Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of First Principles. We're today here with
Brian Johnson, the man who is trying to live forever. We're
going to talk a lot about a bunch of different things in this conversation, both the science
of what he's actually doing with Blueprint, this protocol that he's put together, but
then also his philosophy towards life and basically where he thinks humanity is
headed and why he's doing this in the first place. So Brian, thank you so much for being
on. Yeah, happy to be here. Awesome. Well, I think that maybe that's an easy place
to start. Well, not easy, but it's a fun place to start is about kind
of like the broader thing that led you here. I mean, I think it's interesting that,
you know, you have this principle or you have this idea of zeroth principles thinking,
and yet this is the first principles podcast. So maybe let's try to just, you know, address the
I mean, I guess there were a few beats. After selling Braintree
of MO, this had been a goal my entire life, try to
do something meaningful for the future of humanity. And
that's such a challenging question. If you read history and
you learn about various people in various places, sometimes discoveries
or behaviors were accidental, and sometimes they
were thought through carefully. And if you try to actually pose a question, like right now, like if you
were trying to influence the future of the human race, what do you do? And
so I did two things to try to sort that out in my mind. One
is I gathered all of my smartest friends, and
I did 12 dinners around the country. And I would pose the
thought experiment to them and say, now let's imagine we're in 2050. What
did we do in 2016 that allowed this world to
be remarkable? Then I listened intently to everyone's ideas. Basically, you
could imagine whatever the zeitgeist was in 2016, I
wrote down all those ideas and I drew a box around the ideas and
then I challenged myself that I couldn't do anything
inside that box because inside that box was
basically a collection of first principle thinking It
was the things that people were identifying were the next step
in the iteration of various technologies. And so I challenged myself to zero. But
then when I started looking outside the box, I realized that it
was a very challenging thing to do. And
so I confronted this, when my mind
was searching for in the unknown space, I
was struggling to think coherently. Like, how do
you construct thoughts in zero space? And
so one night I went to bed and feeling deeply
the limitations of my own intelligence, I thought, I need to find
a framework that allows me to punch through. And that night I
had a dream about zero-wealth principle thinking. And
the idea just dropped in my mind. I jumped up and
I wrote it all down. I thought, I can't forget this. But yeah, it
was one of the most exciting moments
of my entire life. where I felt like it gave
me like a new appendage where I could maybe feel
more, see more, intuit more. And so, yeah,
so I've been working on this concept of zero principle thinking and how, um,
I think going forward, we may need to
transition from first to maybe a higher ratio
Totally. And the basic idea being that, you know, first principles is great about
working in a system, right? Like you can get down to the nitty gritty,
like the bare, like fundamentals of the, of the system you're
in. But zeroth principle thinking is that throw the system away.
Like what is the new system we need to be doing? Like, uh,
totally disregard all that first principle stuff and where should we be
Exactly. Like examples, germ theory. So
in 1870, you're trying to identify what it
is that is causing people to die. especially around maybe
births and surgeries and other things, then this
idea that there are microscopic objects that
the eyes can't see would be insane to contemplate in
the 1870s. And most people rejected the idea that there were these invisible things
called germs. And so that's an example, you know, special theory
of relativity is also, you can't take Newtonian physics
and first principle think your way into the next iteration
of physics. Because yeah, these things, they don't just change
the graph, you know, they change the x-y axes. Like, they
Totally. Have you ever heard of the book After Virtue by Alastair
MacIntyre? No. Oh, actually, I have heard of it. I haven't read it, though. It's
a really good book. I actually found it back when I was like a high school debater because I was like looking
at it for arguments or something. But there's a really good thought experiment in
it that's super zeroth principally. So, Uh, there
are two guys that are sitting around a campfire. It's like prehistoric times. Um,
one guy turns to the other and says like, you know, have you ever heard of this thing
called like the wheel? Have you ever thought of this? And the guy's like, no, what are
you talking about? And so the first guy goes, well, it's like, it's like the
circle and like how it can like rule things. And like,
it has this thing, uh, but it hasn't been invented yet. And
the other guy turns up, he's like, I think you just invented it. Like the
process of describing this new thing is the act of invention. And
so his argument is, if you can describe something, if you actually have words
for it, then you've already done the act of invention. So it's like sort
of what you're trying to do is do that, like invent, truly invent
in a way that is, you know, goes beyond the words that we have today. I think it's pretty
cool. Exactly. Totally. Um, Heck yeah. So I'm
curious. So that was the thought experiment. That was the
theoretical framework that you were operating within. Were there a lot
of ideas that be kind of like came to you within zeroth
principle thinking and you had to sort of whittle it down to don't die? Or was it did
Yeah, once 0th principle thinking became a framework I
could play with, then I was set off on the task of how
could you find a 0th principle endeavor.
