Advanced Age Reversal: A Step-by-Step Blueprint for Longevity with Bryan Johnson
I kind of playfully say a blueprint is the best diet ever created for health in history and if you want to prove me wrong do so with your data so I do so like with a half smile of like basically we've tried to create this diet which produces perfect biomarkers and we're just looking at the data and nothing else there's no tribalism we're just watching the data I did Express a preference that we'd be plant-based so it does it does not mean that meat is bad it doesn't mean it can't be done with meat it doesn't mean that meat's not better it just means I express a preference as I said is there evidence in the world that would allow us to build this protocol and could we achieve basically perfect biomarkers across hundreds of very variables by doing this [Music] all right folks if you're into longevity anti-aging age reversal or anything of the like you've probably come across this incredibly popular age reversal blueprint there's a guy who is really Making Waves in the longevity realm his name's Brian Johnson now this dude comes from a corporate background not like a health and fitness background he's probably best known for founding Braintree where she sold to PayPal for like 800 million in 2013 and then he started to develop all these different Technologies including one called kernel which is super interesting it's called the K which is a company that's building Advanced neural interfaces to augment human intelligence using what I mean by that as hardware and software systems to improve cognitive function and this guy has a crazy protocol that he's doing to live an incredibly long time or at least marry Health span and lifespan in a really elegant and scientifically informed way so I will link to his entire blueprint protocol and everything we talk about in terms of what he's done for age reversal for gray hair reversal for a decrease in his biological age for massive improvements in Fitness in muscle composition in fat percentage he's aging slower now than the average 10 year old based on his data and he slowed his pace of Aging by an equivalent 31 years and while I'm certainly as I've said on podcasts before not a fan of Simply living a long time just to do it and have bragging rights this guy is like functional he's a dad he's running a big company and he's doing some amazing things in the longevity realm so we're super lucky to be able to tap into the brain of Brian Johnson everything I talk about on today's show you can find at bengreenfieldlife.com forward slash Brian Johnson and one last thing before we get to Brian you know I didn't want to talk over him too much but I get a lot of questions about my own age reversal strategy and well I don't have a comprehensive website like Brian does that blueprint website where everything's laid out in great detail I can share with you some of the big wins for me so if you stay tuned for when Brian and I hang up and quit chatting to each other at the end of this podcast I'm going to give you an overview of what my own longevity enhancing protocol currently looks like from supplements to sleep habits to temperature regulation to workouts Etc so should you be interested in that just keep listening when Brian and I finished chatting and again all the show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com Brian Johnson Brian uh first of all welcome to the show and uh second I'm just curious how you got into all this man thanks for having me I'm excited to be hanging out with you yeah Maybe by Maybe by mistake um I mean I guess from a personal side I was trying to fix a problem I had where I couldn't control my Indianapolis at night it led me to be 60 pounds of our weight and I was in a tough time of life and then a second part of it was I was thinking about the future of humanity of what does the future of our existence look like and the two of them kind of collided into a practical way to solve my own problems and a philosophical thought process on how we might understand ourselves as a species going forward so so for you with this kernel company that you founded to kind of optimize cognition which I'd be curious to learn just a little bit more about is that what initially got you interested in studying up on the human brain the human body I mean it was a combination of if we zoom out of planet Earth and we try to contemplate what is the most important thing going on I would say it's the the creation of intelligence where with with computers and not now artificial intelligence the cost of manufacturing and distributing intelligence is going to zero intelligence is going to be everywhere it'll permeate all things and with that that is the case uh contemplating what is our role going to be in this we need to figure out a way to scaffold our progress like in a way that is measured quantifiable and we can take one step we can go version one to version two to version three not that we become our technology but in a way where we can systematically evolve and improve ourselves and so colonel was the idea that uh our mind is one of the most important things we have but yet it's now currently one of the only things we can't routinely and reliably measure and so to put it in Practical terms if you buy a washing and a washing I guess a washer and dryer you don't think what that's going to fit through your front door you just know it's going to because Society has built engineering standards on you build a washer and dryer to this spec so it fits through everyone's doors and everyone's door is roughly the same size but we don't have the same if you could measure the mind you could re-engineer society around the mind but we just don't know we go by our feelings and and so it's kind of a disaster it's a kernel was a way to try to build the world's first mass-market device that could measure the the brain in the mind uh basically be capable of measuring every brain of mind and planet Earth so we built basically wearable fmri it works it took us five years it was impossibly hard with the edge of physics but it's not built you mean a wearable FR MRI like people would normally go and lay in one of those big MRI Chambers to do something like a brain scan I actually did something like this done uh down in Florida this fountain-like facility and they did a whole scan it was super interesting as far as predictive data what you're saying is you could do that same thing with like a headset that you wear exactly like a bicycle helmet you just put it on your head and it scans we don't with our technology we don't get the full depth of the brain you're getting you know 15 20 millimeters into the cortex so you're sacrificing deeper structures but you're still getting entire cortex which is something that just hasn't been possible and so whereas fmri MRIs too expensive and too constraining to be practical for uh societal-wide adoption and EEG isn't good enough we basically got right in the middle of it to say high enough quality that it's highly useful and also scalable for the entire world and also you don't need surgery and so I think we really threaded the needle nicely now we're on to the difficult part of can we figure out the first markets for adoption which is always equally as hard as building the technology yeah it also doubles up as a protective device for your head during any mountain biking excursions I saw you on the web really expensive mailing box I saw you wearing it on your website on the blueprint website and by the way folks you're going to want to check out Brian's website I'll link to it in the show notes if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com Brian Johnson and his name's both the Y by the way
