The 2026 Immortality Protocol - Bryan Johnson - #1054

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Sorry to report, I have a new boner record. Three hours forty nine minutes. The Fellowship of the Ring is three hours forty eight minutes. Is that a good thing? I mean, I'm not sure. From whose perspective? Pick. Well yeah. Is it good for you? Yeah. I mean it's yeah, it's it's uh substantially better than an elite eighteen year old. What would an elite boner?

Around two hours and forty five minutes ish. What refers to elite? Like v vasodilation, like Yeah, like take an eighteen year old in peak condition. Okay. And let's say what would their nighttime erections be? They probably hover somewhere around like high two or two nearly three hours. Uh that would be elite level. And so it just crushes that level. So yeah, I mean from a like a pure biological capacity, yeah, it's pretty it's pretty good. Okay.

What were you doing with it? Three hours and forty nine minutes. So this is it's uh kinda like it's news to people as I've been sharing this, that I mean people Men are generally familiar with the idea that when you are 12, 13, 14, you start having boners and they happen a lot. You know, like in class. You don't even ask for it. Gust of wind. Yeah, gust of wind. Literally anything and you can't do anything about it. Like I mean, do you remember like I would walk in between classes and it's like

You gotta bonus. Where's it gonna go? Where'd it go? Tuck it into the waistband, fold it. Exactly. Pull it up, you exactly put a little book cover in front of it, but like you can't control it and you can't really stop it. And then as you age, those things naturally go down. So people kind of forget about it as a phenomena. But men and women have arousal cycles every night, three to five erections every night. Men get erect, women have their clitoris and gourd.

And so it's this natural process the body says, like I want to keep my sexual function l alive and vibrant and it pulses it every night. And so it depends upon your quality of sleep. Your uh metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, your physiological health, and your hormone health. And so if those things are not in place, It doesn't happen. And so if someone's bragging about four hours of sleep at night and like they feel fine, they're doing great.

They have no boners. You might have survived with the sleep, but your erection wasn't there. This is why I started talking about these things. Right now, sleep deprivation is high status. Right. If you can basically flex and say, I only need to sleep four hours a night, I'm amazing, I work eighteen hours a day. People like, oh my God, what an amazing person. We admire you so much. And so it has this really weird high status.

So this frame of the boners makes sleep deprivation low status. Right? It's like, sure, you can brag about that thing, but Also, your body has shut down its sexual function and you can no longer get boners. And so it's really like that was one angle. The other one is like that the erections really are a one of the most representative biomarkers of overall health. that you can have big muscles and you can have great skin, but if your boners are not there, then, you know.

It's not your body's not in a good shape. Nighttime erections are like the weather vane or the canary in the coal mine that's an aggregate of a ton of other shit that's going on. Exactly right. Yeah. It basically is a representative marker and you can't do anything about it. Like you can't you can't go to the gym and like work out your bonus, right? You can like you can't pump iron. You go to sleep, it either happens or it doesn't. You have no control over it.

So it's this really great marker. But what do you mean is you have no control over making it happen at the time? But you do have control over your health, which is going to be indicative of whether or not that does happen in future. You could go to the gym and do a ton of zone two, which I imagine improves cardiovascular health. And then make it some more bonus. Exactly right. Right. Yeah. But otherwise, when you lay down and you close your eyes, it's just like you say a prayer, it's like

I hope they happen. You can think of Lord of Rings all of you want, but it's if it's not gonna happen, it's not gonna happen. I mean, like the the company that does this that makes this device, they've got a twenty thousand uh nights data set and my scores just like trounce everybody in the data set. Okay. And so we've worked very hard. Like Is that the thing you're most proud of?

You know, um it really is. I know it's like a in our society, people hear that and they blush, like, Oh my god, that's so you know, like why are you talking about that? Yeah. But like It it's like a biological function. Everybody has them. Like we as a species, our primary biological objective is to reproduce. It's like

It's on point with what our DNA is meant to do. And it also is like the most counter culture thing you can be doing because We have this culture that has high status relative to sleep deprivation and having a shitty lifestyle, drinking a lot.

um, doing addictive things, nicotine, vaping. So it really is like co like counter to all those things to trying to say those are actually low status, this is high status. Let's try to change the moral narrative on like what do you aspire to and what really is a flight.

Great point. Um it's a weird Trades like that, I think most people understand uh if you're smoking particularly cigarettes, uh, if you're drinking very regularly, uh if you are overweight. Yeah. These are um There are visual markers right now that also suggest you're probably gonna be pretty fucked down the line. Yeah. Sleep deprivation is one of these weird inversions of that where you're rewarded for the sleep deprivation in the moment and the costs are pushed further down the line.

Uh, I guess it would be like um a birth rate decline. Like you don't see it. because the population can be getting bigger even while the birth rate is getting smaller'cause people live longer. And then...

this thing drops off a cliff. Or uh climate change. Yeah. You can continue to do it and continue to do it and continue to do it until you reach some point where you can no longer handle it. It's like going bankrupt gradually and then subtly. Suddenly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh you're you're right to call out the fact that There's this sort of pedestalisation of it. I think about um especially watching you, who is now the tip of the spear of sort of

Like you're the canonical example in basically no time at all. You know, it would have been back in the day like a Ben Greenfield, and then it would have been a a Tyr or a Huberman. And I guess these guys all have their own pockets. Right. Your like hard longevity now moving into culture with like

um limited balance on I'm just doing what it takes to be as healthy as possible. Yeah. Um anyway, everyone's got their own little pockets. You've become the canonical example. What I've seen is this sort of the spiral is getting tighter and tighter and tighter of movement, counter movement, counter counter movement, counter counter counter movement. So um we don't know that sleep's important.

Matthew Walker comes out and says, Should watch How Much You Sleep. That was w the first time I ever learned about it. Right. And I think he we'd be right to say he was close to this sort of front modern push of that. then that lasts for a good while and we get back to, well, you know, like

the hustle and grind culture can come back in and take over and then you get back to, No, this is really, really, really fucking important and it'll improve your performance right now. And now we've already gone back to like the next iteration of the hustle and grind culture, which is much more of a uh pushback against over optimization. So there was this is important.

Fuck off no it's not hustle and grind. Yeah. Uh you will perform better if you do sleep well and also you should consider your sleep, which was an elevated version of the first one. Yeah.

Fuck off your overoptimizing, like we can just do it ourselves. Like it gets tighter and tighter and tighter. Yeah. It's like also the uh I mean I'm waging memetic warfare, right? And so like this is the classical thing that has always been done throughout history is you take a given moral value in society If you don't like the

that that thing has power, you invert it. Right. So this is like uh Christi like Christianity would say the meek inherit the earth. Right. So this is like a counter to the rich and powerful have the ability to push everyone around and do as they please. And so you can't really combat that.

So if you can't compete on strength, you compete on virtue. So you invert that. Right. And so this has been done through religions, it's been done through all kinds of cultural norms. And so this is I'm trying to basically do the same thing to death culture. And so death culture is, you know, we power, wealth, and status are the primary objectives of our society. We will do anything for power, wealth, and status, including killing our.

And that killing yourself for power, wealth, and status is actually a virtue. Right. Like you're you're a hero, you're on the hero's journey if you do this thing. And so to combat that, you have to take that, which is high status, and make it low status. And so the way you punch away at that is you you do the the thing where it's like if you get four hours of sleep a night,

you have no boners, right? If you don't have a boner, are you a man, right? And the same thing is true for for women, you know, it's like same cycle. Then you can also say, you know, if if you're not well rested, if you don't have good nourishment, if you're not exercising, You have functional IQ ten to twelve points lower. Nearly a full standard deviation. So it's actually making you dumb, right? And now like what

what do people care about more in that high status place than their intellect, right? Their ability to to actually maybe only after that would be their erections. Exactly, yeah, exactly. I mean like y there's it's so primal. It's like how smart am I? And like how sexually um

Formidable am I as a person, right? Like that's that's who we are as these animals. And so I'm trying to take those high status things, bump them up to low status, and invert the arc. Because otherwise, when you make these like um

good natured, like sleep because it's good for you. No one gives a fuck. You have to hit the heart of power because unless you peek to speak to power walls and status directly, nobody's gonna change anything because they're locked in on the goal they've been taught to pursue, which is like I care about my status and the tribe. I don't want to be ostracized, I want a high status, I want high respect, I want high power as much as I can get.

Which is uh talk to me about power wealth and status, uh Is there a hierarchy to you? Is there one which is more seductive than the rest? Is there a w a a sequence that people seem to move through on their evolution to wipe themselves, rid themselves of the slime. Yeah. I mean it you can like just jump in between groups and just see it so cleanly. Like, for example, I spent some time in D C recently. They're

They're not after wealth. I mean, you can get wealthy being in DC, but that's not the primary objective. You're really after connections and power and status from that community. Whereas in Silicon Valley, it's really about wealth creation, right? Like that's like the ultimate objective. And so different communities have different levers.

uh I'm impartial to whatever they are. Like ultimately people are trying to people playing this game are trying to superimpose their view on the world. Right? They they're trying to muscle in And reorganize the world to somehow be trained by their mental models of existence. And whether that's done through a product, or their philosophy or their presence or their personality, but everyone's trying to wrest r wrestle like their mimetic essence onto the world. Hmm.

What do you make of the Harvard longevity study? I'm sure that you've become familiar with this. the world's longest running study on adult life and happiness. And it does have some sort of longevity life uh span, health span uh predictions in there. Uh given that that's been going already for such a long time and has had lot a huge data set, right? I think it's like eighty thousand, maybe even more. Yeah. What's your perspective on that, given

What you're interested in. Yeah, I mean there's probably some truisms on like humans respond favorably to having robust relationships. Like that's true long ago, it's true now. Uh humans respond favorably to exercise. There's a lot of truism. It's like, we know this shit's really, you know, the case. But I think it it's like what may be interesting about this is.

uh that is a good retrospective study. I'm not sure all of it's going to carry over into the future. So in the in the coming years, if we figure out some of these uh new therapies to rejuvenate ourselves in ways we couldn't before.

it may be an entirely different environment in which we look at long lived species. And it may be less about those things and more about other things. Now, this is not to say that relationships are going away. It's not to say the fundamentals of like uh being active are going away, but I do think we're at a s a moment in time where And if you have that study going on and we were talking in the nineteen sixties, we'd be like, Yep.

Good data, let's carry on. But being in twenty twenty five where AI is now starting to make novel discoveries, I think the landscape's gonna be very different. What are the specific differences that are gonna have the most lever behind them?

I mean we there's an open question like what is AI in our lives? Like is AI a relationship or not? Uh do we have human relationships? Like what are the contours of those things? Uh what do longevity therapies do for us if we start playing around with gene therapies? What does it also? I mean, for example, you look at Ozempic, you know, these GLP ones, you you put a you take a shot, it alters your experience with hunger. Like it changes a fundamental part of being human.

