The $2M Plan To Age In Reverse - Bryan Johnson

my body's aging extremely slowly I have 50 biomarkers the things you would normally expect like cholesterol and triglycerides and things like that that are in the perfect optimal clinical outfit range I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age several Fitness tests where I test out as an elite 18 year old my body runs three degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal so no matter how you're looking at it whether it's my DNA methylation my fitness test my biomarkers my phenotypic markers whatever you're looking at the data says the same thing I'm in near perfect health Brian Johnson welcome to the show thank you for having me do you fear death no I love life is there a distinction between those two I I do not have a I I know what fear feels like and I don't experience that emotion when contemplating death I spend a good bit of time looking at the longevity uh subreddit many many years ago when David Sinclair first came on the scene and um one of the things that I kind of realized or I thought I might have realized was it seemed like a little bit of a rehabilitated denial of death in a way uh it seems like there are certain elements of the longevity community that that do see that but based on what I've looked at from what you're doing it seems like a very enjoyable fun experiment where you're trying to see how far you can push your body but I'm trying to work out you know is there deeper down in the recesses is there something is there a denial of death is there a fear from from what's coming in the future driving you at all my my main source of inspiration is having read hundreds of biographies I love learning about people in their time and place that we're able to work on impossibly hard things so Talent is the ability to hit the target no one else can genius hits the target no one else can see and the majority of us in life we play the games that Society gives us so that's hitting the target So currently you know social media followers and you know this and that so people like to play games where points can be kept and you can be compared to people and ranked uh genius is a different game it's trying to find things that don't exist and you need to have the stamina and fortitude to go out and pave your own path and do things that are not recognized appreciated or valued even in your lifetime and so to me that reading biographies is about people who do that is they really try to survey all of existence they are somehow immune to their time and place and are able to see these things that's really so in my in my understanding of My reality I seek to be like those people and with that it means disregarding current wisdom around approaches for Health Fitness sleep diet nutrition training everything everything the reason why we exist what we do with our existence everything okay so in your view what is the reason why we exist lucky us we exist I mean I do not recall asking to exist it just happened and I really enjoy existing and I would like to continue to exist and these questions for example like what is the meaning of life I think that is an example of what it means to exist I don't think there is an answer it just is a person's answer is reflective of that of the time and place like you basically it's a mirror of the social and cultural norms and the person's trying to express themselves within those Norm structures and again trying to hit targets uh but to me it's we live at this really special time uh no no uh human before us no generation before us has ever been in the situation we're in where we're on this of potentially radically extending and altering what it means to be uh conscious being and it's just it's delicious Beyond uh words and I think the faster we can fully Embrace this opportunity the better off we are but I think we're we're still a little bit zombified like we just haven't quite seen it and um we'll be better off if we can try to catch these these waves I like the idea of the meaning of life being basically dependent on the local ecology in the local time so if it was uh Britain in 1100 A.D it would be in service of God you know it would be hoeing the garden and the sun beating down on your back but you're doing it because you need to praise the Lord and if it's you know pick your time pick whatever it is that people desire I mean just just building on your comment like if you basically look throughout thousands of years of human history and if you look at the emergent spiritual practices and religions that have emerged and you put a Chinese you know you put a wall in between the technology that time and place and the ideologies that are merged so just not even including the personalities who gave birth to these ideologies they're simply a reflection of what was technologically capable in that time and place that's it uh you know human Guru narrative aside that's just it it's just a mirror on what on the Practical extent to which humans can Aspire okay so in this regard does technology unlock our ability to think about our meaning and our place in the world yeah I mean the behind blueprint I mean a lot of people observe the blueprint they think that blueprint is about health and wellness and anti-aging it is really a contemplation about the future of our existence and what I think we've demonstrated is that we've built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can and we know what happens when algorithms get better at us at doing things flying airplanes calculators digital navigation You Name It We embrace them because they do a given thing better and they help us achieve our goals better than we could ourselves so we can free our minds up and do other things with blueprint I think I've I'm showing uh following Nietzsche of God is dead I think the mind is dead that if if the algorithmic ability if I can measure you know the 35 trillion cells in my body an algorithm can better manage entropy than I can of course I'm going to opt into it and free myself up to do other things and I think that's what we're at as a society I mean uh so yes does unlock does technology unlock it yes I mean I think at the most fundamental level and the most meaningful philosophical uh Revolution to happen in a long time the mind is dead it's here like it just arrived I think a lot of speculation about artificial intelligence maybe five years to ten years ago was that yeah sure we'll be able to automate certain things it'll be able to do kind of normal forward-thinking processes but it can't do creativity you can't do art it can't do writing it can't do music and then it turns out that it probably can and given enough time it's going to be able to do it better than us one of the interesting things to reflect on from your point there was that um a navigation system everybody uses Google Maps or Apple Maps or some equivalent now right why we used to navigate by our favorite roads we would look at a map and have an A to Z out and go through all of the different routes and there would be a co-pilot that would be giving you the wrong directions why is it that we were so quickly prepared to switch from this personal orienteering approach to using a GPS well it's because no one was existentially connected to their ability to do wayfinding I think that there is a a difference in kind in terms of how people see their own regulation of their physiology right that there is some sacred sense that I shouldn't go in and Tinker with what Nature has already done that it is able to regulate itself it can optimize so on and so forth there's uh you know even see this around vaccines as well that the difference between somebody taking a pill versus getting an injection there's just there are certain relatively arbitrary sort of rules that we place on what feels sacred what doesn't what we should Tinker with what doesn't what we're prepared to relinquish control of and Outsource to a computer and what we're not and given that we as we just said we thought that AI could do certain things and there was a limit and it seems like that limit has been pushed through uh it seems quite timely that you are um trying to break through another Frontier of assumption not creativity but I guess self-regulation of the body uh also using technology very well said yeah I'll give you yeah you you absolutely uh synthesize that beautifully I'll give you two thought experiments which I think capture the essence of this I hold these blueprint brunches at my house I call them the first supper and to prepare people I'm I explain to them I'm going to introduce a few ideas to you that are most likely going to break your brain they're going to basically you're going to experience one or multiple existential crises in this two and a half hour dinner so here's a few thought exercises to get your brain prepared like I do those three and then I give them a thought experiment and I say let's let's imagine a scenario where an algorithm is built specifically for you your personalized algorithm and it takes better care of your Wellness than you can yourself but as far superior physical and mental spiritual well-being you can have this algorithm the the catch is you have to be willing to accept its recommendations and follow its protocol would you be willing to do it and about a third of the participants say yes like anything to Free Me