People really want me to die. One of the craziest things in the entire world is that we give people money and power for killing other people. Can you go back in history and be comfortable at any point in time with humans running the show? I mean, we wing it.
Bryan Johnson, you are the face of the longevity movement. You are rich, popular, seemingly very young and healthy. You are also a bit of an oddball. You write and talk about your erections, your sperm strength, taking sex pills daily. You spend millions a year on you, making yourself the most expensive human lab rat in history, perhaps. Why should people believe in the merits of your longevity treatments instead of just assuming you are perhaps a self-indulgent oddball?
Yeah. It's not really about people believing in what I do. It's about the zeitgeist. And so humans are social creatures. Humans do things that other humans do. And what I'm signaling is that we are in a moment where the values of society says making money and getting high status and having power is the greatest trophy one can get. And so people dedicate all their time and attention to these objectives, even at the cost of their own life. And what I'm trying to say is we are at this inflection moment as a species where we are transitioning to "Don't Die." And that means we have a different value system. So what creates status and power and prestige is going to be different. And as crazy as it sounds, it may be your nighttime erections. It may be your fertility strength. It may be your ability to dunk a basketball at age 49.
Is the goal to delay death? Do you really believe that you will never experience death, that this Bryan Johnson is not going to have that experience?
Yeah, I think it's entirely rational. The first time in human history where a human could be seen as credible and not crazy to say we may not die. Now, that does not mean that we're going to go until the sun burns out. That's a timeframe we just can't get our heads around. But for all intents and purposes, we think about the world in terms of 70 years, 80 years. We don't think about 300 years or 500 years, but there's no reason why that couldn't be the duration of time we think about. So, yes, I really think it is a true possibility that we may be the first generation who won't die.
And you think this is possible for you specifically?
Yeah, I mean, so I'm 49 years old. Yes. I mean, even if you say nothing that I'm doing right now is going to improve my longevity, "I'm just going to increase my health span, but not my actual longevity," that's 30 years for AI to start doing something that allows me to start either curing my disease, slow my aging and/or reverse or all three.
And to achieve this, you go to very great lengths. I think, are you at 50 pills daily or more than that now?
I've actually gone down about 30.
Oh, okay. So only 30 pills a day, strict diet and exercise, a concierge team, constantly testing things. I heard you compare yourself to Amelia Earhart crossing the Atlantic, which there's no way for me to fact-check you on that yet because you haven't landed the plane. How can people fact-check you? Is it just based on how long you end up living?
The reason why I do these comparisons with Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton is because people, there's not a bucket to put me in. I'm not a politician. I'm not a business person. So people are like, "I'm confused. Who is he? Is he an influencer?" And so they try to assign a name to what I'm doing and I'm trying to say I am an adventurer that when I look back through history and I see people who did things that I personally admire, they were able to identify some impossibly hard objective that wasn't part of the global goal objective. There weren't people doing this thing and then they did it and other people were like, "That's really cool. I want to try it too." And so until I start doing this, there wasn't really a known effort of someone trying to not die. That is a new concept. It's one of the things where I think you look back a few hundred years from now and say, "What big things happened in the 21st century?" It's the transition from "die" to "don't die."
So you have these big-picture, macro, big thoughts about society, "Don't Die," but then you also post these videos online and you are very good at having what I would consider often rage-bait viral hooks and headlines. Why do that when you are fighting for the benefit of humanity, as you say? Why lean into some of those tropes that you know are going to be catnip for people online to critique you?
Yeah, I'm in this private discussion group with a bunch of influencers and content creators. And the other day this topic came up of hate and everybody kind of offered up their strategy on how to deal with hate. Their team looks through the comments and surfaces the ones that they find interesting or they never look at the comment section or like...
And you read all your comments,
I love them. I love the hate. And so what I was trying to explain that my perspective was there is no such thing as good or bad. It's all energy. It's just people trying to understand what's going on. They're trying to find their angle. They're trying to score some points. They're trying to use you to signal to their community like, "I'm like this." So everybody has their specific objectives and it's kind of like a piano. When a piano has 88 notes, and so when someone sits down to play the piano, they can play a beautiful song by using the notes. The same is true with a human. If I only play one note, only sincerity or only rage or only sarcasm, I play one note on the piano. And so by doing what I'm doing, I basically give people all the notes to play with. Somebody can take my content and say, "He's crazy," or take the content and be like, "I do this." There's so many different directions they can take it. So we try to basically allow the most playful, most musically appealing content we can create where people can play with it, positive and negative.
And I wonder how you think about the impact of that. When you walked in, we met your dog very briefly. You talked about the security challenges that you've faced. How are you thinking about your own safety, especially in relation to what you stand for with Don't Die?
