my life when I read this book by Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize laureate from the University of Chicago. And in this, he was writing essays, excuse me, for Newsweek. And he would take a given topic like poverty, for example, and he wouldn't describe it

• 8:36Speaker 00

  in qualitative terms and story terms. He would talk about it in numerical terms. And it was, I think, one of the most joyous moments of my life to understand that reality could be understood in mathematical terms. And I did go to the University of Chicago and I got a master's degree there. But I do wonder in that decade of depression, if, you know, if storytelling wasn't my primary skill set for problem solving, what would have happened in my life?

• 9:08Shane Parrish?

  What advice would you have today for somebody who might feel depressed, having been through that yourself?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  First, I understand you. The mind is relentless. And so when people feel suicidal, I am deeply empathetic. It is rational to want to kill oneself. It's reasonable. So when you're in that moment, it feels lonely when you try to explain to somebody how you feel and how life is not worth it. And a response is something like, get over it, or just feel better, or like, go outside. It's hard. It makes you feel very isolated and not able to reach out and get the help you need. And so one is, I would say, I understand you deeply, and I empathize with you deeply.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  And then I would say there's some basic things you can do to increase your circumstances. One would be sleep. I would make sleep your number one life priority. Like, the most important thing you do in any given day is high-quality sleep. And I would build your life around it. Because when you have good sleep, so many other things in life are much better. And then if you get good sleep, you can start doing some baby steps into exercise, even going on a walk every day, doing something small, and then starting to add a few good foods and a few fewer bad foods. But just baby stepping your way. Because when you're depressed, you don't have the ambition and energy to do big stuff.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  And so really, it's the wins are in the baby steps. And it starts with sleep. Because once you can sleep well, your energy goes up, and your motivation goes up, and your discipline and willpower increases. So try to get the flywheel moving in a positive direction, where every day you have just a little bit more energy to make one more positive baby step.

• 11:05Shane Parrish?

  It's almost autocatalytic for the negative, right? Like, because you're depressed, you become more depressed. Like, it feeds into itself.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  It does. And sometimes, I suppose, in a dark, humorous sort of way.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  We humans kind of got stuck in this really weird level of consciousness. You know, like a dog seems to be optimal in its level of happiness about existence. And we humans are smart enough to do the remarkable things we've done, but yet our mental existence can be extraordinarily challenging. And it seems to be we share many of these challenging traits that it's not often that we're given a default mental state that is just nice all the time. It's a pretty brutal place in our minds, most of our minds. And I wonder if in how we're moving as a species, if we can evolve past this. And if we do look back and like, yeah, we we got stuck in that narrow band that was pretty uncomfortable.

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• 13:02Shane Parrish?

  When did you start to overeat or binge eat, as you you've mentioned before?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  It was a soothing mechanism for my depression. I I wanted to feel some form of stimulation. I was so dead inside something, some sort of arousal, some sort of pleasure.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  And my life was just devoid of pleasure. I mean, in the religion I was in, it's like you, you don't do caffeine, you don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't go to clubs, you don't, you know, like you don't look at porn. You're basically just devoid of those kinds of pleasures and you're, you're supposed to derive pleasure from being in service of others and obeying God's commandments. And like, those are your rewards that generate. Now, of course, those things do generate rewards and you, we all understand that when we do help out someone else, we do feel that. But, you know, when you're grinding 24/7 on a startup, startups are just pure pain. Like, you don't feel joy for years. And when you're raising

• 14:05Speaker 00

  babies, you have these glimpses of joy, but most of it's just really hard work with a little, with a newborn. And so I think my life is just devoid of pleasure. And I was trying to find a vector where I could feel something. And that's what it would do for me.

• 14:20Shane Parrish?

  Those patterns of self-destructive behavior get in the way of so many of us. I guess the question is, how do we stop the patterns of self-destructive behavior?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, this is the essence of my entire life's mission, this single question. What I did is, you know, after failing for a few years and a few hundred times of saying, "Tomorrow, I'll start. Tomorrow is the day. One last time, just this one last time," and failing a few hundred times to stop that. One day, I jokingly said, "Evening Brian, you're fired. You make my life miserable." And Evening Brian was the version of me that occupied my consciousness from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM. He was tired from the day. He was, you know, fighting multiple fires. He was trying to, like, deal with the emotional upset of like,

• 15:15Speaker 00

  all the things that had happened during the day. Like, you know, very common human experience. And then in those, in that window of time, when he's beat down, that's when he goes. I don't think Evening Brian's a bad guy. I just think he... Was just trying to find a relief of the burden that he felt in that role. And I fired him. And so the past few years has basically been trying to reimagine my reality of who's in charge of me, who makes decisions at what point? What is a sacrifice and what's appropriate? And what I've come down to is with Blueprint, I wanted to demonstrate that an algorithm takes better care of me than I can myself.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  And to do that, I became the most measured person in human history. I wanted to show that if you ask the body's 70-plus organs to speak and you consult scientific evidence and then you let the algorithm run. So it tells me what time to go to bed. It tells me what to eat. It gives me all these nudges on what to do. And if I just simply say, I can't deviate. My mind can't impromptu saying, you know what? We're going to add a brownie to the lunch session here. So removing that. And I basically am arguing, this is the core of it. I'm arguing that as a species,

• 16:35Speaker 00

  this is the most important question facing the human race, hands down. As algorithms improve and they increasingly become better at a variety of tasks, including taking care of ourselves on planet Earth, what do we do? It's, I think it's the defining question and contemplation of our existence.

• 16:59Shane Parrish?

  What percentage of people do you think if, and you have this, right? You have a blueprint and the algorithm can take care of you better than you. We can use self-driving cars as an example, right? Which we know statistically, they're better at driving than we are as individuals or collectively, maybe not individually.

• 17:20Shane Parrish?

  What percentage of people are comfortable handing over the reins to an algorithm, which is sort of like a purely scientific process, right? Which assumes nothing, measures everything, and adapts as it gets input and...

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, this topic is sufficiently rich and nuanced. I wrote an entire book about it, titled "Don't Die." And in the book, I break myself out into multiple characters, like Evening Brian's, Present Depression, you know, this guy Scribe, Dark Humor Brian, like, all these people are there. And they have this discussion on what does it mean to have individual choice? What does it mean to be run by an algorithm? What does an ideal existence even mean? What does it mean to have choice? So it's a really nuanced conversation. But I'd say I've been hosting dinners at my house for the past few years and having two and a half hour long conversations about this topic.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And it does take about two and a half hours to get people warmed up. I can abbreviate it for you, though, and I can tell you the five big emotional swings that happen. So one, as I say, I posed the question, "If you could have access to an algorithm that can take better care of you than you can yourself, would you say yes?" Now, immediately, people are like, "But what about?" So it branches into a thousand, you know, questions. And I just say, "Just assume what you want. Let's just keep it high level and abstract, yes or no." And then people go through this process where the majority of people are vomiting distaste, like, "This is the worst idea. I hate it for all these reasons." A teeny number of people are like, "Please save me from myself."

