← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Anti-Aging Protocol To REVERSE AGING & Live Over 120+ YEARS OLD | Bryan Johnson
01:58:49
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A
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A
to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today@shopify.com win today. I've got Brian Johnson back on the show. If you want to live forever, this episode is for you. Brian spends more money on his body every year than LeBron James and he's now sharing all of his secrets with all of us. We talked in detail about the protocol that he used to set the world record for the most rapid reduction in biological age ever recorded. If you don't know who Brian is, he's an obscenely successful entrepreneur that's had a really successful trajectory to Elon Musk. He built and sold an online payment processor, including Venmo, and then went on to found a company dedicated to creating a machine brain interface. He's a fascinating guy working on what are arguably the most important issues of our time, longevity and the brain. This episode really blew my hair back and I hope you guys enjoyed listening to it as much as I did recording it. If you do, please leave a review on the podcast. It's the best way to support us and help us reach more people. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory.
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B
The fountain of youth is a story as old as humanity and typically it's a group of people on a boat going to a jungle in some sacred temple and some elixir. And that's kind of been really what people believe more generally a magic pill is going to come that we take and it solves the problems. And what I wondered is is the ability to slow the rate of aging and then reversing aging that has occurred possible. Now it's just hiding in tens of thousands of scientific publications and a lot of really hard work. And so that's what my team and I have been doing for the past two years, is collecting all the research, doing all the protocols, and basically using evidence based medicine to explore this question, what is possible with today's science?
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A
So in just like yes or no format. Do you really believe where we're going that we will actually be able to meaningfully reverse aging? I'm not saying that we'll all be able to get to 18, but like, is this really a thing now?
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B
Yes.
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A
I love that you were thoughtful about that. I'm going to say something. I don't know if you're going to love this or hate this. So we've spent time together before, but it's been years since I've seen you. And I mean this in a really good way, but you look like a Lord of the Rings elf. And like, dude, there's something about the clarity in your skin, the vibrancy in your eyes. I don't know. So I'm really, really interested in slowing down, aging, reversing aging. I come at it the same way that you do. If when I lay my head down, I think I want to wake up tomorrow, then why would I not want this ride to end? We can get into some of the complexities of the question of ought we do that later, But I really do want to get deep into the protocol. So as I said to you when you first arrived, seeing you on camera does not do justice to what it's like to see you in person in terms of just the externally visible markers of health. Really do like, it does something to my brain to be like, oh, this person looks healthy. So the protocol. I've watched a lot of your videos on this. You've gone into tremendous depth about the blueprint, which I assume is the blueprint on how to live in a way that slows down aging and possibly at some point will reverse it. But what is the protocol? It is very complex. So I'd love to. Before we get into the minutia, what's the organizing principle to the blueprint?
- [04:11]
B
That if you can measure every organ of the body and let the organ speak about what it wants to be in an ideal state, reference gold standard scientific evidence, and then create a protocol and then have perfect adherence. You create a system where the body can maintain itself in an optimal state. Now this is in contrast to typically we approach things in life where we think our brain is the primary tool which solves all problems before us. Well, my brain, as most brains do, is a cause of a lot of self destructive behavior. We are prone to eat too much food or of the wrong kind of food or drink or other substances, or spend too much time consuming content, not prioritizing sleep. And so the solution for me was just to take my mind. It was very Counterintuitive. Remove my mind as a problem solving tool, empower my body by measurement through my entire body and then looking at the evidence and so letting my body solve its own problems of how to be in the ideal state is the protocol. And so I just simply follow the data. And so we look at all the things you would imagine like blood, stool, urine, saliva, mri, ultrasound, fitness test, DNA, methylation, microbiome, everything we can measure, we measure and we take all that data, we look at the evidence and we just do this again and again. And so my responsibility in this is to ensure perfect adherence to the protocol and we can see how these things work in an iterative basis.
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A
I heard you say that sleep and diet are probably the two most important things. Is that a true assessment given all the data you've looked at now?
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B
It's difficult to make too strong of statements about power laws in the entirety because most people reasonably look at this and they see that it's not doable for the average person.
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A
Yeah. Watching your protocol, I will say that like I've got the resources to pull it off. I've even got the discipline. But I was like, this is a lot, It's a lot, it's a lot. So especially the part about needles in the face. That's where I was like, oh God. So we'll get to that in a minute. But so okay. It's hard to break down the power law.
- [06:25]
B
Your point is correct. If you're going to get just a few things right. Sleep. I'd say stop self destructive behavior and get good sleep. Like you don't even have to eat vegetables, berries and nuts. Like that would be an advanced thing. Just stop doing things that hurt you. Because when you do things that cause self destructive behavior, it's so hard, that ruins your sleep which then ruins your willpower to do be able to do good things. It's just vicious cycle. So sleep well, stop bad behaviors and it gives you get you in a neutral position to feel like you can start doing some positive things in your life and gain some momentum. It's ironically, it's a lot of people, we all know this. If we go to the gym and work out, we feel good about ourselves and later in the day we want to reward ourselves. And sometimes we reward ourselves in a way that offsets what happened in the beginning of the good thing. So really the root of it is trying to get at this self destructive tendencies we have.
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A
Okay, so I'll make a hypothesis about what the self destructive behaviors are and why we do them. And tell me where I go wrong. So I look at everything through the lens of biology. So you're having a biological experience. I want that on my tombstone. Like, I really want people, if I die and you don't solve this problem fast enough, I really want people to understand that and to look at life through that lens so they figure out, okay, the, what you're calling self destructive behavior. There was a biological root to that. So if I were to sum up quickly, the biggest problem people make is that they all round it to they eat a lot of sugar and processed foods. And if they. That's like the biggest sin that everybody does in terms of self harm. And to undo that, they have to understand that the thing that's driving them to do that is that your brain was created over millions of years of evolution where food was really hard to come by. And if you came by something that was calorically dense, that you were going to go after it as hard as you could, remove the brakes as much as possible. Overeat, over, consume. And that food is. It's not a calorie is a calorie. Food is signaling molecules or food are signaling molecules, whichever. And so they're going to tell your body to do certain things. And the things you're prone to overeating because they were so rare, are typically things that make you put on fat and that are going to spike your glucose, which then causes a huge dump of insulin, which then has a whole host of problems. So it's like whenever, like if I had. You have 30 seconds, Tom, you have to like tell your younger self or you have to impact somebody. I'd be like, stop eating sugar, get a lot of sleep and believe that you can get better. Which we'll set that aside for now. But it's like, are we close? Like, if we really had to dumb this down or is it. No, no, no. Like there's just something else entirely that is the root of self harm.
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B
I like your articulation. It seems like you identified a version of yourself or someone else that you identify with. I did the same thing with me where I said I'm a whole bunch of different kinds of Brian's. I'm 6am Brian when I wake up and I'm excited about the day. I'm 7pm Brian. When I'm stressed out, I'm out of energy and I just want to relax and do nothing and maybe have some food I shouldn't be eating. There are different versions of ourselves, and in these different versions we behave different ways so in my case it was 7pm Brian, that was the disaster. He would overeat, eat the wrong kind of stuff, then I wouldn't be able to sleep and I felt awful the next day. And so it helped for me to think about this. We think of ourselves as the most intelligent species on this planet, yet we commit. We have behaviors that accelerate disease and aging and misery and cloud our minds and they dampen our conscious experience. Yet even though we do these things, we've normalized it to make it okay. Where we celebrate it, we encourage it. If it's a social norm that's challenged, we try to ostracize a person or make them feel like they're out of step. And if we can muster up the greatest sobriety possible about this, it's a little insane. We commit self destructive behavior.
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A
I agree. So do you feel. I feel like the battle line is very clear. It's you versus your evolutionary impulses. Is that how you read it or is there something else going on?
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B
I think you're certainly correct that there's probably a lot that has to do with where we've been as a species. A lot of social norms where it's okay to do the things you were talking about, eat a tremendous amount of sugar or to drink excessively or to stay up and not prioritize sleep or any number of things.
- [11:09]
A
What do you think about weed? That's like the most socially acceptable thing in like in the world right now. It's crazy. You want to talk about celebrating self destructive behavior. People talk about it like it's the coolest shit ever. And I won't say that I haven't done it, but I will say that the times I have done it, I wasn't like, I'm so fucking cool. I was like, this is a trade off and I am diminishing future potential for today. Pleasure. So when you think about, it's interesting. There's a nested idea inside your mind. I've watched enough of your content that I think I have a read on it. But before we get to the very complex, because people may not know for everybody watching right now that you also own a company called Kernel, which is trying to. I'm going to use words that you haven't used, but effectively read and write in the language of neurology. I'm not sure how you would phrase that, but to be able to see how we think so that we can also write in the brain, God, I'm really reaching now. But that feels like directionally where you're headed.
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B
It's well said.
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A
Nice. Okay, so this is really interesting. Okay, so going back one gigantic idea at a time here. So sticking with the blueprint, the protocol for change, we have these evolutionary images, impulses, they lead us to do really dumb things that has created a society where we now celebrate behavior that is very fraught in terms of being self destructive. Certainly from an aging perspective and also probably from just a mental health, how do you feel about yourself perspective. So taking the things you've already talked about. Okay, so there's multiple Brian's, there's multiple all of us. Jordan Peterson was the first person I heard talk about this, about. You have entire personalities around when you're hungry, hungry, when you're tired, when you're intoxicated. If you have addictive personality, like it becomes a whole set of behaviors. And I think that's really interesting. So you have all these Brians, you had one Brian, 7pm Brian that was causing a lot of self harm for all the other Brians. You are hyper logical. So despite having these human foibles, you were able to override that with some logic and go in and say, I'm going to remove that from the equation and I'm going to use data. And I'm going, how many organs are in the body by the way?
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B
78. Okay, it depends on how you classify
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A
them, but that's already fascinating. Okay, so you're the only person I've ever heard talk about. I'm going to read data from all 78 organs. I didn't think we had that many, so I was already a little startled. But I'm going to read the data from these 78 organs and that's going to tell me what behavior I, God, would you say can and can't do, ought to and ought not to do? Like what word do you use there?
- [13:56]
B
It's a beautiful question and it's at the heart of all of this. So I love how you framed out the collection of ideas. If we put this in even a broader basket. What I really think is interesting for all of us to ponder is we zoom out on planet Earth and we say, what is really going on? Let's just remove all the noise we can. Let's quiet the room as much as possible. What is really happening? And it could be the rise of computational intelligence. We call it AI. It's this new form of information and knowledge and creativity and all the things and we're giving birth to it. So there's this question, as this new form of intelligence emerges in the world, what does that mean for us? What does that mean for all things? And in contemplating this, it might be wise for us to ask what should we aspire to as a species? How do we get ourselves pointed in the right direction? And so blueprint is not, it may seem, about health and wellness and diet and food. It's really not. It's my best guess at the ideal way for all of us to prepare ourselves to walk into this future. And that starts with, I guess what I call goal alignment. So if I think about myself as a 78 organ system before it was balkanized and at war with itself. So I committed these self destructive behaviors when my mind wanted a pizza party and drinks. My kidney wasn't asking for that and my, you know, my liver wasn't and all my, my DNA methylation wasn't. And so there was a war within me going on this misalignment. And I had to figure out how could I achieve world peace inside of me. And that was when you let these organs speak and everyone can say, I want this in an ideal state. And then you help the reconciliation process. This mirrors what we're doing with planet Earth. We treat the earth as we treat our bodies. It's the same relationship. And if we want to think about how could we potentially cooperate on a global scale, how could we potentially imagine ourselves walking into this future with computational intelligence? It starts with our ability to align ourselves in these interesting ways. And for me it was removing my mind, which was the cause of self destructive behavior, enabling a system to take care of me. This is the, this is the fundamental question I wanted to propose. If I could build a system that could better care for me than I'm able, would I say yes to it? And I did. Now there's all kinds of ways you can slice that up because a lot of people will say, well, does that mean you can no longer have your pasta with friends? Does that mean you can no longer. And there's a very long list of things that they say. I'm familiar with this. I perceive these things that cause me joy. If I can't have these things, I don't know why I would exist. So it's just a knee jerk reaction. It's temporary and people work their way around it. But this is really the fundamental question we're all thinking about. And to me it's worth our attention. Definitely we are in a situation where we would benefit from by ruminating that we are in a special moment of time and we probably don't want to be caught being Behind.
