Bryan Johnson Wants To Live Forever

True or false?

You, Bryan Johnson, the man sitting across from me,

one day, at some point,

as of yet undefined in the future, you will die.

False.

Tell me more.

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[upbeat music]

Death has always been inevitable.

And so we have made all these preparations,

like, we talk about immortality

in professional achievement,

we talk about a life after death.

And so they are the ways

that we've dealt with it up to this point.

And now we have this real possibility

of extending our lifespans to some unknown horizon.

So that's extension.

But we also have the ability to begin moving ourself

to computational systems.

So currently, in a very crude form,

I have a Bryan AI

that has digested everything I've ever said all by-

You do currently have this?

[Bryan] I do. Okay.

Yeah, and so as the technology gets better,

and it gets trained on more of my thoughts,

it's only going to improve.

I think all of us are in a time and place

where we will be immortal to some degree.

Now, whether it's in this body,

whether it's in some kind of computational arrangement,

whether it's both, or a combination of both,

I think we've reached that point as a civilization.

And the reason I ask that, I mean maybe it's obvious,

but I'm trying to sort of understand

from what premise you are beginning, right?

Because you talk a lot about living a healthier life,

extending the human lifespan.

What I was curious about is sort of how far you see

that possibly going,

and sort of whether you accept the notion for yourself

that, at some point, you, Bryan,

your biological material, right,

everything that makes you you will be buried,

will be cremated, there will be a will,

there will be an estate plan, right?

That all of those things

that go into the way we plan for death,

like, are those things that you contemplate

and that you plan for or not?

Do you have a will?

I do.

Yeah. Good.

I do.

I have a will,

and I've made all the practical decisions on,

if I am in a comatose state, what are my instructions?

So I have gone through all those preparations.

The future is always present.

It's just a question if you can see it or not.

And I think this moment is probably the biggest test

of trying to piece together what is really happening

with the speed at which AI is improving

and what does that mean

for how it's going to change everything we understand

about reality.

And many people are poking at this,

like, trying to make their predictions

and organize the world to the best they can.

And I'm basically saying

that we are headed towards this event horizon

where AI is now improving at a certain speed.

In a few years time, we probably can't see past that point.

We don't know what happens.

And as technology gets better and better,

the most prized asset is going to be existence.

That immortality, as we thought about it before,

through accomplishment or through offspring

or any other, or the afterlife,

will be devalued relative to existing.

And that's my fundamental bet on the future,

is that's where we're headed.

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Let me ask you this,

if there was a world where, let's say, in five years,

you could upload Bryan...

Yeah.

Into an AI, right,

an AI Bryan is, yeah, pretty much as good as Bryan Bryan.

Does Bryan Bryan eat the cheeseburger?

Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, does some of this, does sort of this, you know,

from everything I can tell,

it is every waking minute of your life,

and it is every sleeping minute of your life

sort of committed to this one singular goal, right?

That is your entire existence.

Yeah.

Have you contemplated whether or not that would change?

Yeah.

I mean, okay, so let's think about your question

in a different way.

I could say about people today

that most people spend every waking moment pursuing wealth.

The time they're not spending pursuing wealth,

they're pursuing some sort of status or prestige,

you know, socially signaling to their community,

their tribe of some power,

or something to that effect.

Now, I could certainly say that

and say that's a malaise that has everybody locked in

to a singular game that is consuming

all of their resources and all their attention.

And what I'm saying is I'm devoting every second

of my existence to existence.

When you die, inevitably, that's when how it has been,

it makes sense to pursue power and status.

That makes sense.

When you give birth to superintelligence

and now you can start extending lifespans

to some unknown horizon, 200 years, a thousand years,

10,000 years, we don't know, millions of years,

we don't know.

When that happens, the entire game of humanity shifts

from that singular focus

on wealth accumulation and status and prestige to existence.

Now embedded in existence,

we may still play games

of power, prestige, status, et cetera,

but it'll be conditioned of that existence itself

is the highest virtue.

That's the shift that's starting to happen right now.

So let me pivot over then to the conversation

about your existence.

So, you know, you've talked at length,

you talked a great deal.

You are very much out there in the public eye

talking about a day in the life of Bryan.

Yeah.

Walk us through a day in the life right now.

I know that the protocol changes,

that you're adapting it, modifying it.

What does it look like today?

Take us through a typical day

for you. Yeah.