• 19:03Speaker 00

  And the others are like, "Yeah, but I want to make the following exceptions," which really is no. So like, there's a lot of resistance. And the next turn, as I say, now imagine the 25th century is viewing us right now, and they're observing through our comments on this question, what our norms and ethics are, and how we understand ourselves in time and place, in the same way we would look at the 16th century with cold, detached perspective on what they thought.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And then you flip it. So now people are looking at looking at themselves in the mirror. So no longer are they defending their knee jerk reactions. They're invited to be reflective, like, how did I behave in this moment? And what am I really saying I care about? And then the the next turn is you say, uh, what things about our current reality may change? That would make our current reality unintelligible to us. So now you're in this creative space where it's like, okay, we assume all these things to be unquestionable truths about our existence, but we know from history, none of these things ever really hang out for very long. Society moves into new truths and new norms.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  So wherever we're at now, it's a temporary state. And once you're there, like now you've swung from like, no way to, I'm kind of being reflective of myself to how might things change? And then the next step is about the philosophy of this change, which is zero principle thinking. And then full circle back to the thought experiment. But you can see through those beats with about 12 people. It takes each person, the ability to cycle through these ideas and emotions and hear how other people respond. But the very end, uh, the majority of people who attend my dinners are like, I gotta say, I get it. I understand the situation.

• 20:53Shane Parrish?

  When you say it, and I want to go through some of the details of blueprint. To me, it sounds like an algorithm for living. And the algorithm's in charge of you and the algorithm is basically just creating a bunch of automatic rules for success or a recipe to follow. You follow the, the, the rules, the algorithm. You create an output, which is sort of your biomarkers and your indicators that feeds back into the system and it adjusts.

• 21:22Shane Parrish?

  It strikes me that that's sort of easy and sort of really hard too. Like, do you have, I'm imagining your house and walking through it. And like, do you have bags of chips? Do you have ice cream? And you just don't do it because the algorithm told you? Or how important is the role of environment? And how important is the other stuff going on here to actually shape that behavior?

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, you know, if you're here at the house and you're hanging out with me, there's not a lot of trouble we're going to get into with what I have in stock. If we want to get wild and down some extra virgin olive oil or, but no, it's, I, I basically don't trust myself still.

• 22:04Shane Parrish?

  That strikes me as really interesting, right? Because it's sort of like, okay, we can have this thing of what we want to do, but now we get to create an environment or a reality. And it can be an artificial environment, which the algorithm kind of is an artificial environment for you.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:18Shane Parrish?

  And then you have to follow that. So you have to have multiple things in line. Like, I'll give you examples. So a few years ago, I was, I was trying to work out three days a week. And I ended up going to the gym because I was like, am I actually working out three days a week? And I was like, can you give me a list of like, all the times that I swiped in? And they gave me this list and it, you know, it's like once, he was going like one, one and a half times a week. And so I was talking with Daniel Kahneman a little later that year. And he had this phone call and he was talking to this, this gentleman on the phone. And at the end of the call, he said, I have a rule. I never say yes on the phone. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow. And he hung up and I was like, well, tell me about this. What is this rule?

• 23:01Shane Parrish?

  And he's like, well, I found I was saying yes to please other people. I want other people to like me. I'm a human, I'm a social. So I end up doing these things that aren't really good for me. And so I created this rule to do this. And I was like, well, this is amazing, right? This is the most powerful thing I think you've done. And you've got a Nobel Prize. So like, this is really interesting because you rewire your brain in the moment to think in a certain way, which your automatic response becomes that. And so I was like, I'm going to try this. I'm going to go to the gym every day. I'm going to work out every day. And the duration or scope can change, but I'm going to exercise every day. And the conversation went from, should I work out today? Which in my head is like, oh, I have a really busy day. I didn't sleep well. I'm not going to work out today. I'll do extra tomorrow.

• 23:45Shane Parrish?

  You negotiate with yourself to I'm going to do exercise every day and it completely changed my approach to exercise and my health. And it sounds like the blueprint is very much an automatic set of rules where you have multiple things aligned, but you're trying to follow this pattern. I'm wondering what your response to that is and specifically around how we can correct our self-destructive behaviors.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Your, your experience is exactly mine. To say yes and to what you said. If our conversation is about a practical topic of how do you achieve better health? Or how to increase crop yield or how to run a more efficient driving route? Those are interesting questions. The backdrop of this thought experiment is as a species, are we facing an existential outcome? I mean, what are the stakes? Is it we'll make a little bit less money or we'll have maybe a four pack instead of six pack on our abs? Or are we really talking about life and death?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  And my premise is that we are in existential moment as a species on a variety of fronts. And then it invites a contemplation of if that is the case, what do you do? And so that, that question itself primes the response. Like, how do you stop self-destructive behaviors? Because if I say, how do I stop self-destructive behaviors?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Without identifying these things, a person has a given willingness to change their behavior. But then there's a, it'll stop if it's like, it's a nice to have. But if it's life or death, the behavioral change profile may be very different. And so really, I think it depends on where the person's coming from. You know, someone mentioned to me recently, I haven't verified this, that the only way to get someone to change is to tell them they're pregnant or to diagnose them with a certain condition. Otherwise, no change will happen.

• 25:55Shane Parrish?

  That's interesting. A friend of mine had a, it brings to mind this story. A friend of mine had.

• 26:04Shane Parrish?

  Heart surgery a while back and I went to visit him in the hospital. And I was talking to the surgeon and you know, the surgeon sort of had said all the typical things about changing your diet and changing your lifestyle.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:18Shane Parrish?

  And when I was talking to the surgeon, he goes, you know, odds are about 10% that he's going to do this. And I said, well, that's interesting. And he's like, he's like, I've been a surgeon for 30 years. And he's like, people used to change all the time because I used to have to break ribs. I used to have to like, there was a physical pain, a big scar, a visual reminder. And he's like, now the incision's like, you know, half a centimeter. And, you know, you're in and out of the hospital and there isn't a lot of pain. And so he's like, people, people change a lot less than they used to. And I thought that that that sort of related to what you were talking about. I'm wondering if you can walk me through at a high level, sort of the overarching day

• 27:02Shane Parrish?

  of blueprint. And what does it mean to live like Brian Johnson?