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A
Okay, so caught being behind would look something like we're trying to create artificial intelligence. And we really, as we're recording this, AI is at the elbow of the exponential curve. And people are freaking out in good and bad ways because of how rapidly it's happening now. And this is certainly the first time where I've really been consciously paying attention to something where I see the elbow happen and it breaks the prediction machine that is the brain. And that's unnerving. Now, I'm optimistic about it. But you're onto something here which is really fascinating. And I've heard you say this before. People talk about, for AI to work, we have to get goal alignment between humans and AI so that AI doesn't run into the paperclip problem where it's like, oh, sorry, bro, but your atoms would be way better paperclips. And so I'm just gonna destroy you to get at those atoms so I can make more paperclips. And you said goal alignment with AI, we don't even have goal alignment with ourselves.
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B
That's right. Let alone between each other.
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A
Right, yeah. Which if you've been in a marriage, you know, immediately, like, there's a lot of goal alignment that goes along there that you're gonna have to constantly be working on, which is utterly fascinating. Okay, so you have made. Oh, I'm going to say it in a provocative way. Take it apart as you see fit. You have made a deity of data. And I think inside of all of us there is a God shaped hole. It has not played out as a religion in my life, not since I was a teenager. I don't know. I know that you used. You were brought up deeply religious. I don't know if that echo does an adult or not, but does that sound right or am I missing something?
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B
I would use an example. A few years ago, I was in the Middle east with a country leader and he offered up his country's 2030 plans. This was in 2017, I believe. And I said, that's fascinating that you would be planning 13 years in advance. At the time, I was deeply involved in my venture, investing in synthetic biology, nanotech, computational therapeutics. So I knew from the trenches what was going on in those worlds, from machine learning and AI, through the biology, and. And I said, how do you think you can possibly plan that far in advance? And he said, like, how would you think about it? Just as a playful gesture. And I said, okay, let's imagine, let's play a game. We have two robots and the goal is to get the robot to the furthest sand dune on the horizon, we can barely see it. We can do one of two things. One is we can take a topographical map of the sand dunes, program the map into the robot and say, go robot to that sand dune. Now we know what's going to happen in a few minutes it's going to be stuck in the sand because the sands are going to shift, the map is going to change. The other thing we do is we say, okay robot, we're going to give you the tools to navigate the sand no matter what happens. So as the landscape changes, as we know it will, it navigates its way to these endpoints. And so all you have to do is point in a general direction. And that's really what this entire thing is with blueprint is. I've basically just said my body is a system with tools to navigate terrain as it moves along. So measurement science protocol. Now the science is going to get better, the measurement is going to get better and it just improves again and again and again. But my body is not subject to the same problems of self destructive behavior where it can't move forward. I've tried to put myself, my body in a position where it can have compounded gains. So as technology improves, my body improves at the same rate of the technology. And in this case it's slowing my rate of aging and reversing the aging that's happened. Now there may be chances where we start talking about enhancement, where we build technologies in society. But if we start thinking about ourselves, that we really care to go together to this distant point on the horizon, we want systems that allow us to move through changing terrain. What we don't want are these maps that assume certain things. And so this is the zeroth principle of thinking. So when you say a God of data, I would say to me, this is a philosophy of zeroism.
- [21:45]
A
You have to tell people what that means.
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B
So the idea is talent hits the target that no one else can. Genius hits the target no one can see. Talent is first principles thinking. So you survey the world, you identify everything you can know in a given time frame. And you just, you know those basic things, you make decisions. Zeroth principle thinking, you can't even see the target. And so this is like Einstein's special theory of relativity where he gave birth to something that already existed but just changes everything. Or when AlphaGo played Lisa et al in AlphaGo, it played moves in the game of Go that could have been played by humans, but no human did. Humans saw these moves. It Broke their brains. And they said it's as if an intelligence from another dimension were playing a game of go. So first principle thinking is genius. It's a talent that no one else can see. And so the hypothesis is, with the emergence of computational intelligence, it introduces zero principle breakthroughs at a rate faster than humans have. It changes the landscape more and faster than we have been. So we're going to enter into a Zeroth principle world where the landscape is going to change faster and faster in ways we don't anticipate. It's going to surprise us continually in the same way Lisa Doll was done with AlphaGo's plague, we're going to feel the same way. And so the, the idea for this is let's try to zoom out on planet Earth, look at the situation we're in of what's really going on. Let's adopt systems of evolving ourselves and improving ourselves so we can roll with all these changes no matter how the terrain shifts. And we can move into this future of zero principle. We don't know what it's going to be. We can't imagine it. It's beyond our own imagination. It's, it's a. And so it's really and I an effort to say we can recognize the special moment we're in. We can create systems where everyone wins and we can shed the characteristics of ourselves that no longer service like self destructive behaviors. That's really what I'm trying to do. The entirety. So it's about the future of human existence, ironically or humorously, begins by eating broccoli and by letting your organs run the system versus your mind.
- [24:20]
A
Okay, I think there's more to talk about with the how you're getting. I think you're getting compliance in yourself because you believe so much in the data's ability to lead you to. Maybe it's Zero principle thinking where we're able to completely come up with something that we otherwise would not have. But before we get lost in that far more philosophical conversation, I'll bring us back to the actual protocol itself. So you've brought a bunch of food. This is stuff I assume you eat on a daily basis. I've heard you say you basically eat the same thing every day. So pull me down into what the data is showing. So we have 78 organs. They're all saying they want something. Do they want the same thing? Like is there one protocol that matches everything? Or is it like we're doing 78 different things every day hoping that it comes together somehow?
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B
Yeah, this is. Yeah, so My diet every day is roughly 2,000 calories. So it's a 25% calorie reduction of what I would normally consume. So I'm on a caloric restriction diet.
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A
So you're hungry all the time?
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B
I'm hungry all the time.
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A
In fact, let me ask you really fast before we get into this. Does your life suck?
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B
I've never been happier or more fulfilled or more energized or more. I've never, ever been in a better state in my entire life.
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A
Even though you're hungry all the time?
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B
Yes.
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A
Interesting. Okay, so we'll get into that after you show me what you're going to eat.
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B
I wouldn't trade my life for anything right now. It has never been better.
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A
That's incredible. Sleep diet. Okay. Steering by the data kicked off by our 78 organs.
- [25:56]
B
Basically, this is 2,000 calories. Every calorie has to fight for its life to exist because it's such a small budget, and my body needs to have all the nutrients it needs to be ideal. So the objective was, how do you create a perfect diet? And so for breakfast, I eat this dish called Super Veggie, which is black lentils, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic.
- [26:18]
A
And you named it Super Veggies?
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B
Yeah, I did. Okay. Yeah. So I eat 70 pounds of vegetables a month.
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A
Oh, my God. Jesus. Okay, that's a lot.
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B
An hour later, two hours later, I ate nutty pudding.
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A
So you don't eat it all at once?
- [26:33]
B
No, I used to do one meal a day. My body fat went down to 3%.
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A
Whoa.
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B
A bit too low.
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A
How low were Your calories?
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B
Same 2000. Just having it all in in a single window. It had the effect of dropping my body.
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A
3%. That's competition. That's like bodybuilding up on stage. Let's go. I'm a step away from dying. Wow. 3%. That's insane, man.
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B
I mean, I'm 5.1 now, so I
- [27:00]
A
thought you were trying to bump it up.
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B
Yeah. So three. Three is too low.
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A
Sorry. I had heard in an interview somebody put the words in your mouth, so I have to be more careful with that. That you were trying to go up to like six and a half or seven percent.
- [27:12]
B
I mean, I've been there. I'm five right now, so it kind of hovers.
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A
Wow.
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B
Five to six range.
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A
Okay. And that's comfortable. You're hungry, but it's comfortable?
- [27:19]
B
Yeah, it's 5% is enough subcutaneous fat because your heart needs fat, you need fat in your body. And so we're comfortable with 5ish percent.
- [27:29]
A
Okay, so one meal a day. It was two. You're getting too lean. Which is already interesting from a fat loss perspective. Intermittent fasting is doing its job. So how much do you spread this out?
- [27:39]
B
Sorry, six hours.
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A
Total window.
- [27:41]
B
Total window of time is six hours.
- [27:43]
A
Got it. Starting first meal is what time?
- [27:45]
B
5, 6am a.m. whoa.
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A
So you get up and eat or do you get up crazy early?
- [27:50]
B
I get up and I drink. This guy here.
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A
So like I'm wiping the sleep out of my eyes and I. Interesting.
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B
Yeah.
- [27:56]
A
So I have an unwritten rule that I don't eat. So I wake up usually 4 to 5am I don't eat until roughly 9am and I eat all of my food in a pretty narrow window. Five to six hours, two meals only. But I've always thought that I needed to wake up, work out, fasted, all of that. But not true because you're way leaner than I am.
- [28:26]
B
Okay, so on these questions, my experience has been I trained as a pilot, I got my license as a pilot in multiple airplanes. Even though I'm a competent pilot, I'm never as good as a professional pilot. They do it every day. They think about it day in, day out. They just have higher levels of skill than when I jump in and jump out. The same is true with blueprint. This team I have led by Dr. Oliver Zollman, this is all they do. They're consumed by it night and day. When they don't have anything to think about, they're thinking about this. And even among the most elite experts in health and wellness, they disagree with each other. You know this. There is absolutely no agreement on just about anything. And so it's important as a system that a team run in a way that has some way to try to tease out signal from noise and then do something and see if it works. We don't know all the answers and that's why we're testing these things. This is why I'm doing all this is we're trying to punch through these open ended questions and debates that never ever resolve it's never ending debate. And so in these cases of your question of is it optimal to eat before you exercise or after you exercise? I don't know the specifics but I'm sure you could open it up and it would be an endless debate among experts on the ideal status of doing things. And so we just don't get involved in those arguments because there's limiting, there's limited returns in doing that. And so we've set up a system of evidence, of analysis, of protocol of
- [30:15]
A
measurement that meant you had to agree on what are the optimal state for the 78 organs that we're measuring. You had to have an ideal in mind to be able to steer towards it. So at some point either you're saying that we did get a group of people to agree on these things, or this is where our hypothesis lies. And for people that aren't super familiar with the scientific method, so hypothesis, basically a best guess. A theory is something that has proven to work even though it may not be ground level truth yet. So is this your hypothesis? Is this a working theory? Like where are we at? How did you get consensus there?
- [30:57]
B
I think the data speaks for itself. So you look at the highlights of what we've done for two years. So one, my speed of aging using an epigenetic DNA methylation clock.
- [31:10]
A
Okay, so looking at what exactly? So anybody that's followed me for a while, they've heard methylation talk before. So you can get kind of nerdy. And as long as I can track it, we're in good shape.
- [31:20]
B
So if we're looking at these biological expression patterns in our body that have some relationship to aging, these aging clocks are not yet gold standard, they're silver standard.
