Dr. Mike Israetel and Bryan Johnson on Steroids, Longevity, AI, and What Is Worth the Risk
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson, who has built his public persona around slowing and reversing biological aging, sits down with Dr. Mike Israetel, a competitive bodybuilder, co-founder of Renaissance Periodization (RP), and one of the more visible fitness voices on YouTube. The two first connected after Mike criticized Bryan online and Bryan answered with a friendly comment. The conversation begins with how Mike handles sudden fame, then moves through the coming wave of pharmaceutical body modification, Mike's steroid use, Bryan's "Don't Die" philosophy, AI, and Mike's biological-age test results. It ends with a candid exchange about call-out culture, risk aversion, and Bryan's decade of depression.
The central tension throughout is that both men think humanity is approaching a transformative moment. Bryan argues that almost no present-day pleasure is worth risking one's chance to see it. Mike largely agrees in theory, but openly admits he still makes trade-offs for the here and now that Bryan would not.
Living with being recognized, and with the comment section
Asked how online notoriety has changed him, Mike says that view counts felt abstract at first, "devoid of any reference to any kind of emotion." It became real about a year and a half to two years before the interview, when strangers in malls and airports started recognizing him. He says he likes meeting people, but the loss of assumed anonymity required him to "recontextualize" how he moves through the world. His example is a joke: discreetly picking his nose on a flight now feels like being in a "mini spotlight."
The larger shift, he says, is the volume and frankness of opinion. He grew up in a pre-social-media world where criticism happened behind your back, and adults almost never said it to your face. Online, he now gets "very unfiltered opinions" about who he is and how he phrases things. He admits he has had a streak of reading comments and wondering whether the person would say it to his face, which he calls "dominance hierarchy alpha male" thinking he is trying to get rid of.
His coping strategy is to accept a few truisms: he is doing his best, he is not perfect, and some criticism is probably deserved. He says that never being conventionally good-looking helped. Unlike a celebrity who grew up hearing only praise, he has no attachment to his own infallibility to lose. Years of standing nearly naked on bodybuilding stages to be judged also gave him something like a thick skin. He used to reply to every comment "until I beat the conversation to death and won the debate," but time no longer allows it, and he calls learning to shrug things off good for him emotionally.
Bryan, who also started YouTube about two years earlier, calls comment sections "a new psychological phenomenon." He notes that several of his friends never read comments and have their teams pass along only positive ones. His own disposition is the opposite: comments are his favorite part of social media, especially carefully crafted insults, which he respects for the effort.
The podcast's hidden motive
Bryan is candid about why he is doing the show. He believes humanity is at a "critical juncture" and could evolve into something spectacular or get into a mess. He finds it hard to think about anything else. Most people, he acknowledges, are focused on building muscle, losing weight, managing anxiety, earning more, and finding a partner. Having discovered that he and Mike see the world similarly, he says he is remapping his questions.
He describes their methods as essentially the same. Both take physiological evidence, map it as best they can, stay open to being wrong, and keep evolving. Mike applies this to physique and Bryan to aging. The question is whether Mike has found a bridge between what he is known for and the larger change Bryan sees coming.
The GLP-1 drugs as the "first raindrop"
Mike says he has a few bridges, and his main one is the future of physique, health, and biotechnology. Today, he argues, the highest-return interventions are sleep, exercise, diet, and stress management. Much of his work through videos, books, and software is explaining the theory behind these and giving people autoregulatory feedback so they can check whether they are training and eating properly. He considers this "a known road." Some questions have good answers and others do not yet, but research is tractable.
Most people stop their mental model there, he says. But "something really big changed recently," which he calls the first drop in a coming rainstorm: the widespread use of a new class of anti-obesity drugs such as Ozempic, tirzepatide, and the oral Rybelsus. Before these, as he frames it, pharmaceutical options were weak. Supplements had tiny, contextual effects. Metformin "might do some things" with small effects. Anabolic steroids and growth hormone worked but carried a "laundry list" of side effects worse than the main effect. Older appetite drugs like phentermine stopped working after about three months. The new anorectic drugs, in his account, gave millions of people for whom dietary control was unrealistic the ability to treat body weight as "a turn dial," with side effects that are "very manageable" compared with older drugs.
Before 2022, Mike says, he and his friend Jared, a pro bodybuilder, would talk to anyone about the coming biotech renaissance, and people would tell them to stop watching Ray Kurzweil videos. After Ozempic, the question became whether this was a one-off or the start of a pipeline.
He names drugs he hopes AI drug discovery and receptor-selective design could produce. The first is a "non-androgenic anabolic," a substance that grows muscle with almost no other side effects. He calls muscle a major contributor to organ health. It lowers blood glucose, acts as a calorie sink, and supports mobility. He points to people who, through age or genetics, gain only a few pounds of muscle a year of training no matter what. He says there are plausible pathways, citing the myostatin pathway as "at least one very good candidate" that would not be difficult to exploit "on paper." He also imagines drugs that raise resting metabolic rate and others for mental health.
His picture is of a person in their 50s who needs to change their health and, maybe by the late 2020s, can be supported by drugs that cut food intake and build muscle alongside diet and exercise. He wants to be there as this happens to tell people these options are real, while advising them to talk to their doctor.
Bryan agrees that Ozempic "changed the game" by showing that a single shot can modulate a primal drive like hunger, and he extends the idea to other basic drives.
Why Mike lifts: "being your own sculpture"
Mike's motive for bodybuilding is "pure art aesthetics." Alone in his gym with a pump, he takes his shirt off, hits a few poses, and thinks, "that looks right." He admits he is not a particularly beautiful sculpture. The downside is that he does not always like what he sees. The upside is how much room there is to improve.
He respects people who simply do not care how they look, calling it "a mature outlook," but says many more people are uncomfortable in their bodies. He wants to be part of the "stack of helpfulness" that gets people into the body they want. He does not judge exercise, pharmaceuticals, or eventually genetic engineering as means. His analogy is online avatars, which can look like anything, while the physical body stays fixed. He calls it "a mini super tiny violin low-key tragedy" that people live in bodies they do not love.
He sees his contribution in two phases. First, teach the strategies that already work. Second, as new drugs arrive, help destigmatize them, since he considers the reflexive anti-pharmaceutical reaction "understandable but largely out of date." He adds that these are "powerful weapons that should not be misused."
In a lighter aside, Mike says he met his wife online, and it was not his physique that attracted her. According to him, her main requirement is that he stay bigger than her. What caught her eye was a Facebook photo from the Arnold Classic trade show in which he wore a backpack and glasses and "looked like a nerd." He says he currently weighs about 235 pounds at roughly 9 to 10 percent body fat.
Why Mike took steroids
Mike gives three reasons. First, when he was coming up, drug-free bodybuilding and powerlifting were marginal, so to be taken seriously as someone who knew things "you just had to look like you knew things." The people who looked that way were "gigantic juice monsters." He compares it to a football coach, for whom playing at a high level helps credibility even if it is not required.
Second, he trained naturally for 12 years and was still gaining, but slowly, and he wanted to lengthen the road of progress. He says he has never used a huge amount relative to what is possible and has scaled up gradually because he cares more about working on his "masterpiece" longer than about reaching a peak quickly.
Third, he is "a nerd first," and using molecules to upgrade abilities is "straight up comic book" material that he is fully on board with.
Bryan quits rapamycin, and the problem of being frozen in past positions
Bryan shares a parallel example. He recently stopped taking rapamycin after four years because it was affecting his lipids and blood glucose, raising his resting heart rate, and causing small tissue infections. He also cites a preprint released about two weeks earlier which, he recalls, found that rapamycin accelerated aging on around 12 of 16 aging clocks. He says he now feels relief, with a substantially lower resting heart rate during sleep and better sleep.
Mike praises him for dropping the drug without attachment and predicts people will keep calling him "that rapamycin guy." Mike describes his own version of this. He says he was probably the first to formalize training-volume landmarks with colleagues, including the maximum recoverable volume, minimum effective volume, and maintenance volume. Because the maximum recoverable volume became popular first, he was known as "the high volume guy," and later as "the low volume guy." People still ask why he trains with fewer sets than he "recommends," but he says he never recommended training at the maximum recoverable volume all the time, except perhaps for a few months in 2013. He thinks people who refuse to allow updates are a small, highly disagreeable minority who are overrepresented in comment sections.
Rage, anxiety, and tolerating discomfort
Bryan asks how Mike justifies side effects he has described, such as anxiety and rage, that affect his conscious experience. Mike says his gift is being able to "eat a shitload of discomfort" and delay gratification. He points to years of low-paid graduate work alone in a lab and choosing vacations based on where he can train and eat well. He says he once got so far out of touch with his feelings that he had to relearn that he has internal states. He describes his wife as an equally driven workaholic who went through many hard periods on the way to her achievements. Their shared response has been: "breathe it out, re-grit the teeth, keep plowing."
For anabolics specifically, he says he had finite timelines and explicit goals that were open to review. He eventually did modify them. Rage on extreme doses of androgens was "not a surprise." What makes him feel better long term is sticking to a hard plan to unlock benefits later. Later in the conversation, he says his anxiety has dropped "to nonclinical levels" since he substantially reduced his intake.
Advice for a 19-year-old considering steroids
Bryan asks what Mike would tell his son Talmage, who is 19, or any 19-year-old thinking about steroids. Mike says that in almost all cases it is a miscalculated trade-off. His main point is that people need to be explicit about the upside, both what they literally gain and what they think that muscle will get them, such as more dates or feeling better in their skin. Many leave the payoff as a "hazy cloud of good things."
He uses two analogies. One is startups between roughly 2000 and 2020 that collected data without knowing its purpose. That had little downside for a software company, but steroids do have downsides. The other is imagining a party as a pizza-commercial fantasy without knowing what you will actually do there. Parties are fun. Steroid side effects are not.
