Biological Age Reversal With Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. Johnson sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800m in 2013. Since then, he's been investing millions to slow and reverse his aging. In 2021, he set a World Record by reducing his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months. Johnson publicly blogs, sharing at no cost his protocols, data and learnings for others to implement and improve upon.  Project Blueprint, is an endeavor to achieve humanity and earth scale cooperation starting within Self. 

In 2023, Johnson launched Rejuvenation Olympics, an epigenetic leaderboard assessing one's speed of aging. Of the 1,750 people who have been using this state-of-the-art aging algorithm to track their progress longitudinally, Johnson ranks #1 in speed of age reduction. 

Johnson is also the founder & CEO of Kernel, creator of the world’s first mainstream non-invasive neuroimaging system; and OS Fund, where he invested $100M in the predictable engineering of atoms, molecules, and organisms into companies now collectively valued over $6B. He is an outdoor adventure enthusiast, pilot, and author of children’s books, Code 7 and The Proto Project.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00.330] - Kayla Barnes

Brian, it's such a pleasure to have you here with me today.

[00:00:03.200] - Bryan Johnson

Thank you for having me.

[00:00:04.770] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. I mean, your story has really taken the Internet by storm, and I absolutely love it because as I was mentioning, and my followers all know that I run a precision medicine clinic. But you're really bringing longevity to the forefront in a very studied, calculated way.

[00:00:23.440] - Bryan Johnson

I'm glad that's your perception and there's been a lot of different perspectives.

[00:00:28.810] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah. And actually, when we get to talking about discipline, we'll definitely talk about that because I can relate with you. I don't know how many times people have asked me if my life is extremely boring. And for me, I actually think it's the most rewarding. I love it. I mean, I have a mentality of I get to not I have to. So I can kind of feel that through what you're doing.

[00:00:55.430] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. I would imagine if you actually measured my biochemical reactions as they represent joy and fulfillment and happiness, I would wager that I am higher than I ever have been in my entire life. And if I think about my previous life, even though I engaged in a lot of the indulgences that people associate with happiness, eating late night drinks with friends or a pizza party or name your vice or thing, that your dopamine becomes so out of whack, you become doled to life. It becomes more of a ritual and ritualistic thing of trying to find your next hit. But I would wager that I do legitimately feel greater joy and contentment than I ever have in my entire life, which, again, is exactly the opposite of what people's intuitions are.

[00:01:48.610] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. And as a side note, you know what would be a great experiment for you? So we do a test called the neural zuma, and it actually measures your levels of dopamine and serotonin throughout the day. You could actually show people your results and that you are happier. Now, you won't have your past baseline, but you can definitely document how much joy and dopamine that you're getting. I think that would be a really cool experiment as well, because I totally agree.

[00:02:17.480] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. Letting the data speak.

[00:02:19.260] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah. We've been very conditioned to believe that having fun is having drinks with friends. Right. That's how you relax. That's how you reward yourself. Or we've created a world in which a cheat meal is something that you receive for perceived efforts. Right. And what you're doing and what I've been doing for years and people thought I was so boring, is that you're turning that on its head. And the reward is feeling great. The reward is sleeping well. The reward is having a physique that you can be proud of, and that makes sense for longevity. So very exciting.

[00:02:59.220] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. It's funny. I do these dinners, these brunches at my house, blueprint brunch. We call it the First Supper. And we get a group of people together that we've had some extraordinary people entrepreneurs, physicists, scientists, astronauts, musicians of all types. And it's a two and a half hour brunch and I walk people through the entirety of Blueprint. We begin looking at health and wellness and we talk through the future of being human. And I find it to be most interesting in that just like Chat, GPT is basically looking at the next word that has the highest statistical likelihood of being next in a given sentence, and it's just going from word to word as it constructs its text. I find the same thing to be true as Blueprint is being discussed, that I've done so many of these branches now, I can predict with 90% plus accuracy the responses that people are going to have with a certain prompt. And if we take a moment and we contemplate that the majority of our responses in life are in fact knee jerk reactions and statistical likelihoods and if we pause and take a breath and try to look things in their true state, we can oftentimes get past these knee jerk reactions which really mask the more worthwhile contemplations and insights.

