#188 Bryan Johnson: Five Habits for Longer Living

0:00:00 Okay, phase one is like, do something that is unrecognizable in your time and place.
0:00:06 Okay, so we’ve seen this throughout history.
0:00:09 Phase two is people come with pitchforks.
0:00:12 Phase three is you’ve got to survive a whole bunch of attacks, you know, like the power
0:00:18 to be you’re going to want to start taking you down.
0:00:21 If you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little bit and you kind
0:00:26 of have some open horizon.
0:00:28 And so that’s where I’m at now is I’ve survived the major dunk, you know, where people try
0:00:32 to cancel me in society.
0:00:34 I’ve survived several attempts at takedowns and now I’m still at it.
0:00:39 And so I’m really happy I’m on the stage four now.
0:00:42 And now it’s just opening up into a bigger gameplay.
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0:01:46 Today my guest is Brian Johnson.
0:01:49 In 2007, Brian founded the payment process and company Brain Tree, which almost killed
0:01:54 him through depression.
0:01:55 He sold the company in 2013 for I think about 800 million.
0:01:59 In 2021, he decided to dedicate his significant resources to Blueprint, an algorithmic approach
0:02:06 to optimal health and living.
0:02:08 Brian turned his decision rights over to an algorithm and now lives in accordance with
0:02:13 its guidelines.
0:02:15 In this conversation, we talk about Blueprint, the diet and sleep routine you need to reverse
0:02:19 aging, how to overcome depression, how he stopped binge eating, the automatic rules
0:02:25 he uses, lessons he wished he knew earlier about money, his daily schedule for anti-aging,
0:02:32 why posture matters, overcoming hair loss, the relationship between sexual health and
0:02:37 biological health, hot and cold exposure, sunscreen, frying pans, and so much more.
0:02:43 What I love about Brian is that he’s living life on his own terms and he’s not harming
0:02:48 anybody else.
0:02:51 It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:59 So what’s it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken?
0:03:02 Well, let’s say I’m at a food truck I’ve never tried before.
0:03:05 Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco?
0:03:08 No, sir.
0:03:09 I’m keeping it simple.
0:03:10 Starting small, that’s trading on Kraken.
0:03:12 Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket.
0:03:17 Easy.
0:03:18 Go to kraken.com and see what Crypto can be.
0:03:21 Not invested by a script of trading involves risk of loss.
0:03:23 If you’re on the road, you have a license plate, but not every license plate supports
0:03:33 our provincial parks.
0:03:35 Proceeds from BC Park’s license plates help conserve the beauty of nature, from the peaks
0:03:41 of our mountains to the shores of our beaches.
0:03:44 Adventure starts with a license plate.
0:03:47 Choose the one that gives back.
0:03:49 Ensure how BC Parks license plates help protect our parks at bcparks.ca/getinvolved.
0:03:56 A message from the government of British Columbia.
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0:04:01 That silence has two friends enjoying the new creamy pommageon and bacon Kota Pounder
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0:04:30 I was thinking about where to start, and I think we’ll start with your love of biographies.
0:04:34 Where did this start, and what are a few of the lessons that you’ve learned from them?
0:04:40 I suppose I approach this question with the contemplation, how do you understand reality?
0:04:49 There’s a few ways of doing it.
0:04:50 We’re born into this world and we’re given a narrative about existence, and that narrative
0:04:56 depends upon when you’re born and where you’re born and to whom you’re born.
0:05:02 But you’re told certain things about yourself and why you exist and what to care about and
0:05:08 how society works and what ethics are and norms, and there’s never been universals.
0:05:13 If you look at the thousands of different societies that have emerged on earth, it’s
0:05:17 extremely varied.
0:05:20 If you’re poking at this situation and you’re saying, “Okay, I know that I’m born into a
0:05:25 given system and this system is not a universal truth system, it’s just where I’m at in time
0:05:29 and place and it’s going to change in time,” then you can go about poking at a few ways.
0:05:36 You can try to say, “I’m going to take a quantitative approach and say I’m going to learn the world
0:05:40 through mathematics or through physics or through some scientific discipline or I’m
0:05:46 going to understand it through behavioral psychology.”
0:05:50 You have to approach systems understanding, and biographies for me was something that
0:05:57 always intuitively helped me make sense because I was able to transport myself in time and
0:06:03 be in different times and places instantaneously and understand with a pretty decent level
0:06:10 of detail what was happening at that point, how people thought, what they cared about,
0:06:16 how it contrasted with my time and place.
0:06:18 I’d say biographies have been the most useful thing I’ve ever invested my time in that has
0:06:25 helped me understand reality with various dimensions and perspectives at any given moment.
0:06:32 Are there a few that stand out to you that you reread time and time again?
0:06:37 Probably the biography of Zero by Charles Seif, the number zero.
0:06:43 It was not common sense to me that the number zero has not always been around, but it took
0:06:49 humanity a long time, thousands of years to discover the number of zero, and even when
0:06:55 you do discover it, to really understand the potential.
0:07:00 From Cartesian geometry, from Euclid elements to Cartesian geometry, or the function that
0:07:06 zero plays in the vanishing point in art, or how zero enables the modern world in computation.
0:07:13 It took a long time.
0:07:15 I’d say zero is probably my favorite one because it’s an entity, it’s an idea, it’s
0:07:23 a concept, it’s a number that has revolutionized almost every part of society.
0:07:28 I was listening in previous interviews and you said, “I think it was age 24.
0:07:33 You got depressed.
0:07:35 What happened?”
0:07:36 I think the onset was circumstantial.
0:07:38 I had my first baby, and he was colicky, so he just cried nonstop.
0:07:46 I don’t think his mother and I got a night of sleep of good rest for six months.
0:07:51 Meanwhile, I was building a startup, and I was grinding at that with all the stresses
0:07:56 of not having income and trying to make something work that was new.
0:08:01 Then I was in a new marriage, and then I was also dealing with some internal turmoil related
0:08:06 to my religious situation where I wanted to leave my religion, but I was pretty stuck
0:08:12 in the system, my community and the family, and all of my community structure.
0:08:19 It was just a chaotic time in life.
0:08:22 One day, I remember it as the day my brain snapped.
0:08:28 I just felt like something broke, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something felt different.
0:08:34 I was in that hole for 10 years.
0:08:37 Did you know you were depressed?
0:08:39 Yes, unquestionably, yeah.
0:08:43 It strikes me with somebody who takes such a scientific approach to things that you would
0:08:49 do the same with depression.
0:08:51 What was the process of, after you recognized you were depressed, what was the process to
0:08:57 sort of get out of that depression?
0:08:59 I was raised in this small rural community that was really, the existence was religion,
0:09:09 and so I was taught to understand reality through story, not through mathematical methods,
0:09:18 not through scientific methods.
0:09:19 In fact, I didn’t meet an engineer until I was in my early 20s, and so I just hadn’t
0:09:27 yet developed the cognitive abilities to think like a scientist or engineer.
0:09:33 It’s always complex looking at your past, but I do reflect what would have been like
0:09:41 if I would have had some awareness and some training early in life of how to think about
0:09:45 the world quantitatively.
0:09:48 It was one of the most significant moments of my life when I read this book by Gary
0:09:51 Becker, a Nobel Prize Laureate from the University of Chicago.
0:09:57 He was writing essays for Newsweek, and he would take a given topic like poverty, for
0:10:04 example, and he wouldn’t describe it in qualitative terms, in story terms.
0:10:09 He would talk about it in numerical terms, and it was, I think, one of the most joyous
0:10:15 moments of my life to understand that reality could be understood in mathematical terms.
0:10:25 I did go to the University of Chicago, and I got a master’s degree there, but I do wonder
0:10:30 in that decade of repression, if storytelling wasn’t my primary skill set for problem solving,
0:10:37 what would have happened in my life?
0:10:39 What advice would you have today for somebody who might feel depressed, having been through
0:10:44 that yourself?
0:10:45 First, I understand you.
0:10:49 The mind is relentless, and so when people feel suicidal, I am deeply empathetic.
0:10:57 It is rational to want to kill oneself.
0:11:00 It’s reasonable, so when you’re in that moment, it feels lonely when you try to explain to
0:11:07 somebody how you feel and how life is not worth it, and a response is something like
0:11:14 get over it, or just feel better, or go outside.
0:11:19 It’s hard.
0:11:20 It makes you feel very isolated and not able to reach out and get the help you need.
0:11:27 One is, I would say I understand you deeply, and I empathize with you deeply, and then
0:11:32 I would say there’s some basic things you can do to increase your circumstances.
0:11:38 One would be sleep.
0:11:40 I would make sleep your number one life priority.
0:11:43 The most important thing you do at any given day is high-quality sleep, and I would build
0:11:48 your life around it, because when you have good sleep, so many of the things in life
0:11:53 are much better, and then if you get good sleep, you can start doing some baby steps
0:11:58 into exercise, even going on a walk every day, doing something small, and then starting
0:12:02 to add a few good foods and a few fewer bad foods, but just baby stepping your way, because
0:12:10 when you’re depressed, you don’t have the ambition and energy to do big stuff, and so
0:12:15 really it’s the winds that are in the baby steps, and it starts to sleep, because once
0:12:18 you can sleep well, your energy goes up, and your motivation goes up, and your discipline
0:12:23 and willpower increases, so try to get the flywheel moving in a positive direction, where
0:12:29 every day you have just a little bit more energy to make one more positive baby step.
0:12:36 It’s almost autocatalytic for the negative, right?
0:12:40 Like you, because you’re depressed, you become more depressed, like it feeds into itself.