From Myself yes a third say uh sure but I want to change a few things it's like LOL that's not the thought experiment and then a third group gets deeply offended you know just what you're saying you touch upon if they can't decide what to eat and what to drink and when to do it they don't understand their existence uh so that's the thing the first thought experiment the second thought experiment I layer on top of that is when you and I if we say how good is technology going to be in 20 years time without questioning it you and I are going to agree it's better now are we going to say there's Nanobots in our bloodstream repairing our DNA in real time or is it AGI whatever our speculations are it has this dramatic assumption that's better if you and I say what are you and I going to be like in 20 years from now we don't even question it it's worse we just don't know how how slow or how fast the Decay is going to be but what if uh in the 25th Century people were talking about what humans in the early 21st century changed the fundamentally altered the future of human existence it was that humans figured out how to attach themselves to the speed the compounded rate of improvement that we see in our technology today so when you and I go with that second thought experiment we say what are you and I going to be like in 20 years we don't know but better unquestionably we believe that it's like the uh human Moore's Law affiliation I like to mean I like to meme things okay so um we've we've flirted around what it is that you're doing at the moment what are the headlines of what you've managed to achieve with your protocol so far I think the most compelling data is that I've using a state-of-the-art DNA methylation algorithm I have slowed my speed of Aging by the equivalent of 31 years my body now accumulates aging damage at the speed uh better than the average 10 year old and better than 88 percent of 18 year olds which means you know people at 10 years old are accumulating aging damage uh most don't realize that just as you get older you accumulate damage faster and it compounds and so my body's aging extremely slowly number two is I have 50 biomarkers the the things you would normally expect like cholesterol and triglycerides and things like that that are in the perfect optimal clinical outcome range I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age several Fitness tests where I test out as an elite 18 year old my body runs three degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal so no matter how you're looking at it whether it's my DNA methylation my fitness test my biomarkers my phenotypic markers whatever you're looking at the data says the same thing I'm in near perfect health pretty impressive pretty useful what is the projection presuming that you don't get into a car accident at some point what is the projection of your age your potential longevity yeah I mean people are a familiar frame reference would be what is the return of investment on this company and investors typically want like a 3X return or a 5x return or a 10x return will be out of the park think about that on lifespan if you can be around for the future of these Technologies coming your return on Life Investment could be 5x 10x 100x 1000x no one knows you could have a massive return in life and so the goal is be around it's worth doing the hard work right now to dramatically slow your speed of Aging what I've been trying to do with blueprint is when people talk about aging it's always this oh it's coming and oh it's exciting and wouldn't it be amazing if but no one had in my estimation said okay let's take all of the current scientific evidence let's put it in one person and let's see where we're at let's just give it a go let's see what the data says is the Fountain of Youth here right now if not how close how far where are we at and that's what I've been trying to do is say actually you know what it's it's pretty compelling what's available right now are you familiar with the concept of longevity escape velocity I am yeah so it sounds like you're kind of referring to that basically that the longer that you stick about the better the technology will be down the line which means that it will be able to extend your life longer and if there is a point at which the technology is able to bypass or uh the technology gets stronger than the rate at which we age you go okay my point is to stick about until that and that would be longevity escape velocity so I've had a ton of people on the show talking about longevity health and fitness and it seems that the conception the overarching principles aren't necessarily as universal especially when we add your approach into the mix what is the overarching principles that guide your approach for longevity [Music] yeah this is this has been a fun learning for me you can have four anti-aging scientists read the same five papers and then ask them to design an anti-aging protocol and you'll get five different anti-aging protocols there's just no agreement and there's not a way of settling the agreement and that's why I've endeavored to do this is I do it and then I share my data and yes there's limitations of it's n of one but it's better than n of zero okay given your markers given what you have learned what does the framework look like or what does the or what are the principles and the longest levers that you're looking at it's a process of measuring extensively I think I'm potentially the most measured human in all of history that is taking that data and it's trying to assess the very best evidence now that's that's an art because again you can have scientists look at the same data and they come with come up with different conclusions so it's looking at the evidence then it's implement the protocol uh in a subject like myself where I'm trying to be perfect in protocol adherence and then it's repeating data evidence protocol and do it again and again and again why are you vegan what's the thinking behind that uh by choice so it blueprint does not express opinions about anything it doesn't say whether veganism is good or bad or meat is good or bad it just is a process to say measurement evidence protocol and so I basically just asked my team is it possible for us to do a vegan protocol and be within the targets of the optimal clinical outcome ranges so the only exception is I take collagen peptides I'm trying to find a vegan source for that but yeah it's a preference not a necessity why do you prefer it uh because I would like to I hope that a scale a scaling law of technology that the more intelligent a system gets the more compassion that it has so this is an ethical veganism substrate a little Foundation that you're playing on top of reducing animal suffering I'm gonna guess it it's a it's a contemplation that the the problem that Humanity the only problem we have to solve as a species really is goal alignment we have these god-like Powers now we just simply need to figure out not simply we need to figure out how to cooperate and that means not just humans but humans and planet Earth and humans and AI like trillions and trillions and trillions of Agents of intelligence whether they're cells or whether they're Bots or whether it's plants or whatever it is we have this gigantic tapestry of computational goal alignment and it's a problem of a size and scale that just baffles the mind it so far exceeds anything we're content we're we're capable of and so when I think about the real game we're playing here at the largest possible scale of this mathematical model uh I hope that we Trend towards compassion because while we are alpha on this planet right now that's not I don't think we're Alpha anymore and I think that we are going to want the attribute of compassion to exist in this broad tapestry of intelligence would it potentially be easier simpler more efficient more effective for you to add animal products in have you ever considered trying to do that is there a point in the future at which you'll say let's do a six-month test where fish comes in or seafood comes in or or red meat comes in yeah I've shared everything I've shared the entire blueprint protocol so people can do it and they can share their data I personally don't want to do it right I understand in order to get the nutrients that you need without touching on animal products I imagine that that's a very large amount of vegetables that you need to eat I mean I don't know large I mean the my if you just look at the evidence and you say my I'm trying to goal align 35 trillion cells that make up me and the objective function is to reduce entropy so I'm I'm running this this massive computational model with 35 trillion cells on goal alignment with myself and I'm basically saying can everything inside of me try to go after one goal Which is less entropy and we're looking at all the evidence we're looking at all the different data but to me it's a really interesting quandary because we think about goal alignment and cooperation of can we get AI to align with eight billion humans can we get a hundred and you know 60 some odd nation states to cooperate on planet Earth like we're always thinking about these big cooperation problems but the the cooperation problem the goal alignment problem Almost Never is asked of each one of us we get to always Point our finger at everyone else and blame everyone else