Transcript for:
The Quest for Immortality and Longevity

I've seen you talk about um your penis Health quite a lot working on your butthole or is that like not part of your we're trying to figure it out yeah we need the anus anus health or a nice youthful anus what you're for aners old anus get old anuses get cancer quite yeah that is true so it was in this moment standing in a multi-millionaire bathroom talking about the relative health of his butthole that I started to wonder how my search for immortality had led me here ever since man was cursed with knowing he will one day die he's been trying to find ways to delay that deadline but this isn't some quest to find a madeup magical Elixir or a Jacuzzi that washes the wrinkles away I've been looking for the real deal and I found I wasn't the only one searching got to get all your nmn I got NM in there apparently longevity is a wide Church attended by stem cell scientists madat practitioners and Venture capitalists you know and I'm trying to build an institution that will last for a thousand years for the less scrupulous longevity is just the latest catch or catchphrase a biotech buzzwords to slap on high profit margin pills and powders While others are true believers who see longevity as a secular root to eternal life not granted by God but by Advanced medicine in this documentary I'll be sorting the scientists from the snake oil salesman and figuring out if anyone really knows how to live forever my own obsession with not being dead started in January when my own skin tried to kill me one of my moles got bigger and changed color which I understood to be a bad sign so I paid a guy to cut it off no matter how small it is getting a piece of yourself removed inevitably makes you worry about the parts you have left after a life of string cheese straight whiskey and sitting down it would be fair to say my lifestyle was sub optimal so I did what any overly online young dude in 2024 does when he needs Health advice I consulted Papa Joe so what are you doing personally today males aged 18 to 35 aren't like the young men of previous generations on average they are better educated but less well off we are more sensitive to gender inequality but we're shagging less and marrying later we don't drink as much but have fewer friends we are fatter and spend more time inside but these are just generational generalizations the statistical sweet spot where the extremes get flattened because many young men are taking their health more seriously than any generation before them and they are getting their advice from YouTube Instagram influencers and podcast hosts my stra score is only getting better better share it with all the people I never talked to in real life if you listen to Joe Rogan and Andrew huberman or Steven buy my [ __ ] bartler chances are you're a man aged 18 to 35 the most coveted cohort in marketing hard to reach and harder to persuade to spend but when you guys do spend [ __ ] me you can create whole Industries overnight sports betting cryptocurrency dried elk meat supplements sauner accessories and inflatable ice bars this is The Joe Rogan economy a shopping list for disaffected and digitally native young men who crave fast money big muscles and more status basically any product that indirectly sells you on the one thing we all really want sex with ladies ah some things never change but because modern man is Shyer and less certain of himself advertisers are starting to exploit an anxiety and self-hatred that was once only the reserve of women aged 13 to dead women have had the fear of Aging prematurely rubbed in their face since the Advent of marketing itself the term anti-aging first came into use at the start of the 20th century but became widespread in the decade of Botox hairspray and Skyhigh divorce rates the era where Boomer women watch the skin around their eyes get crunch coincided with them watching their husbands start to eye up their gen ex colleagues I don't intend to grow old gracefully Oil of Olay I'm fighting it every step of the way cosmetic companies like Dior sold creams crammed with special active anti-aging ingredients and some of these do work the effectiveness of sunscreen hyaluronic acid and retinol are backed up by longterm scientific studies sunscreen especially ideally you should wear it every day you expose yourself to my attempted murderer today the anti-aging racket is one of the best in marketing history and the sector is dominated by a few big cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies they produce an enormous array of almost identical skincare products as the list of actually anti-aging ingredients hasn't changed much since the 1980s the global anti-aging Market is worth more than $60 billion and is expected to reach 100 billion by 2030 but isn't all this a bit skindeep after all any population with enough disposable income to blow on inedible creams is also an aging population eligible for what I've been able to do with the uh with with the co the market of people worrying about getting old is only getting larger and older for the foreseeable future and this is the problem that longevity seeks to answer I think exercise is the single most important longevity drug we have there are thousands of companies and researchers working in longevity today luckily they can all be oversimplified into this ven diagram okay first there are the health span dude Bros who promote lifestyle changes as longevity practices Fitness sleep nutrition mouth tape whatever they are usually scientists or just uh straight up Fitness influencers they stop shy of suggesting you can reach a superhuman age instead believing that they can help you die late and in basically good health Andrew huberman and Peter here sit firmly in this Camp no podcaster has ridden the longevity wave better than Andrew huberman he's gathered an audience of millions by getting on guests who know their [ __ ] the Huber mench is the perfect figurehead for the health conscious modern man he's smart and swo he's got the academic creds and the aerobic exercise packs to inspire confidence he boils his personal health advice down to a set of easy to understand protocols so it won't take PhD to become a pretty huge dude earlier this year huberman was exposed by New York Magazine for having several secret girlfriends simultaneously It Was Written like a hit piece but read more like a paid for puff piece to me and the rest of his mostly male audience hey don't listen to this guy or you might end up with bulging biceps and the mental Clarity necessary to juggle six chicks at once in your late 40s oh no all you need is the hman LA's podcast a gym membership and a uh second phone you can't have long-term affairs with six different partners yeah unless he's um juggling multiple uh phone accounts or something right right right and some men try to do that but um I think it's a could be very taxing yeah well and and in this day and age it's um but huberman is only a Stanford educated neuroscientist with a perfectly chiseled Jaw so to get a full picture of longevity he gets on guests like Peter AA now the the medical definition of Health span is the period of time uh by which you are free from disability and disease Dr AA is probably the best regarded expert that attaches himself fully to the label of longevity his 2023 book outlive has been a runaway bestseller and for him longevity means something quite simple and reasonable his basic message is that medicine is stuck in the treat the disease mindset but it needs to put greater emphasis on preventing disease in the first place this is what health span is all about adopting the best practices to ensure a long and healthy life so I don't believe there is any scenario ever in which we avoid death I am 100% in the camp that says we are all going to die doesn't matter how much biohacking you do we are all going to die I have a very low tolerance for nonsense and buffoonery Dr Pete don't believe you can biohack your way to a superhuman age but he's promoting ways to keep your body younger for longer and this is perfectly scientific people really do age at different rates from one another genetics and lifestyle play a huge part and like most longevity promoters Atia is insistent that the best drug for longevity is actually just exercise having very high cardiorespiratory Fitness so having a V2 Max that is Elite we would Define that as the top two .5% of the population compared to below average is a fivefold reduction in all cause mortality death from any kind we actually now have pretty good data as to the fact that strength is more important than muscle mass we just use muscle mass as a good proxy for strength but if you just focus on strength that's the metric that matters it's about a three-fold reduction in all cause mortality after watching this single podcast episode I finally decided to take my muscles and my health seriously huberman recommends the mix of resistance training cardiovascular workouts and flexibility exercises following the hub's advice I went from getting zero hours of exercise a week to some exercise I started resistance training every other morning as that's when cortisol is naturally higher in the body instead of getting an app to deliver me piping cold fast food I actually bought and cooked with fresh ingredients low carb reduced sodium lean WI Meat and Fish combined with heaping piles of leafy green vegetables white bread was out one cup of brown rice was in on huberman's advice I waited 90 minutes after waking before consuming coffee and cut out the caffeine at 2 p.m. sharp which is when I timed my cardiovascular workouts 30 minutes of running or rowing every other afternoon followed by a 30 minute SAA sash which is my favorite piece of longevity advice so far as it involves sitting down human Labs recommends Thrice weekly SAA sessions Papa Joe Cooks himself four times a week for 20 minutes evidence from his many SAA selfies and beef jerky skin tone your blood pressure is virtually never measured correctly in the doctor's office that