[00:04:29.990] - Kayla Barnes

I think you really hit the nail on the head with that. Joe Dispenser talks a lot about this in his work, but by the time we're about 25 to 30 years old, we are just a finite set of reactions. It's like a software program. You say cold therapy and the immediate response is going to be, oh, no, I can't do that. That sounds miserable. Instead, if you take some time and you ask yourself, is that really true? Is the statement I just made about this thing really true? You can usually turn that around. So conversation about these things is everything and it's also leading by example, which is what you're doing. You're saying, here's the hard data. This is what I've been able to accomplish, this is how I'm doing it. And it's so exciting because we live in a world where I want to get to how you started this, but maybe we'll talk about this first. What you're doing is so incredibly disciplined and I've always known that discipline equals freedom. Jacob Wilmick says this, but how do you maintain people? Look at this. I have it pulled up on my iPad here and it's so regimented down to half of a Brazil nut.

[00:05:37.830] - Kayla Barnes

So how did you develop this level of discipline? Because I think if people could just harness a little bit of that, we would see monumental change in the health of our society.

[00:05:48.990] - Bryan Johnson

It's built upon this foundation that the original contemplation was. We're all familiar with the story of the Fountain of Youth. It's a story as old as humanity. It's people told in a boat, going in a jungle to a temple, drinking in a magic elixir. And what we wanted to propose as a team was, is the Fountain of Youth actually here right now? It's just hiding in tens of thousands of scientific publications and a regimen that would be unprecedented. And so what we designed is we would measure every organ and biological process of my body, allowing each one to speak its needs. So the heart and the liver and the pancreas, everything could speak exactly what it needs, match that up with gold standard scientific evidence, then create a clinical grade protocol for each one. So everything in a methodical, evidence based approach. And then my only role was do the protocol exactly as it's written. And the fundamental this is what I find to be the single most interesting thing about blueprint is I was basically willing to entertain this possibility that an algorithm built on my behalf would better care for me than I am able.

[00:07:05.350] - Bryan Johnson

Now, we know this is true. For example, there was that famous competition in the desert that DARPA put on for selfdriving cars to introduce this idea that computational algorithms could drive cars more safely than humans could. And we see this everywhere in technology, and we acknowledge this as a society. When algorithms exceed our abilities to do a given thing, we like them to do it because they're safer and more efficient. And so the same is true for blueprint is a system better cares for me than I can. And it's possibly the first demonstration in history that we just crossed the threshold. And I think it has some pretty significant ramifications of what it means for us to be human going forward.

[00:07:48.710] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. So you gathered the data, you trusted who put it together, and then you just execute no matter what?

[00:07:57.930] - Bryan Johnson

No matter what. And to your point on the discipline, I find this to be the most rewarding thing I could ever do. I'm really motivated. I grew up on biographies. I've read hundreds of biographies. And I admire immensely people who, in their time and place, no matter what age they lived, when they surveyed the landscape of possibilities, they tried to identify the singular thing that they could do in their lifetime that was seemingly impossible. And the frame I think most captures this is talent hits the target no one else can. Genius hits the target no one else can see. And right now, in the early 21st century, I think the point on the horizon, the genius spot for us to hit, is, can we actually arrest aging? Can we slow aging down and then reverse its effects, fundamentally changing our relationship with time? And two, can systems run our health, run our bodies and our minds, the wellness of these things better than we can? And if that's the case, it's not a loss. It's not something that we need to mourn and feel bad about. It means we can play even more exciting and majestic games.

[00:09:03.610] - Bryan Johnson

There's this nice quote from alfred north whitehead. He said, civilization advances by the number of important operations that can be done without thinking about them. And this is true for humans that we oftentimes see the world through a frame of loss. But what if we all maintained ideal health and that was just status quo and we were able to reorient our attention towards more majestic things?

[00:09:30.470] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I think that the hard answer, and I see this clinically, is that yes, when the program is laid out, that the program is more powerful than the human emotion. Right. Because we will always choose the easier route. That's what our brains are designed to do. We are designed to reap the most reward with the least amount of effort. So in order to achieve incredible results, like you have, it is all about reorienting and trusting the process. And I think it's very incredible. So, going back a little bit, why did you decide to do this?