um Brian I saw you wearing what what I assume is the kernel on your website like this big kind of bicycle helmet techie looking device but is that actually available for people right now or is it just all in in beta and Under Wraps it's in clinical studies so we have a few clinical Partners where we're exploring uh early detection of cognitive decline and also depression so we'll find a market somewhere in those areas but yeah it's not yet ready for a consumer device okay and I I assume you probably scanned your own brain with it and I know you do a lot of self-qualification and actually before I even ask you about like your intriguing protocol which goes all over the map uh I'm just curious if you could tell folks what it is that you've experienced as far as like the age reversal that you've Quantified or perhaps qualified because because honestly for people watching the video you look like you're like 16 years old uh how old are you I'm 45 but right now okay can you see my face can you see how it's all peppered up well I wasn't sure if it was the pixelation on Skype or if you've done some kind of a facial protocol what is going on you almost look like a little bit avatarish yeah if you look at my neck I did a pretty intense laser treatment on Saturday 48 hours ago and we have this new laser protocol we've been we've been adopting and the technician I have is wonderful he tells me I have the highest pain tolerance she's ever anyone she's ever worked with so she really gets after it and so yeah Saturday was the most intense we've ever done I mean it was felt like getting uh the worst sunburn I've ever had my entire life for 24 hours it just was excruciating now feels a little bit better yeah I mean I look like I basically got tattooed all over my face yeah with this or these red dots yeah it's funny because I actually have a guy locally who does that camera and Chestnut he's been on the podcast and I've had a few celebrities come up and crash at my house to get their laser treatments and they come back and it literally looks like their face is peeling it's nasty they're sunburned they're embarrassed to go out in public yeah you actually don't look too bad considering it's what Monday today and you did it on Saturday yeah so so anyways though besides the the spotted neck you look pretty good dude so so tell tell me about what you've experienced as far as your actual results I think the most interesting results we have are the reduction in the speed of aging and so we use this algorithm using DNA methylation as a built out of Duke out of called the Newton Pace it's a longitudinal study out of New Zealand looking at uh five decades now and they basically are trying to say can you Peg someone's uh the speed at which they're aging with this DNA methylation test and we like it because we feel like it's a better representation we feel like uh epigenetic clocks are a merchant they're interesting they're not yet gold standard they're still a standard uh this pace of Aging has been highly responsive to all the things we're doing so in short I've slowed my speed of Aging by the equivalent of 31 years and I now accumulate aching damage slower than the average 10 year old now a lot of people don't realize that 10 year olds accumulate agent damage they do we accumulate 80 damage to our entire life it just accelerates rates as we get older and compounds and so that's why yeah so I'm 10 I'm I'm slower than the average 50 year old uh 88 accumulating HD damage slower than 88 or 18 year olds and 90 I think four percent of people my chronological age okay I think I think actually that that clock that you mentioned the Dunedin Pace um Ryan Smith who runs true age Diagnostics yes he sent me this website called Rejuvenation Olympics where it shows like all the different people with the top age reversal scores I think you were at the top but there's actually like this competition where you can see how slowly people are aging and I think the way that I contextualize it because I think I brought it up on a podcast before was let's say that your rate is like I don't know 0.73 or whatever that would mean you're only aging like what 250 260 days out of a 365 day year right yeah that's how I've explained it to simplify it that's right so like every year I get September October November December for free yeah yeah so we I got launched uh I launched the Rejuvenation Olympics with Ryan and so the idea was to have some fun because in the world as you know this band better than anyone in the world of anti-aging health and wellness uh there is an endless number of choices for gurus and the difficulty for the average person trying to decide what to do is what do you do and why and I know like my parents are just totally confounded by this thing and so I wanted to create a competition to say all right let's actually let's put some numbers in the board let's have some fun and compete so yeah we created the Rejuvenation olympics.com based upon DNA methylation and so I did out of the 1750 people that have been measuring their speed of Aging over a multi-year period i ranked number one as having reduced my speed of Aging so you have you have kids right I do okay are they like jealous are they doing the same thing or are they concerned that their dad might eventually be younger than them they have different responses my 17 year old is all in he does everything that I do my 19 year old's a college and he's it's difficult being at college and my 13 year old daughter you know she's got different priorities in life but I mean it's definitely a family conversation it's fun over the holidays we did a Rejuvenation Olympics as a family so we did like sit and reach we did uh grip strength and a few other things so we play around with it a lot it's just part of our culture it's a family it's fun um but you know it's also like they they um it's a big contrast like my son took what I call this super veggie to school lunch them every day a bunch of vegetables and and his friend tweeted out uh taking a picture of him eating it I don't know what's wrong what do you say this boy's been eating this every day for the past month I don't know uh what's wrong at home I hope everything's okay but it was just like it was so jarring for his friend to his that he was eating vegetables in comparison to his