#188 Bryan Johnson: Five Habits for Longer Living
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Okay, phase one is like do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. Okay, so we've seen this throughout history. Phase two is people come with pitchforks. Phase three is you've got to survive a whole bunch of attacks. You know, like the powers that be are going to want to start taking you down. If you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little bit and you kind of have some open horizon.

And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the major dunk, you know, where people try to cancel me in society. I've survived several attempts at takedowns and now I'm still at it. And so I'm really happy I'm on the stage four now. And now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay.

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Today, my guest is Brian Johnson. In 2007, Brian founded the payment processing company Braintree, which almost killed him through depression. He sold the company in 2013 for I think about $800 million. In 2021, he decided to dedicate his significant resources to Blueprint, an algorithmic approach to optimal health and living.

Brian turned his decision rights over to an algorithm and now lives in accordance with its guidelines. In this conversation, we talk about Blueprint, the diet and sleep routine you need to reverse aging, how to overcome depression, how he stopped binge eating, the automatic rules he uses,

lessons he wished he knew earlier about money, his daily schedule for anti-aging, why posture matters, overcoming hair loss, the relationship between sexual health and biological health, hot and cold exposure, sunscreen, frying pans, and so much more. What I love about Brian is that he's living life on his own terms and he's not harming anybody else. It's time to listen and learn.

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I was thinking about where to start, and I think we'll start with your love of biographies. Where did this start? And what are a few of the lessons that you've learned from them? I suppose I approach this question with...

The contemplation, how do you understand reality? There's a few ways of doing it. We're born into this world and we're given a narrative about existence. And that narrative depends upon when you're born and where you're born and to whom you're born.

but you're told certain things about yourself and why you exist and what to care about and how society works and what ethics are norms. And there's never been universals. If you look at the thousands of different societies that have emerged on earth, it's extremely varied. If you're poking at this situation and you're saying, okay, I know that I am born into a given system and this system is not a universal truth system. It's just where I'm at in time and place.

and it's going to change in time, then you can go about poking out a few ways. You can try to say, I'm going to take a quantitative approach and say, I'm going to learn the world through mathematics or through physics or through some scientific discipline, or I'm going to understand it through behavioral psychology. You have to approach systems understanding. Biographies, for me,

was something that always intuitively helped me make sense because I was able to transport myself in time and be in different times and places instantaneously and understand with a pretty decent level of detail what was happening at that point. How people thought, what they cared about, how it contrasted with my time and place.

And so I'd say biographies have been the most useful thing I've ever invested my time in that has helped me understand reality with various dimensions and perspectives at any given moment. Are there a few that stand out to you that you reread time and time again? Probably the biography of Zero by Charles Seif, the number zero. It was not common sense to me that the number zero has not always been around.

But it took humanity a long time, thousands of years to discover the number of zero. And even when you do discover it, to really understand the potential. So from Cartesian geometry, from Euclid elements to Cartesian geometry,

or the function that zero plays in the vanishing point in art, or how zero enables the modern world in computation. And it took a long time. And so I'd say zero is probably my favorite one because it's,

entity it's an idea it's a concept it's a number that has revolutionized almost every part of society I was listening in previous interviews and you said I think it was age 24 you got depressed what happened yeah I think it was the onset was circumstantial I had my first baby and he was colicky so he just cried non-stop and

And I don't think his mother and I got a night of sleep of good rest for six months. Meanwhile, I was building a startup and I was grinding at that with all the stresses of not having income and trying to make something work that was new. And then I was in a new marriage.

And then I was also dealing with some internal turmoil related to my religious situation where I wanted to leave my religion, but I was pretty stuck in the system, my community and the family and all the societal, like all of all my community structure. And it was just a chaotic time in life. And yeah, one day, it, it, I remember it as the day my brain snapped, I just felt like something broke.

And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it just felt something felt different. And I was in that hole for 10 years. Did you know you were depressed? Yes. Unquestionably. Yeah. It strikes me with somebody who takes such a scientific approach to things that you would do the same with depression. What was the process of after you recognize you're depressed? What was the process to sort of get out of that depression? You know, I was raised in this.

small rural community that was really the existence was religion. And so I was taught to understand reality through story, not through mathematical methods, not the scientific methods. In fact, I didn't meet an engineer until I was in my early twenties. And so I just hadn't yet developed the cognitive abilities to think like a scientist or engineer.

It's always hard. It's always complex looking at your past, but I I do You know I do reflect like what would have been like if I would have had some awareness and some training early in life of how to think about the world Quantitatively and it was one of the most significant moments of my life when I read this book by Gary Becker a Nobel Prize laureate from the University of Chicago and in this he was writing essays excuse me for Newsweek and he would take a given topic and

like poverty, for example, and he wouldn't describe it in qualitative terms and story terms. He would talk about it in numerical terms. And it was, I think, one of the most joyous moments of my life to understand that reality could be understood in mathematical terms. And I did go to the University of Chicago and I got a master's degree there.

But I do wonder in that decade of depression, if storytelling wasn't my primary skill set for problem solving, what would have happened in my life? What advice would you have today for somebody who might feel depressed having been through that yourself? First, I understand you. The mind is relentless. And so when people feel suicidal, I am deeply empathetic. It is rational to want to kill oneself.

It's reasonable. So when you're in that moment, it's, it feels lonely when you try to explain to somebody how you feel and how life is not worth it. And a response is something like get over it or just feel better or like go outside. It's hard. It makes you feel very isolated and not able to reach out and get the help you need. And so one is I would say I understand you deeply and I empathize with you deeply.

and then i would say there's some basic things you can do to increase your circumstances one would be sleep i would make sleep your number one life priority like the most important thing you do in any given day is high quality sleep and i would build your life around it because when you have good sleep so many of the things in life are much better

And then if you get good sleep, you can start doing some baby steps into exercise, even going on a walk every day, doing something small and then starting to add a few good foods and a few fewer bad foods, but just baby stepping your way. Cause when you're depressed, you don't have the ambition and energy to do big stuff.

And so really it's the winds are in the baby steps and it starts with sleep because once you can sleep well, your energy goes up and your motivation goes up and your discipline and willpower increases. So try to get the flywheel moving in a positive direction where every day you have just a little bit more energy to make one more positive baby step. It's almost auto-catalytic for the negative, right? Like you, because you're depressed, you become more depressed and

Like it feeds into itself. It does. And sometimes I suppose in a dark humor sort of way, we humans kind of got stuck in this really weird level of consciousness. You know, like a dog seems to be optimal and its level of happiness about existence. And we humans are smart enough to do the remarkable things we've done, but yet our mental existence can be extraordinarily challenging. Yeah.

And it seems to be we share many of these challenging traits that it's not often that we're given a default mental state that is just nice all the time. It's a pretty brutal place in our minds, most of our minds. And I wonder if in how we're moving as a species, if we can evolve past this. And if we do look back, like, yeah, we got stuck in that narrow band that was pretty uncomfortable. Yeah.

