The $2M Longevity Protocol: Bryan Johnson’s Biohacking Blueprint

Today we discuss, perhaps, the most audacious goal in the history of humanity and question: is death inevitable? Bryan Johnson is a modern-day explorer who has dedicated significant resources over the last few years to arresting—and possibly even reversing—his biological age. In doing so, he is reframing the zeitgeist and revolting against our culture of self-destructive behaviors. Centered on Project Blueprint and the ambition to halt and potentially reverse biological aging, he challenges cultural norms that tend towards self-destructive behaviors. Despite my initial skepticism, Bryan’s mission emerges as humanitarian. His ventures include Kernel, a brain activity monitoring company, and OS Fund, a science and tech venture capital firm. We explore Bryan’s exodus from Mormonism and his AI-centric vision for the future. Amid critical press, I urge listeners to approach with discernment as Bryan delves into longevity science with emotional depth. It prompts profound contemplation about aging and humanity’s role in an imminent, unimaginable future. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: INSIDE TRACKER: Get 25% OFF tests 👉insidetracker.com/RICHROLL ROKA: Enjoy 20% OFF 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL BON CHARGE: 15% OFF 👉BONCHARGE.com/RICHROLL AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs 👉 drinkAG1.com/RICHROLL WAKING UP: FREE Month 👉WAKINGUP.com/RICHROLL This episode was brought to you by BetterHelp: enjoy 10% off your first month 👉BETTERHELP. COM/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:22Bryan Johnson?

  It's really simple. I basically don't trust anything in reality. Not authority, not my mind, not my perception, nothing. I just trust data and numbers. And the only thing I believe in is I don't want to die.

• 1:40Rich Roll?

  Brian Johnson is a successful entrepreneur who has spent every minute of the last three years entirely devoted to not just slowing the aging process, but actually reversing it.

• 1:53Bryan Johnson?

  What if I tried to become the best in history at not dying?

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  The world champion of not dying.

• 1:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00Rich Roll?

  The project blueprint involves a large team of medical experts, costs him $2 million annually, and reliably provokes the ire and suspicion of others.

• 2:11Bryan Johnson?

  I'm usually the most unrelatable person at the table. We think we have choice. We think we have optionality. We don't. We are up against survival.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  Do you believe that there's a possibility that you won't die?

• 2:29Bryan Johnson?

  Yes, unquestionably.

• 2:39Rich Roll?

  A bit of forewarning before we dive in, however, Brian is not without controversy. There's controversy around what he's doing, around Project Blueprint itself. There's also controversy around his personal life. Some of that controversy is certainly earned, some perhaps not. Either way, there does remain something undoubtedly fascinating about this guy that led me to wanting to better understand both him, but more importantly, the why behind this mission. And I wanted to do it firsthand. And this conversation, which was recorded way back in early November, is nothing if not unique.

• 3:19Rich Roll?

  It's one I entreat you to receive with an open mind and one I believe is going to leave you thinking a little bit differently, not just about aging, but about humanity's place in a future hard to imagine that is far sooner upon us than we wish to believe.

• 3:39Rich Roll?

  So nice to meet you, Brian. Thank you for doing this. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. And I want to begin this by saying something upfront, which is a bit of an admission on my part. I think that my original kind of relationship to what you were doing was a little judgmental. It was based solely on clickbait headlines that I would see without reading the articles, without really devoting an adequate amount of time to truly understand what you were doing. And I think that left me, maybe not dismissive, but sort of not that interested. And the more that I've learned about you, the more I've come to really appreciate what

• 4:23Rich Roll?

  you're trying to do and also appreciate the extent to which I think... You're misunderstood and judged in the way that maybe I was judging you, all of which leads to today, because I really, I really want to truly understand what you're up to. Because I think on face value, it might appear as somewhat of a vanity project, but there's a lot more going on here. So why don't we begin with your T-shirt? It says, "Don't Die." That obviously has an obvious meaning on its face, but for you, that means something much more.

• 4:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. First, thank you. That's magnanimous of you to be that transparent.

• 4:58Rich Roll?

  Well, it's the least I can do. If I expect you to open up, the least I can do is admit, you know, my own vulnerabilities.

• 5:05Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, it's the most common experience of those getting to know me.

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  Why is that?

• 5:13Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, my reading of history is that most of us are born into this world, and we never really understand the systems we're born into. So for example, I was born into a deeply religious community. It was the singular reality I had of existence in everyone in my community. I was in a fishbowl. I had no idea I was in a fishbowl until I was 21 years old. And so it makes me wonder how many of the fishbowls I'm in. And that's what I've been trying to do my entire life, is trying to understand where my perception takes me, what I can't see. And I think the default state for humans is we live in fishbowls. We don't understand what we don't know.

• 6:00Bryan Johnson?

  And this endeavor is pretty different to everything else going on in the world. And I think when that happens, the propensity is just a need to react to reject it. So I can't speak for everyone on this, but yeah, it's been pretty ferocious in our response. It's not been a lackadaisical thing. It's been, yeah, it's been ferocious.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  I have noticed that you've become... Somewhat adept at tackling the critics, though, and you seem to be having fun with it. You know what I mean? Like, I've seen an evolution in how you communicate publicly with respect to that. Rather than avoid it, you're kind of confronting it head on and doing it in a playful way.

• 6:42Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Yeah, the key is that most people feel strangled by adversity and by critics. They feel like that's something that dunks them under the water and that will somehow defeat them. And they are more apprehensive to take on trolls. And it's really counterintuitive. The best strategy is to always say, yes, and. If somebody makes fun of you, yes, and. Someone makes a dig at you, yes, and. And it's so counterintuitive because you want to defend yourself. That's what you want to do, and you want to make the counterpoints. It's a losing strategy every single time. You never win. And so lean into it. And you then take away the power of those who are trying to do it, and you just play.

• 7:26Bryan Johnson?

  It creates an environment where your ideas and your endeavors can thrive.

• 7:31Rich Roll?

  Well, I think anytime anybody is trying to do something new or different, or somebody like yourself is putting themselves out there very openly, publicly and transparently in an effort to do something no one has ever done before, not only to extend your lifespan, but perhaps even reverse your biological age, you're going to open yourself up to a lot of criticism. That's to be expected, of course. So on the one hand, it's perhaps the most audacious goal in the history of humanity. On the other hand, as somebody who has a history of being an ultra endurance athlete, I have a lot of respect for anyone who's willing to flirt with the outer edges of human possibility.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  And I think we've seen, even in recent years, in my own little subculture of ultra endurance, some massive gains in terms of what humans are capable of athletically or what they're able to endure. It wasn't that long ago when people thought running a marathon was the furthest anybody could possibly run. They wouldn't even let women do it until recent decades because they thought it would be too harmful to them. And now... Hundred mile races are selling out. You know, my friend Harvey Lewis just ran 450 miles over like 96 hours without barely sleeping. So there is a ceiling being raised in terms of receptivity to human capability.

• 9:00Rich Roll?

  But we are locked into this idea around the inevitability of our aging. And so I want to give you the opportunity to kind of, let's just, you know, basically define our terms here. So people who don't know who you are and don't know what you're up to can kind of understand the goals that you have set for yourself.

• 9:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, okay. I'll first say, all right, when you and I woke up today, okay, let me ask you this question. What is your number one priority today? Number one, not number two, actually, let's say number zero, number zero priority, not even number one.

• 9:31Rich Roll?

  Zero pri- um, hmm.

• 9:34Bryan Johnson?

  The zero thing that has to be done above all.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Well, I have to survive the day. I have to live, right? But I don't think about that.

• 9:42Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. So your zeroth principle goal every single second is to not die. You inhale air as an effort to not die. You, then you do other things like you look both ways before you cross the street. You throw out moldy food, you wear a seatbelt. So all day long, that is your, your, your zeroth principle goal is to not die.

• 9:59Rich Roll?

  Sure, but I wouldn't say that I devote a lot of conscious resources to the idea of surviving the day.

• 10:07Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. So it's not top of mind because in our daily lives, we play this game every day. And we do things incrementally to get better at it. So for example, when it's discovered that getting hit and run over by a car produces death, it spreads throughout the human race. This is a bad thing to do. And therefore we create these habits of looking both ways across the street. We have lights, we have stop signs. So we create these mechanisms and systems to say, how do we not die as a society? So society is built around this concept of don't die. And based upon that principle, I had, did this thought experiment. When I was 21 years old, I should back up a little bit. I came back from Ecuador, I was a missionary there and I had. Been living among extreme poverty and dirt floors, mud huts. And it was such a shocking experience that I had come from this middle-class family in the United States.

• 10:52Bryan Johnson?

  You know, like my mom made my clothes for me. We didn't have a ton of money, but like still I wasn't, we were not fighting for basics on a daily basis. I came back and I was really questioning my reality on every level. And the only thing I could make sense of is that I wanted to spend my life trying to improve the human race in a meaningful way. I had no idea what that meant. I wasn't good at anything. I wasn't a standout in anything. So I thought I'll just make a whole bunch of money by age of 30 and then with money, go out and do something interesting. So lucky me, I sold Brentwood Venmo for $800 million. On the eve of that, I thought, okay, now I'm flush with cash. What do I do? And so now you have this basically unlimited option space. You can do anything in the world with the amount of money I had. What do you do? And it's such a challenging thought process.

• 11:35Rich Roll?

  Did you find yourself indulging in your wealth and, and kind of playing that out to see if that would, you know, resolve any existential crisis that you might be having at the time?

• 11:45Bryan Johnson?

  I did a few things. I, I really enjoy outdoor adventure and so I did some dog sledding across Sweden. I did some racing in the deserts of Morocco. I did some Iceland adventure. So I kind of did some outdoor stuff, but outside of that, no, I really didn't.

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  You didn't buy a Bugatti and a private jet or anything like that?

• 12:05Bryan Johnson?

  I did get my pilot's license and I started flying airplanes, but for functional reasons. Money has never really been anything that really interested me. It's, yeah, it's, it's really not a priority for me.

• 12:15Rich Roll?

  So economics no longer being a factor in your life, this desire or, or kind of compulsion to do good or advance humanity is pretty open-ended. Like, how do you then take your life and your copious resources and point them in a direction that's going to fulfill that sense of purpose that you have? The choices are endless.

• 12:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Rich Roll?

  So how do you arrive at this idea of health span extension?

• 12:45Bryan Johnson?

  The first thought I had, it came back to when I was 21 years old, discovering that I was in a bubble, in this religious bubble that I'd grown up. This reality had been created for me.

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  We should just say, I mean, you grew up in a Mormon community.

• 12:56Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Rich Roll?

  Very indoctrinated in that religion.

• 12:59Bryan Johnson?

  That's right. Mormonism is not a chill religion.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:02Bryan Johnson?

  It's all consuming for your reality.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  Were you in Salt Lake or were you in like a smaller?

• 13:08Bryan Johnson?

  A small town.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's more intense the further you get away from Salt Lake.

• 13:12Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. And everyone in my community, there were 30,000 people in my town. I don't remember knowing a single non Mormon. They were probably there, I just didn't know them. So everyone shared a singular understanding of existence and you have the rules. So it's like, it's kind of like this thing where the religion says, here's the rule set. And if you play by them, you get this eternal life that's spectacular. All you have to do is play by the rules. So as a kid, it's like, that's a pretty good deal, right? I can obey rules, I can do that. You then become part of this culture and you forget you're playing the game. You just are the rules. It's very hard to identify that you're actually in the game.

• 13:50Rich Roll?

  So when did that begin to fracture for you?

• 13:53Bryan Johnson?

  So I served a mission in Ecuador, which even hardened my beliefs even more. And then I came back and I was 21 years old. And even on the mission, I started for the first time really thinking about the religion. Cause before it was more of a cultural thing of I was embedded in the community. It was more of a practice. And there you're deep in the doctrine. And I started asking questions like, this doesn't make any sense. Like how, how do I reconcile this? But the challenge was like, half my brain was intellectually engaged in that. And half my brain was emotionally engaged with what I had done. And I was of a split brain. It was very hard for me to discern what I really thought and felt about it. The religion largely talks about how you feel about a given thing. The God communicates via this emotional language. Like you feel the Holy Spirit in doing these things.

• 14:37Bryan Johnson?

  So it's very confusing because you're trying to deduce like, what is truth? How do I discern truth? Is it a logic train? Is it emotion train? And then you have to reconcile those two things. And you have to then say, I only believe in logic. That's the only way I can derive any kind of objective view of the world. And then there's this emotional cloud that's like, but really, is there such a thing as intuition and emotion and other ways to receive truth? And so as a kid trying to parse reality, especially when you've been in that your entire life, it's very hard to understand what is really going on.

• 15:06Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So when did that begin to?

• 15:10Rich Roll?

  Open up for you, like, was there a specific event or a set of circumstances where you began to feel like you needed to put some space between you and this doctrine?

• 15:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I read a biography of Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, Rough Stone Rolling, and I think it was written by a member of the church, so a historian, I think at Columbia, if I'm not mistaken, and it was a historically accurate account of Joseph Smith, and it was the first time I learned the true history of the Mormon Church, because when you grow up into it, you get this washed up version of this clean cut set of events where like you have good guys and bad guys, and you read the history and it's, boy, it's complicated and it's not clear cut. And so I read that and I thought, this is really weird, because I've trusted these people my whole life to tell me the truth at any cost. Like, I trust you to act in my best interest. And I read this, I thought,

• 16:05Bryan Johnson?

  wait a second, this is not a relationship of integrity. I would have expected you to tell me exactly what happened, so I could parse this myself, not clean up the whole thing and give me some version. My trust started decaying in the institution. Like, I can't trust you to tell me things anymore, because you have an agenda to tell me things a certain way, and it just started falling apart from there.

• 16:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that must have been confusing.

• 16:28Bryan Johnson?

  It's excruciating.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  There's one thing that's abundantly clear with the Mormon Church and these Mormon communities, which is that if you are to break ranks or part ways with the faith, you're risking your connection with that community.

• 16:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Rich Roll?

  Like, there's a lot at stake. There's a gigantic social cost that comes with deciding that you no longer want to participate.

• 16:58Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, this has been really relevant in recent years. So I had three children with a woman that was Mormon, still is Mormon. We separated, and at the time, my oldest son was, I think, 10.

• 17:11Rich Roll?

  Is that Talmage?

• 17:12Bryan Johnson?

  Jefferson.

• 17:13Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 17:14Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, all very young. And in that moment, it kind of replayed my childhood where my father left the church very early on. I was three and he was on his way out. But growing up, he was always painted by the community as a bad guy, a guy who couldn't be trusted. He was on the outside of the community. The devil must surely be whispering in his ear. He must surely be my greatest threat of pulling me outside. And so he was always held at arm's length. Now, my father didn't help himself by some of the things he did where like he could have put himself in a better spot. Still, he was other and he was outside the trust circle. And so when that happened, the same thing happened to my children where I became other.

• 17:56Bryan Johnson?

  There I was, like having devoted 10 years of my life to try to be the very best dad I could. I was super attentive. I mean, I was really devoted to be a good father. The event happens and now my kids are wondering, is dad okay? Is dad a good guy or bad guy? And it caused this rift by, you know, probably like six or seven years where the kids were like, I don't know. And they didn't trust me. When they're with me, it was all this, there was this tension. We got along really well. My kids and I, we've never actually gotten into a fight. We get it along really, really well. But there was just this tension where they could never cross to fully engage with me again, that they could trust me. Now, Talmage, my, my middle child, when he was 16 years old, he left his mother's house and came to live with me to be like, hey, I'm with

• 18:40Bryan Johnson?

  you, dad. Let's go. So he made the transition. But with the other two kids, like it's still kind of this mixed thing where I almost lost them as children, you know, where it's like, I can't be their father in a way where I could before.

• 18:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that has to be additionally painful. You, despite your best efforts to be such a good dad, repeating a pattern that your dad did and whatever pain that that must have caused you as a young child, confusion about your relationship with your dad. And your dad struggled, right? Like he had substance issues and all kinds of things, right?

• 19:16Bryan Johnson?

  He did.