friends eating Doritos pizza and soda for lunch that he was like what's wrong with him is he okay yeah yeah actually that that leads in so I wanted to ask you what what does your diet look like like before we talk about like fancy supplements and hacks or anything else I'm just curious like what you eat in a typical day uh 2 000 calories it's a primarily vegetables berries nuts and seeds so for breakfast it's a broccoli cauliflower black lentils garlic ginger mushrooms then for uh midday the second meal of the day it's macaroni nuts flax seeds walnuts pomegranate seeds and then the final meal of the day is just the vegetables berries and nuts and then um yeah take 100 supplements but yeah 2 000 calories oh then I take three tablespoons of olive oil so 45 milliliters of extra virgin olive oil and then dark chocolate for a total of 2 000 calories oh amazing I could get on the olive oil dark chocolate bandwagon uh actually I think I think I heard you talking about that at one point and obviously now I've seen a lot of other stuff on cacao flavinols and some of the Omega Omega-3s and and benefits of olive oil and started putting about a tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkled up dark chocolate in my morning smoothie and so and you feel absolutely fantastic with that but is it is it really like the same thing every day for you yes uh except the third Mill which varies every day it is so 75 of what I eat every day is the same even on days that you work out do you adjust calories at all or is it just like same thing yeah that's the thing that surprised me it's no matter what I do the exact same thing every single day and we have this experiment could I basically be plant-based could I be 2000 could I work out for an hour a day if we just hit autopilot and let it run what would happen and so far so good we can't find any deficiencies in everything we did a full body MRI of found muscle across my entire body we're measuring hundreds of biomarkers were measured we're optimizing them for optimal clinical outcome ranges so it all looks fine um there's a few things we had to crack four like when you're on caloric restriction your testosterone goes down so I do ttrt with the patches but other than that seems like everything okay yeah yeah and as far as like what you described for your meals I mean it sounds like a little bit of like a typical vegan-esque diet and it also sounds though like you're taking some of the steps it sounds like some of this stuff is like fermented or in its whole food source and not necessarily Ultra processed but possibly even like more bioavailable through fermentation or whatever like have you taken a dive into the why buying each of those meals or is this just like what you like to eat no it definitely is so that the calories we have because it's 2000 calories uh every calorie has had to fight for its life so every single ingredient every single ingredient is based upon evidence and so from the broccoli and the cauliflower and the black lentils it's not to say that they're the only thing that can be done it's to say that they are a thing that can be done and so we say food in and the output is the few hundred biomarkers and we say are they pegged in the optimal clinical outcome range so for example like this week uh I was looking at my liver enzyme uh some alt uh AST ggt and I think this number was 49 and I tweeted that out and I said does anyone else have a better liver enzyme uh some than this and so like we we really are looking at the outputs of do the biomarkers hit the um the ranges we think are optimal and again like if you look at my pace of Aging my liver markers or hundreds of other markers they're all ideal and so certainly diet has some relationship with that but um and none of these things were really based upon my genetics or anything to sort it was just we found evidence that you know in gestation of these things have these relationships with these certain markers so I don't eat anything that we can't measure yeah most 45 year old dudes who are working out an hour a day would be kind of hungry on 2 000 calories like do you are you hungry all the time really yeah yeah yeah I'm all the time you know hungry and that's the thing that's been really interesting is I've been waiting for my body to recalibrate and say actually we're okay you know like we don't need food because my body fat you know hovers around five percent or so um but I still have the under I I don't have any drawbacks I'm not experiencing any um symptoms so as far as we can tell from all the data everything is working as expected yeah I did notice you you said on on the website that your body um temperature is running cooler than when you first started which obviously can sometimes indicate a slight drop in the metabolic set point which could mean your body kind of like adjusted to that lower calorie intake do you think something like that could happen yeah quite possibly I mean so routinely when I measure my every single morning when I wake up I measure my my waking Body temp and it's you know routinely 95.9 96.1 and uh and that
was never the case before so yeah possibly yeah do you take anything for thyroid or or like iodine or anything like that I do yeah 125 entities divide iodine and then I also take I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism when I was 21. so I've been taking Levothyroxine and armor thyroid for the past 20 years okay and so I uh but all the thyroid levels t3t4 TSH they're all normal okay got it and that body fat percentage is is pretty low as well you know it's pretty rare actually that I interview somebody who has kind of like the same issue as I do like uh the difference between you and me is I eat like a horse it seems uh but my body fat percentage just ranges like five to seven percent to people always ask me dude why do you starve yourself I'm like I don't I'm just that's that's my leanness you know based on dexa scans and everything and it just is what it is you know yeah what's your caloric intake well I range from 3 000 to 3 500 calories a day and you know I I do a lot of it looks like the type of like Mediterranean and Asian type of vegetable and plant forward Foods as you do but I also like my I have the same favorite breakfast every morning for me it's a raw liver smoothie with bone broth and colostrum so it is a little bit more like nose-to-tail meat base and in the afternoon my lunch is usually like a really good cut of fish served over vegetables or Miracle noodles or Japanese yam or something like that and then dinner is widely buried but it's always a very good like grass-fed grass-finished meat or pastured pork or something like that with roasted vegetables and um you know I honestly like even on that calorie intake I'm still kind of hungry but I use these uh these drinkable ketones have you ever messed around around ketones to keep your appetite satiated in between those meals have yeah interesting uh DNA protective effect and I I think they actually definitely play a role