It may be helpful to have the backdrop

that what I do is I'm saying

that existence is the highest virtue.

And if you accept that premise, then I say on a given day,

I want to identify every single thing

that could kill me or make me die.

And then I want to identify every single thing

that could help me make me live.

Okay.

And so let's just say I live in California

and the life expectancy is around 79 years.

So if I behave like a typical human,

I probably have a life expectancy to 79 years of age.

Now, if I identify things

that could potentially shorten that,

like smoking, drinking, breathing bad air,

drinking toxic water, you know, not getting exercise,

et cetera, then if I think of good things

that could extend my life even further

to, you know, currently the cap is, like, 120,

I can say, well, I'm gonna eat healthy foods and exercise.

And so my daily protocol

is basically trying to identify at a molecular level

every single thing that either extends or shortens life, so.

I mean, I'm laughing because your daily protocol,

I will be honest, it's much more elaborate

than eating well and exercising.

It was not just eating well and exercising,

like, you'd have a pretty chill time.

Yeah.

You're not necessarily having, like, the chillest time.

[Bryan] Yeah.

Tell us a little bit

about that. Okay, cool.

So, my everyday begins the night before.

[Katie] Okay.

So I have built my entire existence around sleep.

I mean, I like that. You have to sleep.

Yeah. How well do you sleep?

Well, we're gonna get to that.

Can you tell me how many hours a night you sleep?

Eight hours and 34 minutes is my 12-month average.

My sleep profile is that of a early 20 something.

I've worked very hard at this.

So it's eight hours and 34 minutes.

I get over four hours of restorative sleep.

That's deep sleep and REM, where the body cleans itself

and repairs and rebuilds.

I'm up less than one time per night on average.

I go to bed, within two to three minutes,

I have my head hitting the pillow,

and I have 94% sleep efficiency.

So once I lay down

and my stress score during the night,

like, typically, most people's sleep signal

is like a rocky chart of a stock market, you know,

and mine is just flat, like my consciousness is at peace.

And so those are the stats you wanna see

for a perfect night's sleep.

But to do that, you can't just show up

and just say, I'm gonna put my head on the pillow

and fall asleep.

You kind of have to build

your whole life system around that.

So my day begins the night before when I go to sleep,

and then I'll wake up around 4:30 or 5:00.

Okay.

And then I'll do, for the next four hours,

I will have a series of measurements and therapies.

I get outta bed, I try to, within one minute of waking.

Within one minute?

Yeah, I try to avoid the 10 more minutes

or pull the phone up and start scrolling.

I get up, I will get light in my eyes

within a few minutes of waking.

So I wake up before the sun,

so it's 10,000 lux light in my eye for a few minutes.

I'll take my inner ear temperature.

I measure my temperature every single day.

One thing we've noticed is,

as I've done this for the past four years,

my body temperature has dropped

almost four degrees Fahrenheit, a massive drop.

So now it's around 94 degrees Fahrenheit each morning.

That's down from 98.7.

So there's good evidence that species

with a lower basal temperature live longer.

I will then put a serum on my hair or my scalp,

rub my scalp with a silicone scrubber for hair growth.

I'll take a quick shower and then I'll come downstairs.

I have a morning drink.

I will eat something, I'll work out for an hour.

I'll do red light therapy.

I'll then do a hyperbaric oxygen therapy, then some sauna,

then I'll rinse off and then I'm ready for work.

Okay. So that is quite a regimen.

And you stop eating at?

Around noon.

Around noon.

Yeah, and then, like, also in the morning,

I'll typically do, like, a few tests.

Like today, I did three tests.

There's so much to this protocol,

there's sort of so much data that you've accumulated.

Really quickly, like, rapid fire,

not to put you on the spot, but I am,

ask me a couple really quick questions about myself.

[Bryan] Yeah. And then tell me

how am I doing in the Bryan Johnson universe.

[Bryan] Great. Go.

What is your resting heart rate?

48 beats per minute.

[Bryan] That's fantastic. Thank you.

What is your most recent inflammation,

your body inflammation blood test result, your hs-CRP?

Bryan, I have no idea.

What is your blood glucose level?

A good one.

Okay. Okay, good.

How many continuous pushups can you do?

Probably, like, 10. Okay.

If you stood on one foot and closed your eye,

how long could you stay standing?

A minute.

Yeah. A minute?

[Katie] Yes. A minute.

That's very good.