cuff they put on in that squeeze bulb that's not if you look at the rigor with which you need to measure a person's blood pressure the right way to do it is the person has to be sitting like this for 5 minutes doing nothing okay folks so when you go to the doctor now you don't let them take your blood press blood pressure sitting for 5 minutes and that doesn't include in the waiting room because if you walk the get up and walk over it right I also started to take my blood pressure every other day as this was the one metric that cannot be tracked by a wearable and I was shocked to find [ __ ] I had pretty elevated blood pressure that's quite that's quite High um I wasn't expecting that [ __ ] but after embracing my new podcas inspired muscle Focus workout regime for all of two weeks I was already having trouble keeping up my enthusiasm building muscle was taking time and that was the one thing I was running out of besides what was the point of all this effort if I was only going to extend my life by a measly few decades surely there must be some products out there that could help me live even longer this is where the second major group of longevity Advocates come in the lifespan loud mouths and they are going to help us get to the 22nd century folks like the two Daves Dave asprey and David Sinclair who believe we might be able to biohack our way to 180 with advances in modern medicine you can extend human life you can already reverse your age I age at 72% the rate of average people your goal is to live to 180 and at least 180 I don't want to put a cap on it lifes spanners are mostly scientific res Searchers SL entrepreneurs of a product to sell or a venture in need of funding they go on podcasts site rodent stes and wave their supplements around I do I eat healthy I try to skip meals uh I also take supplements um and in fact most of my colleagues are in the field of Aging yes longevity supplements you've seen supplements sold by everyone from gwenneth palro to Alex Jones so if you're cynical about their effectiveness you are right to be they are cheap to produce and can be sold for an outrageous markup uh so I take nmn every morning what is nmn so what nmn does and this other molecule called NR which both you can get on the internet they boost the body's levels of NAD back up to youthful levels again and if we give them to mice these molecules to to mice or even to worms or Yeast they live longer and they're super healthy nmn is what I take which is not to be confused with m&m the cholate David Sinclair takes a daily dose of nmn and is largely responsible for its reputation as a longevity Super Supplement something that he directly benefits from as the co-founder of metrobiotech and look longtime nmn treatment has been shown to increase median lifespan by 8.5% in mice ah yes in mice those dreaded two words that appear at the end of every headline that promises and extravagant medical breakthrough mice might be somewhat similar to us on a mammal level but there aren't nearly enough similarities to prove that the drugs that will work on them will work on us more than that keeping a bunch of them alive and in similar health is surprisingly hard especially when you're juicing them to the whiskers with research chemicals there's a ton of other variables too food temperature gender stress cage size so outcomes are highly variable regardless long longevity research relies on these studies heavily and here is where the perverse economic incentives of Biotech kick in once your theoretical longevity company has scored some successful rodent trials and acquired millions in Venture Capital you better get that product to Market or you'll risk the rra of your investors shareholders and employees people's livelihoods now depend on your success even if human trials or further research prove your drug isn't the longevity Miracle you once claimed it could be whatever happens you better move some pills since nmn first hit the market in 2018 it has been sold in supplements and drinks by a dizzying array of companies critics argue that oral consumption doesn't even work and that the drug is overhyped or simply a placebo the reason so many lifespan experts end up acting like influencers is to ensure their own longevity because if they don't their investors might murder them their product might be nothing special but slap a longevity sticker on them alongside a premium price tag and you might still turn a profit now I am not saying that scientists like David Sinclair are scam artists but I am also not not saying that he probably believes in his product and certainly believes in his research Arch he is just a victim of the perilous economics of Biotech investing I think that it is extremely likely that people born today will on average live to a thousand then there are researchers like aubre de gray who take things even further believing that it's possible for humans to achieve extreme longevity potentially living for several centuries or Millennia and considering it looks like that he's already been alive forever I'm inclined to hear him out he's best known for coining the phrase longevity escape velocity referring to the idea that as medical Tech advances every year we get closer and closer to allowing individuals to avoid age related illness indefinitely his theory is a bit like Mo's law except Mo's law is based on the number of transistors you can fit on a microchip and Longevity escape velocity is based on Magic numbers that Aubrey pulled out of his wizard B weird to just cut to the mathematical chase the answer is that there is no actual halflife anymore that the curve a radioactive decay curve eventually it's ASM totic to zero eventually all the atoms Decay right the curve that you get if you do this calculation is not asymptotic to zero anymore most people will live literally forever in this scenario now some of these guys are just optimists working on cutting edge Med but others are the scientific equivalent of televangelists using longevity as a sales pitch to dupe the desperate do you yearn for the White Knuckle frill of mowing down your fellow man in the heat of battle then welcome to War Thunder the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made escape the boredom of your everyday life by jumping in the driver's seat of over 2,500 tanks planes helicopters and ships from 10 major countries and War Thunder is now available to play for free on PC PlayStation and Xbox and this isn't some hitbox baby simulation it has one of the most sophisticated vehicle damage models in gaming war is so realistic it will give you PTSD with the incredible x-ray view damage you'll see exactly what violence your weapons have brought join a worldwide community of 70 million players who are waiting to blow you up including me what I love about War Thunder is that I can drive tanks and fly planes from Any Nation or era one minute I'm giving Jerry what for in a Spitfire Over Nazi occupied France the next I am blasting around in my Soviet f-13 conducting bombing runs in Afghanistan the possibilities are endless in War Thunder with a game mode for every kind of player and in-depth customization with countless camouflage options and historical markings download War Thunder today with my link below and you will also receive the massive Eagle of Valor Bonus Pack available for a limited time the problem with the term longevity is that it's broader than Andrew huberman's shoulders there is no scientific or regulatory standard for what can be considered a longevity product from Beverly Hills to Singapore private clinics are offering human growth hormone and testosterone replacement therapy as longevity it treatments so today many middle-aged men are attending these clinics to top up their supply in order to maintain adolescent levels of muscle growth and retention along with anabolic steroids human growth hormone is also a common enhancement used by professional athletes despite being banned by the anti-doping agency this has Garner it a reputation of danger and illegality even though it can be acquired through a prescription in most countries but there are serious side effects associated with excessive use like acne outbreaks mood swings and heart explosions or to put it in medical terms cardial the enlargement of the heart muscle leading to heart failure which sure sounds bad but there was another side effect associated with human growth hormone that interested me more [ __ ] winning I am the fastest man in the world I've broken you same bolts world record but you've never heard of me I am a proud enhanced athlete now we have important allies in our battle for bodily Freedom as we build the first sporting event that allows performance enhancements and pays all athletes according to this ad there are a bunch of secret roid freaks that are so jacked that those dweebs at the Olympics want them banned and it's not just roids apparently there's a whole world of injectables pills and risky therapies that I could enhance myself with there weren't any affiliate links for me to click so I did the next best thing and went to meet the organizer of the enhanced games himself Aaron uh you're a successful entrepreneur litigator and uh so I guess my first question is why are you doing this I'm the kind of person who sees a problem in the world and decides that it is my responsibility to solve it yeah so this is a Barack Obama yeah as Superman um and you know in some ways my politics is very libertarian um but I I do really deeply admire Barack Obama 44% of Elite Track and Field athletes admit to using band performance enhancements 1% get caught so your solution to that is to let them cheat no from an by the Olympic standard it's not cheating but the Olympic standard is yes but that's also you know a broken ancient standard most people think of ban formance enhancements as being illegal right but actually um so much of what is Ban by the Olympic Committee um is available over the counter and so we want to embrace science and we want to be honest uh yes so this sword is a British