His concrete advice is to wait until 25, collect the natural gains with "almost zero health downsides," and then ask whether you are mature enough and still want it. If so, he says, "start threading in the anabolics," adding that in the United Kingdom, in his words, they are legal. If a young person cannot give a well-articulated, passionate, and sensible reason not to delay, his answer is don't. He compares it to someone earning $100,000 a year asking about a $200,000 car. There may be a case for a lifelong collector buying a dream car, but "it's kind of cool" is not a reason when the cost is two years of income and the benefit is "notional." Too many people start steroids, he says, because of vibes on TikTok.
"Don't Die" versus "I'm a sideshow"
Bryan lays out their shared view that a period of health flourishing is coming. Injections or gene editing might one day deliver the benefits of exercise, which Mike says violates no biological law. He then asks how Mike reconciles doing things that accelerate aging, such as anabolics, with that future.
Mike's answer draws on about 20 years of meditation. He sees the history of increasingly complex systems, from atoms to self-replicating molecules to biological life to "technological life," as the most beautiful thing to witness. But he is "not a critical component of it." He says he would unthinkingly take a bullet for Sam Altman because Altman matters more to the path toward AGI. He does not index heavily on never dying. Some of his choices do not fit that goal, and he says he makes trade-offs he does not recommend others make. Still, he tells the audience that if you survive another 10 to 15 years, "you may never die," which he thinks should motivate anyone.
Bryan frames his own position with a thought experiment. Homo erectus a million years ago could not have said anything intelligent about quantum mechanics, markets, or even cities of 1,500 people. Likewise, we cannot say much about the next 10 to 15 years. His goal is not immortality but simply not dying so he can witness what comes. He suggests existence may be "the highest virtue," and that money, status, and power will stop being the game once AI rewrites human games. He asks whether Mike sees a contradiction.
Mike offers two partial answers. First, there is a discount for the "hit by a bus" scenario. If he over-invested in the future and died in an accident, he might wish he had enjoyed being jacked while it lasted. Second, holding two preferences with a trade-off between them is not a contradiction. He notes that he eats well, stays lean, no longer takes high doses, has always had excellent blood work, and comes from a long-lived family. But if a time traveler told him everything would happen without him, he says he would essentially shrug, because technological progress is "transcendent in a religious way" to him. He recalls crying in public with Jared at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when they saw an early delivery robot, because years of theorizing had become real. What matters most to him is "the great awakening," a machine intelligence learning from and interacting with nearly all humans. "As long as that thing's kicking," he says, he is a sideshow.
Would a future self even recognize today's values?
Bryan asks whether a 2030 Mike might look back and find today's values, including self-sacrifice, unrecognizable. Mike says some beliefs from high school, such as objective reality, roughly consequentialist causation, and the power of mathematics, have held up, while he got plenty wrong. He expects both kinds of results in the future.
He then walks through a thought experiment about his own values. He cares about how he looks because of genetics and environment. If brains were uploaded to the cloud, which he considers "inevitable" unless AI has no use for it, he imagines living a year every few days at a thousandfold speed, including as a champion bodybuilder. But if the brain regions governing sexual preferences or body-image concerns could be edited, "I literally no longer care about how I look." He compares this to asking an uplifted chimp what it wants from VR: bananas, mates, and revenge on the chimp that kicked it at 13. That is understandable but parochial. He says he is less curious about his own future opinions than about what a superintelligence would say: "Hey, GPT-7, what are we supposed to do with all this?"
Bryan says his team has built an AI trained on his writing and interviews, and he suspects current AI can already be better at being him in many respects, though not yet at physical tasks or nuanced relationships with people it has history with. Mike says GPT-4 is already "so much kinder, so much gentler" than he is. Bryan's conclusion is that the only thing the species should do is "lock in and say let's not die." He treats staying up all night, eating badly, environmental damage, and war as versions of the same self-destructive "YOLO" pattern. He argues that because billions of individual choices form a zeitgeist, ordinary people's behavior does affect outcomes, and people with platforms carry special responsibility.
Mike then red-teams himself. Optimizing for five to ten years of YOLO against a possible 500,000 years of "ecstatic scientific exploration" in the cloud is "myopic." He compares it to a three-year-old approaching a socket with a fork. He speculates that people may eventually be paid enough to live on just so AI systems can study their behavior as training data, which would make nearly everyone valuable. So avoiding irrational risks and investing in basic health is "probably the smartest thing you can ever do." He adds that dismissing this because it comes from "a gigantic steroid addict" would be the genetic fallacy.
Meeting people where they are
Mike proposes a division of labor. Bryan argues for total commitment. Mike, a self-described libertarian whose political philosophy is "wealth and freedom," would ask people to look at their trade-offs. If drinking and late nights are truly worth it after thinking it through, fine, but is there anything on the margins that could push longevity forward? Some people "can't be reached in a totalistic way yet." He jokes that he will be Bryan's "fallen angel."
Bryan notes that the goals people chase now, such as muscle, money, status, and power, are "ephemeral social cultural phenomena" rather than truths, but that people need objectives and like difficult things. He wants to offer a new game that starts with not dying and rests on humility about what is coming.
Mike's biological-age results
Mike then opens his test results, sighing that he expects to have done terribly. The results as read out:
- VISIA skin scan: skin age 44 against a chronological age of 40. Bryan says they have seen much worse. Mike's routine is occasional generic soap.
- Spirometry: 99th percentile, 13.2 liters per second.
- Advanced glycation end products: a score of 1.3, corresponding to age 23. A score of 1.2 would correspond to 18. Bryan says there are few therapies for this, since it is mostly accumulated damage from things like foods cooked at high temperatures.
- Grip strength: 132.8 pounds, about five pounds above the 127-pound 99th-percentile mark for men.
- Push-ups: 46, which is 99th percentile for his age group. The 99th percentile for all men is 56.
- Sit and reach: 15 inches, 50th percentile. Eight more inches would reach the 99th.
- Sit-to-stand: 9.5, 63rd percentile. Mike says his large quads and torso create a leverage problem and he has only tried it once.
- One-leg stand (eyes closed): 13 seconds, 9th percentile, against 35 seconds for the 99th. His first attempt lasted about 4 to 5 seconds.
On push-ups, Mike says he stopped deliberately. The marginal risk of even a minor pec strain is not worth it for his physique goals, which is also why he refuses stunts like tire flips in collaborations. Bryan says he thinks about life "through that frame everywhere."
The balance result leads Mike to wonder about his neural health, since "anabolics are no good for that," and whether his intense work habits leave enough time for repair. He says self-estimates of cognition are unreliable, but he does not feel duller and thinks his ability to grasp complex concepts has grown. He also says he expects neuroregenerative therapies in five to ten years to be powerful enough that he "can lose a few IQ points and afford it."
Intelligence, wisdom, and "AI will fix it"
Bryan argues that clear judgment is needed now more than ever, comparing the moment to the early Cold War or a pandemic. Mike suggests that wisdom leans on crystallized rather than fluid intelligence. He compares older people to a less powerful AI model trained on far more data, which may outperform a stronger model trained on little. Bryan counters that knowing too much can also be a liability, because established patterns make older people resistant to new ideas, which is why young people disrupt them. He sees it as a genuine trade-off.
Bryan recounts an AI worker who stopped wearing sunscreen because "AI is just going to solve it." He says the old excuse, "I'm going to die anyway," is being replaced by "AI will fix it." Mike offers a third version, "AI is the show and I'm a sideshow," while noting he is not endorsing it. Both conclude that people will find clever justifications for whatever they already want to do.
What the podcast should be
Asked for feedback, Mike first asks Bryan to state the goal in a sentence. Bryan calls it "information compression." He wants a billion people to commit to not dying individually, as a species, with Earth and with AI, and to opt into a future that "could be the most extraordinary existence" in this part of the galaxy.
Mike suggests several categories of guests and topics:
- How to live: meaning, psychological health, motivation, and career paths for people who wonder what their role is "if AI is the show."
- Serious researchers: scientists in anti-aging, age reversal, cosmetics, and physique alteration, including plastic surgeons and facial de-aging specialists, to explain what is in the pipeline and what is validated. He describes the health space as having something like a 10-to-1 ratio of nonsense to validated work, such as $50,000 machines backed by one old study, and suggests episodes on the biggest anti-aging myths.
- Emotional difficulty: conversations with psychologists, war veterans, and others about surviving the darkest times, drawing on Bryan's own past suicidal thoughts, since "you want a billion of us to make it."
Mike also argues that aesthetics is the "cheater way" to reach people in their 30s and 40s. For them, death feels too distant, and some have relatives in their 60s who smoke and drink and are still fine. Nearly everyone wants their 22-year-old body back. He expects the cosmetics and plastic surgery industries to rush toward any biological breakthroughs. Once people want tighter skin or a leaner waist, he says, they start sleeping, eating, and training better. Finger-wagging like a parent does not work on young adults, but enhancement does. Bryan calls this "the shortest path." Mike notes that RP's clients in their 50s already want both his aesthetic goals and Bryan's longevity goals.
Call-out culture: when to criticize
Revisiting how they met, Mike says his original video was respectful where due, but he struggles with the fact that people love it when he is harsh online. He wants more "laughing together, not against other people." He believes exposing charlatans has social value and does it "begrudgingly." But he regrets some early criticism of Hollywood trainers on his Friday show, imagining how it would feel to be personally mocked by a household name. He poses a hypothetical: if an assassin could end the war by killing Vladimir Putin, should we refuse because Putin is still "on our humanity survival team"? He clarifies that his real question is about exclusionary negativity, not violence.