0:12:45 It does, and sometimes I suppose in a dark humorous sort of way, we humans kind of got
0:12:54 stuck in this really weird level of consciousness, like a dog seems to be optimal, and it’s level
0:13:04 of happiness about existence, and we humans are smart enough to do the remarkable things
0:13:09 we’ve done, but yet our mental existence can be extraordinarily challenging, and it seems
0:13:15 to be we share many of these challenging traits, that it’s not often that we’re given a default
0:13:21 mental state that is just nice all the time.
0:13:24 It’s a pretty brutal place in our minds, most of our minds, and I wonder if in how we’re
0:13:29 moving as a species if we can evolve past this, and if we do look back, and like, yeah,
0:13:35 we got stuck in that narrow band that was pretty uncomfortable.
0:13:39 When did you start to overeat or binge eat, as you mentioned before?
0:13:45 It was a soothing mechanism for my depression.
0:13:49 I wanted to feel some form of stimulation.
0:13:52 I was so dead inside, something, some sort of arousal, some sort of pleasure.
0:14:00 My life was just devoid of pleasure.
0:14:03 In the religion I was in, it’s like you don’t do caffeine, you don’t smoke, you don’t drink,
0:14:09 you don’t go to clubs, you don’t look at porn, you basically just devoid of those kinds of
0:14:14 pleasures, and you’re supposed to derive pleasure from being in service of others and obeying
0:14:21 God’s commandments, and those are your rewards that generate.
0:14:25 Of course, those things do generate rewards, and we all understand that when we do help
0:14:30 up someone else, we do feel that, but when you’re grinding 24/7 on a startup, startups
0:14:36 are just pure pain.
0:14:38 You don’t feel joy for years, and when you’re raising babies, you have these glimpses of
0:14:42 joy, but most of it’s just really hard work with a newborn, and so I think my life is
0:14:48 just devoid of pleasure, and I was trying to find a vector where I could feel something,
0:14:55 and that’s what it would do for me.
0:14:57 Those patterns of self-destructive behavior get in the way of so many of us.
0:15:01 I guess the question is, how do we stop the patterns of self-destructive behavior?
0:15:08 This is the essence of my entire life’s mission, this single question.
0:15:15 What I did is after failing for a few years and a few hundred times of saying, “Tomorrow
0:15:22 I’ll start, tomorrow is the day,” one last time, just this one last time, and failing
0:15:28 a few hundred times to stop that, one day I jokingly said, “Evening, Brian, you’re fired.
0:15:35 You make my life miserable,” and evening, Brian was the version of me that occupied
0:15:40 my consciousness from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. He was tired from the day.
0:15:45 He was fighting multiple fires.
0:15:47 He was trying to deal with the emotional upset of all the things that had happened during
0:15:52 the day, very common human experience, and then in that window of time, when he’d be
0:15:58 down, that’s when he goes, “I don’t think evening, Brian’s a bad guy.
0:16:02 I just think he was just trying to find a relief of the burden that he felt in that
0:16:07 role,” and I fired him.
0:16:10 So the past few years has basically been trying to reimagine my reality of who’s in charge
0:16:19 of me, who makes decisions, at what point, what is a sacrifice, and what’s appropriate,
0:16:23 and what I’ve come down to is with Blueprint, I wanted to demonstrate that an algorithm takes
0:16:30 better care of me than I can myself, and to do that, I became the most measured person
0:16:36 in human history.
0:16:37 I wanted to show that if you ask the body’s 70 plus organs to speak, and you consult scientific
0:16:44 evidence, and then you let the algorithm run, so it tells me what time to go to bed, it
0:16:49 tells me what to eat, it gives me all these nudges on what to do, and if I just simply
0:16:54 say, “I can’t deviate,” my mind can’t impromptu, saying, “You know what, we’re going to add
0:16:59 a brownie to the lunch session here.”
0:17:02 So removing that, and I basically am arguing, this is the core of it, I’m arguing that
0:17:10 as a species, this is the most important question facing the human race hands down.
0:17:19 As algorithms improve, and they increasingly become better at it at a variety of tasks,
0:17:25 including taking care of ourselves and planet Earth, what do we do?
0:17:30 I think it’s the defining question and contemplation of our existence.
0:17:35 What percentage of people do you think, and you have this, you have a blueprint, and the
0:17:41 algorithm can take care of you better than you.
0:17:44 We can use self-driving cars as an example, which we know statistically they’re better
0:17:48 at driving than we are as individuals, or collectively, maybe not individually.
0:17:57 What percentage of people are comfortable handing over the reins to an algorithm, which
0:18:03 is a purely scientific process, which assumes nothing, measures everything, and adapts as
0:18:09 it gets input.
0:18:11 Yeah, this topic is sufficiently rich and nuanced.
0:18:16 I wrote an entire book about it titled “Don’t Die,” and in the book, I break myself out
0:18:22 into multiple characters, like evening brines, present depression, this guy’s scribe, dark
0:18:28 humor brine, all these people are there, and they have this discussion on what does it
0:18:35 mean to have individual choice?
0:18:38 What does it mean to be run by an algorithm?
0:18:40 What does an ideal existence even mean?
0:18:43 What does it mean to have choice?
0:18:45 It’s a really nuanced conversation, but I’d say I’ve been hosting dinners at my house
0:18:50 for the past few years, and having two and a half hour long conversations about this
0:18:55 topic, and it does take about two and a half hours to get people warmed up.
0:18:59 I can abbreviate it for you, though, and I can tell you the five big emotional swings
0:19:04 that happen.
0:19:05 One, as I say, I pose the question, if you could have access to an algorithm that can
0:19:09 take better care of you than you can yourself, would you say yes?
0:19:13 Now, immediately, people are like, but what about?
0:19:16 It branches into a thousand questions.
0:19:18 I just say, just assume what you want.
0:19:21 Let’s just keep it high level and abstract, yes or no.
0:19:25 Then people go through this process where the majority of people are vomiting distaste.
0:19:31 This is the worst idea.
0:19:32 I hate it for all these reasons.
0:19:34 A teeny number of people are like, please save me from myself.
0:19:39 The others are like, yeah, but I want to make the following exceptions, which really is no.
0:19:44 There’s a lot of resistance.
0:19:45 The next term, as I say, now imagine the 25th century is viewing us right now, and they’re
0:19:51 observing through our comments on this question, what our norms and ethics are, and how we
0:19:57 understand ourselves in time and place.
0:19:58 In the same way, we would look at the 16th century with cold, detached perspective on
0:20:03 what they thought, and then you flip it.
0:20:07 Now, people are looking at themselves in the mirror, so no longer are they defending their
0:20:12 knee-jerk reactions.
0:20:14 They’re invited to be reflective.
0:20:16 How did I behave in this moment?
0:20:18 What am I really saying I care about?
0:20:21 The next turn is you say, what things about our current reality may change that would
0:20:29 make our current reality unintelligible to us?
0:20:33 Now you’re in this creative space where it’s like, okay, we assume all these things to be
0:20:38 unquestionable truths about our existence, but we know from history, none of these things
0:20:45 ever really hang out for very long.
0:20:47 Society moves into new truths and new norms, so wherever we’re at now, it’s a temporary
0:20:53 state.
0:20:54 Once you’re there, now you’ve swung from no way to, I’m being reflective of myself to
0:21:00 how might things change, and then the next step is about the philosophy of this change,
0:21:05 which is zero’s principle thinking, and then full circle back to the thought experiment.
0:21:09 You can see through those beats with about 12 people, it takes each person the ability
0:21:15 to cycle through these ideas and emotions and hear how other people respond, but at the
0:21:20 very end, the majority of people who attend my dinners are like, I got to say I get it.
0:21:26 I understand the situation.
0:21:29 When you say it, and I want to go through some of the details of Blueprint.
0:21:33 To me, it sounds like an algorithm for living, and the algorithms in charge of you, and the
0:21:39 algorithm is basically just creating a bunch of automatic rules for success or a recipe
0:21:44 to follow.
0:21:45 You follow the rules, the algorithm.
0:21:50 You create an output, which is sort of your biomarkers and your indicators that feeds
0:21:54 back into the system and it adjusts.
0:21:58 It strikes me that that’s sort of easy and really hard, too.
0:22:04 Do you have, I’m imagining your house and walking through it, and do you have bags
0:22:09 of chips?
0:22:10 Do you have ice cream?
0:22:11 You just don’t do it because the algorithm told you?
0:22:13 Or how important is the role of environment, and how important is the other stuff going
0:22:18 on here to actually shape that behavior?
0:22:23 If you’re here at the house and you’re hanging out with me, there’s not a lot of trouble we’re
0:22:27 going to get into with what I have in stock.
0:22:30 If we want to get wild and down some extra virgin olive oil, but no, I basically don’t
0:22:38 trust myself still.
0:22:40 That strikes me as really interesting because it’s sort of like, okay, we can have this
0:22:44 thing of what we want to do, but now we get to create an environment or a reality, and
0:22:49 it can be an artificial environment, which the algorithm kind of is an artificial environment
0:22:53 for you.
0:22:55 You have to follow that.
0:22:56 You have to have multiple things in line.
0:22:58 I’ll give you an example.
0:23:00 A few years ago, I was trying to work out three days a week.
0:23:06 I ended up going to the gym because I was like, “Am I actually working out three days
0:23:09 a week?”
0:23:10 I was like, “Can you give me a list of all the times that I swiped in?”
0:23:13 They gave me this list, and it was going like one and a half times a week.
0:23:19 I was talking with Daniel Kahneman a little later that year, and he had this phone call,
0:23:25 and he was talking to this gentleman on the phone.
0:23:27 At the end of the call, he said, “I have a rule.
0:23:30 I never say yes on the phone.
