Was it cooler to take psilocybin than to fall in love with Kate?
They're both magnificent, you know, like they're different.
I think there's a correct answer to this question, Brian. Brian Johnson, welcome to Interesting Times.
I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
I'm very glad to have you. And you have the dubious distinction or maybe the extreme honor of being the guest for my last episode as host of this show. And I think this conversation, I'm hoping, is a fitting finale because one thing we've been trying to do on Interesting Times is exploring how what seemed to a lot of people like strange and radical ideas have been entering more into the mainstream of American politics and culture and technology and more. And one of those radical ideas that's come up more than once in this show's run is the hope of dramatic life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity.
In the next 10 years, we're going to see breakthroughs also in life expectancy. So try to be alive.
Life extension is a miracle and I don't think...
You're right. I'm in favor of this especially when it comes to my life.
It's part of the pitch for artificial intelligence's potential benefits and it is now your life's work. It's very explicitly 'don't die' and you have made yourself a personal guinea pig in fact for all kinds of potentially life extending treatments and even taking what some, though certainly not me, might call a TMI approach to everything that's happening with your own body. And you've taken a certain, like you're an internet character, right? There's some mockery out there maybe but I take you to be extremely sincere about this. And so I just wanted to start with your motivation. Why do you, Bryan Johnson, want to fight and maybe abolish death?
You know, I was building my brain interface company a couple years back and I was working with this esteemed professor and we were trying to define intelligence. And he had a definition which I thought was really interesting and that is that intelligence is to know what to do next. And right now in this moment, it's a tectonic shift in terms of what will become of the human race. What will become of each of us individually? What do we aspire to? And that's the question I'm really trying to tackle is in this moment as we remap our imagination as a species, what do we do next? And my conclusion on that is we are now at peak human knowledge. Also, we're potentially at peak ignorance with what AI will unleash. Like it's never been a time where there's been a stronger juxtaposition between what we know and what we may not know. And in all that contemplation, I say the only thing I can truly trust in this moment is I don't want to die right now. So this is not about immortality. It's not about trying to live a million years. It's to say the one thing I can say with certainty is I don't want to die right now. And I think that's true for almost everybody.
I want to get into some of the philosophical ramifications of this view, but can we talk biographically for a minute? I think most people would say of course I don't want to die, right? But there's a difference between having that sense or sensibility, right, and taking the sort of study and remaking of the human body, or your own body in this case, as a mission. So what was going on in your life when you decided that this should be your mission?
Yeah. It goes back to when I was 21 years old. I returned from serving as a missionary in Ecuador. I had lived in mud huts on dirt floors and I understood the depths of poverty and I was struck by the opulence of the United States and the conditions where I was at in Ecuador. And so in that moment I said I don't know what I want to do with my life other than I want to do something useful for mankind. And so I said I'll become an entrepreneur. I'll make a whole bunch of money by age 30. Then with money I'll do something interesting. You know, a very common thing people hear. And so I did that. I sold my company, Braintree, for $800 million. I made a few hundred million. And then at that point, it was okay. Like, now I've done that. What do I do? And the irony was I was absolutely broken. I had burned myself out. I was raising three young kids. I was separating from my religion. I was chronically depressed. I was getting a divorce. And then I just sold my company and lost my identity as a professional. And my world, even though I had $300 million in my bank account, it didn't matter. I was just absolutely broken as a person. And so I had to rebuild myself.
And so I set out to ask all the basic questions. Who am I? What do I care about? What do I want to do? And then I read this book called Zero: A Dangerous Idea. And I learned about the history of zero, how it's disrupted everything in history, physics and math and art and religion and philosophy. And I wondered what is the zero in this moment? What is the thing that is hiding in plain sight that is so obvious but that no one's doing? And I thought about that question for several years and then I did a second thought experiment which really did it for me. I imagined being present in the year 2500 and there I am conversing with whoever that is, whether it's human, AI, some combination of human AI, and they're reflecting on the early 21st century and they say we're so grateful for homo sapiens that existed in the 21st century because they did blank, you know, because in a few hundred years they will compress our century into two or three or four sentences. And so I thought that compression...