And then, that was basically don't die. So,
death is inevitable. And we've talked about life
being everlasting in religious settings, but never in
IRL. And so we've kind of jumped from, yeah, we
made that leap. And so don't die in IRL is a different thought
process. And then I needed to develop the philosophical structure
that supports what that means. And specifically, what
does that mean when you're on the eve of creating super
intelligence? And so I was trying to stitch together how to understand
reality in this moment from the
vantage point of the wisdom of the 25th century. That's
like a thought experiment where you're in the 15th
century and you're trying to deduce reality
in some coherent fashion with the wisdom of the 21st
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the, it is definitely like one
of those thoughts of like, you know, that is beyond the current, the
thing that is definitely not the current thing or it wasn't at the time of, you
know, we did have, we sort of had like measured self and
we had sort of longevity stuff. And there were, there were some, you
know, like the, whatever the Peter Atiyah's of the world, the Tim Ferriss of the world, we had those kinds
of folks that were, that had been talking about longevity for sure, but
definitely not with the frame of don't die. and definitely not to
the kind of same extent of the experimentation that you've been doing. So,
I mean, how did you see yourself as sort of, you know, either working
with and like on top of some of the other research that people have been doing versus
Yeah, it's definitely a yes and situation. I'm
a yes and kind of person. with friends and trolls and
everyone else. I'll quickly, I've been doing these dinners at my house. Actually, Christian,
it'd be great to have you attend one. But I'll, maybe I'll just quickly walk
you through like what I do to arrive at this don't die thing. So
there's five turns in the conversation. It takes us about two
and a half hours. And so I opened with the thought experiment of if
you had access to an algorithm, actually, let me just do it with you. Sure. Yeah, let's
go for it. Christian, if you had access to an algorithm that could give you the
best physical, mental and spiritual health of
your life, Because in exchange for that, you
did what the algorithm said. You went to bed when it said, you
ate what it said, you exercised in the ways that it suggested. Would
Without knowing more, I don't know. I'd be
afraid of what else I would give up. Are there experiences that
I don't get to have anymore? Am I deciding to forego
pleasure to have this thing? If all
else equal, 100% obviously yes. But I would wonder about that.
So you basically want to think with first principles and
Kind of, yeah. That's my brand, man. No,
So it's like a no, but a
cautious maybe. Yeah, it's a cautious maybe no. Okay. Now
let's imagine that the 25th century is
observing our conversation, and they see me pose this
question to you, and they're simply observing, what
are the characteristics of intelligence and morals and
ethics and norms and assumptions of a homo sapien that
I actually think about this all the time, and I would love to get your answer to it, too, of what
will future generations basically judge us for? I think
there's so many things. They're going to judge us for eating
animals that were birthed naturally, for sure, 100%. Because
they're going to have the ability to create matter however they
want, basically. They're going to judge us for I
don't know, treating homes as assets, like there's a there's a big long list of these
things. But I think there are plenty of things are going to judge us for and I'm sure I'm
sure there are things that we haven't discovered that related to health
And so when they observe your answer, where they they hear you say,
No, because I want to learn more. And like, I
see a trade off space of sensorial pleasure. And
you know, and like you, you so how would they assess your
intelligence? What are you revealing with
Maybe this is just too easy because I think I know where you're headed with it, is that my brain
is in control, that I'm thinking through it, and that
I myself have this limited understanding of what will be best for my
I think it is true. So yeah, the first turn of the thought experiment
is meant to provoke our beliefs that remain invisible
to us. So we all blurt out an answer, and
it's kind of our knee-jerk reaction to a somewhat provocative question,
and it kind of shows our cards. The second turn, it shows
a mirror to us, and we become much more self-reflective, just like you've
done. So now you've seen this from both angles. Okay, so what could
possibly happen in the future that might change
our responses and how the 21st century would view
our evolution. So I'm going to make three statements right now. So
if we contemplate what's happening with AI, I
think there's one specific thing that is
important. One is I think that
AI is going to know more than
any one of us individually and all of us collectively, and
it will discover better than any one
of us individually and all of us collectively. So And
whether someone says that's impossible, AI is in
a nascent state, I'm talking about from the perspective of
the 25th century. So give it some time, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, whatever.