And so if we have the ability to change something so like fundamental to our essence and we get really good at drug design, like what else are we gonna change? So I'm talking about this on like a ten, fifteen, twenty year timescale. This is not like next two or three years, but still like we are on this open frontier. where there may maybe some things that continue as universalisms that just as a biological species they're true.

also, uh it's like a radical change and I'm more interested in like what is going to be different than what has been. Mm. Yeah. Uh Morgan House those books same as ever.

uh is an interesting one that people try to predict the future, but what is easier is to work out the stuff that's not going to change moving forward. Because the future is as yet undetermined, but working out what from the past can be predictive is quite nice. Um, there is this sense, right? Everybody's had this sense that our generation.

We are the one. It's the inflection point. It's the precipice. It's right now. It's always right now. Because it always does feel like that, right? If you look at a hockey curve. that graph at each point, it was the highest, most rapidly ascending, biggest, quickest moving point ever. And then you just Pull it along a little bit and then it zooms out and you go, Oh, that was nothing. But now, now it and then you zoom out and you're gonna go, but now Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah, like we like we I've read um I just finished nineteen twenty nine about the stock market crash, also Tripping on Utopia, and also a History of Western thought. I finished those three books last week. And like the the theme that comes through is that humans replay the same actual play every generation. It's the same cast of characters. It's the same archetypes. It's the same arguments. And they just roll through different ideological spaces, but it's the same dynamic.

And so we experience this moment, like you're saying, like we think it's novel and unique and we imagine we're something that's pivotal, but really like it's just the same thing. It's really very humbling because then it goes back to like how much of your lived experience is NPC and how much of it is truly novel. And like I have to con like concede probably ninety nine percent of my lived experience as N P C

I probably have one shot at a novel thought or that you know, like it's just it's just the state of play and it's very hard to get outside of that. But once you realize that it's some way, it's somehow relieving that that's the case, but also um challenging because you have to figure out like how do I pull myself out?

and try to find moments of sobriety to see what this moment is. Mm-hmm. There's a again, speaking of the Christian piece, the the meek, the sort of humility, the you're less special than you think you are. Uh it's grounding in that way. I don't think British people need more of that. Maybe Americans do. We're already got it. God, I love the Brits. I I love how uh I love how um honory they are.

and brutally honest and acrimonious and it I find Sanguine. I I do I find the those personality traits to be so charming. Well, I think everybody misses what they don't have. Right. Uh um Americans would probably quite like a little bit more piss taking and being brought back down to earth. And British people want a little bit more enthusiasm and encouragement. Yeah. And that's why I came over here. I was like, Oh my God, it's like being

you know, taking a drink and not knowing I was thirsty. I was so nourished by this. And then for you, it's I f I've always wanted someone to tell me I'm a prick. Like I you know, if you're finally these people will find say it to me straight. Yeah. Um I I'm interested, you know, sort of relating to the Harvard longevity thing.

Um from the outside. a lot of what you're focused on seems to be kind of the raw physiological, um, but there's a huge emotional piece to longevity, regardless of how much AI is going to change things. Yeah. Um, and some of that will manifest in

uh uh like sympathetic stress, chronic stress, uh blood pressure, sleep, blah, blah, blah. But m more than that as well, is what is your moment-to-moment experience of of life like too. So I'm interested in how you are thinking about the emotional and spiritual piece of longevity and health. when you've got all of this focus on the physical piece. So are you are you and how are you looking at the at at those two elements? Do you even conceive conceive of them within your map?

framework. Yeah. I mean, first I don't really feel emotions. So no, joking. I mean, people that so the that's a very common perspective. What people don't realize is that the entirety of my endeavor is um is about AI. And how we as a human race survive this moment. Like full stop. That is the only reason I'm doing this.

Was it like that when you first started? Yes. Really? Mm-hmm. So you saw the writing on the wall with regards to AI before normies like me did? In twenty sixteen I I gave this talk and I was like look, if we look at this graph Very clear, it's up and to the right and it's big. What was the graph? AI. Right.

Whatever it is, it's gonna be big. And so I didn't care to get into the prediction game of like what it when it's going to arrive and what it's gonna be and all that, just that this is a moment. And I was trying to poke around like given this. Uh it it really does feel like this is like very much like a feel intuit intuition. It feels big and it feels consequential.

And it feels like we probably wanna be sober to get this thing right. And so what I've been trying to do more than anything is to say we need a new moral philosophy. That enables us to survive this moment. That basically the philosophy we have now that drives everything is is one built on death. We are inherently a die species.

We seek death for the glory of immortality through our various games. And the new moral philosophy I'm trying to create is don't die. That is like when you give birth to superintelligence, existence itself is the highest virtue. And so that back to this book of the history of Western thought.

Plato, Aristotle, uh medieval t uh Christianity, medieval times, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern day scientific era, like big chunks of time for these big ideologies. We're due for a brand new moral philosophy. And that will be induced by AI. And so it the opening is right now. And it's not just like some small tweak. It's a really big opening.

And that's what I'm really angling for. And so health is a vector to basically talk about it to say, like, here's how you understand philosophy through these very practical actions. But that's really what I'm trying to do. And so above all, it's a health is a

is a language to communicate a new moral philosophy on what we do as a species in this moment. Before we continue, if your sleep's been off, taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times or feeling groggy in the morning, Mementous is sleep packs. Are here to help. They're not your typical knock-you-out supplement just overloaded with melatonin, just the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly.

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Yeah, I've got uh miniature essay from you. People are confused by me and my intentions. I'm called a narcissist, a tech bro, vampire, grifter, and health freak. Let me be clear about what I'm doing. My goal is to build the world's next major moral framework, an ideology that bridges human and machine, biology and intelligence, the ancient and the emergent. The coming psychosis, a real possibility in the coming years, is that society becomes dangerously psychotic.

Yes, we are already psychotic, addicted, fragmented, and self destructive. But I mean clinically psychotic and on a civilizational scale. We are already showing precursor symptoms, record antidepressant use, rising suicide rates, rampant addiction, and global increases in loneliness and anxiety disorders. These are all biomarkers of a species whose cognitive environment has outpaced its biology.

Human cognition evolved under conditions of l slow change. Our nervous systems and social architectures were shaped for a world that changed near imperceptibly over millennia. When things change faster than our native capacity we lose coherence. The hippocampus binds the present to memory and the prefrontal cortex constructs a coherent future. That mean? Yeah. Um, it means that we are going to struggle to keep up. And it's gonna be so unnerving to us that Thank you.

Uh things might get chaotic and psychotic and it might just like have the bottom drop out. Like for example, when I was reading this book, 1929, about the stock market crash, uh the The focus was financial gain. You know, invest in the stock market, get credit to invest more, like lever yourself up. And then when that burst, it created all kinds of d destruction in the economy and we took us a long time to recover from that. I think the equivalent right now would be hope.

that you have hope for the future, right? Like you have imaginations of what you want to be become, what you want to achieve. Everyone has that. And as society progresses, when AI starts doing various things, it's not that they're bad. It's just that change happens and that creates uncertainty for humans. What am I gonna do? Who am I? What's my identity? How do I feel secure? All these basic questions, if we can't answer those as fast as people feel insecure about it.

then you kind of teeter on the psychosis where like, can you keep your shit together? And so people focus a lot on AI. Like is AI a threat? Uh, should we pause it? Like all these different questions. there's an equal and opposite concern of what happens to human society when all this change is happening so quickly and we can't respond fast enough. Like is is humanity like is is the bottom falling out?

the real risk of you know, then humans do human stuff. Right? Like we What's the bottom falling out in this scenario? Uh it's the sturdiness of law and order. of hope that I I m my my son, you know, my twin year old son, he can go to school. He can get a degree a degree, he can get a job, he can make money, he can find his own apartment, he can get married, you know, if he wants to have kids, like the natural life progression, if he can't quite see that structure anymore, who is he?

Or you take like my dad, who's like now his early seventies, he's on the other side, he's in the legal profession, the tools are getting so good, like he just can't hang. Like it's it's it's hard for him to hang. And he's like, What do I do? Like I'm now out of the game and I don't feel any worse. Like I don't have any identities. He's really, really struggling. And so you take any person at any stage in their life, you've got really serious existential challenges. And this is not guaranteed.

It's just as like a thought experiment of like what could happen and so what don't die could be is like this this sturdiness b beneath us to say It's okay. Like our identities are not tied up in our profession. They're not tied up in our status in the community. It's it's like actually it's tied up by this ex this

virtue of existence that we're going to fight this new game as a species that don't die. And so it's trying to create sturdiness of identity, sturdiness of community, sturdiness of like, we've got this. We have a purpose. We have a mission. We're here for a reason.

If the mission of being alive is simply mortality, does that not uh drop down much of the complexity that people find beauty in? It's like simply being alive, like There's two parts to this that I see in my mind. One is one which is very whole. It's about enoughness. It's about being okay as you are. Yeah. Um but That's not how humans are wired. You know there's Yeah. Like power, status, money.

Like we are going to try and even if it's just I play pickleball on a week weekend with my friends, I want to become better at pickleball next week. If I'm not better at pickleball, there is this sense of lack that comes through. Yeah. But on one side there is sort of enoughness. Um, but when you get down to a more sort of raw objective ledger, like your job is to be alive tomorrow. Yeah. So I

Fucking hell. Really? Yeah. Like maybe if we were in a time of war or there was a lot of pressure or there's a pandemic, like, ooh, that'll imbue me because I'm there's resistance. But like, really? Like the The peak of my contribution is to not expire by tomorrow.

Permanently until you know it does happen. Do you understand what I mean? How inspiring is that as a vision versus Yeah. I mean so to make a parallel example, think of capitalism as an objective function. So you say making money is your goal. Right. When you wake up, that's what you do. And now you you see the entire world is engaged in that goal in some capacity. Everyone. Don't Die is a similar game.

where you say our goal as a species is to end death, not just for ourselves, for us collectively and the planet. And so you're basically taking on the biggest challenge you could ever take on in this part of the universe. You're trying to solve for entropy. Like let's just like list out a few things we could work on. Like, how would you go about building a global biological immune system?

So let's say we say a pandemic like COVID is not good for us. Like we don't want those anymore. We don't want the plague. We don't want somebody in a lab, you know, cooking up Smallpox again. Great. So how could we build out a global biological immune system where we have sensors around the world where it automatically detects any kind of pathogen that is threatening to our life?

That's a pretty cool scientific project. Now let's say we care about the oceans and the ocean health and a coral reef is burning up right now. That's bad from an environment. How do we stop that from happening and rebuild coral reef? And so you just start like ticking down the projects of how could you as a species solve for entropy, like solve for death, the list is endless. Like it's just like you have more to do than you ever could in capitalism. It's it's it's a bigger game than capitalism.

Can you flex it in the same way? Sure. I mean you have the same rules, right? Like anyone who does something has high status in the community. Like if I'm sol if I'm making a contribution, like for example, I started to to again like my entire game is to make Uh, death related things that are high status, make them low status, right? That's my whole thing. And so in in this case, you could start. uh scoring companies that do something that actually kill you. Right. So that could be scrolling.

Endless scroll, inducing you to endless scroll. It could be alcohol, it could be vaping, it could be porn, it could be um toxins, like right, all those things. Companies that introduce that into the world, you would quantify it and they would get a die score. Any fast food company represents death.