diplomatic sword o um from the reign of Queen Victoria oh nice um it's a diplomatic sword because it doesn't have an edge it's a disrupt as apartment but with a love for for the British establishment a little bit of a contradiction there there there are plenty of contradictions in my life I I'll give you that like I'm I'm a technology innovator um you know but I live in a like a 400y old house in a recent Guardian piece you said that performance- enhancing drugs could be a route to anti-aging so a fountain of youth and I suppose beyond the enhanced games I'm wondering do you see this as something that's going to be available for all of us even been reading my business plan um I think of the enhanced games like Formula 1 M uh Formula 1 is a combination of the athlete and the engineer the enhanced games are the athlete and the scientist I was going to ask you if you are enhanced and if that's the case how are you enhancing we're all enhanced M right um about you I don't think of enhan as a binary are you natural are you enhan enhan as a spectrum sure from wearing glasses or drinking coffee or the best enhancements are the cheapest ones getting eight hours a day of sleep m uh reducing that's not ban by the Olympics though that wouldn't be followed by the enhanced games I'm talking about steroids physical enhancements basically make you like a teenager right they make you strong they make you uh uh more excitable but also I think they affect your mental accuity in some ways and so at this very moment in time where as I was discussing earlier my job is to uh do a lot of the boring things to make the enhanced games a reality I have to focus on optimizing my mental acuity you found human growth hormone to be helpful there not yet I'm I'm only 38 years old I can't ignore the fact that were this to go on the enhanced games was to be a roaring success um it would be very entertaining I'm I will be watching be certain of that but it would also be an excellent advert for pharmaceutical companies and I believe that 75% of all television advertising in the United States by revenue is now for pharmaceutical that's true yeah so you be G getting a little slice of lap pie is that the idea I think so and I think that ultimately science is real so this isn't just scientific progress It's social progress absolutely on your website you compare athletes revealing that they're enhanced to coming out do you think that is that's a comparison to sexuality do you think that's valid absolutely right and uh as a gay man myself uh I see strong parallels between the experience of the LGBT community and the enhanced Community they're an oppressed minority we hiding in the darkness M it's happening in the dark alley it's deeply unsafe right I think of of of being an enhanced athlete today like being gay in the 1970s you can't talk about it with your doctor it leads to unsafe circumstances it's literally done in the dark alley and in many ways we're creating the first Pride Parade I wasn't sure about everything Aaron said but he made me realize I had to think bigger the podcast Bros had some good ideas but they weren't selling any secret esoteric knowledge they'll help me really live forever I wanted easy answers silver bullets and Miracle drugs for that we have to look towards the final circle of longevity the Never Die dreamers these guys really believe we could all live indefinitely so long as we unite in our fight against dying these guys aren't always scientists instead they tend to be a Libertarian crypto crazy techno utopian people with a quasi religious faith in the transformative power of high tech [ __ ] greetings and welcome to the United States transhumanist party virtual Enlightenment Salon my name is jady stol II and I am the chairman of the US transhumanist [Music] party [ __ ] this according to my Calcom atrians if we combine AI biotech and this toaster I'll C Aging for good most of these guys are wannabe cult leaders or just odd blls who spend their days [ __ ] posting on Twitter people like Kai M Mills CEO of cryo Pets the company that wants to defeat death by freezing your cat yeah essentially what cryo pets is is we're we're building uh here in solake City Utah um we're building a hybrid facility where it's uh it's essentially half animal hospital half chics and and uh yeah we can offer real lab quality cow preservations to pets cryo pets is one of a number of very real companies that support vitalism or the vitalists a United moral ideology and uh nonprofit based in Delaware with the modest goal of allowing every human to live in Optimal Health indefinitely so vitalism is the Revolutionary movement against biological aging and death or you could say four Unlimited lifespans in Peak Health if you wanted to say it in the affirmative the organization is the brainchild of co-founder Adam gri who is nothing if not ambitious he wants to unite everyone that agrees with their Creed and mobilize SL monetize anyone who is dead serious I'm sorry I mean alive serious about it lucky for all of humanity the vitalists have a threo plan to make immortality happen number one unify supporters great number two spark and grow a network of vitalists don't see how that's different from the first one but okay and number three transform jurisdictions into longevity States huh huh yeah this is where it all gets a little bit kooky for reasons many in the longevity space are also hellbent on starting their own country so what is Ralia in one sentence it's a city that builds longevity companies and it's centered around one commandment we're here to make death optional popup cities tax Havens and theoretical cyber jurisdictions will be the home bases we need in our war against dying so yet longevity is a wide church and Brian Johnson has become its poster child partly by staking a claim at its dead overlapping Center if you've spent more than 20 minutes on the internet since 2023 then you've probably had a Brian Johnson jump scare but Brian isn't your average fitness influencer he has his sight set on immortality at its most literal Brian claims to be the most measured man on planet Earth a claim he justifies by monitoring every or or he can for signs of aging and then taking action to slow or reverse these [Music] metrics through this golden path of internal inquiry Brian believes there is a nonzero chance that he could sustain his life indefinitely or at least beyond the current human limit it is this quest for eternal life that has won him many disciples who are willing to preach his don't die philosophy don't die you have that yeah I know make new friends that we feel like we're part of community and Brian is no stranger to religious thinking he was born into a strict Mormon family and had started his own family while he was still studying at Brigham Young University he made his fortune a few years later as the founder of brain tree a web and Mobile payment company that Acquired venmo and was later sold to PayPal for many millions of dollars uh we help online businesses accept credit card payments and so our customers in include local Chicago companies like 37 signals we work with living social GitHub fab.com Uber and we power their credit card payments after becoming Filthy Rich Brian experienced a reverse road to Damascus moment he lost his faith got divorced and contemplated suicide for many years uh one needs to be a problem Sol a problem snob that everyone can make meaningful meaningful contributions to humanity and that's what I want to talk about today is how we can do that he only found his purpose again when he started project blueprint in 2021 an age reversing super project that he is now utterly devoted to uh what I would give to go back in time it is so much harder to reverse aging damage than it is to prevent it I started losing my hair in my early 30s it's been a difficult thing I've had to work really hard to try to keep ahead of hair Brian reached Global notoriety in 2023 when he underwent what he called the world's first multigenerational plasma exchange with his dad and son one one leader out one leader in for me one leader out for me leader in dad right after the family Johnson posed for this photo shoot that looked more like an incest themed Calvin Klein ad the supposed benefits of this family fluid swap came from a few controversial rodent studies where older mice were given blood and organs from their younger counterparts and experien some reverse aging effects maybe possibly now there is no direct evidence to suggest such an exchange would work in humans and that's probably why the Johnson's haven't conducted any blood sharing ceremonies since perhaps revealing that the whole Endeavor was more about publicity than longevity I hope he gets hit by a bus the thing on this though I wonder what happens if if a bus gets hit by me the internet love to hate it the story was shared across social media and the mainstream press as people clowned on Brian or openly scorned him as a symbol of big Tech hubris but to Brian the whole Endeavor was a roaring success as it turbocharged his public reputation it has since formed the basis for all of his self-aware stunts using his sincere strangeness as a path to viral infam me happy you're here come on in thank you very much first though I wanted to make sure Brian was the real deal so I offered him something that no mere mortal could resist so I couldn't tempt you with a sidecar donut it's the best donut in La I personally very partial to the uh the maple uh bacon donut you know oh my God I can't believe this is legal like is even smelling it giving you like a little bit of a contact I can model the whole thing like how was her against the law and how is this legal like that makes no sense to me now if all you know about Brian is the blood boy bit then I can understand why you'd be skeptical of whatever he's selling what he is selling is blueprint his own personal hyperd disciplined routine for diet sleep and exercise we basically took all my protocol and we put it into his few pills and one drink and so that's the longevity