• 19:16Rich Roll?

  Which makes for a bit of a confusing childhood. You know, I'm trying to tie a relationship between.

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  The experience you had as a young person in the church with your father, you know, being painted in a certain way and then out of the house and having his struggles to the mission that you're on now. And I have to believe on some level, there was some trauma that you suffered as a result of this. And typically, when there's chaos like that, there's an impulse in the traumatized person to want to exert control over their life, right? Because they're used to being, things being out of, out of control. So it would make sense that you're living a life that is so, I mean, to say your life is regimented is to completely underestimate the, the manner

• 20:08Rich Roll?

  in which you, you know, pursue each day. But is it fair to say that there must be some connection between those two things? Like, I'm trying to understand part of the motivation for how and why you live the way that you do.

• 20:22Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So my perception of myself, which I give very little weight to, you know, like you can observe me probably much more clearly than I can observe myself. So having said that, my perception is that my upbringing taught me to not trust anything. The authorities that I trusted with my soul failed me. My community failed me. Now, their responsibility was not to help me acquire awareness of all possible realities of different religions, of different ways of being, of a history. That was not their objective. Their objective was to keep me in the fold with this singular understanding. That said, it led me to believe, to distrust all authority. And then the second beat, which I think was relevant,

• 21:06Bryan Johnson?

  is when I was 24 years old, I became chronically depressed. I got married, we had a new baby, I was building a startup full time, I wasn't getting much sleep. And I think the stress and the relationship and all that kind of stuff just kind of broke me for a little bit, and I didn't take care of it, and I just sunk into this dark depression. And in that moment, you know, my brain is now squawking. Life is not worth living. Everything's terrible. You should probably end your life. And those who've had depression just knows this is just on repeat. Like, it just pummels you every second of every day with these thoughts about ending your life. And so I genuinely am empathetic to people who commit suicide. Like, I've been there. I've been to that very edge. So at this point, I'm coming from distrust of authority in my life. At this point, I don't trust my mind.

• 21:51Bryan Johnson?

  Like, my mind is telling me to end my life. But when it tells me to do other things, why do I trust it? So now I think, how can I trust anything in reality?

• 22:01Rich Roll?

  Including your own mind?

• 22:02Bryan Johnson?

  Including my own mind. Nothing my mind says am I going to believe.

• 22:06Rich Roll?

  Certainly, we all filter reality through a lens of perception. And we convince ourselves that what we're perceiving is, is truth. When in fact, you have a more kind of well-honed appreciation for the fact that perception is opinion, at best, right? We can't trust what we're being told. We can't necessarily trust what our mind is telling us. And extrapolating upon that gets into this whole very interesting notion that you have, which I agree with, which is this culture of addiction. From the very first moment that we're born,

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  we're exposed to impulses and marketing messages and temptations incessantly throughout our life, every single moment of every single day, luring us into habits and behaviors and beliefs that not only don't serve us, but are orthogonal to our wellbeing.

• 23:08Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  So elaborate on that a little bit.

• 23:12Bryan Johnson?

  One day I read this book, Economics of Life by Gary Becker. He's a Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago. And he did a series of essays for, I think, Newsweek. And he explained social phenomena in mathematical terms.

• 23:31Bryan Johnson?

  So he'd take a topic like religion, and normally you'd go about explaining religion with a story. But he would just say numerically, here's how you understand it. This is also made popular by Freakonomics, where you take and you look at the numbers behind. So he exposed this world of math and models and equations. And it was one of the most spectacular experiences in my entire life, because my entire reality before was story. This person did this thing in this way, and you feel this emotion, and you make this perception, and then you do this thing. And now he's saying numerically, you can understand reality. And I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. So I'm coming from this little teeny town. I don't meet an engineer, and so I'm like 22 years old. I don't have a computer.

• 24:15Bryan Johnson?

  I have no access to technology or the world of engineering. So this discovery that you can understand the world numerically is just like this mind-blowing experience for me. So I go to the University of Chicago. I study there, and I fully appreciate this way of understanding the world. And as I've gone about my life, this is how I get to "Don't Die." It's really simple. I basically don't trust anything in reality. Not authority, not my mind, not my perception, nothing. I just trust data and numbers. And the only thing I believe in is I don't want to die. Outside of that, you know, like I'll go play around and like say this and that. But if I really try to say like, what can I distill my existence down to?

• 25:00Bryan Johnson?

  I enjoy being alive right now. And I don't want to be dead in five minutes. I don't want to be dead in 10 minutes. I don't want to be dead tonight. Now, what's gonna happen 100 years now? I don't know. But that's what I've really tried to do, because otherwise, life is just so messy. It's so hard to understand what's really going on. It's hard to understand what to do. It's hard to understand how to resolve conflict. It's just messy, and it's chaotic. And so I tried to distill this down into, in this moment in time, in 2023, and this goes back to what I was trying to do for the species. If you ask this singular question, you can do you. You can do one thing with your existence, and you try to up-level the human race or make a contribution to the human race. What do you do? And that's what I just spent 10 years trying to figure out.

• 25:45Rich Roll?

  To go from the Mormon church with its doctrine around the afterlife to a place of making data and numbers your godhead is quite a transition, right?

• 26:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  I can't help but wonder, like, what is the nature of your relationship with spirituality? Is that a thing? Because I think for all of your fidelity to data sets, you are a deeply emotional person. You wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you didn't have this connection to the future of humanity. And if you thought, nothing else matters except what is happening right now, then why would you devote your life towards advancing something that perhaps you're not going to reap the benefit from?

• 26:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I guess, uh, school never really made sense to me because the class was so slow, the teacher's monologue was so slow, the idea of memorizing information and regurgitation just didn't appeal to me. I hated school. It was just the worst. I would have rather be home and read a dozen books in the same timeframe. And once I freed myself from school, I set out and I just read every biography I could get my hands on. I enjoyed the process of looking back through the centuries and looking at individuals in their time and place, the 14th century, the 15th, 16th, you know, even before AD, and trying to evaluate, what did they do in their time and place? What did they see that no one else could see? And how did they do it?

• 27:23Bryan Johnson?

  Like, what was the dominant cultural trends in their time? What were the ideas that were novel? What were the ideas being rejected? And I built this relationship with historical figures where I cared more about being friends with them than I cared about being friends with people in the present. Because most people in the present were playing games that I didn't really care about. You know, it's largely about social signaling and status, everything that plays in this moment, but 99% of what happens right now is going to be lost to history. That's true for the past. When you look at the 15th century, our history books only capture less than 1% of all the events that happened.

• 28:04Bryan Johnson?

  Everything else is washed away. I liked the idea of doing something that would contribute to this continuous stream of contribution for the human race. And so I built this relationship along this time span. And so even looking forward, I feel more committed to or connected with intelligence of the 25th century than I do right now. I care more about what they're going to say of me than what people say of me now. Because it takes time for history to kind of distill what happens. To me, that's the game I want to play. Those are the people I think about when contemplating what to do.

• 28:40Rich Roll?

  It's more than first principles thinking. You have this proclivity for having a bird's eye 10,000 foot view. Like, your timeline is longer, your altitude is higher. And that requires not only a deeper way of thinking, but also perhaps a divergent way of thinking, right? Like, you do think differently. There is something maybe slightly neurodivergent about how you view the world. Do you have awareness around that? Is that fair? Is that accurate, do you think?

• 29:13Bryan Johnson?

  It's such a fun question. My experience of reality is when I engage with other people, I observe like, what you're doing is nuts. It's like insane to me. And then their perception of me is like, hey, are you maybe aware? Are you maybe a bit neurodivergent? And so there's this swapping of perception. And there's this default where when you use the word neurodivergent, it encumbers that person to be like, that person is odd, therefore maybe slightly, like, they get discounted a little bit versus the norm. And so there's this perception game going on where I view the world as literally insane, but I know

• 29:58Bryan Johnson?

  people view me as like, huh, that's a bit different. I'm not quite sure what to think about that.

• 30:03Rich Roll?

  I don't mean the word neurodivergent in a pejorative way. I truly mean it in the purest sense of somebody who is seeing things differently and thinking about them differently. And I think you do. And I think the world is insane, but we're so inoculated, we're so indoctrinated into these norms that...

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  It's very difficult to even identify them, let alone challenge them.

• 30:28Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so my comment was nothing about the way you were using the term. I think generally, when I hear people talking about neurodivergence.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 30:36Bryan Johnson?

  It's always with just a slightly pejorative tinge.

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 30:40Bryan Johnson?

  Right? It's always like, it's just a slight knock of like, you know, but we'll be nice to them anyways. It just has this cultural phenomenon in conversation. So yes, I'm absolutely aware of this. I have full self-awareness of the situation. I go to dinner with friends, right? And I hear everyone talking and I'm like, whoa, I really am so different in how I think. So definitely have this self-awareness. Also, I think that

• 31:05Bryan Johnson?

  this is the attribute that I see most common in the biographies I read. These individuals throughout history, they were able to structure their ways of thought in ways that were unique. They were able to see the world differently, able to act differently, able to rise above the norms and status quo and expectations of their time and place. And this is why I say I feel so much more connected to people of the past and my imaginations of people in the future. I feel at home on this spectra and why I feel almost alien in this time and place. Because when I do my things, we've seen this, it creates this vitriol where it's like, we're not sure if we want to welcome you to our polite society. Like, we're not sure.

• 31:48Bryan Johnson?

  Like, we actually want to dunk on you. We want to push you away and we want to criticize you. We want to lower your status by saying the meanest things we can. And that's really what's been happening is if you look at the volume of trash talk of me, it's meaningful. And people are having fun with it, which is great. I'm having fun with it too. But it's also, it's as humans play power games, they're trying to take me down a notch. They're trying to reduce my power.

• 32:21Rich Roll?

  Anytime anybody's taking a bold step to do something different, they're going to be across purposes with social norms. So for you, that's just affirmation, right? That you're on a trajectory towards, you know, the aspiration of being one of those historical figures. And when you think about those people or those biographies that were most impactful, like who are the people that stand out?

• 32:44Bryan Johnson?

  It's such a great variety. I just finished up Magellan, you know, first person to circumnavigate the globe. And if you read about it, it's like the world was going crazy on this idea of trade routes and spices and all the things. It's just like every boom cycle we have right now. Like humanity just plays this game over and over and over again. It's the same thing. We think we're playing this new novel game. It's not, it's been played for thousands of years. So Magellan is really fun. I finished up a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a religious person in Hitler's World War II Germany, and he was trying to assassinate Hitler. So in that moment, I was so curious, because you can read about World War II, about this army doing that thing and Churchill doing this and like those moves.

• 33:26Bryan Johnson?

  But I wanted to understand, if you're in World War II Germany and Hitler's rising to power, what's happening? Like, how do you discern is this person good for Germany or bad for Germany? Do you understand what he's suggesting for the Jews? Or do you not understand? Do you hear secrets about it? Like, I want to understand real time and place what was happening. And his account of how he was basically scheming to assassinate Hitler and all the maneuvering thereabouts, that was just fascinating for me because that's a very cloudy time in my mind. How does Hitler rise to power? How does that thing happen? How does the world know or not know and do something about it? So those kinds of things, I really enjoy reading about that to understand in detail.

• 34:07Rich Roll?

  Right, the frog in the water that slowly boils. You're in a situation that's creeping in a certain direction, but because you're a participant in it, you're not, you don't have adequate awareness to understand what's truly happening.

• 34:21Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. This is the most exciting thing for me. So if we play this game right now and you and I say, ask this question, in this moment, what is really going on?

• 34:34Bryan Johnson?

  Like really, really going, what's happening? What's really going on? And now to do this, the first 20 thoughts we have, we probably have to just push aside because they're probably garbage. We have to like really sit in this thing. And that's the only chance you have at clarity of thought. After I sold Brunchy Venmo, I organized a dozen or so dinners around the country. Got my friends together, their friends' friends, and just wanted to bring together ambitious people. And I gave them this thought experiment. Let's imagine we're in 2050, at the time it was 2017. We arrive at 2050, we are thriving as a species. Like it's just this magical existence. What did we focus on in 2017 to make that a reality? And I wanted to tease out, like what are the intuitions? And probably predictably, you would imagine that you,

• 35:16Bryan Johnson?

  you basically hear clusters of thought that represent the modern zeitgeist. It was very, very rare for someone to come up with something contrarian. You know, like it's something that someone wouldn't just pull out of the zeitgeist. But it was really helpful nonetheless, just kind of find like, where are people's minds at right now? Where do they think trajectories are heading? So I really wanted to seed, I wanted to seed my own thoughts on like, what is happening now? Where do people think things are going? And then you have to put to the hard work of now, what is no one seeing? Mm hmm. And what is no one seeing? What did you extrapolate from that experience? It was a single thought experiment, which led me to what I'm doing now. Whether I'm right or wrong, we'll see. But a conviction to move forward.

• 35:56Bryan Johnson?

  It's I'm present with intelligence of the 25th century. I can't say they're talking because I don't know how that communication works. But just there's this essence of intelligence. And they're observing what happened in the early 21st century to make intelligent existence thrive in this part of the galaxy. What do they observe? So in the same way, we look at the 16th century and we kind of compress the entire century down to like four things or five things. It's a very intense compression. And the observation I thought they said is Homo sapiens figured out on the eve of the creation of superintelligence, that the only foe was death.

• 36:39Bryan Johnson?

  They figured out to turn all their attention to not dying. Don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't destroy the planet, and build AI in a way that enables all intelligence to thrive. That's the biggest revolution in the history of the human race because it challenges that death has always been inevitable. So it challenges that fundamental thing. And two, it challenges every game of status and power we've ever played. If you wanted to rise above your peers, before you'd raise an army, go kill people and acquire their territory. It's always been rooted in this violence and acquisition at one person's gain and another person's loss. You have to transition the entirety of the species to say, we're going after different

• 37:24Bryan Johnson?

  games. And that's when I, yeah, I started doing Blueprint, I thought, so philosophically, you can say this, but it doesn't matter. You actually have to be it for people to understand it.

• 37:34Rich Roll?

  Hmm. There's so much in what you just shared. I want to tease out a few things that came up for me. The first of which is the presumption, which is increasingly becoming more and more real with every single day, that artificial intelligence is going to become not just an overarching kind of aspect of how we live our lives, but in your case, almost an all powerful entity that is benevolent by nature, to which we then outsource all of our decision making that our brains, you know, we've relied on our brains since the dawn of humanity so

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  that the artificial intelligence can make better decisions in our best interest and in the best interest of the collective and the planet as a whole. That requires a very optimistic view of this emergent technology amidst a lot of discourse around its perils and its potentiality to actually do the opposite of what you're projecting.

• 38:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So a few examples, I just did this AI art to retell the story of Adam and Eve.

• 38:49Bryan Johnson?

  So I wanted to pose the question, if we retold our origin story right now, instead of thousands of years ago, right now in 2023, what would the origin story of Adam and Eve be like? And how would we project ourselves out? And I thought that was an interesting thought experiment because it gets at exactly what you talked about, which is if you look at the precedents where the first time a message was sent with a telegraph, the Pony Express was dead. Nobody wanted to run mail anymore with horses. It was so much better. The first time you could navigate with GPS, a paper map on your lap is dead. It's just inevitable. Like, we don't do these things because it's more efficient. When you can wash your clothing in a washing machine versus down at the river. So you look at these hundreds of examples

• 39:33Bryan Johnson?

  of where technology becomes sufficiently good at doing a given task, gets more efficient or cost effective, or whatever the case may be. We humans adopt it extremely fast. I'm arguing with my health and wellness that my team and I have built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. It is able to look at all the data in my body. It's looking at scientific evidence. It creates an algorithm. So it creates superior cognitive ability, superior metabolic ability, superior physical ability. All above, I am a superior human because of this algorithm. So I have two options. Do I say I'm going to do things as I did and go peruse my pantry? Am I going to make decisions on the menu? No, like, I'm going to choose the algorithm, just like I use GPS, like a washing machine,

• 40:17Bryan Johnson?

  and like I use autopilot on an airplane. And so it's inevitable that when these things cross the technological threshold and they allow each of us to achieve our goals, we adopt them instantaneously. Up until that point, we kick and scream. We talk about lost job. We talk about the fear. Like, it's a process every single time it happens, but we ruthlessly adopt them. And so that's just what's going to happen. It's absolutely inevitable.