Right. They are actively introducing molecules into people's body that induce death versus uh more, you know, healthy ingredients. So like that's an example where you start assigning a quantitative measure. on what an entity, individual or company is doing into society. Like a carbon offset but for longevity. Exactly. But defined at this really granular fashion and you try and you tie'cause right now, if you make money and you dirty the world, it doesn't matter.

Right. If you if you make money and you poison people, it doesn't matter. In fact, you're kind of a hero. So like to tie social status with your actual effect on life or death for the species. Mm. What have been the

biggest changes uh in your approach or beliefs about health and longevity over the last few years? We we you came on the show maybe three years ago and then we got to hang out in Roatan a couple of years ago. But lots of research, lots of experimentation, self experimentation. What have been the biggest pivots? Yeah. I I'd say one is do less. Like most things in health and wellness and longevity don't work. And so people spend a lot of time doing stuff.

And I would say save your time and money and don't do a lot of stuff. Do a few number uh do a few t things. And then two is the biggest yield is typically doing behavioral change. So like if a person has I like ta everybody has their thing. Let's say somebody's thing is like they they love Skittle. And they just, you know, can't help themselves but have a bag late at night. then um that's the biggest longevity therapy for that person is to stop eating the bag of Skittles.

And so what a person will typically do is like if they have that if they're locked in on that battle they will um to compensate for that. They'll go to a a gym, they'll go get red light therapy, they'll do a cold plunge. They'll do all this stuff. That isn't a thing. And but it yeah, it's basically to compensate for the fact that they feel so powerless. To stop the Skittles thing.

that they'll rather do those things. So most so most people are doing that compensation. And even though like those things are good, they're not the higher yield thing. The higher yield thing is to stop the bad behavior. But that's the thing that most people feel very hard. And what they don't realize in doing that is like the reason why that's hard is because they're not sleeping.

uh not sleeping well just destroys your willpower. And they're not sleeping well because the like five other preceding things are the case. So I I try to help people understand like here's a five step process to nail your sleep. When you nail your sleep, your willpower boosts. When your willpower boosts, you can tackle Skittle.

That's your therapy. Okay. So is sleep numero uno? By far. Okay. Give me, after all of the experimentation, what's the thirty thousand foot view on how to get perfect sleep? You you want to lower your resting heart rate before bed. It's the highest value biomarker you can track on a daily basis. So you'll find that everything that increases your heart rate before bed, besides sex,

is bad for you and everything that lowers your heart rate before bed is good for you. And so for example, food, timing of food is really important. So if your bedtime's at ten PM, you want to have your final meal the day at six PM. So four hours. Uh I personally do like ten to twelve hours because I really like that digestion time. It lowers my heart rate to like thirty-nine to forty beats per minute. So food, uh four hours before, uh 60 minutes before bed, screens off.

So that's very hard because we're all addicted to our phones. but hard cut, phones off. Uh because you want to avoid scrolling, texting, working, and that's very uh arousing for the body. Um red light, amber light in the house, so whites, blue lights, uh are really bad for melatonin release. Um, you wanna have a like a wind a sixty minute wind down. So when screens are off, you wanna use that sixty minutes to just calm yourself down. So

This is very hard because people have we've created these habits where we're glued to our phones and if we're not on our phones, we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so it creates this panic. So the 60-minute time window before bed is really precious in that you just need to kind of be with yourself.

Now you can hang out with a friend, a family member, you can go for a walk, you can do breath work, meditation, a hobby, like puzzle journal, like whatever, but you just need to learn how to be with yourself without stimulation. And that will naturally allow you to calm yourself down. I do this process where I talk to myself. So like I talk to my various Brians. So like sleep Brian comes on duty at seven thirty P. M.'cause my bedtime's at eight thirty PM.

And then all the Brian's line up and they want to talk to me. How many are there? Oh man, there's like probably a dozen. Like probably loud. Yeah, so the first one's ambitious Brian. Ambitious Brian is by far the loudest. Right. He's always like he shows up and he's like Do more. I got a banger idea.

Brand new idea. It's fucking amazing. And Sleep Brian says, I love you, ambitious Brian. Right. Doing us a real solid, like doing great out there. Also, we're in sleep mode. So I'm gonna write down your idea and tomorrow we'll talk about that. And then the next one is anxious Brian. He's like doing all the checks like today, did you make any big errors? Did you like, you know, do anything upset anyone. Do anything anything stupid, anything you say anything you regret.

And so like doing that internal reconciliation of like do you have good self-awareness and they all just line up. But if you don't talk to them, then when your head hits a pillow, they show up and they're like, We're here and we want to talk about our stuff. And then you go to bed finally, you wake up at two AM and they're like, we're back. And so you've got to have some kind of reconciliation process to calm those voices. So like those those are the big ones, like food, um, light.

Um window routine, screens off. Um that Um yeah, like and then caffeine. So you want to have your final caffeine around noon each day. So it has a six hour half life. Those are the real big ones. So but what you want is like for a man you want to be like

50-ish heart rate, same with the same with the female. If you're in that zone, you're doing pretty well. If you can bump down a bit more, um, once you get that nighttime routine knocked down, then you can start exercising very well. Like if you sleep really well, your willpower is skyrocketed. If you sleep poorly, it like knocks your prefrontal cortex offline. You can't really have much mil willpower. So that's like number one. Okay. Well that's the.

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How do you avoid an optimal routine becoming a fragile superstition. Yeah. People um people try to uh they they come back they come with that argument that's great. Like um The body loves routine. Now it does not mean that you have to always be in a routine, but the body is built for routine. So for example, if your bedtime is ten PM,

Your circadian rhythm rhythm is locked in to ten PM and your body expects sleep to happen at ten PM. This is what jet lag is. Yes, exactly. And so like you have a garbage truck that rolls through your body at around ten thirty PM. And it's there to pick up all the trash. What is that? It's your your basically your cleansing system of like your your lymphatic system is cleaning all the trash from your body.

And if you're not asleep at 10 30 p.m. and in your deep sleep mode, it's gonna it's gonna not come. So you've got trash buildup. Like New York, you've got the trash bags all over the place. And so people think if I'm not in bed by ten, I'm gonna go to bed at one, that's okay, I'll sleep in tomorrow morning, make up. It doesn't work that way. And so the body has very specific rhythms that it wants to be on. And so when you lock in, it's good. And so when someone makes the argument like,

I'm gonna give my body ho some hermetic stress, right? I'm gonna like push it to one and then it move back. The body hates it. Like inconsistent sleep is as bad as little sleep. I was gonna say, do you When it comes to prioritization, is duration more important than regularity or are they equal? So regularity by far is the best one. Yeah. More than duration. Uh oh, so I'm sorry. You said duration. Um

Uh dunno. Uh I'm not sure on that one. It's kinda like picking your favorite child, I suppose. Yeah, because you kinda need both. Yeah. Like the the lesson here is uh'cause these are bad habits people have. You need to be on time. You can't make it up. You can't uh skip during the week and then make it up on the weekend. It doesn't work that way. So you miss a garbage truck every day, it doesn't come back. Like

Sure, maybe in the weekend, but then you're so you're so off on your circadian rhythm that like now is the garbage truck even in service. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Um Uh I understand what you mean with regards to the timing.

But the sixty minute window, what if you don't get it? What if this you're out at dinner, you're doing something with friends, you're hanging out, you don't get to you're around some bright light. I've got a great a great story from a friend when he was in his hyper hyper optimizer zone, which everybody goes through, where it's like you the stress of trying to be perfect kills you more quickly than your imperfections do. Yeah. And uh he had this sixty minute wind down routine which was

blue light blockers on and the mouth tape and the nose strip and the magnesium bag glycinate and the g everything else. And he'd been sort of winding down for sixty minutes and his girlfriend at the time had been downstairs and he was brushing his teeth in the dark. So that he wouldn't have any light on.

And she just comes like tinkering in, hits the light in the bathroom, like the lights come on, he's like, Ah, he's blinded, he hasn't looked at light for for an hour, goes to bed and he's raging. He's like, Ah, is my entire routine's been messed up and I laid there sort of staring at the ceiling, doesn't sleep and she

drops off within five minutes. Having just come in from like, you know, scrolling TikTok or whatever. Yeah. Um the example is about the fragility of reliance on that and the fear that without it, what does that create? Oh, I mean, how am I s gonna be able to write my book today? I didn't get my you know, like a as you said, like what were the stupid things that I said today that's anxious Brian?

But another type of anxiety is oh I didn't get my routine done, therefore I can't sleep, which becomes self fulfilling. Sleep's one of the very few things that trying harder at it makes it worse. Yeah. I mean, people can find their happy balance. I think if you look at the uh various archetypes of people Some people love that kind of regimen. They love to be um regimented. They like structure, they like process, procedure, order.

And that's just their personality type. Other people like the girlfriend in the story, she's not. And so the I think the thing here is for people to recognize their kind of archetype of where they naturally gravitate to where they feel good about themselves. If you're not naturally orderly and structured, like don't be that. Right. If you're so it's just like find your gem, but understand there are principles at play which you can't just override.

Right then. Regardless of whether you like structure or or don't, like if you have a three hour swing between bed times across a week, yeah. Y your body doesn't work in that way. Okay. Um what are What are the things that people focus on for sleep that don't move the needle?

I I really uh I guess I take three hundred M Cs of magnesi of um melatonin. Just like so a third of a gram. A microgram milligram. Yes, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like one milligram, five milligrams, like Thirty and fifty milligrams. It's a very tiny dose of melatonin. Uh it's to offset the calcification that happens in my pinal gland. Like as you age, your pinal gland calcifies.

you produce less melatonin, so it's like a little offset, teeny bit. So in ten years' time maybe you'll take five hundred micro. Otherwise I don't take anything for sleep. And so I'd so much rather build habits. And this is the same thing, like Americans, just like we are we take more antidepressants than any country in the world. Quick fix. We love pills. Like we love pills to solve fundamental problems.

A gummy or a powder. Yeah. Habits are the strongest ones. So like that's why I focus on the dick. Just build your sturdy habits. In the archetype you are, that's the tried and true thing that delivers the best. Now, if you want to try to amplify with whatever you take, cool, but generally speaking, um, it's really about habits.

Okay, give me your formula for behavior change. If behavior change is so important, let's assume someone's taken the first red pill, which is sleep and I now have access to uh the amount of willpower that I'm supposed to have as opposed to however much is diminished when I'm a shit sleep from the night before. Yeah. I've arrived. Hid look at behold my litany of shitty habits. Exactly. Like a guy in a side uh side alley going, Would you care to peruse my words of shitty habits? Yeah. Um

Someone has a shitty habit. Maybe it's the Skittles. Maybe it's whatever. Pick whichever you think is a good one. Talk me through your James Clear. approach to the Brian Johnson's James Clear too. Okay, so actually I I'll show you mine, but I wonder if this resonates or not with people. But I had this issue where at seven PM I would overeat every night.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, evening eating for me is the only time. And no no one ever overeats in a f uh breakfast. Oh yeah, it was nine AM and I gorged myself on Snickers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like maybe like an a a weekend brunch where you order, you know, pancakes and you're like, Oh my god. That was a bad idea. I don't wanna do that again. Yeah, exactly. So like your willpower goes down all day, it makes sense. Like seven PM, like you have stress, you're worn down, like you just wanna like whatever. So

That was my issue. It was like over eight at seven PM. And so I did it every day for years. And every night it was the same battle, right? Like I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. I do it. And then like, you know, my the top button of my pants, I can't be buttoned up and I'm like,

fucking hate myself. Like this is so tight. I'm so uncomfortable. So I tried so many things to stop that and I couldn't. And so the one thing that I did is one day I just kind of said in jest, evening Brian, you're fired. Like y you, Brian, who occupy me from five PM to seven to ten PM, you're an unreliable Thing. Like every day. Steward. Yeah, steward. Like you basically um come up with these rationalizations like tonight's the last night.

tomorrow morning we're going to exercise really hard. It's one bite, like whatever your specific entry point is you always convince me to do it. You're a slippery motherfucker. Exactly. And you basically make morning Brian miserable. You make Dad Brian less good less good dad. Like ambitious Brian is hurting because of you. And so I said you're fired.

