Most Replayed Moment: This Longevity Protocol Actually Works! - Biohacker Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur, longevity researcher, and founder of Blueprint - a project to reverse his biological age through rigorous data, diet, and discipline. Known as one of the world’s most committed biohackers, Johnson lives by a strict protocol involving 111 pills a day, precision meals, and relentless self-tracking. In today’s Most Replayed Moment, Bryan dives into his purpose for pursuing such a life. He then breaks down the exact protocol he follows - from daily pills to the meticulously engineered meals he eats - to optimise every aspect of his biology. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/6oGS7xtMkWb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/8lvwhFCMkWb Watch the episodes on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos⁠ 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.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What mission are you on? And why does that mission matter to you, but also to everybody else listening to this right now?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  My mission is for the human race to survive and thrive. And it's figuring out what we do that creates the highest probability of that being possible.

• 0:24Steven Bartlett?

  And why specifically have you taken on that mission versus any other mission you could have committed your life and time to? Why you?

• 0:33Steven Bartlett?

  And I want the long answer to this.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:35Steven Bartlett?

  All the context, going right back to the beginning.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I had this transformative experience when I was 19 years old. I went to Ecuador and I was a missionary. And I lived among extreme poverty, dirt floors, mud huts, people not knowing how they're going to make ends meet day to day. And I came back to the United States. And my family was poor growing up, but it was opulent compared to Ecuador. I couldn't believe that I had lived in a bubble my entire life, unaware of circumstances, of other realities, like where I was at in Ecuador. And I was facing decisions in college, what to study, what to become, who I was going to be, you start creating these identities. All I could identify was this fire that had lit within me, that I wanted to spend my life trying to improving the human race at a global scale.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I don't know where it came from, but it just coming back from Ecuador, it seemed like that was what I wanted to spend my life on. I didn't know what to do. I was 21 years old. I didn't have any ideas. And so I thought I would become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by the age of 30. And then with that money, try to figure out a plan to do it. And so lucky me, I sold Braintree Venmo at 34 and made a few hundred million dollars.

• 1:42Steven Bartlett?

  Sold for 800 million dollars, right?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  And then I set my mind to this question of what one thing in existence could I do that would be relevant in the 25th century? I grew up on biographies. And so I'm accustomed to thinking about things on centuries time scale. So doing things that not that matter in the news cycle tomorrow, but that intelligence in the 25th century would say, you know what? We appreciate what happened in the early 21st century.

• 2:11Steven Bartlett?

  You've only really been following this protocol for a couple of years now, right?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, my, I guess I really do understand myself as on a singular mission.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  For intelligent existence to thrive.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  That is what I am. That is what I'm doing. That's what I'm pursuing. Nothing else matters to me.

• 2:39Steven Bartlett?

  The question, the ultimate question, I think, in, you know, you just said all these people are gonna say I'm weird or whatever else. There's this ultimate question because you're very, very clearly mission driven. And there's always a cost. Much of what I do here, when I meet extraordinary people, is to understand the cost. In fact, the reason I started this podcast is because we, we, it's called the Diary of a CEO, is because we see the CEO stuff, but we don't see the diary. That's why it's called what it is. And it started as me just sharing my diary and I shared everything from masturbation, my mental struggles, everything, my issues with my family. I shared it all to, to put the cost out there to the world. Cost of my mission, my calling, my pursuit, the thing that was dragging me.

• 3:20Steven Bartlett?

  The ultimate question becomes, are you happy?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Never more so in my entire life.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Unquestionably.

• 3:33Steven Bartlett?

  And what does that mean?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I've never felt more fulfilled. I've never felt more stable. I've never felt a more expansive consciousness. I've never felt more free. I've never felt more bold. I've never in my entire life been this alive.

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  And you, you experienced the antithesis of happiness, right? You experienced, I mean, maybe some people would argue that it's something else, but you experienced the bottom of the, the crevice of depression. You know what that felt like?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  I do.

• 4:07Steven Bartlett?

  The voices in your head that were telling you to do things, the unthinkable actions of suicide.

• 4:14Steven Bartlett?

  What, what goes on in your head now? What are the, the same voices saying?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  It's all play. I'm, I've never had more fun. Most of my life has just been a grind. It's like doing the things to achieve the objective because that's what the societal role play says to do.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And that, what I'm doing now, I'm not doing this for anyone's expectations. I'm not doing this to achieve anyone's acceptance. This is the game I've selected to play. I don't care what anyone says about it, sincerely. I just feel free.

