Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Tech Millionaire's Plan to Save Humanity with Longevity Protocols | Bryan Johnson

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. Johnson sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800m in 2013. Through his Project Blueprint, Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5% of 18 year olds, inflammation 66% lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years. In today's episode, Curt is joined by Bryan Johnson to discuss areas such as longevity, sleep, meditation, and the philosophy behind Bryan's "Project Blueprint".Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

Brian Johnson, there are broadly two spokes of this longevity movement. So one is the more technical research type, which talks about autophagy and mitochondrial DNA expression, technical terms. And then there's the more YouTuber influencer type about, well, let's live in a healthy manner. And some people see you as bridging the gap between both of those. Do you agree with that? both of those. Do you agree with that? I'm proposing that none of us should actually think about our health and wellness. I think it should be a process of computation and automation. And this is the observation that Alfred North Whitehead made, the mathematician, that society advances at the speed at which it can automate things. And so we have Moore's law

and we have other markers that we try to look at progress. I think it might be interesting if we had an automation law. What is the speed at which society is automating tasks that previously required our attention, but no longer do? For example, like basics we do on a day-to-day basis. Clean water comes out of the tap. Neither you nor I wonder whether that water is going to kill us. Now, it may be dirty to some degree. it may not be the purest thing ever, but it's probably not going to kill us, at least not right now. And when you look throughout society of the automated tasks,

and so yes, for an entry point, I do talk about things that are within people's immediate control, eating well and exercise, but what I'm really trying to demonstrate is that algorithms are systematically doing things better than we can as humans. And it makes sense that we deploy an algorithmic approach to our bodies. And so even though mine is analog, I'm saying that we really have bigger things to use our brains on than worrying about what to eat or what pills to take or how we're doing in health. So you know how many people talk about the dangers of the algorithm, the algorithm of Google or

YouTube or Facebook or whatever it may be. Do you see then a similar danger of some algorithmic application of health to oneself? Yeah, I mean, there's a few potential dangers. I mean, one is you have to realize that the reason why people are justifiably apprehensive about algorithms is because the entities that develop the algorithms are in many regards killing you. So when they build an addictive app, they're not keeping metrics like, you know, oh, we're so happy that this user got eight hours of sleep. They're saying we're able to get this person onto our app and we're able to keep them on there for blank number of minutes uninterrupted.

And so they care about the metric internally that they brag to their coworkers about of how long they were able to keep your attention. Or inside of a junk food company, they're bragging about the potato chips they sold or the candy bars they sold or whatever the case may be. And that's what they cheer and they celebrate. And so we have this culture behind all these algorithms, whether it be junk food or addictive social media, where these companies are celebrating your death.

And it's not said that explicitly usually because it's rather benign of like, oh, we're just doing capitalism and we're giving people option to be entertained, but it really is a death culture. And so people are justifiably suspicious of algorithms because that's what they've done. And so it's easy for them to say, like, if that, if they're trying to kill me in these are the ways, like why in the world will I give them access to my health when they've

shown that they've want nothing but the worst for me. Speaking of algorithms. So speaking of automating, what are your daily uses for LLMs? We are implementing our first LLM right now. So up until this point, we've largely been tracking data in spreadsheets. We haven't done all that much data analysis. There's just not a lot of room. The data we have is pretty sparse.

And so the LLM we're building, basically, I say that the blueprint is an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself, which is another way of saying that. So the premise behind this is that we see algorithms getting better at pretty much everything in society. And we systematically say yes to these things. Like, for example, can an algorithm help me find better content? Okay, great. Can it help me find, you know, can it help me write this sentence better?

Okay. So we say yes in all these incremental fashions. And then slowly it's's gonna get to a point where the algorithm is going to become better at being you than you are. You just mentioned two words, blueprint and then data. Briefly for people who are unacquainted, what is the blueprint? And then my second question is,

is there a place where people can find the data that you have on yourself as one of, if not the most measured people on the planet in some readily readable fashion as people, as many of your fans have to then comb through old interviews to find out what is he said about so-and-so. Yeah. It's protocols.bryanjohnson.com and I have the data listed out according to organ, lungs, et cetera, cardiovascular. And there, my data is listed and my protocols as well. But the point you raise is a good one

because Blueprint is challenging in many ways. And so I tried to take that feedback. We just put out a product. And it's 74 to take that feedback. We just put out a product and it's 74 interventions into 400 calories. And I think it's the best health protocol ever built. And so I say this, people can go to my website protocol.bryanjeltsin.com.

They can see exactly what I do, the supplements I take, the foods I eat, and they can implement the entire thing. So it's available for free. Also now they can buy for $343 the entire stack, and it just shows up, and it's ready to eat and drink, eight pills a day. So I'm trying to basically build out this algorithm so it's easily doable by everyone at the most basic level. So this is the starter point, and we'll slowly work up.

What would you say, Brian, is the largest misconception that people have of you? Or ones that you've encountered? Okay. Like literally everything. I mean, this is the most common experience I have where I will be in person with someone and if we have any kind of time together, they'll say predictably, wow, I really had the wrong idea about you. You're actually a pretty chill dude. Your ideas are compelling. This is interesting. Almost universally. And I guess it's been like the...

Getting the attention of the world has certain characteristics. You can't just walk into the global conversation and speak to really heady stuff. You have to kind of talk, use the language, the local language, memetics and stuff like that. But I think we're slowly working, chipping away at making this more understandable.

That, you know, Blueprint, Blueprint is basically an invitation for us each to say that we may be at a point in time where we are invited to let go of everything we think, expect, assume, and imagine. Okay, well, this takes us to some philosophical terrain. Now, well, I'm curious what your view is on the nature of reality. I think that up until this point, we humans have been the generators and the stewards of knowledge. the generators and the stewards of knowledge. We discover things, we learn things, we memorize things, and we teach others things.

We collectively maintain this intelligence. So we are the managers of knowledge. And AI has now become a better manager of knowledge. AI knows more things than any human knows. These large language models. And these LLMs are also getting pretty good at discovery in certain vectors. And there's this trajectory where they probably are going to get substantially better. And so we're currently transitioning from knowing all things, or knowing what we do know, to not knowing, not being the steward of it.

And so this is, to me, the most significant transition that's happening is that we humans are moving from a species of knowing to one of not knowing. Or at least we need to ask to know, but we're not the primary owners of that knowledge. And so when it comes to questions like what is reality, before you could pose that question and it would be socially appropriate for a human to say, based upon that person's education or knowledge, in a very short period of time, I don't think it will be culturally or socially appropriate for a human to say that because they'll be so outmatched in knowledge relative to AI that it just will be seen as foolish. And so in this moment, I would say that it's really not my interest of using words to try to expand on reality. I'm saying that my objective as an intelligent being in this moment has been reduced to trying to stay alive and don't die. So I can bridge myself into this new reality, whatever it may be. But that again, this goes back to like whatever we think, assume, imagine, know,

is probably not going to be the case in the future. It's going to be some entirely new emergent properties that we can't, we don't yet know. Have you heard of John Vervecky? I haven't. Okay. So John Vervecky would say there are different forms of knowing there's propositional, which is what you've referred to, but there are three others. So perspectival, procedural, and participatory.

Those can be defined elsewhere, but if you want, I can define them. The point is that it seems like LLMs are not masters yet. I wouldn't say that they're stronger at knowledge than humans. I would say they're stronger at knowledge, broadly speaking, than in any given one human, which is a different statement, but they're on the way to be more knowledgeable and even in one's own domain. At least seems like that. But anyhow, that would just be relegated to propositional knowledge and not like procedural knowledge or participatory. What it's like to participate in this dialogue, for instance, or perspectival, what it's like to have a perspective. So what do you make of that?

Do you also see AI encroaching in those domains? I do. And the perspective I take is that I do look at this, our moment, through the lens of the 25th century. And I do that because in any given question that you or I could pose to each other about any topic, we can say, do we think we are in a simulation? Who do we think is going to win the 2024 US election? What do we think about whatever, like fill in that question mark.