And so that means from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., you do not have authority to eat food. No matter what. Like I don't care what's happening. You cannot eat food because you're so shifty. And so I just made that rule and so I gave him a name, I wrote down his arguments, and so he would come into my mind and be like, Hey, I'm here.

And I'm like, Hey, evening Brian. Like, how you doing, man? Fuck you. Yeah. And like, oh, you're gonna use the we're gonna work out hard tomorrow morning argument or like tonight's last night, like I see you and I know what that is. And I've done this a hundred times. I've never in my entire life felt satisfied with myself after doing this. Ever. I've never felt proud of myself. I've never felt good. Yeah, you're selling yourself a lie about how you're going to feel after doing this. Exactly.

And so yeah, that was just it was just a rule. And so I guess th the rule is something like none or is better than some. that we do like to rationalize that, oh, just like every once in a while is fine, moderation is a principle of life I want to play by. We have all these very clever catchphrases to justify our inability to actually do what we want. And so yeah, that was a really clean hook for me. That

Cool. And the reason that I like it is because of this most recent iteration of ah the over optimizing. Can we not just fucking like how lame, how like you know the the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections? um moderation man. And I there is a kernel of truth in it and this is why like a slower, more gentle approach to I see you, I think there's something there. The I see you, I think there's something there is, hey man, um your focus on these habits

is a kind of fragility, uh and it is destroying the enjoyment of life by obsessing it over how you live it. Right. So I get the angle on that. The problem is that nobody scrutinizes the just live by vibes man approach with the same like l level of uh resolution because by design they're living by fucking vibes, so nothing's being tracked. Yeah, yeah. But you've I've never even thought of it before, but you've fucking nailed it, which is

I just live by moderation, dude, is not living by moderation. It's living by extremis. Yeah. Like you end up the moderation you you put I always use this example because I like biscuits, cookies. I like biscuits. Um, if you tell me pack of Oreos, there's one outside, uh, you can eat none of them or you can eat all of them. I'm like Yeah Done. Exactly right. But you can eat two of them.

Well I'm exactly fucking Superman. Yeah. No, I can't eat two of them. Yeah. No. If you give me a star maybe I don't know, maybe some people aren't like this. Yeah. I'm I'm a eat all of them or eat none of them kind of guy. Yeah. So your what on the surface, like first order, looks like

that could be very bureaucratic dictatorial Nazi policy, like how can you do this to yourself? Like ah you're not balancing life. Like it would be much better if you just allowed yourself to treat like every so often. It's okay. Show me how every so often your every so often is. Yeah, exactly. It's not that every so often. Yeah. It's actually most of the time. Yeah.

Uh you know, I just like I'm a bit more flexible with my sleep. You know, sometimes I let myself sleep in, sometimes I give myself I go to bed a little bit later, like I'm Okay. Let just look at when you're going to bed. It just keeps on shifting later and later and there is no trend over time. It's just w and sometimes it's getting wider. Yeah. Um so yeah, I think I I've never thought of it before, but the um

Everything in moderation is not done in moderation. Exactly right. Yeah. So th this is like again a medic moral philosophy warfare. So the person who's arguing for moderation is attempting to take uh a A drive towards health. and uh make that low status and make their moderation high status. Yep. So this if you if you real if you look at the world through this lens, you realize everybody at all times is trying to take their position.

And they're like assessing the battlefield and they're saying anything that makes me feel low status, I'm going to invert and make that high status thing low status and my thing high status because I inherently want to feel superior to people at all times. And so then that is like literally everything that is happening at any moment in society. Ever. It's just like humans want to feel superior in high status. Okay.

Do you know uh the Inner Citadel idea by Isaiah Balen? I don't. Allow me to teach you. I think this may be useful to you. Uh Asiba Lin says when the natural road to one human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally.

If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. A different way to look at it is if your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg.

And if you can't, then you cut off the leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. That's right. Yeah. I mean that's it. That's it, I mean basically that's the exact articulation of what we've been discussing. Yep. It's permetic and moral philosophy of warfare to feel superiority. Mm. Because nobody wants to feel inferior. Yeah.

It's like it's a little bit more than that. Yeah, and a lot of that is driven by this I can't be inferior. Yeah. This is why getting into a a relationship with too much of a power imbalance One person is significantly busier than the other, one person is significantly better looking the other, one person has significantly more attention than the other. The power imbalance is so great.

That unless the second person is happy to only ever sing harmony and never sing lead, and is there like in service and the service becomes their reward. if you have two people you can't have two people singing lead. Yeah. Like one person has to sing harmony. Yeah. And if your lead singing and their lead singing and theirs is fucking way ahead or yours is way ahead, there's going to be tension. You know, I think about um I think about those bridges that you see during earthquakes.

And they sort of do this. They like flex like that. And I think about that's the kind of visual. It's this sort of flexing intention. It's not even necessarily a pulling apart. It's I'm going this way and you're going that way and Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. I mean like a hundred percent. Like what what is society? I mean, I guess like there's two macro games happening in society, like in that tension is um what is what is high status and then within that game of who is high status.

Right. That's it. And then you've got everyone else playing to try to take the high status, make it low status. But like right now, the highest status game is well. Right, capitalism. And this came from Adam Smith, a couple hundred this so I'm saying, like when you look Is the highest status game raw wealth? What what about uh uh renown, popularity, recognition? Because you look at uh

at somebody who already has lots of wealth and a lot of the time they continue to pursue status. I spoke about this with Naval and his I I I think this is true. Interested to get your perspective. Money is evolutionarily novel and yet it's a proxy for status and it gives you things that status can't. But we should have raw status for status' sake, prestige, dominance, access, it's like uh recognition. That should be more deeply rooted and therefore less easy to satiate.

than money. Yeah. Because money is more novel. Yeah. And money is not direct access to the thing that you need. Right? Money without status can make you live, but st and status without money can make you fucking miserable and kind of on the street in a way. Yeah. But it seems like lots of status rarely continue to pursue money, whereas people who get the fucking infinity money

Do always continue to pursue status. Do you see an asymmetry here? I'm interested with your perspective on money and status. Absolutely right. I mean, I think uh basically I think that's correct. I think uh money has more raw power. Just from a transactional. Just just raw power. Like the ability to to do things in the world. Now, behind that, so again, like you remember two games. One is what is high status, and then two is who's winning within status.

And so my con my comment on money is that that is within context of that as high status. But if you look at broader status of what is high status, um, right, like religion has played status, right? Like you look at Christianity where Jesus is like, look, guys, um, I've got a new status game for you.

And it's not what uh you're being told. Like I'm gonna tell you a whole new rule set. And so any religion's done that. And so this is the game I'm trying to play. I'm trying to basically say, like, right now, capitalism is status. Like it is if we said like this is the thing, and I'm trying to say this is the thing that might lead us to make a a terrible error in judgment on what we do in this moment. And that the the flip is existence itself is high status.

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Yeah, I I I do understand and I think what I like is that you are not trying to upend the game of status itself. Yeah. Uh that's locked in. It's like saying it's like saying, uh, well, you know, rather than trying to work out a more efficient rocket to get us off this launch pad, we can just defeat gravity. And you go No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So really the master game in society, like the ultimate game is determining what is status.

Like what is high status? And then of course you have billions and billions of humans will play within the game. They'll just be like, Oh, this is the this is the game and the function and the reward system, like I'm playing. They won't think about it. They they won't realize

that the game's been set up for them. They'll just play it. That's interesting. Yeah. So rather than trying to uh convince people not to play the game, you just change what the game is pointing to. Exactly. And they'll play they'll have the same fundamentals they'll apply to the new game. So when you when you say existence is the highest virtue

Same direction, same stuff every single time, just get the game right. And that's what I'm saying. Like if this moment is so simple, just get the objective function correct.

It's like a I know some sort of judo throw that uses your opponent's momentum against them. Yeah, exactly. So to speak. Okay, tell me about your th sauna experiments. Yeah. I was watching those unfold with intrigue.

So we really did we discovered quite a few things that I didn't d I shouldn't say discovered. Um we found out a lot of quite quite a few things. So one is For those who are new to sauna, um, dry sauna has the most evidence because you're trying to get your core body temperature up, and so infrared does not get hot enough, and wet sauna

uh will basically burn you at the temperatures you need. So dry sauna is the right traditional dry sauna. Yep. Yep. Uh twenty minutes a day at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Nine uh eighty three is that eighty three Celsius? Ninety defree Celsius. All right. Two hundred Fahrenheit.

So three things we found. One is I was in LA during the LA wild wildfires when like twenty Yeah, that'll be you up if you go close to them. Yeah. So I was measuring my toxins in my body, uh when before the fires happened. And then after the fires happened and I was absolutely baked in toxins. So I was in like the ninety ninth percentile, as I'm sure other people in LA were too. You could like go down the list and be like, This chemical is used in P VC pipe for for housing.

This chemical is like a a countertop. This chemical is like you can like literally see the burned houses of the bigger. Breathing in Teflon and whatever else. Down the list, you could look at the industrial solvents. As a Kia Sorento. Exactly. So my body was full of all these houses and cars that were burnt.

And the sauna annihilated the toxins. It was remarkable. So that was cool. Okay. Two is we have been trying to get my microplastics uh down because microplastics live in the body and the brain. And we were measuring microplastics in my blood and also my semen. And so microplastics uh hang out in the testicles.

And that has all sorts of negative effects on testosterone, on uh fertility. It you just don't want them hanging out there. So I have over a ninety percent reduction in my blood and my semen of microplastic. And that was a first in world demonstration of no one had ever done that before.

It's because the microplastics test is actually kinda hard to do, right? Exactly. Yeah. The test is hard and no one had done semen before, no one had ever paired blood and semen. Yeah. Yeah. Uh intro just to hold uh'cause this is fascinating. But you know why um Kitchen detergent, say ninety nine point kills ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of bacteria. Why?

It's not because they don't they're unable to kill more bacteria, it's that the testing tolerance only goes up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then this kind of feels like it's not too dissimilar if the same. So one is we we showed that uh sauna is a really efficacious detox protocol. Number two is we showed uh well, if we we think

sauna was the reason why my microplastics went down so dramatically. Relatively controlled across everything else. Exactly. We it was very controlled. Like we didn't do any therapy in that time frame that were meaningful. Um And then three is um I had really great changes, improvements in my vascular markers. So it actually improved, even though I'm in really good health, it still had a measurable increase in my um vascular markers.