[00:10:09.730] - Bryan Johnson

As a species, we face some formidable challenges. I think there's a broad agreement that things are off. It's a high stakes gamer playing on many fronts and it doesn't feel like the powers that be are guiding us into some kind of path that we can feel confident in. And I've been thinking about this for a decade of trying to figure out where could I try to apply my energy to do something useful? And I come back to this idea that in my own life, I've always thought of my mind as the singular most important problem solving tool I have. A problem arises, I'm going to point my attention at it and think through the problem and come up with a solution. But in the case when it came to managing my health and trying to achieve the best possible health I was capable of, the solution was counterintuitive. It was to move my mind aside and empower my body. And so by measuring my body and letting my organs speak directly and then giving them power to determine the protocol, and again, not allowing my mind to do anything, my mind is not allowed to go to the pantry.

[00:11:23.550] - Bryan Johnson

It can't impromptu decide on a pizza party, it can't decide on a drink, just because today is a special day, it has no decision authority whatsoever. And more broadly, if we think about this, we treat Planet Earth like we treat our bodies, it's an identical relationship. And so blueprint is not a specific diet, it is a protocol of empowering systems. In this case, with the body organs looking at evidence and then creating protocols. The same thing could be done with Planet Earth, measuring the Earth with millions of measurements, finding the proper science for an optimal biosphere, and then a protocol that's implemented. And so for me, if you look at Planet Earth and exactly where we're at, perhaps the single most relevant problem we have is our minds, the exact thing we think is essential for solving it. And we need to do the counterintuitive thing and push our minds aside and let other systems work.

[00:12:26.750] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's an incredible way to describe it. So when you were starting out, I've done a bit of research on your doctor. How did you put together your team? Where did you start?

[00:12:40.690] - Bryan Johnson

It's about 30 people now. And so we have specialists in every area. We have a clinical grade ultrasound machine here at the house, and we have four or five sonographers. So we have someone who specializes in the heart, another in the lungs, and other different organs, one that specializes in muscle skeletal. And so the team is just built out for this routine of measurement, evidence and protocol. And we try to find experts in the various areas where we're working and it just increasingly grows. There's only a few full time, but everyone else is part time helping out.

[00:13:18.350] - Kayla Barnes

Amazing. Yeah, I mean, just that part of it is so much fun, right? Like comparing expertise and ideologies what people think about specific things. It's very exciting. Okay, you have your team in place and then did these protocols come together kind of slowly or was it just all at once? I'm sure you have refined them many times, right?

[00:13:40.900] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, it's true that we have criteria. For example, there's a 15 biostatistical criteria that's applied to things we implement. So evidence is carefully analyzed, the studies are carefully analyzed. And so we really do focus on evidence. If there's not evidence to support the endeavor, we typically don't do it. And if there's evidence we think that is emergent and has good physical properties, we're willing to play with it. But we really try to everything based on evidence and then everything based on data. If we can't measure something, we don't do it.

[00:14:14.210] - Kayla Barnes

And how often are you doing these measurements?

[00:14:18.050] - Bryan Johnson

Each one is different. Like, for example, I measure my core body temperature daily and then weight, body fat, muscle mass daily. Whole body MRI is annually. We typically do whole body ultrasound every quarter. DNA methylation is monthly on a speed of aging. So everything has its own frequency. And we're refining each one. As we get more data, the frequencies are refined.

[00:14:44.490] - Kayla Barnes

Amazing. Yeah, I get a full body MRI once a year too. I've actually had a couple more than once a year recently because I wanted to compare the data. Of course, every machine is going to give you a different result, but I think that's incredible. And to be honest, I think that's the future of preventative. Even if you're not trying to accomplish what you're working on, preventative. And these diagnostics are incredible tools to catch things way before they really become an issue. So I think that.

[00:15:14.470] - Bryan Johnson

On the full body MRI, we are trying to image every organ of the body. So we do a full body MRI is like a basic, but then we're also doing each organ. And so, for example, we found that we just completed the thymus for the first time. And so getting a high quality image of the thymus to age it to work on rejuvenation was very hard. We had to write our own protocol. We had to find a specific MRI, we had to get the proper technician to do it. So this whole body MRI, getting every organ, attempting to do every organ has been enormous amount of work.