in you know in a longevity-based diet do you like them uh we tried it and they Spike my liver enzymes oh really yeah so immediately we discontinued them after 19 days they spiked it from uh it was like 200 percent uh in 19 days yeah that's in some sometimes agents that up regulate autophagy cause a short-term rise in liver enzymes so it could have could have possibly been the case but yeah I'm not sure um so so you also said that you take a hundred different supplements a day that's right how do you decide what it is that you're going to take from a supplement standpoint the statement of the diet every single supplement has to justify its existence it has to fight for its life and everything needs to be measured and so nothing is included because it's trendy or cool or sounds interesting or because others do it everything has evidence everything has an end point and if we can't measure the endpoint we don't do it and so they're all tied so the basics like you would expect a d and a c and an e but then others like metformin a carbos so everything has a purpose and it's just kind of grown to about a hundred are there any in particular that the supplements that you use that you really feel like that are non-negotiables for you as far as not keeping your fingers crossed that they might be having a protective effect or a longevity enhancing effect but you're just like I feel amazing when I take these particular supplements the only thing I I feel that way about is my sleep my I sleep I just can feel I maybe you like like me I can just feel it so thoroughly if I get a bad night's sleep my next day is wrecked uh but otherwise um you know I don't eat junk food like my diet's still stable I don't think I really necessarily feel the supplements I don't recall a time when I could yeah you know that doctor uh uh actually I don't know if she's a doctor but Sandra Kaufman who has a pretty good anti-aging protocol in a book is also some of you have interviewed in the past kind of like priority ranks that host a different longevity enhancing compounds like astaxanthin NAD C60 Etc of the supplements that you take would you say that that certain ones have really left out to you as hell yeses in the longevity category and in terms of the research that you've seen or the effects on your own age reversal yeah we my team has systematically reviewed every lifespan study and every Health span study and then systematically ranked each one according to the evidence and the staff teach one according to the quality of the trial that was run and then we stack ring all the studies look at all the evidence so we try to prioritize which evidence we think is worthy and that we take those and you know then it's also is it an animal model as a human and then we go from there and so we've tried to go from highest value ad and work our way down and so we yeah so I guess the protocol is built based upon that methodology yeah that's interesting it's very very data driven and you mentioned a couple times you have a team is this like the team at Colonel who's kind of like Moonlighting overseeing your health protocol or do you actually have a team that you've specifically hired just to like manage Brian Johnson and measure Brian Johnson yeah there's several full-time and then several part-time so like the 30 for example we have a an epic five uh ultrasound machine here at the house medical grade system and we have several uh sonographers we have one that specializes in in the heart one that does uh muscle skeletal and one that does all other organs of the body and so that's for example free members of the team and so it's basically built up on everyone we need for every organ and every diagnostic uh protocol we have and because we do full body ultrasound on a regular basis we need to have that kind of expertise that can do it and we don't want uh we don't want an msk person to be doing a cardiac you know like we really want a person that is absolutely expert in their given area and uh we value really a measurement above all that's the whole thing that enables blueprint if if I can't measure anything I'm doing uh it's very hard for us to know the cause and effect relationship yeah yeah and I assume you're tracking and measuring your sleep because you mentioned that as being something that's really important to you I'm curious how you set up your sleep like are there any particular steps that you take to optimize sleep yeah I mean it's honestly the number one priority of life because I know from my personal experience Matthew Walker said this that the difference between hope and despair is a good night's sleep that is definitely the case with me I mean like life fills doable and amazing with a good night's sleep and without it it feels irritable and frustrating yeah and so yeah it's it nothing affects my conscious experience of reality more than sleep and so as a result I'm making my number one priority so I do all I mean I basically built my life around sleep wow so all the things you would expect like I I stopped eating around noon or so so I have 10 hours of fasting that allows my resting heart rate to get to about 45 or so before I go to bed okay real quick so all three of those meals you're having before noon Yeah Yeah from 6 a.m to noon honestly okay so a six hour compressed feeding window wow um well and and sorry one other question related to that but before we get back to sleep so are you like eating that first meal like right when you get up or are you waiting a little while till after you're you've kind of gotten that cortisol Awakening response I take uh I drink what I call the Green Giant when I wake up this concoction of collagen peptides and uh amino acids creatine cinnamon uh what else is in there and uh spermidine via chlorella powder I take 100 supplements or 50 somewhat supplements then I work out and then I eat breakfast around seven eight my next meal around nine or ten the final round 11 12. okay okay gotcha so so back to your sleeping protocol