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A
Is there a gold standard or we're
- [31:33]
B
just working towards not like phenotypic markers. Okay, so on methylation is still a still silver standard. But if you look at the entirety of my data, so you say one is, last year I set a world record in reducing my epigenetic age, 5.1 years and 7 months. Using six clocks, not one, six. I didn't cherry pick a clock. So let's just say, okay, epigenetic clocks are up and coming. Fine, take that with a grain of salt. Second, my speed of aging, so the pace in which my body ages is 0.76. What do you look at for that DNA methylation? This is based upon a multi decade longitudinal study based out of New Zealand. It's called Danuden.
- [32:19]
A
I'm going to tell people what DNA methylation actually is. I'll probably get it a little wrong and correct me where I do. So, DNA methylation, you have these little things, sirtuins. Is that what's running around on the DNA? I can never remember. But there are little things that run around the DNA. They're probably a protein and they are marking the DNA saying this is a liver cell, this is a brain cell, this is an eye cell. And thusly you should only read these sections. So read here, stop Reading here. And every time a cell gets damaged, it has to go in and like remarket and say, okay, this is the part to read and not read. And aging is effectively the de differentiation of cells. Your eye cell begins to forget that it's just an eye. Your liver cell begins to forget that it's just a liver, so on and so forth. And so it stops doing its things. Well, because the things reading the DNA are basically being told to read the wrong parts of the DNA. And so it starts to basically get confused. And that is aging.
- [33:18]
B
Yeah. And I say yes. And if a detective went in your body and is looking at a crime scene, they might find some details in how your body's expressing itself in these DNA methylation patterns.
- [33:29]
A
Interesting. So there's something being revealed in the patterns that you methylate your.
- [33:33]
B
Exactly. You look at these patterns and it's just like, it's like a biological age versus chronological age.
- [33:39]
A
So there is a type of malfunction in the methylation that we can see.
- [33:44]
B
There's. Yeah, there's patterns that manifest themselves in the body. So we know, just as a basic concept, we know roughly what, we know how a 15 year old's heart should look like with the characteristics of its functionality and also its anatomical. We know what an 80 year old person's heart, how it functions, what it looks like. They're very different hearts. You're not going to confuse a 15 year old and an 80 year old heart if you're looking at an MRI or even looking at it in tissue. And so you can biologically age. And so DNA methylation is to say we can identify patterns that reveal. And so this is what they're sorting in the science, it's fine. But what I may be trying to get at in a quick summary is I have over 50 perfect biological markers and their optical clinical outcome range. So that's like my cholesterol and you know, the triglycerides, like all the usual things people talk about. I have 100 biomarkers that are less than my chronological age. I set a world record for reversing my epigenetic age, my speed of aging, which is currently 0.76. I'm number one out of 1750 people that have been measuring their speed of aging over several years for total reduction of age.
- [35:03]
A
And so, so for every calendar year you age. 0.76 of a calendar year.
- [35:10]
B
Exactly. So jokingly I say I get October, November, December for free. You know, but like, let's just say, let's discount all my data and say, okay, we think that the science is like 70% correct in that area. It's still a pretty compelling data set to suggest that what I'm doing may be interesting and it may be in the right direction. So it's not. This is not to state that we've figured everything out, that everything's perfect, that we know all things. It's meant to put forward all the data we have and say, pretty interesting. If you build this system measurement, evidence, protocol, then look what it's doing. And that's what really we're trying to do. And so it's step by step. And of course, everyone's going to look at this and they'll nip at it from one direction or another. Wonderful. Like, that's the process, that's science, that's how we're going to improve. But by open, sourcing this and sharing with everybody, others can implement it, they can improve it, they can generate their own data. So it's really meant to try to punch through. The game we're playing is not. This is not the game. The game we're playing is the future of the human race.
- [36:22]
A
That's so interesting. You're taking us back to the philosophical side. We're going to get first to the broccoli and the mushrooms and all that stuff. But it really is interesting. It was one of the notes that I took when I was doing the research is that you're really coming at this from. I'll boil it down to ought versus can. And in my language, and I don't know that everybody would agree with this, but in my language, ought is a moral statement. We ought to be doing things in this way. And you introduced me to an interesting idea. When we first met and you were talking about. You talked about data and the data that all of us kick off from behavioral to biological in a way that I'd never contemplated before. And it seemed too big of a problem to solve at that time, but I haven't stopped thinking about that. And as somebody. So we're building in the metaverse, and now I think a lot about, whoa, I'm going to be influencing the way that people think about life. That if Jordan Peterson is right and it brings out, like, psychopathy and that the way the algorithms work, they tend to, like, reward people with dark triad tendencies. So I'm like, wow, we really have to be thoughtful about this. So bringing that back to what you're talking about now, it's like, okay, if we're building AI and you've talked about the computational and distribution Cost of intelligence is going to zero. So basically now we all have a genius in our pocket that can take us from it doesn't exist to existing with these huge breakthrough insights. Okay, well now all of a sudden we really have to get alignment. And all of that alignment starts with the food that's sitting on this table here, which is so. That rings so true to me in terms of what I know about the, like just getting people to understand. I don't want to talk about diet, I don't want to talk about exercise. But all these cool things that I do want to talk to you about, I can't get you there until we talk about this.
- [38:18]
B
Yes.
- [38:19]
A
With that, we have broccoli, we have cauliflower, which I hate, so you're going to have to make me a believer. And mushrooms, which I, I am so freaked out by mushrooms. But I learned a lesson. So I had real food trauma as a kid. And it's a fascinating thing. My mother and I see my childhood very differently. So I had a lot of food trauma eating rice, a roni and really basic horrible things as a kid over and over and over. Just, that was how I grew up. And when I got older, my whole thing was no one will ever get me to eat something I don't want to eat again ever, ever, ever. I end up marrying a Greek girl, her family's const offering me all this weird food. I do not want to eat it. But I didn't want to offend my father in law. And then we finally got to the point he would always offer me two things. There's this weird cheese that they have called halloumi cheese. They're Cypriot now. Halloumi cheese, if you grew up like I grew up with American cheese, it melts. Cheddar cheese melts, Swiss cheese melt. Those are the only cheeses I was ever introduced to. Halloumi doesn't melt. You can put it on open flame and it doesn't melt. It'll burn, but it doesn't melt. And so I was like, I'm never going to eat something that a cheese that doesn't melt, that's too weird. And so anyway, one day, he's always offering me two things, so I can always take the other thing and not try this freakish cheese. And one day, still not wanting to offend my father in law, he only offers me halloumi. And I'm like, oh, this is a test. So I'm like, damn it, I have to eat this cheese, otherwise I'm going to offend my Father in law. And I eat it and it was like fireworks went off in my mouth. It was so delicious. And I was like, I have missed out. I think it had been. I'd known him for four years and I was like, I had missed out on four years of eating this incredible cheese because I was scared. So I was like, if somebody offers me food sincerely, they're not trying to mess with me. If they're offering me food sincerely, I will try it every time. I can only imagine you were offering me this sincerely, so I'm going to give it a shot. All right, so mushrooms, broccoli, quinoa. What was the other thing in there?
- [40:18]
B
Black lentils.
- [40:19]
A
Lentils. All right, where do we start?
- [40:22]
B
Well, I guess it is a question. Do you prefer to eat your sweets before savory or savory before?
- [40:27]
A
Oh, savory before sweet.
- [40:29]
B
I would. I would probably dip into the super veggie with some broccoli.
- [40:33]
A
All right, let's see what we got here. Is there a particular, like broccoli mushroom, cauliflower, all in one bite kind of thing?
- [40:44]
B
You know, this cooked.
- [40:45]
A
This is softer than I thought it was.
- [40:46]
B
Yeah, it's all steamed. So for fodmap, to avoid getting indigestion, you know, making it comfortable for your microbiome. Everything's steamed nice. It's important to take seven to eight minutes and then.
- [40:57]
A
Oh, God, the mushroom. I'm so freaked out.
- [40:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, the talk here. Yep.
- [41:02]
A
All right, here we go. Let's do it.
- [41:04]
B
All right.
- [41:15]
A
Other than the texture of mushrooms, which I'm super sketched out by, tastes great.
- [41:18]
B
Great.
- [41:19]
A
What are you putting on it? Is it literally just steam and the natural thing or is there I. Sauces I could add?
- [41:28]
B
No sauces. Sometimes I'll sprinkle with nusalt, which is potassium chloride. So it's a replacement for sodium. But no, just. I puree mine. So it's like a veggie hummus.
- [41:40]
A
Why puree it?
- [41:42]
B
Because the volume I eat, it's almost 900ml of volume. It's very large. And so I have a lot going on in life. And to eat that much vegetables every day purees.
- [41:55]
A
What do you chew?
- [41:57]
B
Masticate all these other. My third meal of the day, nutty pudding and the berries.
- [42:02]
A
And so we're about pudding again. But the berries are whole.
- [42:06]
B
Yep. And then the third meal is whole. Yeah. So the third meal is vegetables, nuts, berries. So sweet potato or.
- [42:14]
A
That was good. Again, the mushroom, I'm a little sketched out by why broccoli? Why cauliflower?
- [42:22]
B
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- [42:41]
A
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- [42:44]
B
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A
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place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered
- [43:13]
A
with plenty of time left on the clock.
- [43:15]
B
So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done so I'm vegan by choice, not by necessity. So this is not to say that someone couldn't achieve similar or better results than mine doing other things Interesting.
- [43:37]
A
We need to talk about mtor. So we're back to ought now. So you're eating this way because you believe we all ought to.
- [43:50]
B
I'm eating this because of the concept of what Alfred North White had said. Civilization advances by the number of important operations it can automate without the person thinking about it. And if I contemplate what are the most majestic games my conscious mind could
- [44:13]
A
play, that's a question and a half.
- [44:18]
B
And let's just for a moment try to create some separation with everything we hold near and dear right now. And let's just open ourselves up and say, what are the most majestic things we could experience? There's of course, a little band of what we could see and think about and be creative. And then there's this gigantic space of unknown, of surprise. And when I think about that as the potential future, I'm motivated to spend my time and energies doing that. And so eating this food is among the most delightful experiences of my entire day. I love every second of it. I also appreciate it that it is now solved in my life. I don't spend 40% of my day thinking about what I'm going to eat or trying to order what I'm going to eat or trying to. It's all just built into a system so I can have my mind pointed in somewhere else. So the goal here is not that everyone in society creates their own version of blueprint. The idea here is that society creates blueprint as the norm. It is unfair to the individual that they're set out in society and they have to navigate on a daily basis. McDonald's and Snickers and TikTok and everything else. It is unfair. And this goes back to your point on data. When you are broadcasting data, the capitalistic system is taking this and then using it against you, so you commit greater self destructive behaviors. And then we celebrate it and then we call people weird when they don't participate in it. The whole system is rigged against us. Meanwhile, we worship our technology. We are willing to sacrifice ourselves for technology. We're martyrs for technological progress. Yet we have almost, we have a minuscule amount of attention focused on improving ourselves. And it should be the exact opposite. The new Apple keynote should be the new blueprint. We should be able to showcase human advancement in ways that are stunning and exciting. That gets everyone on this movement of how do we prove ourselves individually, uncollectively. And if we look at ourselves in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, we might look back and say that was obvious, like why did we sacrifice ourselves for this technological advancement? Why did we just grind ourselves, drive ourselves into the ground? Why do we encourage each other to do all these self destructive things? Why do we allow it to happen in ourselves? We might consider ourselves to be insane and just a snap of sobriety. We'd say, of course, like why wouldn't we move forward in this fashion? And that's what this is meant to do, is we naturally gravitate towards things that improve our lives. And if we can have systems that help us do that, could we say yes to it in a way that it doesn't threaten our being, it doesn't threaten our meaning making, doesn't threaten our identities. We say cool because we really want to play bigger games than existence.