[00:15:50.430] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely.

[00:15:51.410] - Bryan Johnson

I'm not sure anyone's ever done it before.

[00:15:53.710] - Kayla Barnes

I know it sounds like you have something really special over there. Maybe you'll have to let people come and get it done. I'm sure probably not, but it would be fun.

[00:16:02.290] - Bryan Johnson

It's a lot of time in the MRI.

[00:16:04.090] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah. Oh, I can imagine. Yeah. Usually I spend 60 to 90 minutes in there. Is it longer than that?

[00:16:09.830] - Bryan Johnson

Oh, yeah. This is tens of hours a year.

[00:16:11.940] - Kayla Barnes

Oh, my goodness. Wow. Well, incredible data that you're getting there. So when you first put together your protocol, what were maybe like the top five things that you were most surprised about their efficacy or you felt like, we're working the best? Because you have a lot of different things on that list from, of course, like Nmn and spermadine and all these amazing are there like three to five things that you were most excited about initially?

[00:16:39.550] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, I guess it's a bit of humor. Oftentimes being human is very hard. We all know this. And when these topics come up, people's first intuitions are often to debate, do you want to take NR or Nmn? And that question is posed while eating a bag of cheetos. And that's and that's so true. And a lot of people, you know, will acknowledge that about themselves. And it's it's funny. And so, really, I think before you even get to these more granular debates of this and that supplement and do you cook your food this or that way? The primary check you can do is how much self destructive harm are you engaging on a daily basis? How many bad things are you doing to yourself? Wrong kinds of food, too much food, smoking, drinking, other abuses, staying up too late, too much social media. All the things we all know are not conducive to being our best selves that we do for a variety of reasons. And so I would say the number one most powerful thing anybody can do is to try to identify a singular self destructive behavior you engage in in a daily basis.

[00:18:02.340] - Bryan Johnson

Identify who that version of you is, give them a name, identify all the arguments they use to get you to do those things, the emotions you feel after participating in and try to arrest that just get one baby step, win that you have control over these versions of yourself that do that. I think once you start making progress on the self destructive behavior, you can babystep into these other areas. But it's very hard to make good progress if you can't get the basics done of lowering the amount of self destructive behavior you engage in.

[00:18:33.890] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. And I see that in clinic all the time. People hear, oh, I heard about spermadine, or I heard about this longevity supplement, let's do methylene blue, that's all amazing. But if the foundation is broken, if you're staying up late binging on junk food, or you're sitting on the couch all day like a workout is not moving from the couch to the refrigerator, that's not adequate movement. You absolutely have to address the basics and the core pillars of health first. I completely agree with that and I think it's a really good point to make because I'm sure a lot of people, and it's funny, a lot of patients and friends have actually sent me your website just knowing how into this I am, and they get excited about it, but you have to walk before you can run. So really good point. But for you now, where you're at, so say that you have all the bases covered and I know everything is really bio individual and tailored to your own needs, but some of the more unique and upcoming supplements, what would you say are some of the most intriguing to you?

[00:19:43.690] - Bryan Johnson

Well, I'd say in an exciting result I got yesterday is that my recent pace of aging test scored me up zero point 69, which is the lowest score I've achieved yet. My previous lowest score was zero 76. So roughly that means out of 365 days each year, I age roughly 250, which means I get September, October, November, December free. And so I'd say the cumulative effect of the things I'm doing seems to be working very well. And that consists of a caloric restricted diet trying to achieve optimal nutrition. So I take 100 pills a day, which is clearly way too many for almost everybody. But again, the objective I'm trying to achieve here is demonstration of age escape velocity, of slowing my rate of aging and reversing the aging that's happened. So I'm willing to go to the outer edges of the extremes doing this and then doing the exercise, but trying to get out the basics as a team. We have a list of all the health span studies, lifespan health span studies, and we stack rank them according to effect. And of course, there's nuances in each one. And so we've tried to add the highest value thing.

[00:21:07.580] - Bryan Johnson

So that probably includes metformin, carbos, rapamycin, spermadine, CA, akg. There's probably a few others in there outside of basic nutrition.