Right. Any one of us can run our mouths and we can string words together and we can express an opinion. Then others are going to listen to that and say, well, I agree or disagree or whatever the case may be. And that's the same as true as like how fast you think AI is progressing, do you think we're going to develop AGI? Like, you know, all these questions. And so it creates this pretty messy landscape of opinions. But if you look at this moment from the 25th perspective, it kind of makes

all those opinions just wash away. And so will, will artificial intelligence know more than humans from the vantage point of the 25th century? Like, of course. You just look at it on a trajectory from like a 100-year perspective of the entire century. Of course. Do we think blank? And so to me, that gives clarity of thought because if I don't hang out from that perspective, I get stuck in the mud of everyone else's opinions. And I don't think, I mean, if you look back through history, most human opinions were incorrect about the future. It's very hard to predict the future. And so I don't try to hang out in this really narrow time span because I ultimately consider it to be rather futile in trying to play this

much larger game, which is really what I'm saying is how do we get existence right for this next few centuries? And the first thing on order is how do we humans secure our place in the future? When we're inherently not the alpha on the planet, when we're not the primary value producers, when there's something more intelligent than us, how do we stick around? How do we get onto this continuous progress curve? And so that's really the entirety of my thoughts. I generally just try to avoid those. If we're a tribe of humans trying to navigate our way into some

intelligent existence, I, the role I try to play in the tribe is to offer a unique perspective that others are not offering. This is super interesting. How do you choose? Like you chose 25. I'm sure that's not completely arbitrary. Now, some people would say, well, you live in the moment. So the temporal meaningful moment is the now.

Some people would say, let's do what makes our ancestors proud. So then that's something in the past. Some people would say the rocking chair test. So that's maybe 40 years into the future. You said 25, the 25th century. There's also the 10 to the 30th century where there's the heat death of the universe

and everything is meaningless. So how does one choose which one to place at the top of a value hierarchy? Yeah, I mean 10 to the 30 though, you know, I don't, I don't hold that to be true. You know, like from our current models, okay, but it also presumes we know that like in the known to unknown ratio. So it's to me like the most interesting question is what we don't know. And so I know we jump to those things, those conclusions of like, okay, there's this heat death so nothing really matters. But I don't think we even begin to contemplate that.

I mean, that kind of time span is just insane. But the 25th century I selected, it's basically at the current rate of progress, it's inconceivable. It's so far outside the contemplation zone, you couldn't even begin to imagine. And so it's just meant to break the imagination to say, I agree. We absolutely have zero idea. Like, if you could say, let's imagine... So the uncertainty is too large as you move forward in time. Exactly. You say, yeah, you say 2075 and people are like, well, we've got flying cars and like, you know,

we're going to genetically design our babies and like they map. So just like Blade Runner in 2049, there's flying cars, there's droids, you have all this advanced infrastructure, but humans are identical. Nothing's changed about humans. And so that's most of sci-fi and most because they have to make it relatable to audiences. And so really it treats humans as an unchanged thing outside of maybe a few augmentations, but otherwise like we're fundamentally the same thing. Do you meditate?

I do. Can you speak on that? My meditations are mostly an exploration of observing my mind's inner workings, like before when I was depressed and I would have a thought about wanting to commit suicide, I would think that was me. I didn't know how to distinguish between what landed in my conscious awareness and what my mind was generated. And then I realized that I can observe these things and I'm not these thoughts I'm not these emotions. I'm not this emergent phenomena. It's separate and so I spend my meditative time Trying to become familiar with what my mind naturally turns out on its own and It become it makes me more aware of like in this conversation

like you know when when we're having these discussions, my mind is populating ideas on what to say and when and how to say it. And I'm actively running scripts in my mind of like, I don't trust that, I don't trust that, I don't trust that. Okay, kind of interesting. But I'm filtering very, very heavily on what my mind says because the majority of what it outputs is Is really not trustworthy and so I learned that in meditation. Mm-hmm

Okay, so you have to magistrate between these different possibilities that emerge instinctively now this magistration is that also you? Which ties into free will like do you also? decide Yeah, um, I I Decide? Yeah. I generally, like on conversations like this, I don't have any learned expertise. I've read books on the topic, I've had conversations on the topic, and I think the most prudent answer for me to give is I don't know. Great. Okay. I wish more people would give answers akin to that. How long do you meditate for? Presumably, you know that.

It depends on the day. It depends on the objective. The weekends, I have a larger stretch of time to get into it. Of course, there's compounded gains in meditation. When you get in, you get in deep and you find the right spot. It's wonderful to be there. Other times, if the day is fast paced, it's harder to get into that spot. So it depends on day and context. How about your thoughts on psychedelics? If I'm not mistaken, there is a molecule, a certain molecule tattooed

to you somewhere. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, this guy. Yeah. Five MEO DMT. You know, like, we all know that when we find ourselves in life moments, like the passing of a loved one or a near-death experience or something that jars us sober. And for a very brief moment in time, we have our head on straight and we're able to see clearly. And psychedelics have that effect. They have this sobering, expansive property which tears us loose of being almost suffocated by the omnipresent focus of now. And so I do love psychedelics for their properties of allowing us to expand outside of normal and to acquire greater tools that... I mean like I guess what's cool to me is how big is consciousness?

You know, like, is it as big as the electromagnetic spectra? Are you asking me or you're just saying these are thoughts that occur to you? Sure, I'm asking you. Yeah, I mean, right? So if we just say, if we can define consciousness, and let's just say we can categorize states and we can numerically define them. And then we look at the size of other realities. So I'd ask you, what is the size of consciousness? What do we have access to now? Does psychedelics give us increased access? access, can we imagine that even these two things might even be the smallest of introductions on what the full range is? That's an interesting

question because how does one compare something physical like the electromagnetic spectrum which seems to be infinite or maybe goes up to the Planck length because you measure in terms of wavelengths and it would also depend on what does What does it mean to measure consciousness? Yeah, so I don't know You mentioned that people are surprised that you're a chill dude So then what does that mean that they think about you that you're this this punctilious? ritualized

Uptight person is that what you're saying? Yes, they... They grab onto the most accessible frameworks that they can imagine. characterization of like rich, narcissistic, ruthless, selfish. So they just kind of put me into this category of a bad actor in society. So there's no goodwill assigned. It's just this guy's a nemesis. Is this common among a certain type of people or is it just... Like, what is it? I imagine your fans don't think so, almost by definition, they're your fans. Yeah. Yeah, those of you, those of them, those of my, those who have journeyed with me, they understand, I think, the essence of this project.

And so they see it for what it is and it's just others who have a peripheral awareness. I mean, I think, like when I have these dinners, it's two and a half hours long. The thing I find most remarkable is I pose several thought experiments is how predictable people's thought patterns are. If you pose that question, one of the thought experiments I give is if you had access to an algorithm that could give you the best physical, mental, spiritual health of your life, but in exchange for doing that, you needed to do what the algorithm said, ate what it said, went to bed what it said, etc., would you say yes or would you say no? And even though the average IQ of the people who attend my dinners are above 130, they're very capable people, the predictability of their answers is stunning. And it reminds me almost like a reflection of that likely means how predictable my opinions are about almost everything else.

We experience reality as though we're novel, as though the first time it's been experienced. But we're kind of oblivious to these larger patterns that we're in. So when people read headlines of me, unbeknownst to them, their brain is formulating these conclusions and then they just parrot it. And so it's really invited me to be so much more cautious on anything my mind generates and any opinion I have about anything. You mentioned these dinners and for people who are unaware, you house some friends of yours or some colleagues on a fairly regular basis

and discuss philosophical implications of your practices and what it means to be human. From these dinners, what would you say are some key takeaways other than the predictability of one's own opinions, yet the ascribing of novelty to it? The dinner is fundamentally, most dinners are a friendly social competition on who knows the most. Even if it's among friends, there's still a status game to be played of who can make the best point or who can... There's like an intellectual status game that's played.

And most people walk into this dinner thinking that it's an intellectual battle trying to figure stuff out. And really, it's a game who can figure out how to figure out I don't know. And so it's the opposite side of the spectrum of intelligence and it's recognizing that right now in our culture I don't know is seen as weakness and unintelligent and lowering one's status. And this is an endeavor to say the future of intelligence

probably is closer to I don't know as the starting premise versus now I know is the dominance. And so people will spend two and a half hours navigating this course in their mind and if they're successful, they'll land in the spot and realize that I don't know is the most intelligent answer given the contemplations we've discussed. Is it a different set of people every time then? It is. Hmm, okay.