• 27:08Speaker 00

  The premise on this is I, I was posing the question, in the early 21st century, is it the case that we have achieved longevity escape velocity? Which means that for every one year of chronological time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically? And if not, where are we at? And so that's the backdrop on what my daily routine is. And so what we did to establish this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication that's ever been done on health span and lifespan. We then graded the evidence of these papers and we then stack ranked them according to effect size. And then we've systematically been implementing each one of these, these protocols.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  So becoming the most measured person in history and then using, using all the scientific evidence.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  I wake up, so my day begins really the night before. I go to bed currently at 9:30 PM. I just changed my bedtime from 8:30, but it's 9:30 on the dot. So it's not, I don't have a two hour window of time. And I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable, which no human in history had ever done. So I wanted to demonstrate that you can get reliable, high quality sleep for this extended period of time. And then I wake up naturally. I never wake up with an alarm roughly 4:30, 5:30 in the morning. And I will, I'll weigh myself, the body composition, like weight, hydration, fat, et cetera. I'll take my inner ear temperature. I'll take two pills.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  I'll do a few minutes of UV light therapy to start my circadian rhythm. It's still dark in the morning. I'll go downstairs. I'll make myself a morning concoction. I'll take 60 pills. I'll do light therapy on my hair. Like once a week, I'll do my blood, my blood pressure. I'll then work out for about an hour in a specific protocol. I'll come in, I will make breakfast, which is a few pounds of vegetables. I'll shower, I'll do a skincare routine and get ready for work. I'll eat my second meal of the day. And then I work for the day. And then I have a evening, and then throughout the day, I'll do various doctor's appointments,

• 29:23Speaker 00

  medical procedures and measurement. And then I have a wind down routine that I follow ritually. And what we've done is we've tried to stack hundreds of protocols into my daily routine. Because we do so many things and we're trying to follow the evidence, I'm not able to just randomly do things. It has to be highly structured in order for us to control this experiment with the rigor we need for the results. And so we've just done this for several years and fine tuned it. And we go through the process of measure me, measure myself, look at the evidence, we do the protocol, measurement, evidence, protocol, again and again and again. And I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  So for example, my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. My bone mineral density is the top 0.02% of 30 year olds, which is age minute for that test. And you know, my, my, uh, my strength test, same thing like top 1.5 and 10% of 18 year olds. So the biomarkers across my entire body, whether it's my cardiovascular ability, my strength, my muscle, my, my muscle and body fat are the top 99.5 percentile. So it's produced a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I'm in pretty good health.

• 30:36Shane Parrish?

  I thought your workouts were like 25 reps of exercise and stuff. Are you, is that giving you the, the incredible strength?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Uh, yes. So it's about an hour a day and you're right. It's like, uh, you know, 20 plus. And so it's mostly, I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. So I don't do heavyweights that are, uh, hard in the joints. But yes, even doing these things, I do it every single day. I don't take any rest days. And yeah, I'm on my bench press. It's a top 10% of 18 year olds. And we use 18 year olds, a lot of people, I mean, the, with 99% certainty. When I say this, people are like, but wait a second, why not a 30 year old? It's because you max out your weight to, uh, rep ratio at age 18.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  So even though you can lift more in your twenties and maybe even your thirties, your ratio peaks at 18. The same is true with your VO2 max, your cardiovascular fitness. And so we do a reference to an 18 year old, not because it's an easy way to pick off a number. We do it because according to these age, these biological age standards, you're looking at when the human, when a, when a male peaks before, peak performance.

• 31:52Shane Parrish?

  And I think your last meal is at like 11:30 AM.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  That's right. So I have roughly, you know, 10 hours or so of fasting before I go to bed.

• 31:59Shane Parrish?

  Do you feel hungry when you go to bed?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  I used to, I'm now normalized to it.

• 32:04Shane Parrish?

  And does that help your sleep? Like what happens if you eat later? I assume this was all like sort of measured and.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  I eat my last meal of the day at 11 AM for the objectives of good sleep. Because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting. I think the evidence is still maybe developing. So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around forty six beats per minute. And if it's forty six, I'm gonna have a perfect night's sleep. If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart rate is gonna be fifty six. And when I do that, I'm going to knock off about fifty percent of my REM and fifty percent of my deep, and I'll increase my wake time by about thirty five minutes.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  And so I've done these, I've done so many experiments now, it is algorithmic. And I know exactly what happens when I eat what at what time and how it affects my sleep.

• 33:01Shane Parrish?

  It sounds like Blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep. Is that correct?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  I mean, so sleep is an important one. It's the number one priority because everything else rests, you know, hinges upon that. But it also, we are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every organ of the body. So we have seventy plus organs, and we've tried to quantify and rejuvenate every organ of my body. So we just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your, your chest here, responsible for your immune system. And so, you know, I can say I'm chronologically forty six years old, but the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart and of my lungs and of my liver. And that's really the, the more powerful predictor

• 33:52Speaker 00

  than a chronological number.

• 33:55Shane Parrish?

  And where were you when you started Blueprint? Were you basically your, your biological age for your, like, was everything the same?

• 34:03Speaker 00

  No, I was, I was coming from a pretty bad place. I, after being depressed for a decade and running, you know, being a startup entrepreneur my entire life, and having just gone through a bunch of stuff, I was pretty beat up. And I was in a bad state. So I definitely subscribe to grind culture, where, you know, you do things in society to try to earn people's respect. And have a position of a status in a social group to when you conform with these social norms. And so like when you hear a story about a colleague who worked on a problem for two days straight and didn't sleep, it's like, wow, they're so awesome and amazing. You know, like that it's very hard to not to be induced to think that that's

• 34:47Speaker 00

  an emulation worthy behavior. So I had to peel myself out of grind culture and find out that this is the thing is we are accustomed death is the enabler of all things immortality. You know, if you love country, die for your country. If you want to, if you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life. You know, if you want to achieve immortality in your professional endeavor, have your works live beyond your death. Everything we we think about existence is around death. And I was calling question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in human history where death is no longer inevitable. And if that is true, everything about our reality changes.

• 35:32Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we'll see a quantum leap in average age in the next 15 years? Like average, average life expectancy? So not people. So yes, there's people who will learn from what you're doing. They'll change their habits and they'll extend their personal life expectancy. But do you think we're going to see a collective big leap? I mean, like you have sort of Jeff Bezos and Patrick and John Collison and people pouring money into billions of dollars into research on this topic.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  To me, the most compelling contemplation is trying to predict how fast intelligence is improving. So we humans have been the dominant force of intelligence on this planet for 200,000 years. And we've been able to increase our abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation in our society with language and all kinds of organizational methodologies. We've increased our ability to utilize our intelligence with technological tools. We've now created intelligence in AI that is creating better intelligence.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  And if you say, what is the speed at which intelligence is improving? It's fast, faster than we can comprehend. And so when you, when we make these, when we model out the future and we say, what's going to happen on a 10-year time span? We are unqualified to answer that question. Because that timeframe exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine. So it's the first time in human history where we, the superior form of intelligence, are up against a wall of not knowing what to predict what comes next. Because it's going to supersede us so fast. And so this is the thing, this is why I come down to,

• 37:28Speaker 00

  the only thing I know to be true in the year 2024 is don't die. That's it. I don't know anything else other than I want to be around for what could be the most spectacular existence in this part of the galaxy.