and ask everyone else to align their goals with ours we're not being asked to do the tough work to say hey you know what inside of each of one of us is an absolute War it's a balkanized war with our very with our various selves and so to me the Mastery of self is the ultimate challenge for anyone to go after it's harder than going to the moon it's harder than going to Mars and that's I think where if we're going to succeed as a species that's the hard work we need to do we do not have complete control over ourselves though right we don't even know what ourselves are we are self-deceptive we often have contradictory and destructive behaviors and desires that we want to engage in and how do we know we don't we don't have a metric that says I want it I want a relationship but I also want to be good at business but I also want status but I also want to have fun with my friends but I also want to sleep well and I also want to be healthy you know for us to be able to pull all of these together yeah is challenging and I want to get on to self-destructive behaviors but before we even get to that how can someone work out what it is that they want to want in life so if uh this is fun talking to you um this is the exact problem I've been trying to solve and this is why I say the mind is dead so when I approach this problem with myself the difficulty I had was I myself was out of control I would overeat I would engage in all kinds of self-destructive behaviors I was 50 pounds heavier than my healthy weight I was marching myself into the grave and I couldn't stop myself no matter what and so that was like the like the personal problem I was trying to solve which then Maps like some other Ambitions I had but when I look at myself and I'm trying to distill those kinds of questions like who am I what do I want what are my goals there's thousands of Brian's chiming in like right now it's you know it's 10 30 a.m Brian speaking 5 30 PM is going to have a different brains on every different answer Saturday Brian's gonna have a different answer with friends Brian's gonna have different answers like there's thousands of different ways I'm going to answer it based upon my biochemical State I trust none of them and that's why you know I don't know how to tackle this complexity so what I said is like what is the most basic and simplest possible thing I could do that would actually wrestle my chaos into some order and you know like try to eliminate the unruliness of of my existence and that's what blueprint has done and that's why I follow the algorithm it's it's freed me from this Insanity which used to be me but you had to make a value judgment at some point right you had to say that the goal that I'm going for isn't to maximize status it's not even within the world of health and fitness to maximize muscle mass to compete in a bodybuilding show to maximize my endurance or my HRV or my VO2 max or whatever it might be there was a point at which you had to go through a process of stepping back and saying what do I want to want yeah that was the first step that had to be the first step yeah yeah foreign step number one don't die stay alive well that's the problem with alignment right you know that's the concern that everybody has as soon as you get a self-aware recurrent Improvement yeah AGI Okay so um Daniel Kahneman often talks about this idea of um uh two uh levers that you can use to encourage Behavior change one of them being uh try harder and one of them be sort of stop doing the things that are stopping you from doing the thing more so press on the accelerator further or release the break and I think what I like about your approach is that you your first priority as far as I can see is stopping pressing the brake before starting to press the accelerator stop doing the self-destructive Behavior what is your framework for identifying self-destructive behaviors and overcoming them it's a a complicated question and I've tried to simplify the thinking of it anything that increases my speed of Aging I label as self-destructive anything that slows my speed of Aging is rejuvenative so try to just make it very clean left or right and what about overcoming it how do you do that you've got the many Brians coming in yeah and I you know I've heard you talk previously about the fact that it's not about what 5 p.m Brian wants to do he's a dick it's it's what the plan says that he's supposed to do and then when 5 PM Brian comes around I have a friend who uses uh the term I'm just working for the boss so when it's his time to do something to get up and start writing a book or whatever it is that he needs to do I'm just working for the boss I don't make the decision the boss already made the decision previously I'm working for the boss the boss also happens to be you but it's not as simple as I have made a prescribed set of rules that I'm supposed to follow therefore at 5 PM when my felt sense changes oh I remember the protocol there's motivation and and there's there's a felt sense of what we're supposed to do so like take me through or what are the lessons that people can take away for improving that adherence for not having to rely on motivation as much for improving their discipline if that's even what you refer to it as yep yeah I uh I'm currently putting together a team of Behavioral change experts and I wanted to do this as a public experiment I'm going to invite whoever wants to participate in a 30-day challenge to try to get their self aided destruction scores to zero and so the easy ones we target would be eating too much food eating junk food skipping exercise not meeting your bedtime like just some really basic ones not get into the nuanced ones where you know is gaming good or bad under what circumstances you know like let's leave those complicated ones out just can you stop the blatant self-aided destruction behaviors and then to have five behavioral change experts represent you know present their school of thought like here's our protocol here's how you go about doing it CBT versus whatever and then have people choose the school of thought that they resonate with and then just have the teams compete for who can lower their self you know their sad scores the most so I'm in no way an expert in this area on behavioral change and I just thought it'd be a cool thing to try to popularize sad that um we've normalized sad in societies so much so that you can do it out in the open with friends and everyone's cool with it no one calls it out and it's all expected and if you don't participate in sad you get called out and ostracized from the group you're the one who's meant to feel like you don't belong and so for me personally it was uh a food is a gateway for bad behavior for me and that was really where the dam was breaking and so doing this protocol with blueprint was a way to arrest the most violent destructive behaviors I had and then the other ones have just been baby steps on top once I got control there uh that kind of discipline has been naturally extending everywhere else in my life but uh this is I guess this is why I get excited about the future of being human is if this algorithm legitimately can arrest my worst uh proclivities that I'm helpless to to get to arrest you know uh cannot do other things for me too including can I get into my mind one day of stopping all the self-destructive harm I do on my uh to myself with my my own mind and so this just takes a remapping of what it means to be human but I've never been happier and more fulfilled and you know it's funny because people when they observe my behaviors their assumption is that I'm sad which is weird which is ironic meanwhile you know they're drowning in their own sad behaviors and I'm the one that should be ostracized so it's a really funny self-defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they're doing what were the steps that you found most effective at stopping yourself from binge eating it was uh separating myself into multiple I'm not one person I am many and then it was identifying the specific most egregious version of myself which was evening Brian he showed up at 7 pm every night so I identified who he was I gave him a name I listed out his persuasion tactics like you know it's been a long day you deserve it you did really well at this you you worked out really hard you probably already burned the calories off tomorrow we start all the persuasion tactics and then when he shows up I I treat him as other hybrid hi even Brian I see you're here I see what you're trying to do with your persuasion techniques and you're not like you have been unauthorized to make decisions on how to you know you can't eat food like period you have no authorization and so it's like this this game of going about doing it and in my mind when I do that I can see evening Brian throw a tantrum you know that the fact that his authority has been revoked and how offended he is and how outraged he is and how he's just if he could be violent he would be uh but it's just it's phenomena that's psychologically so interesting to watch How I myself play Within Myself on these in these dialogues and at first it was really uh is contentious you know like you feel that tension and you're so close to breaking for him overpowering but it was really uh personalizing these aspects of myself and making them other and then I could work on them one at