mix and then eight pills from blueprint you must be pretty pleased to not be taking 200 pills a day imagine that took a lot of your time yeah it was one the max was 111 111 yeah that was your record was it yeah but still it's it's a lot of pills so yeah and I'm down quite a bit so it's really nice you know what the most ironic way for you to die would be to choke on your daily supplements It's that or getting hit by a bus it's guaranteed to happen his diet consists of the same vegan meals every day and his last meal is consumed before noon this is to mitigate even the minor damage the ordinary digestion can do to the cells in the gastrointestinal tract it's about preventing your cells from aging right exactly that is that centrally what the protocol is about is about to Pro to slow the de the degeneration of your cells entirely okay yeah so like the our bodies naturally age every day every second of every day and the question is how much can we slow those things right and then once the damage occurs can we reverse the damage well that's the million dollar question isn't it kind of reversal the blueprint is a lifestyle designed to protect and maintain every cell in his body it is a datadriven medically tested algorithm for life extension and youth retention so I wanted to see if I could recreate it on a budget first of all I cut down on the calories and swap the stringed cheese and beef bowls for organic vegetables and replace the contents of my chocolate Shelf with Brian's own nutty pudding a gray brown nutty nesquick style treat that I started off tolerating and ended up almost enjoying I followed Brian's supplement regime to the letter which I choke down not with water but with Brian branded extra virgin olive oil which he also promotes as a longevity superfood under the ironic label of snake oil wink wink you guys you see he's self-aware so Brian actually drinks a few shots of this every day and uh I don't know maybe I'm a culinary idiot I was born British after all uh but turns out not only can you drink extra virin olive oil I like it it is good it just of like burns like it's going to kill [Music] me his exercise regime is 6 hours of cardio and strength training every week this is apparently the optimal routine to maintain his muscle cells without overexerting them Brian is a big proponent of healthy posture as well even claiming that sorting his posture out actively averted his own early demise I had internal jugular vein stenosis these internal pipes that have blood flow from my brain were restricted because of bad posture in order to fix my own chronic case of nerd neck I copied Brian's exercises to the letter and bought a standing desk to keep me upright and above ground I also upped my three hours of exercise a week to a Brian approved six making my way to the gym in the afternoon based on the twink terminator's own muscle building schedule but combining this with his advice on UV rays was a real challenge without the benefits of a home gym Brian avoids sunlight for most of the day ideally only exposing his skin cells to natural light in the early morning this is when the UV register is at its lowest as UV can damage DNA cells and accelerate [Music] aging like Brian I got some sunlight in the early morning I had to make my Journeys to the gym under the cover of this special UV umbrella and admittedly this lifestyle Edition made me feel like the [ __ ] elephant man but I was far from finding my final freakish form Brian's sleep routine is meticulous he sleeps alone in a temperature controlled room on a temperature controlled mattress according to the data collected from his whooop band he is in the top 1% of sleepers perfect sleep means optimal recovery repairing the cells in your brain and the rest of your body as perfectly as possible aping Brian here was a greater challenge to my status quo as my hobbies mostly involve staying up late getting stoned and bathing myself in blue light this had to change so I started by whooping myself into shape tummy just rumbled then the whoop band is the one commercially available wearable that Brian Johnson swears by an alwayson Fitness tracker that keeps him aware of his sleep strain and stress and crucially heart rate variability a high HRV indicates good overall health and that your body can efficiently adapt to stress from illness injury or you know the stress of devoting your entire life to reaching the overall high score for minute spent breathing my woop data showed me that my HRV was dog [ __ ] apparently a month of exercise hadn't dented a decade of canopis adult content binging so I gave up the gang and started to follow my whoops daily advice more strictly Brian swears by fullbody red light therapy which he believes will enhance cellular energy and promote tissue repair now I couldn't afford to get one of these full body dealies so instead I ordered this current bodies red light LED therapy mask ah if this isn't the face of a man taking his skin care seriously I don't know what is even if it also looks like that I've just killed a robot and I'm now wearing his face as my face using current bod's mask I could now toast my epidermis and reverse my twink death all without leaving the sofa which was helpful because I was [ __ ] exhausted yeah I feel like my face mask is like not cutting the mustard man like this is what I need although am I supposed to be fully clothed here would would you be doing this in the nudes that's right right all right here we go so you're you can now compare your mask to this guy one okay two I feel like I'm on the sun four and then I have a a handheld temperature device and so what we normally do just to check is we would look at the uh skin temps so you would heat up to around 104 fahit so you'll get pretty toast oh man I'm toasting like for real oh blackout that's my penis measurement device wait which one sorry sorry what this is my penis measurement device don't take this the wrong way it is quite small so how well yeah so what you do is you you this guy comes out you put it around the shaft mhm and you think it's going to be annoying it's actually fine and so I took my Baseline measurements 6 months ago and then two weeks ago I logged uh one uh 179 minutes almost pure hard on of pure boner okay nice through five erections so almost as long as the movie Titanic and so night erections are a meaningful bio AG marker for cardiovascular health sexual health and physiological health so wait you your boners are better than an 18-year-old yes so technically your dick is underage yes be careful where you put that thing man I'm looking out to you yeah so yeah this is like a whatever there's there's a story and a reason and evidence behind every single thing here some worked some didn't I need to clean it out though the CVS receipt for this must be like the Dead Sea scws old anuses get cancer quite yeah that is true so trying to keep it you know okay I don't know what else to ask what you doing for your B but yeah what keeping it young uh a good diet so taking care of your colon with a good diet so avoid bad stuff like donuts eat good stuff Brian is paying a series of medical professionals to track every organ that can deliver data for signs of aging CU we took care of my heart and my lungs and my brain and I said how do I get the most measured penis in the world and is then embarking on a series of interventions to reverse these signs and so if you take the penis you can say you can measure it according to sensitivity and according to erectile strength according to like a whole bunch of variables and we said can we make my penis legitimately younger I hesitate to ask this in your bathroom yeah but are you measuring how big your loads are yeah so amount of you're measuring amount of jits that you're producing that's right there's there's even a a is a prediction Market that is predicting whether my load size will increase or not on the next measurement interval measures on sperm Health on number of sperm on motility and so like for example in the past year my sperm Health has improved by a few hundred% so I got just left the doctor I got a A+ on my sperm test for for an 18-year-old in many ways I already related to Brian he wanted to stay healthy so that he could keep doing what he loves forever experimenting with a bunch of unregulated drugs I don't actively do psychedelics I have done psychedelics in fact I did ketamine wearing the kernel brain interface we had this question what happens when you take ketamine right and typically you ask people and they'll give you their your opinion like I was in another dimension or I experienced this or that but you can't provide numbers and so I wore the interface I measured my brain for for five days before during ketamine and then 30 days after so we have to see what happened in my brain uh it's the first time ever someone had done that so it was cool to see it so it didn't get included into the blueprint then so no longevity benefits of ketamin as far as you can see not it's not yet studied I mean okay potentially I mean when I took it I just ended up passed out in a bathroom somewhere so really got me anywh what was the setting that uh a long time ago now I think it was a house party sometime doing a little bit too much of it but you know certainly recreational rather than scientific did you do intramuscular intramuscular or was it straight up the Hooter so yeah his Ned Flanders no risk no fun Health optimized lifestyle is all in service of his more adventurous side he spends over $2 million a year on his health but most of that cost goes to the professionals that are prescribing him treatments that I can neither afford or pronounce gut health CR microbiome stuff all right nice nice wine someone brought this to the dinner last night story and then this one is a new one I just got in today this is it's today yep cuz the protocol is always changing isn't it you're always trying to add stuff in add take stuff out I guess the obvious question to that is that do you really know if these things are going to interact