Bryan Johnson Predicts The Year He Stops Aging

You know, it's such a funny question. It's like why do I want to live? It's funny because I think it shines a spotlight on this idea that we do live in a world where everyone assumes that you will die and therefore you basically budget out your life and you make your life plans according to your stage of life, but you assume it's coming to an end. And this is the first moment in the history of our species where that may no longer be true. And so I know that creates a lot of consternation for a lot of people because one of the most intense things people deal with is what to do with time. You know, like you wake up and you find yourself conscious and it's like what do you do with yourself? And so I understand. So basically, I'm doing this because I think we are at a pivotal moment as a species. We are evolving into something new and we are the first generation who won't die.

It was yeah. So when I was 21, I felt motivated. I wanted to do something that would be useful to the human race. I had read a lot of biographies. I was familiar with history. I loved reading about people who in their time and place were able to do something that impacted, you know, future generations, potentially for hundreds of years. And so I wanted to do something, but the problem was I wasn't good at anything, nor did I have any good ideas. And I was from a small rural community. So like what do you do when you don't have money or connections or you're not good or you're not like stand out in anything? So I said, you know what, I'll just become an entrepreneur. I'll hustle. I'll make a whole bunch of money by age 30. And then with that money, I'll do something useful. And I fortunately worked out. So I sold Braintree to Venmo. I made a few hundred million. I sold it for just under a billion. I made a few hundred million. And then at that moment it was like, okay, we just achieved the 21-year-old imaginative dream. But I was also burnt to a crisp. 14 years of entrepreneurship. I had three babies. I had just gotten divorced. I left my born-into religion. I was just kind of scrambled in life. And I, you know, off a decade of depression. And so it was this question, what do you do with life? Like what do you do with time? And so I basically took a couple years and I did two things.

One is I organized my friends and we had dinners and I would get like 10 of them together and I would say all right here's a thought experiment for you. We are living in the year 2050 and we are amazed at how remarkable existence is. Like it exceeds our imagination on every aspect. What did we do in 2016 to make that world possible? And then I would just listen and people would like talk about the things that they were working on or they heard about in the zeitgeist. And by dinner three I was like wait a second I see a pattern everybody is saying the same things you know like and that's what happens when in any given moment we all kind of exchange ideas we all kind of see similar things and similar patterns which becomes echo chamber so I then gave myself a challenge if I'm going to do something I'm going to take all the ideas I heard I'm going to put them inside of a box my job is to do something outside that box I can't do anything anybody's talking about and so that was the goal that was the constraint and then I did a second thing where I did this thought experiment where I imagined myself in the year 2500. So I imagine myself like reading the biographies of people who existed in the early 21st century and there they are capturing existence and there was one frame that really got me. I thought there they are talking amongst themselves and they say, 'We are so grateful to homo sapiens that lived in the year in the 21st century that they did blank and blank that allowed intelligent existence to thrive in this part of the galaxy.' And then my job was to figure out what blank and blank was. Because you know over time history compresses like we look back to the third century we say four things happened in the third century. like really like a whole bunch of things happen in the third century but time just compresses it to the essence our century as rich as it is and as many things that are happening will be compressed and so I think the answer is they say that's when homo sapiens figured out when they gave birth to super intelligence and that's when they figured out they would no longer die those two things define our century.

For sure. I mean, so the idea was that we have not had a discussion about life and death for about 2,000 years.

It's the first time in 2,000 years where we are legitimately discussing life and death. And so it is this monumental moment. So really the observation was we need to birth a new ideology. It's not, you know, science is a part of it, but like there needs to be a new thing, a new philosophy, ideology, religion, culture, community, whatever you want to call it. There needs to be something that is the defining epicenter of our existence. And that's what I wanted, that's what I started out to build. It's like I started doing it in a very practical way through the terms people understand through like the language of sleep and exercise and you know me by first that was the origin.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was born into a deeply religious community and formerly left that faith in my late 20s, early 30s. And so I guess the topic I think is worth introspection is we have a grand question right now as a species of what do we value and right now our actions demonstrate that we value power, status and wealth above all endpoints. We are willing to trade life, willing to trade our existence for the accumulation of power, wealth, and status. And that's the case because we all know that death is inevitable. And so when death is inevitable, you're going to yolo your way to those end points. And what this transition means or what it raises is it raises the question if existence itself is the highest virtue, that the only thing profitable is existence. Anything that weakens existence or calls existence into question is not profitable. And that's the whole discussion I'm trying to have is immortality not for the sake of individual immortality, for the sake of selfish pursuit. It is of being a warrior and caretaker of existence that we are defenders of the flame of consciousness. And so the thing that I think will be the most significant discovery in the 21st century is not going to be AGI. It won't be solving aging. It will be discovering how precious our existence is and how we are willing and eager to do anything to preserve our collective existence to be again the warriors and caretakers of it in this part of the galaxy.