It cuts both ways. I mean, I can't go anywhere in the world now without being identified instantaneously and it's challenging. One of the criticisms I get is, people say, "Why are you spending all this money on your own body? Why don't you fund a clinical trial and get something approved?" And what they don't understand is this is not about me and my body. This is about a zeitgeist shift for the human race. I am a performance artist. I'm trying to change the value system of the human race to say, "We are conscious on this planet. It's kind of unreal, and we have a chance to be the first generation to dramatically extend our lifespans and remake what it means to be human." That is insane. It's the craziest thing that's ever happened to humans on this planet. That's the goal I have. Now I do that through the means of this scientific methodical experiment and talking about these things because otherwise, if you talk about this in abstract form, no one cares. Talk about it in philosophical form, no one cares. If you talk about it in performance art where it has a vibe and an energy to it, people will engage. So they don't understand my goal. If I could spend $5,000,000 or $10,000,000 and change the trajectory of the human race on the value system, that's the highest ROI investment I could ever make versus some teeny tiny clinical study that has some kind of teeny... It's insignificant on the grand scheme of things. What I care about is, will the 25th century give me a head nod, be like, "Thank you." In 500 years, will they give me a head nod? That's the goal, is can you change the species to think about themselves differently enough? So that's the game I'm playing and everything else is like a feeder for that and just people don't really understand that's what I'm trying to do.
I don't think I've heard you say that you're a performance artist before.
That makes it all click.
Let's talk about AI. I'm an AI reporter, so this is my area of expertise. Does it have to be you that survives? Can it be an AI agent that you transfer your brain to, to feel successful?
I mean, I'm open to continuation in a variety of forms. I think there's a potential thing that's happening where we have been trying to establish rights. Like the human rights are new and there's laws we abide by in war where before it was just, you know, anything goes. There's potentially an upcoming consideration where a human or an intelligent being has a right to exist for as long as one chooses.
Now, if that's the case, if I can opt in to exist, because right now everyone, there's an exit for everybody. It doesn't have to be debated, but what if that's not the case? Then there's going to be, inevitably, a conversation about resources. Who gets to live? Who gets to die? Is there a right to exist? And if so, how does that actually work? And so I do think there's, if we are in that situation, it's a fantastic situation because we now have to grapple with disability that we have these amazingly life-extended technologies. So how do we sort the moral, ethical issues? That's a wonderful conversation to be in.
Would it feel like success to you, though, if Bryan Johnson survived as an AI agent that I could interview in 60 years?
But you as your physical self were not here anymore?
Yeah, I would, in my current mindset, I strongly prefer to continue to exist as I am.
Yeah. And if technologies emerge, I think it's going to be very hard. There's been a couple Sci-Fi shows where the person is decapitated and then their consciousness is moved into a machine and it's like, "Are you there?" And it's like, "Of course I'm here. That's great. Do we know?" So I do think those things may emerge, but it's so far down the road. But I think that I really want a continuation of my conscious existence as I stand now. And I think it's the biological imperative. Everything that is alive wants to continue to exist.
Part of the pitch of AI is the extension of life.
Talk me through some specifics. What specifically can AI do or supercharge with your effort to beat death that you feel modern medicine can't right now?
Yeah, I mean, everywhere. So I think about this in the terms of my autonomous health, cars drive themselves, software writes itself. The next inevitable thing is my body's going to take care of itself by itself. And so there's a couple closed-loop tools. So I've built an analog version. So, for example, my bed measures my body in real time and it makes adjustments to temperature to keep me asleep. That's great. I don't have to do anything. But in the case of nutrition, it's very laborious. I have to measure my body, find out what my body needs. I go to that process and loop it in. Same thing is true with therapies, and so it's very analog. Eventually, though, we'll get to these closed-loop systems where the readout my body is real-time reported to all the systems around me, water, food, environment, interventions, and they all just get fulfilled instantaneously. Again, it's probably a ways out before that happens, but it inches forward a little bit more. I mean, it's kind of like the first time you get into a Waymo, it's mind-blowing. It's like this whole thing is just crazy. I think the same thing will happen to the body. Now, we'll have things inside of our bodies where it will report things out automatically. Like I have a blood glucose monitor on me right now.
So it reports out real-time. That could be fed into my different systems. And then we also use AI for—I have—depends on how you want to count it. I have something like, you know, 4.2 billion data points on my body over the past five years. And that is—and then once you include—those are just data points. Once you include my calendar and my journal and all these other data points for all the context, there's no way any human can master that. And so we've just exceeded the capacity for a human to understand the data. So we use it in that capacity. And then, of course, all the things you're aware of, which is we're starting to make discoveries with AI where humans couldn't, like the recent one with Anthropic with the new enzyme. And so I think that we're starting to see hints that we're turning the corner.
But that's very interesting that you already have felt that the amount of data you have can only be understood by utilizing AI.