I mean, I don't know. It's like if you pose the question, what is the hardest thing any human can say? And what is the easiest thing any human can say and what is the easiest thing any human can say? The easiest thing that a human can say is I know. The hardest thing any human can say is I don't know. Mm-hmm. Have you ever had your IQ tested?

I haven't. You measure almost every aspect of your life. Is there a reason why not IQ or say dual end back or something that's analogous to it? Yeah, it just hasn't come up. So do you focus on nootropics? I haven't. Hmm. Okay. Have you heard of BPC 157? We have. I have, yes.

Okay. Please, tell me about that. What are your findings? Yeah. Well, so we just started a peptide protocol. In fact, a week ago, I started cerebral lysine, a peptide. It's five milliliters injected every other day for 10 days. I'm on day five right now. And it is for, it's been used in acute situations for concussive treatments and things like that. The evidence is a little sparse. So it's on our evidence ranking. It's not as strong as we normally do, but we think it's safe. So we're trialing that. Sorry, not as strong as you normally do? What do you mean?

So typically, so what we did at Blueprint is we looked at all scientific literature on health span, lifespan. We did a power ranking of all the effect sizes, and then we've been trying to implement the power laws. Because without some kind of organizational methodology, there's infinite number of things to do for one's health and wellness. And so unless you have some kind of guideline on what to do and why, you'll be forever in the mesh of this and that and probably never achieve meaningful results. And so we've tried to order according to power laws. Cerebral lysin, this peptide for neural health and neural cognitive performance, is not a power law because it doesn't yet have these levels of evidence we typically like.

But we like it because we're focused on the brain and when you look at the brain and try to find interventions that have a meaningful effect, the number of things with strong evidence in the power law is pretty low. What other nootropics have you tried that would pass your test of this power law? I mean, in my daily protocol, we have 74 total interventions. There are basic things like vitamin D, but then also more advanced things like calcium alpha-ketoglutarate, fisetin, lutein, and so there's a few others. And many of those do have cognitive benefits. We do mushrooms.

So, I guess we have several things. We have several components that people do put in nootropics. So I guess, yes, I do take those. It just depends on how you define what specific ingredient within your tropics. What about intermittent fasting for the mind? Have you found any increase in focus or speed or creativity? And by the way, do you measure creativity? Even subjectively, just keep a tally of it.

Subjectively, just keep the tally of it. I mean, subjectively, I would say I've done my best work intellectually in my life in the past three the ideas I've had in terms of originality, that they far exceed anything I ever did before. And so the combination of sleep, exercise and diet, I think, has significantly altered my consciousness. Uh-huh. And in a predictable and steady way. So psychedelics are wonderful for its acute window of perspective and insight and experience, but then it fades and in a few days time you've renormalized. I did this, for example, I did ketamine, intramuscular ketamine with a kernel brain interface.

So I measured my brain for five days before I did ketamine, I did ketamine with it on, then I did it for 30 days after I measured my brain. And we looked at the effects of what ketamine did to my brain. No one had ever done that before. You mostly are asking people subjective opinions about their experience with ketamine and afterwards. And we saw that the data we got, it showed my brain like a map of the globe. Think of it like airports are scattered throughout the planet and you see traffic patterns like Tokyo, New York, London, you know, Dubai. And certain patterns have more traffic than others.

You know, for small airports, there's very few planes. And so I had these patterns in my brain of big networks of communication. And these patterns explain a lot about intelligence, behavior, mental wellness. It's very rich. And then when I did ketamine, it basically wiped out those networks. It's like you took the globe and you just like put Tokyo's airport in the middle of the desert in South Africa. And so...

It sounds disorienting. Well, it's also it makes sense that there's this therapeutic window where once you do a I guess this is just ketamine. I can keep it narrow to ketamine. You're open to new ideas. You're open to revisiting traumas. You're open to like, you know, all sorts of things of creating new habits. And so you have this two or three day window where things are pretty scattered and you're open to all kinds of different possibilities.

And then on day four or five, it closes up and your old patterns re-emerge. And so it was really cool to see in real time my brain open and close. And I did experience that. I mean, I journaled on those days and my openness to new ideas was dramatic, you know. But then day four or five, I did see myself slip back into my patterns really fast, which goes back to this topic you and I were talking about, which is like, I wonder quantitatively how aware or unaware I am of my own thoughts. So even as much as I try when I meditate to watch things drop into my conscious awareness, there's so many more things happening in my own consciousness that I can't access. So I can't see those things drop.

And so it's the same question with how big is consciousness, how big or how small is my self-awareness? And so you can kind of see that I'm endlessly curious about what I don't know. I also notice you're curious about the quantity. You keep mentioning this word quantity and that comes pars and parcel with measurement. What if to consciousness, what separates it is that there's a qualitative factor but not a quantitative one? I mean science begins with counting. You know, I would, in that case, others may hang out in that space and explore it. I would endeavor to find a new measurement modality that allows us to put numbers to it.

Explain. If you look at like what systematic progress is heavily reliant upon the quantitative nature of the building blocks. I heard you describe the blueprint as not only nourishing, health-giving, but also spiritually enriching. Please expand on that. Is that related to what you're mentioning regarding consciousness and ketamine?

Also, let's be clear, ketamine is not on the blueprint and the blueprint is the protocol that's publicly available. Yeah, that's right. As an entrepreneur, I would rather be homeless and hungry and be an entrepreneur, then I would be comfortable in a professional setting where I'm restrained in what I can do. And so, with those kind of tendencies, I love to build things. And with Blueprint, it's one thing to build the product, it's an entirely different thing to be the product. And most people think of themselves achieving some level of immortality

through their work accomplishments. What they publish, what they earn, what their status is. They view that, or their offspring, and I'm proposing this is the first time where you can be your own best product, that you are your own immortality. And to have that mindset, it requires you to shift all of your energies away from the former way of understanding self to a new way of understanding self. So yes, ketamine is a way for me to explore building my own product, myself, in a quantified fashion. I'm equally as interested in psychedelics, as you mentioned, and so,

but I wanted a quantitative baseline. What happens to my brain when I do psychedelics? What can we tease out numerically? And how does that match or mismatch with my subjective experience? The former way of understanding oneself ties to, oh sorry, understanding one's immortality ties to one's job or one's influence on the world and then you mentioned that you have a new way or you'd like to instigate into people the possibility of a new way which sounds like bodily immortality but if you go back enough

there's the spiritual immortality, the soul or what there may be in the afterlife So do you do any? protocols to make yourself Endure in that area Yeah, I mean Believing in a life after death is something akin to being hopeful or optimistic or insane. We have no evidence that it exists. No one has ever returned and told us. We have no idea.

And if we're being intellectually honest, every story that has ever been created about a potential reward of afterlife is complete speculation. It doesn't pass any level of intelligence. Now you could say, you know, there's benefits for cultural cohesion, to give people hope you can come up with all sorts of arguments on like why it's actually a useful technology for societal events if we're sober about that We have to realize the species were extremely delusional

And so this is the moment where we may not need to ever reconcile with this. We may be able to just walk into the future and we never have to reconcile those in a religious environment, Mormonism, I was told that the scriptures foretold the end of the world, that there were prophecies about wars and about floods and disasters, and that when a certain time and place that Jesus Christ would return, unite His people, you know, the people be divvied up, those going to heaven, those not. And so, I had no incentive to make the world a better place. I had no incentive to fight for the future.

If the world was going to hell in a handbasket and burning, better, because it proved my beliefs to be correct. It dissolves me of all responsibility for the future because my spiritual longevity is assured if through my adherence to these spiritual practices. Over half the world believes in this concept that there's really no reason to invest in that because the afterlife is the ultimate prize. And so it really creates a very large problem. Now maybe with the advent of AI, it's going to bridge us to this world where we don't

need to reconcile with that. We can just jump past that and maybe people will think this new world is actually heaven, that we just bypass the actual physical death and run to something else. But for me, I never would have had the motivation to do blueprint had I been religious. It would have been contrary to the entire ethos of that religion. On the spectrum of afterlife theories, Mormonism is just one. How do you throw all of them out? Or I'm not saying you're throwing them out, but how do you ascribe a low credence to them?