I mean, I think what's going to surface inevitably is a rights issue where we establish there's human rights, there's a right to vote, you know, we have basic rights. What we haven't discussed is a right to exist. If the technology exists for me to extend my life and for you to extend your life, does one have the right to exist for as long as they choose? And that's where I think it's coming is I don't think that this is a rich versus poor argument. If that's like a secondary consideration. I think it's a basic fundamental human question of what are our rights? Do I have the right to vote? Do I have the right to influence my government? Do I have the right to exist? And if you say that's outlandish, that is so far into the future, I think you're underestimating the speed at which AI is going to change this conversation even in 10 years from now. And if you try to measure that, if you look throughout history and you measure when a technological disruption happens or when a political disruption happens, it causes holes in society. It creates problems. Society does not have answers for and then an ideology or philosophy or religion needs to emerge and patch those holes and say here's how we can make sense of this. Like here's how we can smooth this out so things are okay so that people are treated in an equitable manner so that society is functioning in an orderly fashion. And so if you say look at the amount of change that's happening right now in society with AI we're building up ideological debt and right now when you survey the world and you say what ideology in the world is going to in political economic social moral whatever whatever your source is what ideology is actually robust enough to patch the holes created by AI and that will be created by AI. And my hypothesis is none. There's not a single ideological framework that is even close to patching the holes. And so I wrote an immortalism manifesto on the spring equinox with an attempt of articulating what the new ideology is that patches the holes the AI all holes the AI is creating. And these components are you know existence is the highest virtue that which fortifies existence is profitable. that which removes it is not profitable etc. But I think it's a tsunami of change coming and we're just we have not properly sized it up on what will be necessary to actually stabilize society in a new equilibrium.