you finish eating at noon and that obviously can help with body temperature and a lot of people I'm I'm the opposite by the way I'm hypoglycemic I wake up at like 2 A.M unless we have these big glorious family dinners at like seven uh and so it's a little bit different than me I've I've experimented with the compressed feeding windows I usually have my first meal around 10 or 10 30 a.m right before I jump into a podcast like this and then I'm generally kind of shutting off calories around 8 30 but I've got you know a solid 10 hour feeding window compared to your six just because like if I if I eat as early as noon I can't sleep but you seem to do okay with it yeah it's actually better yeah so you're saying you your first meals around 10 your final meals around eight or so yeah yeah exactly yeah so so leading up to sleep are you doing any type of uh anything from like biohacks mats you know the cold water devices supplements things like that to enhance sleep uh it's really uh analog so I just it's a one hour before sleep I try to turn off so I'll hang out with my family we'll stretch top read watch something just low-key but I try to basically um stop the world and its tracks because I know that when I go lay down and go to sleep and I work up until the very moment whatever I'm ruminating on of all the to Do's or like some fire that I need to put out or like whatever high stress situation that's on my mind I'll dream about it all night it'll be have a restless night if I can have that one hour to to wind down and just kind of tune out the world uh I get high quality sleep so one hour is a non-negotiable and then I do small things like blocking glasses I'll take 300 ncgs of melatonin so I don't really do a whole lot it's I think what I really went at is it's every single night is the same so the routine never deviates um my lifestyle built in a way where I don't have things that are disrupting like alcohol or I'm not eating pastas or something like that that also have negative effects I have a blackout bedroom uh so Julia I think just the consistency of the routine my body expects it and it's in a system now where every night I get high quality sleep and for my entire life I never could knock out high quality sleep it was like a roll of the dice every night I had no idea was gonna happen but now it's it's just you know every single night it's high quality wow what's a blackout bedroom oh just there's no light okay so it's not like full on like EMF kill switches Faraday cage and stuff like that just like no light [Music] I actually have a kill switch in my bedroom and then a push button remote control Faraday canopy that I I had to I had to make it look aesthetically pleasing for my wife and everything so it's like a princess poster bed and you push the button you cannot send a text message you cannot take a phone call and it you're completely cut off to anything electronic the entire night in that thing and my only complaint about it is it gets a little bit muggy if my wife's at home and sleeping in bed because she's like a freaking furnace with her metabolism while she sleeps so I have a little oscillating fan on one of the bed posts and that keeps the air circulating but but for me that's amazing because I can just be totally cut off from the electricity during during my night of sleep and it seems to help a lot um what time do you go to bed around 8 30. okay and I'm assuming you're doing like eight hours yeah okay all right cool do you do any like napping or CS does anything like that uh nope yeah uh I tried to avoid it because yeah it messes things up yeah our Protocols are a little different because I I go to bed typically by the time I get the kids to bed and have done some reading and stuff you know I'm usually asleep by 9 45 10 but then I usually get up around 3 45 or 4 just because yeah that allows me time for my spiritual practice and my me time and you know prepping for the day and some of the early work but then every day after lunch usually either in the hyperbaric chamber or or on this like big are you familiar with pulse electromagnetic field frequency like these pemf mats yeah so I'll lay on one of those or climb inside the hyperbaric chamber and I'll do about an hour of meditation or Yoga Nidra or something like the brain tap device which is like a light sound hypnosis device and the reason that I've developed that protocol is it's a little bit of a hack because it buys me an extra hour to an hour and a half every day because even though on paper I'm shorting myself on sleep during the night sleep cycle I'm getting what feels like a full sleep cycle or two in the afternoon with just an hour dedicated to that so it's it's kind of it's not quite that like that Uber man sleep cycle that some people talk about but it's for me it frees up so much productivity and do do you um do you find it in these rhythms you uh your markers change with these protocols uh you you mean sleep specifically or yeah I mean just the things you're watching your measurement are they do they track with these things yeah typically as long as I get that that siesta in what I track would be like the aura rings resting heart rate Readiness score based on heart rate variability sleep cycles Etc it does fine if I don't get that nap in obviously and I'm sure doing that short of a sleep cycle everything goes to crap after a couple of days so it is kind of hyper critical to make sure my team knows don't schedule Ben for anything between about two and four pm because that's kind of time tucked away so um you know I understand that you mentioned that you work out for about an hour a day I'm curious how you developed your workout protocol and what it looks like uh yeah basically I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body and so it's about 40 movements inspired a lot by my knees over toes and uh uh Ben Patrick yeah oh his he's great like yeah he's been on the podcast before and his Protocols are amazing for especially when you're talking about the longevity stuff so tell people about it yeah so that's wonderful uh yeah friend and so he um he came hung out with me and showed me some of his stuff which was wonderful I appreciated and so it's yeah 40 things upper body lower body cardio flexing uh stretching uh muscle so it's really I'm not I guess the other day uh this YouTuber came and visited me and he's like hey but wait a second what if you're dropped into the middle of the Jungle and you need to fight a wild animal well I don't know I might get eaten because like you know I don't know I'm not I'm not preparing pretty far-fetched hypothetical but I was like you know like I really I'm I'm optimizing for a singular thing which is my speed of aging and so I'm not trying to be to be an athlete in um I'm not trying to do an Iron Man I'm not trying to be dropped in with a wild animal and so everything I'm doing for the routine is all about that and so we really watch the evidence on what what would a you know a an elite athlete in their early 20s be capable of in basic things like a single rep bench single rep uh leg press sit and reach VO2 max all the above so we watched uh those variables as The Guiding post and then we also like use ultrasound for example and look at my tendons and ligaments and whatnot so you've watched my body changes the exercise protocol is it the same like your nutrition every day the way you work out yes so every single day of the week it's the same yes interesting yeah sorry my my workout routine it's it's similar from week to week but definitely not the same every day you know I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this since I kind of hung up the Hat myself on Athletics namely for me it was obstacle course racing and Iron Man Triathlon and now mostly it's just pickleball and and walking in a little bit tennis um I've adapted my routine to really be based around two primary modalities Blood Flow Restriction Training I don't know if you've messed around with that at all like these katsu bands or anything that that kind of increases