- [47:31]
A
All right, that's super interesting. And we will certainly continue balancing this razor's edge of practicality and philosophy, which I actually really do find interesting. I want to understand. So you've answered the question why you eat veggies over meat. So I get that. And I think it'll be important for us to go into the N of one idea. But right now I want to talk about. You said every calorie has to fight for its survival in terms of the right to be consumed by you. I'm very curious. I'm going to ask one question before we go on with this, which is I think of nutrition as so n of 1. If for no other reason, than your microbiome. But nutrition is so N of one that we'll never get to 100% one blueprint for everybody. But I also think throwing up your hands and saying, well, it's hopeless because it's all n of 1 is also a mistake. So I'm going to guess that 85% of the blueprint will be the same for everybody. And then there's going to be 15% nuance. But I'm going to set aside the 15% nuance. But my question is, do you agree? Like, is it 80%, is it 4% is going to be universal? Like, how much of this is going to be blueprint for everybody and how much is going to be individualized?
- [48:55]
B
Those that data will naturally emerge over time.
- [48:59]
A
Do you have a gut instinct, though?
- [49:01]
B
I wouldn't dare to guess.
- [49:02]
A
Really interesting. I'm so, I think that it, I think everybody ought to be willing to say this is how I think about the problem. So I always find myself spouting off about things. I'm, I know that I will definitely change my mind. Like I, I will 100% follow the data, but I need organizing principles. Okay. Anyway, so your organizing principle, you're not sure. So going back to this bowl here, your 78 organs are competing. Every calorie has to like justify its existence. But this bowl has raised its hand in the data and said, for all of the 78, I'm one of the best things that you could do. You've already been clear. Maybe there's a meat protocol or whatever that will do the same thing or maybe it's even better. But the data has said, and your elf like appearance backs it up, that this is effective. But I don't yet understand why. So what, what is hiding? Not hiding. What is the, the matrices of these Items that the 78 organs are like? Yes, please.
- [50:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, for example, if you, if my 17 year old and I both do our blood panels, we're looking at liver enzymes and we're looking at all of our basic blood panel. We're nearly indistinguishable. It would be almost, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between his and mine. And that's what this food has produced.
- [50:33]
A
But why isn't this bok choy and collard greens?
- [50:35]
B
It could, you know, it could be. It's just that the.
- [50:38]
A
Why isn't this tomatoes? I'm now picking nightshades on purpose. Why isn't this tomatoes and eggplant and peppers.
- [50:46]
B
As a team, we look at the evidence, we try to find gold standard evidence. So with a random controlled trial, and we say blank has shown to do blank in this organ or this biological process. And that's what the result is here.
- [51:01]
A
So broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and lentils, get the blood panels that we want. And you've tried. How many things have you tried?
- [51:12]
B
A lot. Yeah, they have for me. They have for a lot of people around me. And so again, it's. Your statement is you're directionally correct that for some percent of people this will work, for another percent, it won't work. And how much of a difference we don't know. And so the blueprint is less about the exact things and more about the system of measurement, evidence, protocol.
- [51:39]
A
And I assume because that that system. So you put out a video. So I know a little bit about this. You put out a video where it's like, here all the crazy things we do. It's so overwhelming that even somebody with like, my identity is. I'm one big throbbing discipline molecule. I don't even know how to finish that statement. But, like, I. I am disciplined, like incarnate. That's how I see myself. And when I watched that video, I was like, yeah, no, like, it's so complex, like the machines. And you spend more. In fact, this will sum it up. In fact, I don't even mind the money. It's the time. You spend more money on your body every year than LeBron James. Okay. Let people at home, let that one sink in. So this protocol is very robust. And the gap I'm trying to bridge is we keep talking about the protocol like, sort of in the ether without, like really grounding it. But because I've seen the whole thing. Thing, it's so complicated. I know we have a bunch of your supplements here and we need to get into that. So I'm going to say for now, for the sanity of people watching this, we're going to continue going through the foods that we have here. And while there is going to be n of 1 variations, if you're going to get into this, because I've seen the level of complexity, most people should just eat what's in the bowl. And I'm going to take this sort of on blind faith that if I want to replicate the protocol, rather than me go do all the things you're doing, because I'm not willing to just being completely honest that I'm just gonna eat this. Okay. That. That's guidance for myself on how to run this interview. Okay? So these are the things that the Data has kicked off for somebody doing this in a vegan format. Okay, so we've got our super veggies which you smoothie the out of because you don't want to chew the £70amonth.
- [53:28]
B
I don't mind chewing it. I. Hummuses among is my favorite food.
- [53:32]
A
What do you dip in the hummus though?
- [53:34]
B
Vegetables.
- [53:35]
A
Okay, so we, we save some of our broccoli.
- [53:38]
B
So the third meal of the day could be a hummus. I'm just saying, generally speaking, hummus is among my favorite foods.
- [53:43]
A
Got it.
- [53:44]
B
Super veggie is hummus. It's just a ground in texture. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so a lot of people look at it and the texture triggers these associations in their mind. A lot of people.
- [53:54]
A
In fact, you're right. Mushrooms hidden in a hummus would be far better.
- [53:57]
B
So my sanity, it's a lot of fun for people to poke at the thing and make funny jokes. It's hummus. And I have hummus for breakfast and it's just chock full of vegetables. And so yeah, so that's breakfast. I like to in the morning. So then I also drizzle olive oil on this and I also put chocolate in it. That's a new. That's a recent addition into the hummus or separately into the hummus.
- [54:23]
A
Interesting. Can you taste the chocolate?
- [54:25]
B
Yeah. So it's a really weird combination.
- [54:27]
A
Let's start eating through this stuff. So, so you here we've got the chocolate. These are going to be bitter as hell, right?
- [54:33]
B
They are, yeah.
- [54:34]
A
So this is like straight up.
- [54:37]
B
That's right.
- [54:37]
A
So there's what makes this special and what brand is this?
- [54:40]
B
We think about everything. This chocolate's a good example of a five level stack of thinking. So first statement is chocolate's good for you. Second is dark chocolate is good for you. Third is dark chocolate undouched is good for you. Fourth is dark chocolate undoubted without heavy metals is good for you. And the fifth is dark chocolate undoubted non heavy metals with the highest polyphenol count. And so with every one of these things, we want to get to level 5 on every single thing. And that's what again, what this is, is it's had to survive a tremendous amount of scrutiny to arrive. So that is pure 100% dark chocolate. We have tested for heavy metals with high polyphenol count. We have several suppliers. We have several suppliers we work with.
- [55:24]
A
Do you not like to talk about the brands?
- [55:25]
B
No, because we're actually going to make our own one.
- [55:27]
A
I was going to Say, like, literally, I was like, talk to Brian about getting into business in food because it's very hard.
- [55:34]
B
It's very hard to find.
- [55:34]
A
Let's make a hummus, Brian.
- [55:36]
B
Exactly. But the. The chocolate, you know, it. It's delightful to eat. And so then you pair 70 pounds of vegetables with 100 dark chocolate and the same thing with the olive oil. So we run the same criteria of the absolute highest quality olive oil, and that's breakfast. It's the most nutritionally dense dish I have ever consumed in my entire life.
- [55:57]
A
What are some of the things you've thrown away? Like, we tried asparagus. Yeah, we don't. We don't do asparagus anymore. Have we. Are there any ones that were amiss?
- [56:06]
B
I mean, at one point, I had too many carrots in my diet.
- [56:10]
A
Why? So I also had to dial back the carrots, but I did it because it was spiking the life out of my glucose, which I was utterly scandalized by. I had no idea that baby carrots, I don't know if it matters, but baby carrots, if I eat them to satiety, I will spike my glucose over 100, which is crazy. And I live in the sort of mid to low 80s. Is that why you did it, or was there something else? The organs were kicking off bad data early on.
- [56:35]
B
We basically. We had settled in on the first two dishes of the day, the drink and the two dishes, the chocolate, and
- [56:42]
A
we haven't talked about the drink yet.
- [56:43]
B
And then the third dish we had. We identified like, 100 plus vegetables and, like, basically this huge number of things. And so the person I work with, we just said, randomly choose from this assortment of vegetables and vary it up. Like, give my. Give me some diversity of food. And so we really left.
- [57:02]
A
You think that's important?
- [57:03]
B
Well, we were just testing it out, like, let it be a wild card. And so they tried a whole bunch of different preparations. And so in that it wasn't a systematic approach. And so we just had too many carrots. And so that showed up in our measurement.
- [57:19]
A
Did you know it was the carrots?
- [57:20]
B
I forget the tracks we had.
- [57:24]
A
But all of our. Because you've got some ungodly number of people on this.
- [57:28]
B
It's so funny, there was this one time where I take iodine.
- [57:33]
A
You worried about a nuclear attack?
- [57:35]
B
No, I take 125mcgs a day.
- [57:38]
A
Why? Why iodine?
- [57:41]
B
Just part of my daily dietary intake
- [57:43]
A
data tells us to take iodine. You'll have to come up with a better answer.
- [57:47]
B
And there's Markers for it. So at the time I was doing this zinc test where you. Have you ever done this? Where you put. You can test whether you're zinc deficient or not by putting this in your mouth. And if you taste the zinc, you're zinc deficient. If you can't taste anything, you're good on zinc.
- [58:01]
A
Interesting.
- [58:01]
B
So I just came prime from that. And so basically you're looking at your body's reaction to doing it. And I thought, that's interesting. So I did the iodine and it tastes really good to me. And I thought, does that mean my body's asking more of it? And so I started doing two drops instead of one. Just playfully doing it. And then a month later, my lab show up and as a team, we're looking at this and they're like, wait a second. That result makes no sense. And I had to bashfully confess I've deviated from the protocol. I did two drops instead of one. But any.
- [58:37]
A
Was it a good deviation?
- [58:39]
B
It was a bad deviation, really.
- [58:40]
A
So even though it tasted, I thought the punchline was going to be if it tastes good, like, no, of course. I should have known better.
- [58:45]
B
This is like me going off and doing something with my mind. Like, maybe this is a good idea. But it's funny because every. I cannot do anything without it showing up in the data. It's like I have 247 surveillance on my body in all the measurements we take. So whether it's my wearables or my imaging or blood draws, it is so comprehensively captured in every moment with everything I'm doing. I have found every time I do something immediately manifests. Not immediately, but it manifests in the data and the team can tease it out.
- [59:17]
A
So then let's get back to the things you're actually putting in your body. So. So that people don't want to punch me because I can feel that they're going to. So we have our super veggies, which we turn into a hummus. We've got. Got the five step ultra bitter. But actually was I've damaged my palate because I eat clean. So to me that was fun. But the ultra bitter dark chocolate, high polyphenol, no heavy metals, so on and so forth. Looks like we're gonna get to some sort of berry smoothie. Yeah, we've got chocolate covered berries. I'm guessing it's the same chocolate melted. Looks like maybe some nuts on it. Extra virgin olive oil. Any special thing about something a chocolate,
- [59:55]
B
it's five levels deep.
- [59:56]
A
Okay. For the purity, probably Worth going through the five on that. But first. And then what's the mystery drink here?
- [60:02]
B
Oh, this is for breakfast. So this first here tin is 50. I think it's 54 pills. So in the morning.
- [60:08]
A
Jesus Christ. That's a lot of pills.
- [60:10]
B
Yeah. So we wake up, you greet, you drink green giant, 54 pills.
- [60:15]
A
But so, so much of what you do is like, oh, the data just tells us to keep going. But how did you pick the 54 pills to start with?
- [60:23]
B
Yeah, same process.