• 37:45Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, there's a part of me that's really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right now, we don't die, we're going to get a lot of advantage from technology that thinks about things in a way that we couldn't even comprehend.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  I mean, you take the, for inspiration, if you say, okay, well, point me to an example of where intelligence has been used that would give me any sort of bearings on what I might imagine. Okay, so take AlphaFold. It was, many people thought solving the protein folding problem was unsolvable or would take us some unknown duration of time. And DeepMind allocated their attention to that thing and solved it faster than anyone ever thought possible. The same thing would go. And so when these groups of people that are very talented focus on a very narrow problem, they solve stunningly hard problems faster than anyone thought.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  And as these systems get better and are used more broadly, and as these systems create better systems, this is why we are at this launch point. And, you know, is it going to happen in two years, one year, five years, 10? I don't know. But it's basically, if you zoom out far enough, it's in the blink of an eye at this point. And so don't die is don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill planet Earth. And when you're building AI, the objective function of AI is this don't die ideology. So if you, I mean, what I'm trying to say is like, so we've, we've never been in this situation before where we're baby steps away from creating superintelligence. And when you're at this, in this moment, we have this, this incredibly practical question

• 39:26Speaker 00

  to ask, what do we do? Like, how do we think about reality? What do we care about? What are our ideals? What are our objectives? And then if you start surveying the world of like, hey, who can tell us how to practically think about reality? And you probe religions and capitalism and communism and socialism and like any other group, who can pull up and say, here's a playbook. Here's an instruction on how you actually think about reality. And that's what I've been trying to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack that informs humanity on what to do on a daily basis. For example, what to eat for breakfast, all the way through the most complicated question of how do you begin thinking about a philosophical alignment with AI?

• 40:10Shane Parrish?

  I have some specific questions about Blue Print. So like, how much water are you consuming a day?

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Between 60 and 80 ounces.

• 40:17Shane Parrish?

  Is that the only beverage that you really consume?

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• 40:52Speaker 03

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• 41:15Speaker 00

  It is. I drink mineralized water, so it's always tea or has some electrolytes in it.

• 41:21Shane Parrish?

  Is that tap water? Is it filtered? Is it out of a glass or plastic?

• 41:25Speaker 00

  It's filtered and ceramic.

• 41:27Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about things like Teflon and things that can sort of like get into your body or things that are widely sort of thought to get into your body like microplastics and Teflon and?

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I try to avoid plastic bottles. I use stainless steel cookware, filtered water. I don't eat out. I don't use a takeout materials. So I try to avoid the things that are more polluting.

• 41:56Shane Parrish?

  Why vegan? I think that's a, that's a personal choice, isn't it? Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 42:01Shane Parrish?

  Is there anybody doing this who's an omnivore?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, my son.

• 42:05Shane Parrish?

  And are, are his results sort of similar to yours?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty similar. I think that diet is a special kind of provocative. People break out into warring tribes instantaneously and the intensity around this topic is a lot. And so I've really just stayed out of it. I, I'm, I'm impartial. I don't want to get into the war. And so I just say you do you. I do think that there's every day, there's more evidence coming out suggesting plant-based diets are more conducive for longevity.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  So I think the evidence in time will speak for itself, but right now it's of all the battlefields I could choose, this is not the one I want.

• 42:49Shane Parrish?

  That's a really interesting way to put it. I think it's really interesting too. People aren't convinced by data. I mean, you can show them all the data in the world and it's not going to change their mind. How do we take blueprint and build habits with it? So it's one thing to know, okay, here's this manual, follow this manual and this manual is going to be better at running your life than you are. You can take your evening Brian, you can put them away and just follow the instructions. But how do we actually turn that into habits that we follow?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Every person is different in how they go about change and there's many ways that people go about habit, you know, behavioral change with very habit formation techniques. For me, it's really helpful to understand my own behavioral change in a larger context where I say, I'm endeavoring to maintain my health so that I don't die, so that I can participate in what may be the most spectacular existence in the galaxy. Now for me, that's really motivating because I have, I have a goal and I have a reason to live and I have something to look forward to. Now, a side effect of that is my body feels great and

• 44:02Speaker 00

  it looks great and you know, I can do all sorts of things. But for me, it's the bigger goal that motivates me. For other people, they may have much, you know, different goals of like they, they want to fit into a certain pair of clothing, or they want to look good for a certain event, or they want to achieve a certain physical outcome. So like the end goal, I think, I think the motivation is really important. And then I go through the process, as you heard me say, is I like to break myself out into my various selves because I am, you know, dozens of different kinds of people. I'm morning Brian, I'm evening Brian, I'm after workout Brian, I'm dad Brian, like I'm, and every one of those situations, I'm biochemically a different human. I have a different way of understanding reality

• 44:46Speaker 00

  and I'll make decisions that are different in each one of those circumstances. Like you said with Daniel, where he doesn't say yes on the phone because in that moment, he's please others, Daniel, and he wants to be a different version to let him in his life. So I do the same approach. I break myself out into different persons and I decide which versions of me have authorization and win. Because you know, like who who's in charge 10pm you who sets the alarm for 6am? Or 6am you who wants a few more minutes with the snooze button? And so you need to make those decisions on who's in charge. Because if you just let it roll out, you know, that the present you is always going to win and always get what they want at the expense of other versions of you that have your better interests at heart.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  And then the third is, once you get to the structural, where you have a goal and you've separated yourself out and you know who's making decisions and when, then you can do these hyper focused things on behavioral change, like you can pair a habit. So every time you see a given thing, you do a certain action. And so that's really in my estimation, how I've tried to stack my life. Where I basically, I've tried to build a life where I make zero decisions of doing things I don't really want to do. And I've almost got it like I mean, it's actually, I'm surprised I've gotten this close to achieving it. I just don't behave in ways that I regret anymore. And that's phenomenal, because I was just like walking regret before.

• 46:15Shane Parrish?

  What I love about you is that you're living life on your own terms and you're not hurting anybody. And yet what you're doing is so outside of what we consider normal that you get so much hate and vitriol. How do you handle that?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  I love it. I I have such a positive relationship with the hate. It energizes me. I am endlessly amused by it. I think it's just fun to engage with. And you know, I depression was a much better troll than anyone online. You know, like my my depression could eat me up pretty efficiently, get new the zingers and the dunks. Everyone else, you know, like it's just play for me. I guess like, you know, like you, you can think about these two phases like, okay, phase one is like, do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. Okay, so we've seen this throughout history.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Phase two is people come with pitchforks. Like, we know this. Phase three is you've got to survive a whole bunch of attacks. You know, like the powers that be are going to want to start taking you down. And then phase, if you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little bit and you kind of have some open horizon. And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the, the major dunk, you know, where people tried to cancel me in society. I've survived several attempts at takedowns. And now I'm still at it. And so I'm really happy I'm on to stage four now. And now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay.

• 47:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I was amazed at some of the, the stuff that I read online and some of the stuff that you've been through. And I don't know if you want to share some of that or not. What's been the hardest moments for you?