a time that's interesting so othering yourself creating a distance between you and the things that you tell yourself understanding that that it is you but it's it's a malignant version of you it's like an evil Alter Ego or some conjoined twin that keeps on coming in and talking to you about things that you kind of they're born out of your desires but they're not your highest desires they're not your truest desires they're not the things that tomorrow you would have wanted yourself to have done yes you're creating that distance I like that I like anything that involves having a mindfulness Gap you know a break in between stimulus and response I think more of that is very very good what is it some insane number of our decisions we've made the day before some insane number of the thoughts that we have today we had yesterday some insane number of I mean here's a really really great Insight from a friend Alex homozy and he says that um when people talk about changing their diet to improve the things that they eat they often get lost in the weeds around conceptualizing what the diet consists of but he said you probably eat maybe eighty percent of your calories from the same 10 meals there are 10 meals that you have that probably consist of like almost the entire Lion's Share of your diet like I'm not a chef I I have maybe five good recipes in my back pocket okay so all that you actually need to do is just change those things right you're actually focusing on those small number of decisions and it's kind of the same with this so yeah I mean I I think that for me I've realized the the most self-destructive behaviors that I have too is probably evening eating that I've had this long day and I mean I live in Austin Texas now and everybody goes for barbecue everybody goes for um whatever and they oh well there's dessert and then there's home and then there's snacks and then so on and you're like it's 10 p.m and I stopped eating half an hour ago yeah um so that's why I'm particularly interested in in your uh in your approach for it yeah I mean it's it's hard to be human and I think if if we are um if we can all be honest just for a minute and to to confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self-destruction all the time as a starting point and not try to spin up uh these pretty little stories about that's what it means to live or this is what brings me happiness their lies but we've done such a phenomenal job of making them pretty stories and protecting them because we don't want to face this uncomfortable reality but we are a species addicted to self-destructive behavior and I don't think this is the form of intelligence that we want to be walking in as we engineer AI I think we know again we have this tendency to point our finger at everything in the world except for ourselves as the thing that needs to change to play devil's advocate for the other side I think that much of the behavior that people do could be classed as self-destructive especially using the parameters that you set out earlier on but people can't know what they don't know and for somebody who doesn't understand that the behavior that there that doesn't understand that binge eating isn't actually good for them because it helps them to relax for those people we're getting into a philosophical sort of linguistic lexical question here but I don't know if it is quite the same it's the Pandora's box or Plato's Cave thing here right like if you don't know that the thing that you're doing is destructive is it fair to say that those people have the same sort of obligation to be aware of their self-destructive Behavior you can't know what you don't know hmm talking about training that was one of the other levers binge eating skipping training sessions what has the data said to you about the optimal setup for a training protocol for yourself what does it consist of how often do you do it what time of the day Etc yeah I work out an hour a day at uh cardi it's basically I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body and we've worked back through the science of what is cardio zones to be in and we also look at this in terms of measurements of my VO2 max of my flexibility of my tendon ligament strength of my we measure my muscle with ultrasound we do whole whole body fat on MRI so we're we're using these quantitative endpoints we probably do a hundred different markers that quantifies my exercise protocol and they're all markers that we can map to Optimal clinical outcome ranges so again the the goal I'm a problem I'm working on is my 35 trillion cells having less entropy so I'm not trying to engage in a marathon I'm not trying to right achieve some athletic uh record and so really is that one goal and so um yeah so it's just a bunch of Weights uh cardio flexibility strength training I noticed looking at your routine that you've got a good bit of knees over toes and Patrick's stuff in there and that's been borne out in the data as something which is very effective yeah as we measure my my tendons and ligaments uh specifically they've all dramatically improved and this is a good bit of backwards sled drag some of the atg knees over toes lungy stuff what were you most surprised by uh what are the exercises or the contributing routines that you do while you're like [ __ ] I wouldn't have thought that that would have been in there I wouldn't have thought that the data would have been happy with me doing this hmm I suppose overall I'm surprised by how robust I feel I've actually never felt this robust in my entire life even when I was 18 years old and a an athlete in high school and I don't have a single ache and pain in my body I've never been more flexible I've never had better cardiovascular capacity so I guess I'm just surprised that at the chronological age of 45 I would be peaking in my life of ability and I don't feel like I'm entirely I mean I think there's more I could gain but I suppose I didn't I previously viewed this as trying to stop an inevitable downward Trend but it's actually dramatically improved and maintained are you adding in walks each day on top of this you know an hour a day for me if I was to think about it doesn't seem like much to optimize you know the absolute optimal amount I would have presumed it would have been two and a half hours and it would have included all manner of high intensity interval training in a shitload of zone two and then there would have been a 45 minutes of Yin Yoga stretching with breakfast you know what I mean I would have thought it would have been more but why isn't it more why aren't you training more uh there's a it's a It's Tricky puzzle we're trying to solve I mean so we I'm on a caloric restriction diet so it's 2 000 calories and I take 100 pills a day and so the scientific question we're trying to solve is if in the year 2023 someone like myself wants to be an Explorer like Shackleton or Magellan or Lewis and Clark and I want to say all right I want to go to the absolute limits of what's possible in the form of slowing my speed of Aging then we're trying to optimize for uh caloric input uh cardiovascular activity heart rate variability you know when you do too much exercise there's a U-shaped curve where you start inflicting harm on the system and so you're trying to tune all of these things with caloric restriction it has a side effect of lowering testosterone so I need to supplement testosterone to get myself in the normal levels and so we're just playing this really tricky playoff trade-off space all across the board and we're always making Minor Adjustments here and there trying to maximize for this very narrow goal of slowing entropy in my body interesting yeah because if your RDA of of cows is what two six two five uh sorry what would be your recommended oh yeah yeah yeah maintenance for you would be two five or two six yeah two six five five yep right okay and you're a 1980 or something like that basically two thousand uh if you were to train more because that's not I mean you're quite light right you're about 160 pounds I think yes yeah so you are quite light um but still like maintenance at 2-6 given that you train for an hour a day and it's not like you're not doing other stuff throughout the day too exactly isn't isn't a massive amount so I understand now if you were to really start to push that if you go from UH 60 Minutes to 90 minutes to two hours your maintenance cows then get up into the sort of 3000 range and then you go okay do we want to be in a 1 000 calorie deficit every day well no okay therefore we need to bump calories up yeah what because G flux Theory which you may or may not be familiar with something we've spoken about in the show before what's the problem with increasing your caloric output and then increasing the amount of food you could eat this means that you can eat more food throughout the day this would mean maybe you're more satiated there will be a sweet spot how come you guys haven't decided to do that yeah exactly right uh really well said so we are um the combination we're doing is not common so it's caloric restriction it's intense exercise it's vegan which a lot of people haven't really combined robustly and we're trying to do that all to maximize speed of Aging and so we we have not covered all the variations uh for example like I don't know what my markers would be like with meat I don't know