Over some duration of time, AI is going to be better at both
knowledge acquisition and knowledge management
and discovery. And so that's going to
create a situation where we are transitioning as a species from
one of knowing to not knowing. and
our entire existence is based upon knowing many
things. And so when that happens, what do
we do as a species? AI is probably going
to be better at being you than you are you. It's gonna be
better at being you than you are. And so we know this, we say yes to
an algorithm that helps us navigate in our car. We say yes to an algorithm to
entertain us on our phones. We say yes to an algorithm, so on and so forth. Soon
we'll have algorithms that help us with our reasoning processes. We
do this in text-based form now, right? But you can see it naturally that
algorithms just do things better over time. And
we say yes in all these incremental ways. And eventually we'll
just say like, legit, this algorithm is better.
Like I'm actually more productive. I'm happier. I'm more stable. You
can, you can imagine a world where it just generally gets better. Now I'm
going to avoid dystopic outcomes for the moment, but generally speaking,
that's what we see is like algorithms generally improve our lives when we say yes. So
if we take those two principles of where we're going, then the
most important question in this part of the galaxy surfaces.
What do we do as the most intelligent species we know
in this part of the galaxy? What do we do when we're giving birth to
superintelligence? When we don't, or we're not the
knowing party anymore, we're not the discovery party anymore. When
it's not clear what our control is going to be on how this thing evolves, what
do we do? So I have an answer. I have a proposal, but I'd
I think that the fact that it is more intelligent than us means
that what we think about it might not really matter that much. Like, I
think that because it is so much better at reasoning, any answer
that I come up with for what it should do is going to be very, I
actually think we might actually be seeing this in the way that we're training AI, like
right now in 2024, like we're hitting, you're seeing a
little bit of an asymptote. And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that humans
are rating the answers, the AI, and we're just like saying what we
would have said. So it's, it's sort of a paradox. It's like, you know,
AGI or whatever is this infinitely smarter thing, like better
than us. And so it'd be the equivalence of me like going up to my like pet rabbit
and saying like, what do you think is the best way to care for you pet rabbit? It
It has no idea. So this is when I went through this thought process, I
arrived that we really can only say one
thing with confidence. And that is Don't Die. Don't
Die is the most played game by everybody on
planet Earth every second of every day. We play it more than religion,
we play it more than capitalism, we play it more than anything. Like right
now, if something were to threaten your life or my life, we would stop the
podcast and we would take care of not dying. As a species, it
is the only thing we agree upon. And
it's not that we even disagree, like, don't die in 20 years. People will
smoke and people will take risks. So it's not even
that we agree on don't die in 20 years. We agree we don't want to
die right now. And so if we have to really figure out
what alignment means, that's the singular thing we
align on as a species. And so don't die individually, don't
kill each other, don't kill the planet, and
align AI with don't die. And so then, whatever
happens after Don't Die, like what games we play, how we evolve, that's
all a secondary consideration to securing Don't Die
as the zeroth order operating system of
this planet. And so that's what my entire endeavor was about, is
I wanted to demonstrate me as the embodiment of
Don't Die. Like, how do you actually be that? And
so it's a system where you measure every single way
my body dies every day. You try to find therapies to
slow down that speed of aging and then compensate for aging damage. And
then you measure to see how you did and you repeat again and again
and again. trying to drive the you know death
to zero not you can't stop entropy so you can just slow it down a certain
degree and then repair and then it's the same protocol that would apply to
earth you take the earth you measure everything you know billions of
data points a second you look at the science of how do you maintain a coral
reef that's healthy you know like a biosphere that's healthy you implement the
protocol again and again and again And so you do that for all
verticals in society. And so as a species, I guess my proposal is,
we currently live in this luxurious world where we can say many things about
existence, and we're quickly narrowing that aperture to
be able to only say one thing, which is lock
in on don't die. And then we can, of course, we can join hands and play
games and Bob don't die. But we can't do that until we
first secure don't die as the singular operating system
I love that. I think that is really interesting, too, because and
I wanted to ask you this question of like, what do you see your role as in the system? Like
you just said, it's sort of the embodiment of don't die. I
also hear though, there's a lot of like, you're like the chief philosopher of
don't die. And that you've sort of done the thought experiments that lead you to
conclude that we shouldn't die. Like, there's like a lot of I think
therefore I am sort of parallels of like, just shed all this other stuff
that we can't be certain about what can we be certain about not dying? Like,
let's let's be certain about our existence first. Yes. So there's
philosopher, there's embodiment. What are the
other roles that you play within Don't Die, and which of them do you