• 48:08Speaker 00

  I'm so happy to be alive. I appreciate existence with an intensity that I've never felt before. I know what it feels like to want to end your life. You know, like I desperately wanted to kill myself for 10 years. And I'm grateful I didn't. And I'm grateful I'm alive. So, you know, when, when people come and dunk on me or when they're trying to attack, attack me or when they're saying things about me, it's okay. Like, it's fine. Everyone's just trying to do their thing and deal with themselves. So it's not really worth getting caught up in.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  I think it's possible that.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  You know, we'll look back at ourselves right now and we'll say, oh, man, like, can you believe how hard it was to be human? Like, can you, like, do you remember how bad it was, like, the anxiety and the depression and the jealousy and the angst and the FOMO and the, like, you know, all the things we felt like, God, that was just so hard. Like, can you imagine going back to doing that? In the same way, we imagine, you know, previous areas not having the technology we do today. I think it's possible that we're just in this moment in time of a conscious existence. It's really brutal. And so I guess I don't really expect anything different. If, if people's internal experiences are beating them up, they're gonna try to beat other people up, too. It's just, it's like, kind of the situation.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  It's, it's okay.

• 49:44Shane Parrish?

  Do you think you have that confidence to sort of face that because you've been to a really dark place and come out of it?

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it's also because I get great sleep.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  But you, honestly.

• 49:57Shane Parrish?

  But you've also, like, it's, it's one thing, like, I get this, you know, it's one thing when it's an anonymous person online, uh, saying, you know, something about you. It really mostly says something about them. But you've also had people close to you, uh, come after you. And that's a whole different kind of vulnerability and feeling.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  I, I was poor my entire life. And my mom made my clothes for school. I, um, I worked in third grade, I worked the school tables at lunch to pay for leftover food so my mom wouldn't have to pay my $25 a month of cafeteria money. Like, I knew we were poor and I was in on my family's, uh, circumstances. And I didn't make money until I was 34 years old, until I sold Braintree. And I've had money for 10 years now, for 12 years. And I've learned a lot of lessons about the complexity of money.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  I really wish that I would have spent more time having made money and say, can, I talk to somebody who, who's had wealth and can tell me how to, how this game works. But I will tell you, uh,

• 51:13Speaker 00

  of the people close to me over the past, you know, 12 years.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  A very large number, like almost like 50% have ended up doing something to me that is

• 51:32Speaker 00

  that is unambiguous bad behavior, in some cases illegal behavior. And this is not to say they're bad and I'm good. It's meant to say that when you're around these circumstances, it's oftentimes very hard to keep your bearings. And sometimes you lose your reality and you become so lost in it, you can no longer tell what's going on. But money is extraordinarily complicated and it drives people to do crazy things. And I've seen this pattern now repeat itself so many times in my personal life, like those who are the closest people to me.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  And to see what they would do when money was at stake, they'll do anything. And they lose touch with reality in the pursuit of that objective.

• 52:28Shane Parrish?

  I have a friend who is incredibly wealthy and we've been friends for a number of years now. And one thing that struck me a few years ago was his circle kept getting smaller and smaller.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:43Shane Parrish?

  And I remember asking him about this and I was like, you know, like we were hanging out last year and I'm just making this up, but there was like 30 people here and now there's like 15. And you see it shrink over time. And he said, yeah, you know, because people do these things that

• 53:01Shane Parrish?

  they ask me for something or they do things and then I can't really trust them. And then everybody who's trying to be my friend, and I'm paraphrasing here and I'm not going to reveal who it is, but everybody who's trying to be my friend wants something from me or that's how I think about it. So it's really hard for me to like open up to new people because I always like, I've become skeptical of motivations and intentions and.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  That's been what I have seen. So when I've shared my problems.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  They are almost identical to the life experiences other people have had. It's just algorithmic. Like, this is why I'm saying I wish I could go back in time and talk to somebody because it is so predictable how people will behave in these circumstances that you can do so many things to try to lessen the negative outcomes. But I'm inherently a very trusting person and I am hands off, right? Just kind of let people do their own thing. And that's just not a good recipe. Most people can't thrive in that environment. Most people will really struggle to play by the rules that we as society have agreed that would constitute fairness and honesty and legality.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  So, again, it's fine. This is not a critique of people. It's just, it's the human condition. It is what it is. And this is the same reason. Like, I, I don't trust myself. You know, like, this is why I don't have sweets in my house. It's not like I think I'm the best person in the whole world. I know that I will cheat. I will do things I don't want to do if I put myself in those circumstances. So, this is coming from a place of distrust of myself and all things that we humans do.

• 54:48Shane Parrish?

  If I inherited or, you know, suddenly came into $500 million tomorrow and I came to you and said, "Brian, I just got this big chunk of money.

• 54:58Shane Parrish?

  Give me the lessons that you've learned over the last 12 years that I should put in place today. What would they be?

• 55:05Speaker 00

  One is, I would suggest you not change anything in your life for six to 12 months. Keep on with your same habits and have the money so you can distinguish between your preferred lifestyle and what money would otherwise alter your perception of what you want. Because once you start acquiring things, you start losing your perspective on where your baseline is. So, and the shock of going from zero to 500 million is so, is so sudden that it scrambles your reality. And then, number two is, it is reasonable

• 55:49Speaker 00

  that a, a large majority of people are going to want something from you at all times.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  And it's it will be small things like, you know, a niece or a nephew. When you're invited to their wedding, most people will give a gift, you know, a hundred dollars or $200 or $20, whatever the number is in that cultural norm of the family, they're going to expect you to give something for $500 or $1,000 because you have so much money. And so people just assume that because you have so much money that you have more obligation to them. So there's like this, this acyclical relationship. And then three is I'd say identify what you want the money to achieve.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  And that really needs to come from you on what your objectives are, because if you don't determine your objectives in life, money will run you. And so it creates this really inverse relationship where you wanted the money so you could, you could achieve your objectives, but now money's running you and you've lost yourself. And if you don't follow those three things, pretty soon you're in a situation where you don't know what is up and what's, what's down. You don't know who you can trust. You've got people on the inside who are engaging in potentially compromising behavior without you knowing. And so it just creates a real challenging environment. And then you become, your, your internal world becomes destabilized where, like your friend said, you just don't know

• 57:26Speaker 00

  who you can trust. And it becomes a really isolating experience. Does that ever make you feel lonely? It's a challenge, you know, like anything, like, I mean, like in, in life, it's like all of our problems are equal. It's not like if you're rich, you have fewer problems. It's not like if you're poor, you've got, I mean, like, so, so there's like,

• 57:52Speaker 00

  There are some clear differences, like if you're poor and you've got a very serious medical condition, you don't have the resources to address that. That's a very big difference. But overall, every person I know who's wealthy has just as many problems and it feels to them their problems are just as intense as everyone else at every other class of wealth. Excluding, you know, like the extreme situations where like a person does not have the ability to pay for basic nutrition, or does not have the ability to pay for medical bills, or is suffering from some other disparities. But what I'm trying to say is, human suffering is pretty universal.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of misperception that somehow money lessens problems. You know, it's not a panacea. It has its own problems. And many people with money wish they didn't have the money. But of course, that's also hypocritical, because if they did, just give it away. Like, talk the talk. So it's complicated and nuanced, and it's just a very hard question to parse, because it's hard to imagine those circumstances.