What is this evaluation that one uses on the field of possibilities to say this one's more likely than this one, when given underlying all of that is the credence of I don't know like that's the one that you hold most yeah I mean in in a reality where everybody dies it kind of doesn't matter so if it doesn't matter like make up your best story believe in your best story and feel good about the time you have to exist. When you're looking at a horizon where it's not clear anymore whether death is going to be inevitable, it does matter. So in any other time period, I wouldn't have even raised this topic. matter. So in any other time period, I wouldn't have even raised this topic. But right now, we're trying to navigate a pretty precarious situation in the world. We've had weapons

to annihilate ourselves for a couple of decades. So far, we haven't. We are now bringing online tools that are equally, if not more powerful than nukes in AI. And we're still playing games as a human where we want to conquer territory, we want to acquire power, we want to dominate others, we use violence and death. And so we're still this primitive violent species as we're pulling the superintelligence online. And so my objective of Blueprint is it's really about purging our existence from this want of violence and death and to something new. And it's a remake of who we are as a species. And it begins with I don't know, but it requires the courage to say,

I'm willing to boldly and courageously step into this new future not knowing, which not knowing gives us panic. So it really requires a lot of stamina to do that. And to say, and we're going to be willing to let go of everything we've ever believed and thought and assumed and imagined. Like none of it may carry forward at all at the starting point. Now, if it does, great, but we at least have to be open-minded that if we are trying to carry over our preference stack,

it's going to be probably in conflict with the emergent properties of whatever we have in front of us including our disposition towards war and status and power at the cost of all else. What would you say is the difference between stating I don't know but then courageously moving forward anyway and faith? Yeah, it's the same thing. It's faith in I don't know versus faith I know. You know, Mormonism, you had this practice where every Sunday was testimony Sunday. I mean, every once every month, every month. And so like you get up in front of a congregation of say 200 people and there from 200 people you bear your testimony.

And so it's something like this. I'll bear my testimony that I believe the Book of Mormon is the true word of God. I believe that you're burying your soul on what you believe to be true. And so you repeat that and the entire congregation just goes to that practice. So for an hour, you just hear non-stop dozens of people repeating this thing to each other. That this unquestioned knowing about all things. And so it's a faith practice, which most faiths have the same practice, where you're repeating to each other your unquestioned confidence that you know. And so I think that captures and I think even in a secular world, like even in casual conversations, are we in a simulation? It's not too dissimilar from testimony meeting where people may like given this and that theory, but are we in a simulation? How would anyone even begin to answer that question in any serious fashion. You can like you can

populate ideas like here are some contemplations and here's how this might be thought but it's rarely framed as like this is a wild guess I don't really know but like we blur as a species we really blur the lines between what we know and don't know and so we sometimes confuse most of our social interactions are meant for social cohesion. They're not meant for truth seeking. But yet we don't distinguish between when a conversation is cohesion versus truth. And therefore we walk away as cohesion thinking that it's truth.

And this creates some peril for us. Again, when we're all going to die anyways, like not a whole lot of risk. When we're gambling with the future of intelligent existence in this part of the galaxy, it matters. So again, this also relies on a propositional definition of truth. Even to say that it could be the case that society is incorrect, but truth will always be correct as if those are distinct. That's not entirely clear, at least not to me. Can you please expand on that? Yeah. So truth is, I'll use that word very lightly. Yeah, like what are the things I think I know? Right? You can start at the most basic premise of your sensory system and your experience of

reality. Like I think, you know, the following things. So yeah, I'm not doing capital T, it's lowercase, lowercase T. Okay. Before we get to some of the more particular questions about the protocol, like do you incorporate coffee and why not and Ashwagandha and NMN and so on. Before we get to that, I want to just stick to when you talk about not dying or don't die is a slogan. Do you technically mean like if you were to expand on that, I understand that's a phrase and it's meant to also be catchy.

But if you were to expand on that, would you say actually what it means is don't die today or don't die involuntarily? What would you say is the longer version of don't die? Yeah. Does it actually mean like never bodily die? No matter what, even if there's an undue amount of suffering, whatever. Yeah, it's... Upon hearing don't die, many people will say, that's so negative, the brain can't understand,

you know, a negative. So they'll say, it's really much better to say, live long, live well. They'll go to the positive. And the challenge with that frame is if I say that to you, you'll say, no matter who you are, you'll die, you have to deconstruct everything you understand about existence. And you're forced to make an opinion. So if you want to die, you need to justify why you want to die. If you don't want to die, you need to grapple with don't die. And so it's designed to invite that we are baby steps away from creating superintelligence, and that is going to invite us to revisit every foundational element of our existence. And so don't die is a frame that also calls attention to, in any given day,

if you just make a list of what things do you do on a daily basis and which things would you put into the die category and what things would you put into the don't die category. So at lunch, you're out with friends, you choose to have the burger and fries and a soda versus the salad, vegetables, and whatever else. So you chose dye in that situation. At nighttime, you're gonna stay up late, watch your favorite show, you're gonna miss your bedtime, and you're gonna have some ice cream and some potato chips. Two other dye categories. You know, like, so if you just go through your day

or you scroll through social media for three hours versus whatever. And so if you just take an accounting of what you do on a daily basis and put in the die or don't die, it draws your attention that you really do live. Most people live a life of die and they do that because they just think death is inevitable. This is what everyone else does. I'm being normal.

This is how, this is how you live life. And so it's really meant to provoke that contemplation and awareness. And so it's really meant to provoke that contemplation and awareness. Mm-hmm. What if someone says, okay, it doesn't have to be so black and white, as the phrase goes. It doesn't have to be so extreme. It could be like Tony Robbins once went 10 years or 20 years without eating anything other than fish and salad. And then he got married and his wife started, who was also extremely healthy, was eating a chocolate fudge sundae. And he's like, how could you? What do you... I thought I knew you. Then she's like, live a little. And then from then he started to incorporate more desserts and fun.

So in other words, you could say, don't die. Or you could say, don't die in a banal manner. Die in a way that is fun or... Right. It doesn't have to be, again, the party animal sort of fun. Yeah. To sum up, what if someone says it's a false dichotomy, like this extreme stringency versus extreme leniency?

Yeah. So in the case of your example, she introduced to him an ideology of die. And she justified it under a cultural frame that there's this idea that if you eat this sugar and cream, that you are scoring points of living an ideal life, that these are virtues in society that we should admire. And so people hear her explanation, they say, Oh God, that's just, that's so reasonable. Of course, like we all want to have ice cream Sundays. But what is really at the heart of that is we are saying as a species We love die we are addicted to die and

We are willing to tell any pretty story we can that die is good and so if you look at this from a larger perspective what I'm trying to say is When in what the 25th century says about this moment is they say homo sapiens figured out it was it was time for that for them to transition from die to don't die that they purged existence from every source of death. That's what intelligence does as it approaches superintelligence. The concept of doing anything that introduces death is contrary to what an intelligent being would do. And so what I'm suggesting is, what I tried to do with Blueprint is I tried to say, I'm actually going to quantify death at a molecular level. I'm going to become the most measured person

in human history. I'm going to quantify it at an organ level, at every possible level. And then I'm going to share the data. Like what does a hot fudge Sunday cause for death? What are you paying for in life? And so I'm saying that this is primitive. And I realize it scores cultural points.

It plays within the boundaries of people's willpower. I understand people can't, you know, don't have the discipline I do. I get it. That's fine. But what I'm trying to say is that is a cover-up and it misses the point entirely with where we're at in our evolution as a species. And it's an inherently an inferior form of intelligence. Don't die is logically equivalent to continue to live infinitely. Okay. So what if someone's like, continue to live for what? Yeah, it's living forever breaks the human's brain. Like you know this as a physicist, there are certain concepts in physics that break most people's brains.

They just can't compute it. And living forever is something that breaks people's brains. We can't understand it. And that's why I say don't die is not dying so you have tomorrow. Because the only thing we actually can compute is tomorrow. And so living for tomorrow and don't die and living forever are the same concepts. They're identical in nature. It's just that we understand wanting to live to tomorrow, but we can't understand wanting

to live forever. And so just like, you know, we all have things to do tomorrow. Don't die is based upon the premise. You can live until you don't want to. But so far in my life, I've always wanted, okay, so minus my depression, most of the time I've wanted to live at least until tomorrow. And so it's meant to take steps we can all understand and say, yep, we have something going on tomorrow and let's just roll the dice and see how this happens.