Bryan jokes that he is taking money from Putin, then answers seriously. Some people in power are beholden to systems around them. Others choose not to be beholden to anyone, which costs some partners but attracts others. He perceives Mike as evidence-driven, without hidden motives, and self-aware enough to correct himself. He says the danger zone is overconfidence combined with a lack of self-awareness. His advice is to lean in, because Mike's most valuable asset is trust, and softening what he says out of fear of reactions would compromise it. Bryan mentions he once made a video harshly criticizing an older version of himself. Mike calls the feedback very valuable and says he will think it over.
Should they arm wrestle?
Bryan jokingly challenges Mike to arm wrestle, then immediately withdraws. Mike recalls winning an arm-wrestling match at an undergraduate party as a competitive powerlifter and pulling a small forearm supinator muscle that bothered him into the next day's training. Seeing no upside, he never did it again. He also stopped jumping onto 3- to 4-foot platforms after scraping his knee once. He offers a properly supervised no-gi jiu-jitsu roll with waivers and mats, but asks what the point would be. He and his wife Crystal, who both train jiu-jitsu seriously, even avoid bike riding for fear of an elbow injury. Bryan tells of a friend who wrestled a muscular grappler at a party, hurt his back, and has since had two surgeries.
Mike asks how they can make risk aversion sound fun rather than boring. Bryan says about a quarter of people react to him with some version of "so focused on living forever, he forgot how to live." His answer is that, just as Mike avoids anything threatening his craft, Bryan treats living into the future as his craft, and no sensory pleasure is worth losing it. Mike adds that over time the people still around will disproportionately be those who cared about surviving.
Bridges, dystopia, and Demis Hassabis
Bryan argues that well-meaning people would agree if they understood the moment, but AI researchers' language about matrix multiplication does not reach them. Practical topics like muscle and sleep can serve as a bridge to the bigger picture. Mike adds a red-team concern: Bryan's optimism can sound like faith, and many people imagine dystopias. He offers to contribute a "third pillar" of reasonable, trajectory-based forecasts to go alongside what works now and what is in the pipeline.
Bryan says he has known DeepMind's Demis Hassabis for about ten years and would like to see him in a position of power, citing Hassabis's thesis that solving intelligence would solve everything else that is tractable. Mike compares this to wanting a trustworthy person, rather than almost anyone else, to put on the Ring of Power. Bryan pushes back on the idea that only a small number of people will shape the future. Governments, cultures, and a billion individuals deciding what to build, how to regulate, and whether to go to war all matter, so "we are actually all of us in the game."
Bryan's way out of depression
Mike mentions that he experienced depression as a pharmacologically induced side effect of Adderall when he was younger. Part of his mind always knew "it's just the drugs," which he says is different from depression that is not drug-induced. He then asks how Bryan got out.
Bryan says the earliest version of Blueprint, "V0," was an attempt to solve his depression. For about ten years he systematically tried everything with and without evidence: energy healers, TMS, tDCS, medication, CBT, and acupuncture. In the end he believes the cause was mostly circumstantial. He was raised in and still belonged to the Mormon religion, which he says boxed him into a kind of paralysis, and he was in a challenging personal relationship. The combination "broke" him. After selling his company, divorcing, and leaving the religion, he rewrote his life. The depression lifted gradually, he was "fully out" within a year, and he says it has never returned, even partially.
Mike summarizes the behavioral genetics literature he has read as happiness being roughly genetic proclivity multiplied by life circumstances, and says people underestimate how much a bad marriage "follows you everywhere." Bryan agrees he had not connected how large a contributor the relationship was. Asked whether he had hoped things would improve, he compares it to building a team: "Never in my entire life has someone changed to become the right fit." Mike largely agrees.
Bryan describes the lifting of his depression as "probably the coolest experience in my life," like being infused with hope after a decade in a dark cave. Mike closes by saying he had known Bryan only as "the vampire guy on the internet," found this side of him wonderful, and hopes future episodes dig further into personal journeys and happiness.
I think initially we met because I think you were talking [ __ ] about me. Exactly. Yeah. And I made a nice comment in return. It was an incredibly awesome move. Today I'm joined by Dr. Mike Israetel, who has a PhD in sports physiology.
Look, we're all flawed. I said all of us. I didn't mean you, your lordship. Am I really going to alienate other people on a big platform and say they're charlatans and liars? I do think there is a social value for exposing charlatanism. He's also co-founder of Renaissance Periodization and is a coach to Olympians and professional athletes. Mike is a competitive bodybuilder and also a popular YouTuber.
I love being a voice for positivity and inclusion more than I like anything else. But does the witty banter and the dogging on people who kind of suck also do well? You're basically acting like autophagy. I don't like that I did those things, and I'm still kind of dealing with how much positivity to call-out culture am I willing to put up with in my own head, in my own action. All right. Should we arm wrestle? I don't want to lose or get hurt.
How have you dealt with, I mean, you've really blown up online and you have a lot of notoriety. How has that affected you, the way you think about the world and yourself and what you're doing?
It's a really good question. It's definitely something to think about, because when you make YouTube videos and write books and make software and stuff, you do things, things happen. You can even pull up your own iPhone and see your face on the screen. And there's a bit of like, oh, like I guess, you know, you see the numbers, like how many views or whatever you get, and you're like, okay, those are numbers. They're kind of almost devoid of any reference to any kind of emotion. Like, okay, those are high numbers, I guess, relative. What does that mean? Doesn't mean anything.
And then it first started to really hit about a year and a half, two years ago, when, like, I think most people operate when they're in the public sphere, like walking through a shopping mall and an airport, under the assumption of general anonymity. Like I can go to the mall and walk around with my wife, and it's just my wife and I, and people look at you. I look really ridiculous, so people often stare, but that doesn't bother me at all. It's just normal. But then the first few times when people look differently, and you know they know who they're looking at, and some of them will be like, you're Dr. Mike. And I'm always really happy to meet people, so it never throws me off. But the fact that it happens, after, when I walked away for the first several dozen times, I was like, "Whoa, what the hell?"
And then after a while, it's like it happens all the time. And I still to this point have not gotten used to it in the sense of like, "Ah, whatever." It's much more like, oh, cool, that happened. It's still the same narrative as before. But it is a thing that is a little jarring at first, and kind of, maybe not jarring, requires me to recontextualize how I see things.
Another thing is, like, this is disgusting, so my apologies in advance, but, you know, some of us pick our noses on occasion. I'm not talking about eating it or something. Just a little boogie gets in there, you kind of try to get in there, little napkin. And let's say you're on a flight and you're doing that nowadays. I'm like, but there are many people around that maybe know who I am, and you know, like, oh god, it's like I'm always in a mini spotlight.
And if you go on the internet, you look at other fitness YouTubers and stuff, people are always talking about you, and the number of comments that are addressing you or about you, when anyone makes a video about you or on your own videos, starts to climb to an amount you can't possibly dedicate almost any time to processing. And rarely do you hear that many opinions from that heterogeneous population of people about you.
Like, I come from the old world of pre-social media, as do you, where if someone was going to say something about you, they were going to talk that [ __ ] behind your back, and either you wouldn't hear about it, or you would hear about it and it would be like, oh, you're talking that [ __ ] behind my back. You wouldn't take it seriously, because real men say things to the face. And then otherwise, face to face, though, someone finds you disagreeable or finds something you said erroneous or curious, they'll say it to you. Which means in the real world, they just never say it to you, because people almost never do that after, you know, teenagehood.
But then on the internet, you see very, very unfiltered opinions, very hot takes about who you are, what it is you're doing, how you're thinking. You have this other thing where, including right very now, exactly how you phrase and don't phrase various things, alternatively, you are judged on. And I have absolutely no problem being judged. I don't think I'm expected to be perfect every time. When I flub on something and give an explanation that's not amazing, of course, if I watch it back, I'm like, "Ah, crap. I should have said this versus that." So that kind of thing is a bit more of a thing. I'm coming to grips with it.
I have had my streak of reading comments and being like, I wonder if this person would ever say this to my face. But that's this really nasty kind of dominance hierarchy alpha male [ __ ] I'm trying to excise from my head. So at the end of the day, what's been comforting to me is to accept a few truisms of: I'm here just doing my best. I am who I am. I am not perfect.
I was graced, luckily, having never been born beautiful, that, you know, if people are like, oh, that guy's face looks weird, I'm like, [ __ ] join the club, my friend. I've been looking at this thing for 40 years. Imagine how I feel. So I haven't had to be liberated from any attachments to my own infallibleness. Cuz, like, imagine you're a female celebrity. You're a very pretty girl growing up. You heard only good things. Then social media comes on and everyone's dunking on you, like you look terrible. You had one bad makeup day on a show and they caught an interview from the wrong angle, and it's just a hundred thousand comments about how you've crested the hill and all this other stuff. Luckily, I don't have to deal with that.
My physique is open to criticism, but I'm also a competitive bodybuilder. I have been that much longer than I've been social media relevant. It's like when you're on stage in basically underwear in front of a crowd of people and they're literally judging you, you sort of just kind of develop, I don't even know if it's a thick skin, but you're kind of just like, yeah, you have an opinion about my body, that's cool. People may be right, may be wrong.
And so my best kind of coping mechanism has just been like, I'm just me. I'm absolutely not perfect. And if people are going to criticize me, I probably have it coming. And if they're going to be incorrect about their criticisms, you know, it's not my responsibility to correct every single person. I would love to do that. I used to do every single comment or reply until I beat the conversation to death and won the debate. I can't do that anymore for time constraint reasons.
So I just have to really, it's a really good thing for me emotionally to have the constant exercise of letting things just get shrugged off. Like, oh, you're an idiot, you're a charlatan, you're a clown, you're a steroid addict, and you're ruining fitness and media. And, you know, at the end of the day, I have to be like, there's probably some good points in there, and I probably could be doing better in many respects, but also, like, yeah, I'm pretty damn good at some stuff, and I have a decent amount of confidence about that. So on the aggregate, I'm just kind of going to be like, it is what it is. And that's what's helped me the most.