It makes me think about the number of AI researchers I've interviewed recently who've said that the technology could lead to human extinction, which feels at odds with the Don't Die movement. Are they potentially right and you're wrong?
You know, I personally don't think any human knows enough to make an assessment whether we are headed for utopia, dystopia, or extinction. I think every human is giving it their very best shot. They're modeling the world the best way they can. I am unsure how anyone can pull up with confidence that their particular thought process is somehow the thought process that renders the judgment correct. It kind of reminds me of that quote Edward Murrow said in World War II. He said, "Anyone not confused by the situation doesn't really understand what's going on." And I kind of feel that. I mean, my smartest friends are like across the entire map of how they think about AI. There's no pattern that emerges in their thought process. Everyone is trying their best. So I just don't know how anyone arrives at clarity of thought in this moment.
Where do you land, though, on AI, on this end of the spectrum, extinction, on this end, huge optimist on AI? Where are you on the scale right now?
Yep. I personally think that the thing we can most expect is surprise.
Okay, that's not an answer.
No, so I mean, I guess what I'm saying is I—there's a way—so the temptation is for me to express an opinion, right? "This is how it's going to go, and this is the emotion you should feel." And I think the other way to say is, "We don't know," which gives people a lot of anxiety, but what I do think we know is I think surprise is coming our way. Like the thing we hear about AI, the one thing I see is surprise. It moves faster. It moves in ways that wasn't expected. It has, right? You studied, you've covered this, that surprise is the only consistent outcome I can record. Everyone else's opinions all over the map and like it's like a, right, a coin flip.
Like, are they right or wrong, and who and when?
And you mentioned that you're in the group chats, you're friends with a lot of AI founders. Are you comfortable with the future of humanity being in their hands?
I mean, human—can you go back in history and be comfortable at any point in time with humans running the show? I mean, we wing it. We don't think ahead. We act at the very last moment. We can't keep our shit together. Like we're like this disaster of intelligence and yet we don't die. Like we've survived these insane circumstances. And so like we have a good track record of surviving really crazy things. So I personally am on the side of like humanity's pretty resilient. We've been through a lot and, you know, we might be able to pull this one off. So I'm actually—I think whether this all ends well or poorly, it's the most exciting time to ever exist on planet Earth. In the 4 billion years that this has been around, like this is by far—like it's not the season finale, but I mean, if we are in a simulation or there's alien civilizations watching us, they might be on the edge of their seats. This is a pretty good show.
Yeah, well, knowing these founders personally, do you feel more or less confident in their specific capabilities given that they are at the forefront of this technology?
They're nothing special. They're just like you. They're just like me. They have the same anxieties. They're the same thought processes. They're just as influenced by everyone else. There's no illusion. They're not special. It's like we're all the same.
They have a lot more money.
But you know what? Like it doesn't matter.
Like money doesn't confer judgment. It doesn't give you wisdom. It doesn't give you some superpower. And, like, we somehow, we conflate this, that if someone's made money, somehow they're more wise. It just doesn't map. They can make—
But they have more power over this technology, over how it's regulated, over how it impacts people's lives.
Sometimes, but you know, like they exist in big organizations. There's hundreds and even thousands of people at the same time working for these things. Some things they don't control. Like when you're building an AI, you don't architect it, you grow it and it grows in ways that are unexpected. And so even they, I think, are less powerful than they might imagine. And I think some of these founders acknowledge that humility is a really prized attribute to have. But you know, I've spent too much time in these rooms to think there's anything special about anyone's opinion or insight, that everyone's winging it.
Yeah, that's kind of iconic. There is an extreme version of that idea that a small number of technologists armed with their own technology that they've amassed wealth from know better than democratic institutions and people. Where do you draw the line on that?
Yeah, we are in an in-between state where AIs are brilliant and dumb. They make really stupid mistakes all the time. I would never trust my health to an AI, right? It can generate insights, it can generate suggestions, but we need to go back and double-check it, double and triple-check it. I always want a human in the loop, so they're just not ready for prime time. And we all know this from our experience. They make really silly mistakes. So they're not ready for prime time to be thrown to the ER and be like, "Run, take care of all these incoming people." But they definitely perform roles that my doctors can't. They can look at all my data. They can look at 4.2 billion data points and say, "Here's my suggested hypotheses on these various things." So maybe in time, you know what? Maybe that last 5% or 10% is going to be impossibly hard for AI. Maybe we never really get there. So humans always have some kind of unique value of this judgment or taste, they call it in other professions. So again, I'm very humble in this situation. I think what maybe as a species, we're at peak ignorance where we know enough to realize we're pretty smart, but relative to where AI will be, we might be like cavemen. There's this whole new world that will be uncovered before our eyes and we just can't quite—grok. Like, how naive we really are.
I guess I'm more so trying to get a sense from you on how you think about this idea from the sort of like techno-autocratic view that technology is going to know better than humans can know about their own choices and decisions and whether or not that feels like a taking of your philosophy that feels too far for you.