• 4:54Steven Bartlett?

  I, I noticed there's something on the chair over there. And I'm, I'm actually starving. It's, it's just gone four o'clock and I haven't eaten today. But you were very kind in bringing me some food. So I want to talk about, I want to talk about food. Jack, could you bring me the food, please? And you can tell me what you've brought me to eat. Presumably this is what you eat.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:18Steven Bartlett?

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

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I did.

• 5:24Steven Bartlett?

  Just for anyone that's looking, I'll try and tilt it up so people can see. If anyone's watching on YouTube or Spotify where you can get the video, you can see what's in these bowls. And you've brought me two little buckets of pills here. And there's a drink here. What is, what is this food?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  This is, this is the answer. If you ask the body, what do you want to eat to be in ideal health? This is the answer that it generated. So this is not to say that is the only food you could eat. It is a version where you could eat. So the, my daily caloric intake is 2,250 calories a day. Every calorie has to fight for its life. There's not a single calorie in my entire life protocol that exists for any reason other than serving an objective in the body. So dish number one is called super veggie. It's broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, garlic, ginger, hemp seeds.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And over a month, if you, if you were to do this with me, you'd eat around 70 pounds of vegetables per month.

• 6:31Steven Bartlett?

  70 pounds of vegetables per month. Wow. Wow.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And I think we also have in there extra virgin olive oil and chocolate.

• 6:41Steven Bartlett?

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

• 6:45Speaker 01

  So we, I pair the chocolate in here. It's an unexpected pairing. The way we think about this is.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  You could say chocolate is good for you, which might lead you to eat a Snickers bar. The more precise way of thinking about it is you want dark chocolate, undutch, tests for heavy metals, and has a high polyphenol count. If you don't do all five layers to qualify the value of the chocolate, you have an inferior chocolate nutritional value for your body. So everything we do at Blueprint uses that frame of reference of understanding everything a full stack way of how do you serve the body's objectives in the maximal way.

• 7:23Steven Bartlett?

  That is a mushroom covered in chocolate.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  How fun.

• 7:33Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are Matakki mushrooms.

• 7:36Steven Bartlett?

  Matakki mushrooms. This is a normal broccoli, isn't it?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:40Steven Bartlett?

  You didn't put anything on it?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:41Steven Bartlett?

  No salt?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I use potassium chloride, no salt.

• 7:46Steven Bartlett?

  And we've got some broccoli in there. So is that, is that that dish explained?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  That's explained.

• 7:51Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And then this is, looks like dessert to me.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Nutty pudding. It is, many people consider it to be a dessert. It's macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, sunflower lechon, pomegranate juice, berries, and pea protein.

• 8:05Steven Bartlett?

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

• 8:09Speaker 01

  There's one more dish, which we don't have, which varies day to day.

• 8:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  But this is really it. I have three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, one's in here, then I have an avocado and a third meal a day.

• 8:21Steven Bartlett?

  And this drink here that you've given me?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, make sure you stir that up. That's the Green Giant. So the way that it works is I'll wake up in the morning, first thing I'll do is drink the Green Giant, take 60 pills, work out for an hour, then eat super veggie, wait for an hour, eat nutty pudding, wait for one more hour and eat my third meal of the day, and then I'm finished for the day.

• 8:39Steven Bartlett?

  How many pills were you taking one day?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Currently 111.

• 8:43Steven Bartlett?

  Wow. And you take 60 of them in the morning?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 8:47Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 8:50Steven Bartlett?

  Wow, that's an interesting taste. I've got to say, it doesn't taste amazing. You know, it's not like something I'd find in a juice bar or something.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:59Steven Bartlett?

  There's a little bit of an aftertaste to it. That's not fantastic. And I mean, I like vegetables, so I like most of this stuff. The chocolate, I think, is a bit of a spanner in the works because it's not like a chocolate that you'd get. It's not a milk chocolate or a Mars bar.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:14Steven Bartlett?

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

• 9:20Steven Bartlett?

  which is a strange thing to add to a mushroom.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could also put the dark chocolate in the nutty pudding or you could have it independently. I find it's fun because it's a new experience for people to try. So it's really an optional thing.