Yeah. A lot of the people I, so I just started doing YouTube videos a couple years ago, like two years ago. Same. Yeah. Meeting people where the comments really are a new psychological phenomenon that many people need to deal with. Yes. And so, like you're saying, it's true that typically we had these social circumstances where you gathered information about yourself by those around you. You heard gossip of what people said about you, but you didn't have to confront the brutal assessments people make. Sometimes on point, sometimes they're mean-spirited, but it really is a pretty tough environment for many people to be exposed to that.
So I know several of my friends, they don't read comments at all. So their team will put together the best comments, you know, the most cheerful ones, and they'll share those, but they leave the negativity out. And so, like, do your thing. I've always found it to be fascinating that everyone takes their strategy of life and figures out a model that keeps their psyche stable. Yeah. Yeah.
So I mean, my personal disposition is I love the comments. Get out of here. You're going to do great on social media. It's my favorite part of social media. Oh, I wish I could say that. It's to hear what people say. It brings me so much joy, especially those who try earnestly to, they try to create their best insult, right? And you can tell that they thought about it a lot and they really carefully crafted it, taking their best go, like a paragraph-sized kind of, or even a sentence. But you just respect, like, you actually gave them some thought, according to your abilities, tried to land one. But yeah, that's interesting.
So Mike, one thing I want to talk to you about today is, so I'm really trying to figure out the vibe of the podcast. Like, why does this exist? Why is it valuable to people? And I'll confess my secret motive is that I do think that humanity is at this critical juncture. Like, we could be evolving to something spectacular. We could also get ourselves into a mess in so many ways. And I see the situation for what it is, and it's hard for me to spend time on anything other than that.
But that's not where people's minds are at. People want to put on muscle, and they want to lose weight, and they want to not feel anxious, and they want to not be depressed, and they want to make more money at their job, and they want more status in life, and they want a partner in life. These basic things that humans want. And so I discovered in hanging out with you that we really care about similar things. We see the world in a similar way. So I had many questions for you that I'm now remapping into other directions. Okay. Thank God. Yeah. I'd much rather talk about the stuff you and I connected on, though I would be happy to talk about anything you like.
Okay, cool. So I mean, this is like an open conversation. So you and I both have an interest in the science of physiological function, and you have applied it towards physique. I have applied it towards age. But we're both using the same architecture. You take evidence, you try to map it as best you can. You keep an open mind on it. You know you're going to be somewhat right, somewhat wrong. You're going to be constantly evolving into new things. But our approaches are pretty identical, in that we really do try to isolate the evidence and the results.
And so as you think about what you're doing, how have you imagined bridging these two worlds, from what you've become known for and what you see happening in the world? And do you see there's a way to bridge these two into a conversation that brings people in, that makes them relatable and understandable? Or have you not found that bridge?
I have a few bridges. I don't know if any of them would be something I would claim to be the bridge, the big one that gets everyone thinking on the futurism topic. But at least one of my bridges that I've been fortunate enough to get to talk about a few times in places, though never for long enough, is the future of physique and health and biotechnology.
Because today, the tip of the spear of the best ROI things you can do for your health and how you look and feel are things like sleep, things like exercise, things like proper dietary management, stress modulation, so on and so forth. And those are now beginning to be more and more well-understood tactics and strategies. And it is a big part of my job, in the social media sphere and in general through books and all this other stuff, including software, to get people both to understand the theoreticals behind what is sleep, why do you need sleep, what's good about getting enough sleep, how do you know you're not getting enough sleep, so on and so forth. And also empowering them with strategies and recommendations to actually do the thing, and having various autoregulatory mechanisms in there for them to guess and check to see: am I doing the thing? Am I lifting properly? Am I getting results? Am I eating properly? How's that going? So on and so forth.
So that is stuff that's already kind of a known road. It's not a road we have walked completely yet, but we know roughly where we're going, and there are some questions that have really good answers, questions that have marginally good answers, questions that we don't know the answers to, but getting the answers is very tractable, and research is currently very fruitful in that regard.
I think a lot of people kind of stop their own mental model at that point. Not to be derisive to other people, but at large, the practical human being in 2024 will ask the question of how do I sleep, how do I eat, how do I fitness train in order to get my best combination of, let's say, longevity, quality of life and physique vanity, etc. You know, RP is really a vanity channel at the end of the day, and that's totally cool.
But something really big changed recently, and it's the first drop in a rainstorm that's going to be an insane downpour. Texas-sized hail, all that [ __ ]. I'm kidding. Hopefully just pleasant raindrops, fat raindrops of progress. And that first raindrop to me was the exploitation at large of a new class of anti-obesity drugs, the Ozempics, the tirzepatides and so on and so forth.
Because it used to be that in your pursuit of fitness and health, you could take some supplements, and they had these very small upsides. They were very contextual. Like, if you're not deficient in vitamin D, more vitamin D doesn't help you, arguably can become toxic, so on and so forth. And then you could do the basics of actually eating well and doing fitness and all that stuff. But the conversation about pharmaceutical intervention and enhancement was like, you know, metformin might do some things, but it's a very small effect and most people don't need it, blah blah blah. And then there's anabolic steroids and growth hormone, which are like, oh, they work, but the side effect profile is bigger. It's a laundry list. It's worse than the main effect.
And so with the new class of anorectic drugs, which is what they're called, drugs that reduce appetite and food intake, you had this situation occur where millions of people for whom dietary control was not realistic, given their genetic food drive and food environment and history of eating and their current adiposity, now became insanely empowered. Yeah. To be able to control their diet however they saw fit. The ability to do that through just one injection a week, subcutaneous, or now they have, I think, Rybelsus is like a pill or something like that. Baffling.
Because now, to a large extent, for a huge fraction of the population that struggles with weight, your body weight becomes a turn dial. You could just turn the medication dose up and down, as long as the side effects are manageable, and they are very manageable relative to older drugs like anabolic steroids, for example, or phentermine and stuff, drugs that would work for three months and then you were used to them. They didn't do anything, just side effects. Now that we have that, all of this proselytizing that I've been doing, and no doubt you've been doing, about the coming biotech
revolution has its first real killer on the block. And it's such a weird thing because you're like, it used to be before the 2022 kind of revolution, I would just, myself and my friend Jared, pro bodybuilder, we would just blather to whoever was listening about the coming renaissance of biotech. And you get some point you're just like, "Look, I get it, man. You like YouTube videos with, you know, Ray Kurzweil in them. Sweet. Shut up." But after Ozempic and all those drugs, it's kind of like, oh, oh, is this a one-off or are more drugs like this coming?
And for me, one of my huge passions and one of my bridges that I mentioned earlier was, okay, what other drugs could be potentially in the pipeline through AI drug discovery and very receptor selectorized drug design, which is now a reality. What kind of drugs are there that could be real game changers? And I can think of at least two offhand.
One is what would be called a non-androgenic anabolic. Muscle mass is a critical part of your healthiness, of your organs. It's a huge contributor. Lowers blood glucose. It works as a calorie sink. It allows you a crazy amount of mobility. It allows everything else to be healthier. I mean, the laundry list of having higher than declining muscle mass with age, coming back up to that mid-20s status and even a little extra, is enormous. And you can resistance train. It has a very large effect, but it takes time. And in addition to that, some people, through combination of age or just have not so great genetics, quite frankly, put it quite frankly, they don't get a lot of traction on the problem. They'll gain three pounds of muscle and after a year they'll gain another pound. And the doctor's like, "You could gain another 10. That would be great, but it's just really not in the cards for you. You're 63 years old. You have whatever genetics that are just like, you ain't doing the thing."
And so a non-androgenic anabolic would be a muscle growth substance that you take that would help you grow muscle and have almost no side effects at all otherwise. And you think this is fantasy land nonsense, but there are many pathways, at least one very good candidate, the myostatin pathway in humans, that would be not on paper difficult to exploit. They think, okay, if we had that, how would that change the game?
Well, imagine now you are a person who's out of shape. You're in your 50s and you're like, I need to do something. You go to the doctor and you're like, I need to change my health. It used to be like, well, you got to diet and exercise, and it was a very uphill battle for many people. Now you can be empowered by various drugs, like drugs that reduce food intake and drugs, potentially, hopefully in the future, that increase your muscularity. Another drug that increases your resting metabolic rate and potentially another series of drugs for mental stuff. And we're already maybe in the late 2020s at a very different point where, if you have physique problems, these bridges to the next generation are here meaningfully to affect you. Very different than theory. I want to be there as it happens to bring people in and go, you should try these, but talk to your doctor, because they're real and they're coming.
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think Ozempic really did change the game, that it can change a fundamental part of being human, which is the hunger response. Huge. And you just get a shot. And so like other primal things we have, like the want for sex and the, right, like all these basic needs we have, and now we can basically reliably modulate them. Turn the dial. Yeah. And even turn up, right, on certain things. So it's actually pretty remarkable.
When you got into this, to bodybuilding, what was your primary game you were trying to play? Is it you locked in because it was a fun game to play, or did you have an inspiration you wanted to be like? What was the primary motive for you getting into bodybuilding?
Pure art aesthetics. When I have a huge pump in the gym and I'm relatively lean and there's no one around, I train in a gym that's just me, and occasionally my wife will come and scoff at me and then leave disappointed, as many women do when they're in my presence. I pull the shirt off. I hit a couple poses and I'm just like, "Yeah, that looks right." It's being your own sculpture. Now, I'm not a particularly beautiful sculpture, which is an upside and a downside. The downside is I don't always look that great in my own eyes, so I'm like, "Uh." But the upside is it's so exciting to have so much more enhancement to allocate. I want to eventually be in a world where, in my own body, for my own selfish, artistic interests, I look so much cooler than I ever have. And I want to be able to help other people accomplish that as well.