Oh, yeah.

[Bryan] Okay. Good. Try me.

[Bryan] Okay. Not right now.

[Bryan laughs]

Yeah. What is the length of your telomeres?

I don't know.

Okay. What are your omega levels?

[Bryan] I don't know. Okay.

These are very involved questions.

What is your speed of aging?

Well, according to the skin test I took earlier, Bryan,

it was 1.9.

Yeah. Yeah.

So tell me, okay, so I didn't learn very much.

I think what I learned is that there's a lot more to this

than do you drink, do you smoke, do you exercise,

do you sleep enough?

That's what I thought you were gonna ask me.

I do not know the length of my telomeres.

[Bryan] Yeah. But apparently,

that's something someone can find out.

Yeah, so the reason I ask you those questions

is because I can pose a question, like, How's your sleep?

[Katie] Yeah.

And you can give me a generic answer like,

I sleep great or I feel great.

But if you look at the actual data of your telomere length,

it tells me the story of your overall health.

The same with your blood glucose levels.

The same with your speed of aging.

These are readouts of your biology that just say,

This is me in raw form.

There's no storytelling, there's no subjective assessment.

It's just the data.

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You were in a Netflix documentary earlier this year.

You talked a lot sort of about your history

in that documentary, right?

You were a successful entrepreneur.

You felt like you weren't living your healthiest life.

You parted ways with Mormonism.

You were Mormon for a very, very long time.

You got divorced, right?

You went through all of these seismic life changes.

And a lot of people make major changes

to their lives, right?

They hit a wall with stress or in a marriage

or with their religion, right?

Exceedingly few people.

Very, very, very, very, very few people

go as far as you have.

What is it that pushed you past the point

that the vast majority of people would go?

I'm really motivated by having read

various biographies of history

and people throughout time and place,

in their moment, they were able to identify

the most far ranging ambition identifiable.

You couldn't have sequenced the genome in the year 1800.

The technology wasn't present.

You could have had that ambition in the early 90s.

And that they did, someone did.

And they actually sequenced the genome.

And so in any given time point,

a new emergent possibility is present.

Then there's two questions that arise.

One is, what is it?

And two is, will somebody do it?

And in the year 2021 was the first time in human history

where a person could say,

We are the first generation who won't die

and not be ridiculed.

It just became possible.

And I saw that and I thought this is a moment,

like, when it comes together where you see it

and you can do something about it.

And so I wanted to try to capture what this moment is.

Hmm.

Now, if you talk to people who know me,

if you asked my husband, right, poor guy,

they would say that I'm a very controlled person, right?

Like, I wake up at the same time every day.

I do the same exercise.

I tend to eat a lot of very similar foods.

Like, there's a lot of routine and structure to my life.

I will say, when I read about you,

when I watch, you know, videos about you,

when I hear about the way you live,

I, as a very controlled person,

am astounded at how controlled your life is.

Have you always been that way?

Well, like, when you think back 20 years ago, 30 years ago,

six years ago, was control always something

that was a defining characteristic?

Mm-hmm.

I suppose it's the difference

between being called a germophobe and being germ-aware

and how people label your methodical building

of life systems as control.

And I would reframe it and say,

you're actually a really smart engineer.

That you realize that the metabolic cost

of you having to make these decisions every single day

spur of the moment is so expensive to you

that you are wise and say, You know what?

It's not worth it.

I'm just going to systematize this

so that my brain can then be allocated

towards other higher level thinking.

So I would applaud your systems

and say like, you actually are very clever

in the way you've structured your life.

And so I kind of feel the same way

that why would I fight these daily miscellaneous,

ultimately irrelevant decisions

on a moment-to-moment basis when they can just be automated?

And I'd rather spend my scarce brain capacity

thinking of higher level things

about the future of the human race, for example,

than I would, like, what am I gonna have for breakfast?

And so I think historically,

I've very much thought like an engineer my entire life.

You take a given system, you dissect its parts,

you reassemble it into some kind of constructive

and positive manner.

But I'd say, like, what I do now

is definitely beyond what I did before.

But what I'm trying to demonstrate is Bryan Johnson in 2025

is a normal dude in 2030.

It's just like our-

In five years?

In five years, that the apparatus around us

that things will just be automated,

health will be so much more automated than we are now.

That the weirdness of who I am

or what I am will be forgotten.

People will remember in that context,

but when they look at me, they'll just be like,

Oh, yeah, like, he just was ahead of the time.