When did you start to overeat or binge eat as you mentioned before? It was a soothing mechanism for my depression. I wanted to feel some form of stimulation. I was so dead inside something, some sort of arousal, some sort of pleasure.

And my life was just devoid of pleasure. I mean, in the religion I was in, it's like you don't do caffeine, you don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't go to clubs, you don't look at porn. You're basically just devoid of those kinds of pleasures. And you're supposed to derive pleasure from being in service of others and obeying.

obeying God's commandments and like those are your rewards that generate. Now, of course, those things do generate rewards and you, we all understand that when we do help out someone else, we do feel that. But you know, when you're grinding 24/7 on a startup, startups are just pure pain. Like you don't feel joy for years. And when you're raising babies, you have these glimpses of joy, but most of it's just really hard work with a little, with a newborn.

And so I think my life is just devoid of pleasure. And I was trying to find a vector where I could feel something. And that's what it would do for me.

Those patterns of self-destructive behavior get in the way of so many of us. I guess the question is, how do we stop the patterns of self-destructive behavior? Yeah. You know, this is the essence of my entire life's mission, this single question. What I did is, you know, after failing for a few years and a few hundred times of saying, tomorrow I'll start, right?

tomorrow is the day one last time, just this one last time and failing a few hundred times to stop that one day I jokingly said evening, Brian, you're fired. You make my life miserable.

And Evening Brian was the version of me that occupied my consciousness from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. He was tired from the day, he was fighting multiple fires, he was trying to deal with the emotional upset of all the things that had happened during the day. Very common human experience. And then in that window of time when he's beat down, that's when he goes. I don't think Evening Brian's a bad guy, I just think he...

was just trying to find relief of the burden that he felt in that role. And I fired him. And so the past few years has basically been trying to re imagine my reality of who's in charge of me, who makes decisions at what point, what is a sacrifice and what's appropriate. And what I've come down to is with blueprint. I wanted to demonstrate that an algorithm takes better care of me than I can myself.

And to do that, I became the most measured person in human history. I wanted to show that if you ask the body's 70 plus organs to speak,

and you consult scientific evidence, and then you let the algorithm run. So it tells me what time to go to bed. It tells me what to eat. It gives me all these nudges on what to do. And if I just simply say, I can't deviate, my mind can't impromptu saying, you know what? We're going to add a brownie to the lunch session here. So removing that. And I basically am arguing, this is the core of it. I'm arguing that as a species,

This is the most important question facing the human race, hands down. As algorithms improve and they increasingly become better at a variety of tasks, including taking care of ourselves and planet Earth, what do we do? I think it's the defining question and contemplation of our existence. What percentage of people do you think, if...

And you have this, right? You have a blueprint and the algorithm can take care of you better than you. We can use self-driving cars as an example, right? Which we know statistically they're better at driving than we are as individuals or collectively, maybe not individually. What percentage of people are comfortable

handing over the reins to an algorithm, which is sort of like a purely scientific process, right? Which assumes nothing, measures everything and adapts as it gets input. And yeah, this this topic is sufficiently rich and nuanced. I wrote an entire book about it titled Don't Die.

And in the book, I break myself out into multiple characters like evening Brian's present depression, you know, this guy scribe dark humor, Brian, like all these people are there. And they have this discussion on what does it mean

to have individual choice? What does it mean to be run by an algorithm? What does an ideal existence even mean? What does it mean to have choice? So it's a really nuanced conversation. But I'd say I've been hosting dinners at my house for the past few years and having two and a half hour long conversations about this topic. And it does take about two and a half hours to get people warmed up. I can abbreviate it for you though. And I can tell you the five big emotional swings that happen.

So, one is I say, I pose the question, if you could have access to an algorithm that can take better care of you than you can yourself, would you say yes? Now, immediately people are like, but what about? So, it branches into a thousand questions. And I just say, just assume what you want, let's just keep it high level and abstract, yes or no.

And then people go through this process where the majority of people are vomiting distaste. Like this is the worst idea. I hate it for all these reasons. A teeny number of people are like, please save me from myself. And the others are like, yeah, but I want to make the following exceptions, which really is no. So like there's a lot of resistance. And the next turn is I say, now imagine the 25th century is viewing us right now

And they're observing through our comments on this question, what our norms and ethics are and how we understand ourselves in time and place. In the same way, we would look at the 16th century with cold, detached perspective on what they thought. And then you flip it. So now people are looking at themselves in the mirror. So no longer are they defending their knee-jerk reactions. They're invited to be reflective. Like, how did I behave in this moment? And what am I really saying I care about?

And then the next turn is you say, what things about our current reality may change that would make our current reality unintelligible to us? So now you're in this creative space where it's like, OK, we assume all these things to be unquestionable truths.

about our existence. But we know from history, none of these things ever really hang out for very long. Society moves into new truths and new norms. So wherever we're at now, it's a temporary state.

And once you're there, like now you've swung from like no way to I'm kind of being reflective of myself to how might things change. And then the next step is about the philosophy of this change, which is zero principle thinking and then full circle back to the thought experiment. But you can see through those beats with about 12 people participating.

It takes each person the ability to cycle through these ideas and emotions and hear how other people respond. But at the very end, the majority of people who attend my dinners are like, I got to say I get it. I understand the situation. When you say it, and I want to go through some of the details of Blueprint. To me, it sounds like an algorithm for living.

And the algorithm's in charge of you. And the algorithm is basically just creating a bunch of automatic rules for success or a recipe to follow. You follow the rules, the algorithm. You create an output, which is sort of your biomarkers and your indicators that feeds back into the system and it adjusts.

It strikes me that that's sort of easy and sort of really hard too. Like, do you have, I'm imagining your house and walking through it and like, do you have bags of chips? Do you have ice cream and you just don't do it because the algorithm told you or how important is the role of environment and how important is the other stuff going on here to actually shape that behavior?

Yeah, you know, if you're here at the house and you're hanging out with me, there's not a lot of trouble we're going to get into with what I have in stock. If we want to get wild and down some extra virgin olive oil or... But no, I basically don't trust myself still. That strikes me as really interesting, right? Because it's sort of like, okay, we can have this thing of what we want to do, but now we got to create an environment or a reality where

And it can be an artificial environment, which the algorithm kind of is an artificial environment for you. And then you have to follow that. So you have to have multiple things in line. Like I'll give you an example. So a few years ago, I was trying to work out three days a week.

And I ended up going to the gym because I was like, am I actually working out three days a week? And I was like, can you give me a list of like all the times that I swiped in? And they gave me this list and it, you know, it's like once he was going like one, one and a half times a week. And so I was talking with Daniel Kahneman a little later that year about

And he had this phone call and he was talking to this gentleman on the phone. And at the end of the call, he said, I have a rule. I never say yes on the phone. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow. And he hung up and I was like, well, tell me about this. What is this rule? And he's like, well, I found I was saying yes to please other people. I want other people to like me. I'm a human. I'm a social. So I end up doing these things that aren't really good for me.