• 58:58Shane Parrish?

  It's hard for society to talk about too. I feel like it's exceptionally hard for my wealthier friends to talk about money than it is for other people, because...

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they risk getting slapped on the hand for saying anything that is just insensitive. Right, it's like, because their experience is complex, right? That it causes very serious problems in their life. It creates loneliness. It puts them in very challenging situations. And then their natural response is like, boo hoo. Like, go complain to someone. And I understand that. It's also just like, I think it misses a little bit, because we all live together in society, and we share classes of problems. And so, to me, it's like, it's a bigger observation about how all of us struggle all the time, and how it's worthwhile to contemplate how we can all struggle less.

• 59:55Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, we're more similar than we tend to think that we are, I think, across not only cultures, but... And socioeconomic statuses too. I want to come back to blueprint for a second. I want to go through specific things. So I want to go through nine things. I want to go through behavioral interventions. I want to go through diet interventions and supplement interventions. And I want you to give me your top three behavioral interventions, top three diet interventions and top three supplements that people listening to this, if they're looking to sort of like play around with blueprint, but maybe they don't want to go all in that they can do. And they'll get a noticeable sort of like bang for the buck out of.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can tell you, I would structure that just a little bit differently. I can tell you the top five power laws.

• 1:00:46Shane Parrish?

  Okay, yeah, let's do that.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  And so you, by doing these five things, you could achieve a life expectancy of 92. So one, don't smoke.

• 1:00:56Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Two is exercise six hours a week. And that's a combination of strength and flexibility and cardiovascular. Three is eat a blueprint like diet or like Mediterranean diet. Four is maintain a BMI between 18.5 and 22.5. And then five is limit alcohol consumption. And those five things, the power laws. Sleep is a contender for being a power law of health. I think the evidence is emerging now that we've got much better measurement around it.

• 1:01:33Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about the alcohol consumption because that one is is sort of a bit vague in a sense of you didn't offer specifics like BMI, you're like this range. What's, what is a limited alcohol consumption? Is that like two ounces a week? Is it six? Is it like we're best with none, but up until this point, it doesn't hurt us?

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  If I remember correctly, it's something like between one and three glasses of wine a week equivalent. So it's limited. I do zero alcohol intake.

• 1:02:04Shane Parrish?

  You used to drink alcohol there.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I drank three ounces of red wine for breakfast daily. Yeah.

• 1:02:10Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. What was the thinking behind that? You gave it up, I think, I remember if I remember correctly, it's because you couldn't afford the 80 calories in your diet.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:02:19Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, but you liked red wine.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  It was delicious. It was such a wonderful experience. Yeah, it increased the joy of food a lot.

• 1:02:28Shane Parrish?

  Do you ever have wine now, or it's just like a rule that you don't have it? Because once you go down that path, it's like a slippery slope.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  I don't now because even small amounts negatively affect my sleep. Even if I drink them, drink it around noon, or even if I do three ounces at noon, I still sometimes see effects in sleep. And nothing is worth trading high quality sleep to me.

• 1:02:54Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating. Are there certain foods that like if you ate even at 11:30 would disrupt your sleep that you know about?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Carbohydrates, so breads, pastas, even rice is hard for my body to digest.

• 1:03:10Shane Parrish?

  Is that your body or most bodies?

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  My body, and maybe it's because I don't eat rice very often. So, you know, that the one time occurrence. But yeah, when I eat anything of that variety, my resting heart rate will be 55 plus, you know, probably in the 56, 57 range. Then of course, anything fried, but I never eat fried. But if I did, it would definitely do it.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Flowers of all types.

• 1:03:35Shane Parrish?

  Even like almond flour?

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Shane Parrish?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  I tried, I tried a bunch of different flowers. I wanted to find, you know, like, I wanted to find some variety of foods that would do it and that, that didn't. And then also sugar. So if I, you know, on occasion I've tried like a fun drink, like someone, someone took me and got a Bobo or something, Boba or something like that.

• 1:03:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  It's made by tapioca. But yeah, that will do it for me. That will increase my, so I know now the list of foods that increase my resting heart rate. And this is the cool thing. Before, I would say, I would be confronted with a situation of like, I really want to eat this cookie, but I know I don't, I really shouldn't. Then I did it anyways, you know, and I probably did that in my life thousands of times, maybe. And for the first time in my life, I've gotten to a point where I can look at the cookie and have it in my hand and say, you know what? The pain of eating this thing so far exceeds the momentary pleasure from eating it. There's no way I'm going to do it. And I can feel that with such confidence, I'm not even tempted to

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  eat the cookie. Whereas before, I was just desperate in its face to just be, you know, there's no way I was gonna win in that situation. I was gonna eat the cookie. And then after that, I was gonna eat the five more in the pack, you know, like, I couldn't stop myself. And so now, my, I finally, finally, finally, finally got to a place where I can model out the pain and that's so unpleasant that I just don't want to do it.

• 1:05:04Shane Parrish?

  And the pain in this case is you know, it's going to impact your sleep and therefore you know it. How much of that relates to the fact that you've had eight months of perfect sleep? Like if last night was like, oh, the streak ended and now you've got the cookie in your hand, are you still thinking with the same logic?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I actually measured my brain at my brain interface company, Kernel. I looked at my brain based upon sleep patterns and I saw, we saw in my brain, I had less willpower when I had a poor night's sleep, when I had less REM and less deep. And so, yes, when you have bad sleep, you have substantially less willpower.

• 1:05:40Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's so interesting because I talk to my kids about this and I talk about it in the context of positioning and easy mode or hard mode. And I'm like, when you go to sleep, it doesn't mean you're not, like, when you sleep well, doesn't mean somebody's gonna do something, you're not gonna do something to you tomorrow that makes you angry or upset. It means your ability to regulate your emotions and have a healthy response is going to be much easier than if you have a poor night's sleep. So you can like, you're playing on easy mode or hard mode, and I think sleep is one of the prime indicators of that.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Great job.

• 1:06:12Shane Parrish?