I mean, there's five levels of ambition that I would
categorize. It's start a company, start a country, start
Because in any other generation of time, you
really all in the past couple thousand years, you can only aspire to
one through three. You could never aspire to four or five. It just was out
of technical reach. And so now like just in the past few years, a
reasonable person could aspire to
four and five. And that's insane. Like it levels up ambition of
the species to a never before contemplated goal. And
so yes, I think that is, it's not just my goal. I think it's our
Got it. So if there's this shared goal as a species, which is don't die, and
you're trying to bring it about, obviously, like that's, you know, you've
had the original idea, you think it's powerful, you've seen its impact on your life,
you want to bring it to as many people as possible. I mean, it does, I
mean, it feels a little bit religious, though, doesn't it? I mean, in the
same sense that religion is a set of shared ideals that people get behind that
change their lives, that that make them do rituals that,
uh, you know, have them believe in things that are larger than themselves, especially with
the whole kind of like, um, I wouldn't call it ascetic, but I would call it
like you're sort of surrendering self-control, like your own self-control to
a certain extent. It is, it is fairly religious in that sense. I mean, as
I know that, um, you know, there was a, there was a period of your life
where you were more religious and then sort of, you weren't like, do you
see that parallel or do you, do you feel that parallel and how you're kind
Religion is used in a pejorative term, right? So it's like, if
you're going to pull out the R word, you're basically going to level an insult. It's
not like someone starts a company and you admire the
ambition, you admire the galvanization, you admire the idea. You
talk about a religion and it's like, you know, all of a sudden everyone's apprehensive
and they want to cast shame. But religions are, you
know, like the most durable form of human organization.
ever created. And so it's a really weird cultural thing to
just jump on the bandwagon and say, you know, religion's bad. And
so, you know, the people, of course, use the pejorative word like cult. Yeah,
I guess what I'm saying is I want to call to our attention, to
our zeitgeist, that we are presuming we're better than
religion, that we ourselves are You are
post-religion, but everyone is religious. Everyone
follows rituals. Everyone follows shared community practices. It's
a really silly debate. And so like, I just embrace it. Like
if people want to call Don't Die a cult, like, yes, we are. And
our evil design is to get you to go to bed on time and eat well.
Like we are pernicious and like we're coming after But like, there's
no better way to deal with it than just say yes and. But yeah, I mean, if
you're ambitious, then you should never deride
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strata.io slash firstprinciples. Let's get back to the show. If
Blueprint or Don't Die is sort of like religion, and
you are, you know, its greatest follower, but also sort of its like, you
know, message bearer. Do you think a lot about,
you know, to bring it back to sort of first principles, do you think about like the
building blocks of getting a meme into the world?
Like, what are those? And you have so many different tactics that you've
used on social media from, you know, posting,
like, semi-nude photos to, like, picking fights to,
you know, like, being inspirational. Like, all the whole gamut. Like,
have you thought a lot about bringing a meme into the world and how you do that from
Yeah, it's kind of like a... I do play with old mediums. I play with
seriousness and troll and, you know, and
fights because it's like an instrument where You
want to play as many notes as you can. You want your range to
be, you want a big dynamic range. And if you're serious
or sincere is your primary currency, you could only play so many songs. As
I'm always looking for the broadest dynamic range just for the
music creation in all the different factors. So yeah, I mean right now I'm
trying to formalize and create action behind
Don't Die. So I've done it with help, right? That translates to
basic things we know about. But if you take it to an adjacency like
school lunch. So for example, when you smoke two cigarettes, it
shortens your life by 30 minutes. So let's just say you can actually quantify
certain behaviors and what they have for a cost of life. So
let's say we're trying to quantify the cost of
the school lunch we give in America to kids. So
let's say it's a piece of pizza, it's chocolate milk,
and it's canned vegetables. And let's just say together we
assign a die score of 7 minutes. So
we're feeding our kids die. Now that's helpful
because if you tell somebody about die
individually, they're going to put up all these blocks like, but I
prefer a life of stimulation. I want my alcohol and
my benders with my friends. Like they're going to defend all their vices. They're going to defend
all their behaviors. They're going to tell me that life, that death is beautiful because
it replenishes the earth and death is wonderful because it gives life to me. Like they're going to
have all these elegant arguments defending death and their own vices.
If you frame it like, hey, we're feeding kids die. You
can't defend that. Nobody wants kids to eat
dye. And so that's a good example of, okay, if you want to eliminate
dye from school lunch, what do you do? And that
is the same process I went through, right? You have to quantify death. You have to figure out
what the science is of not dye. Then you have to go through the protocol again
and again. So we get zero don't dye for kids. And if you
get to a positive side of your extending life, even better.