It increased my Veg F. This is uh like You want VEGF in your body because it helps produce more capillaries and and blood vessels. Like you want a higher level. It increased it by four hundred percent, which was amazing. Um, I had a dramatic drop of uh P tal, which is a uh a a protein in the brain that leads to Alzheimer's. So if that dropped dramatically, um We also I did a test on looking at uh when you're in that kind of environment.

you want to put ice packs on your testicles because otherwise it annihilates your fertility markers. It'll take down your count, your morphology, all the above. And even men who say, like, I don't care, I'm not trying to have a baby, there's really negative feedback loops. So if you have smashed fertility markers, then it has negative effects on your health overall. So I did uh three weeks with ice. And then I went two weeks without ice.

In that two week window, I got smashed. So my fertility markers went down by fifty percent. The prices that you pay to uncover this stuff for the rest of smear mortals. So I went back on ice and I've been back on ice for six weeks now and I got these results on my drive here. Okay, cool. Tell us. Yeah. So um I'm gonna go by memory. Um so it's the highest

sperm count I've had ever. Right. It's the highest motility count I've ever had. It's the highest morphology I've ever had. So like they bounce, not only do they bounce back, it's the highest I've ever been. And if you look at these are like off the chart numbers. Like six to ten times the level of uh normal fertility. So what do you think's going on there? Is that just straight vascular changes? We're not sure. I know. What do you think's going on? Have a play around. Yeah, I mean um Yeah.

I really need to deep dive into this more. Yeah, I I don't know. It's it's a really big jump. And uh I've been doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, we've been doing the sauna. Um We haven't done really any other meaningful therapy that could boost it. Okay. So let's go through the protocol for this one. You said 200 degrees. Dry twenty minutes. Yeah. Dry. The traditional sauna. Ice pack on the balls. Yeah. Uh

Does time of day matter? Okay. Um does uh what did you go for as a solution for ice pack on the balls? Yeah, so you can buy these from Amazon. They're like eight bucks, BPA free, uh no toxins, reusable. So uh yeah, they're blue. uh you get a s pack of like four and then you want them on the balls in the sauna. So put on cotton underwear and then cotton shorts and then slide them underneath

The shorts. In between the two. Exactly. Yeah. And then like so just have two of them in there. But yeah, if you keep them chilled, like I We wonder whether the chilling actually has an improv like we we can't be so interesting. Should you put an ice back on your balls for twenty minutes?

But we wonder like is is the icing because we saw get out of the sauna, put the ice back on. So like yeah, if you're if you're working now, like so we actually were going to do another experiment after this completed. I was gonna start icing the testicles during the day. Like just when I work. Like Because we saw a like a thirty percent jump in my fertility markers in the first three weeks of we're I'm doing nice.

And we were trying to figure out like why. Did like did the sauna increase it and then the ice just protect the protected the increase or? So we're still trying to figure out what the cause is. Okay. Um what else have I got to ask? Are you taking any binders like a charcoal, a cholesteroline, uh a a NAC flush type scenario, something to capture the heavy metals that are coming out of you? Right. No. So it was just

Two pairs of cotton shorts, an ice pack, and like a cotton towel, wipe yourself off and you'll as you're sweating, jump in the shower and why to wipe yourself off. Oh, just if if the if the toxins are being excreted via sweat. Just snag it when it's like hanging out your skin so it doesn't dry and Uh Shower straight after. That's it. It's the entirety of the protocol. Cool. Um I'm gonna guess you were doing that seven days.

Yeah, every day. Right. Yeah. And I do it after working out. So I go work out for an hour, I immediately jump into the sauna, and so I'm already really warmed up. As opposed to spending the first seven minutes getting up to temperature. Also there seems to be from Ronda Patrick, there seems to be some pretty good evidence about well, you're kind of extending the session's benefits somewhat. So you're stacking a few things together. That stacking about behavior change earlier on, stacking habits.

Yes. It's very strong. It's like look, if I'm gonna train and I know that when I get home from training, my training session is an hour, but I'm actually gonna book an hour and forty in and that gives me ten minutes to get home and then I'm gonna get in the sauna for twenty minutes.

Or wherever I'm gonna go to this maybe the song is in gym or whatever. And then he's gonna give me ten minutes for my shower and then I'm done. And I've done both of these things and I've done them in the right order. Yeah. I've done them like together. Yeah. In that format. Um Anything else on sauna? Anything else? Yeah, initially I did sauna in the morning. So in the first like two weeks, it absolutely wrecked my sleep.

like destroyed it. Well, I think just doing it period. Like it's it's a like two hundred degrees is a lot. Like it's really, really warm. I had never done sauna before, so I think it was just the adaptation time period. I'm fine now, but just like note that there's initially an adaptation time period and then Two is I tried at night, initially it wrecked my sleep. But then I tried it after I had the adaptation period.

and it boosted my sleep. So I found that there is some virtue in doing it before bed. So you just have to run the experiment. You have to see for you if it's going to improve sleep or not. Yeah. That also means that you're gonna have to be training later in the day, which is not always necessarily. Yeah, exactly. If you pair those two things, exactly. Because you don't want to exercise within four hours before bedtime. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. H bot. Talk to me about that. I was messaging you the day that I started my H bot. Yeah. Was the day that you put your video out. And I'm in there and you were like, I can't remember what the fuck you w you replied with like a a a a Twenty fift twenty and five. Yeah. Uh eighty three percent with natural blah blah blah.

'Cause I'm in this big fucking metal dildo and the guy that's there, uh Vance from Beam Hyperbarracks in Austin, if anyone wants to go to a a great hyperbarracks place, it's fucking sick, you can book it by the hour, uh Vance is great. And I'm like knocking on the little this tiny little portal out of my submarine and comes in and I just showed my phone. I'm like I couldn't be bothered to use the radio to get outside. Brian messaged, Did you Are we doing this? And you sort of went

That's so funny. Yeah, put his thumb up like that. So uh Yeah. Hyperbaric I mean some I was when you messaged me I was worried about you because uh like a week before somebody had blown up in Arizona. So yeah. Well so in in hyperbaric the idea is you pressurize. So uh you're actually so at atmosphere at sea level, we're about fifteen pounds per square inch of of concentration of oxygen. At two atmospheres you're at thirty. So you you pressurize. And some hyperbaric chambers are

they pressurize and then they just push one hundred percent oxygen into the chamber. So you're just hanging out and breathing the oxygen. But if you're doing that, you're sitting in a pressurized chamber and you're basically a flammable If you're you're a bomb. Like so if something if if there's a spark of any type, your phone or some device that you've got with you. So we're not going to be able to do it No no no no no I would th this was I was not.

I was breathing the mask. I was so great. Okay, cool. Yeah. So um yes, hyperbaric oxygen therapy uh I think to date it's fair to say has been the single best performing therapy we've ever done. And the this is both good news and bad news because the bad news is that it's expensive.

It's inaccessible. It's time consuming. Super inconvenient. So it sucks because I hate sharing this because people it it's very exciting, but then it sucks because people can't do it. Like I mean, if you're already to say, I've got to find a sauna to use and most people don't have a sauna in their house.

Oh God, now you're telling me I need to produce my own oxygen. This thing weighs fucking two tons. It's g I don't where does it fit? Totally. Yeah, and and like who has ninety minutes in a day to like go do this thing? So I would just say for for people who have a serious condition.

And there's a variety of conditions that that uh this could uh address, like even cognitive decline or, you know, um wounds for diabetes. What what would be on the list? Uh like Uh so there's a lot of emergent evidence for a cognitive decline that if you're entering the latter parts of your life and you're really struggling, this could have a meaningful impact on that.

Um, it is used for diabetics who can't heal very well. It's used for healing, so people who've had surgeries uh to accelerate the healing process. If you have some kind of injury you're really trying to overcome, That's that can be great. So like there are telling me that some athletes post surgery are in ninety minutes three times a day. Exactly. They're trying to get they're trying to hit that ninety session number within a week.

Yes. So like there are some specialized applications where and people where it makes sense for the person to do, but I just want to be very sensitive. I understand like It sucks to hear something's really efficacious and you can't get at it. Exclusion, right? Yeah, it makes sense. So like uh but yeah, we we we basically like we do with all things, we measured we had this we cast this really wide net. We measured everything we could. My brain, my microbiome.

Um a full blood panel, um saliva stool, metabolomics, proteomics, like you name it, we measured it. And we just found improvements across the board. It was really because most therapies will improve like this particular marker or that marker, but rarely do they have this broad spectrum improvement. So we saw like the n the cognitive decline marker Ptal two one seven drop. We saw my microbiome. I had zero dysbiosis in my microbiome, like no signatures at all of dysbiosis.

Um we saw I had no detectable inflammation in my body. So my when my HSC RP came back, zero. No, the ninety nine point nine nine we like he's beaten the test. Exactly. Like it just like it was really remarkable uh across the board. And so it was really efficacious. I did sixty sessions over ninety days and I've continued to do it. I've now done something like

200 sessions over the past year or something like that. So I just have it as part of my routine. I do it um you you you want to be careful not to do it too much. 'Cause you're you'll have oxygen toxicity. Yes. But that's why the five minute break is so important, right? Yeah, and I also take a like a week long break. I'll do a sprint, then a week long break. So you just need to be careful'cause you can overdo it and cause harm.

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And modern wisdom. A checkout. What was the protocol of mask on, mask off? 20 minutes on, five minutes off. Yeah, I was doing that. That w the one super fucking annoying thing there is it's very relaxing to be in it can be very relaxing to once you've pressurized. Uh, but you can't sleep. Yeah. Because to take this thing on and off.

Um one of the things that I really enjoyed doing was HRV resonance breathing. Yeah. While I was in there. Have you got into resonance breathing yet? Have you been doing it in the H part? Yes. So much fun. Yeah, it is. So much fun. Um there's a a a product that I got sent, I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got it, it's this little lamp. I wouldn't be able to take it in. It would all fucking hell would break loose.

But it's basically a a resonance breathing uh stone. Yeah. And you pick it up and it's got a an FDA approved thing in it and the lamp goes up and down, then you put it back and it's done. So you don't need your phone, you don't need nothing else. That's brilliant. But um Elite HR V is what I was using with the strap. I'm gonna guess you'll have seen. Um, one thing that I noticed about that niche. Niche issue.

The strap that came with the elite HRV thing, which you put on so that it can detect like real high fidelity, high hertz. Yeah. Um the button that you use to press to turn it on has a tiny little air pocket around it. So I got into the fucking H bot and by the time I'd pressurized to get down there, the button had been smashed it and I couldn't pre there was no

air to press the button. Yeah. And then I ca I was like trying to press it and it's just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah exactly. It's like Spongebob when he gets outside of the water. Yeah. Um so anyway, H Bod. Uh so I mean a couple of questions on this. Sixty sessions as quickly as possible, basically. Yeah. With uh to start to accumulate. It's not like a a one and done type thing. Yeah. Uh, I think I asked you this at the time. I'm interested if there's any more information. Going from uh

State change to trait change. Like, is this the sort of thing that locks in? I'm aware you haven't then tested coming off and seeing what the tail of this is. Uh but the same thing goes for sauna. Yeah. A are you just fighting entropy with this? Is it something that you just need to do? Or is there anything I cause I think there's a I I suddenly know in me, if I look at a therapy or a modality or whatever And I find that uh there's no

carry over. Yeah. I feel despondent. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, fucking hell, like I've just m found this new thing. Here's another another thing I have to do. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's because both you and I are on the other side of the entropy curve. You know, like The the dealer you want. Right, like when you're twelve. Mm-hmm.