And so I created this rule to do this. And I was like, well, this is amazing, right? This is the most powerful thing I think you've done. And you've got a Nobel Prize. So like, this is really interesting because you rewire your brain in the moment to think in a certain way, which your automatic response becomes that. And so I was like, I'm going to try this. I'm going to go to the gym every day. I'm going to work out every day. And the duration or scope can change, but I'm going to exercise every day. And the conversation went from, should I work out today?

which in my head is like, oh, I have a really busy day. I didn't sleep well. I'm not going to work out today. I'll do extra tomorrow. You negotiate with yourself to I'm going to do exercise every day. And it completely changed my approach to exercise and my health. And it sounds like the blueprint is very much an automatic set of rules where you have multiple things aligned, but you're trying to follow this pattern. I'm wondering what your response to that is and specifically around

how we can correct our self-destructive behaviors. Your experience is exactly mine. To say yes and to what you said, if our conversation is about a practical topic of how do you achieve better health or how to increase crop yield or how to run a more efficient driving route, those are interesting questions. The backdrop of this thought experiment is as a species,

are we facing an existential outcome? I mean, what are the stakes? Is it we'll make a little bit less money or we'll have maybe four pack instead of six pack on our abs? Or are we really talking about life and death? And my premise is that we are in existential moment as a species on a variety of fronts. And then it invites a contemplation of if that is the case, what do you do? And so that question itself primes us

the response, like how do you stop self-destructive behaviors? Because if I say, how do I stop self-destructive behaviors without identifying these things, a person has a given willingness to change their behavior, but then there's a, it'll stop. Uh, if it's like, it's a nice to have, but if it's life or death, the behavioral change, uh, profile may be very different. And so really, I think it depends on where the person's coming from.

Someone mentioned to me recently-- I haven't verified this-- that the only way to get someone to change is to tell them they're pregnant or diagnose them with a certain condition. Otherwise, no change will happen. MARK MANDEL: That's interesting. A friend of mine had a-- it brings to mind this story. A friend of mine had heart surgery a while back, and I went to visit him in the hospital. And I was talking to the surgeon.

And the surgeon sort of had said all the typical things about changing your diet and changing your lifestyle. And when I was talking to the surgeon, he goes, odds are about 10% that he's going to do this. And I said, well, that's interesting. And he's like, I've been a surgeon for 30 years. And he's like, people used to change all the time because I used to have to break ribs. I used to have to, like there was a physical pain, a big scar, whatever.

a visual reminder and he's like, now the incision's like, you know, half a centimeter and you know, you're in and out of the hospital and there isn't a lot of pain. And so he's like people, people change a lot less than they used to. And I thought that that sort of related to what you were talking about. I'm wondering if you can walk me through at a high level, sort of the overarching day of Blueprint.

And what does it mean to live like Brian Johnson? The premise on this is I was posing the question in the early 21st century, is it the case that we have achieved longevity escape velocity, which means that for every one year of chronological time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically? And if not, where are we at? And so that's the backdrop on what my daily routine is.

And so, what we did to establish this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication that's ever been done on health span and lifespan. We then graded the evidence of these papers, and we then stack ranked them according to effect size. And then we've systematically been implementing each one of these protocols. So, becoming the most measured person in history and then using all the scientific evidence,

I wake up, so my day begins really the night before. I go to bed currently at 9:30 PM. I just changed my bedtime from 8:30. But it's 9:30 on the dot. I don't have a two-hour window of time. I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable, which no human in history had ever done. I wanted to demonstrate that you can get reliable high-quality sleep for this extended period of time.

Then I wake up naturally. I never wake up with an alarm, roughly 4:30, 5:30 in the morning. I'll weigh myself, do body composition, like weight, hydration, fat, etc. I'll take my inner air temperature. I'll take two pills. I'll do a few minutes of UV light therapy.

to start my circadian rhythm. It's still dark in the morning. I'll go downstairs, I'll make myself a morning concoction, I'll take 60 pills, I'll do light therapy on my hair. Once a week, I'll do my blood pressure. I'll then work out for about an hour in a specific protocol. I'll come in, I will make breakfast, which is a few pounds of vegetables. I'll shower and do a skincare routine.

and get ready for work. I'll eat my second meal of the day, and then I work for the day. Then throughout the day, I'll do various doctor's appointments, medical procedures, and measurement. Then I have a wind-down routine that I follow ritually. What we've done is we've tried to stack hundreds of protocols into my daily routine. Because we do so many things and we're trying to follow the evidence,

I'm not able to just randomly do things that has to be highly structured in order for us to control this experiment with the rigor we need for the results.

And so we've just done this for several years and fine tuned it. And we go through the process of measure me, measure myself, look at the evidence. We do the protocol measurement evidence protocol again and again and again. And I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal. So for example, my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. My bone mineral density is the top 0.02% of 30 year olds, which is age minute for that test.

And my strength tests, same thing, top 1.5% and 10% of 18-year-olds. So, the biomarkers across my entire body, whether it's my cardiovascular ability, my strength, my muscle and body fat are on the top 99.5%. So, it's produced a

a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I'm in pretty good health. I thought your workouts were like 25 reps of exercise and stuff. Are you, is that giving you the, the incredible strength? Uh, yes. So it's about an hour a day and you're right. It's like, uh, you know, 20 plus. And so it's mostly, I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. So I don't do heavyweights.

that are hard in the joints. But yes, even doing these things, I do it every single day. I don't take any rest days. And yeah, I'm on my bench press. It's a top 10% of 18 year olds. And we use 18 years. A lot of people, I mean, the, but 99% certainty when I say this, people are like, but wait a second, why not a 30 year old? It's because

you max out your weight to rep ratio at age 18. So even though you can lift more in your 20s and maybe even your 30s, your ratio peaks at 18. The same is true with your VO2 max, your cardiovascular fitness.

And so we do a reference to an 18 year old, not because it's an easy way to pick off a number. We do it because according to these age, these biological age standards, you're looking at when the human, when a male peaks perform peak performance. And I think your last meal is at like 1130 AM. That's right. So I have roughly 10 hours or so of fasting before I go to bed. Do you feel hungry when you go to bed? I used to, I'm now normalized to it.

And does that help your sleep? Like what happens if you eat later? I assume this was all like sort of measured and I eat my last meal of the day at 11:00 AM for the objectives of good sleep.

Because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting. I think the evidence is still maybe developing. So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute. And if it's a 46, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. If I eat at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., then my resting heart rate is going to be 56 beats.

And when I do that, I'm going to knock off about 50% of my REM and 50% of my deep, and I'll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes. And so I've done these, I've done so many experiments now is algorithmic on I know exactly what happens when I eat what at what time and how it affects my sleep.