• 40:43Rich Roll?

  The picture also paints a very authoritarian view that obviates human choice, right? Like you're lobbying for a world in which there's an AI that has your best interests at heart. It's going to tell you exactly what to eat, when to go to bed. All of your decision making is outsourced to this thing that will produce better outcomes for you. But with that becomes a relinquishment of some level of liberty that many people would, you know, counter argue undermines the beauty of living, right?

• 41:17Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  So your response to that is?

• 41:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. This is the dinner I invited you to.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, it was. Who else was there? What did that hit? I'm sorry I missed that.

• 41:26Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, no. It's been remarkable. The people. So I've had this dinner over a dozen times. And so I posed this thought experiment. And I say, okay, so imagine you have an algorithm at your disposal. It creates the best health and wellness of your life, spiritually, mentally, physically, all the above. You can say yes to that. The trade off is you eat what it says it will. You go to bed when it says it will. Like you follow the instructions.

• 41:47Rich Roll?

  And you can't opt out. Once you're in, that's it.

• 41:50Bryan Johnson?

  Well, I mean, I don't even make that parameter. I don't get that specific. It's just very general. So I create the thought experiment and we go around the table. There's like 12 of us. At this point, like, we're pretty intimate. We understand each other. And so it's mathematically, it's almost identical every time. So a third of the people say, yes, anything to save me from myself. Like, I can't stop myself from doing blank, blank, blank. So like, yes. Or 30%, yeah, or like, hey, yes, but I want to make a few modifications. And I'm like, lol, that's not the thought experiment.

• 42:21Rich Roll?

  The human desire for the à la carte version of the new part is undefeated, I'm sure.

• 42:26Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. And then the remaining, you know, let's just call it 40%, I kind of like, fuck off. And so you gave me a pretty soft fuck off. Because you were basically raising like, look.

• 42:37Rich Roll?

  I'm just raising the argument that I'm sure you hear a million times to hear how you respond to that.

• 42:41Bryan Johnson?

  But like, it's legit. Because you're basically like, look, I've got human agency. This is a thing I understand. I want to choose to live life a certain way. I've got certain ideals and what it means to live life. I've got plans. Like, it just, it trips every wire in the human brain where it's so offensive. That's why people like, they don't even know. Some response would be like, is this a cult? You know, like, it's like, it just generates these really strong responses. And so I'm not lobbying for this. I'm arguing.

• 43:11Bryan Johnson?

  It's inevitable. It's already here. We're wasting time on these debates. This is not a situation where we're like, we're in full control and we're going to decide how this thing. It's not like it's gone. And so what I'm suggesting is if we can reconcile philosophically with what's happening, we are going to be in a better place for the species. We increase the probabilities of our survival. Right now, we're in la la land, thinking that we're somehow in control of the whole situation.

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  Hmm. I can't decide whether I'm excited or terrified.

• 43:42Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. I'll fast forward two hours for you. So at the end of the conversation, we go around and everyone's able to basically be like, okay, so like, here's my emotional state. Here's my concern. Here's my philosophical position. And like the same 20 or 30 arguments are presented every time. We go back and forth. We look at all the different angles. So then, and then people have like three or four existential crises. You know, they drop down. It's like, I don't know why I exist. And they come back up. At the end, gladly, everyone hugs. It's like, this is one of the best experiences of my life. I'm so happy we got to do this together, the exchanging numbers. So it ends up being this incredibly emotionally productive thing where we all get to reconcile our various views of reality. Not that we agree, but just like we can reconcile with like, here's maybe the situation.

• 44:26Rich Roll?

  What is the thing that helps the most resistant person come to terms with what you're forecasting as the inevitable reality?

• 44:34Bryan Johnson?

  So I'm usually the most unrelatable person at the table.

• 44:39Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So like, I'm not surprised.

• 44:44Bryan Johnson?

  What I say doesn't really matter or resonate. So it's like when someone else is able to like, take these ideas and maybe they get their head around it a little bit. They're like, I think this. And they say it in some relatable way. The person's like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But it's like never me that delivers up the relatable thing that people are like, okay, I'm actually okay with that thing. It's a slow walk. To just understand the basics of they perceive themselves as having full control right now. In reality, they live in several AI bubbles. The content they see on YouTube, the music they listen to, what they see on Netflix, the books they read, you know, they're recommended to them. Like, we have all this algorithmic influence around us already, and we just don't talk about it.

• 45:27Bryan Johnson?

  But it's dramatically influenced what we see, what we see on social media. And we understand that, one, we're already in the whole bunch of these webs. And two is as technology progresses, we do adopt them in our lives unquestionably, because it helps us achieve the things we care about. And once we do that adoption, we feel empowered. And so if you just look at the landscape of our lives today, we already say yes to this. We have said yes to this. Our lives are evidence of that. And so it's not a big jump to what I'm saying. It's just really, it's trying to bring it out into the open and say, can we have a discussion about this? And if we are open about it, we may actually build a more robust system.

• 46:05Rich Roll?

  Part of that involves popping the balloon, the delusion of agency that I think we like, we believe we have more agency in our decision making and our opinions and our beliefs and our sense of what is true and what is real, right? So you're challenging that cogently by disabusing people of that notion. And I think on top of that, like, look, I'm deeply aware of and connected to the fact that like, my brain doesn't have my self-interest at heart. Like, I'm a recovering alcoholic, junk food addict. I've been, you know, in the gutter. I've been, you know, overweight and out of shape and left to my own devices.

• 46:49Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm gonna bury my head in that bag of chips like every single time, and I'm gonna make the wrong choices. And I've had to create incredibly stringent rules for myself, guardrails, to avoid the temptations that are overpowering for me. And perhaps, you know, maybe more overpowering for me than they are for an average person or somebody else. And I've been successful in that regard, but I'm highly flawed. And I, you know, I'm not always great at doing this, and I'll mess up. And so my life has become Regimented, not to the extent that yours is, like I'm a poor man's version of your

• 47:26Rich Roll?

  experiment, but it's all been informed by my experiences with the limitations of my brain, which don't have my best interests at heart. And that has to be overridden by not allowing myself to have an opinion about certain things. So the rules are very binary, and that makes them easier to follow. I'm not outsourcing them to an artificial intelligence, but by making that choice and that declaration, it is easier to kind of adhere to those guardrails, I suppose. You've just taken this, you know, a thousand degrees further.

• 48:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, and I would pause and say, I really enjoy being here with you.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, thank you.

• 48:07Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I really am misunderstood, and it is extraordinarily challenging to get to this level of conversation. And so I appreciate you going here with me. I just really appreciate the back and forth.

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 48:22Bryan Johnson?

  And especially your acknowledgement of your own limitations. It is so rare for someone to observe in themselves the disaster situation it is to be human. And like, we're all just barely on a thread. So yeah, I guess I'm just really appreciative that we have a chance to talk about this.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Thank you. That's meaningful. I appreciate that. Yeah, listen, we delude ourselves into thinking that we're our own best friend. And most often, at least in my case, I'm my own worst enemy, like constantly, even with the kind of narratives that loop in my mind about who I am and what I'm capable of. Like, it's terrible. I wouldn't do that to anybody else. And I think having an appreciation for that, or a really kind of mature understanding of that allows me to be more compassionate and less judgmental of other people, because it's fucking hard to be human.

• 49:13Bryan Johnson?

  It is very hard.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  Every single day, we're faced with temptation. I mean, our modern world has perfected through Science and experimentation and psychology to create a landscape of material goods, foods, you name it, every single thing is specifically designed with gigantic resources behind it to entice and addict you.

• 49:36Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  For reasons that have nothing to do with your well-being.

• 49:41Bryan Johnson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  At all, right? And in fact, is quite often in opposition to that.

• 49:45Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  And so you're sort of staking, you're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "I will not adhere."

• 49:51Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  "I am not living in accordance with these rules. I'm stepping outside of it. I'm gonna let a team of very smart people study me and study what's best for me, and I'm gonna let them make those decisions for myself."

• 50:04Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  Now, certain people would say, "Well, you've created a gilded cage for yourself."

• 50:08Bryan Johnson?

  True.

• 50:08Rich Roll?

  But I know through other interviews that I've watched with you that you're like the happiest that you've ever been.

• 50:14Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Rich Roll?

  And I think, I want to hear a little bit more about that. And I will just say in, you know, prefatory to that, that I think we over-index or over-emphasize a sense of happiness that comes with choice. Like, "I have liberty, so I'm happy." And we under-appreciate, or don't appreciate at all, that with certain restrictions or guardrails to kind of rein us in and prevent us from indulging in our behaviors that don't serve us, there is a certain under-appreciated freedom that brings a certain happiness that, at least in my life, I haven't experienced in any other way.

• 50:54Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Amazing. So, I'm gonna take this opening you've created. Thank you. I've never been able to talk about this on a podcast. Because it's always about like, what are you eating? What's your exercise protocol? What time you go to bed? I'm arguing for basically three things. In the early 13 colonies of America, there was a big debate on whether they should be ruled by the monarch of England, or whether they should adopt a democracy. And Thomas Paine wrote this pamphlet. And he argued that the colonies should adopt democracy because they would be better at ruling their own interests than having the monarch. And he talked about all the shortcomings of the monarch.

• 51:39Bryan Johnson?

  And we now look back and we think, okay, democracy is actually one of the biggest advancements in the history of the human race, where you had this new way of governing away from monarchs. At the time, it was not clear. And this is an example of history of like, what is really cloudy in that moment? How do people see clarity? His pamphlet was the bestselling of the early American colony days, and democracy prevailed. And in that moment, democracy ended up being a more powerful system of managing human thriving. One individual as a monarch was inferior to this democratic system. I did the same thing with my body. My mind is a monarch. In the same way, you just spoke about your mind.

• 52:23Bryan Johnson?

  Your mind is acting contrary to your best interest.

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  My mind is a drunken sailor.

• 52:28Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly, it is. It's an absolute disaster. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. I did the same with my body. I said, who should really be in charge? The monarch? Or should we have a democratic rule? And then we started with Blueprint. We started measuring every organ in my body. And we said, okay, heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, cardiovascular function. What do you need to be your best self? And I let them speak. And so I shifted the power from my monarch mind, that's a disaster, to my body to be in charge. And that's what the algorithm works with. The algorithm works directly with my body. What I'm arguing here for the human race is I'm suggesting

• 53:08Bryan Johnson?

  we have always treated our mind as the ultimate authority on all things. It decides on, in any circumstance, what it wants, when it wants, how it thinks, what it's going to prioritize. It has ultimate authority like the monarch. I'm arguing in this next phase of the human race that that is an antiquated model of management of human life.

• 53:31Bryan Johnson?

  There are more powerful and more capable systems of intelligence that are emergent, specifically what I've done with Blueprint, empowering my body and artificial intelligence to manage itself. Now, do I still have free will? I feel like I do. Do I still have my same agency? I feel like I do. Am I happier? I feel like I am. But it's this paired with the challenging of death is the most significant revolution in the history of homeless sapiens. And it is almost impossible for somebody to get their head around it. It takes hours to sit down and have a conversation to understand. In this conversation, your mind is like immediately chirping, but wait.

• 54:13Rich Roll?

  I still bristle at the idea of outsourcing everything to a superintelligence.

• 54:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  In the same way that when we have a GPS on our phone or on our car dashboard, we suddenly are paying less attention to the topography of our natural environment because we've outsourced having to really understand that. When we begin to outsource more and more of our decisions to something outside of ourselves, to play that to its ultimate conclusion is to play out the paperclip thought experiment, except instead of paperclips, it's people. So this could go very wrong in the most dystopian way.

• 55:01Rich Roll?

  What you're arguing for requires a level of trust and faith in our ability to craft this superintelligence in a way that is truly benevolent, but does that not overlook the fact that perhaps it might have its own ideas about how that might go?

• 55:23Bryan Johnson?

  I'm suggesting that we have no choice. We think we have choice. We think we have optionality. We don't. We are up against survival.

• 55:40Bryan Johnson?

  I understand your emotion of bristling. That's what happens every single time. And it does, it takes a long time to get past the bristle. This is the same as a monarch. It's the same revolution. Your mind is a monarch that does a terrible job managing your best interests. You know this. And even knowing this, even telling me in this conversation, you still bristle with the idea that this thing wouldn't be in charge of you, that you don't trust at all. You know it's bad for you and you bristle still.

• 56:12Rich Roll?

  The enemy you know.

• 56:13Bryan Johnson?

  It's so complicated. So if you take yourself out of the situation and you're observing someone else, isn't it curious that the enemy you do know is working towards your demise? And you're basically powerless against it. And there's another technology, another way of doing this that saves you from yourself. Would you be open to that?

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  It sounds like an invitation to join the matrix. Like, just like, I want to have a nice steak and make me a movie star.

• 56:44Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Rich Roll?

  You know, plug me in.

• 56:50Rich Roll?

  You're like, it's happening.

• 56:52Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, so just look at the past thousand years. We live day to day, so time seems slower to us. But if you look at the speed of technological progress, the rate is aligned straight up.

• 57:04Rich Roll?

  It's astronomical right now.

• 57:06Bryan Johnson?

  It's straight up. So like, whether we're talking about one year, or five years, or 10 years, or 20, whatever, it's absolutely in a blink of an eye on any time scale that is longer than our two hour conversation. It's here, right now. This is why I don't die. When I do the thought experiment of all the things we could be contemplating about our existence, if we're trying to avoid a situation where we annihilate each other with nukes, or bioweapons, or anything else, and we're trying to say, can we agree on one thing? Just one thing so we don't destroy the species and continue to exist? What can we agree upon? It's don't die.

• 57:47Bryan Johnson?

  It's the game every single human on this planet plays every second of every day. It's the only thing we can agree upon. But outside of the don't die, we branch into thousands and thousands of disagreements. As a species, we have this wild range of disagreements about everything. That's why I can press it and say, what does the 21st century say about the 21st century? It's the rallying cry for the 21st century. It's the only way to build AI. The only ethics and morals is don't die of anything across the planet. Now, of course, it branches into all kinds of complexity, but still you can start with some agreement. Basically, how do you stitch together this moment in time? What is really going on? How do you punch through all the noise and all the chaos?

• 58:32Bryan Johnson?

  And really figure out what's going on right now?

• 58:42Rich Roll?

  I still can't shake this idea that within you is some profound or deep fear of death that is not unrelated to your break with a church that promised everlasting life. And now, living a life outside of religion, this mission has supplanted or replaced what used to be provided by the church. Is there any truth in that?

• 59:17Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, possibly, right? As far as my self-awareness goes, Camus, the famous French philosopher, he went to the existential edges of philosophy, of existentialism. And he basically came to the conclusion, you know, existence is meaningless. So the only relevant question is whether you commit suicide. There's nothing else that matters. And once you decide whether you commit suicide or not, if you don't, then you just play. In my thought experiment, whether I'm influenced by my past or my upbringing, like, I don't know, it's very, very hard for me to comment. The only thing I'm trying to do is distill the most basic essence of reality, to know one thing.

• 59:59Bryan Johnson?

  It's not just be wandering about in the confusion of existence. I'm trying to say one thing is distillation of essence.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  There's something inescapably Buddhist in what you're doing, though, because this quest to see how far you can push the boundaries of health span is an experiment in...

• 1:00:23Rich Roll?

  Not just self-preservation, but it's a very singularly focused experiment on self. So you could make the argument that this is the most self-obsessed person and experiment of all time, but the overlying mission is to do this for the benefit of humanity. And so it goes to that Buddhist idea of the best way of improving the world is to improve yourself. And if you can be a model for what is possible, that becomes a template for others to modify or copy.

