To be very clear, I love haters. I love the commentary. I love the critiques. I play with it.
Hello from New York. I'm Ellie Austin and you're watching Fortune Daily. Today, America's total national debt has topped $40 trillion for the first time ever. If you want a sense of the scale of that figure, it equates to just over 46 times Elon Musk's current net worth. So, this figure is up from 39 trillion just 5 months ago, and it has more than doubled since 2017. The government is now spending even more to cover interest on that debt with Treasury rates surging at the same time that costs for Social Security, Medicare, and defense keep rising. And when Washington has to borrow more, that can push up interest rates across the board. $40 trillion is a record. It's a huge sum. But the real question is whether America's bet on continued prosperity will be enough to keep up with the interest payments.
In a move nobody expected, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, otherwise known as Harry and Meghan, are moving back to the UK. This decision comes 6 years after they left the prince's home country for beautiful California, stepping back as working royals in the process. At the time, they cited the invasive British media, a lack of support from the monarchy, and a desire for financial independence, and notably privacy as the reasons for their move across the Atlantic. They ended up in picturesque Montecito. So, why is this a business story? Well, it's only been about 18 months since Meghan launched As Ever, which is her lifestyle brand known for its jams, which she calls spreads, its teas, its wine, and its chic, minimalist, oat-hued aesthetic.
The launch came with much fanfare. It also came with a podcast called Confessions of a Female Founder, which has since ceased to exist, and the sense that Meghan hoped to become a major lifestyle influencer slash entrepreneur in the vein of Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart. Reports suggest that Meghan plans to continue running the company from the couple's quote "international bases." But how does a brand built on selling an aspirational Californian lifestyle resonate when its founder is living in Gloucestershire or wherever else Harry and Meghan might end up? Does a founder or leader have to live the life and values that they are selling in order for us the consumer to buy into their product? In our authenticity-obsessed age, I would venture that the answer to that question is yes. Can Meghan buck the trend? We'll be watching in the coming months to see how As Ever fares.
Today on Fortune Daily, we have a big show ahead. So for the big story, I sit down with tech mogul Bryan Johnson for a conversation about the business of a good, extremely long life. Fortune's Asia editorial director Lee Williamson joins us to talk about Vietnam's ascent to powerhouse status in Anatomy of a Deal. And editor Katerina Jouro shares her report on the crisis hitting cheese banks. Yep, you heard that right, cheese banks. That's all ahead. Welcome to Fortune Daily.
So, I start with a post you put out on X last month where you said, "I've been thinking things over and I wonder if I've taken this whole longevity thing too far. What led you to post that?"
I was making fun of myself and calling to the absurdity of who I am. I mean, I think over 60% of my social media followers have started following me around, you know, six months ago. And so, I don't think they're—people are familiar with my humor.
That's really interesting because you have been in the zeitgeist for a pretty long time now and have become one of, if not the faces of the biohacking movement. One of the things that when I told people I was talking to you, everyone wanted to know was: you talk so much about wanting to live longer, are you enjoying your life now while investing in this superhuman longevity?
That question I think is a really interesting reflection on the person that asks the question, and I think in many ways what they're trying to say is: are my current world views or my current beliefs safe, or do you know something that I don't? And so, I think that my behavior makes people feel uncomfortable because I challenge the status quo, and that I'm not doing the things that people normally do.
Would you describe yourself as happy in this moment?
I've never been happier. And I would confirm that biologically. When someone reports out, "Hey, how are you doing? Fine. How are you?" then if you get deeper, like what's really going on? It's like, "Oh my god, I'm in this terrible fight with my ex, and my kids got expelled from school, and I've got some drama thing at work." There's a certain level of difficulty that everyone experiences in life on a daily basis, and those things can be measured. You can look at a person's cortisol: is it healthy, is it elevated? You can look at levels of inflammation. You can look at their sleep quality: are they getting restorative sleep? So there's actual ways for the body to report out: is it happy, is it doing well? And if you look at my body, it's reporting it's better off. It's happier than it ever has been in its life.
You have recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, I think that affects the stomach. I wonder if that has in any way altered your view of the efficacy of biohacking.
Not at all. So if anything—first, the diagnosis: this is a condition that's 30 years old. This goes back to when I was first diagnosed with hypothyroidism. The thyroid and the stomach are grouped together in immunology. And so when there's a problem with the thyroid, you want to look at the stomach as well. And so this has been a long-standing problem. And it's counterintuitive to most people: I've been taking such good care of my body over the past 5 years that had I not done that, I might find myself in a really bad situation. In fact, I'm really surprised we haven't found more things wrong with my body. We've acquired 1.5 billion data points. So having things wrong with the body is an omnipresent condition. Everybody deals with it. It's just a matter of how fast and how aggressive those things become. But no, this is currently what it makes to be human.
And up until recently, your longevity work was very much focused on your body, as you said, but you've now expanded it to include your business partner, who also happens to be your romantic partner, Kate Tolo, which gives a really interesting perspective on women's health in the women's body. You recently shared some data on her vaginal microbiome and that obviously provoked a huge reaction online. What's your response to critics who say giving a value judgment—I think you ranked her vaginal health and you said it was in the top 1%—that giving a value judgment around women's health in this way is counterproductive? What's your response to that?