what my markers would be like with 90 more minutes of cardiovascular exercise and more calories so we haven't covered all the iterations and the reason why I've been trying to uh share all my data is to say here's the process we're going through to trial the thing you can do this yourself and you can do different iterations yourself so add meat add more exercise do this or that and then share your data too but let's do that let's try to accelerate the speed in which we can structurally advance the field even if it's n of one all right it's again better than n of zero uh yeah but but um the evidence of my that my teens looked at uh they their current hypothesis is what we're doing does optimize and I guess there's some interesting data where uh using DNA methylation patterns looking at this the Newton Pace algorithm over this longitudinal study of nearly 2 000 people who have been measuring their speed of Aging over uh several years time I rank number one as the most reduced speed of Aging out of the entire group and so it's interesting uh I hope others take that spot from me that's the goal hey what if somebody someone might come in and and do that would you consider switching protocols if somebody did do that absolutely I mean that's the whole goal right I mean I want someone to beat me uh for that same purpose like build the field and and share with everyone what you're doing and so that's why I share Freedom with every everyone what I'm doing is I want them to do it and then apply their own uh betterment and everyone improves and so crowdsourcing longevity research yeah and yeah it's just like it's uh I mean the intensity of competition which this has triggered has been incredibly inspiring like I mean people it's a big deal and so I I'm in private conversation with a ton of people about how they can beat me and I I sincerely hope they do what would your testosterone be at without the supplementation have you got any idea because you're walking around at five percent body fat heavy caloric restriction Etc yeah I don't know uh we we hover around 800. we hover around normal uh but that's with um uh I think it's nine units a day of testosterone uh is that true it's 2mg patch I think each one converts into like nine something like that I forget that's a dermal patch of testosterone I've never heard of yeah that being a delivery mechanism for testosterone before is that common uh it works yeah so I mean it keeps my levels steady it's a dermal patch yeah [ __ ] yeah yeah I mean it's much cooler than having to you know pin I am every three days or whatever two and a half times a week or something throw the patch on go about your day peel a patch off put the second one and go about your day that's pretty cool yeah yeah very interesting so you mentioned there that we both mentioned that you're running a um quite low body fat percentage why is that the optimal position for somebody to be in you would have thought well ancestrally the average body fat for somebody that was moving around a lot would have probably been significantly higher uh how is it or what's your thinking behind the fact that in the fives range which is like ridiculously lean um why do you think that that seems to be optimal as opposed to having high level of body fat yeah I mean in questions like this I would always defer to my team you know I can I can Echo what I've heard them say but I mean I I learned this as a pilot I trained I got certified to fly in several airplanes that got typed but I had a rule for myself that I always flew with someone else who was a professional because when I was in the cockpit even though I knew what I was doing I was never as fluid and as competent as them uh when they that's all they did every day all day is thinking about that versus me jumping in and out and so uh and then also just knowing that if you have five longevity experts doing this doing this they're all going to disagree but um yeah we've just been following the evidence of you know caloric restriction has some meaningful evidence and like we're looking at these made these lifespan of Health span studies and we try to follow it and so I don't know if uh five percent body fat is a target of more of where the body has settled out at it's a byproduct of the fact that you're doing this caloric restriction and that is why your particular body ends up setting out somebody else would be at three and a half someone else would be at seven and a half on the exact same protocol okay interesting one of the things that I haven't heard you talk about is heat and cold exposure this is the current most popular um Bro Science approach for a longevity routine are you using ice baths are you using Sonar exposure do you consider it a hormesis stressor have you tested with it we uh we kind of don't do anything that's popular right now and we we've looked pretty carefully at a cold and hot exposure we've looked at Hyperbaric and it's not to say that these things don't have benefits it's that they don't have benefit in the ways where we have objectives and so I mean there's an unlimited number of things I can do in a given day that would potentially be useful to me but we have an extremely specific goal of slowing my speed of Aging and when you have that narrow of a goal it just creates a really clean workspace to say does this thing have inclusion or does it not and so no we don't do any colder or heat exposure that's interesting I'm starting to kind of get a conception about this this singular ordinating principle slow down the speed of Aging that means that there are other things that other people who have slightly different ordinating principles might need to add in but let's say that it was your goal to optimize uh dopamine throughout the day okay well you maybe you would look at adding in cold exposure maybe you would even look at adding in cold exposure multiple times throughout the day and maybe you would do some research to look at whatever the equivalent of the Circadian rhythm for dopamine is and well maybe we can bring it up on flat points and maybe we can boost it on other points and maybe we'll be taking a bunch of supplements and that would be the ordinating principle if we want to maximize dopamine throughout the day it's interesting that um slowing the speed of Aging and you would have done it had it been something that you think would have contributed to it hasn't folded heat and cold exposure in you said we're not doing the things that other people are doing but you're not doing them because other people you're not not doing them because other people do them you're not doing them because presumably the data doesn't suggest that it's something that should be worthwhile yep again very well said it's strange that it's not looking at the data the data isn't screaming at you get in a [ __ ] cold tub or like going a sauna like it's strange that that's not happened I think yeah yeah it's hard I I really um we we get asked about I get asked about cold exposure I think more than anything and um my objective is not to rain on anyone's parade it's not to discourage anyone who's trying to do good for themselves is not to try to be a know-it-all I've just really not wanted to engage in the conversation you know it's not part of my protocol fine whatever you know like I don't need to go out and trumpet it and I don't want if other people are excited about it that's wonderful but really this is trying to move the entire field forward and uh you know I think there's a certain disposition that helps people feel encouraged and so maybe we'll find the evidence and maybe it'll be uh something we do in the future like I never know like I every time I've expressed an opinion I've come back to think I'm never expected an opinion again except you just never know where it's going to go but I will say that you know with with what we're doing now with sleep and diet and exercise maybe it solves my dopamine for me I don't know I mean I don't currently have a dopamine problem I think you know like my mood is never been more stable in my entire life I've never felt more more motivated in my entire life so it's just different ways of saying it but I think what you said really was a nice construction where if you don't have the clarification of endpoint then it really gets in this fuzzy space of where you don't really know where to put that piece of the puzzle and then people can misinterpret how to think about it I remember I heard stories about both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and during his time at Amazon Bezos had one ordinating principle that every single decision went through and it was does this improve customer experience does this improve customer experience every single decision and musk's apparently may still be was does this get us closer to Mars every single thing every single question does this get us close to Mars do I go to the party this evening or do I go to bed do I decide to hire this person or do I satisfy this person do I decide to start this new company or invest here or buy Twitter or sell Twitter or tweet or do whatever does this gets us closer to Mars there's maybe an argument to be made some of the tweets that he's put out probably don't get as closer to Mars but I I think taught me the value of a single ordinating principle Ryan holiday's book from last year discipline is Destiny the biggest