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I was getting ready for this interview.

I was reading, sort of reading up on you.

And in 2023, I was leading the newsroom at VICE.

And we actually published a story on you.

And you talked in that story about your body image

from decades ago.

You talked about how hard it was at that time

to control yourself around food at night, right?

You talked about how you now often go to bed hungry,

that you have learned to find joy in that.

And in reading that and just in very good faith,

I'm being very transparent with you here,

if I stripped your name out of that,

and I just looked at a bulleted list of those comments,

you know, that sounds a lot like me 20 years ago

with a very serious eating disorder.

I mean, there was a period in my life where I was very sick,

and I was very controlled

and everything that went into my mouth, right?

And it wasn't about the number on the scale,

it wasn't about how I looked.

It was about being able to systematize

and control my environment.

And, you know, I am not a doctor, I'm not a psychiatrist.

I think if you were to ask some doctors and psychiatrists,

and I'm sure this criticism has been leveled before,

these comments have been made before,

they would say, Well, that sounds like disordered behavior.

That sounds like an eating disorder.

Yeah.

Does that resonate with you?

I mean, how do you respond to that?

And I think particularly,

when we're talking not just about you,

but about you as a public figure

advocating for a certain approach to health,

do you have concerns about sort of

what you are advocating for and sort of what you are doing

and how that might be adopted

by sort of the population at large?

Yeah. Yeah.

Most people I know in America have an eating disorder.

I rarely meet somebody

who doesn't find themselves late in the evening powerless

to stop themselves from eating the ice cream or the cookies

or the chips or, you know,

whatever else they find in the pantry.

That is probably the most universal experience

shared among Americans in this moment.

And it probably has to do with a combination of,

it's culturally acceptable.

Our foods were scientifically,

methodically built to be addictive.

You just pull up an app

and, like, delivers to your house real time

whatever you want.

So I would say it's really more

of a widespread societal problem

that we have an addiction problem with food, our phones,

and, you know, our entertainment, our scrolling,

it's everywhere.

And so certainly,

I don't know if my addiction is more excessive

than other people's addictions,

or if it just weighted more towards food versus the phone.

But I'd say I'm probably pretty average

on a population level addiction scale.

Hmm, and so you have sort of taken that,

I guess, what used to manifest in one way,

which is sort of, like, an inability

to control what you were eating when you were eating it.

And you have adopted a new way of approaching it,

which is saying, I eat these things at these times,

and I sort of eliminate the variables,

I take the choice out of it,

and that is how I am going to manage

this part of my health.

Yeah, exactly.

And I guess more broadly,

it's kind of a cultural commentary

where I'm saying the most powerful forces in all of society,

corporations, are pointing their power

at getting you to be addicted to their thing.

Whether it's scrolling their app,

whether it's eating their food,

whether it's watching their show,

all their science, all their technology,

all their intelligence is pointed at you

and trying to get you to be addicted.

And what I was saying is, when you are addicted to anything,

it reduces your freedom and your agency,

they ultimately have you in a bind.

I don't want to be addicted to anything.

I wanna have agency and freedom over my existence

as much as possible.

And so that's what I'm trying to build.

And so I realize that people on the outside looking in,

they do take that approach

and say, He's working through his childhood trauma,

he's working through a food addiction.

I'm open to all those explanations.

Like, I would be the first person to be self-deprecating

and be like, This guy's got issues, unquestionably.

Also, in my interactions with others,

it is a very common phenomena

that humans struggle in modern society.

And I'm trying to offer an antidote

that I didn't have anybody,

not a single person in my life advocating for me

that I take care of my health.

Nobody.

It was work harder.

Like, I'm so proud of you for achieving this.

Like, didn't matter if I was ragged or depressed

or overweight, like, the direction went elsewhere

except for, Bryan, can I be a positive influence

in your life and encourage you to go to bed on time

and get some exercise?

So I'm really trying to play that role in society

where I'm saying, Look, this is a mess.

We are all a mess.

And can we be honest about the situation?

Even those who are accusing me of being addicted

and having a food eating disorder

or whatever the problem,

they themselves are equally shackled with addictions.

You're addicted to longevity.

Yeah.

There's probably no way of actually getting over addiction

other than controlling where your addiction is pointed.

I would agree with that.

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I wanna ask you about your fame.