[00:21:20.250] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, no, that's great. Those are all very exciting. We prescribe some of those too in my clinic, so I can't wait to at some point in the near future experience those. But no, I think those are all great. Very exciting. And honestly, the longevity industry is just moving forward every single day and so many new studies and research. So it's great to have someone like yourself be on top of it and implement it and see what works and see what might not work as well. When it comes to your rate of aging test, can you talk a little bit about that? Because I've personally done at least four, maybe five, and they're all measuring something different, but it seems like yours is probably the best. Actually, I want to do the one you're doing.

[00:22:06.310] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. This was one of the challenges for people to start gaining momentum, is they want to know the things they're doing work. They want to see results. And oftentimes the easiest way to do that is a blood draw. And so you get things back, like cholesterol and triglycerides and things we're all accustomed to, but that only gives you a pretty narrow snapshot of what's happening in your body. And I wondered if there was an easier way to get a single number how you were doing overall. And so this company, True Diagnostics, licensed this algorithm from Duke called the Denuden Pace. And. So it's from New Zealand. It's a multi decade long longitudinal study and has high predictability with interventions. And so it's using DNA methylation, and it's responsive, for example, to caloric restriction and other things. But of the aging clocks that are out there, this one is compelling in that you get a single number in response to a fingerprick, and that single number is how fast are you aging? And even being over number one, it increases your chance of a negative health effect by 54%. And so it's really significant, but the data is compelling.

[00:23:31.370] - Bryan Johnson

And again, it's an easy test to do, and it gives you a snapshot. And so using this, we partnered up with Rejuvenation Olympics with true diagnostic and launched Rejuvenation Olympics. And so people can go there and get their speed of aging tested over a period of time, and there's a leaderboard. And so the objective was to make rejuvenation a sport and bring out the competitive spirit in people. And there's a few reasons to think about this this way is, one, when people become acquainted with my protocol, one of the knee jerk reactions is, this guy's insane? Or he's eccentric or blank, blank, blank. That's when you incorporate a frame that I'm leading the average lifestyle of a human, and I'm deviating. But if you were to look at the lifestyle of LeBron James and see what he eats and how he takes care of himself, he wouldn't get the same kind of treatment. People wouldn't say, oh, LeBron is just so eccentric. I can't believe everything he's doing to take care of his body. It's because we understand LeBron is a professional athlete and his asset is how his body performs on the court. And so I wanted to use the frame of I'm a professional rejuvenation athlete, and so what I'm trying to do is push the boundaries of what is scientifically possible.

[00:24:48.320] - Bryan Johnson

And if you incorporate that frame, it no longer paints this as an eccentric endeavor. It paints me as a well intentioned athlete working to play my best on the field. It's just looked at it in a different way as this. So I've really tried to be changing the frame also to give people cover. When people are doing a lot of things in their life to take care of their health, they too get a lot of slack from people. And so a lot of people shared with me that when they're getting heat from those around them, they just send them my website. It could be a lot worse.

[00:25:22.230] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I've experienced that too. I think a key is, and this wouldn't be an immediate thing, but eventually you start to surround yourself by other people who are extremely interested and live the same way. Most all people in my orbit at this point are waking up very early, working out. We never are tempted by sugar at the dinner or anything. So that can be helpful because then you get a better support system. It looks like you're building that as well and have that yeah.

[00:25:53.380] - Bryan Johnson

Be around those you wouldn't mind becoming.

[00:25:56.730] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, absolutely. There's a quote, something along the lines of don't take criticism from someone whose life you are not interested in having. So I think that's important. And we also know that community is one of the biggest pillars of longevity. Right. So how do you prioritize that and build it into the algorithm?

[00:26:16.150] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. My social life is now more rewarding than it ever has been, maybe because a community has formed around this. And so I'm intensely engaged with people who have an interest in this kind of wellbeing, it also has made social norms so much easier. So in having a precise bedtime, in an awareness that I'm not going to drink in all these things, I would say my relationships have strengthened, my community has increased, and I've never been more emotionally connected. Which again, is the opposite of what most people assume, which is I must be isolated. It's been interesting that even people who have carefully studied blueprint from the outside, but then they've spent time with me internally, they walk away saying, I had no idea. I thought you were this miserable rich person killing himself trying to live forever, or whatever the observation may be. So it really is interesting that so few, if anyone, really understands what this endeavor is about and what it feels like to be me. It feels like it's really clouded in these observations that people are making with they're making the best observations they can from the data they have.