It sounds like Blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep. Is that correct? I mean, so sleep is an important one. It's the number one priority because everything else hinges upon that. But it also, we are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every organ of the body. So we have 70 plus organs and we've tried to quantify and rejuvenate every organ of my body. So

So we just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your, your chest here, responsible for your immune system. And so, you know, if I can say I'm chronologically 46 years old,

But the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart and of my lungs and of my liver? And that's really the more powerful predictor than a chronological number. And where were you when you started Blueprint? Were you basically your biological age for your...

Like was everything the same? No, I was, I was coming from a pretty bad place. I, after being depressed for a decade and running, you know, being a startup entrepreneur my entire life and having just gone through a bunch of stuff, I was pretty beat up and I was in a bad state. So I definitely subscribe to grind culture where you do things in society to try to earn people's respect and

and have a position of a status in a social group to when you conform with these social norms. And so like when you hear a story about a colleague who worked on a program, a problem for two days straight and didn't sleep, it's like, wow, they're so awesome and amazing. You know, like that it's very hard to not to be induced to think that that's an emulation worthy behavior. So I had to peel myself out of grind culture and find out that this is the thing is we are accustomed death,

is the enabler of all things immortality. If you love country, die for your country. If you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life. If you want to achieve immortality in your professional endeavor, have your works live beyond your death. Everything we think about existence is around death.

And I was calling question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in human history where death is no longer inevitable. And if that is true, everything about our reality changes.

Do you think we'll see a quantum leap in average age in the next 15 years? Like average life expectancy? So yes, there's people who will learn from what you're doing. They'll change their habits and they'll extend their personal life expectancy. But do you think we're going to see a collective big leap? I mean, like you have sort of Jeff Bezos and Patrick and John Collison and people pouring money into...

billions of dollars into research on this topic. To me, the most compelling contemplation is trying to predict how fast intelligence is improving. So we humans have been the dominant force of intelligence on this planet for 200,000 years.

And we've been able to increase our abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation in our society with language and all kinds of organizational methodologies. We've increased our ability to utilize our intelligence with technological tools. We've now created intelligence in AI that is creating better intelligence. And if you say, what is the speed at which intelligence is improving? It's fast, faster than we can comprehend.

And so, when we model out the future and we say, what's going to happen on a 10-year time span, we are unqualified to answer that question.

Because that time, that timeframe exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine. So it's the first time in human history where we, the superior form of intelligence are up against a wall of not knowing what to predict what comes next, because it's going to supersede us so fast.

And so this is the thing, this is why I come down to the only thing I know to be true in the year 2024 is don't die. That's it. I don't know anything else other than I want to be around for what could be the most spectacular existence in this part of the galaxy.

Yeah, there's a part of me that really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right now and we don't die, we're going to get a lot of advantage from technology that thinks about things in a way that we couldn't even comprehend. I mean, you take that for inspiration. If you say, okay, well, point me to an example of where intelligence has been used that would give me any sort of bearings on what I might imagine. Okay, so take AlphaFold. It was...

Many people thought solving the protein folding problem was unsolvable or would take us some unknown duration of time. And DeepMind allocated their attention to that thing and solved it faster than anyone ever thought possible. The same thing would go. And so when these groups of people that are very talented focus on a very narrow problem, they solve stunningly hard problems faster than anyone thought.

And as these systems get better and used more broadly, and as these systems create better systems, this is why we are at this launch point. Is it going to happen in two years, one year, five years, 10 years? I don't know. But basically, if you zoom out far enough, it's in the blink of an eye at this point. And so, don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill planet Earth. And when you're building AI,

the objective function of AI is this don't die ideology. What I'm trying to say is, we've never been in a situation before where we're baby steps away from creating superintelligence. When you're in this moment, we have this incredibly practical question to ask, what do we do?

Like, how do we think about reality? What do we care about? What are our ideals? What are our objectives? And then if you start surveying the world of like, Hey, who can tell us how to practically think about reality and you probe religions and capitalism and communism and socialism and like any other group who can pull up and say, here's a playbook, here's an instruction on how you actually think about reality. And that's what I've been trying to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack of

that informs humanity on what to do on a daily basis. For example, what to eat for breakfast, all the way through the most complicated question of how do you begin thinking about a philosophical alignment with AI? MARK MIRCHANDANI: I have some specific questions about Blueprint. So how much water are you consuming a day?

Between 60 and 80 ounces. Is that the only beverage that you really consume? It is. I drink mineralized water, so it's always tea or has some electrolytes in it. Is that tap water? Is it filtered? Is it out of a glass or plastic?

It's filtered and it's ceramic. How do you think about things like Teflon and things that can sort of like get into your body or things that are widely sort of thought to get into your body like microplastics and Teflon? Yeah, I mean, I try to avoid plastic bottles. I use stainless steel cookware.

filtered water. I don't eat out. I don't use a takeout materials. So I try to avoid the, the things that are more polluting. Why vegan? I think that's a, that's a personal choice, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Is there anybody doing this? Who's an omnivore?

Yeah, my son. And are his results sort of similar to yours? Yeah, pretty similar. I think that diet is a special kind of provocative. People break out into warring tribes instantaneously. And the intensity around this topic is intense.

a lot. And so I've really just stayed out of it. I I'm, I'm impartial. I don't want to get into the war. And so I just say you do you, I do think that there's every day, there's more evidence coming out suggesting plant based diets are more conducive for longevity.

So I think the evidence in time will speak for itself. But right now, of all the battlefields I could choose, this is not the one I want. That's a really interesting way to put it. I think it's really interesting, too. People aren't convinced by data. I mean, you can show them all the data in the world and it's not going to change their mind. How do we take Blueprint and build habits with it?

So it's one thing to know, okay, here's this manual, follow this manual. And this manual is going to be better at running your life than you are. You can take your evening brine, you can put them away and just follow the instructions. But how do we actually turn that into habits that we follow? Every person is different in how they go about change. And there's many ways that people go about habit, you know, behavioral change with very habit formation techniques.

For me, it's really helpful to understand my own behavioral change in a larger context where I say I'm endeavoring to maintain my health so that I don't die, so that I can participate in what may be the most spectacular existence in the galaxy. Now, for me, that's really motivating because I have a goal and I have a reason to live and I have something to look forward to.

Now, a side effect of that is my body feels great and it looks great and I can do all sorts of things. But for me, it's the bigger goal that motivates me. For other people, they may have different goals of they want to fit into a certain pair of clothing or they want to look good for a certain event or they want to achieve a certain physical outcome. The end goal, I think the motivation is really important.

I go through the process, as you heard me say, is I like to break myself out into my various selves, because I am dozens of different kinds of people. I'm morning Brian, I'm evening Brian, I'm after-workout Brian, I'm dad Brian. In every one of those situations, I'm biochemically a different human. I have a different way of understanding reality and I'll make decisions that are different in each one of those circumstances. Like you said with Daniel, where he doesn't say yes on the phone, because in that moment, he's

Please others Daniel and he wants to be a different version to let him in his life So I do the same approach I break myself out into different persons and I decide which versions of me have authorization and win because you know like who who's in charge 10:00 p.m. You who sets the alarm for 6:00 a.m. Or 6:00 a.m. You who wants a few more minutes with the snooze button and

And so you need to make those decisions on who is in charge, because if you just let it roll out, the present you is always going to win and always get what they want at the expense of other versions of you that have your better interests at heart.