- [60:25]
A
What. What's the first step, though? Randomly ingest bizarre things. There had to be some logic. So I'm guessing you're working with a guy. That guy is like, Oliver, wasn't it?
- [60:38]
B
Oliver?
- [60:38]
A
Yeah, Oliver.
- [60:39]
B
Dr. Zollman.
- [60:40]
A
Dr. Oliver Zollman is like, take these 75 pills. We narrow it down to 54, giving us the results that we want. Something like that. He's got some methodology. That's the one part that's missing from all this is like, what's that first experimental step. But since we don't need that because we're just going to tell people to eat and take what you're taking. You have those broken down on your website?
- [61:00]
B
Yes.
- [61:01]
A
So we can link to that in the show notes?
- [61:02]
B
Yes.
- [61:03]
A
Okay.
- [61:03]
B
Everything here is all on the website. Everything is available for everyone at no cost.
- [61:07]
A
All right, Green Giant. What is Green Giant?
- [61:09]
B
It is chlorella powder.
- [61:11]
A
That sounds terrifying. Is chlorella something that grows?
- [61:14]
B
So it has spermidine.
- [61:16]
A
Is that something that grows? Like, I've heard those names, but honestly, is there a spermidine plant?
- [61:21]
B
Spermidine's in a lot of foods. Mushrooms.
- [61:23]
A
Okay, so it's a. It's a ingredient.
- [61:27]
B
It's just that it's a 13.5 milligrams. Then there's amino acids.
- [61:31]
A
This smells like cat food, Brian. It tastes good, though.
- [61:34]
B
It's delicious.
- [61:35]
A
Wow. I thought based on the smell, I'm like, I'm hate this one.
- [61:37]
B
Interesting, everyone.
- [61:39]
A
It really does smell like cat food. But it doesn't taste like. Not that I know what cat food tastes like, but it doesn't taste like I expected from smell. Has an aftertaste of bubble gum. That's unexpected.
- [61:48]
B
I rarely experience anyone who doesn't eat this food with me and arrive at the same place.
- [61:53]
A
This is really nice.
- [61:54]
B
It is. The whole thing is very nice.
- [61:56]
A
I wasn't expecting that. Okay, I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna confess to something.
- [62:00]
B
Yeah.
- [62:01]
A
I burped a few minutes ago and could taste the. The master veggie. And I Was like, that was nice. Like, even the burp was nice.
- [62:07]
B
Yeah.
- [62:09]
A
So I tried going vegetarian at one point, and I did not like it at all. And I was always like, that's a lie. I tried going way more vegetables. Let me be very careful in my words. So I am now call it 80% of my calories come from meat, 20% from vegetables. I tried to reverse it and do 20% from meat and 80% from vegetables. I didn't feel good. And I was always like, well, I just didn't do it intelligently. I wasn't following a protocol. I was like, what vegetables do I happen to have in my refrigerator? Start eating a lot of those. I would be very interested to try this exact protocol and see how we do. But will there be a transition period where I'm like, crazy diarrhea because my microbiome isn't ready for this? Like, is there. Is there a transition to go through? Or is it like, wake up tomorrow and just start going.
- [63:00]
B
This person's different in terms of the transition period. But to your point is correct, though, that the reason why I take 100 pills, pills a day is if you. If the budget is 2000 calories a day and the objective is perfect nutrition and it's vegan, then this is what keeps my body in that perfect state. And so this is why a lot of people who do try to go vegan or do caloric restriction fail is because their. Their body's missing critical, important pieces of nutrition. And so this basically is addressing. So this is what I did, is I put myself on this. I call this my autonomous self. It's a 2,000 calories a day, an hour of exercise a day. It's vegan. And I just let my body run. So looked at muscle mass, body fat. I measure all these things. Get ultrasound. I'm doing full body ultrasound, looking at tendons, ligaments, muscle. I measure everything. Full body MRI of fat, of liver. And then we say, how is this doing? And it's working like, it basically has tuned my body to near perfect health.
- [64:03]
A
So interesting.
- [64:04]
B
This is the thing, Brian.
- [64:06]
A
This is. So I didn't expect that you're on your longevity arc, as the kids would say. I didn't see this coming from our last interview. Man, this is so interesting. And if you didn't look like an elf, I don't know if I would believe in all of it. But given that you do, like, I'm over here. How fast can I eat this stuff? Okay, so walk me through berries. And this is gonna be your Favorite.
- [64:30]
B
This will be your favorite dish.
- [64:31]
A
What is the puffy stuff?
- [64:34]
B
Oh, that's pea protein. Yeah. You might want to mix it up a little bit, otherwise you might get caught in your. This is nuts. Macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, sunflower, lechen, pomegranate seeds. And most people think it tastes like a dessert.
- [64:54]
A
Yeah. There's no thinking. It does taste like a dessert.
- [64:56]
B
Yeah.
- [64:56]
A
But, you know, let's not trick people. This is not cold stone ice cream, but it is tasty.
- [65:01]
B
I'm repulsed by cold stone ice cream.
- [65:04]
A
You take that back. You take that back right now. Cold stone ice cream is delicious. Is that because you. So Tom Hanks once said when he was losing all the weight for Castaway, he said it got to the point where I didn't want to eat a chocolate cake. You didn't have to tell me. He was like. It just. The idea was disgusting. I've never gotten there.
- [65:24]
B
Yeah. So I. The other day, someone had a Damn.
- [65:27]
A
This is good, Brian.
- [65:28]
B
They had a bag of something, like some chip or something, and I grabbed one and I put it in my mouth, and it just. I. I could taste the chemicals.
- [65:41]
A
Yeah.
- [65:41]
B
It was almost like eating gasoline.
- [65:43]
A
Now, for people in the comments saying everything is chemicals, yes, you are correct. But there are some things that taste like chemicals. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean by that.
- [65:51]
B
Yeah. It was like gasoline.
- [65:52]
A
Yeah. This is really nice, man. You're making me a believer over here.
- [65:58]
B
Yeah. And so you put it all together, and I mean, the people that have
- [66:02]
A
been on this, who created these recipes.
- [66:04]
B
We did as a team.
- [66:06]
A
Wow.
- [66:06]
B
Yeah. So we're just constantly working on it. It's. Again, people, there's.
- [66:10]
A
Are there bananas in this?
- [66:11]
B
No.
- [66:12]
A
Really?
- [66:12]
B
Yeah.
- [66:13]
A
I could have passed a lie detector that there are bananas in here. Yeah.
- [66:16]
B
Yep. You're getting. There's some banana flavor in the pea protein. But I would. I would imagine, Tom, if you did this and you had some duration of time on this.
- [66:25]
A
Jesus.
- [66:26]
B
That you would probably say, you can't imagine life not doing it. You've. You. Well, after eating this, that good?
- [66:35]
A
I. I think I have to do this. Like, I have to try this to do. To do our time together justice. This is so tasty. If. If that can be made into a hummus. Because the mushrooms freak me out, to be honest.
- [66:50]
B
Yeah.
- [66:52]
A
But it tasted great. This is freaky. All right. And we still have more to go.
- [66:58]
B
And then if you want to be wild, I want to be wild. You know, like, this is so. Same dark chocolate with a few berries and so it just kind of. Yep.
- [67:09]
A
See how we do here? Strawberries make everything taste good. That's nice, man. It's really nice. And you eat. Do you eat a plate? Like, is this part of the protocol?
- [67:26]
B
I don't eat that on a daily basis. I serve these up to friends when we do our blueprint brunches.
- [67:33]
A
Wow. Now, do you have anybody doing the blueprint on meat?
- [67:38]
B
My son does.
- [67:39]
A
Interesting.
- [67:40]
B
He has. He is identical in everything except for he has chicken with his super veggie
- [67:46]
A
and his markers going in the right direction. Now, how much is youth A get out of jail free card, though. Like, there are people that really mess themselves up. So I imagine you'd be able to see it. So just to turn that into a full question, so you would be able to see if you're monitoring your son. It's not like, well, he's 17 and therefore everything is going to look great. If he were doing things that were off, you'd be able to pick it up right away.
- [68:15]
B
That's right.
- [68:15]
A
Okay. Very interesting man.
- [68:18]
B
Yeah. And he's our prototype. You know, every time we're doing a new measurement protocol, he is willing, he's excited to be involved. So we have this. I measure, I look at my skin, and I'm trying to basically have skin like an 18 year old.
- [68:32]
A
Yeah.
- [68:32]
B
And so we have this machine that does multispectral imaging, gives us, you know, 10 different dimensions of skin. And I. He'll do the measurement. I'll do the measurement. We'll compare our results, you know, and he'll age out at 17 like he is. And so I always have a biological comparison. It's just fun. We do it. It's a fun family activity. It's, you know, it's humorous.
- [68:53]
A
It's just Friday at the Johnson.
- [68:55]
B
I mean, for example, like, I always try to teach my kids to wear sunscreen. And it was always like, yeah, why?
- [69:01]
A
But sunscreen is not like you're. You're absorbing toxic chemicals into the biggest organ in your body.
- [69:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, they would just like, leave.
- [69:09]
A
Is that true? I mean, I'm phobic of sunscreen. I never wear sunscreen. So I get in the sun. I try to be thoughtful. I know that I can't just take infinite amounts of sun, but I try to have a base tan at all times. It was the one thing. So looking at a lot of the footage that you've done, your thighs, bro, are white. Like, scary white. And don't we. I mean, vitamin D, getting sun. I'm super sketched out by the idea of just isolating compounds and doing everything through supplementation and vitamin D. To your point, there's a lot of stuff we don't know yet. And as more and more people start reading all their data, things are going to spring forth from the data. And I have a feeling that one of the answers is going to be everything you can get naturally, you should get naturally. So if you can eat it like it would be far better. My hypothesis goes that it would be far better to eat things that contain all the things that you're supplementing than it is to supplement vitamin D being the one. Again, I'm a lay person, I am not a scientist. I'm not tracking this. This is just a hypothesis I have, which again is only my best guess. But that vitamin D you want sun impacting your skin is my gut instinct. You're saying no?
- [70:23]
B
I'm not saying no. I'm saying that the way we approach skin, our objective is to get my entire body to have the biological characteristics of my 17 year old.
- [70:35]
A
Yep.
- [70:36]
B
So that includes all the characteristics. And so we do full body treatment and we do a sufficient number of treatments. For these treatments, I need to be out of the sun for certain durations of time. And so really it's an optimization of we're doing treatments, I avoid the sun because we're doing these treatments on an ongoing basis. And we measure everything. We use multispectral imaging, we measure it with all these different instruments. And so we have a protocol of trying to do this and the idea of, you know, should you get sun or not sun and for how long and under what circumstances? That's again an example of it explodes into infinite complexity. And if we actually take this and we look at the evidence, I'm sure we could come up with some cohesive answer. But it's the kind of thing that to me gets in the way of the bigger picture. Like if you people get so fixated on this one thing of like how much time should you be in the sun? And then they spend all their time doing that and then commit self destructive behavior and don't eat anything good for themselves. And it's just, it's missing this bigger picture. And so it'd be wonderful to solve that debate once and for all, for the entire, of all of humanity. There's also bigger things we could be focusing on. And so this protocol we have, that's why my skin is so pale, is we, we have these iterations of these skin treatments and according to our measurement systems, it's working, like across whole body.