[00:27:28.100] - Bryan Johnson

But I guess it just invited me to communicate more clearly what it's like to do this and why I'm doing this, because I think it could potentially ease the landing on others when they're trying to process this as something they may want to consider for their lives. Not the extreme version I'm doing, but fulfillment of the basic principles.

[00:27:47.990] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. What people, I think, fail to recognize in our society currently is that accountability brings immense pleasure and immense reward. And as I mentioned earlier, discipline equals freedom. And I feel the exact same way, but I can also very much so relate. I've had this clinic for two and a half years and then prior I've been in the, we'll say, biology upgrading industry since I was about 20, so I got a really big head start. But I've always felt kind of odd for that for a while until I started to build a community online and everyone now feels the same way. So, A, I'm very happy for you and I think that I can relate as to how much joy it brings because you have such a satisfaction, self satisfaction, from accomplishing your goals. And when your health improves, health is the basis for all happiness and life. Right? Without health, we'll be sad. We won't want to be energetic, we won't do we won't show up for the people that we love. So when you have just, like overfilling health from your cup, you show up for people in the way that you want to, and you get everything you want out of life.

[00:29:01.070] - Kayla Barnes

So very exciting and I totally agree. So let's walk through your routine a little bit in the morning. And you don't have to hit every part if you don't want to, but I think sometimes it's easier for people to listen to it as well. And we'll link your website. So you wake up in the morning, walk me through your routine a little bit.

[00:29:22.230] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. I'll share with you what I did this morning. It changes almost, I would say almost every day. So whatever I say right now, it's going to be outdated in a week or two. But this is what happened this morning. I was in bed for 9 hours and 32 minutes recently. Whoop. I had a conversation with whoop. And my sleep quality was something like in the 99 point second percentile as rated to people who were born the same year as me. Nine and a half hours in bed, where I achieved about two and a half hours of ram and two and a half hours of deep. I carefully watched my wasso, which is my wake time after sleep on set. So how much I'm awake at night. Last night I was awake for 32 minutes, which I'd say was pretty good. I try to be below 30. You can biologically age, of course, according to your sleep scores. Then I get out of bed, I walk into the bathroom, I turn a light on. That gives me basically sun equivalent light for a few minutes of exposure as I take my inner ear temperature to look at my body temp.

[00:30:25.710] - Bryan Johnson

My body temperature is three degrees Fahrenheit lower than normal. So I'm typically in the high 95 point or 96 point something Fahrenheit. And then I take a few supplements. I'm currently trying to. Increase my ferritin as I take three supplements. I then go downstairs, I drink what I call the Green Giant, which is spermidine, collagen peptides, cinnamon, creatine. I think that's it. And I take 54 pills. And then I worked out for an hour. I came in and ate breakfast, which is broccoli, cauliflower, lentils, garlic, mushrooms, and ginger. And then I did 20 minutes of light therapy. I did 15 minutes of high frequency electromagnetic stimulation, which is a device that basically flexes muscles. I did it on my abdomen and my pelvic floor. And I'm probably forgetting a few things. Oh, I did lung exercises. So I have a device where I do inhale and exhale for lung strain to creation. I'm missing a few things here and there, but that's typically it takes me about two and a half, 3 hours. And it's a routine I do every morning. And then throughout the day I'll scatter certain therapies, then the night do more therapies.

[00:31:26.740] - Bryan Johnson

Oh yeah, I did HIV therapy this morning as well, and also red light therapy for hair growth.

[00:31:32.190] - Kayla Barnes

So are you wearing the cap for the red light therapy? Yeah, yeah, I have one of those at home too. It's actually I think it's very effective. I had some peptides and then include that. So for Hrv training, are you just using the, like, Polaris Hrv belt?