And then the third is once you get to the structural or you have a goal and you've separated yourself out and you know, who's making decisions and when, then you can do these hyper-focused things on behavioral change. Like you can pair a habit. So every time you see a given thing, you do a certain action. And so that's really in my estimation, how I've tried to stack my life where I basically, I've tried to build a life where I make zero decisions about

of doing things I don't really want to do. And I've almost got it. Like, I mean, it's actually, I'm surprised I've gotten this close to achieving it. I just don't behave in ways that I regret anymore. And that's phenomenal because I was just like walking regret before. What I love about you is that you're living life on your own terms and you're not hurting anybody. And yet what you're doing is so outside of what we consider normal.

that you get so much hate and vitriol. How do you handle that? I love it. I have such a positive relationship with the hate. It energizes me. I am endlessly amused by it. I think it's just fun to engage with. And, you know, I, depression was a much better troll than

than anyone online. My depression could eat me up pretty efficiently. It knew the zingers and the dunks. Everyone else, it's just play for me. I guess you can think about these two phases. Phase one is do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place. We've seen this throughout history. Phase two is people come with pitchforks. We know this.

Phase three is you've got to survive a whole bunch of attacks. You know, like the powers of B are going to want to start taking you down. And then phase, if you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little bit and you kind of have some open horizon.

And so that's where I'm at now is I've survived the, the major dunk, you know, where people try to cancel me in society. I've survived several attempts at takedowns and now I'm still at it. And so I'm really happy I'm on the stage four now, and now it's just opening up into a bigger gameplay. Yeah. I was amazed at some of the stuff that I read online and some of the stuff that you've been through. And I don't know if you want to share some of that or not. What's been the hardest moments for you?

I'm so happy to be alive. I appreciate existence with an intensity that I've never felt before. I know what it feels like to want to end your life. You know, like I desperately wanted to kill myself for 10 years. And I'm grateful I didn't. And I'm grateful I'm alive. So you know, when I

When people come and dunk on me or when they're trying to attack me or when they're saying things about me, it's okay. It's fine. Everyone's just trying to do their thing and deal with themselves. So it's not really worth getting caught up in. I think it's possible that we'll look back at ourselves right now and we'll say,

Oh man, like, can you believe how hard it was to be human? Like, can you, do you remember how bad it was? Like the anxiety and the depression and the jealousy and the angst and the FOMO and the, like, you know, all the things we felt like, God, that was just so hard. Like, can you imagine going back to doing that in the same way we imagine, you know, previous areas not having the technology we do today.

I think it's possible that we're just in this moment in time of a conscious existence. It's really brutal. And so I guess I don't really expect anything different. If people's internal experiences are beating them up, they're going to try to beat other people up too. It's just kind of the situation. It's okay.

Do you think you have that confidence to sort of face that because you've been to a really dark place and come out of it? Yes. I think it's also because I get great sleep. Honestly. But you've also, like, it's one thing, like I get this, you know, it's one thing when it's an anonymous person online.

uh saying you know something about you it really mostly says something about them but you've also had people close to you uh come after you and that's a whole different kind of vulnerability and feeling i i was poor my entire life and my mom made my clothes for school i um i worked in third grade i worked the school tables at lunch

to pay for leftover food so my mom wouldn't have to pay my $25 a month of cafeteria money. I knew we were poor and I was in on my family's circumstances. And I didn't make money until I was 34 years old, until I sold Braintree. And I've had money for 10 years now, for 12 years. And I've learned a lot of lessons about the complexity of money.

I really wish that I would have spent more time having made money and say, can I talk to somebody who who's had wealth and can tell me how to, how this game works. But I will tell you, uh, of the people close to me over the past, you know, 12 years, a very large number, like almost like 50% have ended up doing something to me that is, um,

That is unambiguous bad behavior, in some cases, illegal behavior. And this is not to say they're bad and I'm good. It's meant to say that when you're around these circumstances, it's oftentimes very hard to keep your bearings. And sometimes you lose your reality and you become so lost in it, you can no longer tell what's going on.

But money is extraordinarily complicated and it drives people to do crazy things. And I've seen this pattern now repeat itself so many times in my personal life, like those who are the closest people to me and to see what they would do when money was at stake, they'll do anything. And they lose touch with reality in the pursuit of that objective. I have a friend who is incredibly wealthy.

And we've been friends for a number of years now. And one thing that struck me a few years ago was his circle kept getting smaller and smaller. Yeah. And I remember asking him about this and I was like, you know, like we're hanging out last year and I'm just making this up, but there's like 30 people here and now there's like 15 and you see it shrink over time. And he said, yeah, you know,

Because people do these things that they ask me for something or they do things and then I can't really trust them. And then everybody who's trying to be my friend, and I'm paraphrasing here and I'm not going to reveal who it is, but everybody who's trying to be my friend wants something from me or that's how I think about it. So it's really hard for me to like,

open up to new people because I all like I've become skeptical of motivations and intentions and that's been what I have seen so when I've Shared my problems. They are almost identical to the life experiences other people have had It's just algorithmic like this is why I'm saying I wish I could go back in time and talk to somebody because it is so predictable how people will behave in these circumstances That you can do

so many things to try to lessen the negative outcomes. But I'm inherently a very trusting person and I am hands off, right? Just kind of let people do their own thing. And that's just not a good recipe. Most people can't thrive in that environment. Most people

will really struggle to play by the rules that we as a society have, have agreed that would constitute fairness and honesty and legality. So again, it's fine. This is not a critique of people. It's just, it's the human condition. It is what it is. And this is the same reason I, I don't trust myself. You know, like I, this is why I don't have sweets in my house.

it's not like i think i'm the best person in the whole world i know that i will cheat i will do things i don't want to do if i put myself in those circumstances so this is coming from a place of distrust of myself and all things that we humans do if i inherited or you know suddenly came into 500 million dollars tomorrow and i came to you and said brian i just got this big chunk of money

Give me the lessons that you've learned over the last 12 years that I should put in place today. What would they be? One is I would suggest you not change anything in your life for six to 12 months.

keep on with your same habits and have the money so you can distinguish between your preferred lifestyle and what money would otherwise alter your perception of what you want. Because once you start acquiring things, you start losing your perspective on where your baseline is. So, and the shock of going from zero to 500 million is so, it's so sudden that it scrambles your reality.

And then number two is it is reasonable that a large majority of people are going to want something from you at all times. And it will be small things like, you know, a niece or a nephew when you're invited to their wedding. Most people will give a gift, you know, $100 or $200 or $20, whatever the number is in that cultural norm for the family.

they're going to expect you to give something for $500 or $1,000 because you have so much money. People just assume that because you have so much money, that you have more obligation to them. There's this reciprocal relationship. Then three is, I'd say, identify what you want the money to achieve.