- [72:00]
A
All right, I want to start teasing out the difference between slowing the aging clock and actual rejuvenation. I know we won't know for quite some time. And you were very thoughtful with your earlier answer. You do think that we will ultimately be able to meaningfully reverse age. How much reversal are we going to be able to do? And what is the key to that? Is this like getting methylation? Right? Like, is that really. Because I want to boil this down into its simplest thing. And if I were to oversimplify based on my, you know, look, I've done so many of these interviews now, I'm really not your average layperson, but I'm definitely not a scientist and I'm not at the bleeding edge of this stuff. But methylation, if the hypothesis that I put out earlier is accurate, it seems like methylation is something we really have to point to. And that is your cells begin to de. Differentiate. So they are no longer the eye, the liver, the skin. They're just sort of, they're falling apart. They don't remember what kind of cell type they are. If that really is true, the methylation, like that's going to be the thing. Zoom in on that. All the things that we're eating, it's working because it's helping with methylation. Again, this is just a hypothesis. Do you have a similar sort of boiled down thing or just. I'm going to guess the answer to this. I don't know if the audience is going to love this or hate this, but I want to see if I'm really beginning to understand. What you're going to say is it's a waste of time to make that hypothesis. And that the. At today's current stage, where artificial intelligence is and all that and where human intelligence is, all you can do is look at the data. And so you're going to try things, you're going to look at the data, you're going to try things and look at the data. It's very unsatisfying in an interview, but if that is the truth, is that the truth?
- [73:56]
B
Dr. Zollman created this 78 organ quantification methodology and he approached this saying, you need to approach the human system by an organ. By organ basis. You of course, can do things for system. Well being like we have been doing. And so we. This first phase of blueprint has been entirely about getting the basics right to slow the rate of aging. We just started in the past month at this phase two, which is what you said, regeneration. And we're doing this on an organ by organ basis. So in the same way we've looked at my heart and we've quantified it from a dozen or so different age markers. And once you have those age markers, you're armed with going to the literature and saying what evidence is there in literature that you can regenerate the heart in these functions or in this anatomical way? And that's how we're approaching the entirety of regeneration. And this is the open question is can we in fact reduce the biological age of me in its entirety, starting with organs? And so it may be epigenetics, it may be DNA methylation, maybe not. So it's really tbd. But what we're doing is we have to start with measurement and we have to look at it as system because your heart can be 70 years old and you're chronologically 30. So your organs are this very wide range. So you're not one age. You're this whole. You're hundreds of different ages. And so that's what we're really trying to do is break it down. That's why you need such robust measurement. It's also why I'm sharing this all publicly. Is that the. I know from experience, if you take this to a doctor, it's a hard conversation to have with a doctor.
- [75:43]
A
They won't get it. Man like you would have to be with somebody so specialized. I'm not saying no doctor ever. I'm just saying the realities of the medical system is so overwhelming. I think about this in my own business. I spend so much time keeping the doors open and the lights on that I don't get to think enough about the future and all of that. And so. God, I can only imagine as a doctor, you have to see so many patients and your income is dependent on the number of people that you get through the door. You don't have time to be exactly researching this stuff.
- [76:14]
B
I agree that I'm saying absolutely nothing negative about doctors. All I'm saying is they have a way of doing things and they have systems and they play within a system with insurance companies and they. They see patients like you're saying. And so I. If somebody's trying to do something that is not as part of the system, it's hard. Which is why I've been sharing this with everyone is then it creates. It gives an opportunity for a bunch of people to jump in and start doing things in different ways. But it's this opportunity for us to rethink entirely. Like last night, I was. I have so many ideas on my sleep. Always. Last night, the idea that was grinding away in my sleep was this idea of Gen Zero. So we say, you know, we.
- [77:06]
A
You tweeted that out yesterday or today?
- [77:08]
B
Yeah. So it was my son's idea. And I was playing around with him with this idea of zero principle thinking and all that kind of stuff, and he said, yeah, Gen 0. And it just stunned me. And so last night, I was just churning in my sleep and I was trying to write in my mind a paragraph of Gen 0 is, you know, in the 21st century, Gen 0 was a group of, you know, people that spanned age and gender and ethnicity and blank. And they came together and they effectively said, we're okay detaching ourselves from all things humans have built, and we're okay to walk into this unknown future in this system where we all move in together doing this goal alignment.
- [77:54]
A
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A
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- [80:04]
A
No, no, no. We got the hardcore practicality to me. So now I'm open.
- [80:09]
B
The future here is if we say the first goal is to create goal alignment within self. And it raises this question, who's in charge? Brian. Who sets the alarm? Brian. At 9pm who sets the alarm for 6am or 6am Brian. Who wants to hit the snooze button? And if we recognize the conflict within us at thousands of points and we say we need to goal alignment within self. And for me, doing that was removing the tool I thought most important, my own mind removing myself and saying, I'm going to allow a system solve this for me. And then if we say, okay, now I've got goal alignment within self, you and I are going to have goal alignment and we humans are going to work on our goal alignment and we're going to do it with artificial intelligence and we're going to do it with planet Earth, the future of our existence. Existence is a computational fabric of goal alignment of trillions of intelligent agents. And we are immersed in this tapestry and we're moving in this trajectory. We don't know where, but along the system. And much like evolution has done on planet Earth and produced. But it's this system of interwoven intelligence and we're part of it. And in doing that, we, we may have to consider different ways of being and what we want to hold on to and how much we're willing to let go and how much we're willing to jump into this expansive future. To me it seems like it's obvious, like this is where it's moving and these are the systems we want to build so we can participate in this future.
- [81:51]
A
Okay, so I love that vision. The data tells me that it will require brutal authoritarian rule to get everyone on board with that. How do you think? Through the messiness of the human mind. Because to your point about the death grip, people grab on. And I have not seen evidence that everyone can let go. Some people can, you obviously can. But how do you deal with the problem, you know, in religion, the problem of evil? I'll call this the problem of human. Like humans are going to Human. They're going to be grabbing onto things, clutching, desperate, unable to see that they exist inside of a frame of reference. They can't break out of it. How do you deal with that?
- [82:38]
B
I've been hosting these blueprint brunches at my home with friends called the First Supper. And I pose this question, this thought experiment. I say, if you could have a system that takes care of you and gives you perfect health, you feel your very best, would you say yes to that? Knowing you're going to have to make. Knowing that you will be making changes that accommodate that. So for example, if the algorithm has you in an ideal state eating the majority of your food in the morning, you do so and you don't do so at night. Like whatever things emerge unless you say it changes something in your life. Right. So if you could achieve perfect health from making some changes, almost inevitably the response is no. And a violent no. And their. And their minds generate Almost like Chat GPT a list of 45 reasons why existence no longer makes sense for them. Because it's a dystopian reality.
- [83:45]
A
Because they're being forced to do it.
- [83:46]
B
Just the thought just hits the brain in a way where there's this knee jerk reaction.
- [83:51]
A
And because I don't think that question gets to the scary part yet. So why are they. So let me reiterate what I heard you just say. There is a system that will give you perfect health. You'll have to follow the system. But there's a system that will give you perfect health. Would you implement that system? And you're saying people violently say no.
- [84:10]
B
Would you say yes or. Yeah, because and I understand this, it steps on what they perceive to be their most sacred attribute of existence, their, their own decision, authority.
- [84:23]
A
The way you pose that question isn't scary yet. I. So here's from your retelling, here's what they're hearing and this I think is actually the thing that I'm worried about. But it isn't what you asked. And I just want to make sure that we tease those two things apart. What it sounds like they're hearing is if I gave you a system that would give you perfect health and you can't opt out, you are going to do it, then I get why they would react violently.
- [84:53]
B
Yeah. So I guess maybe the.
- [84:55]
A
Would you let people opt out? Like if you were the.
- [84:58]
B
So this is the thing. So this is not someone imposing. This is, is your own privately controlled system so that no one's forcing it
- [85:07]
A
upon you and people still react negatively.
- [85:09]
B
Well, so that doesn't confuse. Yes, I need to get to the punchline because there's a good punchline here. But basically, like, you're safe, it's okay. There's no one behind the string the curtains pulling the strings. This is all about you and your private system with your ideal health. So there's no bad things going on behind the scenes. So would you accept that? And this. So the trade off is, would you be willing to consider the modifications of life to do this thing? And so what happens is. And so what I'm trying to say is the mind immediately wants to reject it because the mind wants to keep its authoritarian power. And so your comment to me of the only way this could be implemented into society would be an authoritarian government superimposing on people. What I'm saying is that what you just said was my mind over my body. I had that. My mind was a tyrannical force over me, forcing itself upon all of me. My heart couldn't speak up, my lungs couldn't speak up, my kidney couldn't speak up. My mind did whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted and however it wanted. And the moment its authority is challenged, it throws an absolute fit. And I saw this when I fired Evening Brian. I said, okay, Brian, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm or 10:00pm, he has no control. He absolutely, like, he eats way too much food. He's a very serious problem. And when I got to the day, and I said playfully, you're fired. And I started implementing that, I would write at 5 and then he would show up and he'd be like, just today, or like just a little bit or. And then when the answer came back no, that version of Brian was on the floor throwing a tantrum, punching holes in the wall, kicking and screaming, desperate for control. And so I saw this behavior inside. I saw this whole argument happening inside of me as I screamed for control. But I knew that wasn't appropriate because this guy was really not in my best interest. And so what I'm saying is it's this phenomena we have within ourselves, within society. And so if we're mindful enough about this conversation, what I'm saying is we all have this inside of us right now, this unfair relationship with selves, but we desperately defend it, even though it drives us to early death, even though it drives us to aging disease. And the only way I could solve my own problem was to remove my mind, who was forcing itself upon all my body and have a system do it. And so in these dinners, it typically, it breaks people's brains because it triggers this really tough response. And just like you, everyone understands a question just slightly differently. And they're like, but wait a second, what about this? What about this? What about that? What about this? But then at the end of the conversation, after we've walked through it, people get their bearings and be like, you know what, you're right. Like, I have this nuanced relationship with myself. I have these different versions of myself. I'm not happy with all the different versions. Some of them I actually don't want in me anymore. And so you can, but it takes a little warm up because otherwise it triggers really strong responses. So to me, it's not about a government saying everybody should do this. It's about each person. This is what I'm saying. If we want to solve the problems that are facing us, the biggest problems we have, it's not pointing out and finding who's creating the biggest problem and shaming them or yelling at them, or telling them what they're doing wrong. The best thing we can do is point at self and say, how can I solve the problems within me? And if we can solve the problems within ourselves, we can begin to think about how to solve problems together. But I don't know if we're going to be able to solve these big problems if we just ignore the major turmoil happening in each one of us and we don't solve this fundamental problem because again, we treat this planet the same way we treat ourselves.
- [89:06]
A
Okay, so let's take the thought experiment as far as we can and make it as hard as possible. So let's say the data's coming out. It's very clear that people have an evil overlord in their own mind. The 5 to 10pm Brian, it's making poor decisions that then actually damages the computer, their mind that they're using to approach the world in a rational fashion. And so now I know I've got all the data in the world. Just thought experiment. Every single person that runs the protocol ends up thinking in a more similar fashion. They're not at war with themselves. They're saying the same things you're saying. I would not trade the way that I feel now for anything in the world. Thank God I ran the protocol. Every person, one after another, after another after another. So we know it works. Would you let people opt out knowing they're opting out? Almost certainly because their computer's broken. And so if we just forced them just for a little while so that they could think clearly and then they would all come over to this camp. But would you let them opt out?