in a way that's going to be negative probably yep uh so we try to approach it in two ways one is we try to stagger as best we can and two is we use models uh from the farmer world that you can use statistical based models to try to isolate effect so you can say it does this intervention is it responsible for this given effect okay and can use probabilities and so we do try to methodically approach the process that way we're not just throwing a bunch of stuff in and be like how is it going but that is a degree of risk certainly yeah it's not it's not perfect so have you yet found some examples where something negative has happened we had an experience like that yep so I was trying to rejuvenate my thymus I need to fix this this this lid came off not sure if it's supposed to be okay I'll fix this in a minute these interventions are not available on his website nor does he recommend them to anyone who isn't him you see it's what Brian isn't selling that really sets him apart yeah not a tro this this is the guy I did not okay oh this is Nova ntic right so they've uh they've been making bank right nowen piic okay so it actually it was successful it rejuvenated my thymus by S years so I okay d8 it's G it's huge um but it came at a cost where my blood glucose levels were off I had inoc cranial pressure my sleep was whack so it just kind of wrecked a whole bunch of stuff at the same time I see so it had the effect but to your question yes it had a whole bunch of side effects and we're like this is not worth it to much is going wrong so was that quite an anxiety inducing experience it must be I mean you're thinking so often about how not to die so when you see something go wrong imagine that sets off the alarm bells on your head a little bit it's okay yeah yeah it's just part of the process oh you're a chill dude you freak me out if something seems to work he keeps doing it if it doesn't and the data shows that it might be killing him he stops he's also rolling the dice with risky stem cell treatments human growth hormone and unregulated Gene therapy among dozens of others he is committed to his blueprint and the prophecy of life extending technology but before I could understand where this Faith came from I had to understand the science that drove this faith you know I'm not the most uh socially Adept person in the world yet to meet a YouTuber who is in fact but uh I'm very at home with I don't know Tech Nutters and crypto goons they're my people I'm just curious about anyone who claims that they can change the world or what it means to be human I think even if you think they're delusional you've always got to try and hear them out because nobody wants to be old and sick if you can stay young and healthy absolutely and I think we are now at a point where for the first time ever scientists are able to rejuvenate CS not all of them yet so we are not yet at Living forever today but we are definitely at a point where we can lengthen the health span that's the time you live without any troduced sicknesses basically I mean I see occasionally a sort of religious thinking that is yeah to a certain extent maybe replaces some formal Cults like religion and other ones so literally yeah maybe the biohackers are ultimately trying to replace I don't know a higher force or God focusing on themselves that is what the longevity industry ising is promising the possibility of eternal life and I mean the church has been doing very well on that it has many similarities yeah now longevity investors are an interesting breed they tend to have a high appetite for risk a disdain for authority and a borderline delusional belief in the transformative power of technology so it makes sense that nearly every investor I met at Davos was also at one point leveraged to the tits on crypto part of your job is sort of figuring out the the dreamers the and I think it's fair to say there are a couple conmen in this environment because it's potentially so lucrative and also you know people are promising outrageous returns I just wonder how do you sort the weat from the cha well you know I I come from cryptocurrencies yeah yeah and when you look in 2017 the ico's initial coin offerings there you had con man hope you must have encountered people you consider to be like delusional conmen that's fair to say it definitely runs the gamut I mean if you look historically there have been people in the 1920s there was a guy sewing monkey testicles to people in the claim that it would extend their virility and you're like you know this field has a history of these kinds of people and we need to shed that image so yes there's even today it has its fair share here you you have some people who want to sell snake oil mhm but in comparison to what we have 2017 in crypto nothing yeah it's it's a relatively serious industry the question is long shots so there is promising candidate molecules which might become candidate drugs but that's a very very long process so it's biotech uh and and there you you basically have to shoot 14 arrows so that one medicament comes to the market and 13 will be complete losses so it's very binary that's what we try to avoid so we don't go into this hardcore biotech business mod most biotech firms worth their salt are based in the US where they are also subject to the whims and approval processes of the FDA which is what turns biotech investing into a game of regulatory Russian Roulette investors can pour Millions into a firm for years perhaps based on some promising rodent research only for said product to face plant during one of the many hurdles in the fda's long approval process positive trial results can lead to Skyhigh increases in stock price while negative results can half the value of your investment in minutes this is what crypto and biotech really have in common extreme volatility and the kind of investors who thrive on it this lunch i' snagged an invite to was organized by maximon a Swiss company that provides financing for longevity entrepreneurs their mission is to make that final decade of life a little less miserable by funding the companies with real potential to alleviate age related illness I personally would have taken that one down they are hosting companies that believe they can slow aging rejuvenate the body at a molecular level and even Resurrect The Dead tomorrow offers uh human cryo preservation same stuff as you would do with cells right but for humans in cases where current Medical Technology cannot save the patient yes that's right cryonics unique in the longevity space because it is the only practice that pitches the idea of life after death a sales pitch that requires a serious leap of faith currently it's only Europe with the largest organization here and with us there's somewhere between 4 and 500 people have signed up today to be cry preserved should they die and then the people who have been actually cry preserve that's still you know a handful the option to turn grandar into a corpsicle has been available in the US since the first wave of sci-fi Space Age optimism in the 1960s the cryic Society of California was founded in 1966 and elected TV repair man Bob Nelson as their president but the upstart corpse freezing company didn't have much of a shelf life some bodies were frozen too fast and cracked during their initial freezing their operating costs were also too high their vault in Chatsworth famously failed in the 1970s leaving their customers to Thor out like hot dogs in the sink thanks to Silicon Valley we are riding a new wave of big Tech optimism ail and his co-founder are riding that Wave by becoming the first first to offer cryic freezing in Mainland Europe if history is any indication the world has been getting better and better consistently you just need to zoom out a bit right there's not a single time in history where I would say I'd rather live in that year the issue with cryonics beyond the obvious is that it's a solution that is highly dependent on future advances in other fields rather extraordinary ones that turn serious conversations on cryonics into a spitballing session for a Sci-Fi short story competition we do brain only as well so you can do whole body or the brain great cuz I was wondering if it's theoretically possible to put my brain into a monkey body if that was an option not anytime soon but it might be possible to put your brain into a clone body okay now you're probably aware that stem cell research has a slightly mixed reputation but may not know why the most useful kind of stem cells are plop poent embryonic stem cells and until 2006 the only way to get them was by harvesting them from Human embryos in the bush ERA this caused a bit of a moral panic and a presidential veto that banned any research that destroyed or created new human embryos for this purpose This was later overturned by Obama but the FDA remains very cautious when approving stem cell therapies and clinical trials for another better reason the real problem with stem cell therapy is that when these unspecified cells are injected into the body they can also become cancerous growths and according to the scientific literature Cancer's effect on longevity is uh not good but ambitious researchers and desperate medical tourists have become impatient with the fda's slow approval process skipping the process by going overseas where regulations are either less severe or just easier to ignore this is bio accelerator it's the world lead leader in stem cell therapy I did stem cells in Columbia with bow accelerator out in Columbia man my neck feels 100% man I wrestled my whole life I've been there they saved my back I couldn't go off the boison for them longevity enthusiasts are following suit willing to bet it all on untested therapies that promise a shot at Rejuvenation with a risk some investors who have an even greater appetite for risk are willing to stuff a few more bullets in the barrel they are funding risky experimental medical procedures and offering them straight to the consumer without the fda's approval Honduras has surrendered a piece