How about we get to some technical, not technical, but meticulous questions about the protocol. Is that all right? Great. Let's switch gears now. Sauna. Do you incorporate saunas? Yes or no? I don't. Why? Okay, so why not? I'm sure you know about the research of Rhonda Patrick. I am. Yeah. Okay, so please expound. Yeah, it's not a power law that we identify in the evidence. Now sauna has, you know sauna has many health benefits,

and it could be the case that there's more emergent data, but as of right now, it's not a power law in extending life. So we focus on the power laws. Another way for people to interpret power law in their mind is it's not high enough on the ROI. Yeah, exactly. So we researched every single scientific publication ever on health span and lifespan. And then we ranked them according to the best to the worst.

And then we started with number one or with number zero and we've worked our way down the list to say, can we implement zero? Can we implement one and two and three and four? And so we've tried to implement the most powerful therapies known to science. Because again, the problem is you need to have some kind of organizational principle. Otherwise you have to sort through thousands

of health interventions, Eastern medicine, Western medicine. And so if you say like, is this working? Look at my biomarkers. So I potentially have, okay, so let's just go through a few of them. I'm aging slower than 99% of 20-year-olds. That's like almost number one in the world after 23,000 samples. My cardiovascular ability is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. I'm in the top 1% for low inflammation. I'm in the top 1% for fat, optimal fat, top 1% for optimal muscle, top 1% for strength.

It's like if you go down my list of my biomarkers, I've basically have achieved top 1% in strength. So like if you go down my list of my biomarkers, I've basically have achieved top 1% in almost every single category. Now this is a stunning accomplishment because I arrived here from a real serious deficit after two decades of really destroying my body through entrepreneurship martyrdom and also through depression.

And so the fact that my body could bounce back this much. And so when you pose the question, like, do you do sauna? It's not that sauna is not helpful. It's that what therapies have I had to do to achieve top 1% in all of these categories? Now, if somebody wants to challenge and say like, we think that sauna is really integral, like post your biomarkers, like even though that's not going to be the sole contributor to it, post your biomarkers. And right now, I potentially have, for my age, the best biomarkers in the world. And even in many regards, better biomarkers than like 99% of 20-year-olds. And so for us, that's

where, that's how we stabilize our thought process. This is not a health influencer approach where it's like, do celery juice because it's trendy and cool. We're saying take the best science, measure everything as robustly as you can, and then use that data on biological age comparison charts. And that's the way you determine the efficacy of the protocol. And that's why I think that we've built the best protocol in human history is the data shows it. So in other words, look, there are these biomarkers. If you were to list them out completely, there's some list of 23,000 people and you would be scored in the top 1000 if not top 100, maybe

top 50, whatever. The point is someone's like, why don't you introduce X into your protocol? You're saying, look, we've tried it. It doesn't move the needle. Doesn't make me higher on that one out of the 23,000. Exactly right. OK, great. So what about NMN? What is NMN?

And then tell us your experiments with it. Yeah, you're trying to get intracellular NAD levels. So it's like a source of energy in your body. And with age, this NAD level goes down in your body. And so you can take either NMN or NR, they both work, and you can increase your intracellular NAD levels. So a lot of people are familiar with like NAD drips. You get a needle into a vein and you get some NAD. You can also do it via oral supplementation.

So I tried NR for 90 days. I tried NMN for 90 days. They both helped me achieve these levels. So they both work. And so my intracellular NAD levels are pegged at age 16, which is like roughly 50 something, I forget the unit of measure, but I'm sure at age 16. And so it's a very easy marker to win at. And so I take currently, I take I think 675 milligrams a day of NR. Okay.

And is it sublingual or is it just in capsule form? Just a capsule form. Yep. Have you tried sublingual NMN? Sorry to interrupt. Oh, yeah. It's I take it in pill form. It's part of the blueprint stack.

Yeah. There's I think 250 milligrams in the blueprint stack, which is a baseline for everyone population level. And then I supplement in addition to that, like roughly 500 milligrams on top of that for my levels. What I meant was some people on the YouTube scene who have discounted NMN, and I'm speaking about NMN, not NR right now, have said, well, look, the studies don't show that it has benefits, but the people who take it, who have benefits,

take it sublingually, whereas the majority of the studies are in capsule form. So I'm curious if you tried sublingual NMN. Oh, we haven't yet. No, just capsule. Actually, I'm sorry. NMN is powder, the one I tried, and then NR is in capsule. I see. Yeah. But yeah, those debates really need to be settled with data, right? Because nobody knows. Like, you can use all the words you want, but until you've got data, right? Because nobody knows. Like if you can, you can have, you can use all the words you want, but until you've got data, nobody is stating anything with accuracy. You know how there's the blueprint protocol. Is there also something you're developing that would be a

protocol for how someone can measure themselves in a similar manner to you, maybe not as extensively, but a measurement protocol. Yeah, we, I'm currently building a don't die nation state. And so like on. On a list of ambitions, you said ambition level, um, would go from start a company, start a country, start a religion, become God. Each one being more ambition. And so the next step after building a company is to start a country where you're working on societal advance with a very large number of people.

And so we're trying, I'm trying to build a Don't Die Nation state because if you're serious about your health and wellness and you really do believe that we are at this really special moment in the galaxy of where we're at, there's no government in the world actually helping you not die. In fact, most of them are enablers of a death economy, right? Where they allow, actively allow companies to help you die faster. And so we're going, as part of that, I want to bring measurement in a group buying sense to as many people as we can around the globe. So we can say, here's my measurement protocol, but it's not something that I can do individually. I can't just start a company that enables this because you need to

measure with blood and ultrasound imaging, MRI and ultrasound, DNA methylation. There's so many measurements that need to be done. You really need to power an entire ecosystem of providers to help people do it. So we're going to try to be the community organizer of this nation-state enabling the measurement. And by a nation-state at this point, what you mean is just a large enough cohort that it could rival a country. But do you eventually have aspirations for a separate legal entity like a legal nation-state? Yes. Yeah, so we this is a concept by biology network state.

So yes, like we initially started as community doing these practices together. And then yes, we would seek diplomatic recognition. We would build an archipelago of in-person locations around the world. We would negotiate with nation states. So yes, like the goal is to have nation state status and to be on the global scene as a nation state. When did this idea occur to you? I had been percolating this idea as I built Blueprint, seeing that I was being successful, you know, we were being successful with me as an n equals one and others were wanting to do this

But it is so hard to do. It's just almost impossible. It's why we made the blueprint stack available For everyone like the lowest cost easiest thing to do but when you start getting into the more advanced things It's just painfully hard and so I wanted to start solving that and the biology and I met and he had been working on the same problem and it's just a really good match of ideas. And when you say it's super hard, you mean to say it's financially hard or in terms of time commitment or mentality? There's a few barriers. For example, I'll do a whole body MRI scan where I'll look for cancer or other problems.

That's not something that insurance will cover, is a proactive thing. And so you have to come with that a pocket. And sometimes that's like a barrier. Sometimes when you go to your doctor and you're like, hey doctor, I'd like to get a blood panel and look at these markers. They'll be like, why do you want that? Do you have any symptoms? You know, like they give you such a hard time.

You can't get it done. You can't just order a blood draw without your doctor's approval. You have to go through your doctor. You have to go see them. You have to explain to them. They have to give you, you know, you have their feedback. And so there's so many, then even on more advanced therapies, like if you want to look at something with imaging,

sometimes the imaging center doesn't even have the protocols to do it because they service insurance companies all day and they take care of insurance companies. So the entire system is built for the masses, which makes sense, but that eliminates anyone else trying to do things for their health. And so we find ourselves fighting all day every day with the entire medical infrastructure trying to get basic things done. Now, we've solved most of those things, but still, like we fight it every day. Yes, I know from personal experience, I wanted to get something tested. I don't know, could it be vitamin D level, something like that. And the doctor was saying, well, why there's nothing wrong with you. You're not exhibiting any symptoms and they don't have this concept or maybe they do in their personal life, but in their professional life, not one of living optimally. They have one of if you're sick, let's try and figure it out and then let's remove the sickness.