lactic acid and muscle and increases blood flow to the brain Etc post-workout and then single set the failure training for which I use one of these big it's called an ARX device it's a two horsepower engine that just completely exhausts each muscle group in about two minutes and so three days a week I do the single set to failure training and then I use this thing called a vasper that circulates cold water through Blood Flow Restriction bands for a 21 minute hit workout and so that's typically Monday Wednesday Friday Tuesday Thursday Saturday are all sauna cold breath work walking and tennis or pickleball and then Sunday's a free day off day for frisbee golf or whatever but that single set to failure training using something that magnifies you know be it from a super maximal standpoint The Eccentric load like the ARX or there's another device called the X3 bar you've probably seen the toenail before that wall mounted device that kind of throws you around that combined with the bfr training are are two things that are really the staple of my program and it is kind of the same Monday Wednesday Friday Tuesday Thursday Saturday split but if you mess around with with much of that like the single set the failure or the or the blood flow bands uh we lift the blood flow bands we couldn't find the evidence to justify it okay so so even from the Fitness standpoint you you pretty much have your team looking at evidence for every last move that you do everything yeah and it's like it's not the like what I guess um the reactions right here to blueprint you know given I'll say I'll do a given thing like I do the same thing every day seven days a week and then uh inevitably uh you'll get like a hundred responses but wait what about you know and yeah uh there's a there's a million weight but what about things and uh the one can consider or do or shortcomings over this or that and the objective is not to say that we've covered every possibility in the universe on what can be done it's just simply to say we have a very specific goal of trying to slow down the speed of aging and reverse aging damage that has happened and we're trying to do things that have evidence because we're measuring hundreds of biomarkers and we're tracking them and so if something has the evidence to get into the conversation we look at it but definitely the you know um a blueprint is different in that we're we're so focused on this specific objective that leaves a lot of people confuse what their weight what abouts and um they don't understand how we're guiding our objectives on this thing yeah yeah and and I'm curious you know from from the blueprint standpoint you talked about the kernel which is obviously a piece of technology that you're using for your brain I mentioned the Hyperbaric and the pemf for example but if there are there any Technologies whether it be for Recovery or for longevity or for immunity or anything else that you that you use on a regular basis I mean I guess the yeah the major pillars we've got diet the pills we've got the prescriptions which is rapamycin form in a carbos I'm taking uh Alpha estradiol 17 out the E2 okay which is the non-feminizing um estrogen yeah um those are the big ones yeah that we're doing and then exercise and sleep um yeah so so you don't you don't use anything like uh you know because you hear a lot of people in the longevity world including myself of course I've talked about this before hyperbaric chamber for example or you know infrared sauna or like heat cold therapy modalities like that do you mess around with any of that stuff we just completed a an extensive look at Hyperbaric and we couldn't find the evidence to do it it in our analysis it appeared it appeared as if it was interesting for acute uh um injury but we couldn't find it for Rejuvenation um and so we we did move forward with it yeah yeah I I think that from from a tissue oxygenation standpoint it has some utility and this is this is for me based on just n equals one anecdotal information because on the Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday that I do breath work it's kind of like the bonding activity that I do with my sons so I have 15 year old twin boys and we go into the sauna and just sweat our eyeballs out and do anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes of breath work and we especially focus on the inhale locks and the exhale locks whenever I'm using the hyperbaric chamber regularly I get an extra 30 to 40 seconds on my exhale and typically an extra 10 to 20 seconds on my inhale so I know there's something going on from an oxygenation standpoint even though I'm using a even a home unit that only goes up to about 1.5 atmospheres and I think for me the other thing is I I used to have one of those float tanks you've probably seen those before in it yeah yeah the upkeep on it was horrific but it was nice to be locked away with nobody being able to bug you for me the hyperbaric chamber since I'm using that in the afternoon for relaxation is kind of similar you got to zip yourself up you can't hear anything outside and it's almost like a self-inflicted sensory deprivation chamber and there's something about Yoga Nidra or self-hypnosis or these light sound stimulating machines that when combined with the oxygen mask just allow you to check out and drop ruminating thoughts almost right away so it for for me it's a very very relaxing session for the day yeah yeah then I would imagine people visiting you you're like uh PT Barnum's you know circus like coming to your home with all your stuff with your favorite cage and not I'm sure it's gonna be very exciting for people to see every all the infrastructure you've built for yourself what do people uh what what opinions we are people expressing yeah I mean typically like if I'll have a podcaster come to my house to to record a show or company over they do what we do you know they do what the family does so you know I'll lay them out on like the sound healing table and turn the pmf mat on and let him kind of do like a little 15-20 minute Journey on that they'll climb in the hyperbaric chamber for their naps they use this thing called a biocharger in the basement that it's like an electrical medicine modality you know before dinner will typically have like breath work parties in the sauna and then go jump in the cold pool and you know they'll use the Vesper and the different machines so it's just kind of it's kind of fun it's just like a wacky adventure and you know people inevitably wind up feeling pretty good but of course you know about that out like we meet for family meditation every morning at 7 30 and Family Music time and Story Time and prayers and more meditation in the evening we have many many special comings and goings as a family you know at 7 pm all work gets shut off and we just have this massive glorious family dinner playing games talking playing table topics Etc and you you're no doubt familiar with a lot of the longevity enhancing effects of just not being lonely right