You you just keep on getting better. But once you cross over into your eighty slow down. Slow down. Exactly. Like they just every day they get up and like shit's just better. You know, so like, but yeah, you and I are both on the other side where it we're on this irreversible decline and so yes, you've got to keep it up. But like one thing people are not aware of with HBOT is it's the best skin rejuvenation therapy in the world.

So a lot of people better than red light, better than microneedling. Everything. Like better than the vampire facials, better than any laser. Uh it is because if you look at the data on the biopsies of it rebuilding collagen, elastin, and reducing sedescent cell. Uh it basically remodels your entire skin. It's not just face, like every s layer of skin you're remodeling is really remarkable. Like if you look at people like if I see people now, um, I can tell a signature of HBOS skin.

Like it it's ve it's very, very clear to me what it looks like. And so it just it happens. So yeah, that's the other thing is like m a lot of a lot of women, uh, you know, who are really care a lot about skin, H Bot getting the fucking H Bot. Yeah, I mean then you if you pair like the the best banger protocol.

is to uh for for skin is to pair the best devices with HBOS. So you basically you do like a surface level, like a fifteen, fifty nanometer to resurface the skin for for like spots, wrinkles, stuff like that.

Then you do H BA and you can accelerate the healing. Is that micronedling? Is that what you're referring to? No, it's just a laser. I guess a fifteen fifteen nanometer laser where it's like uh it's a very uh very benign laser, uh if you do it right. It has lower risk of like pigmentation issues. For wrinkles, spots, Uh just like re for texture. Yep. And then you can do a deeper device like a softwave, S-O-F-W-A-V-E, where it's ultrasound, where it's 1.5

milliliters below millimeters below the dermis. Yep. So you hit top layer and underneath the dermis. So you're rebuilding collagen and y like the entire scaffolding of the skin. Yep. And then you do H bot and then you accelerate the healing. So you basically do more sessions In this yeah. So that's like you do an acute like skin rejuvenation thing and then fuck up. That's kind of you still here.

She's outside. I think I did software because I went to your dermatologist in Alberta. Which one? Uh fuck, I can't remember the lady's name. It was in that was why I had a mustache. I grew a mustache'cause I needed to get rid of my facial hair. Because they needed to do that in order to be able to I'm pretty sure I'm almost certain it was software that I was

Um was it like um it felt like a cigarette burn that never actually got to a burn. Exactly. Yeah. Like you're like you're being singed by like a a hot metal iron. Yeah, but it never actually peaked. to the it was a really interesting lesson in uh and the yeah blowing the cold shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um It was a really interesting lesson in pain, uh, that because what you realize is you ride

this crescenda for the people that haven't seen it. It's literally as if someone was to put something really hot out on you. And when that happens There is a swelling, there is a crescendo, but it usually peaks at you can almost hear it. Yeah. Right. If you've ever put alcohol in an open wound, that yeah it like goes like that. Yeah. But it doesn't ever get above a six. Yeah. So if if she did uh if she set the settings to three point five joules, which is the lowest setting.

Then it gets pretty tolerable if she goes to four point two top end. Because basically it's the it's a total energy per area. I think I had it at around about three point I think she had it at three point six, three point seven. So I was on I was being a weenie. Okay. Yeah, so like if you have the four point two where it's basically like it cuts down the number of pulses by thirty percent. If you want to like zip through it, goddamn that

That is so painful. No, thank you. Oh man. It it does. It just feels like uh a a i like red hot iron cinch to the face. No more, no more, thank you. Uh

We we you mentioned there about uh sort of vascular health, um and and blood flow. Obviously we started talking enough about erectile uh nighttime erectile stuff. Uh for guys to improve blood pressure, uh vascular health.

And then I guess downstream from that the impact on erections, erectile dysfunction beyond like nighttime stuff. Yeah. What have you come to learn about that? What's the what's the the protocol for a a guy to improve that? Yeah. So I guess like I would say to people listening, um Like, maybe the the thing I that's most interesting is when I started this when I was forty two, I was pretty beat up. Like I had eaten sugar cereal as a kid, soda, like, you know, downed seventy grams of sugar, like

daily uh e canned foods. Uh I was I did the entrepreneurial grind, right? Didn't sleep. I was depressed for for ten years. I was overweight. Like I did all the Starting behind the eight bowl. Like all the bad things. Right. And so I'm forty two, I'm pretty beat up, my my aches hurt, I'm losing my hair. And so I didn't really know what could be done. I'm I'm really shocked.

by how efficacious this entire thing has been. Like I I'm just really stunned that the body really has this capacity to bounce back no matter how bad things are. And so one, for anyone listening who like who needs hope in their life, It really like the body is totally. Like I just like don't give up. The smallest of things can have the biggest yields. And so have hope.

And then two is I've been jamming on this for, you know, five years now. My markers keep on getting better. And so we still like I've aged, you know, a past five years in time, but I'm still hitting new record highs. in in like nighttime erections, in fertility markers, in my speed of aging, in my DNA, in my T in my telomeres. Like all these things are improving as age as time ascending. So like I mean on the grand scale of things, I suspect these are like

I'm this is not gonna get me to two hundred years, right? Like it's not on that kind of scale, but still like in how I feel as a person, like I do feel extremely energetic, I feel very clear headed. I feel my mood is very stable. I don't get irritated, like I'm just kind of cool with existence. Which is like for me, that's the marker of health. You know, like that so one hope. Two is uh it's I think it's really worth the investment of this stuff, like just paying your your I

Paying the discipline to do it consistency. And then the the that last thing is you don't need to do what I do. Like you don't need to chase these expensive therapies. You don't need to do HBOT. Uh like the basic stuff has the dividends. And so I don't want I want people to feel hope and not discouraged. I want them to feel empowered, not like, damn it, that's out of reach. Because it really is like it's within people's reach and I hope it's intimate.

Yeah, I hope they walk away feeling like, damn it, I can do that. Like I'm gonna do it. I I can't do that. What are the big moves? We've already said sleep, and you've given a good breakdown there. If there was a top three, top five, however many you need for okay. The Parito, eighty percent of the results come from these things, one of those things. Yeah. So I would first I would frame this in a moral philosophy.

So I'd say if believe. Well I guess. First, like um your most prized possession is agency. Nothing values more than your agents. And right now most people's agency is compromised, that they are not the architects of their life because they compulsively scroll, they compulsively eat fast food, they compulsively uh do all these addictive behaviors. And then when pressed on it, they rationalize it as virtue because they're trapped.

And so I would challenge everyone here to say like reclaim yourself. Don't do anything you don't want to do and that the enemy is the motherfucker who's trying to get you to do something that is not in your best interest. Fuck them. That is the enemy. And so like that gives you real moral power. Don't be puppet. Now once you have that principle, like I'm going to set my bedtime.

I'm not going to Doom Scroll. I'm not gonna eat that fucking bag of Skittles, right? Like I'm not gonna eat the fast food. That's f it's poison. They're gonna trick me into thinking it's a treat or something. You know, like but like that's I think for me, the boundary conditions of like how you create the kind of um energy state of like I can do this and I have a moral will.

to do it, not just because of self help, but I'm like fighting an enemy. I'm overcoming adversity. I am a man standing on my agency or woman. Like that to me gives it the Jews too. Like I have the the willpower to do it. Okay. Now that we've got the moral framework, what are the tactical things? Yeah. So you once you have agency, you want to reclaim your willpower.

You you need to have juice in the tank to say like I can make decisions that I can do it. So one is you want to master sleep. You want to build your entire life around sleep. That's very counterintuitive, but you want to plan when you go to bed, when your window routine is, you want to set strict rules.

You want to um plan your lighting. Like again, like you can choose your archetype, whether you're really regimented, whether you're like more flexible, like whatever your thing is, but just build your entire life around sleep.

And if you need uh justification, realize those not doing that are 10 to 12 points stupider than you. Like they're actually dumb. So they're there's like a retardation exercise for them. You're actually gonna be smart. Once you do that, exercise, because that also is going to boost your wealth. So boost it with sleep, boost it with exercise. And then once you get those two down, then tackle food because food is the most complicated.

Food is where we go to like soothe ourselves, to do like the th the self-therapy. So only tackle then. Try to start just having a bit more good things for you and a few uh less bad things, but like slowly walk your way into it. radical change is hard for a lot of people, but it's like slow walk into it. And then if you again have that in the back of your mind like uh a rule, you will never ever eat fast food ever again. Like none.

Is better than some. So m there's no moderation. There's no once a day like the cheat the idea of a cheat mill is the worst idea in history. Like, don't do cheat days, don't do cheat mills, don't do cheat weeks, don't do cheat anything, don't cheat. Uh when it comes to exercise.

Well, for longevity, most people are already doing uh almost everybody that's listening is gonna have some sort of training regime. Uh I would imagine. Yeah. The vast majority of them are going to be something like a push per leg split. And maybe other people are runner boys and runner girls. Um If you were to design the minimum effective dose, this is where I think the blind spots are for people.

What would you say, exercise wise? Yeah, I mean I because everyone's got their jam, well just Pilates, weights, whatever, just do it. Like just be active for roughly an hour a day. Do cardio to strength to balance to flexibility. Everyone's got their own preferences, but I think

Uh I don't go after the details here because there's like endless material to go after. Just be active and commit to beat them. So there's some people like chicken, some people like salmon, some people like kale, some people like spinach. Exactly. Like just and then I same thing with food. Like I don't uh get into the game of carnivore versus vegan versus paleo versus whatever, they're abstractions which are irrelevant.

Eat what you want, measure your body, make sure you're good, and then fine-tune yourself. Like I have a don't die food guide. We tried to look through all the scientific evidence to say, what are the very best foods in existence with the highest value evidence?

that you can put into your body. So we just said by a power law perspective, here's what I'd put on. So I can share that as a plate. Yep. Outside of that, like do your thing. Like just eat what you want, just measure your body, make sure you're good. Right. Okay. Ethylene blue, how do you get on with that?

You know, I stopped it because I started twenty five milligrams a day and then oh, it was conflicting with we started a therapy doing uh altitude training. So you take your your blood oxygenation down to eighty percent. So we did it and the two have conflicting mechanisms of action and we realized it on day three. So we're like, we better stop.

methylene blue to some therapy. So okay. Is methylene blue it's like nicotine derivative, right? Or it's something to do with nicotine? I mean it's a synthetic synthetic diet. Initially it was built because surgeons wanted to see like where they're actually in the surgical body Uh but it was actually F D A approved for um What was it? Um I'm forgetting now.

Yeah, ZDA approved quite a while ago. But overall on we don't think that's really uh we don't think it's worth it. Okay. As a therapy. Yeah. It's but it's more more for like mitochondrial health. Okay. Uh testosterone. Yeah. fucking hormone of the twenty first century. It is. What have you come to learn about testosterone?