Are you planning on expanding the blueprint so that I in Canada, by the way, and maybe you could speak to people in the States or elsewhere, can go in order, can go in person and get some tests done, like a DEXA scan or an MRI scan or some blood tests? Yeah, that's what we're hoping to do. And so there will be a few layers. One is each country is going to be unique with their own system. Two is that we want to be a group buying club. So let's just say in Canada somebody offers DEXA and we can go to them and say, hey we have you know 2,000 people in your area that would get DEXA scans but you've got to give us a better price. So we can do significant group negotiating, and then we can also do other things where people can introduce therapies to the group

in a decentralized fashion. So we're trying to figure out how to break down all the barriers from a cost and accessibility perspective around the world. It's going to be a challenging thing. Health care is not like just scaling Bitcoin. You have really real-world hard problems of accessibility. Actually, no.

That Bitcoin analogy is off, because Bitcoin is also equally hard, because you're talking about jurisdictions, governments, organizations. I take that back. It's not as easy as software, where you'd log into a website. It's very easily scalable. In the world, you have really hard problems to overcome in all countries. Okay. You've given people a great teaser. So what do you see as the timeline for this?

I hope we'll launch the beta app in like June. And so the first thing we're trying to do is so one thing we did at Venmo, which was unique, is prior to Venmo, people imagined their financial transactions to be private. That, you know, what you spent and with whom was like proprietary to your party. Venmo made that open in public. So you're sharing openly like, hey, we went, you know, thanks for the meal last night or whatever. And so it became a social interaction. And we're doing the same with health data. So we're going to trial. Your wearable will be integrated directly with the community app.

And so your data will stream to your friends. And so they'll see your exercise, they'll see your sleep. And now you can comment on it as well, but it's a change in mentality from right now. You perceive your health data as largely private, and we're going to say, actually, this is just public. So there you have all of your friends streaming in real time. So if you have a poor night's sleep, I can call you and say, hey, friend, like, how are you? Are you okay? So it really, we'll see whether people like it or dislike it, but I've been doing this myself. Like I've been streaming my data live and you know, initially it's, it's nerve wracking.

It takes a bit to get over that mindset, but I'm just naked in front of the world now and it's fine. Brian to close the loop on the sauna question. Do you also do ice baths or no for the same reason or cold showers? Yeah, I do not do cold therapy and it's for the same reasons. It's not that it's not without potential benefit. It just doesn't have the evidence on increasing lifespan. What is rapamycin and why do you take the dosage that you take? Rappamycin and why do you take the dosage that you take? Yeah, Rappah is a, it's probably one of the only anti-aging therapies that has general consensus among the quote-unquote experts where most

everyone disagrees on almost everything but Rappah seems to have a lot of support from people in the anti-aging community. And I take a protocol where I do 13 milligrams of RAPA on week 0, and then 6 milligrams week 1, 13, week 2, and we arrive at that protocol. So it basically is one of the most powerful agents to slow the rate of aging damage. And so, the way we do this, it's helpful to understand this, that knowing what dose to take is really important. You know, something like how much vitamin D should you take, you know, is an example. And so, the way you know how much vitamin D to take is you first get a baseline measurement of your vitamin D levels. If they are below the appropriate range, optimal range, then you decide to take a certain dose. You take it for a certain duration of

time and then you measure again. And so we did that same with rapamycin where we measured my rapamycin, my serolimus levels two hours after dose, 24, 48, 72, 96. So we, cause you want to see the half life of the drug because you're trying to hit a C max, the peak, and then see the decay curve. What in the longevity community or anti-aging community, what do they take as rapamycin as the standard dosage? It's my understanding that you take a larger dosage than usual,

but I don't know if my understanding is flawed. Yeah, I do. My dose is on the larger side. It's really not known what the optimal dose is. The wisdom has been, and whether this is correct or incorrect, I don't think people know, is to take as much Rapa as you can, just shy of side effects. And so I know that if I increase more than what I have now, I'll get sores on the side of my mouth. They heal, but I get sores. So yeah, I think it's an emergent area. I think several of us are experimenting,

but I don't think any of us really know. Does the Blueprint protocol itself include therapies that have only been shown to work on mice? Yes. Elaborate on that. Is that controversial? Do you see that as sound, or how do you feel about that? Yeah, we have a grading curve. Is that controversial? Do you see that as sound or how do you feel about that?

Yeah, we have a grading curve. We use 14 bio-statistical criteria on assessing whether or not we would trust the evidence in a paper. And so, yes, we use animal models. We use human models. So we're open to all the different models. And so like with animal, there's just a process on looking at where the evidence came from and whether you can do it. So it's not always the case that we just sell, but yes, we're open to it. When I was watching some of your videos, like you have this wonderful one, which I will link in the description, and it will be on screen right now about something, apologies if I'm not stating the name correctly, but something like 24 hours in the life of Brian Johnson taking us through your routine. You mentioned that you have a mild calorie restriction. Now I wasn't sure if that's the same as a mild calorie deficit. Like explain, elaborate on that please. One of the stronger outcomes in the anti-aging world is caloric restriction.

It's not without question. There's a lot of questions that people are asking. So, I've been on a caloric restriction diet for several years and initially I was 20% caloric restricted. So for my age and level of activity, the recommended daily allowance would be 2,500 calories a day. And so I was doing just under 2 calories a day. I got pretty lean in doing so. And we wondered if I could go to 10% caloric restriction, add back in 250 calories roughly, and still achieve the same benefits. And so we did, we adjusted to around 2250

and my biomarkers have remained unchanged. So it seems that whether you do a 20% caloric restriction or 10%, we couldn't at least, we couldn't pick up the difference in my biomarkers. They apparently seem to accomplish the same objective. Now, the next test would be to go to 2,500 calories and see if there's any effect for caloric restriction or whether it's the same. It seems to me, unless your weight is decreasing every week or so, that that's not technically a caloric restriction, that that's just maintenance.

Yes, that's right. Yes, you basically, I agree, the body basically adjusts. We've seen interesting outcomes, like for example, body temperature is typically 98.7 Fahrenheit. That's quote unquote normal. My waking body temp hovers around like 94.9, 95.5. So it's dropped around 3, 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since doing this. So my body just has a, yeah, it's a cooler state than when I started. Have you heard of orthotropics or mewing?

I have. Okay. Please tell us your, your findings. Oh, I'm familiar with it. We haven't done a deep dive in it though. So I'm, I couldn't comment on it. Would you like to try mewing? It's my understanding you have bruxism.

Yeah, I have had bruxism. So it's basically arrested since I've been using this device called the Somnodent. It's an oral appliance that arrests the upper and lower teeth and stops me from grinding. For people who have sleep apnea, do you have any advice other than a CPAP? Is there some other easier to use device? Yeah, I don't have it and so I don't know anything about it. We have not done a deep drive on it. What are the benefits of coffee? And why do you not despite the benefits incorporate coffee? Yeah I mean coffee is you know there's it has some you know some beneficial

nutrients so it's actually it's great for a nutrition perspective however I personally get addicted to it so I enjoy I enjoy the caffeine high for the first few days, and then on like day four or five, I find myself needing to drink coffee to feel normal again. And then I'm just in a constant deficit. And so I've tried several times to start. I've tried different amounts of caffeine and coffee a different time today, but inevitably it leaves me in tatters after about a week. I see. That's though if you were to abstain from it after consuming it for a while. So if it was to be incorporated into a protocol, what difference week, I need coffee just to feel normal.

But then after that temporary high, I drop back down into a deficit. So it puts me in a permanent deficit where I get back up to normal to some amount of time and then I drop back down. What would be the differences between the Mediterranean diet and your diet? They're very close. What would be the key difference then? I'm vegan. In the Mediterranean diet, there's some level of meat. So I'm vegan for ethical reasons. It's the only thing, it's the only preference I've superimposed on blueprint.