- [90:15]
B
Every intelligent agent can choose as they, they can choose what they want to do. The goal here is to goal align among all agents and every agent, every person. When I say agent I just mean we need to think about this in terms of AI and humans and the planet. It's no longer just humans we're playing with in a much broader game here. We really need to understand the game has changed. Every agent is going to make decisions in this fabric and just like we do today and people play the life with their various decisions. We may turn a corner however is if we arrive. I'm not sure that many of us look around right now and we're giving the world two thumbs up on how we're doing. Maybe there's a better way of doing things and maybe if we could solve this fundamental problem of self destruction not only within self but cheering on capitalistic systems in the world who cause people to commit self harm. Who self destructive behaviors who encourage them to commit self destructive behavior. If we can solve these fundamental things so it's not so violent, maybe we'd feel different about each other. Maybe we'd feel different about doing this as a society right now. It's reasonable to distrust because you know the moment you get into a relationship with some kind of system that you know you have to be suspicious they're going to take advantage of you because it's not embedded in our morals and fabric, morals and ethical systems yet that that's just not appropriate. And so I understand what you're saying. It really takes a few steps to think through this of get into a mindset where you feel safe that people and corporations are not out to get you. You're in a system of goal alignment, you're moving along. Each person can make different decisions on different things with certain variations. But it's just a different way of being.
- [92:28]
A
I'll give you all that. But I'll ask like yes or no style. Would you let people opt out so it works? Everyone that does it, there is a better way. All of that. But will you let them opt out and do dumb things?
- [92:40]
B
Oh, I mean I have no authority
- [92:43]
A
but if magic wand you now can do it. Do you think that that would be a desirable outcome to let people do dumb things? They're putting us at risk.
- [92:56]
B
It's a necessity, it's I.
- [92:58]
A
To let them do dumb things?
- [93:00]
B
Yes. It's interesting.
- [93:01]
A
You're really. I didn't think you were going to answer the question that way. So this is utterly fascinating. So Just to put my own card on the table. I think you have to let people do dumb things. As much as I find it very distressing and it makes me very sad.
- [93:13]
B
Dumb, I mean basically self harm. The system requires agent action. It requires that freedom of movement. That's what the whole system is. Because it's going to produce richness of outcome. It's not entirely negative. There's like this diversity and unexpectedness and iteration. It needs to have characteristics.
- [93:41]
A
Characteristics, meaning you were talking earlier about the element of surprise. Like there's the unexpected, all that. So there is a richness in that that you think is ultimately desirable for humans. Okay, that's really interesting. And I actually thought you were going somewhere else. So I'm very fascinated by that. One thing that I think is I may be approaching the problem just from a radically different perspective, which is so going back to. I want you're having a biological experience to be on my tombstone. And I've heard people say a lot. Until you change the biology, you're never going to change the outcome. Like humans are going to do humany things. And we know what that looks like. It looks like exactly what we have right now. And systems, basically you start from scratch and you build something up and it gets amazing. And then you get to the point where the meaning making machine begins to break down. People don't have to fight anymore. I remember one of my earliest realizations was some people need to be chased by a lion. And I wasn't even sure what I meant by this. Probably my early twenties where I was just like, I get the feeling that some people would actually be better off if life was really hard. And there's almost this like surplus time to ruminate that gets people in a lot of trouble. And so whether it's childhood trauma or whatever, if you're not fighting for your life, that can be all. Okay, let me piece this together. So you're having a biological experience. There is, I think a hyper predictable outcome to the way that the human mind is wired. And it's. It happens at different rates at different times, largely based on geography, which then gives birth to culture. Culture ultimately speaks to your frame of reference, which I could do a whole episode on what frame of reference is. But it is the water to the fish. You see life entirely through your frame of reference, but yet it is completely, completely invisible to you. One country is going to do well for a while and it's going to crumble. Every empire that has ever existed has also fallen apart. So there's something in here that's predictable, but it's just different enough over time and all that that it, it rhymes, but it's not perfectly predictable. But on the grand arc of humanity, I think this is relatively predictable. You're being led by the nose by your biology. You've already identified that, that there's. You're a conglomeration of a bunch of different wants, desires, micro personalities, and they're all sort of competing. And if you could get your diet and sleep, gross generalization, if you could get those right, your frame of reference would be altered so profoundly you would begin making different decisions. But for me to try to force you into that, shoot, I break something in the way the human mind works and all hell breaks loose. The other part of this that is really interesting now we have to get into Kernel and why you're doing all of that is we may be, and it's always dangerous to say this time it's different, but we may actually be on the precipice because of artificial intelligence, where everything really is going to change. And to put a really fine point on it, you said the exact reason why this is what Ray Kurzweil calls the singularity, which people are now defining differently. But I think the right way to define the singularity around artificial intelligence is it is the point at which you can no longer predict the future. Your ability to understand how many zeros, the zero principle, meaning that we go from zero to one just over and over. These are things that weren't guessable from the previous moment. They are the Einsteinian breakthrough of oh no, no, Newtonian physics is actually wrong. It's special relativity, it's general relativity, it's all completely different. Quantum world, it was always there, but now we're like, holy cow. Like, this is really, really different. So when you have Einstein level 0 to 1 realizations coming off at 10 a day, 100, 1000 a day, where you have a computer that can do 20,000 years worth of self improvement overnight, you can't predict the next hour, let alone the next day, week, year, whatever.
- [97:41]
B
That's right.
- [97:42]
A
So if we really are on the precipice of that moment, then it's like, well, we have to be uniquely thoughtful. So to bring your whole worldview together and then we'll go into kernel, it's hey, because that's so real. And oh, by the way, it all starts with this food. Which is why we began the episode here. Because you have to change your biology in order to change your frame of reference, in order to see this moment clearly. Enough. But now this moment is very real. And we have to find a way to align our goals internally, interpersonally, and with artificial intelligence.
- [98:20]
B
Well said.
- [98:23]
A
I have the chills because I'm worried that you're right and that this is a really big, complicated thing. But how true to how I've experienced life, that it all begins with food.
- [98:35]
B
Okay, Colonel, start just one thing on yours. The whole thing is basically, something big is happening. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could cooperate? That's it.
- [98:50]
A
And to cooperate, I need to help you with your biology.
- [98:53]
B
In order for us to cooperate, we need to cooperate within ourselves and then cooperate with each other and cooperate with our. This new form of intelligence. And we. To cooperate with planet Earth. We need to cooperate to move forward. And that's. If you look at the world and you measure the acrimony and the violence and the hate, you know, like, yes, things are moving along, but could we do a better job? And so really boil the whole thing down? Yes. Like, can we figure out systems of cooperation?
- [99:27]
A
Okay, I took down a quote, but I turned my phone off, so I'm gonna have to paraphrase it. This is you. It goes something like this. I can't imagine a world in which, in, I think it was 50 years, in 50 years from now that humans are relevant if they can't learn to read and write in the language of the brain. You didn't say language of the brain, but neurology or something like that. What do you mean by that? And how is kernel helping to address that?
- [100:00]
B
In the same way that blueprint makes maintaining perfect diet an engineering discipline. So we're not. We're trying to avoid guesswork. We're trying to avoid people riffing on the spot. We're trying to say we want as good of data as we can from as many data points as we can. We want to look at evidence, we want protocol. I'm suggesting it might make sense to do the same thing with our mind, the wellness of our mind. And so when you buy an appliance, you don't think about whether it's going to fit through your door, you just assume it will and you don't think about it. And we do all kinds of things every day where we just do something because we assume that it's just going to work in society. So society builds itself according to engineering standards. We figure out the size of a door, then appliances are built for that size, and all the above. We currently have few ways to build engineering standards around our own mental well being, because we don't have measurement and so we have a cognition crisis in the world today with mental health. And we have, as a way of measurement, we have our feelings to express, but we don't have good ways to measure the brain frequently with high resolution. And it leaves us with this huge blind spot. So how much social media is good for the brain? How much social interaction is good for the brain? What happens when someone does ketamine or to the brain over a 30 day time period? What happens when someone does an SSRI? What happens when. And fill in that blank with hundreds of examples. We don't have good examples, we don't have good data. So the technology to image the brain, gold standard fmri, but it's too big and too expensive. It's a multi million dollar machine room size system. On the lower end you have eeg, which is easier to do, but it's not good enough. So there's this huge gaping hole which is why none of us measure our brains on a regular basis. And so the idea with kernels, we've built this helmet that can measure your brain, it looks at your cortex and we can answer questions. So for example, I did ketamine while wearing this brain device, flow.
- [102:16]
A
Interesting.
- [102:17]
B
And we looked at my brain.
- [102:18]
A
Why ketamine?
- [102:18]
B
Of all the drugs it was the fastest path to do because we could do it in healthy participants if we did something like psilocybin or mdma. We had to set up a trial and so this is a way for us to do it quickly. But we wanted to pose the question, what happens in the brain when someone does ketamine? And so I measured my brain every day for five days. Then I measured it. When I did ketamine, I had a 68 milligram intramuscular dose according to an FDA recipe. And then I measured my brain for 30 days after. And we now have data showing what happened in my brain over a 35 day time period when I did ketamine. And it helps baseline. So what we show from the study is a 15 person study that a person's response to ketamine predicted their depressive symptoms a week later, their response to ketamine.
- [103:07]
A
So not taking it or not taking
- [103:09]
B
it, how they responded, they're actually the, the amplitude of their response. So actually how they responded to ketamine predicted their depressive symptoms a week later.
- [103:17]
A
Meaning if you respond, define, responded like positively, what was the data point?
- [103:22]
B
Just meaning like the, the signatures of the brain response that we recorded.
- [103:26]
A
So the type of signature, how universal is this?
- [103:29]
B
Like for Example think of, of how carrots create a response in you if you're glycemic. Yep. So same thing, a ketamine go. Someone experiences ketamine, everyone has a varied response. And so what you're trying to solve with ketamine is who is it going to work on? How well is it working? How many doses do they need? At what frequency?
- [103:48]
A
For depression.
- [103:49]
B
Yeah. Or for anything else ketamine could be used for. But you're basically trying to figure out just like, okay, so think of kernel like a blood glucose monitor. You put that on and you're trialing certain foods like when I eat grapes, spikes, carrots spike when I eat this. And you're creating this intuition of what happens to your body when you have these foods. And you're trying to.
- [104:08]
A
You guys, have you created an AI algorithm that says these brain patterns or brain states. I'm not sure how you think about it, but are these brain patterns or brain states are. They are good and these other ones are bad. And so you took ketamine and you now four days later are in good brain activity versus somebody who took it and respond to the degree that we would want them to respond. And they are now in bad, negative, suboptimal. Again, not sure what words you would use. Brain patterns. Is that how you're thinking of it?
- [104:40]
B
I mean the language of the discipline is not yet to a good and bad state. There are observations about networks and how they operate. And so it's still an emergent area, but you can tease out what are the defining patterns of a person's experience.
- [104:54]
A
So we know what depression looks like.
- [104:56]
B
Yeah, starting to get, exactly. To get patterns of, you know, these things. And again the science is emerging. But just to basically say we can acquire patterns of the brain that give us insight to these basic questions. Should a person do ketamine, mdma, an ssri, breath work, nothing. Blank, blank, blank, blank. We don't know. And should they do one of these or 10 of these? And how do you manage the markers? And should they. They eliminate social media from their daily routines and should they. We just have no idea how to modulate the well being of our brain.
- [105:30]
A
How good is the reading? So I've seen the video of it looks really cool, but I don't. Is that like feeling micro bumps through mittens or are we like really like able to, to get a good read? How, how good is the helmet? That's the question. Question.
- [105:49]
B
It's better than what we have right now, which is nothing. And so another study we did which will help build intuition is we looked at alcohol dose response. So we said we had a placebo, a low and then a medium alcohol. And so we found that when people had a low alcohol response, they became impaired. When they did behavioral measures that you couldn't identify their impairment, they behaved as if they were not impaired. We can see the impairment in the brain because the brain compensates for the impairment and the person performs as well in the task as though they were not impaired. But we can see it when they became sufficiently intoxicated, they became so impaired, the brain lost its ability to make up for it. So this is the same thing that happens in cognitive decline. So cognitive decline starts many, many years before the behavioral measures happen because the brain is compensating for the decline.