takeaway that I took from that conversation was that without a goal without an ordinating principle there can be no discipline before that because the discipline is in service of the outcome what are you being disciplined for like what is discipline and given the fact that we are these multi-factorial multivariate creatures with all conflicting goals and self-deception and 5 p.m Brian and 7pm Brian and tired Brian and hungry Brian if you don't have a very very clear goal it's almost impossible to be disciplined in the service of it and okay in your opinion then is it more difficult to live a life with more than one goal or the more goals you have does life become exponentially more difficult working back on that yeah after doing this for a while this is why I arrive at the mind is dead so so if it's so let's just walk through this the process like if I say an algorithm now takes care of me better than I can myself with the goal of minimizing aging so it's all it's a singular objective that simplifies all the decisions around it but what I'm really trying to demonstrate is this is a system of goal alignment so it doesn't matter what you choose of your goal when you can take 35 trillion agents and goal align them around a singular thing you've built a tapestry of goal alignment so blueprint can scale to anything blueprint can scale to climate change right the the Earth is the body you take millions of measurements you look at the evidence of what is a proper biosphere for the coral reef and the acidity in the oceans and all the above you apply a protocol and you repeat data evidence protocol the same is true for everything else and what I'm really trying to say is if we are thinking about the future of existence the problem we have to solve is goal alignment and that we have to do that so we don't destroy a biosphere we have to do that so we don't have dystopic outcomes with AI we have to do that so we don't annihilate each other because we're of our propensity towards violence it is the singular goal we have as a species and so I'm trying to prove uh this this system with myself the one thing I have control over I would maybe be tempted when you say the mind is dead it's nice because it's like playing off that God is dead thing but you must have throughout your day thoughts that you enjoy creative insights that reflect on your life introspection about memories dreams and hopes for the future so there is still a very real role for the mind it seems it's a little bit more like decision making is dead in that regard um but yeah I think you've spoken a couple of times about why your emotions are at regulating emotions uh you even said earlier on that spirituality or like being spiritual is a component of this fold in your protocol for emotional health and and spiritual health as well how does that play a role how have you learned to optimize that what are your Frameworks and and uh perspectives on it yeah you're right that the sitting beneath the abstract layer of the mind is dead there's all this Nuance of like even when autopilot flies the airplane I'm still Landing the airplane and taxi in the airplane so my mind is still engaged in some of these activities but the bulk of the autopilot you know like it's nice to know I've got that when I'm flying and so but what it is really trying to convey is the only tool we've ever had in existence to manage ourselves is our mind and when I look at myself my objective is to destroy my Nemesis before my Nemesis destroys me and my mind is my most powerful nemesis and so as we as we start breaking out the complexities the nuances of what role do our minds have in society going forward and if we are trying to look at this large computational problem of goal alignment what is that role and to me it's a legitimate question but the very first thing that I can say confidently about myself is who inflicts the most self-destruction upon Me of anything in existence it's myself if we say as we as a species who inflicts more pain upon us than anything else it's ourselves if I say probabilistically who's a bigger worry to me AI or humans humans like I'm trying to get to the root of where is the threat uh coming from and what might we do to try to offset that now what what spawns after that in terms of what kind of spiritual practices we have and how do we find meaning those are all really cool and fun questions we can play with on you know once we have the free space to do so but we're not in a safe safe place right now as a species at all like we're under extreme threat and so what I'm really trying to do is address the the things that are most pressing that threaten our very existence and survival so we can get to this play Space what about when you face negative unwanted emotions throughout the day they're going to arise they're the sort of things that you have significantly less control over than what goes in your mouth than how you train and then the time that you go to sleep then the temperature of your cooled and heated mattress um you know these are unknown unknowns in some regards so how have you learned to deal with emotional regulation uh in an effective way and what strategies can people take away from that I mean I I was chronically depressed for a decade likely the result of being an entrepreneur and working my talent off building Braintree Van Well having three little babies in a bad relationship you know like all the stuff that you go through hard hard times in life and so if I look at that time and I look at the Avalanche of negativity that buried me every second of every day it absolutely pinned me to the ground and I was suffocating I couldn't breathe if I look at now relatively speaking the amount of negativity in my mind there's like zero uh so getting these basic things right in my mind in my in my life like sleep and diet eliminating these self-destruct behaviors I almost rarely ever now have a genuinely um what would I call it a genuinely self-destructive thought now I may contemplate and say boy I wish I wouldn't have said that thing or I wish I would have said this thing differently or I wasn't as nice as I wanted to be or I feel a little ashamed about this kind of thing like sure those are all little mind you know we all do that with our self-introspection to help us improve but I would say generally speaking I've eliminated the most hurtful and self-destructive things that plagued me to the point of suicide and uh I just never thought that would be possible Andrew hubman the first things that he said on a podcast episode I did with him was you do not control the mind with the mind you control it with the body and it seems to me like your mind is Downstream from what you've been doing with your body but I have a pet Obsession for evolutionary psychology and it seems to me that almost every animal humans included aren't meant to be satisfied with the inbuilt base programming um outcome the the the the state that humans are supposed to be in is minor dissatisfaction does the um life is an uh life is suffering from the Buddha right the word for suffering is Duca d-u-k-k-h-a I think and then some Scholars contest that that word doesn't mean suffering it means unsatisfactoriness life is unsatisfactoriness you know the holiday that you plan to go on the stake that you intended to eat there is always something the sand between your toes it could have been a tiny little bit more salted it could have been a little bit less well done it it seems pleasantly surprising to me that you as somebody that is trying to optimize the body as much as possible Downstream from that has found a very large amount of peace in the mind as well given what my assumptions would have been about what uh unperturbed human mentality would have been yeah I mean thinking about your frame if if I were to try to oversimplify our existence you know see like we become conscious and we become aware that were in some sort of of uh unpleasantness hunger or you know need for status or ambition like whatever but we just spend our entire existence trying to address our unpleasantness that's it that's all we're doing and then we make up all these stories and games and the like the Buddha was saying like hey like this is yeah this is this is existence and the only way to deal with existence is to eliminate this permanently but to me that's really what we're we're just walking around trying to deal with our conscious selves and what I like about where we're at as a species is yes that's been the case but it may not be the case if we have the the ability in the form of computational intelligence and we now can physically predictably engineer atoms molecules and organisms we're in Uncharted Territory and this is why I think the zero the future is like a zeroth principle future we have no ability whatsoever to model out what's going to happen and that's never been true with human society you know so um sure that may be the state now we're running from constant displeasure but uh this is why I thought of this computational goal alignment system because it leads us to the future we can't model out or predict and it may be the most extraordinary thing humans have ever experienced you know the optionality is so vast that basically any prediction goes out of the window and the unknown and knowns start to get exponential yeah Naval has a quote which you'll be familiar with desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want given that you sold a company for 800 million dollars which has permitted you aside from the conversation about you need the physical resources monetary time Etc to be able to focus on what it is that you're doing Naval also has a um really great Insight which is it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them and what you're talking about previously is um the unsatisfactoriness the inherent unsatisfactoriness or displeasure that people feel on a daily basis is something that you have largely been able to dispense with if you hadn't had such success monetarily you know achieving the status that you needed do you think that open loop would be intruding still on your life even if let's say somehow you you managed to have the uh someone else was paying for all of these things to be done for you right so like you know you materially were able to make it happen um would that open loop do you think I haven't achieved the ridiculous success within business would that still perturb your thoughts is that a loop that needed closing yeah so this is this is a question which my brain just registered as I just I just uh flagged a few alerts in my brain when you ask me this question because it said to me um hey this person's asking you your opinion you're on uh basically there's no data involved there's no reference set there's no evidence just your free from free form freestyle opinion terrifying dangerous because I can verify any [ __ ] answer my brain comes up with it's like but you know what it's all [ __ ] so like whatever words come out of my mouth are absolutely fabricated have zero basis in reality and are a disservice to everyone including myself interesting so do you let's say that you want to play around with ideas you're at dinner or at the first supper and somebody asks you a question that you don't have an answer for how do you venture into the realm of things that you don't know if you're never prepared to venture into the realm of things that you don't know this is uh this is one of the thought experiments I do at my dinners my the blueprint brunches so I say okay let's let's do a thought experiment where the social Gathering we're playfully having conversation I turned to someone and I say hey I'm interested in hydration I want to be better hydrated how much water should I drink and so volunteer will be like you know I'll play along with you and typically they'll say well I think it's like you know roughly eight ounces or eight cups of water a day I have this flask it's pink I take it with me everywhere I go I'm always in the bathroom it's kind of annoying my friend Susie she has one too her mom thinks it's really weird she carries it with her her mom's kind of not doing very well she's sick she has this other friend who flew in from La the weekend they're having dinner and they go on thing right and then they finally come back and they're like okay so yeah and so I say okay great so your answer is like eight eight cups of water a day yes and then I do the thought experiment again and I say how much water should I drink and if they're paying attention so I'm sorry I'm sorry at the end of the previous discussion I say how do you know eight cups of water a day and they say well I read it somewhere like on some website or you know something like well have you seen the data do you know no but I have seen it somewhere okay so do the thought experiment again how do you you know how much water should I drink and if they're paying attention the person says I don't know if not they'll do the eight cups of water but it really is meant to demonstrate the majority of our social interactions serve the function of social cohesion not truth seeking and as a result we pass on these this lore which is not true but we can't distinguish between the social cohesion dance and what we're passing on is knowledge and so it's this clear distinction to try to to discern and so if you're really in a truth-seeking discussion great like have that but if you're in a social soothing situation don't mistake the two because it really compromises everyone's shared ability to understand reality and make good decisions you muddy the sense making landscape with people doing performative conversation masquerading as truth seeking foreign that's really really interesting um in your opinion then should nobody speak on things that they don't have data for and what is the role of playing with ideas that are more difficult to be analytical with uh I suppose it it depends on who the conversations with and what the objectives are um you know if you're just there to have fun if you're actually trying to solve a problem uh you know these blueprint branches I put I bring people together and no one knows each other so it's it's a set of accomplished people entrepreneurs scientists engineers astronauts Educators so everyone's kind of doing the dance of filling each other out they're trying to figure out ranking and priority and Status they're trying to like do all the social stuff and so people are playing those different games yeah I just say that my personal participation varies according to the group I'm in and what we're trying to achieve interesting um one of the other things that you've looked at and that you're optimizing is a youthfulness on the outside not just on the inside the way that you look what is your perspective on sunlight exposure onto the skin also onto the face not just from a youthful perspective but also from a health and Physiology perspective I don't know I'll tell you that I typically avoid the sun because my skin is almost always healing from some kind of laser you can see here on the screen see how these dots all over my neck what's that from laser so my I had we just we just bought another laser and my face is still healing from this uh so my I'm my skin is sensitive to the sun because it's in these healing conditions so generally speaking I'm always aware of the UV index when I go outside I do wear sunscreen and we measure my skin Health uh robustly we use multi-spectral Imaging where it looks at UV and red and Browns and pore size we use autofluorescence we use mer scores we do biopsies so we're looking quantitatively at the skin from every angle so that we can say with some degree of confidence how my skin protocol is doing with all the treatments we're doing uh but yeah uh generally speaking as I understand it UV exposure has negative effects on the skin of a certain type with a certain duration with a certain you know exposure array so just generally I don't get a lot of sun exposure are you aware of the brand of sunscreen that you've ended up zeroing in on presumably it's very well researched with a bunch of chemicals that aren't going to make you die sooner yeah we use CeraVe am which is a 35 UVA UVB and then also elta MD which is also UVA eamb okay are they regularly available or is this some Vietnamese Pharmacy website yeah yeah regularly oh cool okay that's good um yeah yeah it's again I think that it's very interesting to see what what's showing up in the data uh you know a ton of my friends very very big into earthing into spending time outside in nature rejuvenative practices and a big chunk of that involves sunlight exposure yeah a a non-insignificant cohort of them are ones that have massive problems with putting sunscreen on their body on their skin because of what's going to happen dermily is it going to get absorbed and cause me to full of estrogens um I think that stress testing a lot of these assumptions as you are doing is very interesting I think that it's helping to um see where the rubber meets the road yeah I mean to your point is it is funny every time I say anything about anything I get these predictable responses but what about cold exposure heat exposure sun exposure you know uh oh wow I've hit this basic [ __ ] questions was I you know did I get uh my bare skin exposed to the grass exposure did I like everyone has their frame of you know or have I practiced some Eastern you know meditative blank everyone comes to me with their thing of like but what about and I I don't know what to say like we haven't tested every permeation that's ever existed we've run we've looked at the data we look at the evidence we do the thing and we report back but that's it uh but but it is so predictable and it's so funny that I put something out and I tried like provide something of useful Insight but then people you know their question to smother it into like it's not viable to them at all because all these are the variables compounded which I understand I mean but it is funny that sometimes it feels like it's one step forward and four steps back when people parse these things through all their filters yeah you should have a page on your website of uh like fsrs frequently stated rebuttals and just what about cold exposure I uh it it does not seem that we have any added evidence to say that we're going to introduce it what about heat exposure it does not seem that we have any of it what about sunlight uh that would be maybe time saving one of the things to consider you mentioned that you're 45 you mentioned that you'd spent you know a decade of your life very aggressively building a company during that time you were aging it significantly probably quicker than your biological age was does that mean