The body is insane, and in any given moment it's doing millions of things. For example, it's perfectly maintaining your body temperature right now, both you and me, right? It's maintaining proper blood glucose levels. It's maintaining proper cholesterol levels. It's fighting inflammation. It's fighting bacteria and viruses. So the body is doing all these other jobs, and the body reports out levels that are conducive to good health, and we know these levels. So it's not the case that somebody finds themselves in a high inflammatory state and it's like, "Well, you know what, that's an inflammation positivity movement." That's not a situation—the body does not do well with inflammation.
And so when we make these statements, we're talking about just pure biology, that there are ways to evaluate if a number is good or bad. Now sometimes the science is not solved, right? For example, in the gut microbiome, it is an emergent science. It's very hard to say definitive things outside of a few areas. Whereas when you talk about heart health and resting heart rate and cardiovascular capacity, VO2 max, those things are much, much better studied. So no, we're basically—we've introduced to the world over the past couple of years the idea that you can biologically age your organs. People think about the chronological age. I have an age myself for almost every organ of my body: ears, eyes, mouth, gums, teeth, like we've measured it all. And so we're just introducing this concept that you can be a certain age when you were born and a different age biologically.
You say it is biological, these scores, and it is, but that there must also be some sort of psychological component to it. Particularly in this time that we're living in, I think about every time I open Instagram, I'm being funneled images of ways I should change my face. What's your take on the potential detrimental psychological impact of us putting this very intense focus on our physical form?
I mean, there's two ways to think about this. One is I personally think that social media is going to be viewed as pollution, the same way we view lead or asbestos or microplastics or any kind of pollution. I think that's how history will view this moment for us. It is inherently toxic and it pervades anything.
You use social media a lot to get your message across. So how do you reconcile those two elements?
There's no reconciling it. We're all trapped. That's the thing. When pollution exists, everyone's trapped. You can't go outside and manufacture your own air. It's just omnipresent. And that's why I say pollution, that it is everywhere. And to be a member of society, you can choose to participate in that or you can withdraw, which both are fine routes. But I'm saying it's really a very challenging thing because being separated from the tribe is bad for us, but also being engaged has some elements of like we feel camaraderie and part of the team. So it's very mixed.
I said at the beginning that you've become one of the most recognizable faces of the biohacking industry. Without wishing to be macabre in any way, if you don't end up living an extraordinary long time, what will that mean for the longevity and biohacking sectors in your opinion?
I mean, I'm a meme. To most people, I'm not a person anymore; I'm a concept. And this was what we set out to do. There's a pretty small number of people throughout history who have memetically and philosophically and ideologically become a concept of life, death, and that wrestling match. And so I am that in the early 21st century in this moment. How long that persists, TBD. But I do represent this idea that we may be the first generation who won't die. And we may do that through methodologies of actually measuring our body, of coming up with protocols to intervene, of choosing life over death, of trying to say self-destructive behaviors is not living life, it's actually causing death.
No, I would argue that people maybe aren't asking you to be self-destructive, they're advocating for more of a middle line where maybe you go to bed a bit later, you enjoy three meals a day.
Yeah, that's fine. Again, hey, to be very clear, I love haters. I love the commentary. I love the critiques. I play with it. I think I'm a ridiculous person. I mock my own absurdity. So, I'm with you entirely on that. And what I'm saying is I think that to my assessment, we have been successful that we set out to accomplish establishing a philosophy and an idea that "Don't Die" is going to be the most powerful emergent desire of the human race. Right now, when death is inevitable, you just concede. But the moment we get a taste of being able to extend our lives and be vibrant and healthy, humanity will be ravished to do so. And so we just are a bit early, but it will come around and this will definitely become mainstream.
You say it will become mainstream, but living as you do obviously requires a ton of resources. You're very open about that. I think you said you spend around $2 million a year on your Don't Die philosophy. Is there a future then where only rich millionaires and billionaires are the people who are living into their hundreds and beyond? And if so, what does that mean for society?
If you look at the obesity challenge we had as a country, America was one of the most obese countries in the entire world. And if you said that only someone who's well-resourced could effectively get themselves out of an obese state, maybe that was true for a poor person or someone who had a moderate income. But now you've had GLP-1s, and a very large number of people are able to get themselves out of an obese state. Now, that would have been unimaginable even a couple of years ago with the trend lines. And so things change very quickly. And remember that there was definitely a movement around like, "You know what, it's okay to be obese, you don't need to worry about that," and there's actually some positivity associated with that. The GLP-1 just annihilated that. It totally changed that ideology to people wanting to be well.
So people want to be healthy, they want to be vibrant, they want to be sexy, they want to be hot, they want to find good mates. Humans face challenges, and when they face the challenges and they struggle with the internal experience, it's easier to rationalize it. So in time, I'm proving out the analog version, but in time it will become much easier, cheaper, and so then everyone will do it. But I'm saying that once these things come on board, like GLP-1s for anti-aging, humanity will change its ideology to Don't Die.