You were sort of just talking about population-wide health,

and I think that one of the observations

that I have made as a journalist in the last several months,

since President Trump was elected

and inaugurated in late January,

is that to me with notoriety, with fame

comes a degree of responsibility, right?

Responsibility for what you say, how you say it,

when you speak up, when you choose not to.

I want to ask you about MAHA.

I wanna ask you about RFK Jr.

When President Trump won the election,

you congratulated him on social media

as did so many very high-profile business leaders.

You were photographed with RFK Jr.,

MAHA as sort of the tagline in the photo.

I'm really curious for your assessment

at this point in time of RFK Jr.

and the Trump administration vis-a-vis American health.

If I had to guess,

and I'll let you answer the question in a minute,

you know, I would suspect that there's a lot there

that someone in your position would like, right?

The idea of, you know, stripping additives outta food.

You know, we have also seen massive cuts

at federal health agencies.

We have seen already, you know, grants

with regards to cutting-edge research,

mRNA vaccines being a very early target.

We've seen a lot of sort of the very promising

sort of bleeding-edge medical research

that you have been able to adopt in your own life.

You know, really on the chopping block

in this administration,

I would really appreciate your assessment

of the Trump administration and RFK Jr.

as it pertains to public health,

which is, you know, in many ways,

the sort of premise of your entire operation here, right?

Which is really sort of educating the public

about how to live a healthier life.

Yeah.

How do you rate the administration so far?

Yeah.

I mean RFK is certainly not a status quo person.

I think you can say that,

yeah. Yeah.

And I think I would say

that the status quo in the U.S. is not working.

If you look at the data around the health of our citizenry,

it's embarrassingly bad.

We spend 1.8 times our peer countries in healthcare,

$13,000 per person versus, like, 6,000 or so

the other developed countries.

So we spend more and we get less.

And so whether RFK is the solution or not,

what we're doing is not working.

I'm open to change,

and I'm open to a variety of possibilities.

It's not to say that everything he's doing is correct,

but I do support the idea

that we definitely need to change,

because what we're doing now is not working.

Do you worry about medical research

being delayed, right, by years or decades,

if it is curtailed right now?

Yeah.

In these kinds of circumstances,

I'm not apprehensive of change.

Science always finds a way forward,

and progress always finds a way forward.

And so oftentimes, when one path is discontinued,

everybody thinks it's an end of something,

but actually that change produces a new path

that people didn't anticipate.

So, no, I support the creative destruction.

I think it could have some positive outcomes.

Clearly, there could be some drawbacks,

like, when you break things like this, it goes both ways.

It's not, like, a clean win or loss.

But I'm generally in favor of new ideas or new approach.

Because I mean, I think, what would be cool

is if we as a country said

we want to be number one in the entire world

for life expectancy, that is a very clear goal.

And then once you back into it

and you look at all the practical things

that determine that,

but that to me would be like a something

we all can say we agree,

like living long, healthy lives

and not, you know, long health spans

would be an admirable goal for entire country.

So I would like more unification on this

that we actually have a big goal to work towards,

versus now it's, like, trying to find the evil doers

and knocking them out, which is fine,

but also we don't really have a positive goal.

Who are the evil doers that we're knocking out?

I mean, for example, like, you see the red dye.

A lot of the ingredients we have in this country

are not used because they promote health.

They're used because they create addiction,

or they're low cost.

And so I think there's an acceptance of selling death.

And we just say, That's capitalism.

What else are we gonna do?

What is a life well lived for Bryan Johnson?

Not dying.

People evaluate my life

and they say, Bro is so busy trying to not die,

he ain't living.

They do say that.

And then next they say,

I wish he would get hit by a bus.

Like, they're so upset.

[Katie] Have not seen them say that, but I believe it.

It's, like, LOL, can't wait till he gets hit by a bus.

But they're so upset for a variety of reasons,

whether they can't make the change themself,

whether they feel like they've been wronged,

whether they don't have the willpower.

And I get it, I've been there,

so I'm not blaming them,

but they go through this response

where they're having to reconcile

that they are not the person they wanna be

and someone else is doing something that they're not.

And so they're going through some kind

of reconciliation process.

They go through the other five stages of grief.

And so I understand why people

have a such a strong reaction to me.

I get it.

Like, I've been there before,

and it's a very helpless feeling.

Bryan, thank you for your time.

I'm really glad you came.

Yeah, it's nice to be hanging out with you.

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