uh from an internal body clock perspective that up until somebody really starts to take this stuff seriously or or happens upon it just by chance because they end up having a really perfect lifestyle naturally you're always going to be running ahead of your of your current age therefore is there a part of you that regrets the fact that you didn't do this 20 years ago yeah uh entirely yeah I uh my parents didn't know any better because they were following social norms but I ate sugar cereal for breakfast sodas I was in the sun constantly with no sunscreen I mean I shot guns with no ear protection you know I mean I just did everything um I could have done that would hurt my health I did and aggressively like I you know I was like I'm full of life and um I certainly had a lot of fun I'm sure also it's very hard to correct damage that has happened so with my children for example my 17 year old who is with me right now he's almost entirely on blueprint and you know he to his credit he fully realizes and he's so grateful for starting this at his age and so I mean it's exciting for him you know at this age to be on this protocol and while I mean his friends at school they he just got accepted to a prestigious Institution for college he went there before listen yeah I mean he did a wonderful job I mean he worked as Talent off in school and um he went to this orientation and he sent me this video and here are like some of the most talented humans on planet Earth and they're Downing sugar junk food drinking not sleeping and I was like oh my God this is just I'm so sad this is the future of humans and like we've normalized these behaviors so much and they're sitting within this edifice of intellectual aspiration doing these things and I thought what a disconnect between uh what we're trying to birth intellectually and what they're doing physically and I I'm glad that he had the wherewithal to be like you know Dad I'm glad I'm not doing these things I know how badly uh poor sleep affects my cognition I know how badly junk food you know affects my my mood so but I don't know it's been on my mind ever since I haven't been able to stop thinking about it there are trade-offs though you know there will be a time where your son needs to pull an all-nighter before some sort of project gets put in like we inevitably given the fact that not he right now doesn't just have live as long as possible or reduce the speed of Aging sorry as his single ordinating principle it's also don't flunk University you know it's also probably um make my time at University sufficiently enjoyable that I have memories that I am fond of when I look back it's maybe get a get a girlfriend it's maybe play a sport it's maybe do a bunch of other things so again we've mentioned this earlier on the single ordinating principle is great because it creates a very easy filter through which every decision needs to be made there will end up being compromises that will need to be made during everybody's life right even during yours at some point you will have an opportunity which is so good that you think this is for the greater good of blueprint but it is going to mean that for this next week of traveling and blah blah or I am actually going to speed up my aging so and so forth the difference is there are there is much lower hanging fruit that some of his peers could pick up on like maybe put the full fat Dr Pepper down like maybe Domino's isn't the best way to fuel yourself the night before an exam etc etc um but I think that that displays quite nicely the level of or lack of wisdom around what actually makes people operate effectively I mean if we I I understand practically what you're saying right the trade-off space you've represented um what I would think would be worthwhile for us to think about is you just pulled out of your pocket all of the favorite things we humans like to pull out of our pockets like create enduring Memories We want this experience you know like we're justifying the trade-off space and in the in doing that what we're saying is um we always have the override switch to do this at all times and what I want to pose is and this is how we currently think about ourselves as a species when we walk into this future we bring those assumptions that remain hidden to our own awareness and so I like working with this concept of of gen zero of this idea that we like a group of humans walking into the future that is willing to divorce themselves from all human norms and customs because if you look at this and you say okay how powerful is artificial intelligence how fast is it going to move and what is our relationship in power going to be in relation to this thing we don't know and so I I understand what you're saying on the trade-offs but it comes with a question from this position of luxury that we can always choose under any circumstance and make those trade-offs and I want to say I'm open-minded to the future of our existence may be more wild and weird and different than we can ever contemplate and if you again if you just look at the mathematical if you look at the curves of improvement I think we're closer to that situation than we realize and this is what I'm really trying to get across with blueprint is it is the mind really dead like are we genuinely in a situation where algorithms better care for us and we're no longer pulling the funny business of like oh well here's a cool story I'm going to deviate from now with it because of it um and you know this just generates like violent responses inside of people because it steps on their sacredness but I think this is a relevant conversation for us to have I think it's I think that you're right I understand the point that you mean I think what what it does presuppose is that axiomatically everybody else's single ordinating principle would also be slow down aging as much as possible there are people out there for whom they would say I have taken it from first principles that say that they have all of the Insight that you do and more and they say my life wants to be something which is not that my goal is to see as many different countries on the planet as possible I don't care about how long I live or maybe I do care but it's third thing down the list yeah as soon as you fold that in as soon as you fold in any other goal this is when the trade-offs come and I understand that as soon as you say there is uh there are trade-offs that need to be made you open the door to the executive function of you making a decision not being outsourced to the blueprint or the boss that made the choice I understand that that's a very dangerous game to play and I I from your perspective and with your goals at the moment I think it makes complete sense but that does presuppose that everybody else's goal also should be to live as long as soon as you open the door to that not being the case I think that the trade-offs has to come in yeah well so it's not even I'm not even presupposing that everyone needs to have my goal I'm saying that if you look at the the drivers of our existence where artificial intelligence is a force that needs to be reconciled with that our biosphere and planet earth needs to be sustainable and that needs to be negotiated with and that we humans need to not kill each other that needs to be negotiated with so what I'm saying is we currently do this in society like we say you can't kill someone that's against the rules you can't run someone over with your car that's against the rules like we do this in many ways today we're already doing this massive goal alignment thing in society is just going to get much more computational in nature because right now we see that when humans do whatever they want whenever they want it has negative effects on the biosphere that make it unsustainable so one of those things has to give either the biosphere has to give and become sustainable by itself or humans have to be negotiated with on what their behaviors are allowed to do and this is what I'm saying you look at the large-scale goal alignment problem the presumption that we all have this we can do whatever we want whenever we want however we want may not be true it's a different set of of considerations we're walking into and so I bring up this is really not to predict the future but as a thought experiment to say if we are serious about creating a future that we're going to enjoy I would much rather have an honest conversation about the potential things we need to be thinking about and the changes in our life because everything that you know Society is so delicately balanced where we don't ask anything of the individual it's always blaming someone else and expecting someone else to change we're never pointing itself it's only the presumption is always I can do whatever I want because it's me but again I think we need to call into question all these primary assumptions Brian Johnson ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you do where should they go uh Instagram and Twitter I love it man dude I find you very very interesting very very enjoy this uh very much enjoyed this kind of a conversation one that ranges from principles to philosophy to enacting uh strategies as well is very very cool I appreciate the stuff that you do yeah I really enjoyed the conversation thank you for having me on what's Happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace