We have glorified this idea of people who die young, right? And like the Kurt Cobaines, like we have this glory story.
I'm not saying he's a good example. I do take the point.
But there stories we tell in our culture, like why do we glorify that? What is so great about being dead?
Conquering death will be humanity's greatest achievement. That's the motto of Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who rose to global fame when he revealed he was spending millions a year trying to reduce his biological age and he hopes live forever. He is, in his own words, that crazy guy trying not to die. His daily regime involves dozens of daily powders, pills, gene therapies, and more, including putting ice packs on his testicles. In 2023, he hit the headlines for swapping blood with his 17-year-old son as part of his pursuit of radical longevity. And he joins me now, Bryan Johnson. Hello.
What a pleasure to be speaking with you. Look, you've been trying not to die for quite a few years now, Bryan. I think we're about the same age and so I'm fascinated by what you do for obvious selfish reasons. It strikes me, having read you on social media quite a lot, it strikes me a lot of people get you wrong because people talk about your project as if you were frightened or if it was joyless or egotistic or whatever and we'll cover all that, but what always seems to me is people don't realize how much you're enjoying yourself. You're on an adventure, right?
That's right. If you reframe it, like going to the moon, right? Trying to do something that has never been done before. You initiate a very large project. You bring together a lot of people. This is like going to the moon. This is an epic project. In fact, this is humanity's greatest dream. It has always been humanity's greatest dream to overcome death. So, yeah, people look at the protocols, they look at the project, and they don't quite understand what category to put it in, like how to bucket it. But yeah, I mean, this is one of the most epic and beautiful adventures of all of humanity. I mean, we don't want to be diseased and sick. That's just not a thing that humans like.
But you're having fun. When you find a new thing, you're excited about it. When you find out if it works, you're excited about that. I think maybe the joy of it all doesn't often come across.
That's right. I love this so much. I am in my happy place. I love this game. And it really is. You're just playing this. You're measuring your body as much as you can. You're looking to scientific evidence. You're getting results. It brings me endless joy.
So, you take or subject yourself to about a hundred things a day. I'm not going to take a hundred things a day. I haven't the time or the money. But if I could take three, what would they be?
It would be to go to bed on time, turn your screens off 30 to 60 minutes before bed, and maintain a consistent schedule.
That's very unexciting. I want some drugs. Give me some drugs.
I know. That's the thing. People, they want the sexy thing. It's not sexy. It's going to bed. It's getting high quality sleep. It's exercising every day. And honestly, some of the best longevity therapies are just avoiding bad stuff. So, not eating sugar, you know, not sitting down for multiple hours at a time. So, it really is, when you get into it, it's not very sexy. It's just having discipline and habits that allow you to do the same things consistently every day.
You work with a team who each day make various measurements. What do they do to you each day?
Oh, man. Ever. I mean, I just finished my five-hour morning routine. I wake up at 4 in the morning and I just, right now it's 10 o'clock. I guess six hours of various therapies, measurements, protocols. I'll work for maybe four or five hours and then I have doctor's appointments, therapies, but you know, we've gathered 1.5 billion data points on my body over the past couple years. I'm the most measured person in human history and we just, we've become very good. You want to basically, people think of diagnosis as bad. Like when you get a diagnosis, it's like terrible. I celebrate it. Like we all have things wrong with our bodies. So you're trying to find things that go wrong as early as possible. And so we've really created this joy machine where when we find a diagnosis, it's like, yes, we found it. Like it was cooking somewhere and we found it.
But what are they doing? They're measuring your blood, they're measuring your saliva, they're measuring your stool, all that kind of thing.
Exactly. So those basic ones, blood, saliva, stool, but also a lot of imaging. We do a lot of fitness tests, brain tests. We do a lot of, for example, last week we did a very large blood draw. We looked at one million immune cells. So we looked at each one of my individual immune cells and said, 'Who are you? What are you doing?' You know, can you give me any signal for disease or dysfunction? So we characterize things down to the single cell level.
Okay. So look, of the various supplements you do take, and I've seen lists floating around on the internet. You'll have to correct me if they're inaccurate. Again, I'm not going to list them all, but there's everything in there from sort of fashionable supplements like NMN and NAD+ to more established things like turmeric, for example. And lots of them are on what would seem to me to be on like the threshold of science. Like there have been various studies that say they might work a bit sometimes in the round, but nothing that medical science has nailed down as kind of this will definitely work. I'm interested from your perspective, like is this really scientific? Because as one man, you surely can't test the efficacy of a hundred supplements at the same time. You can't know what happens in one man. What difference turmeric makes, can you?