There are so many people walking around that do not care about how their bodies look. God bless them. I think there's so much beauty in just being like, I exist. Who gives a [ __ ] about it? What a mature look. What a mature outlook. There are so many more other people that walk around every day uncomfortable in the bodies in which they are. If for no other reason than purely aesthetic, like, imagine I put you into someone who is 300 pounds obese. You're like, "All right, you're single, dating scene." And you're like, really? I want to be a part of that stack of helpfulness a person could arrange around themselves to get to be in the body they want to be. And I absolutely, because it's a first principles thing of people want to look like they want to look. No value judgment. And if you want to look more aesthetic or artistic, however that looks to you, I don't judge people for using any combination of exercise or pharmaceutical intervention or eventually genetic engineering to look exactly how they want.
You go, and this is one of these things where the gamification brought to us by the digital space comes back to us in the physical space and makes the digital look a little better and kind of aspirational. If you want a different avatar in a social media site, Bryan, do you have trouble picking an avatar of like, well, none of these fit? Like, it's custom. You can do whatever you want. You can have an artist render one for you, whatever. You can look like whatever you want on the internet. Mhm. But in real life, you're back to this [ __ ] And I want the internet to reflect real life more. Vice versa. I want people to appear in the body they feel the best in. I don't give a [ __ ] with that. You think you look great weighing 300 lb? Girl, come over here. Get some love. I'm married, so don't. But theoretically, you know what I'm saying? But it's a little mini super tiny violin low-key tragedy that people have to exist in bodies they don't love.
Yeah. I think my small addition to this world will be, first, to give people the modern strategies that already work and, second, as the pharmaceuticals come out, maybe destigmatize a little bit, because a lot of people have a reflexive anti-pharmaceutical knee-jerk reaction, understandable but largely out of date. And so I want people to understand that these are powerful weapons that should not be misused but can be used in a way that enhances you. That's so great, and why not look how you want to look. Yeah.
You met your wife online, is that right? I did. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Was it because of your physique? God, no. The funny thing about my wife and I's relationship, and if I, maybe, wife, can I be frank? There you go. Who cares? Let me process that. Yeah, sure.
Okay. My wife likes me for a few reasons, and that's why she's with me, or got with me initially, and now it's just, it's just too laborious to break up. Is this like the comment section your wife leaves for you? Yes, that's right. It turns out that my own aesthetic preferences on physique just are not really her high priority. She doesn't care if I'm super lean or ultra-jacked. I think, if I'm to go back into my library of things she's told me that I've committed to memory, it's like, just be bigger than me and don't make me feel gigantic. So don't shrink down to 120 pounds and we're pretty good to go. Is that right, honey? Pretty much.
So I think if I'm like 220, a little soft, or 230, like rock hard chiseled, kind of. So I'm like 235 and I have some details in my glutes and stuff. So like about nine or 10% body fat, maybe a little lower than that. And so I just store it in such an atrocious way that I always look like higher percent unless I show you my legs and then you're like, "Oh [ __ ] you are really lean." It's the worst, you know, like everything just goes right to the waist and the face.
But for my wife, it wasn't the physique that did it at all. I think what really did it was I had an advanced degree and she saw that, and I was roughly in the lifting community, and that she saw a picture of me on Facebook when I was at the Arnold Classic, the trade show, and I had a backpack on and my glasses and I looked like a nerd, and she's into the nerds, and I was like, "Girl, if you're into nerds, I got a whole well deep of the [ __ ] for you." So that's I think why she was into that. Baby, is that right? I think. Yeah, that one pic. That's it. Just one pic. Yeah. Somehow skating in. Yeah. Putting bait out there. Boy, can you imagine I putting out that pic? I was like, "That's it, man. Girl of my dreams is gonna." No way. I don't even know who took that picture. I thought I looked terrible in it, but she was like, "Oh, this is my vibe." So, yeah.
And so, in pursuing this, you decided to do steroids. And so walk me through that process. Like, how did you come to that conclusion? And what's it been like to be on them?
Yeah, there's probably like three reasons maybe why I decided to do steroids. One is, back when I was coming up natural, everything drug-free, powerlifting, bodybuilding, etc., was very nascent and very irrelevant, unfortunately, very unfortunately. It's much more relevant now. I think it's a beautiful thing. So in order to be taken seriously as someone who knew things, you just had to look like you knew things, and so the people that looked like they knew things were gigantic juice monsters, and I was like, [ __ ] it, let's do it. Cuz my colleagues and I realized we knew some things and could help a lot of people, and we were just inculcated in that culture where, like, this is the thing that you do. Like, if you want to be a really good football coach, you should probably play some football and maybe try to do as well in that as you can. Now, if you make it to the NFL yourself, dope. That sure helps you in coaching. It's not required, but it sure helps, right? So one of those was that.
Another was the fact that I just like the idea of progress, and natural gains. I trained naturally for 12 years. I got excellent gains. I was still making gains, but slower, and I just wanted to see that road lengthened out for a long time. So I've never used a ton of drugs in the grand scheme, and I've always kind of scaled up over time strategies and implementations, cuz more than absolute level of physique, I want to continue to work on my masterpiece longer. Yeah. And so I've actually been working on it not as aggressively as I could so that I can continue to have slight elevations in my experience.
And the last reason is I'm a nerd first and everything else after. And the ability to use chemicals, pharmaceuticals, atoms and molecules to upgrade your abilities is straight up comic book [ __ ] And I'm 100% here for it. So there's my trifecta. I got into
I'm with you, Mike, on the excitement of using any available means to achieve an objective. Yeah. Yeah. And you're trying to piece together the relevant parts you have. So, I know, for example, in some of the things I've done, I was doing rapamycin for a while. Yeah. And I just recently stopped after doing it for four years. What got you to stop? It was messing with my lipids. No way. Yep. So a few side effects. Lipids were messed up. Blood glucose. Resting heart rate was increased, and I had some small tissue infections. Holy crap. Yeah. It is a grotesquely catabolic substance, to the point. Yeah. So we just reasoned that it just wasn't worth the trade-off. And so, of course, my objective was to slow the speed of aging. And then also there's this preprint that came out two weeks ago where, on certain aging clocks, I think 12 out of 16 aging clocks, I think rapamycin showed it accelerated the speed of aging. Ooh, epigenetically.
I love that you're able to be committed to something for so long given the state of the evidence at the time, and then so gently, with no attachment, switch gears and go, it was wrong. Yeah. You're going to get flak for that all the time, by the way, in social media. I think you should stick to your guns and just keep iterating on what works and discarding what doesn't. People like to label people, as in, that rapamycin guy. Oh, Bryan Johnson, you mean the guy that did rapamycin for four years? Yes. And a guy who quit doing it because the state of the evidence was updated. Isn't that strange? Yeah. Have you found that to be the case, that you've had things drag over from previous time periods where you want a clean break and they want you to continue for some reason?
Yeah, definitely. I was probably the first person to really formalize the understanding of how much training volume you need and muscle growth. Yeah. With theoretical landmarks of what's the minimum amount you can do to get gains, what's the maximum amount you're going to recover from. I sort of coined all those terms with a few colleagues, because the term that got the most popular first was the maximum recoverable volume. I was known as the high volume guy for a while. Then when I got to talking about minimum effective volume and maintenance volume, I started being known as the low volume guy. And people were looking at my own training and they were like, "Whoa, you do this many sets, but you quote unquote recommend way more?" But I never recommended way more. I said, "This is the theoretical maximum recoverable volume for many people." I don't say train at your maximum recoverable volume all the time. I pretty much never said that. Maybe for a few months in 2013. So there are people who will hold you to things and allow zero updating of what your position is in their head. But I think those people are few and far between. I would think they'd have high trait disagreeableness, and so they're in the comments section a lot. Yeah. I think most people are just interested in hearing what you have to say, and anytime you change your mind they're like, oh cool, that's the new thing.
Yeah. The rapamycin, I guess I feel a relief not doing it now, because definitely my resting heart rate when I sleep is substantially lower, which gives me better sleep, and it's really been a boost. And so I guess, in retrospect, I've tolerated side effects to achieve this objective. Like, I'm okay with the trade, which is noble in a certain sense. So you've done the same. I've heard you say on steroids that you experience anxiety, that you experience certain feelings of rage, that, yeah, certain feelings. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. How do you think through the balance of choosing to do this thing which does cause these negative side effects to your conscious experience?
I can eat a shitload of discomfort. If I'm gifted in any way, that's probably it. I don't give a [ __ ] I can delay gratification up there, I don't know, with the best of them, but a lot. I mean, I went years of schooling, getting paid nothing, studying in a lab by myself for half a generation, forgoing all sorts of stuff, going on vacation and finding out where I can get good training and good food first. And as long as I get that, that's priority number one. Is it always the thing I approximately want to do and feel like doing? [ __ ] no. At some points I've gotten so out of touch with what I feel like doing that I had to take some time to get my brain to recognize, like, oh, I have internal states and I can't just full send. And my wife is also a psychotic workaholic, commitment-driven person who had, like, I don't know, like 10 nervous breakdowns on her way to like
various insane achievements and I was there for all of them, she was there for mine. I'm like, not large nervous breakdowns, very difficult times, but always our answer is kind of like, "Okay, breathe it out. Grit the teeth. Keep plowing."
To me, the interaction with anabolics and mood and all this other stuff: I had very finite timelines, very explicit goals, up for review and modification, which I eventually ended up modifying. No big deal. But it's like, as long as the plan is the plan, give me nightmares, give me demons, I don't give a [ __ ]. I'm here for it. It's also not a surprise. I'm on extreme doses of anabolic androgenic steroids and I feel like I have a lot of rage. There's not really a contradiction there. Onwards. And someone's like, don't you want to feel better in your own head? Yes. But what really makes me feel better long term is to stick to a difficult plan for an extended period of time to unearth great benefits on the other end. That really gets me going. So it's kind of like, yeah, but I'm here for it, you know.
And thinking through, like for example, you met my son Talmage, who's 19. He was great. Yeah, he's a good kid. That's a trite statement. But can you imagine as a parent you're like, I [ __ ] don't like the guy. He's around, kick him out. Yeah. He's currently trying to sort his models of life. What a time, huh?
What does he do even in his own fitness protocol? You know, like what does he try to optimize for? Is it longevity? Is he trying to become an athlete of some sort? Is he trying to build muscle mass? Like there's so many branched pathways that he could take. And so having done this yourself, you know, like if someone wanted to do steroids at 19, what would you say to them?
In almost all cases at age 19, choosing to use steroids is a miscalculation of the trade-off equation, because it's important to be explicit about what the upsides are. Both in the sense of what do you literally get, like how much muscle and how much less fat, but also in the sense of what are you ultimately thinking that's going to get you. Because people think things like, well, I'll have muscles, and then what? You're going to get laid more? Are you going to feel better inside your skin? Some people get so caught up in the moment of doing the thing, they sort of leave the end product in this hazy cloud of like, good things will happen.
You remember back, it turned out to be a really good gamble, but back somewhere between 2000 and 2020, you would have a startup or some kind of thing that deals with data and software, and people are like, "What are you going to do with all this data you're collecting?" You're like, "It doesn't matter. Just collect the data. Data is data. It's great. It's valuable." But nobody had any approximate idea of how that data was valuable. And it wasn't for a generation until now. AI mining is like, "Oh, you actually are sitting on a trillion dollars worth of data." And so at the time there were people that were visionaries that knew what the data was going to be used for. And there are other people that were like, I just heard data is good, so collect all the data you can. And that doesn't have a huge downside because it's a software company, that's part of the model. But there are people that are like, if I do steroids I'm going to gain muscle, and then, and the rest is haze, like just vibes.
Like when someone's like, hey, you're going to a party, right? You're like, yeah, I can't wait. They're gonna be like, why do you want to go to this party? You're like, you know, like party stuff, and all you have is some kind of little mini pizza commercial version of a party where it's all really good-looking people and they're vibing and someone jumped in the pool and everyone's laughing. You're like, like that, right? Except you haven't realized, what the hell am I going to do at this actual party? Now, parties are fun. The thing is, the side effects from steroids are not fun. So, you had better have a very good idea of what that party looks like to you, so to speak.
So, if you're like, "Okay, I'm going to get huge." Why? "Because in my spirit of spirits, I want veins and mass, and I want to scare old people with my muscles." Dope. Wait until you're 25, when you've got all the natural growth, consistent years of building with almost zero health downsides, and then see, am I mature enough and do I really still want this? If you want it, hey, start threading in the anabolics. If you live in the United Kingdom where they're legal, rock on. But up until you get to that point, staying drug free is a good idea because you pay almost no downside risk. And until and unless you have a distinct clarity of this goal is worth it, definitely don't do it.
So if your son was like, "Hey, should I do drugs?" The next thing I would ask him is why? And if he couldn't give me a very well articulated, very impassioned and also sensical reason why not to delay, I'd be like, "Yeah, don't do it."
It's like someone who, let's say, makes $100,000 a year. One of the poors, as I like to call them. My word, how do you even live on this? I would never speak to someone like that; my butlers would do it for me. And they're like, "I'm thinking of buying a $200,000 car." Now look, if you are an ultra car buff and some guy is selling you an old GT40 that he refurbished, it is the car you had on your [ __ ] wall in the 70s and you finally scrimped and saved and it makes a little bit of sense and it's technically a collector's piece, all right, we're in a conversation. But if you make $100,000 a year and you're not generationally wealthy or something and you're like, "Should I buy a $200,000 car?" The first thing is like, why? And if you're like, I don't know, it's kind of cool. Bro, are you out of your mind? The cost to benefit: the cost, two years of your life. The benefit, notional, like you don't even know what it is. Too many people get into anabolic steroids like, that's just some vibes, like it's something people are doing on TikTok. Muscle's cool, right? Don't do it for that reason. Does that make sense?
It does make sense. Yeah. So I think we've been on parallel paths, where my focus primarily has been on age, and yours, you in mine, and getting older faster. Yeah. I mean, how do you think about this? I mean, again, where we converge on the future is I think that we are entering into a period of health flourishing in ways we can't comprehend. Now we've touched on this. We've said a good example where you take an injection, it changes a fundamental part of who you are. We also both imagined that we could actually just have injections or have gene editing and we basically get the same benefits of exercise. So we could not even have to do exercise in the future. Right.
Which is, by the way, not fantasy land at all on a theoretical biological basis. Anyone who studied nth grade biology could be like, theoretically, if you could arrange all the parts to do the thing, there's nothing stopping you. That's right. Yeah. You're not violating any laws of the universe or anything like that.
Exactly. It could be rewritten, like our entire lives, how we eat, how we exercise, sleep, etc. How we think, exactly, our conscious experience. And so how do you, if you do certain things today that do accelerate aging in some capacity, like let's say anabolics always have some negative effects on health, they do, you have to postulate, how do you reconcile that given this moment? Are you imagining that technological progress will be able to address that in the future? You're not worried about it because you have this other endeavor you're working on now?
I have been involved in meditative practice for some time, 20 years or something, and had a lot of time to think about life and my relation to the rest of the universe. And what I've come to is a few things. One is life on Earth, in the universe, and this trajectory of evolving tiered layers of complex systems, atoms, molecules, macromolecules that self-replicate, biological life, now technological life, which is this huge transition. That all is just the most beautiful thing in the world to study and witness. But I'm not a critical component of it. I don't have to be alive for it to keep going. It's going without me.
Now, if I have some ability to give my life literally to prevent someone from stopping this, like if someone... This is ridiculous, this is going to get me to death, but [ __ ] it, I mean this wholeheartedly. If someone in a crowd raised a gun at Sam Altman, I 100% unthinkingly would take the [ __ ] bullet, because he's way more important than me in this regard. He's one of these people that's doing this to AGI. The AGI pigeon flutters off, right? Yeah. I'd like to not croak sooner than later. But like, you know what I'm saying?
I'm not some kind of linchpin in the universe. If I'm having a time in my life where I feel like I've been net productive to society and had a decent time of it myself, it is what it is. I could always get hit by a bus tomorrow. Am I going to index really highly on trying to never die? I could put that hat on. It fits real well. But some of the choices I've made and continue to make don't comport with that entirely. What matters much more to me is that the rest of the world grows up and matures and evolves into the next thing. My own story is very secondary.
So, while I'm taking quite reasonable steps, I am making some trade-offs for the here and now versus for the future that I don't recommend other people make. I am not somehow some kind of philosopher where I live my own stuff. I live some of it, but I'm just one human being.
And so I think that many people should really invest in the long term, because I think for the first time, and this is really crazy to say, if you don't croak for another 10 or 15 years, on a human relevant time scale of like before the black hole comes and swallows us all or before protons decay, you may never die. When in the hell could we ever say that? Mhm. So, if that isn't something that gets you excited about age reversal and longevity, I don't know what the [ __ ] to tell you. Then you just YOLO eat a lot of really tasty burgers. So, cool.
When we were chatting before, we're both converging on this idea that if you travel back in time and you're hanging out with Homo erectus and you're asking them to map the future of existence, this is a million years ago, we both agree that they wouldn't have the models of reality to even say anything intelligent. So they wouldn't be able to talk about quantum mechanics or about technology or about markets or money or the electromagnetic spectra, or even about city-states. Exactly. How, like, people organized in large, 1,500 people living together. That's crazy. Yeah. Something basic like a tractor in the field harvesting. Oh my god.
So they basically can't say anything. And so I guess as we talk about this, we both see the next 10 to 15 years to be consequential beyond our ability to explain. We can't really fathom it. And so in my calculus of reality, the only thing I'm trying not to do is not die. Mhm. That's it. And that's why the anti-aging efforts, it's not to try to achieve immortality, it's to try to not die, because these series of events are happening that are going to change our outlook and perspectives. And so do you want to see that personally? Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, so do I. I genuinely don't want to die now. That is different than wanting to live forever. Sure. I just don't want to die. And so in this moment, I wonder if in like 10 years from now, if we're talking, if the world has changed so much that our models of reality would have us say existence is the highest virtue. I do think existence is the highest virtue. There's no other game. Making money is not the game. Acquiring status is not the game. Acquiring power is not the game. AI has transformed the world where human games are rewritten entirely. Sure. And so in that case, you know, in that moment, hopefully biotech is at a point where we're able to do things very quickly. Maybe not. Maybe biotech will take some more time to develop. And so in that moment, I guess my question for you is, you're making these trade-offs now. Also, you know that something big is happening. And so I wonder, is there a contradiction in that in your own mind, of what you want right now in the trade-off space, and that it may come at a cost of this magnificent moment that's coming?
Yeah, there's a discount for the just hit-by-a-bus scenario. So, if I overindex on how salient the future is in my mind and I just fall into a ravine and die, on my way down I'd be like, man, I sure [ __ ] wish I would have been more jacked and had fun while it lasted. Maybe. So, that maybe assuages some of the contradiction. The other thing is, if you take two points that are quite different and you accept both of them to be preferences and have some marginal trade-off between them, I don't think there's necessarily a contradiction there.
So I eat very healthy. I stay very lean. I'm very muscular, but no longer taking high amounts of anabolic steroids. All of my blood work ever has come back phenomenal. Most people in my family live, like, too [ __ ] long. You know the old Jews, you're just like, why the [ __ ] are you still here? Like 90, butogyny is still sharp but pissed. So that's half my family. And so I'm not, you know, carelessly freewheeling into just boozing myself to death and [ __ ] like that. So there's something there.