  Why does posture matter? You have like the best posture of, I'm like conscious of this and like, I'm actually having better posture during this interview because of you.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  You know, like I, I realize that I present complexity in people's lives that

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  You know, if someone sees an article about me or a video or something, and if they're not in the same place as me, it can have a negative reaction where the person's like, damn it, I'm never going to be able to do what he does.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  So that makes me feel bad about myself. And so why even try? And I'm deeply empathetic about that. And I, I wish that wasn't the outcome. And so I really try to be thoughtful and meet everyone where they're at, where I hope that when someone thinks about me, and if they view my posture or they view my eating habits, that they can think of me like an angel on their shoulder of like, I'm, I'm there, I'm there with you, friend. Like, I, I want you to be your best self and I understand you. And there's no judgment coming from me and it's fine if you make mistakes. It's cool.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  But it's, it's complicated and I understand that it's difficult. And so posture, I do work extraordinarily hard. I'm also mindful that it potentially has this boomerang effect where people get discouraged. But yeah, I mean, I, I maintain good posture because I discovered I've got genetically narrow internal jugular veins, these two pipes on the side of the neck. And so I've have restricted blood flow out of my brain when I have bad posture. So it kinks my veins. And so I, we did a whole bunch of measurement with MRI and ultrasound and I worked, did a bunch of physical therapy to strengthen certain muscles that maintain proper posture. And so I've just built it as a habit now. But it took me

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  months and months, like, for example, as a family, we have a habit where one day one of my eldest son made fun of me. He's like, dad's like an AI. And he was like, he's like this, like, you know, being this AI move. And so his impersonation of me. Was reduced to zup. So now every time anyone in the family has improper posture, that means if you're holding a phone directly down, you're looking at it, your head's hanging over, or you're in some other catastrophic postural position, you'll hear zup and everyone in the family just like right, like get straight up. And so we're now a family where we support each other in proper posture, but it took us a while to get there.

• 1:08:50Shane Parrish?

  That's awesome. What's the relationship between our biological health and our sexual health?

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, if you're male and you're not getting enough sleep, your nighttime erections are eliminated. And nighttime erections are an important biomarker for sexual health, psychological health, and cardiovascular health. And I've measured my nighttime erections extensively.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Basically, we try to measure everything we can measure. And I know it's atypical. And so this is not a common measurement people are familiar with, but that's true for the entirety of Blueprint. We're doing things that are new. But I guess I say that because people oftentimes associate the cost of not getting good sleep with feeling a little bit grumpy the next day, or a little bit more irritable. But they don't really understand the whole body consequences where basically your sexual function goes to zero. It's not that you can't still have intercourse, you can, but I pointed out, it's a pretty

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  devastating cost on not getting good sleep. So yeah, all these things are deeply connected. And this is why, coming back to grind culture, grind culture assumes death is inevitable. So you're trying to achieve immortality through the means that you have. And so once you go back down the stack and you start questioning these things about our reality, It leads you down this path of like, do I really believe in this cultural moment of this thing? Or is there something else really bigger going on?

• 1:10:26Shane Parrish?

  One of my friends who was in the special forces for a long time, uh, used to be deployed often. And he said, one of the things that they looked for in the troops and they asked them about regularly was their, uh, their poop and whether they had a morning erection.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  I love that. That's fantastic. I mean, that's the first time I've heard of anyone else measuring erections. It's so important. And I know it's taboo and funny and people like to dunk on it, but it's really important.

• 1:10:54Shane Parrish?

  Uh, I'm asking this as a bald dude, but can you prevent your hairline from receding? I mean, I imagine it's way too late for me now, but uh, do you do that? Like, can you?

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hair loss is an enormous amount of work. The technology is really not great. So what I do currently is in the morning, I, I put a topical application on my hair that is, was based upon my genetics of what things I do and don't respond to and metabolize. And then I put a red light cap on my head and it activates certain things. I then work out, eat breakfast and I'll shower and I'll use a certain shampoo that basically creates the right environment on the scalp. And then I'll do, um, once a month, I just started this new therapy where I'll use this laser, um, across the scalp and then I'll apply

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  exosomes. And that's a combo therapy to help hair grow, uh, stronger and faster. And then I used to do PRP, which is you draw blood out, you pull the plasma, you reinject the growth factors. I stopped doing that because we're now doing this laser exosome treatment. Yeah, that's it. So basically it's a topical application, which you've probably heard minoxidil is the most common thing. So it's minoxidil plus a few little goodies, plus red light cap therapy, plus this laser and exosome treatment. Yeah. Cause I mean, I, I should be bald at this point. I started losing my hair in my late twenties and the men in my family are bald, basically. So I'm grateful to have some hair.

• 1:12:28Shane Parrish?

  I started losing mine in my like mid twenties and then it sort of stopped, like it, it, it receded and then thinned out massively and then just all of a sudden stopped.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the the technology that is very close is exciting. There's cloning therapies that are being developed. So if you had a few follicles, you can clone it and then do basically like implantation. So I I think it's a possibility that in like five years' time that you would be able to restore hair yourself.

• 1:13:00Shane Parrish?

  Is there any biological longevity reason why hair matters? I mean, there's probably a sexual attractiveness angle to it. There's probably a confidence angle to it. There's probably a lot of internal ones. But is there any biological sort of like longevity reasons why it matters?

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  If there is, I'm not aware of it.

• 1:13:18Shane Parrish?

  What do you think of hot and cold exposure? Do you do that?

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  I don't. It's it's not that they don't potentially have benefits for right applications. The hot and cold therapy didn't make our cut because it doesn't increase lifespan, health span. Rather, the evidence was not strong enough for my team to recommend it to be cut into the protocol. So if you go back to how we think about this, we've looked at all the scientific evidence through the the specific lens of increasing lifespan, health span. And then we've ranked them according to power laws. And so this is not to say we may, we we won't ever, you know, we won't do it at some point in time. Like, we're very open minded and will always change our minds following the evidence. It's just right now, we don't think the evidence supports it to incorporate as a habit

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  for longevity purposes, which is our aim. Now, if somebody is doing it for recovery and other objectives, like, that's an entirely different question. So it has nothing to say about the technologies for those, just for my highly focused objective.

• 1:14:22Shane Parrish?

  If you think of Blueprint as like 100 pieces of Lego, and each one of those pieces of Lego is an intervention based on scientific evidence, what's the last piece of Lego you took out and put in a new piece of Lego? Because you're like, oh, this is better than that piece of Lego.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  I recently started taking oral minoxidil. So there's there's the liquid minoxidil for hair growth, you know, for for other hair loss prevention. And I took an oral version, which initially that drug was approved for high blood pressure, but was then repurposed for hair growth because it it made hair grow all over the body. But I started experiencing some side effects. I stopped that. So we do stuff like that, like every few days we'll try something new like that. So that one stopped. And then let me think before that. Uh, you know, I did those uh, blood transfusions. So my son gave me his plasma. I gave my dad my plasma. And I did six of those, one a month for six months, and we saw no effect in me.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Uh, but when I gave my father plasma, my father's speed of aging slowed by the equivalent of 25 years. So from a 71 year old to a 46 year old, and those results remained uh, the uh, the stable for six months, which is the last measurement we did. So in that case, the plasma therapy was promising. And it didn't work in me, probably because my biomarkers are already pretty competitive with an 18 year old. Whereas my father benefited significantly because his biomarkers as a 71 year old are pretty different than my biomarkers. And so in that case, we discontinued the therapy for me, but he could continue if he wanted.