And that really needs to come from you on what your objectives are, because if you don't determine your objectives in life, money will run you. And so it creates this really inverse relationship where you wanted the money so you could, you could achieve your objectives, but now running money's running you and just lost yourself. And if you don't follow those three things, pretty soon you're in a situation where you don't know what is up. So what's the, what's down. You don't know who you can trust. You've got people on the inside who are, uh,

engaging in potentially compromising behavior without you knowing. And so it just creates a real challenging environment. And then you become, your internal world becomes destabilized where, like your friend said, you just don't know who you can trust. And it becomes a really isolating experience. Does that ever make you feel lonely? It's a challenge. You know, like anything, I mean, like in life, it's like all of our problems are equal. It's not like...

If you're rich, you have fewer problems. It's not like if you're poor, you've got-- I mean, there are some clear differences. If you're poor and you've got a very serious medical condition, you don't have the resources to address that, that's a very big difference. But overall, every person I know who's wealthy has just as many problems and it feels to them their problems are just as intense as everyone else at every other class of wealth.

excluding the extreme situations where a person does not have the ability to pay for basic nutrition, or does not have the ability to pay for medical bills, or is suffering from some other disparities. What I'm trying to say is human suffering is pretty universal, and there's a lot of misperception that somehow money lessens problems. It's not a panacea. It has its own problems.

And many people with money wish they didn't have the money. But of course, that's also hypocritical because if they did, just give it away. Like talk the talk. So it's complicated and nuanced. And it's just a very hard question to parse because it's hard to imagine those circumstances. It's hard for society to talk about, too. I feel like it's exceptionally hard for

my wealthier friends to talk about money, uh, than it is for other people because. Yeah. I mean, if they, they risk, um, getting slapped on the hand for saying anything that is just insensitive. Um, right. It's like, uh, because their experiences is complex, right. That it causes very serious problems in life. It creates loneliness. It, uh,

puts them in very challenging situations. And then their natural response is like, boohoo, like go complain to someone. And I understand that. It's also just like, I think it misses a little bit because we all live together in society and we share classes of problems. And so to me, it's like, it's a bigger observation about how all of us struggle all the time.

and how it's worthwhile to contemplate how we can all struggle less. Yeah, we're more similar than we tend to think that we are, I think, across not only cultures, but socioeconomic statuses too. I want to come back to Blueprint for a second. I want to go through specific things. So I want to go through nine things. I want to go through B2B.

behavioral interventions. I want to go through diet interventions and supplement interventions. And I want you to give me your top three behavioral interventions, top three diet interventions, and top three supplements that people listening to this, if they're looking to sort of like play around with blueprint, but maybe they don't want to go all in that they can do and they'll get a noticeable sort of like bang for the buck out of. Yeah, I can tell you

Uh, I would, uh, structure that just a little bit differently. I can tell you the top five power laws. Okay. Yeah. Let's do that. And so you, by doing these five things, you could achieve a life expectancy of 92. So one don't smoke. Yeah. Two is exercise six hours a week. And that's a combination of strength and flexibility and cardiovascular, uh,

Three is eat a blueprint-like diet or like Mediterranean diet. Four is maintain a BMI between 18.5 and 22.5. And then five is limit alcohol consumption and those five things are the power laws. Sleep is a contender for being a power law of health. I think the evidence is emerging now that we've got much better measurement around it.

MARK BLYTH: Talk to me about the alcohol consumption, because that one is sort of a bit vague in a sense of you didn't offer specifics. Like BMI, you're like this range. What is a limited alcohol consumption? Is that like two ounces a week? Is it six? Is it like we're best with none, but up until this point, it doesn't hurt us? DAVID ABEL: If I remember correctly, it's something like between one and three glasses of wine a week equivalent. So it's limited.

I do zero alcohol intake. You used to drink alcohol, though. Yeah, I drank three ounces of red wine for breakfast daily, yeah. Yeah, what was the thinking behind that? You gave it up, I think, I remember, if I remember correctly, it's because you couldn't afford the 80 calories in your diet? Correct. Yeah, but you liked red wine. It was delicious. It was such a wonderful experience. Yeah, it increased the joy of food a lot. Do you ever...

Have wine now or it's just like a rule that you don't have it because once you go down that path It's like a slippery slope I don't know because even small amounts negatively affect my sleep Even if I drink them drink it around noon or if I do three ounces at noon I still sometimes see effects in sleep and I

Nothing is worth trading high quality sleep to me. That's fascinating. Are there certain foods that like if you ate even at 1130 would disrupt your sleep that you know about? Carbohydrates. So breads, pastas, even rice is hard for my body to digest. Is that your body or most bodies?

uh my body and maybe it's because i don't eat rice very often so you know that the one-time occurrence but yeah when i eat anything of that variety my resting heart rate will be 55 plus you know probably the 56 57 range uh then of course anything fried but i never eat fried but if i did it would definitely do it uh flowers of all types even like almond flour yeah oh yeah i try i tried a bunch of different flowers i wanted to find you know like

uh i wanted to find some variety of foods that would do it and that that did and then also sugar so if um i you know on occasion i've tried like a fun drink like some someone took me and got a bobo or something boba or something like that yeah he's made by tapioca um but yeah that will do it for me that will increase my so i know now the list of foods that increase my resting heart rate this is the cool thing you know before i would say

I would be confronted with a situation of like, I really want to eat this cookie, but I know I don't, I really shouldn't. Then I did it anyways, you know, and I probably did that in my life thousands of times maybe. And for the first time in my life, I've gotten to a point where I can look at the cookie and have it in my hand and say, you know what? The pain of eating this thing so far exceeds the momentary pleasure from eating it. There's no way I'm going to do it.

And I can fill that with such confidence. I'm not even tempted to eat the cookie. Whereas before I was just desperate in its face to just be, you know, like there's no way I was going to win in that situation. I was gonna eat the cookie. And then after that, I was gonna eat the five more in the pack, you know, like I couldn't stop myself.

And so now my, I finally, finally, finally, finally got to a place where I can model out the pain. And that's so unpleasant that I just don't want to do it. And the pain in this case is, you know, it's going to impact your sleep and therefore, you know, it, how much of that relates to the fact that you've had eight months of perfect sleep? Like if last night was like, Oh, the streak ended and now you've got the cookie in your hand. Are you still thinking with the same logic?

Well, that's what I actually measured my brain at my brain interface company kernel. I looked at my brain based upon sleep patterns and I saw, we saw in my brain, I had less willpower when I had a poor night's sleep, when I had less REM and less deep.

And so yes, when you have bad sleep, you have substantially less willpower. - Well, it's so interesting 'cause I talk to my kids about this and I talk about it in the context of positioning and easy mode or hard mode. And I'm like, when you go to sleep, it doesn't mean you're not, like when you sleep well, it doesn't mean somebody is gonna do something, not gonna do something to you tomorrow that makes you angry or upset.