• 1:01:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I tried to become the problem that I'm trying to solve in society. So we hear a lot of discussion about AI goal alignment. So the idea is AI is powerful. We want it to want what humans want. We don't want it to go rogue and hurt us. And so the paperclip outcomes, like avoid that stuff. We want nation states to get along and not nuke each other. We want each other to get along and not kill each other. So society is basically trying to goal align. We're trying to get on the same page with so many things. And that's hard to do. We do a lot of things to do that. I wanted to say, can I become the goal alignment problem? So I'm 35 trillion cells. Brian Johnson, can I goal align my 35 trillion cells? Because none of my cells want the same thing.

• 1:01:46Bryan Johnson?

  My brain's like, hey, let's have a drink and stay up late and party. And so that's what this endeavor has been, is I'm trying to say, can I take 35 trillion cells, 35 intelligent agents, align it towards a singular objective of don't die?

• 1:01:59Rich Roll?

  Because we have no hope of getting the whole planet to align on anything if we can't figure out how to align ourselves.

• 1:02:06Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. Now, if I do that, then the same model is applied to planet Earth. Okay, so planet Earth is an amazing place. We currently don't have a backup. So how do we make the planet not die? The same concept. You take millions of measurements of planet Earth, the soil and the atmosphere. You look at scientific evidence of what is a thriving biosphere of coral and oceans and air. You implement the protocol and then we humans deal with it. Because we currently treat planet Earth the same way we treat our bodies. We do whatever we want. We pollute it how much we want. Like if the oceans become more acidic, whatever. If we lose coral reef, whatever. If we lose the ice cap, whatever. We just destroy it.

• 1:02:43Rich Roll?

  And this protocol will be dictated by an all-seeing, all-knowing authoritative AI that will rule the planet and create the protocol. Us as humans, our job is to carry the protocol out.

• 1:02:55Bryan Johnson?

  It's just, it's built on just like a step-by-step process and how we build everything else in society.

• 1:03:03Rich Roll?

  So the authoritarianism will just creep up on us.

• 1:03:05Bryan Johnson?

  I wouldn't say it's authoritarianism. So is democracy authoritarianism?

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:03:09Bryan Johnson?

  It's the same system. You're taking intelligent agents that are all acting in some methodology towards goal alignment with this tapestry of rules. And democracy has outperformed monarchy. My system has outperformed almost all human systems. We're just simply trying to elevate the quality of the system towards don't die. It's this very gradual step function.

• 1:03:38Rich Roll?

  Do you believe that there's a possibility that you won't die?

• 1:03:46Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. Unquestionably.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  That you will live in perpetuity? Short of getting into a car accident or something like that?

• 1:03:56Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  You're not going skydiving anytime soon.

• 1:04:00Bryan Johnson?

  We try to sober ourselves when we say, how smart is superintelligence? In what way is it smart? And how smart? How different is it from us?

• 1:04:12Bryan Johnson?

  And if we say, okay, let's just try to do a few thought experiments like maybe are relatable to us. So we're a million years ago talking to Homo erectus. Homo erectus barely has language, has an ax, hasn't innovated upon the ax for a million years. And we say, Homo erectus, we trust you so much. We think you're so amazing. You know, go wild and tell us your vision about the future of the species. Is Homo erectus going to be able to, you know, wax poetic about quantum mechanics and, you know, thermodynamics and computers and internet and markets and money? No way. So if Homo erectus is like, you know, what do I want to live for? Like, you know, life is so hard. I go out and hunt food all day and I have to

• 1:04:52Bryan Johnson?

  battle all these wild things. And Homo erectus has absolutely nothing valuable to say about the future of its existence. The only thing it can say is, I don't want to die because I want to be around for the optionality. In this moment where we exist, I don't think our opinions matter at all. Nothing I think, nothing I want, nothing I hope for, nothing I presume matters at all. We're up against this wall with intelligence that is just unimaginable to us. So I give zero credence to my opinions. I'm Homo erectus. I'm so primitive, it's laughable. So why would I even try to enter into the situation? The only thing I want to say is, I want an option to the, to the future. Is it going to be good or bad? I have no idea. Well, I like it or not. I have no idea. I have no idea.

• 1:05:35Bryan Johnson?

  I just want to say yes to it because it's happening. And so I want to, I want to be along for the ride.

• 1:05:41Rich Roll?

  I want to get into the actual protocol of what you're doing, but before we do that, I want to have a sense of, of what the data is currently telling you and how that plays into this idea or this belief that you have that the possibility of persisting exists for you.

• 1:06:00Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Since I sold Braintree Venmo, I invested tens of millions of dollars in companies that are programming physical reality. So genomics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, computational therapeutics. One of my companies, for example, structures molecule, molecule by molecule like Legos to do novel things in the world. We now have the ability to program the physical world with atoms and molecules and organisms like we can program computer software. We can program, reliably program reality in every way possible.

• 1:06:33Bryan Johnson?

  It's the most unbelievable situation in the whole world. And we're doing this now with these computational tools that are more powerful.

• 1:06:38Rich Roll?

  What would be an example of that? That feels very abstract.

• 1:06:41Bryan Johnson?

  Like, let's say you want to produce rose oil as a fragrance. So typically, you would go plant the plants in the field. You would fertilize it, you'd water it, you'd harvest it, then you would get the rose oil. The alternative is to take a yeast, an organism, and program the yeast to manufacture rose oil. Or the way we build houses now is we grow a tree, we cut it down. We then put it in a certain place and we build a house. You would just grow a house out of a tree. You'd program it. And so you can program biology to do the things that we otherwise would do otherwise. And that's how powerful our ability is to engineer biology and reality. And so we have this root level access to program these things.

• 1:07:26Bryan Johnson?

  That's what my company's been doing for the past 10 years. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's like, it's so amazing that it's happening and it's like no one knows about it, that we have these abilities to do it. It's, yeah, it's really cool. So if you say, okay, when we now have the ability to basically engineer existence at every level, molecules and organisms and atoms, and now you have these new computational tools and we understand the mechanism of aging, you have all the pieces together to solve it. Like, you don't need to believe a whole lot. You just give it some time. There's like some outstanding question that's like, no, this is going to break the laws of physics and there's just no, like, the speed of light, like, how are we going to get faster than the speed of light? We're not sure. This is not the same problem. It's, all the pieces are there.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  And the fact that it's biological systems makes it no different than 3D printing a treehouse or a rose oil.

• 1:08:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. You know, nature does this already. There are several examples in nature, a certain type of jellyfish and others, where they have these remarkable rejuvenation abilities. So like, biology has already demonstrated it's capable of doing this. So we're in a really good place. And that's why this is such an exciting moment to be alive. And if we could just take a sober stock of like the situation, it's silly to be killing each other. It's silly to be going to war. It's silly to be killing our planet. It's silly to commit self-destructive behavior and increase death. Like, this is why the 25th century thought experiment to me is so helpful. They would look at us and be like, of course, you don't die. Like, of course. And but we're so caught up in this moment. We come up with all these arguments on like this and that, and we're scared.

• 1:09:04Bryan Johnson?

  And like, no, like, they're like, of course, you do that one thing.

• 1:09:09Rich Roll?

  You're not the first person to come on the podcast and have a, you know, somewhat Pollyanna perspective of longevity and what the future might hold. I've had Pierre Diamandis on here, Sergey Young. But I think all of this, you know, for me, ends up in a situation where we haven't quite delivered on the promise yet. Like, we've kind of inched our way up to a certain kind of edge. But when it comes to the big breakthrough or the thing that's going to change everything, there's a lot of talk, but not a lot of evidence or proof yet. And then amongst this, this sort of culture of people who are really focused on longevity and health span extension,

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  there's a lot of disagreement. Like, they don't agree on a lot, and they're quibbling over whether it's NMN or NAD and like rapamycin and all, you know, these tiny little details within that world that I can't help but think we're still kind of a ways off from what you're talking about.

• 1:10:12Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. If you extrapolate what's happening right now with how fast artificial intelligence is improving, I don't need any evidence at all to have a bullish outlook that aging is going to be solved in some near future. If you just do some rough math, and let's just say, if humans were in charge of aging research, let's just say it would take us 200 years to try to solve aging. Right? Like, something long and like, we look at our rates of progress. When you include artificial intelligence, it works at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than humans.

• 1:10:56Bryan Johnson?

  And so if you say, okay, it's a trillion times faster than what humans can do, or whatever the number is, let's discount that number and say 90% of that compute capacity is like, not really human intellect, it's like wasted on other stuff. And so you apply some level to that. When you apply that number to the future over the next 10 years, with the aid of self of superintelligence, you have the equivalent of millions of years of human effort on aging.

• 1:11:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:25Bryan Johnson?

  So like, what can we

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Compressed into almost no time at all.

• 1:11:28Bryan Johnson?

  Because you're adding to the intelligence equation, trillions of, you know, compute into that equation. So this is why, again, we can't trust our minds to be making these forecasts. We're in a situation where the power of this intelligence so far outstrips our ability to model it. Any forecast we make is silly.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  Then how can we trust our minds to craft the artificial intelligence or the supercomputer with the adequate safety measures to ensure that its priority is the survival of the human race? If we can't trust our minds with our own daily habits, how can we trust that we even have the capacity to foresee what might go awry with the, you know, the birth that we're giving to something that has a level of intelligence we can't even comprehend?

• 1:12:22Bryan Johnson?

  Don't die.

• 1:12:24Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:12:25Bryan Johnson?

  That mean, right? Like, now of course

• 1:12:26Rich Roll?

  It's circular in that regard.

• 1:12:27Bryan Johnson?

  Now, of course, it's like, it's more nuanced, because what does don't die mean? Right? And it means hundreds of different things. And there's trade offs. So it's really complicated. But then again, if you have to take this incredibly complicated question, how do we agree on one thing? And right now, you know, we don't agree on don't die. We kill ourselves. We kill each other. We kill the planet. We are a violent species killing everything around us.

• 1:12:58Bryan Johnson?

  And that's why this is such a relevant revolution. It's so simple. It's like right in front of our face. For those who are building AI, I would feel much better if they're not actively killing themselves. If they're sufficiently self-aware that they're not proactively moving themselves towards disease and death, that inside of them, they have the philosophy, this is the thing that underpins everything we're building together in society.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:26Bryan Johnson?

  It's not about dominance. It's not about wealth accumulation. It's not about conquering territory. It is a change, a fundamental change of our existence. You know, my bullish about aging, all I can say is I look at the models and like, I want to be around for the possibility, but it seems interesting that like, yeah, we could be around for it.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So, how old are you?

• 1:13:47Bryan Johnson?

  Forty-six.

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  Forty-six. And you've been actively engaged in, in this protocol and its refinements for three years? How long at this point?

• 1:13:57Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, almost three years.

• 1:13:58Rich Roll?

  So, explain what the Blueprint Protocol is. We're an hour and a half into this. We haven't even gotten into what it is that you actually do.

• 1:14:06Bryan Johnson?

  Great.

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  Which you can find in a million other interviews you've done and you've made a zillion videos about.

• 1:14:11Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Really simply stated is, I do what everyone does every day, which is I try not to die. And so, I just simply said, what if I tried to become the best in history at not dying? And so, the way we did that is we said, I'm going to become the most measured person in human history.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  The world champion of not dying?

• 1:14:31Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. So, we're going to measure every single thing about my body, everything we can, you know, thousands of data points. We're going to look at scientific literature. We're going to say, okay, how is the body dying? And then we're going to say, what can we do to stop the body from dying?

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:47Bryan Johnson?

  And that's what we've done. We've just tried to become best in the world at not dying.

• 1:14:51Rich Roll?

  To do this, you have deployed copious resources. I think something like $2 million a year. I don't know, you know, whatever, a lot of money, right? Like, you're all in.

• 1:15:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Rich Roll?

  And of course, you're not doing this alone. You, you have a team of people who are advising you. So before we even get into the practices and the protocol itself, how did you go about identifying the experts and recruiting them to be participants in this?

• 1:15:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Rich Roll?

  Like, who are these people and why did you pick them over others?

• 1:15:23Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Your point is correct. You said that every anti-aging specialist disagrees.

• 1:15:28Rich Roll?

  Right. That's, that's why I'm asking this question.

• 1:15:31Bryan Johnson?

  Everyone disagrees with everyone. And so what we were trying to do is to say, how would you potentially punch through the noise? Because while everyone's debating these topics like NR versus NMN, cold plunge or not, like whatever you're talking, my mom and my dad want to know what to eat for breakfast. And there's like, everyone's kind of in that space. And so we said, okay, the way we're going to do this is we're just going to do me as N of one. And you can criticize it and say, well, that's not a population level study. It's only one, not applicable, whatever. Still, I'd rather do this than I would hang out in never-ending debate land.

• 1:16:05Rich Roll?

  It also gives people who are observing what you're doing, like, an emotional connection to it and a way in, rather than just reading a study or a report. Because you're so transparent in sharing everything you're doing every single day, what's working, what's not working, what we decided to abandon, the new thing that you're playing around with, that it's storytelling. And that's what gets people engaged. And so they have, you're like a locus. Like, we can just look at what Brian's doing. Maybe it's N of one. Maybe there are things that we can extract from his experiences. But I think, you know, saying, I'm going to be this living experiment, is the best way to create interest in what's happening.

• 1:16:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Okay. I would say Blueprint is the best health protocol developed in history.

• 1:16:57Bryan Johnson?

  Prove me wrong with your data. We can all say that.

• 1:17:00Rich Roll?

  I know you've said that many times. Has anybody come back to you with a bunch of data?

• 1:17:03Bryan Johnson?

  This is the thing. No one in the world has done it. No one has measured themselves like me. No one's come with a competing model. I'm three years in, I'm still all by myself. You know, people may be reading papers and saying like, do this thing and that thing. No one. And you know, like, it's hard, it's expensive, so there are barriers to do it. But still, like, I mean, and if someone beat this, it would be the best thing ever. Like, I would absolutely celebrate it.

• 1:17:28Rich Roll?

  Because that would just level up what you're doing.

• 1:17:30Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:31Rich Roll?

  It's not a threat. It's like, it's an ad.

• 1:17:34Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. And I work with people extensively to help them try to beat me. So like, I really want others to come up and improve better ways of doing it. That's how we lift everyone. Like, the objective here is not to be number one. The objective here is to be a zero. That's a concept I guess I haven't played. Like, it really is, this is about thriving as a species. This is not about being me trying to be ranked number one. Rank, being ranked number one is like an old fashioned idea. It's just a former version of being Homo sapiens. It's not relevant going forward.

• 1:18:02Rich Roll?

  Back to the experts. Who are these people and why did you select them?

• 1:18:06Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So the principal architect on the project is Oliver Solman. He's 29 years old. And I was interviewing a bunch of people and he stood out to me. We connected and we instantaneously just kind of got locked in for life. It was like, it was a really great meeting of minds. And he had this approach where he said, basically, you can't understand and treat aging unless you do it at the organ level. You have to focus on the heart and understand what is the anatomical nature of the heart? And what is the function of the heart? You have to age it out. And you have to do the same for the lungs, the same for the kidney and the pancreas. Unless you're doing things on an organ by organ basis, you really can't structurally solve aging. And I loved his methodical approach.

• 1:18:51Bryan Johnson?

  He was mathematical in nature. He was rigorous, he was quantified. And then he and I had built out a team of people all over the world that specialize in the various organs. So we'll find world experts in every organ area or biological process. And we work with them and we just refine these things continually.

• 1:19:05Rich Roll?

  So he's like your chief of staff? Chief medical officer?

• 1:19:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, he's the chief architect. Yeah.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  So let's get into the various practices. Obviously, it breaks down into sleep, nutrition, exercise, supplements, some pharmacology, some medical interventions, lots of testing. You talk about skincare. Hair care, dental care is basically everything, right? But I want to begin with sleep because that is the most important thing. I think you would agree with that. And I think that sleep is really a Trojan horse here. So talk a little bit about the importance of sleep and how you practice sleep hygiene.

• 1:19:47Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I know when I'm not well rested, I feel half dead. I feel inebriated, you know, I feel compromised. I'm onri, I feel snippy. So the difference between a good night's sleep and a bad night's sleep is just nothing changes my conscious existence more.