• 9:31Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, this is nice. This nutty pudding is really nice.

• 9:35Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 9:37Steven Bartlett?

  That's really nice.

• 9:39Steven Bartlett?

  That's really, really nice. So what are your principles for eating then? You talked about calorific restriction. How important is that? Because I eat a lot and I don't count. I just.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Just eat.

• 9:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I'm like, you know, at my heaviest, I'm 15 stone and fives, which is what? About 100 kilograms or something? So I'm quite heavy and I eat and I go to the gym every day, but I eat a lot, kind of out of control.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  It has compelling evidence. Caloric restriction has compelling evidence that it's one of the most effective longevity interventions that can be done.

• 10:14Steven Bartlett?

  And what are your sort of wider nutritional principles that people can very easily introduce into their lives?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It's, I have this, I have this experience where I learned how to fly an airplane. I became a pilot. And we get up at altitude and I would use my hands and try to fly the airplane. And I'd go left, right, up, down. I'd try to be perfectly on the attitude indicator of maintaining exactly the altitude which I was pegged at and the direction. And then I would engage autopilot and this plane would just sit up straight and it would be perfectly pegged. It was so far superior to my ability to do it. And that's kind of how I think about my diet is if I use my mind, I kind of ping pong around life, eating this and that. And like, I hear this thing there and I hear this thing there. I kind of do whatever's available to me. If you think about putting your body on autopilot, I call it my autonomous self. Let the body report out, evidence, algorithm in, and it just runs.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  This is the result. This is autopilot for my body. And so every single thing we do is tracked in the body. Every pill has to justify its existence. If it can't be measured and quantified, we don't do it. And so it's a system, a closed loop system that has an algorithm running me. Which is so far superior to my mind, which is going to do, it's going to add the cookie to the order. It's going to eat blank because of whatever.

• 11:26Steven Bartlett?

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

• 11:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so this.

• 11:38Steven Bartlett?

  Those are all the pills you take in one day.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:40Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred and, a hundred and twenty odd pills in a day, almost.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, 111, yeah. That big one right there. Can you see that guy right there?

• 11:48Steven Bartlett?

  This one here. Jesus, Lord Jesus. What is in these pills?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  A lot of things you would expect, basics like vitamin D and C, more advanced things like alpha ketoglutarate or metformin or carbos or other things like that. It spans from basic and common to some more advanced drugs.

• 12:10Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of my friends, when they, when I, well, one of my friends in particular, when he knew that I was speaking to you, he asked me about NAD plus. That's obviously something that's become quite popular in the longevity culture. What's your perspective on NAD plus?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's trying to modulate those levels in his body and there's nice age graphs. So people, to enter this into an understandable frame, people, it's not commonly understood what a biological age is versus a chronological age. Somebody can be chronologically, I'm 45, but I can biologically be different. I could be either 30 or 35 or 55 or 70, according to the markers. So in levels of NAD, intracellular NAD in particular, there are certain levels that would peg you at age 18, age 30, age 50, because they reliably go down with age. And so when you supplement to try to change these, you're trying to peg yourself to a more youthful state because it's a energy the body runs on. And so what I did is I, people in the longevity community do have a lot of questions

• 13:06Speaker 01

  about how you increase your intracellular NAD levels. And there's a big debate, do you do NR or NMN? It's like this big, this big debate and everyone's always wants to fight about it. And so I trialed both. I did 90 days on NR, I did 90 days on NMN and I measured my intracellular blood levels throughout. And I showed that both were basically effective in doing the objective. So I was able to peg my intracellular NAD at the 18 year old mark on both supplements.

• 13:34Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  So it basically doesn't matter, just get it measured and just titrate your dose to make sure you're getting what you need.

• 13:39Steven Bartlett?

  Nice. And I wanna, I really wanna make sure, because I feel like you're, if I'm never gonna, you know, meet someone who I feel like is so well versed in how the things I put in my mouth have an impact on my biological age. So what advice would you give to me about, say that you could, I'm a blank canvas, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna believe everything you say. My objective is to increase my health span and to not age poorly.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:04Steven Bartlett?

  What would you say about the things that I put in my mouth? Give me some rules.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Do exactly what I've published.