To me, it really, I do see myself as just... if you told me right now, listen, I'm from the future. All of this [ __ ] happens, but you can't be there to see it because you're not going to make it. I'll be like, "Ah, [ __ ]. Who gives a shit?" Really? To me. Oh yeah.
To me, the beauty of our modern world and technological progress progressing is so beyond me. It's transcendent in a religious way. I'd gladly give my life thoughtlessly, Jared and I both would, to get this progress to a higher probability. So, I don't need to be there to see it. Now, if I'm there to see it, will I cry tears of beauty? Yes.
A few years back, Jared and I were walking around the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I went to school. It was summer. It was fun, just existing, and we saw one of the first prototype delivery robots just wheeling down the road. We both cried in public. People are like, what happened? Did you lose someone? Like, this is a robot. Because it was like, oh my god. Him and I had been thinking about this, theorizing about it so long, reading Kurzweil and others so long, and for a long time these were just predictions. And you know, people say, somebody said, belief in the singularity is a religion for people of IQ 145. That was fun to say in 2005, really pithy, really New Yorker type of [ __ ]. And then nowadays it's like, you [ __ ] idiot, this shit's coming like now and you're in it. Like, oh, oops.
And so those moments of witnessing transcendence are gorgeous beyond belief. But I am just one human. And the most important thing to me at this point, value-system-wise, is that the great awakening occurs, which means that a machine intelligence that has read and continues to read vast fractions of the internet, continues to interact daily with almost all humans through robotic or other APIs, and is learning and understanding and living in the world in true deep consciousness like we could never comprehend. As long as that thing's kicking, I'm a [ __ ] sideshow. Yeah.
Do you think it's possible that you yourself may evolve to a point where your current frame of mind is unrecognizable to your future self? In the scenario you painted, so in 2030 there's Mike, right? Mhm. And looking back on this conversation right now and seeing how you express ideas of self-sacrifice and of, you know, taking a bullet, those are definitely cultural norms that we identify with today. Right. Do you think it's possible there could be a version of Mike that can observe Mike objectively and see it, but is not even closely relatable, that has none of the
same viewpoints or models or values but is entirely a different being. Can you imagine that scenario?
Yes, possible. I think there's a lot of nuance in how that's expressed and a few probability ranges. I look back at the thoughts and opinions I had when I was in high school. There is a core of like belief in objective reality, belief in a roughly consequentialist nature of events, belief in the deep revelatory power of mathematics and so on that have just stood the test of time. They're just [ __ ] true. And so I was already with it there, and I'm with it today. I was like, "Oh, I got that right." There's tons of other stuff I did not get right and tons of other labors under mass delusion that I was, you know, engaging in that it was just like, whoa, holy [ __ ] I have that wrong.
So, no doubt some of those 180s are in store. But I do suspect that some of the things that I've come to realize are probably true, at least as how I can see it in 10 or years or something, if I'm still around, I look back and be like, well, I had some [ __ ] right and I had some [ __ ] wrong.
So, can I imagine a world in which everything's turned completely upside down? I can imagine in the sense that I can attach the emotion of an blissful ignorance of awe. But can I imagine what sorts of things that would entail? No. By definition, because I'm constrained to a current world view. I can reach real far with my imagination typically and do some really crazy [ __ ]
Here's take a quick walk for this. What matters to me is how I look. The only reason that matters to me is purely some combination of genetics and environment that has neurally architected me to really care emotionally about what appears in the mirror and how I feel, how big is my gut, how my muscles, all this other stuff.
Let's say we do brain to cloud, which I think is inevitable unless we're so useless to AI that it's just like, just live out your biological lives. We don't need to upload [ __ ] We already know enough. Uploading human brain to the cloud and now you exist in a virtual space. That's cool because you can live a thousand different Matrix fantasies. Dope. Cool. I'll be doing a whole lot of that. So, I think, okay, if I'm a brain in the cloud, I'm gonna be able to live in a reality like simulated at a thousandx normal speed. So, every several days I live like a year of life where I'm like a champion bodybuilder, where I'm like doing crazy, like, you know, fully immersive adult activities, right, with all kinds of crazy stuff.
But then I think, okay, okay, okay, but my whole brain's in the cloud. What if we get to the part of my brain that chooses sexual proclivities and chooses body composition affect relations through visual examination and tune it to where it's either excised or grossly modified, and then I'm quote unquote the same person, but I literally no longer care about how I look. Also, brain in the cloud, there is no how you look. And be like, oh my god, like when VR fully comes in, like fully immersive VR, my own thought to myself was like, I'm gonna have so much goddamn sex with every [ __ ] thing that moves in that space, cuz it's all irrelevant, it's all fully immersive adult experience. But if you can edit the part of you that even wants that and you can edit it down, it's no longer a thing.
Imagine talking to some kind of upscaled chimp and be like, what do you want out of living in a VR space? He's going to be like, so many bananas, you [ __ ] I've never seen this many. So many females of reproductive age, and I'm a clan leader and no one even steps to me, and that one other chimp that kicked me when I was 13 years old everywhere. Everyone hates them. You're like, that is understandable but oddly parochial, but expectedly so. No doubt if I make it that far I'm going to have some like, oh, I'm a different person altogether.
And my last thing I'll say is actually very not curious about what I'll think, very curious about what the machine superintelligence thinks. I want less of my opinions expressed about what I want about the world and more like, "Hey, GPT-7, what are we supposed to do with all this? Can you help us help ourselves? Can you explain some shit?" That to me is one of the reaching stars of artificial general intelligence, is like, "I want something smarter than me around by a long shot." You know what I mean? When's that coming? Damn it. How many more interviews do I have to do until I get AGI?
Yeah. I mean, we may already be there, right? Right. Wonder, I mean if we spun up an AI of all your past interviews, right? Everything you've ever produced. Like we've done this with my stuff. Okay. So we have an AI of me and Am I speaking to it now? Excellent robotic interface. I say we worked hard on it. Thank you. It does that every now and again. We don't even know what the bug is. We don't care.
Yeah. With this basic model, and like it has enough text from me where I've articulated many of my life experiences, many of my viewpoints, my thought patterns are pretty similar on how I map the world. So, it's not unreasonable that a current AI of me could take the best of me and then become better. Like it wouldn't take much to just add some slight additional, some new patterns on top to make me more creative or to have a larger vocabulary or to understand more concepts or to bridge new things together.
So that's the thing, my belief is that it's already happening, that AI is better at being you than you are in many elements of who you are. Now it can't navigate a kitchen environment and make breakfast as well as you, although maybe close. I mean soon, very soon. Maybe it can't do certain interpersonal relationships of understanding nuance and context. You talk to GPT-4, it's damn good. It's better than me in many regards. It's so much kinder, so much gentler. Exactly. But I'm saying like in the far edge cases, the nuances. But what I'm saying is especially with specific people, you know, and have a history with, it doesn't have anything on that.
Yeah. So I feel like we're at this point where AI is already in emerging cases better at being us than we are. Yeah. Like it's done. Yeah. And so in that case, my mind goes to the only thing we should do as a species is just lock in and say let's not die. And so I view like any action that we take, and this could be like me doing something like staying up all night or eating poor, you know, like bad food, or not taking care of my body. Those are all acts of self-destruction. And even though we understand these things of like, oh, I'm taking a day off or I'm relaxing or I'm having a good time with friends, like whatever the following thought experiment is or excuse, I'm still doing something that is accelerating my age. It's actually lessening my biological ability as a person.
And if we say that pattern can be mapped to other things, like when we change the environment of planet Earth to maybe be less hospitable to the species, that's a bad thing. So I'm trying to map all the things in the world we do right now where when you say death is inevitable, you then yolo your way to all these decisions. Yeah.
And so what I'm getting at with the trade-off space you're making, and what I want to talk to you about, is I want us to be an army on this earth. I knew you were going to get to the Dracula show sooner. Exactly. So, here we are, and like to rise up and we say, like, we're going to recognize this moment for what it is and we're going to be around for this thing. And the enemy is our proclivity to yolo our way to death. And that may be individual behaviors. It may be going to war. It may be killing each other. It may be other forms of violence that may be on the earth. But basically to try to eliminate from all of us this trade-off space we have of pleasure and/or debauchery or whatever, and it's just a new era of being human, and that we can't say anything intelligent about the future, like we are blind to what we may be and become. We just can't even map our values and norms.
That's why I guess when we started talking about this I was thinking through like your life decisions and my life decisions and how we're both trying to play this game and how we think about it. We're both front-facing, talking to people in the world about building muscle and about getting good sleep, and like we're taking our own avenues, but it really is not in this intertwined way of like, hey everybody, can we just have an honest conversation, like what is really happening right now, and do our behaviors map at all to this bigger picture? Because a lot of times I think people can say I'm doing my thing, but it doesn't really have an impact on the larger big picture thing, like what's going to happen to OpenAI or Anthropic is their own trajectory, and like little old me, like what am I going to
I don't think that's true. I think why not? Because everyone behaves and it has a ripple effect: where we work, who we vote for, what kind of friend we are, the opinions we express, we post on social media, the comments I make, we're all contributing to this emergent thing as a species. Sure. And when you multiply that and you say it's hundreds of millions or billions of us doing this, it's an overall zeitgeist. And so when someone like yourself or someone like me, we have certain positions where people listen to us to say certain things, then we really are in these positions of authority. And so if you see it, if you see this moment, and there's not many people who do, like who genuinely see what's happening right now. Yeah. I mean, sure, like maybe more and more, but like I'm not disagreeing. Very few people like really understand the extent of how much reality could change, how much better the future is going to be in every regard, and how long the future can be.
So basically to really red team my own position. Yeah, I am trying to locally optimize for the next 5 to 10 years of yoloing, and what I could have with brain in cloud plus rapid computing is 500,000 years of pure ecstatic scientific exploration and unity with the great knowledge that AGI will collect. Holy [ __ ] is that myopic. I'm really, really optimizing for the wrong thing. It's like a three-year-old with a beautiful life ahead approaching an electrical socket with a fork, like, this is going to be fun, but how fun compared to the rest of your life?