Of them will be about podcasting, I'm confident.
Unquestionably. I thought they'd say two things. One is that's when homo sapiens gave birth to super intelligence and that's when they figured out they no longer die. And I thought that's it. That's the moment where it flips where humans go from inevitability of death to don't die and that's going to become my purpose for existence.
You were a missionary. So you were a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right?
Why did you lose your religious faith?
I read a book, Rough Stone Rolling, and I learned...
The biography of Joseph Smith. Yep.
That's right. And I learned about the history of the church. And you know, when you're raised in the church, you're given a version of events that are obviously very favorable to the church's disposition. When you learn the true history, you need to square with the new reality. And like all things, humans are messy. History is messy. And once I started learning more, I thought this I just can't quite make sense of this. And so in my mid-20s, I read that book and it just broke for me. And so I still stayed in the religion because I was married to someone who was in there. My children were in the religion. My entire family was. So it took me a while to get out. But yeah, my faith broke in my mid-20s.
Did it make you an atheist or just a non-Mormon? What's your current position on God?
I'm excitingly undecided.
Okay. Okay. Good. Well, we'll see where we end up at the end of the conversation. So, let's talk then about what you actually decided to do once you realized that this was going to be the hinge of the 21st century. Your project is called Project Blueprint, right? And blueprints, they show you how something should be built or structured. So what are you trying to show with this project with the work that you undertake?
After that thought experiment of the 25th century, it was clear to me that we basically needed to build a new philosophy, a new value system, new ethics, new morals, new incentive systems. And so my co-founder and I, Kate Tolo, decided to make this a project when we said we will make my body the philosophy. And so if you look throughout time, the first story ever written was Gilgamesh, a story about basically life and death and eternal life. And over the centuries, there's been different archetypes that represent the grappling of the human race of what does it mean to live and die and is there an afterlife? And a new archetype needs to exist that represents the quest to try and continue existence in this physical body through the means of science and technology. And there wasn't an archetype that filled that role. And so what we designed is like first from a scientific perspective, I'm a cluster of trillions of cells. So we're going to measure every one of those cells as possible, including we're going to do blood draws and imaging and we're going to measure my body every way possible and then we're going to use scientific evidence and say how do we either slow down my speed of aging and or reverse it. And so we basically have done a robust scientific project. We are performance artists trying to convey a new philosophy. Bryan Johnson is the first don't die homo sapien prototype. That first homo sapien that tried to incorporate that.
But by archetype you mean a positive archetype, right? Like immortality is associated with, you know, anyone from Dracula to Dorian Gray, let's say. So you're trying to make yourself an admirable archetype, right? Someone who people look at and say, 'This is not, you know, a bargain with the devil or something where I'm going to have a portrait in my attic that ages while I stay young, right?' Like, this is something that I would want to identify with.
Yeah. You know, not necessarily. I am willing to shave off good and bad, desirable and undesirable. And so, people make these connections all the time. It's Dorian Gray, it's Dracula, it's Prometheus. Basically, I say yes to all of it. And I think the play here is this is a fun game for everyone. You know, you have people who are watching me wanting to learn from me. You have people who want me to fail and they want to laugh. You have this whole mixture in...
People betting against you.
Yep. And there's an intense interest in me failing. And you know what? That's great. I support their viewpoints. I understand their viewpoints. I think irony is in their favor. But I think it's a group conversation and a group journey. For those who hate me, those who love me, it's all the same.
How is your cause advanced through the haters?
Whether it's love or hate, it's raw energy.
Okay. Tell me about the process then for listeners and viewers who are not fully familiar with the Bryan Johnson experience. Like we're speaking, I guess it's 11:00 a.m. Pacific time, right? So in a typical day, what are you doing to defeat death?