• 14:10Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I'm gonna make it dead simple for you. I say tongue in cheek that Blueprint is the best health protocol ever developed. Prove me wrong with your data.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  If someone has a better, if someone can achieve better biomarkers with their protocol, it's gonna be amazing for me and everyone else. Because now we have a comparison. But right now, the tricky thing for someone like yourself is if you go out into the world and you try to figure this out, you've got to sort through a hundred gurus.

• 14:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Everyone's saying a different thing. And even now, if you give five anti-aging experts the same scientific papers and ask them to develop a protocol for you, you'll get a different protocol from every single one. They're not going to agree. There's no way to go out there and get consensus in the world. So you need to pick a path and then measure. And I've done exactly that. So I've basically tried to punch through all the noise and say, is there actually something I can do which has some believability? That's what I've done. So I've published all my data. And so Blueprint provides people a starter, a starting point to say, I'm going to do something that I can see works and I measure myself, then iterate and improve upon it. And so health and wellness is all like a religion, where the King James Version of the Bible supports a hundred different denominations.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  They all say their gods weren't true only. Same with health and wellness. Everyone claims their gods true health and wellness program. And I've tried to punch through the whole thing to say, it doesn't matter what guru status is, share the data.

• 15:33Steven Bartlett?

  Eat in the mornings?

• 15:36Steven Bartlett?

  If you, if I was a blank canvas?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I'd say trial. I'd say follow my protocol exactly, see how you feel, and then try and experiment what you do later in the day, and then compare the two.

• 15:46Steven Bartlett?

  Sugar?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 15:50Steven Bartlett?

  Zero sugar.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Zero sugar.

• 15:52Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  It does nothing useful for your body. Now, like, our body needs sugar to run. So if you eat sugar in berries, which you're having now, that's great, but a highly processed white sugar or cane sugar, there's no value for your body. There's other things of much higher value for your body.

• 16:12Steven Bartlett?

  God, it's hard to exist in this world without sugar, isn't it? Do you do anything with your testosterone levels?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do a testosterone patch. I supplement with a patch. I supplement because I'm on a caloric restriction diet. And when you do that, your testosterone naturally goes down. So I keep my testosterone pegged in the normal range between six and eight hundred. I'm about eight fifty right now. So I'm not trying to get above it. I'm just trying to be normal.

• 16:35Steven Bartlett?

  One of the reasons why, I said to you before, when you sat down, that men of my age start thinking about longevity is we notice that our hairlines have started to recede. I mean, getting to thirty with a receding hairline is actually quite good. Some of my friends started a little bit earlier. And then we start noticing these gray hairs in our heads. You have fantastic hair. And in fact, a lot of the comments I saw were, what's he doing with his hair? There was one particular comment, it was like, someone ask him, this was online, someone ask him how he's got that hair. What advice would you give to me? Listen, I'm at that age now where I've got to make a decision. Do I let this thing go back?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:08Steven Bartlett?

  Or do I fight it?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Don't do it. Yeah. Fight. Fight with everything you've got in you.

• 17:13Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Trust me on this.

• 17:16Steven Bartlett?

  I will. Trust me.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  You don't want to clean up of, you don't want to clean up aging damage that you can prevent right now.

• 17:28Steven Bartlett?

  And I can prevent my hairline receding?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:31Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I started losing my hair in my early thirties.

• 17:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  And it's been a grind to try to keep it. And so my hair protocol, here's what I do. I have a A custom formulation that we've built, it basically has Modoxidil and a few other things, so people can get that easily. I have a red light therapy cap I wear every morning for six minutes in my morning routine. I do a PRF, so I inject, I get blood drawn, spun up, and then reinjected into my scalp, once every maybe month or three. And then I take a few supplements that are listed online for the Blueprint website. So basically like four things helps prevent hair loss and encourages hair growth.

• 18:22Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all of that and walk my dog. So I'm like, is there, is there like a silver bullet that I could?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  So here's how it works is, I know it sounds overwhelming. If you build habits that just make these things, you don't think about it. It sounds overwhelming in the beginning. But if you just get into a routine where every morning you do your thing, and when you're doing that thing, you just throw a cap on your head and it just is on for six minutes. And then at night, before you go to bed, you put a little liquid on your scalp and you rub it in. And then you take a few pills every day with your routine. It's entirely about building systems so you don't think about it ever. So it's never a burden on you.

• 19:06Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.