Everything else is driven by science. And so the contemplation was, could we do this from a vegan perspective? Then I don't eat pastas. Uh, then I don't eat pastas. And, but yeah, I eat a lot of olive oil, olive oil, extra virgin olive oils, 15% of my daily diet and, uh, I eat a lot of vegetables and lentils. So there's a lot of similarities. What do you make of the carnivore diet? Uh, I've really. Besides the ethical issues. Yeah. What do you make of the carnivore diet?

Besides the ethical issues. Yeah. I've really not stepped into the carnivore and vegan war. Where the moment you enter the conversation, everyone pulls out their sword and runs to the battlefield. It's really emotionally charged. And so I've taken a stance where I am vegan by choice, but you do you. And if meat is your thing, do your thing. And the thing we can all do is measure biomarkers and we can assess how the diets are doing for us. And so of all the, I mean, my preference is to try to tackle the future of the human race.

And I don't want to waste any capital I have on doing warfare on things that I don't think are really going to win. It's just no one wins in that battle. Would you do an A-B test with the blueprint protocols, except what you would change is that one person or one set of people are given high quality proteins or high quality lean meats, maybe fish, and then the other is vegan? Yeah, I mean, people are doing that now. We have a few thousand people doing the blueprint protocol and

Some are vegan some are a carnivore. So we'll have that data What are your thoughts on ashwagandha? Yeah, I do 600 milligrams a day of that Okay, cool So it's my understanding that if you continue to take ashwagandha that there's some effect where it reverses its effects And so you need to off cycle it or you need to cycle it continue to take ashwagandha that there's some effect where it reverses its effects until you need to off cycle it or you need to cycle it. Sorry.

Have you encountered this with yourself or in the data? I'm not aware of that in the data. How about L-theanine? Do you take that on a daily basis? I believe so. One of my worries with taking L-theanine at least frequently is that anything that messes with the GABA system, whether it increases or decreases, it's like that's a tricky, thorny issue. So how do you feel about that? Yeah, let me pull this up so I don't speak out of turn and see.

Yeah, I take 200 milligrams a day. Yeah, I guess on all these things, I think the points you raise are good. And I think that there's many more things we could all raise as we learn more. We just don't know. I always come back to my biomarkers. And that's the thing that I rely upon the most and you know, again, you go back to my list. I, it's hard to find anyone in the world with better biomarkers than me at any age. And so, yeah, yeah, it's just like if we're doing some things wrong, we're doing many, many things right. And like, we don't know where we're at on the known versus unknown spectrum. Like is, is blueprint 99% right? Or is it 3% right? And we'll learn more. Like we're just getting 3% right and we're still getting these gains.

Like we'll know in 10 years. Like this is just the inevitable game we play in science. But as far as what we know, yeah, I'm like, you know, among best in world. You mentioned that much of blueprintueprint is N equals one. Is there at least an N equals two around? Do you have someone else, a guinea pig, a personal one, and not just on the internet anonymously? Yeah, a coworker, my, my 27 year old coworker did it as a female. So we have an N equals two, she did the entire Blueprint protocol for 90 days

and tracked all of her biomarkers. And then we have a few thousand people on the blueprint stack that are also extensively measuring their biomarkers. Someone on Reddit wanted to know, what is your opinion on fresh fruit, freeze dried fruit, frozen fruit and juiced fruit? Hmm. Yeah. What is the process of the fruit? Whatever the process is, the question is what nutrients are retained. For example, we have some dried fruit, like some berries as part of our bloop and stack.

They're equal in nutrients as fresh just without the water. And so everything I consume we try to say that the whatever process is it must yield the same nutritional benefits. If you if the process you know diminishes it then it's not as desirable. Would you say you have a low protein intake compared to what's ordinarily advised? Yeah, I'm at 110 grams a day. So I weigh 173 pounds, so 74 kilograms. And I think most people in the US think that they should be consuming 150 to 250 grams a day of protein. And so we've done something that kind of challenged a lot of preconceived notions.

I'm vegan and colorectal restriction and 110 grams of protein. And even so, I'm top one percentile for fat and muscle and cardiovascular ability. And so, we've shown, like a lot of people think that vegans are weak, caloric restriction makes you weak, that low protein wouldn't allow you to put on muscle. But I've shown that we've been able to defy all of those preconceived notions and achieve top one percent of performance on all those metrics. And you're still able to bench press 245 pounds, something like that? That's right. And I don't even work out my chest much.

That's just like natural. I'm not routinely building my chest muscles. So you still, like when you do bench press, it would be around 240? It's not just something you measured two years ago or something. It's consistent. Yeah, that's right. And so that's, um, you, that is in the top, um, 10 percentile for 18 year olds. And the reason why you use an 18 year old for strength, because a lot of people will

immediately say, that's stupid. Use a 20 year old or drag late 20s already 30s for strength but actually you peak its weight to body ratio and you peak at age 18 and so that's that's the real comparison so if you're looking at it from a because after age 18 even though you you can get stronger in your 20s and 30s your ratio is not going to be as high What about testosterone replacement therapy? Have you experimented with that? Yeah, we did for a while when I was doing 20% caloric restriction Testosterone drops from low calories. So we were augmenting with TRT. I was doing angioderm two milligram patches three times a week and

Then when I bumped up my calories we went off TRT and I've been off TRT for about a year now and my testosterone levels have maintained like 800, 900. So they're at the upper end. So I have no testosterone augmentation going on. Yeah. That's great. My levels are near high. Yeah.

So sad guru had some similar advice to you. Your advice is with olive oil and his advice was with ghee. My understanding is, where do you weigh in on that if you've heard about it? Yeah, I don't know the evidence on ghee. It's not been part of our protocol. It's not risen to the forefront of foods. So I don't know what the evidence is on that. But for some reason, it's not been something my team has suggested is an essential calorie for our intake. Have you heard about the positive effects of going barefoot on the ground? I hear a lot of people talking about it. I'm unfamiliar with the evidence. What is your most outlandish

unorthodox idea about biology or aging. That it shouldn't be something we're concerned about. This is the job for the systems, not us. The systems. Yeah. Like the thesis, like, um, it's not your job to get clean water. You're not going down to the river every morning and fetching water to drink and cook and wash your clothes. It just shows up.

Perfect health should be the same. It should just be automated. We should all have it. It shouldn't depend upon income status. It shouldn't depend upon circumstances. We should all just have perfect health. Have you looked into CRISPR gene editing? Yeah, it's exciting. It's a bit off. You know, it's like it's still emergent. I don't think it's...

It's too early. It's pretty early. It's like when people speak about graphene for batteries it's always two years away yeah we're excited about it it's pretty early yeah you mentioned meditation so plenty of this conversation was revolving around diet and exercise exercise and there's also the third component of spirituality maybe there's a fourth component but at least three what else other than meditation do you do? And maybe you don't even consider meditation to be spiritual. Yeah, I practice a lot of self-talk. So I break myself out into various characters. So it started when I

isolated Evening Brian, the version of me that would overeat. And I identify versions of myself that manifest in certain times and places or biochemical states. And he has certain tendencies, he has certain thought processes. And I try to not treat myself as one person, but as multiple people. So that really helps me understand myself and enables me to predict my own patterns with much more accuracy. Evening Brian. So, okay, two questions. One, is that the reason why you stop eating around noon, maybe 11 a.m.? And then my other question, before I forget it,

what other Brian's are there? Yeah, it's evening Brian. Yes, it was a desperate attempt at stopping my self-destructive behaviors in the evening and then it led to a process of me trying to figure out when was, when is the right time to stop eating. And so I ran a few hundred experiments with types of foods and time of last meal. And it's all around optimizing for my sleep. Sleep is the most, the single most important thing I do every single day. And so my life is, is built around sleep. Now what other Brian's are there other than evening? I mean there's ambitious Brian who really cares about being respected by the 25th century.