0:23:32 I’ll have to get back to you tomorrow.”
0:23:34 He hung up, and I was like, “Tell me about this.
0:23:36 What is this rule?”
0:23:37 He’s like, “Well, I found I was saying yes to please other people.
0:23:41 I want other people to like me.
0:23:43 I’m a human.
0:23:44 I’m a social.”
0:23:45 I end up doing these things that aren’t really good for me.
0:23:48 I created this rule to do this, and I was like, “Well, this is amazing.
0:23:52 This is the most powerful thing I think you’ve done.
0:23:54 You’ve got a Nobel Prize.”
0:23:56 This is really interesting because you rewire your brain in the moment to think in a certain
0:24:01 way, which your automatic response becomes that.
0:24:04 I was like, “I’m going to try this.
0:24:06 I’m going to go to the gym every day.
0:24:08 I’m going to work out every day, and the duration or scope can change, but I’m going to exercise
0:24:12 every day.”
0:24:13 The conversation went from should I work out today, which in my head is like, “Oh, I have
0:24:18 a really busy day.
0:24:19 I didn’t sleep well.
0:24:20 I’m not going to work out today.
0:24:21 I’m going to do extra tomorrow.”
0:24:22 You negotiate with yourself, “I’m going to do exercise every day,” and it completely
0:24:26 changed my approach to exercise and my health.
0:24:31 It sounds like the blueprint is very much an automatic set of rules where you have multiple
0:24:36 things aligned, but you’re trying to follow this pattern.
0:24:39 I’m wondering what your response to that is, and specifically around how we can correct
0:24:45 our self-destructive behaviors.
0:24:48 Your experience is exactly mine.
0:24:50 To say yes, and to what you said, if our conversation is about a practical topic of how do you achieve
0:24:58 better health, or how to increase crop yield, or how to run a more efficient driving route.
0:25:07 Those are interesting questions.
0:25:08 The backdrop of this thought experiment is, as a species, are we facing an existential
0:25:15 outcome?
0:25:19 What are the stakes?
0:25:20 Is it we’ll make a little bit less money, or we’ll have maybe a four-pack instead of
0:25:24 six-pack on our abs, or are we really talking about life and death?
0:25:29 My premise is that we are in existential moment as a species on a variety of fronts.
0:25:36 Then it invites a contemplation of, if that is the case, what do you do?
0:25:42 That question itself primes the response.
0:25:47 How do you stop self-destructive behaviors?
0:25:51 If I say how do I stop self-destructive behaviors, without identifying these things, a person
0:25:59 has a given willingness to change their behavior, but then it’ll stop if it’s a nice to have.
0:26:07 If it’s life or death, the behavioral change profile may be very different.
0:26:14 Really, I think it depends on where the person is coming from.
0:26:18 Someone mentioned to me recently, I haven’t verified this, that the only way to get someone
0:26:24 to change is to tell them they’re pregnant, or diagnose them with a certain condition.
0:26:29 Otherwise, no change will happen.
0:26:32 That’s interesting.
0:26:33 A friend of mine had heart surgery a while back, and I went to visit him in the hospital.
0:26:45 I was talking to the surgeon, and the surgeon had said all the typical things about changing
0:26:51 your diet and changing your lifestyle.
0:26:54 When I was talking to the surgeon, he goes, “Oz are about 10% that he’s going to do this.”
0:27:02 I said, “Well, that’s interesting.”
0:27:04 He’s like, “I’ve been a surgeon for 30 years.”
0:27:09 People used to change all the time, because I used to have to break ribs, there was a
0:27:13 physical pain, a big scar, a visual reminder.
0:27:17 He’s like, “Now the incision is half a centimeter, and you’re in and out of the hospital and
0:27:24 there isn’t a lot of pain.”
0:27:27 People change a lot less than they used to.
0:27:29 I thought that that sort of related to what you were talking about.
0:27:33 I’m wondering if you can walk me through at a high level the overarching day of blueprint.
0:27:41 What does it mean to live like Brian Johnson?
0:27:44 The premise on this is I was posing the question, in the early 21st century, is it the case
0:27:51 that we have achieved longevity escape velocity, which means that for every one year of chronological
0:27:58 time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically?
0:28:03 If not, where are we at?
0:28:05 That’s the backdrop on what my daily routine is.
0:28:09 What we did to establish this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication
0:28:14 that’s ever been done on health span and lifespan.
0:28:18 We then graded the evidence of these papers and we then stack ranked them according to
0:28:23 effect size.
0:28:24 Then we’ve systematically been implementing each one of these protocols.
0:28:30 Becoming the most measured person in history and then using all the scientific evidence.
0:28:35 My day begins really the night before.
0:28:36 I go to bed currently at 9.30 PM.
0:28:39 I just changed my bedtime from 8.30, but it’s 9.30 on the dot.
0:28:46 I don’t have a two hour window of time.
0:28:49 I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable, which no human in
0:28:54 history had ever done.
0:28:55 I wanted to demonstrate that you can get reliable high quality sleep for this extended period
0:28:59 of time.
0:29:00 Then I wake up naturally and never wake up with an alarm, roughly 4.30, 5.30 in the morning.
0:29:06 I’ll weigh myself, the body composition, weight, hydration, fat, et cetera.
0:29:13 I’ll take my inner ear temperature.
0:29:16 I’ll take two pills.
0:29:18 I’ll do a few minutes of UV light therapy to start my circadian rhythm.
0:29:24 It’s still dark in the morning.
0:29:25 I’ll go downstairs.
0:29:26 I’ll make myself a morning concoction.
0:29:28 I’ll take 60 pills.
0:29:30 I’ll do light therapy on my hair.
0:29:32 Like once a week, I’ll do my blood pressure.
0:29:36 I’ll then work out for about an hour in a specific protocol.
0:29:40 I’ll come in, I will make breakfast, which is a few pounds of vegetables.
0:29:45 I’ll shower, I’ll do a skincare routine, and get ready for work.
0:29:49 I’ll eat my second meal of the day, and then I work for the day.
0:29:54 Then throughout the day, I’ll do various doctor’s appointments, medical procedures,
0:30:00 and measurement.
0:30:01 Then I have a wind down routine that I follow ritually.
0:30:06 What we’ve done is we’ve tried to stack hundreds of protocols into my daily routine because
0:30:13 we do so many things and we’re trying to follow the evidence.
0:30:16 I’m not able to just randomly do things that has to be highly structured in order for us
0:30:20 to control this experiment with the rigor we need for the results.
0:30:25 We’ve just done this for several years and fine tuned it.
0:30:28 We go through the process of measure myself, look at the evidence, we do the protocol,
0:30:33 measurement, evidence protocol, again and again and again.
0:30:36 I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal.
0:30:39 For example, my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds.
0:30:46 My bone mineral density is in the top 0.02% of 30-year-olds, which is age-minute for that
0:30:52 test.
0:30:53 My strength test, same thing, like top 1.5% and 10% of 18-year-olds.
0:30:58 The biomarkers across my entire body, whether it’s my cardiovascular ability, my strength,
0:31:03 my muscle, my muscle and body fat are in the top 99.5% tile.
0:31:07 It’s produced a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I’m in pretty
0:31:12 good health.
0:31:13 I thought your workouts were like 25 reps of exercise and stuff.
0:31:17 Is that giving you the incredible strength?
0:31:20 Yes.
0:31:21 So it’s about an hour a day and you’re right.
0:31:23 It’s like 20 plus, and it’s mostly I try to flex and stretch every muscle in my body.
0:31:31 I don’t do heavy weights that are hard in the joints, but yes, even doing these things,
0:31:38 I do it every single day.
0:31:39 I don’t take any rest days.
0:31:42 And yeah, on my bench press, it’s a top 10% of 18-year-olds.
0:31:47 And we use 18-year-olds.
0:31:48 A lot of people, I mean, with 99% certainty when I say this, people are like, “But wait
0:31:52 a second.
0:31:53 Why not a 30-year-old?”
0:31:54 It’s because you max out your weight to rep ratio at age 18.
0:32:02 So even though you can lift more in your 20s and maybe even your 30s, your ratio peaks
0:32:08 at 18.
0:32:09 The same is true with your VO2 max, your cardiovascular fitness.
0:32:13 And so we do a reference to an 18-year-old, not because it’s an easy way to pick off a
0:32:17 number.
0:32:18 We do it because according to these age, these biological age standards, you’re looking
0:32:23 at when a male peaks performance.
0:32:28 And I think your last meal is at like 11.30 a.m.
0:32:31 That’s right.
0:32:32 So I have roughly 10 hours or so of fasting before I go to bed.
0:32:35 Do you feel hungry when you go to bed?
0:32:37 I used to.
0:32:38 I’m now normalized to it.
0:32:40 And does that help your sleep?
0:32:41 What happens if you eat later?
0:32:43 I assume this was all measured.
0:32:45 I eat my last meal of the day at 11 a.m. for the objectives of good sleep.
0:32:52 Because I mean, there’s supposedly good benefits on fasting.
0:32:54 I think the evidence is still maybe developing.
0:32:58 So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my
0:33:03 digestion finished.
0:33:05 So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute.
0:33:09 And if it’s 46, I’m going to have a perfect night’s sleep.
0:33:12 If I eat at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., then my resting heart rate is going to be 56.
0:33:19 And when I do that, I’m going to knock off about 50% of my REM and 50% of my deep, and
0:33:25 I’ll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes.
0:33:28 And so I’ve done so many experiments now, it is algorithmic.
0:33:33 And I know exactly what happens when I eat what at what time and how it affects my sleep.
0:33:38 It sounds like blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep.
0:33:43 Is that correct?
0:33:44 I mean, so sleep is an important one.
0:33:46 It’s the number one priority because everything else hinges upon that.
0:33:50 But it also, we are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every
0:33:57 organ of the body.
0:33:58 So we have 70 plus organs, and we’ve tried to quantify and rejuvenate every organ of
0:34:03 my body.
0:34:04 So we just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your chest here responsible
0:34:10 for your immune system.
0:34:12 And so, you know, I can say I’m chronologically 46 years old, but the more important number
0:34:19 is what is the biological age of my heart and of my lungs and of my liver.
0:34:25 And that’s really the more powerful predictor than a chronological number.
0:34:31 And where were you when you started blueprint?
0:34:33 Were you basically your biological age for your, like, was everything the same?
0:34:39 No.
0:34:40 It was.
0:34:41 I was coming from a pretty bad place.
0:34:43 After being depressed for a decade and running, you know, being a startup entrepreneur my
0:34:47 entire life and having just gone through a bunch of stuff, I was pretty beat up and
0:34:53 I was in a bad state.
0:34:54 So I definitely subscribed to grind culture where you do things in society to try to earn
0:35:02 people’s respect and have a position of a status in a social group to when you conform
0:35:08 with these social norms.
0:35:11 And so like when you hear a story about a colleague who worked on a program, a problem
0:35:16 for two days straight and didn’t sleep, it’s like, wow, they’re so awesome and amazing.
0:35:20 You know, like that it’s very hard to not to be induced to think that that’s an emulation
0:35:25 worthy behavior.
0:35:26 So I had to peel myself out of grind culture and find out that this is the thing is we
0:35:31 are accustomed death is the enabler of all things immortality.
0:35:37 You know, if you love country, die for your country.
0:35:40 If you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life.
0:35:45 You know, if you want to achieve immortality in your professional endeavor, have your works
0:35:51 live beyond your death.
0:35:52 Everything we think about existence is around death.
0:35:56 And I was calling question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in human
0:36:00 history where death is no longer inevitable.
0:36:03 And if that is true, everything about our reality changes.
0:36:08 Do you think we’ll see a quantum leap in average age in the next 15 years?
0:36:14 Like average average life expectancy.
0:36:16 So not people.
0:36:17 So yes, there’s people who will learn from what you’re doing.
0:36:21 They’ll change their habits and they’ll extend their personal life expectancy.
0:36:24 But do you think we’re going to see a collective big leap?
0:36:28 I mean, like you have sort of Jeff Bezos and Patrick and John Collison and people pouring
0:36:33 money into billions of dollars into research on this topic.
0:36:39 To me, the most compelling contemplation is trying to predict how fast intelligence is
0:36:50 improving.
0:36:51 We humans have been the dominant force of intelligence on this planet for 200,000 years.
0:36:58 And we’ve been able to increase our abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation
0:37:03 in our society.
0:37:05 With language and all kinds of organizational methodologies, we’ve increased our ability
0:37:08 to utilize our intelligence with technological tools.
0:37:13 We’ve now created intelligence in AI that is creating better intelligence.
0:37:19 And if you say, what is the speed at which intelligence is improving, it’s fast, faster
0:37:25 than we can comprehend.
0:37:27 And so when we make these, when we model out the future and we say, what’s going to happen
0:37:33 on a 10 year time span, we are unqualified to answer that question because that time frame
0:37:44 exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine.
0:37:48 So it’s the first time in human history where we, the superior form of intelligence are
0:37:53 up against a wall of not knowing what to predict what comes next because it’s going to supersede
0:37:59 us so fast.
0:38:01 And so this is the thing, this is why I come down to the only thing I know to be true in
0:38:07 the year 2024 is don’t die.
0:38:11 That’s it.
0:38:12 I don’t know anything else other than I want to be around for what could be the most spectacular
0:38:19 existence in this part of the galaxy.
0:38:21 Yeah.
0:38:22 There’s a part of me that really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right
0:38:27 now and we don’t die, we’re going to get a lot of advantage from technology that thinks
0:38:32 about things in a way that we couldn’t even comprehend.
0:38:35 I mean, you take the, for inspiration, if you say, okay, well, point me to an example
0:38:40 of where intelligence has been used, that would give me any sort of bearings on what
0:38:46 I might imagine.
0:38:47 Okay, so take alpha fold.
0:38:49 It was, many people thought solving the protein folding problem was unsolvable or would take
0:38:56 us some unknown duration of time and deep mind allocated their attention to that thing
0:39:01 and solved it faster than anyone ever thought possible.
0:39:04 The same thing would go.
0:39:06 And so when these groups of people that are very talented focus on a very narrow problem,
0:39:12 they solve stunningly hard problems faster than anyone thought.
0:39:18 And as these systems get better and use more broadly and as these systems create better
0:39:23 systems, this is why we are at this launch point and, you know, is it going to happen
0:39:28 in two years, one years, five years, I don’t know, but it’s basically if you zoom out far
0:39:33 enough, it’s in the blink of an eye at this point.
0:39:36 And it’s a don’t die is don’t die individually, don’t kill each other, don’t kill planet Earth.
0:39:43 And when you’re building the AI, the objective function of AI is this don’t die audiology.
0:39:48 So if you, I mean, what I’m trying to say is like, so we’ve never been in the situation
0:39:52 before where we’re baby steps away from creating superintelligence.
0:39:56 And when you’re at this, in this moment, we have this, this incredibly practical question
0:40:03 to ask, what do we do?
0:40:05 Like, how do we think about reality?
0:40:07 What do we care about?
0:40:08 What are our ideals?
0:40:09 What are our objectives?
0:40:10 And then if you start surveying the world of like, Hey, who can tell us how to practically
0:40:14 think about reality, and you probe religions and capitalism and communism and socialism
0:40:19 and like any other group, who can pull up and say, here’s a playbook, here’s an instruction
0:40:25 on how you actually think about reality.
0:40:28 And that’s what I’ve been trying to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack
0:40:33 that informs humanity on what to do on a daily basis.
0:40:37 For example, what to eat for breakfast all the way through the most complicated question
0:40:41 of how do you begin thinking about a philosophical alignment with AI?
0:40:46 I have some specific questions about blueprints.
0:40:48 So like, how much water are you consuming a day between 60 and 80 ounces?
0:40:54 Is that the only beverage that you really consume?
0:40:57 It is.
0:40:58 You drink mineralized water.
0:41:00 So it’s always tea or has some electrolytes in it.
0:41:03 Is that tap water?
0:41:04 Is it filtered?
0:41:05 Is it out of a glass or plastic?
0:41:07 It’s filtered and it’s ceramic.
0:41:09 How do you think about things like Teflon and things that can sort of like get into your
0:41:14 body or things that are widely sort of thought to get into your body like microplastics and
0:41:20 Teflon?
0:41:21 Yeah.
0:41:22 I mean, I try to avoid plastic bottles.
0:41:25 I use stainless steel cookware filtered water.
0:41:30 I don’t eat out.
0:41:32 I don’t use a takeout materials.
0:41:34 So I try to avoid the things that are more polluting.
0:41:38 Why vegan?
0:41:39 I think that’s a personal choice, isn’t it?
0:41:42 Yeah.
0:41:43 Yeah, it is.
0:41:44 Is there anybody doing this who’s an omnivore?
0:41:46 Yeah, my son.
0:41:47 And are his results sort of similar to yours?
0:41:50 Yeah, pretty similar.
0:41:51 I think that diet is a special kind of provocative.
0:41:57 People break out into warring tribes instantaneously and the intensity around this topic is a lot.
0:42:05 And so I’ve really just stayed out of it.
0:42:07 I’m impartial.
0:42:08 I don’t want to get into the war.
0:42:10 And so I just say you do you.
0:42:12 I do think that every day there’s more evidence coming out suggesting plant-based diets are
0:42:21 more conducive for longevity.
0:42:23 So I think the evidence in time will speak for itself, but right now, of all the battlefields
0:42:29 I could choose, this is not the one I want.
0:42:32 That’s a really interesting way to put it.
0:42:33 I think it’s really interesting, too.
0:42:35 People aren’t convinced by data.
0:42:36 I mean, you can show them all the data in the world, and it’s not going to change their
0:42:39 mind.
0:42:40 How do we take blueprint and build habits with it?
0:42:45 So it’s one thing to know, okay, here’s this manual, follow this manual, and this manual
0:42:49 is going to be better at running your life than you are.
0:42:53 You can take your evening, Brian, you can put them away and just follow the instructions.
0:42:57 But how do we actually turn that into habits that we follow?
0:43:01 Every person is different in how they go about change, and there’s many ways that people
0:43:06 go about habit, you know, behavioral change with very habit formation techniques.
0:43:12 For me, it’s really helpful to understand my own behavioral change in a larger context,
0:43:21 where I say, I’m endeavoring to maintain my health so that I don’t die, so that I can
0:43:29 participate in what may be the most spectacular existence in the galaxy.
0:43:33 Now for me, that’s really motivating because I have a goal, and I have a reason to live,
0:43:38 and I have something to look forward to.
0:43:41 Now a side effect of that is my body feels great, and it looks great, and I can do all
0:43:46 sorts of things.
0:43:47 But for me, it’s the bigger goal that motivates me.
0:43:49 For other people, they may have much different goals of they want to fit into a certain pair
0:43:57 of clothing, or they want to look good for a certain event, or they want to achieve a
0:44:01 certain physical outcome.
0:44:02 So the end goal, I think the motivation is really important, and then I go through the
0:44:09 process as you heard me say, is I like to break myself out into my various selves, because
0:44:14 I am dozens of different kinds of people.