and prioritizing relationships so like from a softer side of things do you do you focus on much of that like like the relationship or the happiness piece from a more psychological or spiritual standpoint I do yeah my community has been I've kind of been throughout different communities in my life I was raised in a deeply religious community that was actually pretty amazing to be inside the only As I Grew Older I kind of learned the trade-off where if you're in a certain group there's an out group in group good out group bad you know or like you want the outcome to become the in-group and then I've kind of moved throughout various communities throughout my life and I feel like I'm now in a good spot where I'm creating a new community around this new way of being it really takes a lot of synchronization because if I'm going to bed at eight or eight thirty a lot of the activities that our societal Norms uh would just not be conducive and so building Community around people who are also on the same page has been really great so I'd say it's been nice to settle in because then uh basically I've had to get a re-synchronization with people who are cool with this kind of thing and uh I'm there now so it's been a nice recalibration yeah what's it like with your kids like are they joining in a lot of these activities with you are they still preparing their own meals or how do you align this with your children that you know real quickly the reason I ask is like at our house it's kind of like the shoemaker's wife wears no shoes like my wife doesn't have anything on her side of the bed for sleeping she's very analog like you you know my sons will you know sometimes take some of the supplements that I set out for them and encourage them to take based on some of the genetic testing that they've done but I mean they're eating cinnamon rolls and Mom's sourdough bread and pretty carboholic diet all day long whereas I'm kind of Keto and you know the family kind of sort of watches what I do but doesn't engage with that my much of it how's it look like in in your house yeah um my son my 17 year old basically does everything I do uh which is great uh I he does this by choice so he's invited to participate and I'll support him but it sounds like you do the same thing I do I'm pretty hands off yeah uh but I'd say in the house we don't have anything that one can be naughty with like if you go into the pantry and you're feeling naughty you can drink olive oil or take some supplements or yeah or some dirty some dark chocolate dark chocolate you could be a little naughty yeah okay yeah 100 yeah you're exactly right 100 dark chocolate but it's just nothing and so that's one of the rules I have in the house is uh we just don't want to keep that stuff around because it's just no good yeah but yeah I mean I'd say the the the family you know they all have their different uh they're in their different places in life different priorities they're dealing the best in the circumstances they're at and um but generally my son and I we're kind of in synchronization on doing this together yeah and I know people are gonna ask so I'm going to beat him to the punch are you particularly selective about your olive oil and your chocolate and if so what kind of metrics do you look for uh yes so we for extremely particular about everything and so we think about this uh really as five levels so if if you start at the level one you say chocolate is good for you that may lead someone to believe a Snickers bar is okay because at least some portion of that bar is chocolate level two is dark chocolate level three is dark chocolate on Dutch level four is dark chocolate untouched without heavy metals and the fifth is dark chocolate untouched heavy non heavy metals with high polyphenol and so we with everything thing we do everything is five layers deep and so nothing gets a cursory look for every single protocol and so yeah we Source our chocolate and olive oil from all over the world it's been really hard to find the performance specs on those things it's so hard so that we're actually going to we sent blueprint uh became better known we're going to make these available as products because we ourselves had so much difficulty trying to find the product specs that we needed ourselves yeah we're just gonna make it easy for others but yeah those two are such a important inputs of diet and they're so hard to get yeah yeah and when you say untouched just for people who might raise an eyebrow and I understand what that is what's that mean so there's an optimization alkaline alkalinization process that can happen that can eliminate a lot of the um benefits and so uh there's a way the chocolate needs to be uh managed so you get the highest nutritional value uh-huh okay and they do it to eliminate the bitterness okay I got what was the last time you had me or have you always been plant-based eater no I was uh I meet my whole life up until two years ago okay so yeah blueprint I guess uh I I kind of playfully say a blueprint is the most uh is the best diet ever created for health in history and if you want to prove me wrong do so with your data so I do so like with a half smile of like basically we've tried to create this diet which produces perfect biomarkers and we're just looking at the data and nothing else there's no tribalism there's there's um no opinion we're just watching the data and in doing that um I did Express a preference that we'd be plant-based so it just it does not mean that meat is bad it doesn't mean that it can't be done with meat it doesn't mean that meat's not better it just means I express the preference as I said is it possible to find evidence uh is there is not fun is there is there evidence in the world that would allow us to build this protocol and could we achieve basically perfect biomarkers across hundreds of very variables by doing this yeah and so uh yeah that's that's it so just a preference on my side but I would love to see someone else do it on meat and see what data it produces yeah that'd be interesting you know I didn't um you know I've been thinking about that myself because I've seen your protocol and of course as I've alluded to have some different things that I do but the Meat part of what I do is is what I would consider to be a very healthy approach to me very glycine-rich including a lot of organ Meats a lot of bone broth a lot of really clean fatty fish and really not very much methionine Rich meat I don't do a lot of red meat I don't do a lot of you know the Dirty Bird the poultry like for me it's a lot of bone marrow bone broth organ Meats fatty fish and and clean products primarily but you know it kind of kind of makes me think about this idea of like biochemical individuality you know and certain people obviously responding differently to different protocols you know if someone were to come to you because it sounds like maybe they have I mean like hey I want to follow the blueprint protocol A to Z do you ever consider about their body perhaps responding