It means your ability to regulate your emotions and have a healthy response is going to be much easier than if you have a poor night's sleep. So you're playing on easy mode or hard mode, and I think sleep is one of the prime indicators of that. MARK MANDEL: Great job. MARK MIRCHANDANI: Why does posture matter? You have the best posture. I'm conscious of this, and I'm actually having better posture during this interview because of you.

You know, like I, I realized that I present complexity in people's lives that, you know, if someone sees an article about me or a video or something, and if they're not in the same place as me, it can have a net negative reaction where the person's like, damn it, I'm never going to be able to do what he does. So that makes me feel bad about myself. And so why even try?

And I'm deeply empathetic about that. And I, I wish that wasn't the outcome. And so I really try to be thoughtful and meet everyone where they're at, where I hope that when someone thinks about me and if they view my posture or they view my eating habits,

that they can think of me like an angel on their shoulder of like, I'm there, I'm there with you, friend. Like, I want you to be your best self and I understand you. And there's no judgment coming from me. And it's fine if you make mistakes, it's cool. But it's complicated. And I understand that it's difficult. And so posture, I do work extraordinarily hard

I'm also mindful that it potentially has this boomerang effect where people get discouraged. But yeah, I mean, I maintain good posture because I discovered I've got genetically narrow internal jugular veins, these two pipes on the side of the neck. And so I have restricted blood flow out of my brain when I have bad posture. So it kinks my veins.

And so I, we did a whole bunch of measurement with MRI and ultrasound. And then I worked at a bunch of physical therapy to strengthen certain muscles that maintain proper posture. And so I've just built it as a habit now, but it took me months and months. Like for example, as a family, we have a habit where one day one of my eldest son made fun of me. He's like, dad's like an AI. And he was like, he's like this, like, you know, being this AI move. And so his impersonation of me was reduced to zip.

So now every time anyone in the family has improper posture, that means if you're holding a phone directly down, you're looking at your head's hanging over or you're in some other catastrophic postural position, you'll hear a zip and everyone in the family just like right, like get straight up.

And so we're now a family where we support each other in proper posture, but it took us a while to get there. That's awesome. What's the relationship between our biological health and our sexual health? Well, yeah, if you're male and you're not getting enough sleep, your nighttime erections are eliminated and nighttime erections are an important biomarker for sexual health, psychological health, and cardiovascular health. And, you know, I've measured my nighttime erections extensively and

Basically, we try to measure everything we can measure. I know it's atypical. And so this is not a common measurement people are familiar with. But that's true for the entirety of Blueprint. We're doing things that are new. But I guess I say that because people oftentimes associate the cost of not getting good sleep with feeling a little bit grumpy the next day.

you know or a little bit more irritable but they don't really understand the whole body consequences where basically your sexual function goes to zero it's not that you can't still have intercourse jack you you can but i i pointed out it's a pretty devastating cost on on uh not getting good sleep so um yeah all these things are deeply connected and this is why coming back to grind culture

Grind culture assumes death is inevitable. So you're trying to achieve immortality through the means that you have. And so once you go back down the stack and you start questioning these things about our reality, it leads you down this path of like, do I really believe in this cultural moment of this thing? Or is there something else really bigger going on? One of my friends who was in the special forces for a long time,

uh used to be deployed often and he said one of the things that they looked for in the troops and they asked them about regularly was their uh their poop and whether they had a morning erection i love that that's fantastic i mean that's the first time i've heard of anyone else

measuring uh erections it's so important and i know it's taboo and funny and people like to dunk on it but it's really important i'm asking this as a bald dude but can you prevent your hairline from receding i mean i imagine it's way too late for me now but do you do that like can you yeah hair loss is an enormous amount of work the technology is really not great so what i do currently

is in the morning I put a topical application on my hair that was based upon my genetics of what things I do and don't respond to and metabolize. And then I put a red light cap on my head and activate certain things. I then work out, eat breakfast, and I'll shower, and I'll use a certain shampoo

that basically creates the right environment on the scalp. And then I'll do once a month, I just started this new therapy where I'll use this laser across the scalp and then I'll apply exosomes. And that's a combo therapy to help hair grow stronger and faster. And then I used to do PRP, which is you draw blood out, you pull the plasma, you re-inject the growth factors. I stopped doing that because we're now doing this laser exosome treatment.

Yeah, that's it. So basically it's a topical application, which you've probably heard minoxidil is the most common thing. So it's minoxidil plus a few little goodies, plus red light cap therapy, plus this laser and exosome treatment. Yeah. I mean, I should be bald at this point. I started losing my hair in my late 20s and the men in my family are bald basically. So I'm grateful I have some hair. I started losing mine in my like mid 20s and then it sort of stopped. Like it receded. Yeah.

And then thinned out massively and then just all of a sudden stopped. Yeah. I mean, the technology that is very close is exciting. There's cloning therapies that are being developed. So if you had a few follicles, you can clone it and then do basically like implantation. So I think it's a possibility that in like five years time,

that you would be able to restore hair yourself. Is there any biological longevity reason why hair matters? I mean, there's probably a sexual attractiveness angle to it. There's probably a confidence angle to it. There's probably a lot of internal ones, but is there any biological sort of like longevity reasons why it matters? If there is, I'm not aware of it. What do you think of hot and cold exposure? Do you do that?

I don't. It's not that they don't potentially have benefits for right applications. The hot and cold therapy didn't make our cut because it doesn't increase lifespan, healthspan. Rather, the evidence was not strong enough for my team to recommend it to be cut into the protocol. So if you go back to how we think about this, we've looked at all the scientific evidence through the specific lens of increasing lifespan, healthspan.

and then we've ranked them according to power laws.

And so this is not to say we may, we, we won't ever, you know, we won't do it at some point in time. Like we're very open-minded and we'll always change our minds following the evidence. It's just right now, we don't think the evidence supports it to incorporate as a habit for longevity purposes, which is our aim. Now, if somebody is doing it for recovery and other objectives, like that's an entirely different question. So it has nothing to say about the technologies for those, just for my highly focused objective.

If you think of blueprint as like a hundred pieces of Lego and each one of those pieces of Lego is an intervention based on scientific evidence, what's the last piece of Lego you took out and put in a new piece of Lego? Because you're like, oh, this is better than that piece of Lego. I recently started taking oral minoxidil. So there's, there's the liquid minoxidil for hair growth, you know, for, for other hair loss prevention and

I took an oral version, which initially that drug was approved for high blood pressure, but was then repurposed for hair growth because it made hair grow all over the body. But I started experiencing some side effects. I stopped that. So we do stuff like that. Like every few days, we'll try something new like that. So that one stopped. And then let me think before that.