So you take that format and you then say, okay, now it is don't dye coral
reef. what is don't die, international relations, what
is don't die, biosecurity, I take any domain in
society, how do you quantify death in all its
forms? And you basically say, alright, as a species, this is our
game. Like before, it was like how to make the most amount of money
or how do you the most, you know, social media followers, like we're gonna play a
brand new game and see who can rack up the biggest don't die score. Very
I love that. Okay, so this is a perfect time to dive in more deeply into
what the don't die kind of program is, how you think about it,
and the therapies you chose and how you chose them and all that sort of stuff. I
mean, I think just to start it at the true like, ground floor
And how do you think about those things from the first principles, like super,
super basic level in a conversation last week at this group I
was with this gentleman's response was, I'm okay to die.
Like, I, you know, I'm fine. Like, I'm just going to go on to my next version." And
it's like, my response to him is like, you can say that because you're not dead, right?
It's like, can we just be honest? Every time your mind chirps with
any kind of understanding about reality, you're only given that privilege because you're
not dead. And so to realize, and this, it takes people time to
go through this loop. They don't understand that
don't die is what gives them breath. And so that is a
basic level. Like once you take that as a starting point, then
you can walk into the other pillars of the Don't Die
Oh, no, it's okay. So basically, I would love for us
to take like a kind of like a big step back and say like, what is death
Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. So what we did that was unique is
we said, you know, when the heart stops
pumping, how would you, how would you go
about doing this? So like, if you're in health and wellness, and you're with a group of
friends and the topic comes up, you may hear questions like, you
know, I'm doing one nostril breathing, you
know, to activate my, you know, my, my
parasympathetic nervous system where people will be like, I've got a cold plunge practice
or like I do yoga or I do Pilates, like everyone's got
their thing, right? And so if you hang out in health or wellness, you have
a near infinite number of things that people
are going to do. Eastern medicine and spiritual practices and
like community with it, different dimensions via psychedelics,
like everyone's got a gem. But what we did is we said, okay, so there's an infinite search
space. How do you find the power laws? Like you have to basically say,
like, we can actually only do like 20 things and we
can only do those 20 things really well. So what we did as a team, I hired 30 medical professionals.
We combed through all the scientific literature on health span and
lifespan. And then we found the effect size of what actually
worked the best. And then we ranked the biostatistical data
to say, what do we actually believe? And then we rank ordered those. We
said, all right, we have the power laws. Let's start with number one. And
so number one was too risky. It was a gene therapy that
basically you can't turn off. So we said, OK, too risky. We
can't answer number one. What's number two? And then we went down the list. And
so we've gone down, I think we're up to like 200 something now,
but we've implemented all the power laws. And then we
recorded all of this and we shared all my data publicly. And
as far as we know, I have the best biomarkers
of anyone in the world. Now, this is not to say
people don't have better biomarkers than me. They maybe do.
We just don't know about it. So of people who are
measured across the areas of cardiovascular
ability and inflammation and total bone marrow density and
speed of aging, et cetera, this whole long list of stuff, I
have the best biomarkers in the whole world. And so it demonstrates it
actually works. Like we took me as a 43 year old who
had beat himself up his entire life, like bad sleep,
chronically depressed, terrible diet. And we took me from
a terrible place to like among the best
in the world in three years time. And so I wanted to show like basically
the four minute mile for longevity. Like so people
would be like, I didn't think that was possible. And now I'm
Someone's done it. There's a guy who's done it. So it's possible. Is
there literally an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, which is like that,
like 300, 500 rows of all this, this research. That's so crazy. I love that. And
is very, very hard. Because yeah, most as you would expect, most
people are trained in a specific discipline in
a certain religion. Like, you know, it is a religion is
once you get in that world, it's almost impossible to block to
change their frame. And so it's really a bunch of
misfits who like they, they're either in a system or outside of
it, and they just feel uncomfortable. They don't formally enter systems. And
so Yeah, they're like, like refugees almost like and we
just kind of pick we just kind of pick them up and they find a home with us
where we we play fast and we're robust. But
Do you have your body divided among people like
is are there like so I work at a satellite company like we have different
responsible engineers for different parts of the satellite, like the solar arrays or
the, you know, the flight computer or something. So do you have the equivalent of like
responsible engineers for like, do you have like an ear guy and
Yeah, we do it on an organ by organ basis because redefined if
I can say I'm chronologically 46, but that's not
really helpful. I need to talk about my heart age.
And when I speak about my heart's age, I need to speak about it from its anatomical,
uh, a function, anatomical and then functional capacity.