0:44:17 I’m morning Brian, I’m evening Brian, I’m after workout Brian, I’m dad Brian, and every
0:44:23 one of those situations, I’m biochemically a different human.
0:44:26 I have a different way of understanding reality, and I’ll make decisions that are different
0:44:30 in each one of those circumstances.
0:44:31 Like you said with Daniel, where he doesn’t say yes on the phone, because in that moment,
0:44:35 he pleases others Daniel, and he wants to be a different version to let him in his life.
0:44:40 So I do the same approach.
0:44:41 I break myself out into different persons, and I decide which versions of me have authorization
0:44:47 and win, because who’s in charge, 10 PMU who sets the alarm for 6 AM, or 6 AMU who wants
0:44:56 a few more minutes with the snooze button.
0:44:58 And so you need to make those decisions on who is in charge, because if you just let
0:45:03 it roll out, the present you is always going to win, and always get what they want at the
0:45:09 expense of other versions of you that have your better interests at heart.
0:45:14 And then the third is once you get to the structural where you have a goal, and you’ve
0:45:17 separated yourself out and you know who’s making decisions to win, then you can do these
0:45:21 hyper focused things on behavioral change, like you can pair a habit.
0:45:25 So every time you see a given thing, you do a certain action.
0:45:28 And so that’s really in my estimation, how I’ve tried to stack my life, where basically
0:45:34 I’ve tried to build a life where I make zero decisions of doing things I don’t really want
0:45:43 to do, and I’ve almost got it.
0:45:46 Like it’s actually, I’m surprised I’ve gotten this close to achieving it.
0:45:50 I just don’t behave in ways that I regret anymore.
0:45:53 And that’s phenomenal because I was just like walking regret before.
0:45:57 What I love about you is that you’re living life on your own terms and you’re not hurting
0:46:03 anybody.
0:46:04 And yet what you’re doing is so outside of what we consider normal, that you get so much
0:46:11 hate and vitriol.
0:46:14 How do you handle that?
0:46:15 I love it.
0:46:17 I have such a positive relationship with the hate.
0:46:21 It energizes me.
0:46:23 I am endlessly amused by it.
0:46:26 I think it’s just fun to engage with.
0:46:30 And depression was a much better troll than anyone online.
0:46:38 My depression could eat me up pretty efficiently, getting new, the zingers and the dunks.
0:46:44 Everyone else, it’s just played for me.
0:46:48 I guess you can think about these two phases, like, okay, phase one is do something that
0:46:55 is unrecognizable in your time and place.
0:46:58 Okay, so we’ve seen this throughout history.
0:47:00 Phase two is people come with pitchforks.
0:47:04 We know this.
0:47:06 Phase three is you’ve got to survive a whole bunch of attacks, like the power to be you’re
0:47:13 going to want to start taking you down.
0:47:15 And then phase, if you get past phase two and phase three, you get to open up a little
0:47:20 bit and you kind of have some open horizon.
0:47:23 And so that’s where I’m at now, is I’ve survived the major dunk where people try to cancel
0:47:28 me in society.
0:47:29 I’ve survived several attempts at takedowns, and now I’m still at it.
0:47:35 And so I’m really happy I’m on the stage four now, and now it’s just opening up into a bigger
0:47:39 gameplay.
0:47:40 Yeah, I was amazed at some of the stuff that I read online and some of the stuff that you’ve
0:47:44 been through.
0:47:45 And I don’t know if you want to share some of that or not.
0:47:48 What’s been the hardest moments for you?
0:47:50 I’m so happy to be alive.
0:47:54 I appreciate existence with an intensity that I’ve never felt before.
0:48:02 I know what it feels like to want to end your life.
0:48:06 You know, like I desperately wanted to kill myself for 10 years, and I’m grateful I didn’t
0:48:12 and I’m grateful I’m alive.
0:48:14 So when people come and dunk on me, or when they’re trying to attack me, or when they’re
0:48:22 saying things about me, it’s okay.
0:48:26 It’s fine.
0:48:29 Everyone’s just trying to do their thing and deal with themselves.
0:48:31 So it’s not really worth getting caught up in.
0:48:35 I think it’s possible that we’ll look back at ourselves right now and we’ll say, “Oh,
0:48:44 man, can you believe how hard it was to be human?
0:48:49 Do you remember how bad it was?
0:48:52 The anxiety and the depression and the jealousy and the angst and the FOMO and all the things
0:48:59 we felt?
0:49:00 God, that was just so hard.
0:49:03 Can you imagine going back to doing that?
0:49:05 In the same way we imagine previous areas not having the technology we do today, I think
0:49:11 it’s possible that we’re just in this moment in time of a conscious existence.
0:49:14 It’s really brutal.
0:49:15 And so I guess I don’t really expect anything different.
0:49:18 If people’s internal experiences are beating them up, they’re going to try to beat other
0:49:22 people up too.
0:49:23 It’s just kind of the situation.
0:49:24 It’s okay.
0:49:25 Do you think you have that confidence to sort of face that because you’ve been to a really
0:49:32 dark place and come out of it?
0:49:34 Yes.
0:49:35 I think it’s also because I get great sleep.
0:49:37 Honestly.
0:49:38 But you’ve also, it’s one thing, like I get this, it’s one thing when it’s an anonymous
0:49:44 person online saying something about you, really mostly says something about them, but you’ve
0:49:51 also had people close to you come after you and that’s a whole different kind of vulnerability
0:49:57 and feeling.
0:49:59 I was poor my entire life.
0:50:02 My mom made my clothes for school.
0:50:06 I worked in third grade.
0:50:08 I worked the school tables at lunch to pay for leftover food.
0:50:13 So my mom wouldn’t have to pay my $25 a month of cafeteria money.
0:50:17 Like I knew we were poor and I was in on my family’s circumstances and I didn’t make money
0:50:26 until I was 34 years old until I sold brain tree.
0:50:30 And I’ve had money for 10 years now for 12 years and I’ve learned a lot of lessons about
0:50:36 the complexity of money.
0:50:38 I really wish that I would have spent more time having made money and say, can I talk
0:50:46 to somebody who’s had wealth and can tell me how this game works?
0:50:52 But I will tell you, of the people close to me over the past 12 years, a very large number
0:51:04 like almost like 50% have ended up doing something to me that is unambiguous bad behavior.
0:51:18 In some cases, illegal behavior and this is not to say they’re bad and I’m good.
0:51:26 It’s meant to say that when you’re around these circumstances, it’s oftentimes very
0:51:33 hard to keep your bearings.
0:51:37 And sometimes you lose your reality and you become so lost in it, you can no longer tell
0:51:43 what’s going on.
0:51:45 But money is extraordinarily complicated and it drives people to do crazy things.
0:51:50 And I’ve seen this pattern now repeat itself so many times in my personal life, like those
0:51:56 who are the closest people to me.
0:51:58 And to see what they would do when money was at stake, they’ll do anything.
0:52:03 And they lose touch with reality in the pursuit of that objective.
0:52:10 I have a friend who is incredibly wealthy and we’ve been friends for a number of years now.
0:52:16 And one thing that struck me a few years ago was his circle kept getting smaller and smaller.
0:52:25 And I remember asking him about this and I was like, we were hanging out last year and
0:52:30 I’m just making this up.
0:52:31 But there was like 30 people here and now there’s like 15.
0:52:35 And you see it shrink over time and he said, yeah, you know, because people do these things
0:52:41 that they ask me for something or they do things and then I can’t really trust them.
0:52:48 And then everybody who’s trying to be my friend, and I’m paraphrasing here and I’m not going
0:52:53 to reveal who it is, but everybody who’s trying to be my friend wants something from me or
0:52:57 that’s how I think about it.
0:52:58 So it’s really hard for me to like, open up to new people because I’ve become skeptical
0:53:04 of motivations and intentions.
0:53:07 That’s been what I have seen.
0:53:10 So when I’ve shared my problems, they are almost identical to the life experiences other
0:53:18 people have had.
0:53:19 It’s just algorithmic.
0:53:21 This is what I’m saying.
0:53:22 I wish I could go back in time and talk to somebody because it is so predictable how
0:53:26 people will behave in these circumstances that you can do so many things to try to lessen
0:53:33 the negative outcomes.
0:53:35 But I’m inherently a very trusting person and I am hands off, right?
0:53:40 Just kind of let people do their own thing.
0:53:42 And that’s just not a good recipe.
0:53:44 Most people can’t thrive in that environment.
0:53:47 Most people will really struggle to play by the rules that we as a society have agreed
0:53:55 that would constitute fairness and honesty and legality.
0:53:59 So again, it’s fine.
0:54:02 This is not a critique of people.
0:54:03 It’s just, it’s the human condition.
0:54:05 It is what it is.
0:54:06 And this is the same, I don’t trust myself.
0:54:10 This is why I don’t have sweets in my house.
0:54:13 It’s not like I think I’m the best person in the whole world.
0:54:16 I know that I will cheat.
0:54:19 I will do things I don’t want to do if I put myself in those circumstances.
0:54:24 So this is coming from a place of distrust of myself and all things that we humans do.
0:54:30 If I inherited or suddenly came into $500 million tomorrow and I came to you and said, “Brian,
0:54:36 I just got this big chunk of money.
0:54:40 Give me the lessons that you’ve learned over the last 12 years that I should put in place
0:54:46 today.
0:54:47 What would they be?”
0:54:48 One is I would suggest you not change anything in your life for six to 12 months.
0:54:56 Keep on with your same habits and have the money so you can distinguish between your
0:55:02 preferred lifestyle and what money would otherwise alter your perception of what you want.