[00:31:50.530] - Bryan Johnson

We've used, I think, a substantial number of devices on market. So right now I'm currently using parasim, so it just attaches to your triggers. And I do an hour a day. And I've tried Sensate, I've done the Hrv, I tried even an off label gammacore, which is an FDA approved device for headaches. You put some gel and you find your vagus nerve left and right and you do a dose either side. We tried that for off label use of trying to improve Hrv amo fit, which is a little thing you wear on your neck. So, yeah, we worked very hard on Hrv. When I started, my Hrv was in the low 30s, which is probably a pretty good signature of entrepreneur grinding themselves into the ground with bad sleep and bad personal health hygiene. I was probably a representative of many people my age, grand selves, and now we've almost doubled it. So I've been hovering lately in the mid to high 60s I'm sorry, a high 50s, low sixty s. And so it's working. And typically HIV goes down with age and I've been able to go up and so we're excited about that and we're trying ever more things to increase it.

[00:33:12.190] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, I'm sure that your changes physically too had quite a bit of an impact on your Hrv, considering. A lot of athletes that we'll work with, they have HRVs in the like 100 plus because they are so metabolically conditioned, their heart rate stays really low at night. But yeah, I think Hrv is a really great measurement. So you have your morning routine and then skincare routine. I have to know all the current details because I read the one on blueprint, but as a woman, very important.

[00:33:44.470] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah. I do have creams. I use so, a peptide, vitamin C, vitamin E, fruitic acid, a tretinoin, and yeah, so there's some creams. But really, the majority of things we do on skin are lasers. So we have, again, at the clinic, we have an IPL system and a laser, 532 and 1064. Then we use a bunch of skin aging devices. For example, we use autofluorescence looking at advanced glycogenative products, and we use multispectral imaging, which shows you your zombie face, UV spots, brown spots, reds, pores. So we do an extensive whole body laser and IPL treatment, and we're measuring it from as many ways as we can, trying to get the skin health to be again, like, 20 years old or so.

[00:34:39.530] - Kayla Barnes

And where is your skin health based on the diagnostics now?

[00:34:46.250] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, it depends on the region, but skin health, for example, in the face is roughly 28, which is down, I believe, 20 or so years from when I started.

[00:34:55.920] - Kayla Barnes

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, that's wonderful. So what about evening routine? Obviously, you prioritize your sleep, so what about leading up to bed?

[00:35:07.330] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, nothing is more important in life to me than sleep. If sleep is right, life is right. And you can typically manage all things that come your way if you're getting appropriate sleep. So I typically allocate around 90 minutes from the time I arrive home from meetings or work or whatever the case may be, to do my routine and wind down. And so I do face routine, teeth. I'm very happy about my oral health. I dramatically reversed age of my gums, I think 24 years. I had a lot of detachment and loss, and we worked very hard on that. And my plaque index is also lower than my dentist. And my son, my dentist can't get my gums to bleed even when she tries. So then I do an oral health regimen, and then I stretch, read, hang out with my son. We talk about the days events, and we just try to relax for the hour before trying to think what else I do. It's very hard. It's so systematized like. I do things just by muscle memory. It's hard for me to actually call up by memory everything I do. But even when I told you about my morning routine, I forgot three or four things I did this morning.

[00:36:28.270] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, this has been the whole thing is I've had to in order for us to try to push the boundaries of what's possible with today's science, I've had to implement these protocols with precision and get muscle memory to do it for me. Because if I have to think about it, there's no way I could live life and get everything done.

[00:36:46.240] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, absolutely. It's just habitual in the subconscious. It's infiltrated. That's wonderful. What about your oral routine, though I don't think I've heard much about that.

[00:36:58.070] - Bryan Johnson

So I brushed floss and then I use a tea tree oil as the cleansing agent. And then for rejuvenation, we did this procedure, I have it on the Blueprint website where with attachment loss, so gums start falling away from the teeth and start to proceed. You want them to be high and strongly attached to the tooth. And so we did a combination of we did PRP plus Mdogain plus I'm forgetting now one of the thing, and it dramatically improved my attachment loss and recession, getting me back to, I think an average of 1.5 mm across my entire mouth. So we want to do a few more. But yeah, I mean, my scores are now substantially better and in many places are aged out to be like a teenager.

[00:37:55.210] - Kayla Barnes

That's amazing. I think oral health is something that's often overlooked. We know the link between cardiovascular disease, but also the brain and the teeth are directly connected through nerves. So any of that plaque build up or gingivitis can lead to some pretty serious health concerns. So I've been seeing a biological dentist and if anyone has the access to one, I would highly recommend it because it will change everything. When you look at the mouth is more than just teeth and white for aesthetic reasons, but understand that it plays such an important role in overall health.