So I need to measure my heart age by like, you know, 10, 15 measurements. And
then you've got a true estimate on biological age. And
that's true for every organ. And so I'm, I'm chronologically 46. But
Yeah, that's so interesting. I love that. So that like, that is such a rethink of what
age is obviously, like, mostly I, I'm 33, because I've
been alive, I was born 33 years ago, and a couple months or whatever. But
so for can we dig into that a little bit? Like, I don't know if there are specific examples
of organs that you would like, highlight is interesting in
the way that you're calibrating the age of it. But is it like a functional thing?
Or is it like, are there are there like, I'm
sure there's a lot of function, but then also deeper data of like,
I'm curious if a couple examples. Cardiovascular ability through
VO2max. So it's how well your body can utilize oxygen.
That is a well, that data set is solid. Like
you, it's an age graph. So at age 18, you peak
and then you decline from there. That doesn't mean that you're
highest at age 18. You can get higher over time as you build, but generally speaking, age
18 is when you peak. And so yeah, my cardiovascular ability, my VO2
max is 58.7, which is the top 1.5% of
18 year olds. And then if you look at my total bone
mineral density, It's important. I'm in the top 0.02% of
30 year olds, which is age minimum for that test. And if you look at my nighttime erections,
you know, it's like, it always makes people laugh, but it's a really important
marker for psychological, cardiovascular and
sexual health. I'm better than the average 18-year-old by
a significant margin. Because the younger you are, the more erections you
have, and then they start tapering down over time until you have none. And so yeah, if you take any
one of my few dozen markers that are big ones, there's
very clear age graphs on where something
should be at a certain age. And so we've tried to take every single one, kidney,
liver, heart, pancreas, thymus, brain, ears, eyes, everything,
Is there a particular one that you feel like more people should know about that don't? Like
thymus is one you've mentioned, I've heard you talk about before, I think that
most people don't know what that is. Are there other ones
that are, maybe is that one that you would highlight as more people should know
I mean, this is why I did the penis. Because like, you know, I was I
was talking about my heart. We had just done this. I think one
of the coolest things we did is we reduced my
thymus age by seven years. Thymus is like this gland right behind your
sternum. It's responsible for your immune system. It's really important.
Like you don't want to, you know, an aged thymus. And so through
this protocol, we reduced my thymus age by seven years. We published
it. We did three MRIs. We coded brand
new software. We put so much effort into it, and we shared
it publicly, and no one cared. So we
did that several times with these different organs. And so one day I was talking to my team. We're like, you
guys, we're doing this really cool process of we do rigorous biological
age measurement. We look at the science and the therapies. We measure again. It didn't
work. We did the scientific method. what if we did sexual health? And so
I posed the question to the team, what would it take for me to have the most quantified
penis in the world? What would you do? What measurements
do you do of penis function? And then I went and did all of them. I did all
the penis measurements. And then we said, okay, so now we have a baseline on
this. What are the therapies that have clinical evidence
as efficacious? And then we gave a score. We said, okay, so this kind
of all collapses into like, what are your nighttime
boners? And like, no one, no one knew what, you know, like, no one knew nighttime
boners were relevant. No one knew it was a marker of biological age. No one
knew, but it showed the process of measurement, intervention, you
know, protocol. So like, that was really helpful, because it really got the
point across that you can actually approach each function, each
biological organ of the body, and approach it with scientific
That's so so I think it's there's two examples that you talked about that I think are interesting
to kind of compare against each other. VO two max, most people hope
of like, I think I've heard about it, you know, that you see the athletes with
a mask and they're on the treadmill. And, you know, they're, it's like, you know, people
know that one. And I'm sure there's tons of data for it. nighttime erections,
I'm sure, I don't know, but I would assume that there's not a lot of data already.
And probably the comparison that you had to do to like, was, was probably harder.
Like, where did you actually, could you find other studies like,
like existing studies that you compare yourself to? Or was it curious to kind of
compare those? Cause it's like super, super extremely studied. Everybody
less studied i'm sure you guys had to really dig probably to go find stuff
but um you did you you ultimately did find studies one
study that had done nighttime erections and
then we found a company out of the uk adam help they had built a
a device that does erection measurements there's a little cube it
sits at the base of the penis and you put it on before you go to bed, you just
forget about it. You put it on, you think it's going to be annoying, it's actually just fine.