0:55:09 Because once you start acquiring things, you start losing your perspective on where your
0:55:15 baseline is.
0:55:18 And the shock of going from zero to five million is so sudden that it scrambles your reality.
0:55:25 And then number two is it is reasonable that a large majority of people are going to want
0:55:37 something from you at all times.
0:55:40 And it will be small things like a niece or a nephew when you’re invited to their wedding.
0:55:48 Most people will give a gift $100 or $200 or $20, whatever the number is in that cultural
0:55:55 norm for the family, they’re going to expect you to give something for $500 or $1,000 because
0:56:01 you have so much money.
0:56:03 And so people just assume that because you have so much money that you have more obligation
0:56:11 to them.
0:56:12 So there’s this asypical relationship.
0:56:15 And then three is I’d say identify what you want the money to achieve.
0:56:24 And that really needs to come from you on what your objectives are.
0:56:28 Because if you don’t determine your objectives in life, money will run you.
0:56:34 And so it creates this really inverse relationship where you wanted the money so you could achieve
0:56:41 your objectives, but now money’s running you and you’ve lost yourself.
0:56:44 And if you don’t follow those three things, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you
0:56:48 don’t know what is up and what’s down, you don’t know who you can trust, you’ve got people
0:56:52 on the inside who are engaging in potentially compromising behavior without you knowing.
0:57:00 And so it just creates a real challenging environment.
0:57:02 And then your internal world becomes destabilized where, like your friend said, you just don’t
0:57:08 know who you can trust and it becomes a really isolating experience.
0:57:13 Does that ever make you feel lonely?
0:57:15 It’s a challenge.
0:57:16 Like anything, I mean, like in life, it’s like all of our problems are equal.
0:57:24 It’s not like if you’re rich, you have fewer problems, it’s not like if you’re poor, you’ve
0:57:31 got, I mean, like, so there are like, there’s like, there are some clear differences.
0:57:36 Like if you’re poor and you’ve got a very serious medical condition, you don’t have the
0:57:39 resources to address that, that’s a very big difference.
0:57:42 But overall, every person I know who’s wealthy has just as many problems and it fills to
0:57:49 them, their problems are just as intense as everyone else at every other class of wealth.
0:57:55 Excluding like the extreme situations where like a person does not have the ability to
0:58:00 pay for basic nutrition or does not have the ability to pay for medical bills or is suffering
0:58:04 from some other like on the disparities.
0:58:07 But what I’m trying to say is human suffering is pretty universal.
0:58:13 And there’s a lot of misperception that somehow money lessens problems.
0:58:20 You know, it’s not a panacea.
0:58:22 It has its own problems.
0:58:25 And many people with money wish they didn’t have the money.
0:58:27 But of course, that’s also hypocritical because if they did, just give it away like talk to
0:58:32 talk.
0:58:33 It’s complicated and nuanced.
0:58:35 And it’s just a very hard question to parse because it’s hard to imagine those circumstances.
0:58:41 It’s hard for society to talk about, too.
0:58:44 I feel like it’s exceptionally hard for my wealthier friends to talk about money than
0:58:50 it is for other people because if they risk getting slapped on the hand for saying anything
0:58:57 that is just insensitive because their experience is complex, that it causes very serious problems
0:59:05 in life.
0:59:06 It creates loneliness.
0:59:07 It puts them in very challenging situations.
0:59:11 And then there are natural responses like boohoo, like go complain to someone.
0:59:16 And I understand that.
0:59:18 It’s also just like, I think it misses a little bit because we all live together in society
0:59:23 and we share classes of problems.
0:59:25 And so to me, it’s a bigger observation about how all of us struggle all the time and how
0:59:33 it’s worthwhile to contemplate how we can all struggle less.
0:59:36 Yeah, we’re more similar than we tend to think that we are, I think, across not only cultures,
0:59:43 but socioeconomic statuses, too.
0:59:47 I want to come back to blueprint for a second.
0:59:48 I want to go through specific things.
0:59:51 So I want to go through nine things.
0:59:53 I want to go through behavioral interventions.
0:59:56 I want to go through diet interventions and supplement interventions.
1:00:00 And I want you to give me your top three behavioral interventions, top three diet interventions,
1:00:07 and top three supplements that people listening to this, if they’re looking to sort of like
1:00:12 play around with blueprint, but maybe they don’t want to go all in that they can do and
1:00:16 they’ll get a noticeable sort of like bang for the buck out of.
1:00:20 Yeah.
1:00:21 And I can tell you, I would structure that just a little bit differently.
1:00:25 I can tell you the top five power laws.
1:00:28 Okay.
1:00:29 Yeah, let’s do that.
1:00:30 And so you by doing these five things, you could achieve a life expectancy of 92.
1:00:36 So one, don’t smoke.
1:00:38 Yeah.
1:00:39 Two is exercise six hours a week.
1:00:43 And that’s a combination of strength and flexibility and cardiovascular.
1:00:47 Three is eat a blueprint like diet or like Mediterranean diet.
1:00:53 Four is maintain a BMI between 18.5 and 22.5.
1:00:59 And then five is a limit alcohol consumption and those five things, the power laws, sleep
1:01:07 is a contender for being a power law of health.
1:01:11 I think the evidence is emerging now that we’ve got much better measurement around it.
1:01:15 Talk to me about the alcohol consumption because that one is sort of a bit vague in
1:01:20 a sense of you didn’t offer specifics like BMI or like this range.
1:01:25 What is a limited alcohol consumption?
1:01:28 Is that like two ounces a week?
1:01:30 Is it six?
1:01:31 Is it like we’re best with none, but up until this point, it doesn’t hurt us.
1:01:35 If I remember correctly, it’s something like between one and three glasses of wine a week
1:01:41 equivalent.
1:01:42 So it’s limited.
1:01:44 I do zero alcohol intake.
1:01:46 You used to drink alcohol though.
1:01:48 Yeah, I drink three ounces of red wine for breakfast daily.
1:01:52 Yeah.
1:01:53 What was the thinking behind that?
1:01:54 You gave it up.
1:01:55 I think I remember if I remember correctly, it’s because you couldn’t afford the 80 calories
1:01:59 in your diet.
1:02:00 Correct.
1:02:01 Yeah.
1:02:02 But you liked red wine.
1:02:03 It was delicious.
1:02:05 It was such a wonderful experience.
1:02:07 Yeah.
1:02:08 It increased the joy of food a lot.
1:02:10 Do you ever have wine now or it’s just like a rule that you don’t have it because once
1:02:15 you go down that path, it’s like a slippery slope?
1:02:19 I don’t now because even small amounts negatively affects my sleep.
1:02:23 Even if I drink them, drink it around noon or even if I do three ounces at noon, I still
1:02:28 sometimes see effects in sleep and nothing is worth trading high quality sleep to me.
1:02:36 That’s fascinating.
1:02:37 Are there certain foods that if you ate even at 11.30, would disrupt your sleep that you
1:02:43 know about?
1:02:44 Carbohydrates.
1:02:45 So breads, pastas, even rice is hard for my body to digest.
1:02:52 Is that your body or most bodies?
1:02:55 My body.
1:02:56 And maybe it’s because I don’t eat rice very often, so the one-time occurrence.
1:03:00 But yeah, when I eat anything of that variety, my resting heart rate will be 55 plus, probably
1:03:06 56, 57 range, then of course anything fried, but I never eat fried.
1:03:11 But if I did, it would definitely do it.
1:03:16 Flowers of all types.
1:03:18 Even like almond flour?
1:03:19 Yeah.
1:03:20 Oh, interesting.
1:03:21 I tried a bunch of different flowers that I wanted to find, I wanted to find some variety
1:03:27 of foods that would do it and then also sugar.
1:03:32 So if I, you know, on occasion I’ve tried like a fun drink, like someone took me and
1:03:39 got a boba or something, boba or something like that, he’s made by tapioca.
1:03:43 But yeah, that will do it for me, that will increase my, so I know now the list of foods
1:03:48 that increase my resting heart rate.
1:03:50 And this is the cool thing.
1:03:51 You know, before I would say I would be confronted with a situation of like, I really want to
1:03:57 eat this cookie, but I know I don’t, I really shouldn’t.
1:03:59 Then I did it anyways, you know, and I probably did that in my life a thousand of times maybe.
1:04:05 And for the first time in my life, I’ve gotten to a point where I can look at the cookie
1:04:10 and have it in my hand and say, you know what, the pain of eating this thing so far exceeds
1:04:16 the momentary pleasure from eating it, there’s no way I’m going to do it.
1:04:21 And I can feel that with such confidence.
1:04:23 I’m not even tempted to eat the cookie, whereas before I was just desperate in its face to
1:04:28 just be, you know, there’s no way I was going to win in that situation.
1:04:31 I was going to eat the cookie.
1:04:32 And then after that, I was going to eat the five more in the pack, you know, I couldn’t
1:04:35 have stopped myself.
1:04:37 And so now my, I finally, finally, finally, finally got to a place where I can model out
1:04:42 the pain and that’s so unpleasant that I just don’t want to do it.
1:04:46 And the pain in this case is, you know, it’s going to impact your sleep and therefore you
1:04:50 know it.
1:04:51 How much of that relates to the fact that you’ve had eight months of perfect sleep?
1:04:55 Like if last night was like, oh, the streak ended and now you’ve got the cookie in your
1:04:59 hand, are you still thinking with the same logic?
1:05:01 Well, that’s what I actually measured my brain at my brain interface company, Colonel.
1:05:06 I looked at my brain based upon sleep patterns and I saw, we saw in my brain, I had less
1:05:12 willpower when I had a poor night’s sleep, when I had less RAM and less deep.