Yeah. So I think—yeah. So again, for my health, AI will do things I can't do, but I look to my doctors to make the judgment call. So in that case, human loop is very important. I would imagine—I personally want to outsource all things for my health. I don't want to ever think ever again about what I eat. I don't want to think about whether this molecule is a good right molecule or bad molecule. I'd rather just it be basically self-driving, self-writing, and just done. So I think if you could basically—if biology is actually a computational problem that can be solved with AI, I'd rather—just like if driving is a solution, it can just be done solved by AI, which it kind of is. If biology maps become something similar, I'd rather that do it for me. Now, so that's like the functional elements of me, then you go up a layer and you say, "Okay, what about my thoughts? Is it going to autocomplete my thoughts? Is it going to anticipate my mood?" Now, this is kind of where it gets interesting, where I know from measuring myself with this level of granularity, I can predict my own emotions and my own thoughts with my data. And same with my partner, Kate. When we look at each other's data, we play this game where we predict each other's data points the previous night based upon the person's behavior. It's very good. So prediction is—
Does that ever lead to a fight? You're like, "Oh no, your data must have been bad last night because you are not behaving."
I mean, we're such nerds that it's like, it's such fun game.
I get that. But I mean, like, more broadly, you have put some wild things into the public record. You once took plasma from your teenage son. You referred to him as your blood boy. You eventually stopped because you said you didn't find benefits of that. How many of the things that you're doing right now might turn out to be similar to that?
Thing that you find are beneficial and potentially are risky?
Yeah, what is unknown about the plasma transfer is that it's actually for my father. So my father called me one day. He was experiencing some cognitive decline symptoms and he was really worried about it. And he said, "Is there anything I can do?" And I said, "Dad, actually with the team today, I was talking to him and there's this new treatment called this plasma transfusion, and there's early evidence that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's may be the beneficiary of these therapies." So I said, "If you want to try, we can give it a go, but no promises." That was the reason I did it. So the media picked it up and they said it was all about me getting it from my son. So they positioned it like a vampire, but really it was love of my father. It just happened to me. When my dad said this, he said, "Hey, like, Talmage, do you want to do this too? It'd be a trigenerational thing first in the world. Do you want to play?" And so that's what it was. Now, his speed of aging after that test went down by the equivalent of 25 years. So he went from aging at the speed of a 64-year-old to assess a 74-year-old to the speed of a 49-year-old. And so he had a substantial improvement in his health. So for my dad, it was a big deal.
So it wasn't something that in your view didn't necessarily have benefits for any type of person?
Exactly. For me, no benefit because my biomarkers are pretty similar to my 18-year-old. There's not much difference.
(laughs) It's true. Whereas my father, there's a big difference. And so yeah, he saw a big improvement.
And it's an example of how this obviously is personal to you. You recently publicly disclosed that you were diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease.
Are you or your doctors concerned that any of the more extreme interventions that you have done could have contributed to that?
No, so I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism when I was 21 years old.
The thyroid and the stomach are very closely linked in immunology. So, I probably have had this thing for about 30 years. So we're actually looking to the tissue now to see if we can find, if basically we can like carbon-date my AIG, because when this happened, there was joy all around the world. I mean, I think people really want me to die. Now I get it, right? It's funny. It's ironic. I push a lot of buttons that people don't like. And so there was, in the 48 hours after I announced this, there were 1,800 articles written around the world, billions of impressions across. So it was like this global thing. Now, that said, I'm very happy I got diagnosed. So, inevitably, as we age, we're all going to get diagnosed. And actually I'm very surprised I haven't been diagnosed with more things. Like so once you start measuring your body, you just find an endless list of things that are off. I'm surprised I haven't found more things wrong with my body since I've become the most measured person in the world. And so yeah, so I'm happy I got the diagnosis. I think it actually is, if we want to fulfill this mission, if I'm a true adventurer, the first phase would be, "I try to go after the goal." The second phase would be, "I suffer some extreme setback, some diagnosis." And then the journey there would be, "We actually cure the incurable disease," and that's what we're going to do. So I like the challenge. I'm up for it. I think it's good timing. I'm going to get diagnosed with something at some point. Why not this?
You know, everything is about trade-offs in life.
And you talked about the benefits just now of testing yourself a lot because you wouldn't have found this disease. The critique that you know well is that, you know, this can lead to obsessive thinking, even addiction to your regimen. How does that feel to you in your body when I say that?
When I say is this obsessive or addictive to you?
Yeah, I mean, I say, like, how often do people check their banking accounts, and is getting a job and making money an obsessive-compulsive thing? I mean, humans are obsessive and compulsive. Like I would say the biggest addiction in the world is to make money.
But make it personal to you because I don't care about other people right now, I care about you.