[00:38:28.770] - Bryan Johnson

Also, one of the relevant thing about the oral health I mentioned is that I had a crown put on the first time I've ever had that experience, I guess two years ago. And the material palladium was used and test we did a month or two later showed I had extremely high levels of palladium toxicity, and it was from this crown. And I had been getting blurry vision and headaches, and we couldn't quite figure out what was happening, but we traced it back to the crown, and so we had that removed. But padium is used commonplace in the world, taste. So many people have these palladium crowns and it has very terrible effects in the body. And so this is part of the benefit of having the measurement routine we do is we do catch a lot of things very fast just because the routine is rigorously being measured all the time. So we found several things which are unexpected just by a normal routine course of measurement.

[00:39:29.190] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, absolutely. We do a lot of heavy metal mold and glyphosate testing here and this is very common actually. Someone receives dental work, heavy metals are often used and then those heavy metals continue to leach in to the body. And we actually know that heavy metal exposure is one of the very big cause of potentially developing Alzheimer's and brain dysfunction. So, yeah, very important in a biological dentist, which I'm sure you work with now, will remove those in a very safe way and then put something a bit safer into the mouse. So, yeah, I think diagnostics, it's really difficult for people to improve if you don't know where you're starting. So all of these things are so important. I mean, so many people have mold exposure. I don't think I've read much on your home purification, but I'm sure it's very intense. I'm sure, like, river osmosis water throughout the home and have that air filters. You're doing all that, I'm assuming.

[00:40:27.840] - Bryan Johnson

Yes, we monitor environment very carefully. Yes.

[00:40:31.500] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah. And it's just another thing that, unfortunately, is not really a well known fact, but mold exposure, for example, can really wreck havoc on the body. So we have to have those things tested, but very exciting. So what would you say is coming down the line for the future? I mean, what about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, stem cell therapy, some of these things. I'm curious of your thoughts on them.

[00:41:00.370] - Bryan Johnson

The most exciting parts of Blueprint are yet to come. And so this first phase was about really basic things. It was getting me to have zero self harm. And so for the very first time in my entire life ever, I do not commit any self harm, which is an unbelievable thing. I never would have imagined I could get myself to a place where I wouldn't eat bad food or too much food or cheat or have this and do that, or stipulate. I just don't. And it's the most liberating thing I've ever experienced. And then the objective was really to get my pace of aging as slow as possible. And so a zero point 69 puts me at a really great starting place for what we've been able to accomplish. This next phase is about reversing the AG damage that has happened. And so the majority of money that we spend is on researching these level three therapies and preparing them. So we're doing a few things that we haven't disclosed publicly, because we're still assessing that I've implemented, we're still assessing the safety and measurement efficacy of my protocol before we put these out publicly.

[00:42:08.300] - Bryan Johnson

But we've done some fun stuff for rejuvenation of some of the organs. But I'd say this is really where I think it might get interesting. Slowing one speed of aging is one thing. Reversing aging damage that has happened is an entirely different thing. And when you start pushing on aging from both sides, then it gets interesting. Then you say, how close are we to reaching age escape velocity? Is it possible to basically be zero where you don't age at all? We're not going to stop pace of aging because you'd have to take on entropy as a force, but you can slow it, and you then can reverse it. And so I'd say, yeah, the most exciting bits are on the horizon with the many things we focused on.

[00:42:50.310] - Kayla Barnes

Yeah, absolutely. There's someone that I'll definitely have to connect you with. He's been on the podcast, and he's a very good friend of mine, but he's doing Vcells. So when you look into that, his goal. So he actually has reversed his biological age the most in their group. But I always tell them that I want to be, like, right before going back into the womb, like a little baby, like, biologically. So there's some cool things on the market. So that's very exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking taking the time to share this with me. I hope we'll be able to update people as your routine changes, but I really appreciate your time.

[00:43:27.540] - Bryan Johnson

Yeah, it's great to be here with you. Thank you.

[00:43:29.720] - Kayla Barnes

Absolutely. Thank you. Bye.