It seems distracting. Yeah, exactly. You're fine, just fine. And then it measures
the number of nighttime tumescence at the boner,
and so it measures the quality. So it's looking at engorgement of the penis, and it
happens during REM sleep. And so I had
so many of my friends, when I posted this, they
messaged me with great concern. They're like, I'm
getting no boners. I'm never erect. And
most of the time, their sleep quality was atrocious. So when your sleep
quality goes down, boners just evaporate. And
so that's why it's a good evidence. Like, if you are not convinced that
sleep is really important, just look at all the critical functions
that just go away immediately, including... So it's
a really good learning experience of people creating these intuitions that,
you know, going to bed on time really matters. And your
last meal of the day matters a lot because it determines how you sleep. And just
to draw this domino effect, it's like, okay, I can see how these pieces fit
together, that a person's vitality really is
in this chain reaction of events. So it helps people understand that you
go back into this primary thing of like, does it make sense to become a martyr for... You're
basically paying with double or triple time life points by doing
My memory or my creativity is most
robust in my dreams. I have more ideas in
my sleep than I do when I'm awake. The quality of my days are
That's when the other dimension is reaching out to you to tell you your principal ideas.
Yeah. I'm curious, can we talk a little bit about the PAC,
Pace of Aging Calculated Tests? I'm curious to hear about those.
So there's, I don't know if I'm saying it right, doon-doon-doon, doon-doon-doon,
that one. That's the main one, right, for DNA methylation, is that, that's
When we first started, so there's these new clocks they use, they look at DNA methylation
patterns, like chemical signatures in the body, and these
chemical signatures have information encoded that
are patterns about your age. And so they change with
age. And so when the clocks first came out a couple years ago, when I
first started Blueprint, we were like, hey, cool, clocks. But
the clocks are trained with, each clock
is trained for a certain objective. So the clocks are different.
So when you hear people complain, like, I did this clock and it said I was this age, and
this clock said it was that age, it's because the clocks are trained differently. So
it's not like the clocks are bad. It just means they're trained for different objectives. And
so what we did when we started, We said, okay, we're
just going to test all clocks. So we tested me with
six clocks, and then I think we waited six months
or eight months, and we tested me on eight clocks again, and I
had reversed my epigenetic age by 5.1 years. And
that was one of the first viral hits we had. We're just playing around.
We're just trying to figure out, what is the clock? And what do they say? And how do we compare them?
But we were not really thinking I'd reverse my
age by 5.1 years. We were like, hey, the clock shows something. But then over the
years, we've really focused on this true
diagnostic denuded pace. So it's based upon one
of the most robust longitudinal studies out
of New Zealand. I think it's one of the longest running ever. It's
a third-gen clock now, and initially we
would say it's a silver standard marker,
because blood, cholesterol, and triglycerides, those
things are gold standard in terms of predicting all-cause mortality.
But these, we'd say, are silver standard because they haven't yet crossed that
threshold of predictability for all-cause mortality. It's
getting very close now where they can predict this. So it's now getting
the respect of more and more people of like, okay, this was like an
emergent thing. We were skeptical of this. Now we're
taking it much more seriously because it's now predicting the phenotypic markers
much more accurately. So I started with over so if
you're if you score a one on the test if I'm 46 I
score one that means I'm aging at a normal rate
of a 46 year old. If I'm aging at 1.01 or
more and faster than normal and 0.99 or less I'm aging
slower then. And so we've worked my speed of aging down to
0.64, which is my most recent measurement. It's lower than 99 plus
percent of 20 year olds. So it's one of the lowest scores in
the world for men. And we're very proud
of this because we've worked so hard. It doesn't matter if we do it, but
like a rough summary of it is for every
12 months that pass, I age for seven months and I get free
So I know that there's a, I don't know very much about this. I know that at the end
of your DNA, there's like these things that are repeating maybe,
and we don't, I don't know what they do. Maybe somebody else does their, uh,
but they have something to do with aging. Have you, is that something that you measure as
Yeah, we measure it. We have measured it for years. It's something
we routinely do. We have been unsuccessful to change my
telomere length with almost everything. Like there have been small changes, but
nothing really important. But the telomeres, I think is the
number one performing. It was a combination of telomere. I think
if I remember right, it was a study of telomeres, plotho
and folstatin gene therapy. And so we haven't done telomere
telomerase gene therapy yet because it's
not yet safe like you can do it but once you do it you
can't turn it off and so there's only one person who's done it and
it's it's just a risk like you if you if something goes wrong like
cancer you can't turn it off and so i did do my first gene therapy
in october i did so in the world of gene therapies
you need a delivery vehicle to get the gene therapy in the body and
what most people use is called an AAV And
so that's the one that can't be turned off, and it has other complications with antibodies. I
used a plasmid, and so it's a friendly vehicle.