Okay. Yeah. I'll give a couple of quick examples. So, I went to bed at 8:00 p.m. on the dot, and I'm extremely precise about my sleep because it's the number one thing I focus on. I've built my entire life around sleep. Last night, I nearly got 5 hours of restorative sleep. My resting heart rate was 40 beats per minute. My HRV was 13% higher. So, my body got full restoration to clean out the garbage and to rebuild my body. I woke up at 4:00 a.m. I then spent the first hour getting light in my eyes right when I wake up to say, 'Hey, body, I'm waking up.' I then eat breakfast, which is protein powder. It's hemp and pea protein, berries, nuts, seeds, extra virgin olive oil. I then work out for an hour. I'm currently training to dunk a basketball. I then do 20 minutes of sauna. I then do some intermittent hypoxia, hyperoxia training, and then I have my first meal of the day. And so that's every single day I do some version.
The powder doesn't count as a meal.
It does. I guess that's like my... Yeah, you're right. Meal. Okay. Yeah, and but you know, every calorie fights for its life. I have an extremely precise nutrition. Every calorie gets in there. And that's how my entire life is built. And so I'm doing this with you now. I've got some doctor appointments later this afternoon. I'll do more measurements. But my entire life is regimented structure. And this gives rise to people saying like I live in a cage. That's partially true. Also, I'm a living experiment. And so I'll give you some quick examples for those who are unfamiliar. We try to measure everything. So for example, I'm 48 years old. But my left ear is age 64 based upon some hearing loss I had as a kid listening to music too loud and shooting guns. And so I've gotten hearing aids to try to correct for the deficiencies. But if you're looking at the gums in my mouth, what's the recession, etc. So some data sets are very robust, some are emergent. We just take whatever...
My lower gums are ancient. I won't show them to you, but do you know the measurements?
No, no, I just can see them in the mirror and they clearly aged more rapidly than the rest of my mouth. I'm just... this is just a rough estimate based on trips to the bathroom. Yeah. And so we spent several months rejuvenating my gums because I have bruxism, which means I grind my teeth at night. I did that for about 20 years before I had a dentist being like, 'Hey, this is a problem. You need a mouth guard of this type.' And so the grinding caused my gums to recede and my pocket depth to increase. So we did a bunch of therapies where we restored my gums to roughly early 20s age. My left ear, we've made zero progress. So sometimes you find a deficiency where you're older than your chronological age and you can do something about it. Sometimes you can't do anything about it. So yeah, that's why it matters so much to measure is you're trying to find the oldest, highest risk part of your body that creates the highest risk of all-cause mortality.
You mentioned super intelligence earlier and you've sort of undertaken this project over a period where AI has become the focus of so much hope and fear and sort of interest about measurement and analysis and everything else. How are you using AI right now?
You know, this project would be stalled without AI because we've acquired 1.5 billion data points. It's impossible for any doctor to keep that in their memory. And so we have built an AI system where we ingest all my data, my genome and my proteome and every measurement we do, all my wearables, you name it, we do it. And then we're trying to make sense of it. And so the AI has been phenomenal in terms of identifying patterns we can't pick up through manual processes. The idea behind what I'm trying to do is cars drive themselves. Software now writes itself to a certain degree. The next is health. Health is going to write itself. Which means if I can measure my body and feed data to AI, AI will know better what to do than me or my doctors. And so what I'm building is my autonomous self. So I'm building like a self-driving body. So it just automatically takes care of itself more robustly than I can.
Okay. But just to push on that analogy for a minute, right? Like as you describe your day, your body is not just taking care of itself while you go about your daily business, right? Your daily business is this project and you are, you know, a wealthy entrepreneur who can, and we'll get into this in a minute, you're also making money from this project, right? But like this is your business. And so it's not a passive thing where you've just trained your body to drive itself the way that a Waymo might drive you around San Francisco, right? So what's the takeaway for someone who works a 9-to-5 job in which maybe they can eat the protein powder or something but otherwise they're not going to be dunking a basketball at 2:00 p.m. Pacific?
Yeah. So I guess two things on this. One is there are some parts of the project which are autonomous. So for example, the bed I sleep in automatically adjusts temperature according to my body. So it changes my temperature profile about 32 times a night making sure I stay in deep sleep and REM sleep and I avoid wake events. So yes, there's some advanced features where I get real-time data, real-time measurement and real-time adjustment. But you're right that I'm basically in an analog world that as much as I want AI to run my life, I have to physically take those actions. I have to buy food. So I totally agree with you and we're trying to...
I mean you can get DoorDash, but yeah, you have... Yeah. I'm also interested watching you because I spend a certain period of my own life treating myself as a guinea pig. I had a very severe chronic illness that had basically totally ruined my life for a period of a couple of years and let's just say there was insufficient medical data on how you would ideally treat this and so I treated myself as, to use the language of studies, I was an N of one, right? And I was just trying things, things that people had recommended, things that had some science behind them. But this was an all-consuming process at a lot of times. But first of all, I was always treating it as a provisional thing, right? To get me back to health. That was sort of how I understood it. In the end, it got me there or close enough to there that I no longer live like that. And secondly, I didn't imagine that the things I was doing were going to be generalizable, right? Like, I would, you know, if other people had the same illness I would give them advice and compare notes and so on, but it just seemed so clear that whatever was going on in my own body was very, very idiosyncratic. And so when I look at what you're doing, I'm curious both about sort of this is an open-ended thing, right? Like there's no point where you're like, okay, now I can relax and stop trying all these things because you're not trying to attain health, you're trying not to die and that's an ongoing process. Second, I really don't completely understand how you think you can reasonably generalize from, again, one body, one set of measurements and monitoring and so on to a wider population. This is not something we do with, you know, the scientific studies are not based on one person's experience and so on. So you can take either one of those questions or you can react in any way to that that you want.
Yeah, you can think of this in the idea of capitalism means you learn how to make money. You learn the skill sets of how to make money. And people do that in a variety of ways, but you're choosing, I'm going to choose to devote 10 hours of my day to make money or I'm going to choose to spend blank hours of my day trying not to die. And so it's really the exact same thing. And people don't quite understand that right now. You know, we know how much coffee costs and we know what it means when a bank account balance gets below $100, but we have no accounting ledger for life and death. You don't know what it costs you to stay up all night. You don't know what it costs you to be 40 pounds overweight. You can look at some rough data tables, but we don't have an accounting system. You don't see your bank account balance change that frequently. And so, what I'm trying to do is be a prototype, an archetype to say there's a new way of thinking, a new way of being that has this. And so the way I try to compress this for people is I say look, I understand health is complicated, your life is complicated, right? Like everything you have going on, it's stressful. And so I try to say focus on one thing, that is your resting heart rate before bed. If somebody focuses on that single biomarker, it helps them wrestle the bad cultural habits we have as a society, which means we go to bed way too late, inconsistently, we have our screens on our faces up until the bedtime, we eat way too much, we have snacks. So that one thing really wrestles the majority of bad habits. And once a person can wrestle their sleep, then all of these positive things happen. So I do try to say like, of course I'm the outlier, but I can simplify this into basics.
So you're doing a hundred things and you're saying that the person who watches you can do two of those things.
But you're also selling products, right?
Everything I put into my body, I make available so other people can do if they choose.
And is everything you're putting into your body chosen based on some kind of scientific research or background? Like, okay, so you're basically selling products. You're not saying, 'I, Bryan Johnson, have run studies on these things,' but you're saying, 'I, Bryan Johnson, have looked at studies on these things and they've persuaded me that I should be willing to ingest them.'
Exactly. And I need to be very clear. I am not doing this to make money. I started this project and I...
Can I raise an eyebrow at that and have one note of skepticism?
You can raise two if you like.
Okay. Okay. But really, you're not trying to make money.
Absolutely not. I mean, my premise on this, I already have plenty of money. I don't need any more money. And in fact, if I wanted to make money, there's probably 10 to 20 businesses I would start way before this one. The business I'm in sucks. Low margin, pain in the ass, terrible logistics. It just is not the business I would build. And sometimes I really regret having done it. You know, like my life would be so much simpler by not having to spend time on this business. But basically, whether you believe me or not, I'm genuinely trying to do people a favor in doing this.
Do you pull products? Like, are you constantly pulling things in and out, taking things for a while and saying, 'Oh, that didn't have any effect on the biomarker and so I'll stop taking it.' Like what are you adding and subtracting?
Mostly therapies. So when you measure the body and you say, 'Okay, the biological age is blank, right? Can you reverse it? Then what therapies can you do?' And so we went down the list of the best therapies with the best evidence of showing age reversal. And we've done those. So we did a hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We've done sauna. We did IHT. We've done...
What's the best? Again, let's say I'm the person who says, 'Bryan, I can only do one thing out of your list of therapies. I'm a busy man. I got a lot of kids. I have a podcast. I'm changing jobs. What do I do?'
Sauna. I would do dry sauna, not wet, not infrared, dry sauna at between 175 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. And I'd do it about four to five times per week. For you because you're a man, I would suggest you put ice on your boys because otherwise it has negative effects on your fertility.
So, be sure they're cooled. I have five children. Honestly, Bryan, I'm not super worried about that specific issue. So what about the reversal? You talked about the idea that you're looking for things that actually reverse the age of an organ or a part of your body. What's something that you've done that you think has the most promise for that?
We've seen several. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was one of the most efficacious therapies we've ever done. The difficulty is that you need to be in this chamber for 90 minutes for 60 sessions in 90 days. So it's a huge time commitment.
It's a huge one. And so most, it's just not practical for people to do it. But we saw benefits in skin health, telomeres, microbiome, brain. Yeah. So like we saw across the board.
So, and again in any of these cases, right, you're one person, right? So are you assuming that somewhere in your fan base there are people who are saying, 'Oh, this is really interesting that Bryan Johnson got these results. We're going to set up a big controlled trial based on this,' because I mean that's again to take this beyond your own experience. You need that kind of thing, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I'll give you an example where that's bridged. We did this experiment looking at psilocybin. And so people think about psilocybin either as an ancient medicine ceremony or recently for trials looking at PTSD and anxiety, things like that. So we asked the question, is psilocybin a longevity medicine? And so we did the most quantified psychedelic psilocybin experience in history. We measured 250 biomarkers and one of the things we found was there was this unique metabolic reset of my blood glucose and that was not in the literature before. So in that sense, yes, there are several groups now who have petitioned trying to get funding for a rigorous study to look at psilocybin more robustly as a longevity therapy. It would be a very big shift in how people think about this. So we've had several wins like that of reframing given topics in what we do. And again, it doesn't answer it definitively, but it points in the direction of is this worthy of a study.
And aspirationally, based on your knowledge right now without some further dramatic breakthrough, just to put yourself in the hands of your haters for a minute, like how many years of your life do you think you're getting through this kind of regimen?
Yeah. Let's actually amplify their argument and say the better argument for them is I'm shortening my life, right? Not only am I not doing myself good, let's say I'm actually doing myself harm, right? By intermingling with my body. And you know what? Like I'm open to the criticism, you know? Like maybe that's true. Maybe it's better to just let my body do its thing without meddling. We measure things as best we can. We try to look at all the data and we say like how is my body doing? We look at hundreds of markers every month trying to say is it good or bad? But ultimately, we don't know. So, I think it's really an open-ended question. This is like early stages of science.