For people who are scared of AI. I would say to them there's no legitimate reason to either be optimistic or pessimistic and that is because the future of our existence is computationally irreducible. It is an unknown state. You cannot say anything intelligent about the future. Now you can say in classical science you can say I know where Jupiter is going to be in orbit 100 years from now. You can do the math and you know exactly where it's going to be. That is like with through classical science you can make predictions of the future. And before like if you were a farmer in the 1400s you would know your child will be a farmer in 1450 and their child will be a farmer in 1500. But now we don't even know what's going to happen a year from now, let alone five or 10 or 15. And so the starting point here is humans try to soothe their own anxiety by trying to imagine they can say things about the future. And this is the moment in time where we homo sapiens need to confess we have absolutely nothing intelligent to say about the future because it's computationally irreducible. It is impossible to say. And so that's starting point number two is in this case when you can't say anything about the future at all that's intelligent the only thing you know literally is you don't want to die right now. Outside of that that's it you have nothing to say and so if you were to take this conversation and map it back to homo erectus a million years ago and say homo erectus you're in a situation imagine you're going to evolve the equivalent of a million years in a month so everything you understand now is going to be change in a month. What are you going to be doing? And homo erectus would say, well, you're going to forge over here. You're going to fight over here. You're going to like, you know, it would take its own models of the world and map it. That's what we do. And so, homo erectus would not imagine that you're going to discover microscopic objects or invisible waves in the air or magic boxes in your hand that travel the speed of light. We are homo erectus in this moment. We are going to evolve at that same kind of speed over some duration of time. So for us to imagine that we're not homo erectus in this moment is absurd. We are trying to take our ancient models and trying to superimpose it upon a world where we just don't even understand what's coming. And so this is why I'm really neutral about the situation. We don't know. All I know is as a species, the thing we lock in on is we don't want to die right now. Which means we don't want to kill each other. We don't want to kill the planet. We don't want to kill ourselves. We don't want to cause harm to existence. We just want to hold on for dear life and hopefully we can make it to the other side. Now with that, like if there's other cool things to do, amazing. But like, yes, we have a need for meaning. Yes, we need to find meaning. But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves of thinking that somehow the world is going to be the same when we just have no idea what's going to happen.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you say like what are the ten commandments of religion, we know that. What are the ten commandments of capitalism? We know that. What are the ten commandments of social status? We know that. You know, like we have playbooks on like what to do in life. And what I'm saying right now is there's a new ten commandments that are dropping. And when you give birth to super intelligence, your only enemy is entropy. Entropy is the final boss. Entropy gets the stars. Entropy gets right. Entropy gets all things. The only enemy we have. It's not each other. It's not nation states. It is entropy. So this is not just about bodily trying to get your body to live and be healthy. It's about trying to solve planetary sustainability. It's about trying to solve existential threats, asteroids and trying to solve like not nuking ourselves. So when I talk about existence, I mean the full-on project of the human race is we say we are going to secure our existence against all threats, aging, planetary collapse, anything exogenous that may hurt our planet, anything that is a full-scale multi-thousand-year endeavor to figure out how do you actually secure existence. It's an endless stream of work. So when you say like, what am I going to do? Like we have more to do than we've ever had in our entire existence if we're going to actually try to secure our own existence. And it's a humanitarian project is everybody's involved. Everybody can contribute. And then in terms of like so how do you make this actionable? I mean it's kind of like the problem with like climate change like you hear like this terrible thing and it's like what do I recycle my Amazon boxes? But you actually in this thing with existence you can actually do a lot of things. you can actually be the philosophy. So, for example, that's what I've been trying to do with my project is I've tried to say I am a collection of 70 trillion cells, Brian Johnson is, and every day my cells die a little bit and they die and they have an expiration date roughly around 79 years in California. And so, it's a pretty predictable clock of decay, you know, every single day. It's a little less robust. And so we're basically trying to say scientifically, can you make the aging process slow down and can you increase the repair process? Because aging is just simply a function of the breakdown is more than repair. So how do you slow breakdown and boost repair? And you can start with really basic things like what I tell everybody is health is overwhelming. Like if you say I'm gonna want to be healthy, you say I'm going to eat a healthy meal, but then you think are the seed oils good for me or bad for me and you think should I drink this or that drink and it just gets overwhelming. So I try to simplify it and say the best thing anybody can do is by focusing on their resting heart rate before bed. That is the one marker in their life to pay attention to and then the whole game becomes how do you lower the heart rate. Now the reason why this matters is the lower your heart rate the better you sleep. The better you sleep, the more willpower you have and the better mood you have. Sleep is the number one longevity drug in the entire world. There's nothing more powerful than sleep. And then I'll walk you through in a minute like the five things you can do to lower it. But those are the anchor solutions that everybody can do and they're free. So there's no money required and they're also like the power laws of longevity.

So these work because if I can see someone's heart rate on their wearable device, I will see their soul. I will see their relationship with stress and food and work and scrolling. It just reveals all things. And so, for example, the first thing is if your bedtime is 10 p.m. every night, you want to have your final meal at least 4 hours before bed. So, finish eating around 6 p.m. And that gives your body time to digest the food. And your body needs that space to complete its process. And then it has time and space to then lower your body temperature before bed and express melatonin. So now you're ready. If you eat adjacent to bed, it raises your core body temperature. It suppresses melatonin. It raises your heart rate. Then when you go to sleep, the body is doing two things. Digesting food and trying to sleep and then it wrecks your sleep. So by pushing your food earlier in the day, it gives your body space to do the digestion. So you can free it up. I did a few hundred, probably more like a thousand experiments on when to eat, what to eat, etc. I found my optimal time is to finish eating around noon each day. I go to bed at 8:30, so I have eight and a half hours of digestion. If I do that, my heart rate's going to be around 41, 42, 43. If it's there, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. I'll fall asleep within two minutes. I'll get to in a minute like what a good night it is. So, second thing is,

Yep. So your body, so if you go to bed at 10 p.m. the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to drop into deep sleep. It's always that first big trench. The key thing about this is your body is a clock. Because if your bedtime is 10 p.m. and you've got a work project or a social outing and you get to bed at 1:00 a.m. and you think, 'That's okay. I'm going to sleep until 9 to make up for it.' It doesn't work that way. The body has a clock. And so at 10, you start your deep cycle and then you come back up and then within like the first 60 to 90 minutes or so, you come up and you get your first REM cycle. So deep is where you do like deep brain cleaning. REM kind of comes up and does like memory consolidation, emotional cleansing, but your body goes these cycles each night in a clock-like fashion. And that's why it's so important to be on time and be consistent every day because your body wants to run the same processes. So, think of it like this. At 10:00 p.m., there's a trash collector outside waiting for you to go to sleep. If you're asleep at 10 p.m., the trash collector rolls through your body and picks up your trash. If you're not asleep or your sleep is disrupted, the