It delivers a protein inside the nucleus, and then
it just produces more of a protein. Like for example, what I did is full of statin. So
this gene therapy is producing higher levels of full of statin that
I would otherwise have in my body. And this has been typically
seen with bodybuilders where you've seen like the big cows or
dogs that are just very large and muscled out. Have you seen those? Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Yeah, they're terrifying. And so that's what folic acid
has been associated with. But we've been looking at it for its rejuvenation
effects across whole bodies. We've been doing looking at my muscle mass
and my bone mineral density and a whole bunch of markers. Like we're trying to see like what
whole body effect because As the most measured
person in history, we get this really interesting view of everything
that goes on when we do these therapies. And so the thing that the
gene therapy did, which was interesting, is it lowered my speed of aging to this 0.64. Before,
it was hovering at like a 0.69, 0.7. And this is the
only one we did that could be responsible for it. So
in that regard, it's efficacious. We've been very happy
So most of most of my listeners will know this is mostly a,
like a deep tech hardware-y kind of podcast where
we talk to a lot of folks that have built, you know, these devices or have
built, you know, new machines. You've actually done this. You,
you, you helped with Kernel, which is I think an FNIRS project. Is
that right? Do you mind telling us about like what that was and how
Yeah, so after selling Braintree Venmo, it was this question of
what to do. And so in that time duration I spoke to you about of trying to
figure out, I did two things to kind of just fill the time. One
is I started a venture fund. I invested $100 million into
deep tech. So I invested in synthetic biology, genomics, computational
therapeutics. For example, I was the first money behind Ginkgo Bioworks, which
is now the world leader in synthetic biology. And so I did that, it
was cool because I got to work in the trenches with scientists, entrepreneurs,
like how do you commercialize deep tech? And
then the second thing I did is I built Kernel. And so my contemplation
was We are currently
the intelligence building AI, and it may be
interesting if we built our intelligence alongside of
AI. Currently, integrating the brain and AI is
very hard. We have all these things in between us. We have fingers,
we have to type, and visual systems. I wanted to build
the world's first mass market brain interface that could make reading
the brain output easy to integrate with AI. And so we,
we started with the team and we had this question that we were going
to look at it from a first principles perspective. Like, how
can you figure out what is happening inside the brain? So we spent two years looking
at every possible way, electrical, magnetic, acoustic, and
electrical. And then we mapped out each path and
we said, okay, what can the technology do? What are
the challenges for commercialization? We spun up
systems internally, we acquired data, we pressure tested the various paths, but
it was such a cool thing. We were just this group of people
at the edge of physics and science trying to figure
out these new modalities. And so we ended up deciding on
building a time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy
system. And so it's basically, think of it like wearable fMRI.
You put a bike helmet on your head, and you've got
images of the brain in minutes. And it's low cost versus
being in a big claustrophobic system. We were successful. We built
an ASIC. That took like four years to build out. I personally
invested $64 million in the company. I
kept it alive through the financial crisis. I kept it alive through COVID. It
was just like this, like deep tech is hard enough,
but then to ride through multiple crises. So that was brutal. But
yes, the tech is built, it's working. We're now in clinical trial,
clinical studies for mild cognitive impairment and
depression. So I'm very proud that we actually built
something that had never been built before. It works. We just
showed gold standard equivalent with
fMRI. So we succeeded. Like we built a mass market
brain interface. So I'm very proud of it. It was a
really fun endeavor to do. And so I hope that we
succeed at these things and we can go off to much bigger things of getting these in
Yeah, those things that the more I've learned about the the near infrared
spectroscopy stuff is so cool. It's like somewhere between like brain
radar, where you're like kind of pinging these like infrared systems off, but then also
it's kind of like this little, um, well, I don't know what you call them, like the little the
little blood finger clip things. Exactly, right. It's the same idea.
It's the same idea. But it's just looking into your brain and seeing what's happening.
I think exactly right. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. I mean, any any
kind of final thoughts to people other than don't die? How
Yeah, I would say if anyone listening is interested in
building Don't Die With Me, I'm putting together a group of people.
And we're going to get together and we're going to talk about the various verticals, like bring
your idea, bring your specialty. And then we'll work through the
thought process of like, how do you actually quite so take an
abstract concept like international relations. How
do you think about nation-states working on Don't Die? What does that even mean? So
I try to break apart complicated topics into actionable things. And
yeah, I'm really trying to build it out, number one. And number two, yeah, I would
just encourage people that to really think about, like, we
really may be at, you know, on the eve of the
most spectacular existence in
this part of the galaxy. And I know our lives are full
and the day is demanding and there's all kinds of things that demand our
attention. But really, if we can get our
shit together as a species and realize the
preciousness of this moment, it may be spectacular, far
beyond our imagination. So I hope that we can band together and
do this. I think it'd just be an amazing journey to