- [106:45]
A
Yeah.
- [106:46]
B
And so this whole idea is we can record things in the brain that we are unaware of. And so in this case, when people were self reporting whether or not they were intoxicated, you know, impaired, it was wildly inaccurate. And so the fundamental question is, can I rely upon my self report, my ability to feel what I'm experiencing reported? Is that an accurate representation of what is going on in my brain? No. So if we can't rely upon that and we can't measure it, we're flying blind in society as we build systems of mental wellness which like you look at the world and it's like we're, I don't know if we're doing great, I don't know if we give ourselves a five star review in the mental wellness of society. And so flow is meant to say we can record this brain activity and we can apply it to everything that will allow us to create intuitions and data and protocols. So it's basically blueprint but for the brain where you're taking this system of measurement and it gives scientists ways to measure their psychedelics, you know, as they develop these things, whether they want a. Because we could pick up a, a signature of whether someone is going through a altered state of conscious or not. It's something that could level up the way in which we fix things that are broken in the brain and improve things that are working.
- [108:11]
A
Are you guys using AI? Because this feels like I can use it. I can kick off all this data, but if I don't have something that's aggregating these patterns then, and not just aggregating them, but looking at them and associating them either with self reported feelings or something. But something has to make the correlation, right? Something has to tell me your HRV was too flat and by the way, you want this much variability as optimal. Do you guys have that kind of read on the data?
- [108:43]
B
So that is exactly what we're trying to do right now. So we are looking at basically an HRV for the brain. So we're looking at the default mode network, which is a big circuit in the brain that has. It's very studied. And when the default mode network is poorly regulated, sometimes bad things happen. Adhd, depression, anxiety. When the default mode network is well regulated, a person's in a better state. Now, there's a lot of studies showing the power of looking for default mode network. And what we've done is we've built a system where you put flow in your head, you look at a screen and you're training your default mode network. So it's almost, I think about like trying to control move your ear. You're not quite sure how to do it. You just like think about it long enough and eventually you find the muscle and it's like, ah, there it is. I can now move my ear.
- [109:32]
A
So you're using it like biofeedback, neurofeedback. Whoa.
- [109:36]
B
And so it's basically think of it like you.
- [109:38]
A
So I can watch it live.
- [109:39]
B
Exactly. You watch us, you watch a screen. So we all know going to the gym to work out biceps or work out the legs, you do exercises that get stronger. It helps you in everything, you know, in life, life, we're saying you can basically go to the gym for a brain muscle that's really important to everything, managing things that have gone wrong, improving things that are going well, preparing yourself for adversity. So there's a lot of studies showing the promise. It's not yet beyond reproach that it's there. We're trying to prove the science, but that's what we think is potentially the most interesting thing right now is can we isolate the default mode network? Can people wear this and can they do neurofeedback looking at your screen and learn how to build this muscle? And if they do that, I mean, for example, could soldiers do this so that when they encountered something that was PTSD inducing, it'd be less of a blow? Or could you do something where when a person's in a negative state of anxiety, depression, that instead of taking a pill to try to address it, they build the muscle to counteract it? And it's an active thing they do. And so we're excited about this. Our first data is coming out in a month of where we're at. We need to answer Questions like, how many people can successfully do this over how many sessions? How long does it last? So it's still emergent. But we like the idea as a practical demonstration of build a muscle in your brain that helps you resilient. Be resilient to bad things and improve the things that are already working well.
- [111:09]
A
Dude. So I used. I had a very debilitating back problem at one point where it was technically my scalenes. So I, I couldn't even sit or stand. Like everything was uncomfortable. I'm not a crier, but it made me want to cry. Like I had this sense of like, I. If I could just weep about this, that it would. I would somehow have emotional catharsis that I needed it. Was that like all encompassing in my life. Oh, God, it was miserable. And I of course thought, well, it's. It's a problem here with my scalenes or it's a problem with my neck. As it turned out. It's the mid of my back had a weakness. And when I went to see a physiotherapist, he was like, oh, I know exactly what your problem is. I see this a lot. Like, you need to fire these muscles. And I'm like, I am firing those muscles. He's like, no, you're not. And he was like touching me. He's like, you're not firing them at all. He's like, I'm gonna give you a biofeedback device. I'm gonna put, you know, a little electrode or whatever on that part of the muscle.
- [112:06]
B
Yeah.
- [112:06]
A
And this device is going to beep whenever you actually fire that. And it was life changing.
- [112:15]
B
Yeah.
- [112:16]
A
So I finally learned. I was like, I was like, oh my God. And so by being able to hear it, I completely eliminated my scaling problem because I was able to finally figure out how to work out those muscles. Was just mind blowing. So as somebody who has struggled with profound anxiety, the thought of being like, ah, I know what scenarios. Put the helmet on and be like, there's calm, dude. That could be. I've heard you. We're not sure yet. Lots left to do. But if that works, anything like the biofeedback that I got on my back. That's life changing.
- [112:50]
B
Yeah. I love your experience. That's exactly what we're trying to do.
- [112:55]
A
So how does one encounter that now? Is it. They have to come to your clinic and it's all sort of. Of pre commercialization.
- [113:02]
B
Yeah. We're actually getting volunteers right now to do our preliminary study. Then we'll do a second study based upon Those results. So, yeah, you can come to Col. I think we have it on the website. You can sign up. And then if we can show compelling results, we want to get this to clinics all over the world and we want this to be in people's homes. Because if, like you're saying, if you can in fact focus on this brain muscle and it has this connection to a whole bunch of things, it could be meaningfully impactful in a lot of people's lives. And it's not just that the device doesn't just work for the default mode network, it's just the network we chose. Right. There's all kinds of networks in the brain we could, we could train it on. And so it's just the very beginning. And then once you have the data and the networks, you start playing with interventions like, okay, so now you're doing this exercise, now you can add these other things. Does it help? Does it hurt? Does it accelerate? And that's really. We're trying to kick off an enthusiastic improvement of our mental well being across the board. So not just address things that are bad, like adhd, depression and so on, but also performance, concentration and imagination and creativity and resilience. So it's full spectrum. And so the technology is built. Took us five years to build. People suggested to us is impossible. We did it successfully. The team's remarkable. And now we need to prove the science in this window of time we have, which is a big task. We chose an impossibly hard thing to do with this company.
- [114:36]
A
Yes, you did. Now, what is the hard part? Is it getting the light through the skull? Is it making sense of the. Which I guess for people that don't know, that's what you guys are doing, using photons, right? You shoot them into the brain. It's exactly, exactly the way the sun works. So nobody should be freaked out. Sun penetrates you far deeper than people realize. So you're zapping photons in people's brains. Some of them bounce back out. The ones that come back out tells us what we need to know about what's going on. Is that the hard part? Like, what's the, what's the impossibly hard part?
- [115:06]
B
Man, it's like everything's hard. Yeah, it's basically, it's a pulse oximeter. So a lot of people became familiar with pulse oximeters during COVID You put this on your finger, you see a red glow and it tells you your heart rate and your blood oxygenation. And so it's just a pulse. Pulse oximeter for the brain. Very safe. Like you said, you get less light in your brain than we going out in the sun. And by looking, by doing that, you tease out patterns of the brain so you can see how the brain is firing, which regions are talking to which regions. So you have this really beautiful matrix of data. And so it's like. Yeah, it's just, it's the. Once you have a device that can acquire information like so a blood glucose monitor you wear or like a genome sequence or your microbiome sequence or a blood panel, whenever you have these measurements, you get. It creates an entire ecosystem that surround itself with a measurement and they build around it. And right now we're flying blind to brain. So it is trying to create a formal data driven discipline around our mental well being. It's the only device in the world that has the ability that is low cost enough enough high quality enough and easy enough to use. There's nothing else that can do it. And so we need to show this can punch through. We have not done that yet. We're close, but now we're just playing in the realm of science and you just can't predict science. We don't know when we're going to reach a threshold to say it's there now. It could be in a month, it could be three months, it could be 12 months. We don't know. And that's the hard thing about deep tech is you, you can't engineer science in a way that is predictable.
- [116:41]
A
Yeah. And you seem to really be following the data, which I really appreciate. So using the technology on a daily basis to find some sort of ability to use that muscle in order to shape the way that you feel is one of those things that man, that could really be transformational. But I want to know why did you go down that path? So I know you and Elon spoke early on in the process and you were originally about implantation into the brain. And so tying this back into your quote, if humans don't figure out how to write, read and write in the language of neurology, they're going to be irrelevant. Why did you give up on what seems like it would be way more like you'd be able to do far more manipulation if you actually get inside the brain.
- [117:34]
B
Yeah. My analysis was that building an implantable product takes around 10 years. Ish. Once you build it, go through trials, get the clinical outcomes, it's like 10 years to go to market thereabouts. And then you start the rollout process. You're going through the healthcare system and insurance companies It's a long, slow process. Now it has its place and it's done. There's over 300,000 people who have implants today.
- [118:01]
A
Whoa.
- [118:02]
B
So it's been wildly successful to treat things like, like Parkinson's and other things. It has shortcomings in that it's not scaled very easily. You know, you're dealing with surgery and you're dealing with neurosurgeons of like how many people can actually do it. At the time, nobody thought there was a non invasive path to do it. If you just surveyed the world and sampled people, everyone would have told you no path. And so we spent two years looking at every possible path we could look at had according to the laws of physics and with everything. And we found a path that we could just barely see through. Everything had to work to make that happen. And we threaded the needle and we succeeded. We, we built the technology, it works. We have peer review publications on this and it, it does it. And so my bet was the time scale it takes to develop an implantable product is going to be a hard one because the other technologies will come and compete with it, will be less invasive, will come along at a faster clip than this development process. It'll be better to be a non invasive for the short term. And then secondarily is when you write to the brain, you of course can stimulate. So if you're implanted in the brain, you can stimulate a region of the brain, but there's 100 billion neurons. You're not going to stimulate all hundred billion neurons. Whereas you and I right now are stimulating each other's neurons through audio visual input. So if you have a device on the head, you have the full human sensory system for the inputs. So you can write to the brain through all those modalities. And that's what I wanted to try to trade off is could you build a device that could be scaled across the globe, Standardize the measurement of our brains, give every scientific discipline the ability to use this data to improve their discipline lens to improve the human condition. And then you have all these modalities to write to the brain. So could you start a new era of human well being in our minds with this basic measurement of the brain? And that was the bet we've made. And so we succeeded in the first part of the technology build. We now have to show our first market demonstration. So the investors say we're good. You know, like we've, I've poured heart and soul, I've put over, I've put almost $60 million into this company, you know, taking it through Covid and the financial crisis, like, it's just been. It's been unbelievably hard to build.
- [120:32]
A
It's a pretty big challenge before you.
- [120:35]
B
And I'd say like that. Which makes these results on blueprint that much more impressive. If you look at the amount of stress that I felt in building this startup with these difficulties and still achieve these results. I mean, like, I'm not.
- [120:56]
A
You'd be 19 if you weren't a founder.
- [120:58]
B
I mean, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not just chilling at home all day. Like, you know, like, building a startup is an absolute full contact sport. I mean, it is brutal. And then this company is just brutal. And so, yeah, it's been fun to do both. Kernel's been extraordinarily taxing. You know, it's. It's tough, I bet.
- [121:16]
A
Brother, what a joy this has been. Where can people follow you?
- [121:20]
B
Twitter. I mostly hang out and have conversation there. Brian Underscore Johnson.
- [121:24]
A
Awesome. I'll be coming at you hot and fast on Twitter. Man, this was so fun, guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Peace.
- [121:34]
B
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A
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B
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