I respect many people who lived in the centuries before our time and I appreciate what they did that allowed civilization to be in the place we're at. I want to be among the chain of contributors to our own evolutionary greatness. There is dark humor, Brian, where growing up in Mormon land, you could basically only ever look in the light. You could only ever state positives. You could only ever look towards God,

but looking towards Satan or the darkness or dark humor was forbidden. And so half of reality was hidden from me for the majority of my, until I was like mid-20s. And so now I love darkness. I love to look in darkness. And in many ways, I don't know is darkness, right? It's like the ultimate form of darkness because like,

again, like lower status to not know. We value intelligence on knowing and scores and tests and rankings, like IQ is not a test of what you don't know. It's a different form of intelligence. And so it's hard to really quantify, I don't know. And then there's like playful Brian, where I like being in a kid-like state and just being silly and messing around

and having no adult-like responsibilities or no expectations on how I must be. So yeah, I've written down all these characters. In fact, my book, Don't Die, I broke myself out into multiple characters and they all have a dialogue about the future of being human. And so there's depression, Brian, there. And there's like devil may care.

Was that therapeutic to write? Yes. being human. And so there's depression Brian there and there's like devil may care. Was that therapeutic to write? Yes. Yeah, I got to like, you know, play have playful banter in between myself and like make fun of myself and make sharp, sharp jabs. So yeah, it was fun. So then did you ultimately end up on an interplay of them being the solution or one, or there's a ranking of them being the solution or one or there's a ranking of them where one rules out? It was ultimately, I guess as a spoiler of the book, the end showcases that Brian is

evolving and as part of that process, he leaves behind certain characters. So there's certain versions of Brian that die and there's certain versions of Brian that die, and there's other versions of Brian that carry on. And then also these various characters give voices to the various opinions that people have. And I know these from having these dinners. The majority of these dinners, they break out into a pretty predictable grouping of opinion classes, you

know, like of how you understand the world. And so I tried to capture those as well because my opinions naturally fall in like the, as much as I try to be an independent thinker, it's very hard to not also be in time and place a homo sapien in the early 21st century. So then Don't Die doesn't apply to all the personalities? Uh, that's right. The idea of Don't Die is presented and several of the Bryans don't sign up. Hmm.

Would you want them to sign up? No, this is like the example of Tony Robbins wife, right? Like she, she is like, don't, Tony was like, look, I'm serious about don't die. And his wife is like, actually die is actually kind of cool. And Tony's like, oh, you're right. It's like he, he was compromised on his don't die objectives. And so, um, there's just competing perspectives on, you know, like there's this idea that balance is, is, is good.

You know, like if you, if you throw out the word defending extremism is hard. Right. Cause most people are like, no, no, balance is hard, right? Cause most people are like, no, no, no. Balance is always the hard answer. And so when this is a view, but we live in the extremes of previous generations. So like what I do right now, who I am right now will be normal in 2030. It's just weird for 2024. Of the philosophies of the past, like Zen Buddhism, which is about the middle

path or balance or say stoicism, what do you align most with? Uh, I really align most with matrix multiplication of the LLMs. I really align most with matrix multiplication of the LLMs. I believe in a mathematical existence and I would love to live in a mathematical reality. And words are an attempt, a low dimensional attempt at trying to quantify biochemical states and words and the frameworks that humans have offered up are just not computationally as robust as our methodologies and so I think they're all inferior to what our computational models will offer us in an existence in consciousness. In addition to specific practices, do you spend any time developing a theoretical framework

for improving aging akin to a longevity toe? So just for people who are interested in what I'm referring to, this channel itself is called Theories of Everything, and we interview people on their different theories of everything, usually in a physics sense. But anyhow, Brian, what I'm asking is, are you working on a longevity toe? We have a map that, like one of the more interesting things that I've seen is one of the researchers in this field presented a slide one time, and they showed on one page like 500 lines of how aging happens in the body. And it was meant to depict how complicated of a problem it is and how many things we need to get done. And so it's pretty hard.

There's a few people trying to create cohesive theories about aging and how it's to be addressed, it's not clear to me where we're at in our maturity of understanding that we can put forward those theories. So we really are more on the practitioner side and less on theoretical because theoretical there's not a payoff. You know, like for the moment you do theory to practice, you're looking at some time span and we're really trying to, I'm trying to demonstrate the four minute mile. I'm trying to showcase or I'm trying to, like Amelia Earhart did,

traverse the Atlantic, you know, in an airplane or I'm trying to like take any other or summit Everest or get to the bottom of the sea. I'm trying to do something no human has ever done and that most people believe is impossible. But yet when one human does it, then every human can do it or most human, most every human can do it. And so that's really what I'm after is a, I'm trying to accelerate our evolutionary move towards Don't Die as the guiding philosophical, economic, political, moral, ethical framework of our existence. The Don't Die is the operating system of society. It seems like you have achieved the four-minute mile when it comes to sleep.

Please tell people about this ridiculous sleep score that you have. Yeah, it's the best sleep score ever recorded. And not to say that others could do it. I mean, it's achievable, but I had eight months of perfect sleep. I had 100% a score. And yeah, it was I, we all know how well we feel when we sleep well. And we definitely know how horrible we feel when we don't sleep well. Exactly.

It's like, it changes your conscious experience dramatically. I think there's nothing that changes existence more than sleep. And even still the fact that it is the single most powerful thing, somehow we have downgraded its importance to when we get around to it and or celebrating when people don't do it. And so like these moments, I love trying to find clarifying moments of how we're currently insane. We look back at previous generations and we can clearly see their insanity. But seeing our own insanity is much harder.

And our opinions and behaviors towards sleep are insane. So yeah, I was trying to demonstrate that you one can achieve predictable high quality sleep and eight months in a row and it will change your life. And so yeah, I built my sleep, my life around it and I published all my protocols and there's just, you just need to make it a focus, but you can definitely, you know, you can definitely achieve high quality sleep. All right, Brian. Well, there's so much more I could talk to you about. We can go on for hours and hours. And I hope we do. I hope I get to meet you in person,

maybe do your protocol at your place. I was envious of that lady in that video, which I'll put on screen. You are now speaking directly to the audience. What message do you have for them to take away with as they watch and they think, okay, great. Now what? Yeah. Hi friends. It's wonderful to see all of you.

I hope this has been a helpful conversation. I would invite each of you to consider making Don't Die your primary identity in life. And to do that, it's what we discussed. It's believing that we are baby steps away from superintelligence, that we are potentially at the doorstep of the most extraordinary existence intelligence is seen in this part of the galaxy. And that to achieve that, we do need to transcend ourselves and evolve into a species that is trying to eliminate sources of death, individually, collectively, the planet, and we need to align AI with don't die, that this is sensible and that these things begin on a day-to-day basis.

So it's saying no to junk food and fast food and saying yes to healthy food. It's putting systems in place so that you don't need to rely upon your willpower. It's knowing that you will make the wrong decision when given the opportunity. So it's not having junk food in the house, getting rid of all of it. It's making your bedtime your number one priority.

So you can take small, measurable baby steps to get into this, but really to understand the world that a new opportunity is here. And so I hope that you will join this with me, that we do need to build this globally and that if enough of us do it It will become the new norm and it will become so much easier Than having to fight against norms now that promote die as a culture So I'm wishing you all the best and especially those of you who find yourselves in a hard moment. I've been there I understand it and just know that it gets better. That rarely

are things as bad as your mind will suggest. That the sun will rise tomorrow and you'll have a new go. So, it's been great hanging out with you and I'm wishing you all the best. Brian man, thank you for spending so much time with me. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. All right, don't go just yet. There's something you should know about. There are just, in my opinion, a handful of truly innovative incubators. And of that handful, there aren't any that are started by someone as young and as ambitious as my friend Adam, who created EchoLopto.

EchoLopto's polymath events are a highly curated ecosystem for interdisciplinary minds to discuss their most unorthodox ideas with a critically receptive audience. Their next polymath event will be in Boston during September followed by December in Silicon Valley. Follow them on Instagram and X at EchoLopto so that's E-K-K-O-L-A-P-T-O, or visit the website E-K-K-O-L-A-P-T-O dot org. By the way, Echolopto is Greek for the word incubate slash emergence. You can also see my talk at the last Echolopto polymath event here. I think Echolopto is going to be a large, favorable force in the world,

a nourishing one, which is why I'll be at both events, Boston and Cambridge. I know the owner personally and I can attest to the vision and the initiative behind it. Also, I just wanted to place a thank you to the Redditors. There are too many here to count. I went back through the questions and here are the usernames on screen associated with questions that I've asked that were similar. So thank you to all these people. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list.

The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like. That's just part of the terms of service. Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me.

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generosity enough. Thank you so much.