Yeah. Um so I'm in like the seven hundreds naturally. So just by doing all the basic stuff. What were you when when you started, do you know? Um I I guess like yep, hm, when I was forty two. I don't know. Right. Um yeah, but i if if m if a man is low on testosterone and the natural approaches are not addressing it.

It probably makes sense to do something about it. Like being low in testosterone just has really negative consequences. So yeah, good one to watch after. What are the ways to intervene naturally? Or what are the biggest mo needle movers that you've got? Yeah, I mean all the basics, right? Like sleep. Like Uh I think poor sleep, uh four hours of sleep a night, uh will knock you down something like ten to twenty percent. On testosterone.

Uh so like really big drop. Less of a man again. Again, yeah, like high status. So then sleep, exercise, nutrition, like all the basics. Uh there's I don't think there's a lot of proven um Supplementation that can move them needle.

I think without getting into pharmacology. Yeah, I think people have played a bunch of stuff. Uh I don't if I'm not mistaken, I'm not sure the clinical evidence is very strong there. But I need to look at it. I guess I have never had low testosterone, so I've never had to look at supplementation as a means to do it. Yep. So I guess I would be cautious in

my knowledge is limited in terms of like the true evidence for clinical uh interventions. The thing that's interesting around sort of male hormone and I I imagine it's the same for women, but I don't I don't know anything about them. Um, the relationship between it's such a fucking like balance beam of LH, F S H, testosterone, free T S H G B it is There is no it seems to me total like fucking white belt. It seems to me like one intervention is not one intervention.

It starts to roll away into this domino effect. Yeah. So talking about I want my testosterone higher. It's like, well, do you? Yeah, yeah. Do you maybe your FSH needs about I mean people that go on uh enclomaphene or H C G chronically uh what is it, so like twenty percent or some big percent of them talk about uh that inducing depression. Yeah. And you go, okay, so You're worried that you had low energy because of your low testosterone and you tried to take a non like exogenous solution.

to create that. So I'm gonna kick start my own production by using these compounds. And in the process of doing that, I've made myself have depression, which almost certainly made you a fucking low forget low energy. You got low mood now. Yeah. And so yeah, be be careful how you intervene with that, yeah. That's very true. Yeah. So like we I guess the way we thought about it is we approached this holistically. We just said um

Our frame entirely is scientific evidence. Just like what does the body of evidence say to do? And we took the most powerful molecules in the form of foods supplements and then lifestyle, sleep, diet, exercise, and then therapies, sauna, HBot, you know. And we just said like take the very best high performance ones, put it all into one package. And do the entire package. And it makes sense. Like if you if you're taking care of the entire body on every level.

you have these systematic effects. They all come online. Exactly. So I think people approach these things very narrowly, but like our hormones like is a very like you see like microplastics, right? Like microplastics in the testicles has a negative feedback loop. for fertility and hormones. Right. Uh the same is true with toxins. So like that's uh when we talk about testosterone, we don't talk about microplastic intervention, which then leads back to sauna, which then leads back to so like

we've tried to just be holistic, like, give me the whole thing and let me build that into one daily practice. So I don't have to then try to figure out like this and that thing. Mm.

Talking of daily practices, what's this fifteen second phone call thing you're doing? Oh yeah, with my friends, yeah. So um a a friend of mine introduces to me. So he I became friends with this person and he he's He's very powerful and uh He would call me and he'd be like, Brian, like blank statement. I say something to him and be like, All right man, I love you, see you.

It's it. And I was like, that is amazing. It was so clean. It feels so good. And we just did that through like a couple months and we built this amazing friendship. And um 15 second friendship. Fifty and it was like it but it was like this deep um and I guess I I imagine in my mind, like I imagine what his day must be like. Uh he's juggling all kinds of crazy things. He clearly does not have time for like sit down, hang out, do this and that.

But yet he does such a great job of maintaining really meaningful, like deep relationships. So when he says he loves you, it's like you feel it. It's like he's not like just saying it. And so I I appreciated his model of friendship so much because I before I was stuck in this idea that hey Chris

You want to hang out, you know? It's a big deal. Let's give a fucking Airbnb. I'll buck a week off work. Yeah, it's like a four hour thing, right? Versus calling you like, Hey man, like what's up? How you doing? And like you you can answer because you know I'm not gonna tip be on the phone for twenty minutes.

Right. I I mean the uh I did this series life hacks on the show when I first started and we do one every year now at Christmas. And uh Back in the day when that was one of the big thrusts of the show, we'd often get asked, okay, what of a five hundred or thousand life hacks that you'd like. What are the

you know, highest impact ones. Uh the first one is always sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. Yeah. Um but the you say it's an instant ten to fifteen percent improvement in quality of life on that one thing. Uh so th that's actually before sleep. Let's take the charging table outside of your bedroom and put it in the kitchen. Uh but the second one was text your friends when you think of them.

And uh this is my equivalent of the fifteen second friendship. Um and it's just, hey man, like thinking of you, hope hope you're well, like whatever. uh or a photo that you you think about your friend and you find an old photo and you send it. And um it really speedruns Uh friendship. You become tighter friends with people. Yeah.

who you've known for less long than people that you've known longer that you don't do that with or don't do it with you. Yeah. And um I really loved it and it really brightened my day and it felt like I was doing something good for someone. at the at a very low cost. It was like high impact it was l high leverage friendship. Right. Like very, very low investment. Very, very high impact. Yeah. A little bit of a giggle and it keeps it going. Exactly. Um and the other thing it does which

is I guess a hack from my world of uh running nightclubs. It's an idea of uh assume familiarity. Yes. So assuming familiarity in this context is most people that don't know each other particularly well have this sense that n any text n has to be super verbose. Hello, dear Brian. I hope that you are in the family, are well. I must congratulate you on the da da da da da as opposed to like

Funny meme. Yeah. Or whatever. Hey man, thinking of you, hope all's good. Whatever, right? Like not even you can take it a little bit too far and it sounds a bit entitled or a bit like brusque or or or or like um sharp. Uh Expectant. But if I'm like, dude, love the YouTube video. By the way, I'm an age bot. How long am I supposed to breathe it for? Like that's oh

Thank you for fucking consuming my shit and for the respect. By the way, here's a th I don't need to the we don't need foreplay. Yeah. Right. Let's get let's get in let's get into it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean since since we hung out on Prospera, we've been doing that. Bullshit. Three months and then a talk for three months and then

And I and I feel s as fluid with you as I feel with any friend I've had for any duration of time, like we get each other, like we're on the same wavelength, we just tapping each other's lives. It's like most of my friends I'm actually I'm really surprised. Most of my friends who are powerful and successful and famous are lonely. Right? Like they um they work all the time.

They have work relationships, but the amount of time they have to be down and hanging out is so small. And so if you don't have some mechanism to create deep friendships, like and time is not your you can't use time. Yeah, you have to use something else. Yeah. It needs it needs to be a a longer lever to be able to work. And so I just I've just been surprised that um people have this perception that

Uh, they always perceive others like they must have it all. But loneliness is a real thing. And so I guess again, I say this for those who are listening. Uh, if you feel lonely, right, understand like

your pattern is pretty similar to other people's patterns, independent of resources or position or power status. The people at the top of the tree are struggling with the loneliness Exactly. And so I mean and this is the cool thing is like when I talk to my friends and like they'll disclose that and like it's a really

It's a scary thing. Shameful thing. Yeah, it is. To to actually disclose that. It's like I don't have any friends. Like I I had a a friend of mine connected me with this celebrity today, like one of the

A list celebrities in in Hollywood. I said, Talk to this person. I said, Why don't you come over to my house? We'll do a don't die dinner. Get ten or fifteen of your favorite people. Come on over and like I I'll do this whole thing and I explained it. And they said I don't really have any friends.

And yeah, it was like just such a shocking moment'cause like they are epicenter celebrity. And uh one is cool, they just said that. And two I was like amazing. So like I will put the group together for you. come on over, we'll have a great time. But yeah, just like so people realize it it's a very common thing in in our modern society. So nothing to feel ashamed about or feel bad about. Like you can make these corrective actions by doing like small things like

Voice notes, quick calls. And also by by making the bar so low. if you swing and whiff it and this person doesn't actually really want to be friends. Yeah, exactly. And whatever, doesn't think you're cool or they're too busy or whatever the fuck. They're not on the r they're not ready to be friends. Yeah. Um

You haven't invested anything. Yeah. You know, you sent you tried to you met somebody, you sent him a few texts, like whatever. Like it doesn't matter. Um I would just sort of loop back to that thing I said about the emotions piece before. So I I I understand what you mean. uh with regards to sort of creating a philosophy. Um, but I am still interested in what the practices are.

And how you look to prioritize the emotional well-being, the social element, if there is a spiritual element to this too. Um, and how you come to think about how to say it. Um off spreadsheet markers of of Longevity and well being. Yeah. So in in 2025, we did five don't die summits. We uh fifteen hundred people, they were all sold out.

We brought people together and we did uh we experimented with different formats, but we brought'em together. We did education courses. We did raves like at seven in the morning. It was amazing. We had so much fun. Uh we did um group exercises, we did group therapy stuff.

So I think twenty twenty six. So we learned a lot by doing this. We're going to do this in 2026 where I've been uh actually piloting a don't die fam in my neighborhood. So I've got several friends and we had this format where we get together every week. Uh first we take a shot of olive oil. Okay. Yeah. Uh ritualistic. Yep. And then we each go around and we apologize to our body for something we did that way. Okay.

It's kinda funny, it's kind of fun. And then we go around and each person talks about like what's on their mind, like what they're struggling with. And so it's a very like open floor, supportive uh Alcoholics Anonymous for longevity. It's like YPO, AA, it's like it's a s very similar format. It's kinda

stamped out through various organizations. But it's basically like small, intimate, trusted group where you can be vulnerable and there's a specific approach where you're you're focusing on don't die, but really it's about human connection. It's about sharing and what you're struggling with. So whether it's that or something else, we're trying to figure out like how If don't die is to become the fastest growing ideology in history.

Like we're trying to figure out what is the path for that to happen. And so it can happen in small clusters around the world. We could even have physical locations. We could have uh something like a sovereign fund where we have a c you know we pull our capital and we start funding things together. So there's We're we're sorting on community, connection, emotional, social in twenty twenty-six. The fa past couple of years have been like, how do you create something novel, sticky, distinct?

And create a structure around it. And now we're gonna create the wrapper. So it's just like the next stage of where we're at. Very cool.

When we first ever spoke, however long ago that was, I asked you a question about um I didn't use this word, but the grief of not starting earlier. The potential resentment that you can uh place at your caregivers and your friends and your culture of This didn't happen earlier and the entropy, you you started on the other side of the roller coaster, right? You're like, oh fuck. Like I'm fighting against it as opposed to improving it. Uh you know, like I can't

get younger in the same way as I could have gotten younger, or at least slowed it down, or whatever. I'm interested in your relationship with that dynamic now, a few years hence, more time to think what could have been But also to think, well I can't by focusing on that I'm losing the very time which I'm claiming is now being more limited. So that seems like a very stupid way to spend my life. Yeah. Uh where have you come into land with

You said before and I think it's a really good point that you are it's not too late. You can reverse or you you slow down like you can really, really make great progress no matter where you are. But the emotional connection to what could have been had I've started earlier, what I've done to my body, the grief, that stuff. W what's your relationship with that like now? Yeah. I mean, as you might guess, you know, I now I view this question through the moral framework.