differently to the supplement regimen or the dietary regimen or the exercises than than you yeah of course yeah so the blueprint is basically just a a demonstration of evidence and measurement that's it it's just saying let's have a discussion on what we do and why we do it based upon data that's all I'm trying to do okay and so just like eliminate human opinion eliminate tribal Warfare just look at the data and the data is the strongest thing we have because we know where optimal clinical outcome ranges are for uh we know that that data is very good yeah it's a really just it's trying to move health and wellness away from a religious style uh infighting and tribalism warfare between humans right and to be a dispassionate scientific Endeavor of what actually achieves the results that we care about so if somebody were like I don't know riding on an elevator with you maybe a little bit longer than 30 seconds um and you were to be able to tell them hey these are no matter whether or not you follow like some of the nitty-gritty details of the blueprint diet these are the huge wins behind the blueprint protocol for example you've established that sleep is one would there be others that you're just like yeah these are non-negotiables yeah I would say actually the most powerful anti-aging protocol is to stop self-aided destructive behaviors we are a society that is addicted to um self-destructive behaviors so eating too much eating junk food not prioritizing sleep skipping exercise infinite scroll binge uh watching content smoking drinking and so a lot of people of course I think we all intuitively feel that we're kind of helpless against our own selves that if we get ourselves in a situation where our mind gets to decide whether we do this naughty thing or not we're going to lose most of the time and that we're just we're unreliable creatures uh just by by default and so if we say if we subconsciously process that we say well if we're not reliable we ignore it and we try to bury it but I'd say that even more positive in trying to take a supplement or two or this or that thing is to try to stop the self-destruct Behavior so most of the time as you probably experienced yourself is when I talk about blueprint you get these very common responses of but wait what about and then the person brings their their thing to you that they're interested in right and then secondly is like you know what is your opinion versus NR nmn and then when I get into the debate of you know like some specific thing or the famous will X Y or Z break my fast yeah exactly it's like you you get these you get the same questions every time meanwhile um and this is nothing about them this is like me too right you've got a bag of Doritos in your arm it's 3 A.M and you can't stop you know watching videos or whatever and so the the thing really that I found to be most powerful for me in my life was getting control of my own self-destructive Behavior gave opened up everything else but uh it's not something I could have fixed by trying to cover it up by some positive things I really had to stop it it's root yeah so it sounds like to me more more of an Omission approach in the commission approach it's less of the do this and take this supplement than don't do these specific self-destructive behaviors exactly I mean I I would say if you put these if you look at these things and try to see what are where are the power laws and everybody wants the power laws yeah um I'd say my guess would be the power laws are in stopping bad things yeah and that that makes sense you mentioned like Doritos so obvious I mean there are biggies that I think most people are aware of ultra processed foods vegetable oil poor sleep are there destructive behaviors that you think fly under the radar or that more people should at least be aware of so actually I'm in a couple weeks time I'm I'm wanting to get a group of people together like maybe a few hundred people and working on people eliminating sad from their life self aided destruction and so we could start with the basics we all agree upon like eating junk food is not good eating too much food is not good skipping sleep is not good it's keeping exercise is not good so like just like we're all cool there and then there's like a second layer where it's gray area you know like is social media engagement good or bad for how long what ways like you know there's gonna be a lot of disagreement and the science isn't that great and then gaming is that good for how long what types like the same thing but basically just try to refocus the Health and Wellness Community uh counterintuitively away from positive you know actions of taking supplements or doing this and that and moving in the other side of stopping bad things and I want to have five different behavioral therapy coaches present their different schools of thought of whether it be CBT or something else and then they present their school thought and say like I uh you know this is my methodology this is my practice here's what I do if this is interesting to you and it appeals to you for your personal time come hang out with me for a month and then we just do this fun experiment where we just try to bring awareness to how many things are we all doing in our daily lives and I would say the easy bifurcation is if an activity accelerates your speed of Aging it's self-aid or destruction if it slows your speed of Aging it's rejuvenate of a nature and because we've been using this so much in our own work you're basically just looking at information Theory are you causing entropy to happen uh like in accelerated Pace or not yeah are you calling it causing information loss in your biological systems outside of that we can put other abstract layers on top and say gaming blank social media blank whatever but really if you're just getting a biochemical reaction accelerate or Slaughter and aging period and you have a fork and you point in different directions but to me that would be really cool that was the thing that got me on this path is getting my head around self-driving behaviors because no matter how many times I woke up in the morning I was like I'm gonna exercise I'm gonna eat well all day I would just blow it you know like in some moment of weakness everything will go out the door and so um maybe others will experience something similar maybe not but that's something to try yeah two two people that come to mind they'll be interesting from a researcher's standpoint well one one a researcher one more of an author would be a BJ fog I don't know if you've looked into some of his work on tiny habits I think he's at Stanford and then uh author Mark Manson who's obviously written a lot about you know habit and willpower etc those two guys are both the the interesting uh as a as a part of that and obviously from an entropy standpoint you no doubt have to take into account to a certain extent hermetic factors right like if I stay in the infrared sauna or the cold bath or
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