• 1:20:01Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable, the difference.

• 1:20:04Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Rich Roll?

  When you have an extraordinary night of sleep, problems seem to get solved without stress. Your creative capacity is through the roof. Your ability to navigate obstacles, like everything is easier.

• 1:20:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Rich Roll?

  It is like a superpower.

• 1:20:22Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  And I've had so many occasions where I'm having one of those days. And I think I would literally pay any amount of money to be able to replicate this and feel this way every day.

• 1:20:34Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  And I have gone to great lengths, Brian.

• 1:20:38Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

  Not as far as you, but my sleep hygiene routine is pretty fucking extensive. I sleep outside in a tent. Like I do things that you don't even do. And my sleep score on the Whoop is pretty good. Like I'll hit 100, you know, once or twice a week and I'm in the 90s on average or at the high 80s, which is probably good in the context of the Western world.

• 1:21:03Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Rich Roll?

  But it is very rare that I would hit 100% even two days in a row. But you have hit 100% for over six months.

• 1:21:12Bryan Johnson?

  Eight months now.

• 1:21:13Rich Roll?

  Eight months.

• 1:21:13Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Rich Roll?

  Without a single day.

• 1:21:15Bryan Johnson?

  I think I've missed like three or four days, yeah.

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  I cannot even imagine being able to do that.

• 1:21:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Rich Roll?

  Or what it must feel like to feel that good every single day.

• 1:21:26Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I love it. Yes, to everything you said.

• 1:21:31Rich Roll?

  Here's the thing. People think sleep hygiene begins with, you know, when it starts to get dark and you're thinking about going to bed. Sleep hygiene begins as soon as you open up your eyes in the morning. You have to start getting ready for that evening experience. And despite all of the things that I've done, I have not oriented my life with the rigor that you have. Every single thing that you do every day, all the choices you make about the food, when you eat, what you're eating, the type of exercise that you're doing, et cetera, really is all a function of trying to get you prepared for the best night of sleep possible.

• 1:22:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. My entire life is about sleep.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  So when people say like, if I could just do the sleep part of Blueprint, this is why I say it's a Trojan horse, because in order to get 100% sleep score every single day, you actually have to do every other thing in the Blueprint protocol to achieve that.

• 1:22:24Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. You're exactly right. There was this reporter that wrote an article recently for GQ. I was at this anti-aging conference and this person who interviewed me said, you know, like, what is the number one thing you do for, you know, anti-aging? And this reporter, she told a story like, so people are there like listening, like, what's Brian Johnson going to say about this thing? Is he going to say like some peptide or, you know, sauna or whatever protocol? And then he says, sleep. And she said, then like, the crowd just has this collective sigh of disappointment.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  Right. Because it's much sexier to talk about rapamycin.

• 1:23:00Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Whether that was true or not, but she was just like, everyone is so disappointed with my response. But, you know, like, I don't know how to communicate more that everything revolves around sleep. Nothing changes existence more than sleep. You have more willpower. You have more zest for life. You have more energy. Yeah, I just, everything falls apart without sleep.

• 1:23:22Bryan Johnson?

  I don't know how to communicate any better.

• 1:23:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And when people want to hear you elaborate on that, the focus tends to be on the blackout curtains and the type of sheets and the air purifier that you have in the room and the temperature of the room. And those are all fine and well and important and play their part. But to really appreciate it, you have to, you have to actually embrace the entirety of the program.

• 1:23:46Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly right. I mean, I think we're all competing for status and power in society, you know, like in all of our own little circles and places. And there's so much mythology caught up in the hero being sleep deprived and sleeping under the desk and going days without sleeping. It's so built into the psychology that people are trying to signal to others, I'm worthy of being respected, I'm worthy of this status, I'm worthy of being admired, I'm worthy of this mythology. So they're doing things to play this script because they think it generates the respect of others. And in their mind, they may believe it too, like this is how genius is achieved. You know, I can think of so many examples of people who have done this.

• 1:24:26Bryan Johnson?

  And so it's so deep in our psychology that sleep deprivation is somehow positive, that that's what stops most people from adopting it.

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  That hustle porn culture and notion of sleep is in its twilight. Like, I feel like we've really gone a long way towards raising awareness around that. Like, that shifted a lot, even in the last couple of years, I think.

• 1:24:50Bryan Johnson?

  I concur. Yeah, just even like when I talk to my friends, like they'll come to me and say like, I want this so badly. We have to engage in a therapy session where I'm like, what's up? How's it going? And then we dig into the deep into their psychology and they uncover and unravel that they really are trying to be on mythology level with their levels of accomplishment. Now, it takes a lot of vulnerability for the person to be that honest. But like, once we do that in private and they're like, oh, my God, this is totally unnecessary. I can achieve my objectives of ambition and status and power and wealth and success, and I don't have to do this sleep deprivation thing. And it's so liberating for them. They actually become better at their craft. But it's not obvious. It's on the surface, it's very, very hard to see that you're playing out scripts, which goes back to the first thing we talked about.

• 1:25:35Bryan Johnson?

  What fishbowl are you in right now? We're all in fishbowls. Which one are you in? You're playing out the scripts of other people. You don't realize it, but that you're owned by it.

• 1:25:44Rich Roll?

  Whatever I'm trying to create and share with the world. Is only as valuable as the extent to which I suffered to create it. Which leads to unhealthy choices around rest and recovery and self-care.

• 1:26:01Bryan Johnson?

  Huh.

• 1:26:01Rich Roll?

  And it's very difficult to break that delusion.

• 1:26:04Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, you acknowledge this in yourself.

• 1:26:06Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:26:07Bryan Johnson?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  But as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, self-awareness will avail you nothing. Like, having a self-awareness around it doesn't necessarily mean you're making a modification to that behavior. I could really benefit from outsourcing a lot of what my mind is telling me what to do.

• 1:26:23Rich Roll?

  And I do. I just do it with other humans.

• 1:26:25Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Rich Roll?

  You know, my superintelligence is a panel of people who keep me on track, right? And there's a democratic aspect to that, like, I don't want my brain to be a monarch.

• 1:26:36Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Rich Roll?

  I create, you know, a congress of people who are smarter than I in various areas of life, from relationships to athletics, to diet, nutrition, whatever it is, you know? And this podcast is also an experiment of that. Like, I invite people on who know things that I don't, and I learn from them. And they become people in my life that I can call upon to run my decisions by. But, you know, it's really through pain and suffering that I got to a place of willingness to submit to that, to disabuse myself of the notion that my instincts are guiding me appropriately and to develop the humility to allow other people to weigh in on my decisions.

• 1:27:21Bryan Johnson?

  It's amazing, like, you're basically, you're doing this in your life already. You're building systems of intelligence that are superior to native abilities. So if another human is better at doing a given thing than you, you adopt that.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Or if you run that decision by a panel of people and there's a consensus.

• 1:27:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Rich Roll?

  Then that's probably a good metric.

• 1:27:44Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So like, we're all playing this game today already. Like, we're already continually in this game of upleveling our systems of intelligence. Everyone's trying to be their best self. And that's just, we're just gonna do more of the same in the future. So when we talk about AI, it does seem very jarring and new and different. But it's actually no different than what we do already today. We're just taking these baby steps. When you're in the panel of getting opinions, if you find a superior way of reasoning through a problem, you adopt it, right? It overrides your conscious mind. Your mind's like, actually, it's better. So you're already doing it.

• 1:28:17Rich Roll?

  Sometimes.

• 1:28:20Rich Roll?

  Not always. Yeah.

• 1:28:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Rich Roll?

  Not always. It's like, yeah, I know I should do that, but I'm gonna do it this way.

• 1:28:26Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Rich Roll?

  You know, how many times are you gonna bang your head against the wall?

• 1:28:29Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29Rich Roll?

  You know, which is why pain can be such a powerful signal.

• 1:28:33Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Rich Roll?

  Because sometimes you have to be in pain to see another way.

• 1:28:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So like me, individually, I view my current self not living for me right now. I view me as in service of my future self. So I imagine like Brian who lives in, who exists in the year 2050, where superintelligence is omnipresent. Whatever that thing is, I am in service of that Brian. I want that Brian to have that experience, more than anything else. More than me having a temporary pleasure right now, more than me acquiring something. I really view myself in service of my future self because now, if we didn't exist in this time and age, I lived in the 1800s, I wouldn't have thought like that. I would have been like the omnipresent, this is the only moment that matters. But this is the first time it's ever happened in history.

• 1:29:22Bryan Johnson?

  Like, basically, things are changing so fast that our future self could be unrecognizable from our current selves. That's never been the case.

• 1:29:29Rich Roll?

  That's a practice, though, that is counter to human intuition. Like, humans are not very good about thinking about. Or forecasting into the future. I mean, if we were, listen, heart disease kills most people.

• 1:29:42Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  Right? That's, that's the number one killer. So if we really thought about our heart health, or we cared about what we would be experiencing in our seventies, when we are in our teens and our twenties, we would not be eating foods that are bad for our heart. But that's not the way that our society is oriented. And it's not really the way our minds work. Like, tell a teenager that he needs to be concerned about something that's going to happen to him when he or she is 70 years old, and they will dismiss you immediately.

• 1:30:14Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:30:16Rich Roll?

  Talk about your approach to nutrition calorically, and you know, how you make all of this work.

• 1:30:23Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I brought you some food.

• 1:30:24Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did? Good.

• 1:30:25Bryan Johnson?

  I did.

• 1:30:25Rich Roll?

  Do we want to do that?

• 1:30:26Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Rich Roll?

  Should we bring that up?

• 1:30:27Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, let's get you some food, and I'll tell you how it came about.

• 1:30:29Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 1:30:30Bryan Johnson?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:30:30Rich Roll?

  This is the Just Nutty, right?

• 1:30:31Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Rich Roll?

  Yes. We have strawberries.

• 1:30:35Bryan Johnson?

  Raspberries.

• 1:30:36Rich Roll?

  Raspberries, and...

• 1:30:39Bryan Johnson?

  Macadamia nut, walnuts.

• 1:30:40Rich Roll?

  Macadamia nuts and walnuts.

• 1:30:42Bryan Johnson?

  Black seeds, that's some pea protein. Make sure you stir it up a little bit.

• 1:30:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Bryan Johnson?

  It can get caught in the throat, otherwise. Pomegranate juice, sunflower lechon.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's quite good.

• 1:30:54Rich Roll?

  And is this what you would eat as your first meal? Or is this more like a dessert?

• 1:30:59Bryan Johnson?

  That's number two.

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  Number two.

• 1:31:00Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I eat vegetables for breakfast.

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  That's great.

• 1:31:05Bryan Johnson?

  The origin of this, we, we posed the question, if the body could speak, what would it ask for? And that's what we've done. So this is, this diet is 2,250 calories, and every calorie has had to fight for its life. Everything we have has a clinical endpoint. We measure it. If it's doing its job, great. If it's not, it's replaced. We try to justify the presence of every single thing.

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  Well, if you think longevity experts disagree, the world of nutrition, if it's anything, it's a shitstorm of people arguing with each other about, you know, what's in our best interest.

• 1:31:43Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Rich Roll?

  From a health perspective, so. Good luck trying to find consensus there. But the truth is, if you really look at the science, there's more agreement than it would appear.

• 1:31:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Rich Roll?

  If you're like in the kind of nutrition ecosystem of social media. How did you arrive at these meals and these recipes and these types of foods as the things that are going to advance your goals?

• 1:32:07Bryan Johnson?

  All of it's based upon gold standard scientific evidence. We looked at every single lifespan and health span study ever done. We prioritize each one according to its effect size. We looked at each one using 15 bioscific criteria. And so we tried to assess what evidence can we trust the most?

• 1:32:24Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:26Bryan Johnson?

  And then we started implementing it and then we would measure my body simultaneously. Here's my starting point. Here's after, you know, a month of adherence, three months, six months. And we just repeat that loop again and again. And so the most compelling thing about Blueprint is I now have my three year results. You know, I have hundreds of biomarkers. Like for example, my speed of aging is slower than 97% of 46 year olds, slower than 80, I think 88% of 18 year olds. My cardiovascular capacity is the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. My bone mineral density, total bone mineral density is in the top 0.02% of 30 year olds. So, and there's like a dozens more of those markers. So even if a critic wants to say, I don't believe in total bone mineral density because

• 1:33:10Bryan Johnson?

  of blank by blank, you still have to knock off the chart a few of the dozen markers.

• 1:33:13Rich Roll?

  The aggregation or the accumulation of all of these markers taken together?

• 1:33:18Bryan Johnson?

  It is the most robust outcome in history. No one has ever put together this level of measurement, this level of rigor and this level of evidence, never.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:32Bryan Johnson?

  And so let's just say in a few years' time, we blow past this and we have far superior models, which would be the best thing. This is still in the world right now where no one can agree on anything. And people just wanted the simple answer, what do I have for breakfast or what can I eat for lunch? I've given them an answer, the first time in human history where someone can say, here you go.

• 1:33:50Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So you eat three meals a day.

• 1:33:56Rich Roll?

  The final meal, dinnertime is at 11 a.m. 11 a.m. is the last food that you intake for the day.

• 1:34:03Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Rich Roll?

  Why so early?

• 1:34:05Bryan Johnson?

  Sleep.

• 1:34:07Rich Roll?

  See, if I am hungry at night, I have a hard time sleeping.

• 1:34:10Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Rich Roll?

  This is my big problem, Brian.

• 1:34:13Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Okay, so cool. So I always try to be very cautious and say, okay, I do this, but like you do you. And like, maybe you're different.

• 1:34:20Rich Roll?

  I want to get into the N of one versus what is universal here.

• 1:34:23Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. So I always try to be like, look, for me, I tried it out. This is the result of hundreds of different trials, but like you do you, maybe you're different. Everybody around me that has tried this has come back to the earlier they eat, the better they sleep. I don't have a single example of someone who eats late and still nails their sleep.

• 1:34:43Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:34:44Bryan Johnson?

  You may be the first person that, you know, that does it.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  I doubt it. It's discomfort, you know? It's just like anything, you know? When you break a bad habit, it's uncomfortable and you fight against it and you resist it. And then you acclimate to it and then you're glad you did and life is better.

• 1:35:00Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, my, my son, so my 17 year old, my 16 year old started this. He went through a year of trialing this, you know? And like when you're 16, your metabolism is just jamming.

• 1:35:10Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:35:10Bryan Johnson?

  And so he experiences intense hunger pains. And so he really struggled because six or seven, we're all around, he'd be like just dying. And so he has been working on that and lo and behold, he's found out the earlier he pushes that, the better his sleep gets.

• 1:35:25Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:35:26Bryan Johnson?

  So he's just had to negotiate it. But again, like I'm totally open to other people having different routines. It's just everyone around me has slowly migrated back. And it's really my resting heart rate. Okay, a few things like if I, right before I go to bed, my resting heart rate is about 46. I'm almost guaranteed a perfect night's sleep, like really strong REM, really strong deep, very little light, no alcohol, and I've had, you know, 30 to 60 minutes to wind down.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:53Bryan Johnson?

  I can't go straight from hard charging work.

• 1:35:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:55Bryan Johnson?

  To hitting the pillow. I have to have some separation to get my nervous system calmed down. If I can get a few of those things in place, like light clockwork, perfect sleep. It's amazing.

• 1:36:06Rich Roll?

  Wow. Do you ever just lay in bed starving though?

• 1:36:09Bryan Johnson?

  No, I'm pretty accustomed to it now. I think in the early days, I really had to wrestle with that discomfort.

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:14Bryan Johnson?

  And yeah, I've normalized to it.

• 1:36:16Rich Roll?

  2,250 calories a day.

• 1:36:19Rich Roll?

  That number was identified because it is an adequate amount of calories while running a 10% caloric deficit every single day. So you're eating 10% less than your body's physical needs every single day. So what is the thinking behind that?

• 1:36:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so there's reasonable evidence around caloric restriction. It's not a solved topic. It's suggestive that it may be good for you and makes your life and health span. So we do adopt it. Initially, I was on 20%. I got too skinny. I lost too much weight.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  I've seen some of those videos. You were looking pretty gaunt for a minute there.