Right. Like basically the premise of the question is that um I'm in a low status position because of these preceding events, you know, that I I didn't Uh, I didn't have parents that knew health and wellness when I was a kid. I didn't understand health and wellness my myself in my twenties. I fell prey to cultural norms that say that said, destroy yourself, right? And so The way I'd evaluate any person answering your question is

How skilled are they in taking a low status position and converting it to high status? Like how do you flip the question for me to find virtue in my place? and attribute, you know, charity to what's what's preceded because really it never makes sense. for a person to wallow in grief. Like, yes, it makes sense to reconcile, like be honest. Like we can acknowledge that may have been a mistake, you know.

we can contemplate, you know, we wish it wouldn't have happened, but really uh you're you don't want to sit in negative emotions. It's just not good for you. It's you don't want to beat yourself up. And so you can either take a a a a step where you say, I'm reconciled, I'm neutral, like I'm I'm fine with it. Or you can say, I'm going to invert it. But that's what I've really learned uh more than anything in my life. This is what I try to train my kids is

Don't be subject. Don't lose your agency and be subject to pain that is self-induced. you can choose how you filter. This is kinda like Victor Frankel's man's search for meaning, right? He's in the trunk concentration camp and he's like, I'm not going to let these conditions determine my state of mind. I'm going to choose that state of mind myself.

But that's really ultimate agency. And so I'd take your question and s and I'd I would invert it and be like, um, this is the most interesting time in the history of four point whatever billion years that we've been on this planet. I am so fortunate to be alive right now and I'm like in my forties where I'm still like in my prime. And I can have a meaningful impact on what happens to the human race. Like that is a possibility. So I wouldn't trade anything under any circumstance.

to trade the position I'm in right now because it's the coolest moment yep in the history of the human race. And so like quick inversion and now I'm like, damn, pretty cool. I'm pretty I'm pumped about the situation. My shoulders my shoulders have relaxed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh I remember you tweeting a while ago

Do you think you're gonna die in a super ironic way? Of course, guaranteed. Yeah. How's that not possible? It's uh for sure. I mean, like so this morning when I was coming here, I I was opening a a glass jar of uh sauerkraut, fermented sauerkraut. I popped it and it sliced my fingers in three places, bleeding all over the place and as I You know, what if I die from like a glass bottle of fermented sauerkraut? Like wouldn't that be just like beautifully ironic?

So yes, like uh I hope it's spectacular. I hope it's really something epic and not something lame. Sauerkraut would be a cool way to go. I mean I guess like um you tell me, what would be like an epic like Oh wow. But what hits a timeline where you're like, okay. Like ready to go with that. Ah that would be cool. I mean sort of car action a seventies action movie rolling down a huge cliff would be th that seems like a pretty cool way to go. Uh certainly not being the passenger of a

A plane where the pilot decides that he's sick and he just wants to crash it into a right into a mountainside. That would suck. Something something that's just me. Something that I don't want to take anybody else with me. If it's if I'm gonna go up in flames

Like, you know, hit by a bus, but the bus goes on. Yeah. Like uh Yeah. Yeah. Like like caught in the action caught in the act of adventure. Right. Like like you're on you're doing your thing, you're pushing the boundaries, you're in your happy state. Eating fermented foods. Yeah, you know, like I I think of Shackleton, you know, and I think of his uh going through the Antarctic and their survival to that whole like

you know, they were all ready to uh have a noble death. Yeah, like we wouldn't have found out about they would have been gone to history, but still uh, you know, they were I I like that kind of uh

I love those stories. There's a a a book that you may love if you like uh Alfred Lansing's Endurance, which is the best retelling of Shackleton's Crossing, I think. There's a a wonderful one called The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Earhart. Uh s uh British soldier, Scottish, uh captured by the Japanese, bridge over the River Kwai, forced labour Hiroshima bomb blasts. Like everything, everything, everything, everything.

And then I read um Unbroken. Unbroken. Louise Amparini. So I only I never even note'cause I'm not American. Yeah. Right. So I would get Shackleton and I would get Alistair Eckhart, but I'd never get Zamperini. Yeah. I didn't even know he existed. And he like meets Hitler at the fucking Olympics. And he goes through all of this stuff. So if you like Unbroken, dude, yeah, uh the Forgotten Highlander will take your head off. Yeah, Unbroken, that broke me. I mean like He's like on his raft.

Getting shot at from the Japanese airplanes. Underneath the out raft, getting hit by shark. Back on the raft of bullet holes, like and that's like on day a hundred and forty two of not eating food. Like it's Yeah, and the dude's eaten all the chocolate and you're like Your your your mate your best mate, yeah, steals all the chocolate. Yeah, dude. I'm I those stories to me are Wonderful. I I r ruptured in Achilles twenty twenty, uh playing cricket. Fully British. And um

asked a couple of friends that had been through some sort of similarly traumatic injuries, big fuck off, severe thing. Yeah. And uh they said The Obstacle is the way by Ryan Holliday. Uh uh Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Earhart. Um uh Uh Ross Edgely's book The Art of Brazilians. Which is about his swim around the he was the first person to swim around the UK to six months. Six six hours on six hours off. Yeah. Um and then uh Amazon Prime documentary called Resurface.

with Andy Murray. Andy Murray's tennis player, Scottish tennis player, load of Scots. And um he gets a a hip replacement. That lateral movement means that hips really get tested in tennis players. And he's aging out a little and uh

They try and do rehab, they try and do surgery, they try and do surgery, it's just not working. And really the only solution I think is maybe a ceramic socket with a steel joint. Um, but it's not meant for uh l like high impact sports, it's very smooth and and very reliable and the outcomes are great. But not if you're w pushing it to the sort of you steal up against ceramic like fucking porcelain or whatever it is not gonna last that or maybe it's not

And it's just this journey of him going through it and he's working in his uh house like just obsessive, just so like unrelenting. And those sorts of stories I think are Really empowering and really enlightening and and very inspiring. And it's the ability what I'm really interested in playing with now is the ability to take that kind of inspiration and be like, fuck, like I've I've been kicked in the nuts a good bit this year.

All right, you got this. Like you can lean in, you can do this thing. And then being able to I switch it off. That's right. I need to be able to switch it off. If I can't switch it off, then I am pressing the accelerator driving downhill. Yes. I'm giving myself more of the thing that I already have too much of. Yes. So uh playing with that tolerance, I like a dose dependent inspiration.

in that way. Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. It's a U shaped curve. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You need just in like too little you're not doing anything. Yeah. Too much you're wide but tired. Like just about the right. It's probably the skill set society needs the most help on right now because everyone is right up to the red. Uh actually in the red zone and just there constantly. It's I think it's probably like a a chronic thing of our society.

Brian Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, did you're great. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship. Uh what can people expect next however long of years, months, what's what's coming up? Well I this is my prediction. Um AI is center stage already for society. It will continue to be center stage. Uh I'm not talking about time frames of six months or twelve months, but like over the next few years, it's gonna just continually to be evolved to be the primary thing of our attention.

And as that happens, we are going to want. the stability to understand the world in ways that makes us feel safe. that we have meaning and purpose, that things are stable. And I think this is where don't die will step in. It will be a structurally sound, coherent, emotionally resident ideology and and moral philosophy.

that actually answers the most important questions for us as a species, individually, collectively, with AI, with the planet. Like we're just due for a revolution. So yeah, in the coming years, that's what I hope to bring to the world is like that we actually can c find coherence in our existence and realize the spectacular nature of this moment, the most precious thing that's ever existed. And it's like really ours. So we

I guess an invitation to like sober up, realize how special this is, and for us like we we need to prove ourselves worthy of the future. We oftentimes don't think about like we we want to be We want to demonstrate our value to our peers. to our to our coworkers, to our family, to our partners, I think that same relationship exists to the future. That it really does ask us to rise up. And so I hope um Above all, I hope I'm a positive influence of people's lives.

that um when they find themselves in moments of of struggle or weakness, they've got somebody in their court saying, like, you can do this. And um yeah, so I I'm just uh really excited about what's happening. I feel like I've been working my entire life at this moment and I'm excited to play the game.

I'm excited to see what happens, man. Just don't do the fucking don't start wearing white robes, grow your hair out. Like I don't wanna see the cult leader pivot. But uh what I do think is cool is the um like sanguine self awareness thing. I think that's really important to like Yeah. Just read it out. Uh you mentioned a couple of resources like a a a a food guide or something. Is there any are there any cool lead magnet y bits that people can snag that

Yeah. So I'll give you I'll give you the food guide. Um I'm also I'm publishing I have a website protocol at Brian Johnson dot co um dot com and I'm hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll repost all my updated stuff. So if you want to just see my journey and what I'm doing now and why, I'll have it there for you. So like a free guide. Yep. And I'm also writing a book.

So uh Holy Fuck. Oh no. Yeah, don't die. So I'm halfway through and it's basically gonna be like hopefully a guide. And then um yeah, I'm trying to make this easy. And not it's a lot. And then also I'm I just we just raised sixty million for blueprint.

And so yeah. What's going on with that? What is that? Yeah. So basically uh blueprint is don't die in action. Right. And so In the same way where you say, if I want to go to this destination, I put in an address, go, and it tells me what streets to go down or where's the construction, where's the the crashes, blueprint is gonna be basically like AI for your health. It's like you say, I want to be healthy. And we say, come on in, we got you.

And so it will take us some time to build to that, but that's what I have today with my team of doctors. Like I just follow a practice where we measure me. We we uh get the data, we look at evidence, and we say do this, do this, do this, do this. Doing this at scale. Exactly. So I don't have to chase all these esoteric hard things. So blueprint is basically like autonomous health for humans where I just say, like, I want to be healthy.

And you get into a system and now we just run the data, evidence, repeat again. So hopefully like that's like the exciting time. So you f it feels like uh I don't know, you're going back to where you started, back into founder mode. I hope that you Don't take your eye off what the ball is supposed to be.

with regards to that, like the temptation man to be, Ooh, we could build it more and this is time it's good. This time it's for humanity. Yeah. You go, Well, yeah, it service is good, but so's looking after like serving you first. Yeah, you're like the The one thing I care to accomplish in life, like everything else can go by the wayside. The one thing is what is high status?

That's the only game I care to play. And so from specifically from the frame of from the perspective of the year two thousand five hundred, when they look back at this moment and they're looking at moments as say, uh Plato Aristotle, Renaissance, like they'll say A new era was born. of a new status seeking thing.

Okay. And like that's otherwise like the entrepreneurship stuff, like I really enjoy it. It's been my jam. But that's not where my like I want this to work. I want to be successful. It's actually a practical manifestation, but I have one objective in existence is that. Fuck yeah. Ryan, I appreciate you man. Until next time, I'm looking forward to the book. Thanks, man.

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of one hundred of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillex.com/slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.