of this island to host a bunch of venture capital firms who have turned into their own privately run libertarian Paradise the city runs like a business with corporate income tax as low as 1% Prosper is the best one to start in that's why we here it has the maximum degree of legal autonomy it's also a great location for medical t tourism it's a magical Island free from taxes and other forms of government tyranny where you can pay for experimental gene therapy in Bitcoin what do you think about what's going on there yeah very interesting I mean me and my partners we were uh in uh suzu uh last year so that was a similar setup and it felt little bit like the early days of crypto right where nobody really know what's going to happen but everybody knew there is something big happening and that's why proera vialia many of these new models are exact bringing together these exciting people minicircle in prospera offers unregulated F Statin gene therapy to anyone Bussy enough to fly out and fire it into their arm only a few hundred people have already done so and one of them is Brian Johnson today I will be receiving my first gene therapy you know I never imagined I grew up in a small town in on a farm with my grandpa and I never would have imagined that I would be doing gene therapy Brian isn't the only one excited by their gene therapy this idiot on Twitter called it Captain America Tech this is the smallest my delt will ever be gene therapy right now is about where Ben Franklin was flying the Kite we haven't got to the iPhone yet according to Independent reports mini Circle are charging $25,000 for their ftin gene therapy if it works minic circles custom plasmids will suppress myostatin and stop it from inhibiting muscle growth allowing your muscle cells to replicate and expand without the usual biological checks all the powers of Captain America right not quite more like all the powers of a bully whip it but according to Min circle's promotional material it can also decrease fat reverse age acceleration and lengthen your telr if Min Circle have achieved what they claim good news two sketchy dudes on a pirate island have achieved the biotech equivalent of a miss to Mars successful and safe plasmid gene therapy would have massive implications for longevity and biotech as a whole the likelihood is though it's [ __ ] this is me as a kid this is a kid who was born with one of the effects of the gene therapy I'm about to do in mice when they received this gene therapy they lived 30% longer the claims Brian is repeating here are based on this paper which observed ftin gene therapy increased lifespan by 32.5% but in mice and eight mice to be precise hardly a significant enough sample size and the study itself was fully funded by bio Viva a biotech company similar to minicircle dedicated to developing gene therapy solutions to the aging process and they also run sketchy trials abroad to scir safety regulation so yeah more than a little biased when it comes to claiming this Tech works like stem cells gene therapy also carries the risk of multiplying the wrong kind of cells or in layman's terms that [ __ ] can give you turbo cancer bra until now my team and I have avoided gene therapy because it seemed too risky if a therapy caused say cancer in my body there'd be nothing I could do to reverse the process what makes Min cires therapy different is that it has a built-in kill switch if my body reacts badly I can take the antibiotic tetracycline instantly killing and deactivating the DNA molecules I've been injected with now personally I think it's kind of cool to be a scientific pirate taking to the high seas to skirt the fda's regulation but you'll be sharing that water with scam artists selling placebos or Worse Brazen Bad actors who are injecting their patients knowing full well it will likely cause them harm this has been the case for decades with unregulated stem cell Labs who have exploited vulnerable individuals seeking cures for chronic or terminal conditions this is obviously evil but if I'm being generous it's also a gray area under the right to try Act of 2018 American patients with life-threatening illnesses can volunteer for experimental treatments that haven't been fully approved by the FDA yet and personally I don't see why that shouldn't be extended even further if you want to run the gauntlet with unregulated biotech and you understand the risks I don't think anyone should stop you it's the radest way you can risk your life shit's all over extreme sports if you ask me Brian is putting his body on the line and is sharing the results are those results perfectly scientific no can all the tech he's using be trusted [ __ ] no finished up it's high UV index it's like 11 right now I need to test out the full s therapy so I think I'm going to run to the car it might be stupid it might be ego driven and it might ultimately be fruitless but personally I think there's nobility in the attempt suffice to say I wasn't quite sold on stem cells or experimental gene therapy just yet having already sliced off some cancer I wasn't sure I wanted to roll the dice on injecting some more lost among the sales pitches I was glad to run into Andrew steel author YouTuber and longtime educator in the longevity space he wasn't here to sell me on anything other than longevity itself it is our greatest humanitarian challenge to deal with aging in fact it causes about 2third of deaths globally so 100,000 people die every single day of aging and that to me seems like a huge moral imperative to do something about it Brian might be longevity most recognizable face but but many in the space are highly critical of his methods why do you think Brian Johnson has blocked you on Twitter well I know exactly why Brian Johnson has blocked me on Twitter and it's because I suggested so he's reportedly worth $400 million and I suggested that perhaps he should use some of that $400 million to fund a trial into something called metformin this is a diabetes drug that we think might extend people's longevity but we need to do a proper human trial to find out and that trial is looking for a couple of tens of millions of dollars to get it over the line where it can be conducted take 3 to years find out if this works now Brian Johnson takes met foring so it should really be in his interest to find out if this drug actually does something or if it's even shortening his life we just don't know at this point and Brian basically the first thing he did was he told me to go and work for the US government in spite of the fact I was living in the UK at the time could have done his background a bit better but then basically progressed fairly rapidly to a Blog right and it just really surprised me because he claims to love the haters and he does love to screenshot these negative tweets about his appearance or about his crazy regimen but as soon as people approach him with scientif criticism he's very quick to reach that block button there are some cool investable opportunities in longevity there are companies there are 20 or 30 companies working on something called cenotic treatment which kills agent cells in your body so this is something where there's a decent amount of private investment the problem is some of these things are such long shots the only way that we can fund them is if we all do it together and you know the best way we can't we do for doing that problematic that sometimes is is the taxation system the fact that the Aging population is a problem is essentially because older people you know unfortunately can be very expensive if you get something like dementia we don't have any particularly good treatments yet what that means is we have to care for you for years maybe decades before something actually takes your life and even if you don't go you know to the point of actually having full-blown dementia you're more frail you're less independent this means you might no longer be able to hold down a job you might get an illness and have to quit work you might have a relative who has to quit work to take care of you there's this enormous hit to the economy this is being really hard-headed and cold and like it's all about the bottom line here but governments care about this stuff oh [Music] [Music] it's no surprise that the philosophy of don't die would find its home in Los Angeles it's the city of barely surviving a city that doesn't care if you live or die built on the promise of immortality but the absurdly rich and the insanely poor are separated only by luck determination a 10-ft electrified fence and a mile long driveway a city born on life support artificially sustained by aqueducts that ship water in from 200 miles away way where you can get your palm red and your lips filled in the same strip mall that doubles as a Korean church on Sundays a city core in a tug of war between lifespan and lifestyle extreme poverty total decadence woo woo [ __ ] high-tech huis Fitness freaks fenel zombies tres leche kale salad a city where everyone runs to nowhere and drives to everywhere a city of contradiction then the perfect place for Brian Johnson to call home I still can't believe those donuts I haven't seen you slowing down near it man you sure you're not tempted we'll see we'll come back to it so naturally you're quite an introverted person really would you say that's true yeah I do I do go inwards but you've recently in the last few years you you've been forcing yourself onto everyone's timeline you're on the 4u page of people who a lot of people who probably don't want to see you and so like how do deal with that like as an introverted person how do you deal with that new notoriety I love every second of it I sincerely do I love the game I love the back and forth I love the um the friction it causes in the world the past few years I've been endeavoring to build the world's best anti-aging protocol and to do so after 6 weeks on my own budget blueprint I had become an early Rising Shadow dwelling gr guzzling pill popping data driven [Applause] machine I had never felt more alive or more