• 1:36:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, it's pretty fun to look back now. I mean, I've been like five different humans in this three years. I look back.

• 1:37:05Rich Roll?

  You had the long hair with the braid. You had like, you know, yeah, it's like Interview with a Vampire. That's the clickbait YouTube title for this podcast.

• 1:37:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, even I look at myself, I'm like, who is that guy? It's like, I'm so different than I was before. Yeah, but so the 2250, what we found, interestingly, is we have my speed of aging measured almost monthly for the past two years. And the speed of aging clocks are just getting better and better. We now have a 16 organ clock, which just outperformed a bunch of others. But we saw that when I changed from 20% caloric restriction to 10, it didn't change my speed of aging. So we didn't achieve benefits on that marker. Now, that's not to say that we had benefits we didn't get for the heart and the lungs. We're looking at the whole body. But we think that 10% caloric restriction is basically we get the best of it without having to go too far.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  You're confident in the accuracy of these biological clocks? Because I've heard a lot of kind of grousing around whether these are reliable indicators of anything.

• 1:38:10Bryan Johnson?

  The skepticism is absolutely valid. Phenotypic markers are much better. They're gold standard. These clocks are still silver standard. Absolutely true. We trust them increasingly more because the patterns we see there match with other phenotypic markers. So we're building our internal models. But on their own, I agree, out of the gate, skepticism's warranted. With these new generation clocks coming out now, they're getting better and better. So we make sense of our protocol when we put together imaging, MRI, ultrasound, fitness tests. Phenotypic markers, DNA methylation, microbiome, we put them all together and we piece the puzzle together, then we trust it. But we don't have over reliance on one test.

• 1:38:52Rich Roll?

  The most reliable clock then says you are how old? All in?

• 1:38:56Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, we don't trust the age ones. We trust the speed of aging more than the others.

• 1:39:02Rich Roll?

  In other words, looking at a certain system and saying, this is operating in the way that a 20-year-old

• 1:39:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Rich Roll?

  system would operate.

• 1:39:11Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Rich Roll?

  And gauging age based upon data sets from people of varying ages.

• 1:39:16Bryan Johnson?

  That's right.

• 1:39:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Bryan Johnson?

  If you look at my blood markers, my blood markers and my 18-year-old blood marker, my 18-year-old, we're about identical. You can't really tell the difference between us. If you put him in an MRI and me in an MRI, his heart is definitely 18 and my heart is definitely not 18. So some things are very obvious in the difference in the comparisons. And so this is why measurement has been the most important part of Blueprint is when you don't have measurement, anybody's opinion is equally weighted. When you have ground truth with measurement, it dramatically simplifies the conversation to say, well, here's the data. But you have to have repeated measurement over certain durations of time. You have to have the rigor for certain controls. And that's what we've tried to do is structure this in a way where we can punch through the endless debate and say,

• 1:40:04Bryan Johnson?

  like, here's a starting point for us to have a discussion.

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in whether you're in a place where you feel like you can extrapolate upon the data that you've accumulated with respect to yourself to speak more broadly about how it's might be universally understood.

• 1:40:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Rich Roll?

  Because I have this like internal dialogue around the protocol, which is on the one hand, like, I should do this, I can do this. Like, look what's happening here. Like, why wouldn't you do this? And then on the other hand, this other story that loops in my mind, which is, You might be past the point of no repair. Like, I was very hard on my body for a very long time. I treated my body very poorly. Substances, terrible lifestyle habits, you name it. Like, I've done it. And then, even as a healthier person, as an athlete, like, I've pushed my body really hard. And I've done great things as an athlete,

• 1:41:03Rich Roll?

  but that training and that racing was not consistent with longevity, you know, kind of priorities, right? Like, I may have harmed myself beyond the point of no repair. At what point, in terms of arresting the aging process, slowing it, we're not even talking about reversing it, do you have a sense of when it's too late? Obviously, if somebody who's 90 is adopting the Blueprint protocol, it's like, you know, it's unlikely to be successful in preventing them from dying, of course, but even maybe at aging, because that ship has sailed.

• 1:41:41Bryan Johnson?

  I am racing for my parents to stay alive. So, they both joke with me where a new package from me arrives at their house every day, and it's a new thing to do or a new thing to implement. You know, my mom would be like, "Brian, I just, I can only do so many things, so you need to tell me what to do." But I think we should fight for our lives, all of us. And, you know, my dad is 70. He went on Blueprint, and he called me one day. He said, "Brian, I want you to know something really important. When you start experiencing cognitive decline, you don't know it." I thought I would know it. Like, "Hey, I'm slipping." "You don't." He said, "Since I've been doing Blueprint, I've come back, and I'm aware of some loss.

• 1:42:25Bryan Johnson?

  I will do anything to keep my mind." As a 46-year-old, I don't understand that. I can imagine what it might be like to be on the situation where you're potentially losing your mind. But we did a plasma exchange. You know, my son gave me one liter of plasma. I gave my dad one liter of plasma.

• 1:42:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. A lot of people had a lot of things to say about that. Page six, you know? No, uh, no tabloid refuse the opportunity to put some ink to that story.

• 1:42:55Bryan Johnson?

  So I did five liter, five one-liter infusions myself from a 20-year-old donor than one from my 17-year-old. So I got six total and we've yet to be able to identify the benefit of doing that. Maybe with better tools, we'll, we'll be able to tease it out. We just can't see it now. However, when my father took out 600 milliliters of his plasma and took in one liter of mine, his speed of aging lowered by 13%.

• 1:43:23Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:43:24Bryan Johnson?

  And it stayed that way for, it stayed that way for six months. His last measurement was done just two, two weeks ago. So we're doing a more comprehensive analysis on this, but it was one of the most significant intervention outcomes that this company had seen. One time of my super plasma.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  One plasma transfusion?

• 1:43:41Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So like, it's an open question.

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  How many liters?

• 1:43:44Bryan Johnson?

  One liter.

• 1:43:44Rich Roll?

  One liter.

• 1:43:45Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. One liter of my super plasma. But like, okay. So, but there's a question. So was it because he took 600 milliliters of his out? Or was it because he had one liter of mine in? We don't know. We haven't done the experiment. So there's a lot of questions still though. The results are, are solid. Like he's done multiple measurements before, multiple measurements afterwards over a six month period of time. So we trust the data at this point. And so for me, are you past the point of no return? No, like no one is, no matter where you're at. If you look at the time span, like this line straight up on how fast we're moving on intelligence, I don't think there's any reason anybody should give up hope.

• 1:44:26Bryan Johnson?

  All of us.

• 1:44:26Rich Roll?

  I have this thing that like, I'm gonna decline or die right on the precipice of all these breakthroughs that are gonna extend health span, you know, by decades.

• 1:44:36Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Rich Roll?

  Like the last generation to do it old school.

• 1:44:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I just wrote a book and in my author's bio, I wrote that I died in the year 2478 by the last bus in operation on planet earth. Weeks before.

• 1:44:53Rich Roll?

  Brian, it would be such a shame if like some accident happens to you with all of the effort that's going into this. And, and you know, you just walk out onto, I don't know, Lincoln or something like that and get hit by a car.

• 1:45:04Bryan Johnson?

  If we're being sober about this, isn't that inevitable? If that didn't happen, would the universe be true? Do all things not end in irony?

• 1:45:15Bryan Johnson?

  And so, am I destined for some silly death? Most likely.

• 1:45:19Rich Roll?

  Probably.

• 1:45:20Bryan Johnson?

  Most likely. Is it gonna be the most humorous version? Probably.

• 1:45:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:24Bryan Johnson?

  Is it gonna give people endless thrills on the internet? Most likely. You know, like.

• 1:45:28Rich Roll?

  That is the most likely outcome. Yeah. But to like, already embrace that, like, makes it less ironic, I suppose.

• 1:45:35Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, it just is. We look at history, it's just, life is irony.

• 1:45:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Back to the food for a minute. So, one thing about your protocol is, it's entirely plant-based. You've done this by choice, but what is your reason for being 100% plant-based?

• 1:45:54Bryan Johnson?

  I hope that compassion is a scaling law of intelligence. So, evolution created us, we are creating superintelligence. And as we do that, I hope that compassion is a fundamental tenet of this intelligence. For our own sake, I hope that compassion's sake. I think that if we can figure out how to achieve our objectives with greater compassion, we all win a much bigger prize.

• 1:46:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Obviate the unnecessary suffering. And for you to be thriving and doing what you're doing, you know, in your gym and, you know, displaying the biomarkers and the blood markers that are demonstrating transparently, you know, how your body is responding to these types of foods, I think that's a really powerful message to the person who believes or is deluded into the idea that if you want to be strong and vital, that you have to eat animal products.

• 1:46:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, I guess what I really believe is, we need to be what we want AI to become.

• 1:47:02Bryan Johnson?

  And we will build AI with all of our biases. If we're basically living a life of accelerated disease, decay and death, we're going to build that into AI, whether we realize it or not. It goes back to what you're saying of like, are we going to build a dystopic future? We really need to be that thing before we build it. And that's why I want this Don't Die revolution to become a global revolution that consumes the earth in like six months, like not a 10 year timeframe. That we as a species, it just snaps and we're like, it's time, it's going to move. And it happens faster than anyone thinks is even possible. And I think that there's a possibility that could happen.

• 1:47:46Bryan Johnson?

  We currently think of like a revolution like this, like so far away and there's so many barriers. As you see AI advance and it starts posing these really tricky problems of, who are we? What do we do? How do we structure society? Like, what does it mean to exist anymore? It's going to force us to find new games to play, new status, new power, right? All these new things. And if we can redirect it towards something positive like Don't Die, we still get to play our games. And that's what I'm hoping happens is you've got this inversely related structure. And I hope it loops back into humans. For the meat thing, I really don't get into the war of meat. Like, I don't get into the war of anything. I'm basically just trying to say, we need to build a new system of intelligence and let's just follow the evidence and the data.

• 1:48:31Bryan Johnson?

  And if we can do so with compassion, we're all going to win in this new world we're building.

• 1:48:37Rich Roll?

  Of course, the other piece here is all the supplements you take.

• 1:48:41Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Rich Roll?

  110 ish capsules a day.

• 1:48:45Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Rich Roll?

  Some of them are things we've all heard of. Some of them are things we haven't. I'm interested in what you've played around with that you found that you thought would work, that didn't work, and how you came up with this incredibly elaborate, long list of things that you take every single day.

• 1:49:07Bryan Johnson?

  Let me think.

• 1:49:08Rich Roll?

  I guess a way into that is to ask, what percentage of all of these supplements are safety gaps because you're running a caloric deficit and your kind of profile of nutrition is relatively limited that you're making sure you're meeting all of your needs?

• 1:49:24Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:25Rich Roll?

  Versus supplements that are oriented around, you know, kind of progressing this health span.

• 1:49:30Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  Aspect of what you're doing.

• 1:49:32Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, we've tried to build the perfect diet. Again, if you just ask the body, like, hey, body, speak, tell us what you need to be your best self, give us your recipe list, that's what we've tried to do with diet and supplements. And we've really taken a hands-off approach, just like, measure the whole body. Okay, so how are you doing liver? Like, where are your enzymes? Let's image you, how are you doing it with fat, iron, stiffness? We look at all these parameters and say, okay, what does the evidence say on iron and stiffness and enzymes? And we take the evidence, we say, well, you know, here's the following panel that makes sense for the liver to be optimal. And we do the same thing for the heart and for the lungs and everything else. And then that's what generates the list. And so we implement the protocol, we measure again and again and again, and we're like, well, like, okay, liver enzymes on point, cardiovascular ability on point.

• 1:50:16Bryan Johnson?

  So every single thing, and so sometimes there's a multifaceted approach, like, you know, garlic, like, you know, does a bunch of things for inflammation and other things like that. So it's hard to pinpoint one thing for one-to-one relationship, it's really multifaceted. But every single thing has a destination, every single thing is measured, and if it doesn't justify its existence, it's out.

• 1:50:37Rich Roll?

  In the measuring process and in the testing process, though, you have to really be careful about the variables that you're introducing, right? Because you're doing so many different things. You get a test result, how are you supposed to know what that is correlated to?

• 1:50:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Rich Roll?

  It could be a new supplement that you're taking, it could be the fact that you tried a new exercise in the gym, or you put a red light helmet on for a little bit longer. You know, you're doing a lot of things. So how do you track that?

• 1:51:06Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, you're exactly right. We've stacked several things. Like, going back to the speed of aging, what we saw recently is, so we did a statinib and curcetin cycle. That's a combo to get rid of senescent cells. So it's 50mg of statinib, which is a drug used for leukemia, and then 500mg of curcetin. And you do it three days in a row for three months. And the tools to measure senescent cells are not great, right? So like, we have some primitive ways of doing it, but we're not really happy with it. But one thing we did see was it dramatically increased my speed of aging. So the therapy, even though you're trying to clear senescent cells, in that clock, there was an increase in speed of aging. And the same thing happened. We were trying to regenerate my thymus. And so I was doing HGH, 0.6 milligrams, five days a week.

• 1:51:49Bryan Johnson?

  We did achieve a seven-year age reduction in my thymus, looking at fat fraction. We did three different MRIs, which we feel okay about. We're not terribly confident. It's a kind of a new area, but still interesting. That also dramatically increased my speed of aging. And so I use those two examples to say that we are trying many things. But what's cool is when we're doing HGH or the statin and bercetin, they are isolated in the therapy windows and we can see what happens to phenotypic markers. We can see what happens to measurement markers. We can see what happens to speed of aging. The measurement robustness gives multiple angles to slice it up and say, interesting. Same thing with plasma. And so this is why I think the data we have on me is so interesting is it's a more comprehensive view of any human in history.

• 1:52:34Bryan Johnson?

  And even though it's not perfect, definitely some limitations and definitely some crossover and definitely some compound and confounds, like sure, true. Also better than anything in history.

• 1:52:45Rich Roll?

  As this continues to develop and you add and subtract, you know, from this equation, there must be situations where there are compromises that you have to make because, yes, you could take this supplement and it has this positive benefit, but it also has a slight negative benefit on this other thing. But if you combine it with this, you know, it makes it better or worse. Like these things, they don't function in isolation, right? They all have like sort of, they're all dependent upon each other and how they interact with each other. And what might be good for one system has a deleterious impact on some other system. So it's really about how they all work together and what the net effect of that is.

• 1:53:28Rich Roll?

  And that's got to be a very complicated computation.

• 1:53:32Bryan Johnson?

  What a fantastic question. Amazing. So. There's like a pretty large segment of society that, you know, that observes this thing and they'll be like-

• 1:53:42Rich Roll?

  Let me just do what he's doing.

• 1:53:43Bryan Johnson?

  Well, they'll say like, "You're so white, you must be unhealthy." You know, it's like, "You're so pasty, you must be unhealthy." Or they'll say like, "Your facial fat volume is not high enough, you must be unhealthy." So there's like this general perception of like, "I don't know." They use their eyes and trying to do it. That's like one layer. Another layer is you start looking at all the data and you get in there. I think what's interesting is aging is a game of whack-a-mole. So we do the statinib and curstatin to get rid of my zombie cells and it raises my speed of aging. It increases it, right? Bad situation. We do the HGH to try to regenerate my thymus. It does it, but it raises my speed of aging. So exactly what you said is it's a whack-a-mole.

• 1:54:26Bryan Johnson?

  So what is so cool about what we've accomplished is even in this game of whack-a-mole where you do one positive thing and then a negative thing happens, we've been able to achieve elite level of muscle and fat and cardiovascular and speed of aging and, and, and, and, and it just goes on and on. Like we've optimized for like 20 things that compete with each other. Cause it's not like you just do one thing and the whole body is like, "Great." It's a trade-off space and it's very complicated. And that's what I think, like, almost no one gives us props for having optimized for all those variables at the same time. It's really the conversations like, "He looks pasty, therefore this must be a bad situation." And so it just doesn't translate, not yet.

• 1:55:09Bryan Johnson?