1:05:17 And so yes, when you have bad sleep, you have substantially less willpower.
1:05:22 Well, it’s so interesting because I talked to my kids about this and I talked about it
1:05:26 in the context of positioning and easy mode or hard mode.
1:05:29 And I’m like, when you go to sleep, it doesn’t mean you’re not, like when you sleep well,
1:05:33 it doesn’t mean somebody’s going to do something, you’re not going to do something to you tomorrow
1:05:37 that makes you angry or upset.
1:05:39 It means your ability to regulate your emotions and have a healthy response is going to be
1:05:44 much easier than if you have a poor night’s sleep.
1:05:47 So you can like, you’re playing on easy mode or hard mode and I think sleep is one of the
1:05:51 prime indicators of that.
1:05:53 Great job.
1:05:55 Why does posture matter?
1:05:56 You have like the best posture of, I’m like conscious of this and like, I’m actually having
1:06:00 better posture during this interview because of you.
1:06:04 You know, like I, I realized that I present complexity in people’s lives that, you know,
1:06:14 someone sees an article about me or a video or something.
1:06:19 And if they’re not in the same place as me, it can have a net negative reaction where
1:06:24 the person’s like, damn it, I’m never going to be able to do what he does.
1:06:31 So that makes me feel bad about myself.
1:06:33 And so why even try?
1:06:35 And I’m deeply empathetic about that and I, I wish that wasn’t the outcome.
1:06:40 And so I really try to be thoughtful and meet everyone where they’re at where I hope that
1:06:47 when someone thinks about me and if they view my posture or they view my habits, that they
1:06:54 can think of me like an angel on their shoulder of like, I’m, I’m there, I’m there with you
1:06:58 friend.
1:06:59 Like I, I want you to be your best self and I understand you and there’s no judgment
1:07:03 coming from me and it’s fine if you make mistakes, it’s cool.
1:07:08 But it’s, it’s complicated and I understand that it’s difficult.
1:07:13 And so posture, I do work extraordinarily hard.
1:07:16 I’m also mindful that it potentially has this boomerang effect where people get discouraged.
1:07:22 But yeah, I mean, I, I maintain a posture because I discovered I’ve got genetically narrow
1:07:27 internal jugular veins, these two pipes on the side of the neck.
1:07:30 And so I’ve have restricted blood flow out of my brain when I have bad posture.
1:07:35 So it kinks my veins.
1:07:39 And so I, we did a whole bunch of measurement with MRI and ultrasound and I worked, did a
1:07:43 bunch of physical therapy to strengthen certain muscles that maintain proper posture.
1:07:47 And so I’ve just built it as a habit now, but it took me months and months.
1:07:53 Uh, you know, for example, as a family, we have a habit where one day one of my eldest
1:07:58 son made fun of me and he’s like, dad’s like an AI.
1:08:01 And he was like, he’s like this, like, you know, being this AI move.
1:08:04 And so his impersonation of me was reduced to so now every time anyone in the family
1:08:13 has improper posture, that means if you’re holding a phone directly down, you’re looking
1:08:17 at your heads hanging over, or you’re in some other catastrophic postural position, you’ll
1:08:22 hear a zip and everyone in the family just like, we’re right, and I get straight up.
1:08:27 And so we’re now a family where we support each other in proper posture, but it took
1:08:31 us a while to get there.
1:08:33 That’s awesome.
1:08:34 What’s the relationship between our biological health and our sexual health?
1:08:38 Well, yeah, if you’re male and you’re not getting enough sleep, your nighttime erections
1:08:44 are eliminated.
1:08:46 And nighttime erections are an important biomarker for sexual health, psychological health and
1:08:52 cardiovascular health.
1:08:54 And you know, I’ve measured my nighttime erections extensively as we basically, we try to measure
1:08:59 everything we can measure as I know it’s atypical.
1:09:02 And so this is not a common measurement people are familiar with, but that’s true for the
1:09:06 entirety of blueprint, we’re doing things that are new.
1:09:09 But I guess I say that because people oftentimes associate the cost of not getting good sleep
1:09:15 with feeling a little bit grumpy the next day, you know, or a little bit more irritable,
1:09:20 but they don’t really understand the whole body consequences where basically your sexual
1:09:26 function goes to zero.
1:09:28 It’s not that you can’t still have intercourse check, you can, but I pointed out it’s a pretty
1:09:34 devastating cost on not getting good sleep.
1:09:40 So yeah, all these things are deeply connected.
1:09:44 And this is why coming back to grind culture, grind culture assumes death is inevitable.
1:09:51 So you’re trying to achieve immortality through the means that you have.
1:09:55 And so once you go back down the stack and you start questioning these things about our
1:09:59 reality, it leads you down this path of like, do I really believe in this cultural moment
1:10:04 of this thing or is there something else really bigger going on?
1:10:08 One of my friends who was in the special forces for a long time used to be deployed often.
1:10:15 And he said one of the things that they looked for in the troops and they asked them about
1:10:19 regularly was there the poop and whether they had a morning erection.
1:10:25 I love that.
1:10:26 That’s fantastic.
1:10:27 And I’ve heard of anyone else measuring erections.
1:10:31 It’s so important and I know it’s taboo and funny and people like to dunk on it, but it’s
1:10:35 really important.
1:10:36 I’m asking this as a bald dude, but can you prevent your hairline from receding?
1:10:41 I mean, I imagine it’s way too late for me now, but do you do that?
1:10:46 Can you?
1:10:47 Yeah, hair loss is an enormous amount of work.
1:10:49 The technology is really not great.
1:10:51 So what I do currently is in the morning, I put a topical application on my hair that
1:10:59 is based upon my genetics of what things I do and don’t respond to and metabolize.
1:11:07 And then I put a red light cap on my head and activate certain things.
1:11:12 I then work out, eat breakfast and I’ll shower and I’ll use a certain shampoo that basically
1:11:18 creates the right environment on the scalp.
1:11:21 And then I’ll do once a month.
1:11:24 I just started this new therapy where I’ll use this laser across the scalp and then I’ll
1:11:30 apply exosomes and that’s a combo therapy to help hair grow stronger and faster.
1:11:38 And then I used to do PRP, which is you draw blood out, you pull the plasma, you re-inject
1:11:42 the growth factors.
1:11:43 I stopped doing that because we’re now doing this laser exosome treatment.
1:11:46 Yeah, that’s it.
1:11:47 So basically it’s a topical application, which you’ve probably heard monoxidil is the most
1:11:51 common thing.
1:11:52 So it’s monoxidil plus a few little goodies, plus red light cap therapy, plus this laser
1:11:57 and exosome treatment.
1:11:58 Yeah, I mean, I should be bald at this point.
1:12:00 I started losing my hair in my late 20s and the men in my family are bald basically.
1:12:08 So I’m grateful I have some hair.
1:12:10 I started losing mine in my mid-20s and then it sort of stopped.
1:12:13 It receded and then thinned out massively and then just all of a sudden stopped.
1:12:19 Yeah.
1:12:20 I mean, the technology that is very close is exciting.
1:12:25 There’s cloning therapies that are being developed.
1:12:28 So if you had a few follicles, you can then clone it and then do basically like implantation.
1:12:33 So I think it’s a possibility that in like five years’ time that you would be able to
1:12:41 restore hair yourself.
1:12:42 Is there any biological longevity reason why hair matters?
1:12:46 I mean, there’s probably a sexual attractiveness angle to it.
1:12:50 There’s probably a confidence angle to it.
1:12:51 There’s probably a lot of internal ones, but is there any biological sort of like longevity
1:12:56 reasons why it matters?
1:12:58 If there is, I’m not aware of it.
1:13:00 What do you think of hot and cold exposure?
1:13:03 Do you do that?
1:13:04 I don’t.
1:13:05 It’s not that they don’t potentially have benefits for right applications.
1:13:11 The hot and cold therapy didn’t make our cut because it doesn’t increase health span.
1:13:18 Rather, the evidence was not strong enough for my team to recommend it to be cut into
1:13:24 the protocol.
1:13:25 So if you go back to how we think about this, we’ve looked at all the scientific evidence
1:13:28 through the specific lens of increasing life span health span.
1:13:34 And then we’ve ranked them according to power laws.
1:13:37 And so this is not to say we won’t do it at some point in time.
1:13:41 We’re very open-minded and we’ll always change our minds following the evidence.
1:13:44 It’s just right now, we don’t think the evidence supports it to incorporate as a habit for
1:13:49 longevity purposes, which is our aim.
1:13:51 Now if somebody is doing it for recovery and other objectives, that’s an entirely different
1:13:55 question.
1:13:56 So it has nothing to say about the technologies for those just for my highly focused objective.
1:14:04 If you think of Blueprint as like a hundred pieces of Lego, and each one of those pieces
1:14:08 of Lego is an intervention based on scientific evidence, what’s the last piece of Lego you
1:14:13 took out and put in a new piece of Lego because you’re like, “Oh, this is better than that
1:14:18 piece of Lego?”
1:14:19 I recently started taking oral monoxidil.
1:14:22 So there’s the liquid monoxidil for hair growth, or for other hair loss prevention.
1:14:28 I took an oral version, which initially that drug was approved for high blood pressure but
1:14:34 was then repurposed for high hair growth because it made hair grow all over the body.
1:14:38 But I started experiencing some side effects.
1:14:41 I stopped that.
1:14:42 So we do stuff like that.
1:14:46 Every few days we’ll try something new like that.
1:14:48 So that one stopped.
1:14:49 And then let me think before that, I did those blood transfusions.
1:14:54 So my son gave me his plasma and I gave my dad my plasma.
1:14:59 And I did six of those one a month for six months, and we saw no effect in me.