If the trash collector stays outside and your trash stays out on the curb, it's not picked up. So the body cleans itself through these systematic rhythmic processes. And that's why you want to pick a bedtime, be consistent with your bedtime as much as you can to let the body clock run. So the ideal night of sleep is roughly 2 hours of deep, 2 hours of REM, awake less than 30 minutes per night, and then asleep within roughly five or so minutes. That's the sleep architecture of an early 20-year-old or late teens. That's ideal. And as you age, it becomes increasingly harder to get good sleep. You wake up more often. You can't get back to sleep more often. You sleep more lightly. You can't get these big windows of restorative sleep. That's especially true for women. So that's why these sleep habits are so important. They are the foundational building blocks for all of health to master sleep. But you can't master sleep until you master the pre-sleep routines, which is what we're talking about here.

So some people do complain about feeling hungry. The first thing is, it's okay. You're not going to starve to death. If you feel a little bit hungry, it's okay. If you need to start with two hours before bed and then go to two and a half and then three, work your way up. Some people will say, I can't sleep if I'm a little hungry. That's okay. Have a little snack. But what you want to do is measure your heart rate. You can either use a wearable to measure your heart rate or you can just put your fingers on the side of your neck and check your pulse. But that's your north star. You'll see if your heart rate is up, your sleep quality is down. If your heart rate's down, your sleep quality is up.

Yeah. Okay, so screens off 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Being on your phone or on your computer is not a soothing experience. You're not doing that to wind down.

I know this. There's nothing you're doing on your phone. You're getting blasted with blue light. And whether you're texting or working or scrolling, it's arousing your nervous system. So screens need to be off 30 to 60 minutes before bed. And in that time frame, you can do a number of things. You can go for a walk, talk to a friend, hang out with family. Reading a book is by far the best thing. Meditation, a hobby—literally anything but being on your phone. And you'll see that when you do that, it just helps because your body, your nervous system needs 30 to 60 minutes to wind down. You can't just be on the phone and be like, 'Ah, now I'm going to bed.' The body needs space to do it. So that's torture for most people. If you take away the phone, it's like I don't think there's anything in existence I can do at this moment, right?

It's like kind of a modern-day comedy. It's like a tragedy—you take someone's phone away and it's like they don't know existence.

Exactly. So I've tried all those devices. It's all good practices. Something very simple—it's just very simple breathwork. Four seconds in, six seconds out, and when your exhale exceeds your inhale by two, it calms you down by activating the nervous system. And even if you want to add a hum when you come out of the six minutes, it does some vagal activation. So yeah, just something very simple like that can give some really soothing vibes to the body, again, lower the heart rate.

Be mindful of light. Blue light is very damaging to sleep. Two things: one, you're going to have screens off. Two, you're going to have blue light blocking glasses on. You want to be blocking from roughly 280 nanometers to around 510 nanometers thereabouts. So find a good pair of blue light blocking glasses. In my house, we come up with the sun and we go down with the sun. We just don't use any lights in my house. If we have any lights on, it's a red light—a lamp with a red bulb in there with a low flicker light—or we have an amber light. But we just don't do any blue lights ever. I've done so many experiments with blue light. It reliably crashes my sleep. So just be very mindful of light.

Exactly. I mean, the thing is, the airlines are built to kill you, right? When you take an international flight, you step on the plane, the first thing they offer you is alcohol—it's going to wreck your sleep. Then they give you a big meal—it's going to wreck your sleep. They sit you in front of a screen that's blasting with blue light. They have in the cabin, they pulse blue. So they have like four things that destroy your sleep. The best thing if you're taking an international flight: go there fasting, don't drink the alcohol, don't eat that meal, have blue light blocking glasses on, and then go to sleep as soon as you can when the flight takes off. Otherwise, everything in that cabin is just there to destroy your sleep.

Yeah. Exactly. [laughter] Exactly.