  And I think it would be cool if those who can't observe it would speak up because people are trying to make sense of it. They have no idea if this is legitimate or not, or like if we should talk about it. But I think it's the most impressive thing ever done.

• 1:55:21Rich Roll?

  Have you had some of these longevity doctors reach out to you to solicit their input or to be criticized? Like what has that been like?

• 1:55:32Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Recently, a Time Magazine article was written, interviewed several longevity experts and they all dunked on me.

• 1:55:43Rich Roll?

  And their argument was?

• 1:55:44Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So Nir Barzagli, he made the comment, "I went to a conference and he said, Brian showed up, he didn't look very healthy, we were all kind of concerned about him." Then another, Eric Verden, said something like, "This idea of going after the aging being something we can go after..." I forget the exact quote, but like a little bit of a dunk on the endeavor. And then the other gentleman who runs the USC School of Geriontology, I forget his name right now. You have to think of some context because the reporter wants to create the conflict. So she's trying to drum up the conflict. So it's not entirely fair to say that they only said these things. It's probably only true to say that she took the things that they said that created the sharpest contrast and most conflict.

• 1:56:28Bryan Johnson?

  So it's not entirely fair to say these things, but still they said enough to dunk on me, which is interesting. And it's totally expected in a field that is like this, you're going to have a variety of different opinions. Expected, and that's their job is to be skeptical, is their job to raise questions others haven't. So it's fine. It's to point out that it's definitely not like we're riding into the world of anti Asian. People are like, amazing. It's met with quite a lot of resistance because it's their domain of expertise. And so, and it's fruitful and it's productive.

• 1:57:01Rich Roll?

  That's a very healthy relationship to criticism, I think, and a mature one. I think the difference is you are, you know, not only using yourself as the guinea pig. You're approaching this holistically by exploring every aspect of what it means to live in the world. And what would need to be done to kind of take out this insurance policy on extending your life versus slides under a microscope in a lab. Studying Surtuans and certain physiological pathways, all of which is great and fine. But I think within the scientific community, there's a sense that the solution will be found

• 1:57:45Rich Roll?

  in solving a very particular like biochemical pathway as opposed to reorienting not only every lifestyle habit, but also your whole mindset around how you interface with the world. Think about yourself and think about the future of the planet and humanity, which is kind of like what you're doing, right? It's a different way into the same field, I guess.

• 1:58:16Bryan Johnson?

  You're exactly right. We are actually working on different problems. Blueprint appears as if we're trying to solve aging. It's not true. I'm trying to solve for don't die as a species.

• 1:58:30Bryan Johnson?

  I'm trying to solve for at the highest possible level. Like if we just take stock of where we're at, we're in a dicey situation with our biosphere. Right? Like, how serious is our climate situation right now? We don't know. We have no clue. We don't know what the compounded effects are going to be. We don't know how catastrophic it could become and how fast. We saw COVID leveled us as a species and we're walking into this catastrophic climate situation. Like, I don't know, this is like a level of insanity. So we have that going on. We have weapons that we can annihilate each other with. Our fingers are on the trigger. Kind of scary. And we're building AI of like this total unknown of what this thing could be. We have really, really significant challenges in front of us.

• 1:59:12Bryan Johnson?

  And I'm trying to say, if we size up the situation that after 13.8 billion years, we're conscious and we're here and we have a chance to create this remarkable existence. Let's try to get our stuff together a little bit, sober up in this moment, and actually create something spectacular. And so that's the game I'm trying to play. And it all hinges upon this one philosophical thing of don't die. If I can demonstrate with blueprint that maybe there's a chance that we could radically extend our lifespans, it might be enough to shift the zeitgeist and snap it and say, you know what? We're in, we're going to play the game, don't die. Because if death is no longer inevitable, everything about our reality is going to change. Everything about how we think is going to change. Everything is going to change about our existence. And it can happen so fast.

• 1:59:57Rich Roll?

  How do you scale this N of one into a broader movement? I assume that's why you put yourself out there and you're doing podcasts, et cetera. Because, you know, driving all the way over here and driving back, it's not an ideal way to be living your blueprint protocol lifestyle.

• 2:00:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, a few things.

• 2:00:22Bryan Johnson?

  Over the past few months, we've taken Blueprint and we've made it into a product. And so when I first started this thing, it was really explore the scientific frontiers. I did it for two years, no one cared. Then there was this article in Bloomberg, it kind of blew up, and it's just kind of taken on a life of its own. And the most common response I hear is make it easy to do. Like, right now, it's so unapproachable, it's not doable, it's too extreme, I can't do it. So it just doesn't feel like it's actually doable by anybody. Some people do it, but like, you know, it's tough. So people have said, "Make it easy." So we spent the past eight months now building out this product. And we're gonna launch it in 60 days. So it's going to compete for the calorie-for-calorie, dollar-for-dollar, the most nutritious food

• 2:01:06Bryan Johnson?

  program ever built in history. So prepackaged meals, food delivery? What is it? There'll be extra virgin olive oil, it will be pills, powders, drinks, foods. So basically, all-in-one, just, "We'll ship it to you, and you just eat this and consume these things." Exactly. We're gonna say, "We're gonna pack your lunch, don't trade with the other kids." Right. But, you know, like, we're trying to say, "We got you." And so the starter kit, we have about 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day, which we take care of. The person's left with having to solve for about 1,000 a day. We have some fast-follow-on products afterwards that will solve for the whole day. And what we're trying to say is, "We've got you, and we're going to give you the most

• 2:01:50Bryan Johnson?

  nutritious thing you could ever possibly imagine. And we're gonna do so at a cost that's gonna be cheaper than what you're doing right now. We can actually save you money." And so I think, I love this because if you look at technological progress over the past few decades, all the focus has been on computers, and the internet, and the marvel of all this stuff. Meanwhile, we've been marchers for this progress. Meanwhile, we've continued to age and die as we've always have. We get worse, in fact. Like, the situation's not great with our mental health. Where are these societal skill?

• 2:02:23Bryan Johnson?

  Human improvement projects, and I think this is, this is one. This is like, we are full on going to change the landscape of how we deal nutrition. Again, nutrition like done right is the great first step. But we want to revolt against this culture of self destruction. That's fast food and junk food and all these self destructive behaviors. So we're excited about that. We think it really is like, the revolution is in these daily things we do. What we put in our body and there's nothing more intimate than what you put in your body.

• 2:02:51Rich Roll?

  Right. That's a good way of scaling. Cause I think it does speak to the average person who maybe watched a YouTube video or two of yours and is overwhelmed. And it's just like, look, I just, you know, it's something to eat.

• 2:03:06Bryan Johnson?

  I know totally.

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  And that gets into the problem, however, of what is N of one versus what is responsibly extrapolated from this protocol. And there's only so much, right? And so maybe it is in the three meals a day that, you know, there's some universality to that. But then it gets dicey in terms of supplementation and all these other things that you go into. But one thing I would say, which I should have said at the outset, is that in furtherance of this discussion around transparency, like the blueprint website, it's all there. Like, and you've organized it in a way that makes it very easy to kind of understand what you're doing. You just list it all out. Here's everything I do every single day. Here are the recipes. This is the caloric breakdown.

• 2:03:52Rich Roll?

  Here is every single supplement and their hyperlink to Amazon. So you can just, you know, get them. And here's my exercise routine. And here's the video where I go through the, like, all of it. Here's my nighttime routine. Here's my dental, like, my hair rejuvenation routine, my skincare routine. Like, it's all there.

• 2:04:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Rich Roll?

  So we don't have to canvas all of that in today's conversation. That would actually be kind of a boring podcast.

• 2:04:16Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:16Rich Roll?

  It's just more philosophical, which gives you a context for the why, which I think is really important because the what doesn't really mean anything unless you really understand the why.

• 2:04:27Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:28Rich Roll?

  This is all a long-winded way of saying that I just, you know, I appreciate the transparency of it and the fact that it's all listed out there. And as I said to you at the beginning of the podcast, our Ellis Tyler is 28. He's been having a few health things that have challenged him. And he's found a lot of solace and guidance in what you've shared. And it's interesting because like, I'm kind of a thing in the health world, right? Like, you can't hear it. You know, it's like, sometimes you can't hear it from your parents. You know what I mean? And not for nothing, you're doing it next level anyway. So you're a better role model to him than I am by a long shot. But he's really been positively impacted by what you've shared. And we've started preparing blueprint meals and, you know,

• 2:05:11Rich Roll?

  we've done, we've made a lot of changes in our home for which you've, you've been responsible. So I just wanted to kind of publicly acknowledge that. And, you know, I think that it's really cool what you're doing. Like, as resistant as I was initially, when I was watching what was going on with you, I was like, who is this guy? He's a little bit weird. I don't understand this. Like, my whole tune has changed. I'm like, thank God he's doing it. Like, you're sort of this modern day explorer, like an astronaut, you know, out there, like, going places, you know, no one else is going, and then reporting back, like, this worked, this didn't work. Oh, this is exciting, you know? And we can all join in and follow along

• 2:05:52Rich Roll?

  in, in real time. And I think that that is like, a laudable investment of your time and resources for humanity.

• 2:06:01Bryan Johnson?

  Thank you very much. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that kindness.

• 2:06:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is really cool. And I guess, you know, I'm not quite done. It sounded like I was finishing the podcast. I have a couple more things I want to ask you. I guess I'd be remiss in letting you go before asking, you know, what's on the horizon? Or what's the test that you're excited about that either doesn't exist yet, or you're about to do? Or, you know, what is the kind of future, near future horizon that you're inching towards that you think might make a difference in how you're interfacing with all of this?

• 2:06:34Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I really have moved on from the basics of the blueprint protocol. Because I think we've done a pretty good job mastering diet, sleep, exercise. And I really want to go after culture. It's like, for example, last Saturday, I posted on social media, I'm doing a trail run.

• 2:06:50Rich Roll?

  A trail run?

• 2:06:51Bryan Johnson?

  I'm doing a trail run.

• 2:06:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 2:06:52Bryan Johnson?

  Come join me.

• 2:06:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:53Bryan Johnson?

  And 11 people joined me. And we had a fantastic time. We became friends. We had a great conversation. It was really wonderful. We're all strangers to each other, but it was such a wonderful experience. And having done that, I posted again on Wednesday. And instead of capping it, because I capped it to a pretty small group, we have like 150 people who've responded. And so tomorrow morning, on this little teeny trial, we're gonna go run together. And I've been thinking all week of like, what is the ritual we do together? Like, I'm playing with this idea, like, you know, what coordinated movements we do together to feel bonded? How do we feel like we're in sync? How do we feel like we're a tribe? How do we feel like we're really into this? And like, this don't die thing is like, it's real and like, we feel each other's energy.

• 2:07:36Bryan Johnson?

  But I'm really trying to go after, being healthy is very hard. The pressures to do the self-destructive behaviors are so strong and you are at risk of losing friendships. You're at risk of being made fun of. You're at risk, like, it's really painful to not do these things, to like, not comply with them.

• 2:07:51Rich Roll?

  There is a social cost.

• 2:07:52Bryan Johnson?

  Huge.

• 2:07:53Rich Roll?

  You're living your life at cross purposes with cultural norms.

• 2:07:56Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. And it's like, nothing stings more than not being part of a tribe. Nothing hurts more than your friends rejecting you, like, it's awful. And so I'm wondering if I can start doing some cultural events, like some parties and some runs and some things, and convening people to say, you know what? You're not alone. We can do this together. We can derive strength from each other. I've written a book, Don't Die, which walks through this philosophical conversation. So it's almost like, we had dinner together, I broke myself out into multiple characters. And it's a dialogue between the characters about all these ideas. One character makes the argument of like, no way, free will is absolutely the way to go about doing things. I'm never going to relinquish the power of my mind. It's an awful idea. And the next character is like, just hold tight, just like, listen to this idea, just for a minute, breathe through it.

• 2:08:40Bryan Johnson?

  And it just swings back and forth to try to capture the various perspectives of how people think about these ideas. Most people presume...

• 2:08:49Bryan Johnson?

  That large scale societal change happens over some longer time horizon. I think it's really possible that this could happen faster than any of us imagined. And so I want to start laying the groundwork to say, we can do this because as a species, we're kind of beat down. Do we really trust our institutions? Like, we're at war with each other. Like, social media is kind of awful. Like, people are really ugly to each other. We say a lot of mean things. It's really hard to be healthy. I don't feel great. Like, it's just really hard right now in society. And like, in the same way, we imagine unadulterated ambition for our technology. Can we start having that same aspiration for ourselves?

• 2:09:29Bryan Johnson?

  Can we start feeling bullish about the future of being human versus like succumbing to AI and where it's going to be on universal basic income, but we're all useless? Like, how do we create some grand vision for ourselves and motivate ourselves to build a spectacular future? We don't know what's in store for us, but why put our tail between our legs and why just mope into the future? And it's really missing, like, where's the gusto of being human? Where's our gusto of doing this? We love our technology. We worship our technology. We're willing to die for our technology. But where is that on the human side? That's where I want to focus because you diet gets you so far and sleep gets you so far, but like, we need a game to play. We need to have a want to exist, like, an absolute burning desire to exist.

• 2:10:11Rich Roll?

  That definitely feels like it's lacking right now, and I think it speaks to just a general malaise fueled by a growing sense of disempowerment in our lives. And perhaps that speaks to the social constraints that we're unaware of that just drive us, you know, on trajectories that feel like we're never our choice to begin with, but which we've sort of been lured into. And with that, you know, the creeping, you know, increase in mental health issues and the like, like, you know, you mentioned earlier, when you compare humanity to technology and we see all these advances in what we're able to do with tech, and then you look at

• 2:10:52Rich Roll?

  humans and it's like, a lot of mental health disorders, a lot of, you know, increase in unhappiness and, you know, people dying of all these chronic lifestyle ailments, like, and we're just... We're treating symptoms, we're basically medicating people, but we're not really getting at the root cause of what's causing these diseases, let alone exploring the antithesis of that, which is optimizing health.

• 2:11:22Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Rich Roll?

  Right? In large part, that's because we don't have a system set up that incentivizes that. So it requires not only outside thinking, but really breaking the paradigm and creating a new paradigm. And that's a lonely path that you're on. So it's not surprising that you're like, "Please come run with me on the trail, because I don't want to be the only person doing this." And if there's anyone else out there that's doing it, they probably feel quite alone, because you have a lot of support and resources that most people don't have.

• 2:11:53Bryan Johnson?

  The framework that I like in understanding this is a concept called zeroism. And so first principle thinking is something a lot of people know about. You try to assume the fewest number of things in a given timeframe. Sherlock Holmes is a first principle thinker. Dirk Gently, he's a detective by Douglas Adams. He's a zeroth principle thinker, where he arrives at the crime scene and he basically is trying to find what's impossible. So he's trying to find the unknown unknowns. And so if you look throughout the history, the biggest discoveries that we've had, many of the most significant ones have been zeroth principle discoveries. For example, like the earth is not the center of the universe,

• 2:12:37Bryan Johnson?

  or special theory of relativity, or that germs are the cause of infection, or the vanishing point to allow 2D art and 3D perception. They're discoveries of unknown unknowns.

• 2:12:49Rich Roll?

  So first principles thinking would be knowing the knowns.

• 2:12:52Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:53Rich Roll?

  And zeroism is figuring out how to know an unknown.

• 2:12:58Bryan Johnson?

  First principle is that you've got puzzle pieces in front of you and you're trying to figure out if there's a way to assemble this puzzle together in some cohesive, interesting way. You're trying to avoid any assumption on top of that. Zeroism, you're trying to question, is there another dimension here I don't see?

• 2:13:15Rich Roll?

  The application of zeroism to the notion of health span is what?

• 2:13:20Bryan Johnson?