robotic the super veggie as prepared by Brian's team I am living the lifestyle I'm going to say I'm loving life eating super bgy but it's going to be longer this little plastic safety thing you break it off and that way Rel releases the button and then you launch a little piece of metal into your arm ow and then it'll be ready to go in 2 hours and that will give you 10 days of continuous glucose measurement I was now getting continuous data on my resting heart rate blood glucose levels heart rate variability and Sleep Quality which led me to discover that one night of moderate drinking had an oversized impact on my General Health it raised my heart rate the following day and tanked my HRV my whoop successfully scared me sober it had become a priest on my wrist shaming me for the sin of suboptimal sleep routine and one too many sambas all my health all my decisions the success of my life was now reduced to a daily score I started to look forward to it every morning as a form of validation I had successfully gamified my health at the cost of my freedom and uh monthly subscription fee it's the most offensive thing you can suggest to any any person in this moment is to give up your is that there is a moral imperative to give up your free will and you believe that I do so this oh yeah so like this this head hit so it basically just stamp it out it delivers these pulses of light it feels like you're getting branded right that sounds horrible yeah yeah yeah it's pretty painful so we did my entire body and when we're done it looks like I have like tire marks over my entire body yeah that doesn't sound but and yet you see there's a there's a benefit to that that's right I've been doing a little bit of your protocol for a while now and I've seen a lot of good benefits I mean for one I used to have zero hours of exercise a week now I have six and I'm like no this is great but one negative side effect I admit I have is well I'm I'm quite an anxious person and thinking all the time about death thinking about oh what's this line in my head and I've got a twinge in my neck and like by embracing the don't die philosophy you are kind of putting death at the center of your life aren't you is that do you feel that or for you is it I mean all this this makes me anxious yeah but you're comfortable here oh interesting um I'm sorry you go through that that's that's the way I go through life cynical and anxious but you know I'm still I'm I'm figuring out that's a fun pering yeah can be um I don't know I guess for the first time in my life I guess I'm kind of okay with everything M I'm okay with death I'm okay with life I'm okay with hate like I'm just kind of good thinking about not dying all the time is definitely making me go a little bit crazy in some crucial ways living such a disciplined datadriven life might have been affecting my health negatively I became obsessed with my metrics and bitterly annoyed when they didn't seem to react with the changes I was making measuring my sleep so intensely was also keeping me up at night I started to get frustrated when I wouldn't go to sleep immediately and ended up lying on the sofa scrolling through my health metrix I ended up calling a doctor for an appointment yesterday uh because of a red dot on my nose that's been there for years it turns out I went back and watched a few old videos and realized like that red dot has been on my [ __ ] nose for over a year um but I saw it in the mirror and I started getting freaking out thinking it was [ __ ] cancer or something so I called a doctor about it uh yeah so there is definitely some downsides [Music] to trying not to die every second of your life psychological ones probably physical ones too cuz I'm not [ __ ] sleeping after a few weeks of actively trying to bring my blood pressure down with diet and an overc commitment to cardio my blood pressure reading actually went up leading to this embarrassing and genuinely unstaged tantrum maybe it was all those years of door dashing Fried Chicken to my sofa or maybe it was my mostly sedentary lifestyle as a slavish content Gremlin yeah this is all your fault for you lot for watching and enabling me or maybe it was the sudden stress of obsessively checking my body for minor changes and giving them the existential weight of a literal fight against death who knows I wondered how Brian dealt with all this not practically but psychologically maybe I needed to take another page out of his book luckily he had written one don't die isn't just Brian Johnson's Mantra sales pitch and t-shirt slogan it is also the name of his first book most longevity experts seem to write books based on the current science and the data behind their studies Brian has taken a novel approach literally he self-published a piece of philosophical fiction under the pseudonym zero it's the story of a man named scribe who assembles his closest friends on the final day of his life all to introduce them to a new friend a new friend named blueprint other characters are similarly named model builder Relentless dark humor farm boy but they aren't really characters they're all meant to represent different sides of the author's personality reading don't die doesn't give you the answers to its title instead it's a Whistle Stop tour inside Brian's brain so I figured the best way to understand Brian Johnson was to bring Brian Johnson's words and characters to life I I sort of see it as um your version of The Last Supper The Last Supper before sacrificing yourself to the blueprint bro like dying a little bit every day to save the world right very good yeah okay all right okay well that's what we're doing [Music] [Music] of course in the other room is a normal Buffet of great food for anyone who wishes to stress eat but I also thought we might take a day and see what blueprint is up to for lunch and maybe just maybe anyone who wants could try that it won't kill you really it won't actually it could even do the opposite is this a joke it looks like it's just in between the stage of being a caterpillar and a butterfly it's goo it's all just goo it's premastication that's the technical term Blended if an algorithm told you exactly what to eat when and you were promised that you would never feel hungry again and that it would be anti-aging anti-inflammatory and let you live naturally and healthfully as long as possible would you do it don't die die as we prepared to shoot my holy indulgent dream sequence Brian and I had a conversation about self-awareness and repression in the closet there is some conflict in you or at least there was when you wrote the book and was the book a way of like resolving that conflict yeah it was to surface it all and transparent about it so oh this is dark humor that's right dark humor is my favorite character by the way to thought so I he's the one I relate to most so self harm yeah self harm would you say that's like an intrinsic part of your character that you kind of have to suppress uh that used to be the case um cuz I mean those train tracks You' put in on yourself in the clinic form of self harm man honest honestly okay great Insight agreed I'm just doing self harm in a constructive way in the form of therapies but legit farm boy this sort of represents your youth right your earli self and also zero is another one of your um personas that you you're on Twitter as you're writing I do see a little bit of a pattern there that it's like you want to go back to zero is there not some element of your protocol which is about recapturing a youth yes maybe you missed out on yes exactly right I want to go back and relive in some ways I felt sorry for Brian he lost his religion and in doing so he lost his ultimate safety net and a community he obviously felt very safe in is there not a little part of you that thinks that maybe you're kind of recreating your logic of religion in the BL yeah I mean most likely if anything's true it's the irony of my own selfawareness right as self-aware as I am I'm equally unself-aware and so as much as I talk about this past thing I'm probably replicating the identical thing in a different form so I'm absolutely open to my yeah for me being uh unaware of this metap phenomena that's me so I really am trying to be a positive influence in people's minds even if they disagree with me they can ma they can patter match that I'm like others who have cared for them in their life parents or friends or loved ones of heavenly father with his strong desire for community and a radical approach to living I did worry that Brian had all the makings of a cult leader You're Building these groups of people um was it 150 different SE grou yeah around the world yeah is there not a danger of maybe inadvertently staring a cult I mean I joke that it is a cult and our malicious aims are for you to go to bed on time and eat your vegetables you jokingly call it a cult and then you also jokingly call your olive oil snake oil you can hide a lot behind self-consciousness yeah I think Shakespeare said it uh best what is it um many a true things said in just yes at least with his insistence on staying alive there was little chance of a Brian Johnson Jonestown Massacre forget poison Kool-Aid wouldn't even be allowed on the blueprint what kind of people do you find are drawn to it people who are naturally inclined towards health and wellness people who have had a brush with a health uh those who have had family and friends who've had a rush with health it's just saying that uh health is forgotten until uh it's the only thing that matters and they've gone through some experience in life that has shaken them and they're like nah this is real do you think there is a nonzero chance that Brian Johnson will be alive in the 20th 25th Century yes I do this is a new addition that we've had for a month you're bringing new meaning to going nowhere fast cuz you're staying at home you're eating as little as possible get getting as much sleep as possible in some way are you not like putting yourself in stasis yes and what you trying to survive till for that reason yeah