• 1:16:03Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating. That seems like a really easy-ish intervention that you can do to extend the longevity of your parents.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  From the outside looking in, it can sound wild and creepy and weird and everything. On a personal level, you know, to be able to do something like that for a parent is a special experience. It's not too dissimilar than donating an organ. You know, that's very commonplace and we don't think of organ transplants as weird or organ donation is weird. So it's just, uh, it's a new idea and so people think it's weird, but it's actually identical to what we already do in life. And we actually applaud people who make those kinds of sacrifices. And, and I should, I should clarify, it's not a sacrifice. Giving plasma is not a sacrifice.

• 1:16:49Shane Parrish?

  If our goal is not to die, how do you think about the, the things like sunscreen? And sort of like the other things that are sort of proximate to us, especially, I'm thinking especially about things we put on or in our bodies, right? So we talked earlier about plastic bottles and, and sort of trying to avoid that. Do you have a particular sunscreen you use? Like, I imagine you've thought about this more than any other human.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  We do try to be thoughtful. Uh, we're not perfect. You know, there's so many things we're looking at at any given time. But yeah, we have, we use a sunscreen, Elta MD, E L T A M D.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  And it's a good one that has less bad stuff in it. I generally try to avoid the sun when the UV index is above four. So I get sun exposure in the morning and in the night. And this is also another contentious part in society where I get a lot of flack for the paleness of my skin. And, you know, it's a cultural norm that tan skin is somehow a signifier of health and wellness and beauty. But, you know, the sun ages and damages the skin and creates cancer risk. So it's, it's not, this culture of tan skin is not going to survive much longer.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Because it will just naturally push in the direction where

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  we generally, over a long enough time horizon, move towards more positive habits for society. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I think this is one of them that our current ideas around sun exposure will change. I'm not suggesting we will avoid the sun altogether. I'm suggesting we will be more mindful. You know, it, it won't be a case where, because currently our general dispositions are pretty brazen towards the sun. It's like, um, it's not a careful balance of, you know, get sun exposure, but only so much. It's like, you know, unadulterated sun exposure is kind of like this. It's, it kind of is like around like, like certain dietary preferences where

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  it's really a much bigger social thing than it is a data thing or science thing. And that's fine. Like, this is how people kind of break out into camps. But we, we measure my skin age using multi-spectral imaging and using a whole bunch of other technologies. So we see exactly what happens when. And by looking at the data, it's just very hard to, it's very hard to. Go do something that's going to actively accelerate my speed of aging when the objective of this project is to try to slow it as much as possible.

• 1:19:37Shane Parrish?

  And then I want to ask, just before we sort of wrap up here, how do you envision? And I know we don't have a long window in terms of what we can see, but if you zoom out, how do you see AI helping us?

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  I actually, I tried to embody the problem of AI. I tried to become the species as a problem. And so I did that with a thought experiment where I said, okay, I'm a collection of 35 trillion cells. And that's a lot of intelligent agents all doing their own thing with different objectives. The body doesn't have a singular objective. The body has all kinds of conflicting objectives at all moments. And I wanted to see, could I achieve goal alignment within me, Brian Johnson? And that's what I've been trying to do. And so first I had to say, okay, in order to understand these 35 trillion cells, I

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  need to get a read of as many of them as possible. Then I need to find the evidence to tell me how I align the cells. And then I need to implement it with exactitude.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  Now, this is a problem that is identical to AI. So we're building the superintelligence and we then are going to give it objective functions. I say, all right, AI, do this, you know, like solve this math problem or help me write this thing or have this conversation with me, whatever the thing we're asking it to do. It has goals and it has goals we've programmed into it. It has goals that it emerges from the system itself. So we're basically trying to say, what are our goals, under what circumstances and for whom? So it's a giant goal alignment problem. So my situation, I had to say, okay, is 10:00 PM Brian in charge who sets the alarm? Or 6:00 AM Brian who wants to hit this news button? Who's in charge and under what circumstance?

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  That's the same kind of goal alignment problem you have with AI. And it's the same kind of problem we have with Planet Earth. So Earth needs to be a home where we can thrive. If we kill Earth, we're in a bad situation. And so when I say don't die, it's don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't let the planet die, don't kill it, and align AI with don't die. Don't die is deceptively simple and endlessly expansive. It is a heuristic, it is a computational model, it is a mathematical framework, it is a biological system, it is a closed up algorithm. All those things in two words. And this is what I'm putting forward as a species is if we care to be around for the future,

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  we need to be able to figure out how to cooperate at the most basic level. And don't die is the most played game in every single minute of every single day on planet Earth. There's not a game, even capitalism is not played more than don't die. Every two seconds, you and I breathe to not die. We look both ways before we cross the street, we throw out moldy food. It is the most played game in existence. Now, the moment you stand up above don't die, you break out into a billion different directions of what people want, how they understand the world, what they care about, what they'll do and why, all their rules and justifications. So you really have to say, if we're trying to go align a super intelligence around something

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  and not kill the Earth and not kill each other and not die ourselves, how do you do it? And that's what I've tried to put forward is this is an actual plan, a practical plan that spans what to eat for breakfast and how to align a super intelligent system with all of our interests.

• 1:23:11Shane Parrish?

  That's beautiful. We always ask the same question to end, which is what is success for you? But I have a feeling it's going to be two words.

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  I would say it's the courage to believe that I don't know.

• 1:23:27Shane Parrish?

  That's a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. Thanks a lot for your time.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:23:34Shane Parrish?

  All right, it's time for a few of my reflections after that conversation. That went pretty amazing, I thought. I really, and so you know, I try to get into these things. Like, I've been eating Brian's diet for the last week, with a few exceptions here and there, but generally speaking, the pudding and the bowls are pretty good. They're awesome. They're missing a little bit of salt for my taste, but the reason behind that, I talked to him after, and the reason behind that is that the lentils and stuff have enough salt in them that if you consume the quantities that he's talking about on his website, you actually get the daily amount of salt that you need. I loved exploring a little bit

• 1:24:17Shane Parrish?

  of different angles to it. I think the most surprising part of this conversation for me was the lessons on money that he wished he knew earlier, and I haven't heard him talk about that anywhere else. I really enjoyed that. The posture thing, I find myself sitting up straight right now, even noticing it, and I think that that's a really good sort of angle to it. I love the idea that, you know, we can improve our sleep as the one critical variable, and everything else falls in line. Sleep is a lead domino to so many other things, and sleep positions you to play the next day on easy mode. It doesn't change the day that's coming at you, but it does change how you handle it. And I think

• 1:24:59Shane Parrish?

  one of the things that I'm gonna try is just experimenting, eating dinner a little earlier, and seeing how that affects my resting heart rate while I sleep.

• 1:25:13Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with me. Until next time.

• 1:25:19Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear.

• 1:25:54Shane Parrish?

  Until next time.