Uh, you know, I did those, uh, blood transfusions. So my son gave me his plasma. I gave my dad my plasma and I did six of those one a month for six months. And we saw no effect in me. Uh, but when I gave my father plasma, my father's speed of aging, uh,

slowed by the equivalent of 25 years. So from a 71-year-old to a 46-year-old, and those results remained stable for six months, which is the last measurement we did. So in that case, the plasma therapy was promising.

And it didn't work in me, probably because my biomarkers are already pretty competitive with an 18-year-old, whereas my father benefited significantly because his biomarkers as a 71-year-old are pretty different than my biomarkers. And so in that case, we discontinued the therapy for me, but he could continue if he wanted.

That's fascinating. That seems like a really easy-ish intervention that you can do to extend the longevity of your parents. From the outside looking in, it can sound wild and creepy and weird and everything. On a personal level, to be able to do something like that for a parent is amazing.

a special experience. It's not too dissimilar than donating an organ. You know, that's very commonplace and we don't think of organ transplants as weird or organ donation is weird. So it's just, uh, it's a new idea. And so people think it's weird, but it's actually identical to what we already do in life. And we actually applaud people who make those kinds of sacrifices. And, and I should, I should clarify, it's not a sacrifice. Giving plasma is not a sacrifice. If our goal is not to die, um,

How do you think about the things like sunscreen and sort of like the other things that are sort of proximate to us, especially I'm thinking, especially about things we put on or in our bodies, right? So we talked earlier about plastic bottles and sort of trying to avoid that. Do you have a particular sunscreen you use? Like, I imagine you've thought about this more than any other human. We do try to be thoughtful. We're not perfect.

There's so many things we're looking at at any given time. But yeah, we use a sunscreen, EltaMD, E-L-T-A-M-D. And it's a good one that has less bad stuff in it. I generally try to avoid the sun when the UV index is above four. So I get sun exposure in the morning and in the night. And this is also another contentious part in society where

I get a lot of flack for the paleness of my skin. And, you know, it's a cultural norm that tan skin is somehow a signifier of health and wellness and beauty. But, you know, the sun ages and damages the skin and creates cancer risk. So it's not...

This culture of tan skin is not going to survive much longer because it will just naturally push in the direction where we generally, over a long enough time horizon, move towards more positive habits for society. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I think this is one of them that

our current ideas around sun exposure will change. I'm not suggesting we will avoid the sun altogether. I'm suggesting we will be more mindful. It won't be a case where, because currently our general dispositions are pretty brazen towards the sun. It's like, yeah,

It's not a careful balance of get sun exposure, but only so much. It's like unadulterated sun exposure is kind of like this. It kind of is like around certain dietary preferences where it's really a much bigger social thing than it is a data thing or science thing.

And that's fine. This is how people kind of break out into camps. But we measure my skin age using multispectral imaging and using a whole bunch of other technologies. So we see exactly what happens when. And by looking at the data, it's just very hard to... It's very hard to...

go do something that's going to actively accelerate my speed of aging when the objective of this project is to try to slow it as much as possible. And then I want to ask, just before we sort of wrap up here, how do you envision, and I know we don't have a long window in terms of what we can see, but if you zoom out, how do you see AI helping us? I actually, I tried to embody the problem of AI.

I tried to become the species as a problem. And so I did that with a thought experiment where I said, okay, I'm a collection of 35 trillion cells. And that's a lot of intelligent agents all doing their own thing with different objectives. The body doesn't have a singular objective. The body has all kinds of conflicting objectives at all moments. And I wanted to see

Could I achieve goal alignment within me, Brian Johnson? And that's what I've been trying to do. And so first I had to say, okay, in order to understand these 35 trillion cells, I need to get a read of as many of them as possible. Then I need to find the evidence to tell me how I align the cells. And then I need to implement it with exactitude. Now, this is a problem that is identical to AI. So we're building the superintelligence

And we then are going to give it objective functions and say, all right, AI, do this, you know, like solve this math problem or help me write this thing or have this conversation with me. Whatever the thing we're asking it to do, it has goals and it has goals. We've programmed into it. It has goals that it emerges from the system itself. So we're basically trying to say, what are our goals under what circumstances and for whom? So it's a giant goal alignment problem.

So my situation, I had to say, okay, is 10:00 PM Brian in charge who sets the alarm or 6:00 AM Brian who wants to hit this news button? Who's in charge and under what circumstance? That's the same kind of goal alignment problem you have with AI. And it's the same kind of problem we have with planet Earth. So Earth needs to be a home where we can thrive. If we kill Earth, we're in a bad situation. And so when I say don't die, it's don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't let the planet die, don't kill it, and align AI with don't die.

Don't die is deceptively simple and endlessly expansive. It is a heuristic. It is a computational model. It is a mathematical framework. It is a biological system. It is a closed up algorithm. All those things in two words.

And this is what I'm putting forward as a species, is if we care to be around for the future, we need to be able to figure out how to cooperate at the most basic level. And Don't Die is the most played game in every single minute of every single day on planet Earth. There's not a game, even capitalism is not played more than Don't Die. Every two seconds, you and I breathe to not die.

We look both ways before we cross the street, we throw out moldy food. It is the most played game in existence. Now, the moment you stand up above "Don't Die", you break out into a billion different directions of what people want, how they understand the world, what they care about, what they'll do and why, all their rules and justifications. So, you really have to say, if we're trying to goal-align a superintelligence around something and not kill the Earth and not kill each other and not die ourselves,

How do you do it? And that's what I've tried to put forward is this is an actual plan, a practical plan that spans what to eat for breakfast and how to align a super intelligent system with all of our interests. That's beautiful. We always ask the same question to end, which is what is success for you? But I have a feeling it's going to be two words. I would say it's the courage to believe that I don't know. That's a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. Thanks a lot for your time. Thanks for having me.

All right. It's time for a few of my reflections after that conversation. That went pretty amazing. I thought I really, and so, you know, I try to get into these things. Like I've been eating Brian's diet for the last week.

with a few exceptions here and there. But generally speaking, the pudding and the bowls are pretty good. They're awesome. They're missing a little bit of salt for my taste, but the reason behind that, I talked to him after, and the reason behind that is that the lentils and stuff have enough salt in them that if you consume the quantities that he's talking about on his website, you actually get the daily amount of salt that you need. I loved exploring...

little bit of different angles to it I think the most surprising part of this conversation for me was the lessons on money that he wishing you earlier and I haven't heard him talk about that anywhere else I really enjoyed that the posture thing I find myself sitting up straight right now even noticing it and I think that that's a really good sort of angle to it I love the idea that you know we can

improve our sleep as the one critical variable and everything else falls in line. Sleep is a lead domino to so many other things and sleep positions you to play the next day on easy mode. It doesn't change the day that's coming at you, but it does change how you handle it. And I think one of the things that I'm going to try is just experimenting eating dinner a little earlier and seeing how that affects my resting heart rate while I sleep. Thanks for listening and learning with me until next time.

Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog slash podcast, or just Google The Knowledge Project.

The Farnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog.com. Until next time.