why yeah don't die right that's the philosophy yeah what are you not dying for I mean just in general great but like what is it in the future that you're so eager to see yeah I love this moment right now I love that you're here I love we're doing this video I love the conversation I love being alive and why sh off for this by the way sorry why sh off for this I just think it's more cinematically interesting we are in the process of giving birth to a new form of intelligence more capable of certain tasks than we will ever be we are simply its Shepherd our only chance is creating and training an intelligence so profoundly strong it can cancel out our mistakes and bring us into a new era of prosperity when I was growing up in the church the ethics and shame didn't interest me all that much I stuck around mostly for the stories don't do this at home kids not worth it partly because of that religious childhood I've always been sensitive to the prophetic overtones when Tech Bros talk about AI for someone not following where AI is at this may sound like gibberish and nuts yeah if you look at it from just how fast the speed of intelligence has been progressing even in the past two years it's fast and it's faster than we can comprehend you're hoping at least in part that this super intelligence will be able to sustain Brian Johnson as he is now yes that's that so you do hope for that that that there's maybe there super Intelligence coming and with the rate of things More's law or an exponential growth as it is it's almost certainly on its way and your hope is that it can bring you a degree of immortality uh yeah I never talk about immortality because it breaks the human brain it does but okay life extension at least yeah I talk about tomorrow that the but wanting tomorrow is something we all understand and that is effectively the same idea as living for tomorrow because in that experience until waiting to living Forever Living for tomorrow in our minds is living Forever on the time scales that we're contemplating super intelligence we don't know how long we have and it's not certain whether we're going to solve aging it's not certain when we're going to solve it so my Endeavor is not necessarily to solve aging it's to solve the want to live with death being inevitable and facing existential crisis that puts us in a psychological disposition where we're like whatever because we're going to die anyways so what does it even matter this is kind of like when in Mormonism the scriptures prophesy of the world going to hell they prophesy of countries at War and they prophesy of you know all these terrible things blood running in the streets and so as a member of that Community you celebrate when [ __ ] goes wrong in the world you're like look prophecy's coming true things are on the right track I'm doing well and so you celebrate bad things happening you don't stop and say I need to fix this or I need to stop this or I need to somehow be useful to the human race stopping it and so it's this Twisted incentive where you want bad things to happen because it confirms your belief whereas you have more of a positive outlook you are looking forward to the future you think this is the best time that there's ever been to be alive and the future is only going to be better and and I'm saying the most important thing is as species we rally to say we can do this and we have a lot at stake and we have a lot we're going to lose including these radically extended lifespans and a lot more cool stuff so I'm trying to flip the Zeitgeist away from this marrum defe disposition to a Want For Life do you consider yourself a prophit I don't think that's something I can self-label when your dad left biological father because you're very close to your stepfather as well is that right um was he excommunicated church or was it not quite that severe I you know what I don't know he left yeah and he had a drug problem right he did your dad's on the protocol now a little bit your son too yes whole family yeah my one of my children the other two are not yeah is that because they're not quite old enough yet and you think it needs to be a conscious Choice they're with their mother and they have this uh they're kind of stuck in between whether to go with Mom on her religious belief or whether to and so far they've kind of cozied up to Mom and they've kind of kept me arms length and so my middle child talage who's live with who's with me now he embraced me at 16 and he left the religion so the family's kind of fractured we get along really well we always have you know up until we got a divorce my eldest son was 11 I was like super dad you know I was so devoted to be such an exceptional father so it's been very painful for me and for them uh we're just divided and so that that religious Authority is a more powerful Authority in their lives than I am and so creating this protocol are you not trying to create a force that's even more powerful than that religion yeah I I view um I view my born into religion as in inadequate is basically it is incapable of delivering on its promises it cannot do what it says that it will do it's been its sales pitch for a time in memorium right is that hey believe this yes you might live forever yes and you're like that's [ __ ] though it's not it's not true right exactly and I'm basically I'm I'm trying to say for the first time in human history I'm offering up uh potential reward that requires a lot of hard work but it's the first time that can potentially deliver on the actual [Music] idea one thing that Brian said but I guess I've been turning over in my head is this notion of like he's just trying to live for tomorrow right and when he said that I was just like well you're just trying to make what you're doing and sound normal but he's not wrong we're all trying to outrun the reaper to one extent or another we all want to see tomorrow even someone who's 120 is like they still at least want that next day we're all going to die we all come to the end of the path one day but deep down so many of us spend our lives kind of in denial about that fact in that way Brian is just like us except he understands that this denial is illogical unless you're willing to do something about it maybe he's more sayane than the rest of us or at least able to deal with an anxiety that for most people is exhausting to meditate on every day don't die [ __ ] maybe Brian is right with a bit of determination and discipline maybe I could live forever for realsies I just had to stick to the blueprint work out for 6 hours a week never drink or smoke we ah who am I kidding I'd really rather die than miss out on all my favorite substances besides beyond the research chemicals Brian really wasn't offering anything new isn't don't die just extreme Healthy Living mixed in with some classic Mormon self-denial repackaged for the age of big data and secular cynicism with that realization I also realized I was in LA and there was a bunch of substances here I wanted to sample what something like chill like what's the THC levels uh so are you more interested in the flower or joint since I was now chemically suggestible I figured there was one path to immortality that I hadn't investigated yet all right so we come to the Mormon temple in Los Angeles which um yeah it's a pretty big definitely looks like a [Music] temple I am Jesus Christ my father sent me that I might be lifted up upon the cross behold the wounds which pierced my side and also the prince of the nails in my hands and feet was there anything that stood out to either of you as you listen um to be honest at first it was the American accent I don't know if you have heard it before but we do baptisms for the dead so if I got like baptized in behalf of my grandma who's passed away and she's never heard about God or Jesus Christ and she can choose to say yes I want that baptism or I'm good so that means a few basically all your family could be in heaven with you in that case and so it's a way of it defeats death in for your whole family right yeah okay oh well I didn't know that when you've read as many longevity studies as I have you do see some patterns emerge Beyond The Healthy Living and restraint you'll always hear the old-timers talk about the importance of community family and a continued sense of purpose it's obviously not a coincidence that these things are also key to living a good good life this all started because I couldn't handle the existential crisis of getting a mole removed another bad blood pressure reading or a night of drinking could send me on another obsessive and expensive spiral I can't make a documentary every time I have a health scare or worry about every little thing that could marginally contribute to My overall health I'm keeping the workouts and the whoop band but I'm not going to be scared of life just to avoid death as for longevity itself well I think it's a worthy cause and a vital field of inquiry it's doing what all good science should helping us understand nature and figuring out how we might overcome it but it's a field that will always have to contend with charlatans and scam artists because it contains a prophecy that people Leap Frog logic to believe in a promise of an infinite Horizon still I pray we live to see advances that fix the fragility of old age and relieve the burden of those We Leave Behind when I started writing this thing I figured it would probably end on a call for moderation something trite like hey it's not worth killing yourself trying to live forever but take care of your health cuz you only get one life you know nah I think that's [ __ ] if you've got it in you lay down your life in the service of something extreme devote yourself to doing something first best or fastest do something wild do something dangerous thank God for extremists they go there so we don't have to the contrarians the obsessives the prophets Visionaries and explorers and thank God too for all the fools who died failing to become one [Music] hey don't forget to download War Thunder there's a link below