  First principles thinking is only so helpful in thinking about the future because we're up against this wall of fog with superintelligence. We can't see, we can't see past it. We can't predict how it's gonna happen. Like when artificial intelligence played the game of AlphaGo and beat the world champion Lee Sedol, it played moves in that game that stunned human genius. So, human genius has been playing that game for thousands of years. You give that game to AI and in a matter of days, it stuns human genius. It just breaks their brain. The moment you apply this superintelligence, computational intelligence, even its current form, not even even feature

• 2:14:01Bryan Johnson?

  forms, it breaks humans' brains of what is actually genius, what is possible. And so our future is basically going to be a continuous stream of breaking our reality. Our realities have been broken in the past. Like Earth is not the center of the universe. There's little tiny microbes cause infection. Einstein says, actually, Newtonian physics only talks about these dimensions, there's another dimension. Whoa.

• 2:14:25Rich Roll?

  But these breakthroughs are separated by decades and centuries, right? Whereas the accelerating rapidity of what is to come is staggering.

• 2:14:35Bryan Johnson?

  Staggering. So I call this Gen Zero. And this is basically to say like, hey, everybody, we're right now in a moment, we're at the last moment where like things kind of have been how they have been, but they're about to change radically. And in this new future, we can't predict what's gonna happen. We no longer have the ability. And so we're living in a zeroth world. And so Gen Zero is a group of multi-ethnic, multinational people who rise up and they say, we are willing to courageously step into the future and we're willing to divorce, or open to divorce from ourselves all human norms, all human customs, all human thought. And we're

• 2:15:20Bryan Johnson?

  willing to say we're wide open. About everything, absolute blank slate. Now, that is impossibly hard to think about because we have the things we care about. We have our preferences. We have our beliefs. We have our wants. And to basically say, we're open to this being a blank slate of existence is the most challenging thing one could ever do. I think this is why, on some degrees, I get so much flack. I think people kind of see this, where I'm proposing something that is so fundamentally offensive at every single layer of what it means to be human today.

• 2:16:02Bryan Johnson?

  You take every single thing we consider to be sacred, and I'm challenging that head on. And I'm saying that the reality may be the exact opposite.

• 2:16:10Rich Roll?

  Like, the idea that one could possibly transcend every bias and every idea they have about the world and themselves is, again, on some level, it goes back to this Buddhist idea of oneness and of no mind, right? There is, like, are psychedelics a part of this? Because it sounds like in order to inhabit a space of creating distance between yourself and your assumptions and your biases requires some kind of fracture process to even approximate.

• 2:16:48Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I think Buddhism is a really interesting example. If you look at ideologies that have emerged throughout history, you could almost look at the time and place the person emerged. Let's just take Buddhism. And if you look on the other side, what was the technology of the time and place? You could almost predict the ideological thing that would emerge. So in the time of Buddha, they didn't really have any technological abilities. The only thing you could do would be to close your eyes and meditate. You had no other abilities. And then we look at the rise of Islam and Christianity, you find this really compelling storytelling. Like, hey, there's this omnipotent being. We have these rules. If we follow these rules, we get this prize. And that storytelling prevails for a few thousand years.

• 2:17:33Bryan Johnson?

  But that was really the technology of the time. If you say right now, What is the technological ability? And what does that mean for an ideology? You could almost map the ideology. And the ideology is zeroism. It's like, it's so predictable because no existing ideology in the world has anything meaningfully to say about this moment in time. Where are the major religions in offering us practical things about this moment and how to solve our biggest problems? Even with capitalism, hey capitalism, what should we do with our major problems? How do you solve this? Even that, it just is too shallow. So where do we look for inspiration and structure to do it? And this is what I've been trying to fill with zeroism, like build out

• 2:18:18Bryan Johnson?

  a philosophical structure. We can say, okay, like we can understand where we're at. These are practical steps we can follow. We can all cooperate around these core ideas. But I'm trying to create the stableness of a foundation of how we think about and act in this highly uncertain situation we're in and build something as much as we can predict and control the future of a world where it's built around this, don't die and thriving.

• 2:18:45Rich Roll?

  To what extent are you actually participating in the building of that? Like, we've been talking about AI. You're an entrepreneur and you have a variety of companies that you've founded or are heavily invested in. Like, are you directly invested in this aspect of this future casting that we've been talking about?

• 2:19:04Bryan Johnson?

  So I made a couple hundred million from Braintree Venmo. I've put everything into this. I've sunk all my money into it. And it would have been very easy to take that money and make a lot more money. You know, if I could have just done just a normal business, you know, like, it's so easy to make money with money. And I really didn't think that was the right move. The objective was to change the trajectory of intelligence in this part of the galaxy and do something that matters a few hundred years from now, which says a lot with how much we're going to change. Like, to be valued in the 25th century, like, you've got to do something spectacular. And so this is really all poured into that singular objective of trying to

• 2:19:48Bryan Johnson?

  do the one or two or three things in the century that moves the needle for the species. And I've been obsessed about this problem. It just has absolutely consumed me. I think about it nonstop.

• 2:20:00Rich Roll?

  I feel like you should come up with a blueprint, like a literal blueprint for a home where the home is designed in a way that's conducive

• 2:20:11Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:11Rich Roll?

  to everything that you're talking about.

• 2:20:14Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, the systems I've been trying to build is putting myself in someone else's situation. I just want the food to arrive and I want instructions on what to do. And I want that to be solved. And then if I can start making small decisions on prioritizing my sleep and I start banging out 100% nights, I feel amazing about existence. Like if I can get those two things right, and then we can then add on some exercise, which is great, and you know, something else, but just get people in a mindset where we say, we want this. Like, we're up for it, we're down for it, let's go. Like, this is the thing, like, when I was depressed, you know, I really did want to end my life, like desperately wanted to commit suicide.

• 2:20:59Bryan Johnson?

  I would have done it had it not been for my kids. And so there's deep inside of me this imagination that we want to exist no matter what. Unconditionally, we want to exist. When I've tried to talk about this, I'm surprised at how much pushback I get where people are like, well. And there's so many things they tell me of like, why they don't want to exist. Like, I would be bored, or I, I don't want to be blank or blank. There's so much resistance to living. And I wonder in the moment, again, if we're like Homo erectus. Like, if we really understood what it meant to exist in 20 years' time, would we be like

• 2:21:43Bryan Johnson?

  losing our minds of like, please exist, like, no matter what you do, please stay alive? Like, do we have any wisdom at all in this moment to speak for ourselves? And I don't think I do. And this is why I feel like I'm really in the service of my future self, is I have no clue what I'm talking about. I just know I need to not die because this future thing is like, is the most remarkable thing to happen in history.

• 2:22:09Rich Roll?

  Hmm. It must be hard for you to date.

• 2:22:17Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Rich Roll?

  Would somebody have to be on the blueprint protocol? It would be too hard if they weren't.

• 2:22:24Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I, you know, I'm single. I really do want a partner.

• 2:22:27Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:28Bryan Johnson?

  And I guess I have to be like impossibly hard. Like, I don't know, I just can't imagine anybody putting up with me. I just feel like I'm like intolerable on every front.

• 2:22:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, that makes me, that makes me sad to hear you say that.

• 2:22:44Bryan Johnson?

  It's kind of true, right? Like you, you take me as like, uh, most people have expectations for what's reasonable in a relationship. And I think I just break almost everything. And so I don't know, it's just like, I've yet to find a situation where somebody would genuinely be happy with me. Yeah. So it's a pretty complicated situation.

• 2:23:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:07Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There's a long list of things that somebody would have to be on board with.

• 2:23:10Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:12Rich Roll?

  I don't eat after 11 and I'm in bed at 8:30.

• 2:23:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:15Rich Roll?

  And there's no way you're sharing a bed with anyone.

• 2:23:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:18Rich Roll?

  Too big of a threat to the 100% streak.

• 2:23:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:21Rich Roll?

  You know, like, there's a lot.

• 2:23:22Bryan Johnson?

  There's a lot.

• 2:23:23Rich Roll?

  It's a lot, right?

• 2:23:24Bryan Johnson?

  A lot going on.

• 2:23:24Rich Roll?

  And so when you think of it in those terms and you're saying, hey, look, look how happy I am and here's what I'm doing. Like, you're never saying like, you should do this too. Like, you're doing what we say in AA is attraction rather than promotion. Like, you're trying to create an attractive model for what this might look like. But the ask is huge.

• 2:23:44Bryan Johnson?

  It has to be.

• 2:23:45Rich Roll?

  And I think the social aspect of it looms much larger than, you know, the practical implications of the food that you're eating and the supplements you're taking and what time you have to go to bed.

• 2:23:57Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:57Rich Roll?

  And that's really what comes into play in terms of mass adoption.

• 2:24:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Rich Roll?

  Maybe that's why we need to scale this because you need to find somebody to date, right? We've got to grow the population for you.

• 2:24:11Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11Rich Roll?

  For selfish reasons.

• 2:24:12Bryan Johnson?

  I wonder, I, I really, I, I spend almost zero time on dating. I wonder if I actually did spend time if, what would come of it. But yeah, I genuinely want to be in a relationship. My 18 year old and I are like best friends. It's the best relationship.

• 2:24:29Rich Roll?

  Does he date?

• 2:24:29Bryan Johnson?

  Uh, he does. Yeah.

• 2:24:30Rich Roll?

  He does. See? He can be the model for you.

• 2:24:34Bryan Johnson?

  It's the best relationship I've ever had in my entire-

• 2:24:36Rich Roll?

  Until you become 18.

• 2:24:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:37Rich Roll?

  Like, he's showing you how to be 18, right? So when you become 18 again, you can do what he's doing.

• 2:24:42Bryan Johnson?

  Honestly, there's so much about that. Like, I hang out with him and his friends, and we have so much fun together. We just do, we play like kids. It's never-ending fun. Like, I love all my children. Obviously, we have that complication with our past, with religion, where like, two of my children are kind of like, yes, Dad, we do love each other. Also, kind of complex. So, and we openly acknowledge it and have that conversation. But my son and I, we just pal around. We're just best friends. Like, we do everything together. It's so fluid. Like, we're just like one thing all the time. And it is the best relationship I've had in my entire life. And it is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. And so I guess I know what it feels like to be in this wonderfully beautiful relationship. And I do want it.

• 2:25:27Bryan Johnson?

  Just, it's complicated to be human. It's complicated to be in a relationship.

• 2:25:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to hear that you have that relationship with him, but I'm sorry to hear about the constraints with your other kids. That can't be easy.

• 2:25:37Bryan Johnson?

  And as you know, it will change. Like, kids change so fast. It's not like, it's fine.

• 2:25:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time will tell. In seeing you, in watching videos with you, interacting with Telmich, I have to ask this question, but I have to know, I have to know if you've watched the TV series Foundation, or if you read the book.

• 2:25:58Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:58Rich Roll?

  Because you realize, of course, that you are Empire.

• 2:26:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:02Rich Roll?

  That you and your son are the same person.

• 2:26:04Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:05Rich Roll?

  And that, on some level, I have to think, like, even if it's unconscious, that you are striving to adopt the Lee Pace physiology. Because that dude is ripped in that show and looks fantastic.

• 2:26:17Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:18Rich Roll?

  And it's just a series of him at various ages.

• 2:26:22Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Absolutely aware, totally on board.

• 2:26:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Am I the first person to point that out? Or has that been pointed out to you?

• 2:26:28Bryan Johnson?

  It's pretty common, yeah.

• 2:26:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, is it?

• 2:26:29Bryan Johnson?

  I'm sorry. I'm equally Patrick Bateman.

• 2:26:32Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:26:33Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of that.

• 2:26:36Bryan Johnson?

  I get Dorian Gray a lot. I get Elf, Colin from Vampire, Edward Colin, Prometheus. Yeah, so that's a smattering of characters, yeah.

• 2:26:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:26:49Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:49Rich Roll?

  Right. You should make a video about that. I know you did the Mean Tweets video, but like, all this sort of like, blueprint role models out there.

• 2:26:57Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want to do a Patrick Bateman morning routine.

• 2:27:01Rich Roll?

  That's pretty funny.

• 2:27:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:02Rich Roll?

  Last thing before I let you go, you know, I feel like you've already kind of offered up some, some pretty profound closing statements, but I think I just want to leave you with the opportunity to maybe share what, what we haven't covered today that you want to leave people with in terms of, of how to think about this and, you know, feel free to correct the record on how you think you're misperceived in the media.

• 2:27:27Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:27Rich Roll?

  And really just the message that you want to speak to broadly about what you're trying to do and the world that you would like to see be created out of the seeds of your efforts.

• 2:27:41Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So I guess first is I do keep my son in a dungeon in my basement.

• 2:27:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:47Bryan Johnson?

  Unlike what media has reported.

• 2:27:49Rich Roll?

  Just you guys in IV bags, you know,

• 2:27:52Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 2:27:52Rich Roll?

  Sucking each other's blood all day long in the dark.

• 2:27:55Bryan Johnson?

  But unlike what media has reported, his room is not 10 by 10, it's eight by eight. So correct that first. But then, thank you very much for having me. This was one of my most favorite conversations I've ever had.

• 2:28:08Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 2:28:08Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I feel like you really went there emotionally with me. Like you, you did it all. Like you experienced the emotional arousal of being fundamentally challenged so deeply about everything who you are. And you were open to roll through it and you were open to consider other ideas and perspectives. And I feel like this is, was basically the same effect of us having dinner together. We're after this, we're gonna hug. And it's like, you know what, man? Like, we're good. We're friends. We're gonna do life together. Like, I feel like we really connected, which was amazing. And that's not always the case. These are very hard conversations to have. So thank you for being such a generous host.

• 2:28:50Rich Roll?

  You're welcome and thank you.

• 2:28:51Bryan Johnson?

  So, hi friends. I hope this was useful. I would love to hear your perspective in the comments. I do read the comments. I love to hear what, how, what you perceive. I also am always trying to get better. You can see that I, I really am trying my very best to convey these complicated ideas. I know that sometimes I can do a lot better. So I'd love to hear your suggestions on how we can do it. But I'd say above all, I hope that we as a species, that, let me just make this more individual, that each one of you, so you and I,

• 2:29:30Bryan Johnson?

  Can rise up and choose an existence that is potentially more spectacular than we can imagine. Like this moment is so special. It is no previous generation has ever had this opportunity. And I hope that we can be sober enough to capture it. And it's real. It's here right now. And we are not powerless against the world and all the things going on. We can rise up. And so I hope we can build a community on this. And I hope we can take advantage of opportunity. I think it really is the most spectacular thing to ever have happened to the human race.

• 2:30:04Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. I really appreciate what you're trying to do. It takes a lot of courage and gumption, especially to so boldly live kind of outside the structures of social expectations. And you've sacrificed a lot to do this. So I think that speaks to, you know, the authenticity of what you're trying to achieve. And I think beyond all the talk about superintelligence and AI, as I said earlier, like, I really do think that you feel deeply, you know, I think that maybe you don't even appreciate the extent to which the emotional piece of this is motivating you. And I would go so far as

• 2:30:49Rich Roll?

  to suggest that, that it's not the data and the numbers and the superintelligence and the AI, but it's truly your emotional connection to what you're doing that is perhaps the underappreciated superpower here that's operating. And I think it's profound, and I'm really glad that you're doing it. And I just wanted to thank you for coming here today. I appreciate it.

• 2:31:12Bryan Johnson?

  Thank you.

• 2:31:12Rich Roll?

  Very much. Yeah. And we're definitely gonna hug it out. And I want to come to your house and see the whole deal.

• 2:31:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, you're welcome. I hope you come by. And I think we should put together a dinner. I think we should.

• 2:31:22Rich Roll?

  I'd love to.

• 2:31:23Bryan Johnson?

  Get a group of people.

• 2:31:23Rich Roll?

  Are we doing it at 10 a.m.? What time is dinner?

• 2:31:27Bryan Johnson?

  Why don't we do it on a Saturday? We'll do it like at noon. Maybe we can do an activity before or after.

• 2:31:31Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:31:32Bryan Johnson?

  But let's put together an amazing group, and we'll make new lifelong friends.

• 2:31:36Rich Roll?

  Absolutely. I'd love to do it.

• 2:31:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:38Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Brian.

• 2:31:38Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:38Rich Roll?

  I mean that. Appreciate it.

• 2:31:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, great.

• 2:31:40Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:31:51Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting

• 2:32:36Rich Roll?

  the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel

• 2:33:18Rich Roll?

  Solis. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Tractor Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.