1:15:04 But when I gave my father plasma, my father’s speed of aging slowed by the equivalent of
1:15:11 25 years.
1:15:12 So from a 71-year-old to a 46-year-old, and those results remained stable for six months,
1:15:19 which is the last measurement we did.
1:15:21 So in that case, the plasma therapy was promising.
1:15:26 And it didn’t work in me probably because my biomarkers are already pretty competitive
1:15:31 with an 18-year-old, whereas my father benefited significantly because his biomarkers as a 71-year-old
1:15:37 are pretty different than my biomarkers.
1:15:39 And so in that case, we discontinued the therapy for me, but he could continue if he wanted.
1:15:45 That’s fascinating.
1:15:46 That seems like a really easy-ish intervention that you can do to extend the longevity of
1:15:51 your parents.
1:15:53 From the outside looking in, it can sound wild and creepy and weird and everything on a personal
1:15:59 level to be able to do something like that for a parent is a special experience.
1:16:07 It’s not too dissimilar than donating an organ.
1:16:10 That’s very commonplace, and we don’t think of organ transplants as weird or organ donation
1:16:14 as weird.
1:16:15 So it’s just a new idea, and so people think it’s weird, but it’s actually identical to
1:16:21 what we already do in life, and we actually applaud people who make those kinds of sacrifices.
1:16:26 And I should clarify, it’s not a sacrifice.
1:16:28 Giving plasma is not a sacrifice.
1:16:31 If our goal is not to die, how do you think about the things like sunscreen and other
1:16:38 things that are sort of proximate to us, especially about things we put on or in our bodies?
1:16:44 Right?
1:16:45 So we talked earlier about plastic bottles and sort of trying to avoid that.
1:16:49 Do you have a particular sunscreen you use?
1:16:51 I imagine you’ve thought about this more than any other human.
1:16:54 We do try to be thoughtful.
1:16:56 We’re not perfect.
1:16:57 There’s so many things we’re looking at at any given time, but yeah, we use a sunscreen
1:17:03 Elta MD, E-L-T-A-M-D, and it’s a good one that has less bad stuff in it.
1:17:12 I generally try to avoid the sun when the UV index is above four, so I get sun exposure
1:17:19 in the morning and in the night, and this is also another contentious part in society
1:17:24 where I get a lot of flak for the paleness of my skin, and it’s a cultural norm that
1:17:32 tan skin is somehow a signifier of health and wellness and beauty, but the sun ages
1:17:41 and damages the skin and creates cancer risk.
1:17:45 So it’s not this culture of tan skin is not going to survive much longer because it will
1:17:53 just naturally push in the direction where we generally over a long enough time horizon
1:18:00 move towards more positive habits for society.
1:18:04 Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I think this is one of them that our current
1:18:08 ideas around sun exposure will change.
1:18:12 I’m not suggesting we will avoid the sun altogether.
1:18:14 I’m suggesting we will be more mindful.
1:18:17 It won’t be a case where, because currently our general dispositions are pretty brazen
1:18:23 towards the sun.
1:18:25 It’s not a careful balance of get sun exposure, but only so much.
1:18:32 It’s like unadulterated sun exposure is kind of like this.
1:18:37 It kind of is like around certain dietary preferences where it’s really a much bigger
1:18:44 social thing than it is a data thing or science thing.
1:18:49 And that’s fine, this is how people kind of break out into camps, but we measure my skin
1:18:55 age using multi-spectral imaging and using a whole bunch of other technologies.
1:19:01 So we see exactly what happens when.
1:19:05 And by looking at the data, it’s just very hard to go do something that’s going to actively
1:19:14 accelerate my speed of aging when the objective of this project is to try to slow it as much
1:19:18 as possible.
1:19:19 And then I want to ask, just before we sort of wrap up here, how do you envision, and
1:19:25 I know we don’t have a long window in terms of what we can see, but if you zoom out, how
1:19:30 do you see AI helping us?
1:19:32 I actually, I tried to embody the problem of AI.
1:19:39 I tried to become the species as a problem.
1:19:44 And so I did that with a thought experiment where I said, okay, I’m a collection of 35
1:19:49 trillion cells.
1:19:52 And that’s a lot of intelligent agents all doing their own thing with different objectives.
1:19:56 The body doesn’t have a singular objective.
1:19:59 The body has all kinds of conflicting objectives at all moments.
1:20:04 And I wanted to see, could I achieve goal alignment within me, Brian Johnson?
1:20:12 And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
1:20:13 And so first I had to say, okay, in order to understand these 35 trillion cells, I need
1:20:17 to get a read of as many of them as possible.
1:20:22 Then I need to find the evidence to tell me how I align the cells.
1:20:26 And then I need to implement it with exactitude.
1:20:29 And this is a problem that is identical to AI.
1:20:33 So we’re building the superintelligence, and we then are going to give it objective functions
1:20:38 and say, all right, AI, do this, solve this math problem, or help me write this thing,
1:20:43 or have this conversation with me, whatever the thing we’re asking it to do, it has goals.
1:20:49 And it has goals.
1:20:50 We’ve programmed into it.
1:20:51 It has goals that it emerges from the system itself.
1:20:54 So we’re basically trying to say, what are our goals?
1:20:57 Under what circumstances and for whom?
1:21:00 So it’s a giant goal alignment problem.
1:21:03 So my situation, I had to say, okay, is 10 p.m. Brian in charge, who’s that alarm?
1:21:08 Or 6 a.m. Brian who wants to hit this news button?
1:21:11 Who’s in charge and under what circumstance?
1:21:13 That’s the same kind of goal alignment problem you have with AI.
1:21:15 And it’s the same kind of problem we have with planet Earth.
1:21:18 So Earth needs to be a home where we can thrive.
1:21:21 If we kill Earth, we’re in a bad situation.
1:21:23 And so when I say don’t die, it’s don’t die individually, don’t kill each other, don’t
1:21:28 let the planet die, don’t kill it, and align AI with don’t die.
1:21:32 Don’t die is deceptively simple and endlessly expansive.
1:21:38 It is a heuristic, it is a computational model, it is a mathematical framework, it is a biological
1:21:44 system, it is a closed loop algorithm, all those things in two words.
1:21:49 And this is what I’m putting forward as a species, is if we care to be around for the
1:21:55 future, we need to be able to figure out how to cooperate at the most basic level.
1:22:02 And don’t die is the most played game in every single minute of every single day on planet
1:22:07 Earth.
1:22:08 There’s not a game, even capitalism is not played more than don’t die.
1:22:12 Every two seconds you and I breathe to not die.
1:22:16 We look both ways before we cross the street, we throw out moldy food, it is the most played
1:22:21 game in existence.
1:22:22 Now, the moment you stand up above don’t die, you break out into a billion different directions
1:22:28 of what people want, how they understand the world, what they care about, what they’ll do
1:22:32 and why, all the rules and justifications.
1:22:35 So you really have to say, if we’re trying to goal align a superintelligence around something
1:22:39 and not kill the Earth and not kill each other and not die ourselves, how do you do it?
1:22:43 And that’s what I’ve tried to put forward is, this is an actual plan, a practical plan
1:22:48 that spans what to eat for breakfast and how to align a superintelligence system with all
1:22:52 of our interests.
1:22:54 That’s beautiful.
1:22:55 We always ask the same question to end, which is, what is success for you?
1:22:58 But I have a feeling it’s going to be two words.
1:23:01 I would say, it’s the courage to believe that I don’t know.
1:23:10 That’s a perfect way to wrap up this conversation.
1:23:12 Thanks a lot for your time.
1:23:13 Thanks for having me.
1:23:15 All right.
1:23:17 It’s time for a few of my reflections after that conversation.
1:23:21 That went pretty amazing, I thought.
1:23:25 So you know, I try to get into these things.
1:23:27 I’ve been eating Brian’s diet for the last week with a few exceptions here and there,
1:23:33 but generally speaking, the pudding and the bowls are pretty good.
1:23:37 They’re awesome.
1:23:38 They’re missing a little bit of salt for my taste, but the reason behind that, I talked
1:23:42 to him after.
1:23:44 And the reason behind that is that the lentils and stuff have enough salt in them that if
1:23:48 you consume the quantities that he’s talking about on his website, you actually get the
1:23:53 daily amount of salt that you need.
1:23:55 I loved exploring a little bit of different angles to it.
1:24:00 I think the most surprising part of this conversation for me was the lessons on money that he wishing
1:24:06 you earlier.
1:24:07 And I haven’t heard him talk about that anywhere else.
1:24:09 I really enjoyed that.
1:24:11 The posture thing, I find myself sitting up straight right now, even noticing it.
1:24:16 And I think that that’s a really good sort of angle to it.
1:24:20 I love the idea that, you know, we can improve our sleep as the one critical variable and
1:24:29 everything else falls in line.
1:24:30 Sleep is a lead domino to so many other things.
1:24:33 And sleep positions you to play the next day on easy mode.
1:24:36 It doesn’t change the day that’s coming at you, but it does change how you handle it.
1:24:40 And I think one of the things that I’m going to try is just experimenting, eating dinner
1:24:44 a little earlier and seeing how that affects my resting heart rate while I sleep.
1:24:55 Thanks for listening and learning with me until next time.
1:25:01 Thanks for listening and learning with us for a complete list of episodes, show notes,
1:25:07 transcripts and more go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the knowledge project.
1:25:14 The Furnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking,
1:25:19 turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results.
1:25:22 It’s a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your
1:25:27 decision making and set yourself up for unparalleled success.
1:25:32 Learn more at fs.blog/clear.
1:25:37 Until next time.
1:25:37
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