Yeah. I mean, I think to level set where we're at, we are probably in the stone age for health. Like in terms of our real understanding, the things we know that work, high quality sleep, exercise, right? And not doing bad things like don't smoke. Like with those things, we have very high degrees of confidence. Other things, it's not clear. We're still in the very early stages. This is an experiment and that's what people don't really, like you were saying, they don't understand is we're trying our very best to look at the scientific evidence and say of all the things that have been studied which things have the most scientific evidence. So we approach it that way. We just say like, it's not perfect. It's not guaranteed but these things have more evidence than other things. And so we base ourselves on the evidence and then we measure myself and then we go beyond the evidence. Like we discover things the evidence hasn't discovered. And so that's what makes this project really cool is we're getting real-time feedback. If you take this supplement, does it work? Does it move the marker or does it not? That's what I like about this is like we can really get into the granular details of moving beyond like some generic conversation with a friend.
But I mean something like turmeric, I'm not a scientist, but I'd imagine if you want to check whether something like turmeric works, then you give it to, you fund a study, you give it to a hundred people or you give it to fifty out of a hundred people over ten years and you don't give it to the other fifty. You see what effect it makes in the round. Compared to that, giving it to one guy who's taking ninety-nine other things, that's next to useless, isn't it?
I mean, if you think about this question more broadly, you're basically asking about the human condition, right? I mean, if you think about what we eat on a daily basis, everything we put into our body, not just turmeric, but every single food you put into your body is an intervention. All your environmental, like your air, your water, your clothing, your environment, light, your friendships, like your relationships, all those things are interventions. So yes, it is an incredibly complicated question. That said, we try to isolate things as best we can. Like turmeric has this pathway. It does this thing and we can measure it this way. So we try to track it. Then we say this is what it looked like before we started it, this is what it looked like after we started it and this is what it looks like when we stop it. And that way we can isolate it to some degree. Again, it's not perfect, but it's as best we could do with the measurement tools we have now and the science we have.
So you have a very big following online and it intersects, it seems to me to intersect very heavily with parts of the manosphere that are very into wellness. A lot of gym bros follow you and there's a sort of growing culture of biohacking among kind of gym type people with various drugs and chemicals and testosterone and peptides and all that kind of stuff. A lot of which aren't very well regulated. Do you ever worry that people might hurt themselves by emulating you, by finding the one thing that you've said does this and go, 'Well, I'll give that a go.'
Yeah. The thing I'm trying to encourage is the scientific method. You know, when you do something as publicly as my project, you're going to catch criticism from everybody. Scientists will say, 'Ah, doesn't matter. It's an N equals one. Doesn't really matter.' And then individuals will approach it from a different perspective like, 'Oh, no. My version's better.' And what I'm trying to say is you guys, you could all have your opinions. That's all cool. Just measure yourself and do the scientific process. Even if it's not perfect, like you're saying, even if you're doing a few things at the same time, you can do a better job at isolating. If I'm doing this thing, I expect this kind of result, I'm going to measure it this way. So really at the basic level, I'm teaching the scientific method. It is good to experiment with structured measurement protocols and to know the outcome. And so versus like what most people do is scroll social media. They hear about a thing and they do it and there's no measurement to backdrop it. So there's no control in place. So that's what I'm trying to do is really more than tell people what to do. I'm trying to tell them how to do it. If you're going to engage, measure yourselves and follow the scientific method.
But it's not just about the measurements. I mean, it's about supplements that are not necessarily licensed for human consumption as well. Right. And I mean, the scientific method isn't looking at Bryan Johnson and seeing if it works for him. The scientific method, like we said, is a study of a hundred people over ten years.
That's right. But you know the thing is, if we were all to wait, people have real life problems. Something comes up like, you know, a knee hurts, a back hurts, I have a headache and you then go out and try to find a doctor who can help me solve this thing, right? And most people find that to be totally worthless. Then you go to LLMs like, 'Hey, I have these symptoms, I have these kinds of things.' Like most people are out there just fighting on their own how do I find the most basic help in my life to help me address whatever I'm experiencing. And so when you think about it, people are legitimately trying to solve their own problem. And when you go out to the scientific basis, there's not enough science done in clinical trials to actually inform what you do on a daily basis. So people need to take this in their own hands. That's what they're doing. They're taking their health into their own hands because there's not a sufficient body of scientific evidence to support them in doing it. Now, if people want to explore in doing unregulated peptides, let them experiment. Now, can they be dangerous? Maybe. Can they measure themselves? Yes.
Okay. I mean, so I mean is eating fast food dangerous? Maybe. Probably.
I think that's a definite yes.