So there's definitely something to be said for that, and I think for most people they are undervaluing that to a considerable extent. And because almost everyone is net useful to the society at large, most people are net productive, and I think with the enormous emphasis that is likely to come on AI studying all of us, like there's a data problem in AI, right? I think it's insanely overstated, but that's, again, the technical AI discussions for dilettantism another time. But it's going to be apparent that people will probably be getting money, substantial money, probably enough money to live, just so that drones and robots and your interfaces can study every single thing you do, as long as you're awake, all of your decisions, to get as much training data for the major foundation models as possible. Everyone then, even if they're not in some obvious way productive, is hugely helpful to creating this wisdom machine.
And more than that, there's so many great things ahead that if you're struggling through a tough time right now, things are going to get so immeasurably better, you're going to wish you were there. And so really indexing on not taking any irrational risks. Yes. Investing in your health, investing in longevity, at least the basics, is probably the smartest thing you can ever do as a rational human being. 100%. And to whatever extent I do or do not embody that, the genetic fallacy is to ascribe where an opinion comes from, the validity of that opinion. I think that opinion I just shared is valid even though I'm a gigantic steroid addict who's no doubt circling the drain in his last several years of life.
Yeah. So, this is what I wonder if we could team up on, you know, like people. I'm good, man. Next segment. I'm kidding. Yeah, that's funny. Because that's like a legitimate response, you know, like it's true. No, I definitely want to hear. It's not like I don't think the things that people want are necessarily truth, right? Whether you want like more muscle or whether you want more money or whether they want more status or more power or whatever. Yes. Those things are just ephemeral social cultural phenomena. Typical rich guy [ __ ] Here we go. But people want something to focus on. Meaning. Yeah. So they want objective. They want, people like difficult things. Exactly.
And so it's not like the things that are in place right now are truths of intelligence. They're just constructions of our reality, right? And like you could see these games going away. And that's why I think pointing humanity in a new direction to say we have a new game to play. It starts with not dying, but it really is like this humility that we don't quite know what's coming. And so it's this unknowing which gives us power. But definitely we want to embrace not making the trade-offs of the yolo debauchery or whatever, because these games are no longer worth our attention. We really want to play new games as a species. We're evolutionarily moving into this new game. It makes sense we change our new games to want different things.
I love that perspective. I think that there's kind of the old way of assuming you have a trajectory: after age whatever you get older and things sort of degrade, then you die. The future game is there's going to be a you-like entity that is proverating for some time and changing radically with time. Yeah, that's where I think it's going. The bridging the gap part is very curious, and I think there are two ways to go about it, or more than two ways. Yours is to tell people, listen, you're going to want to do these things, which is super, super true and right on.
Maybe the thing I can bring to the table is to at least get people to look at their yolo trade-offs. Yeah. And go like, if this really [ __ ] matters to you, God bless you. I'm a libertine person politically. Freedom is dope. Wealth, wealth and freedom. That is my two political philosophies right there. But if you want to drink alcohol and stay up to odd hours, listen, if you've thought it through and it's really worth it to you, I can't do anything but like your Instagram photos of you throwing up in the sink. But give it some thought and think, is there anything on the margins that I can do to push the longevity thing forward? Because I think you're going to probably thank yourself for it later on.
Because I think if you too much get into that space of like obviously longevity, you're going to gain a lot of traction and you're going to not gain traction with some people. Some people can't be reached in a totalistic way yet. Some people just need to be met where they're at on the margins, and it's so much better than not. Yeah. So, you'll be the perfect exemplar of these philosophies and I'll be your fallen angel to be like, "Look, if you're a real idiot, you can at least be like Mike and entertain some healthy eating and exercise every now and again."
Yeah. Okay. So, I guess on that note, do you want to, should we look at your results? Yeah. I can't wait to see how terribly I did. I like that you breathe out like a heavy sigh of... Oh my god, it's in a cool little envelope. Yeah, it's a cool envelope. This is a legit presentation. All right, here we go.
So first the VISIA scan, this measures age of skin. Yeah. So typically, yeah, sun exposure, you know, can have a cost. And then, okay, so the score came in age 44. Not bad. Terrible. So I'm biologically, sorry, chronologically 40. Yeah. So age 44 skin, a baby. That makes sense, right? And not bad. I would say we've seen a lot worse. Okay. Yeah. So good job. My skincare routines involve, on every several days, putting some kind of generic soap on my face. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, I, same for the first... My skin is my sunblock usually. Yeah.
For the first 43 years of my life. Same thing. I never even applied a cream. What's that for? All right. Spirometry. This is lung capacity. 99th percentile. Yeah, it makes sense. I have a lot of lung. Yeah, good job. So 13.2 L per second. Thank you so much.
Okay. Your advanced glycated end products. Great score. No way. Age 23. 23. Yep. Yep. The score would take 1.3. So fantastic job. If you got to a 1.2, it would be age 18. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. So you're very good on that. So how does one improve their glycated end product scale? It's very hard. There's very few therapies that actually... it's mostly accumulation of junk, right, from like fried foods, foods cooked at high temperatures, etc. But yeah, very hard. Copious amounts of steroids. Yeah, sort of thing. So, yeah. So, good job on that.
All right. Grip strength 99th percentile. That makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. 132.8 pounds. The 99th percentile for men is 127. So, you're five... Oh, dope. Five pounds above. Very cool. So, you're doing very well.
Push-ups 46. So 99th percentile within your age group. Sure. And then if you wanted to be 99th percentile for all men, it'd be 56. Oh yeah, I could have done that no problem. Yeah, you watched me just quit at some point. I wondered. Yeah, the marginal risk of even a minor injury for my physique goals at this point doesn't make any sense. If I clown-showed myself on a podcast and even did a little pulling of the pec cuz I went closer to failure, I would never be able to forgive myself in a million years. I told myself a long time ago that... so like I do a lot of collabs and [ __ ] and they're like, "Oh, do you want to like flip this tire?" Hell no. My biceps not coming off. So as soon as I got a pretty decent pump and felt a little juicy and like I did well enough on this test to do pretty well, I more or less quit.
I'm so with you. Like I think about life through that frame everywhere. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And people always think it's so odd. It's like why don't you want to flex in this moment? Like no. Like absolutely not worth it. Yeah. That's what highlight reel fail videos are for. I thought it was time. I'm not doing that. We're doing different content. Exactly.
Okay. Sit and reach. This is 50th percentile. All right. In the middle. I don't want to stand out. I'm not some freak gymnast. No offense, gymnasts. Yeah. 15 inches. And so, eight additional inches would put you in the 99th percentile. Bryan, if I've ever heard that statement more than three times in my life... I walked right into that. Okay. Yeah. That's what she said.
Sit and stand. 9.5. So, your technique was very good. 63rd percentile. All right. Yeah. What do people score, above 10 or something like that? 10. Almost everyone scores a 10 except for me. The wobbling. But you know, I can't score a 10. No way. Yeah. I haven't tried your technique though. Your technique is very good. Delivered on the spot. Yeah. I can sit with no help. But then coming up... And so I'm the complete opposite. Yeah. I can't sit with... There's a leverage situation for me where there's like a lot of stuff in the way. Yeah. Yeah, like when your quads get big enough and your torso is big enough. Sitting vertically straight down to your butt is kind of like how... Yeah, exactly. I need to actually... I only tried it once. I need to actually work on it. Maybe if I found some greater flexibility or something, but rig the scale.
One more result. One-legged stand, 13 seconds was ninth percentile. That's low, huh? It's low. So the range here is... So the 99th percentile for men would be 35 seconds. Oh, okay. Is there a way we can go through all of these where I caveat everything to make it look like I was barely trying so that I can... I think so. Yeah. Yeah. What a fun use... From your first attempt, your first attempt was what, 4 seconds, 5 seconds, and then you tried and got to 13. So yeah. So I think you were definitely on the trajectory, but I mean overall these are like markers.
What's the balance thing indicating, you think? What does it say about what... So clearly direct balance doesn't help you not age. What are the underlying inferential things we can pull out as far as what is balance, a neural health? Is it something like okay, as you age your balance deteriorates? No way. Yeah. Okay.
I've done tests like this throughout my life and as soon as my eyes close I get wobbly enough to just not give a [ __ ] anymore about trying any harder. So I'm like [ __ ] that. It's a curious test. I wonder about my neural health. Yeah. Because anabolics are no good for that. Though I do take a few supplements and I do get lots of sleep and all this other stuff. I do wonder about how much my burning at the stake work-wise, because like I got an interesting machine up there, likes to think, and like do I not recess back away from intense thinking often enough to get the repair processes going? I do wonder about that occasionally.
Self-investigated estimates of cognitive capacity are always and everywhere dog [ __ ]. Yeah. But I don't feel substantially stupider than when I was younger. I also feel like my ability to have deep revelations about complex concepts has increased substantially since then. So I can't say I'm like duller in some capacity. I do have a thing where I think that if we make it another 5 to 10 years, the neural regenerative therapies are going to be so absurdly powerful that like I can lose a few IQ points and afford it, though you want to be as smart as possible. What is your thinking about optimizing for intellect? And it's a bit of a... how do I say this best? It's nerve-wracking to think about. What do you have about that?
But probably been a few times throughout history where certain people and certain cultures needed to have coherent clear thinking. So for example, in the early days of the Cold War, you know, do you do it or not? Yeah. When you're in crisis of there's a global pandemic, how do you think about what to do and why? You know, like what are the leverage you have and how do you work together as a society? How do you communicate it? Do you lie? Do you tell the truth? You know, like... Sure. Where you need to... real game theory type. You need to have good judgment. Yeah. And judgment of course is like a branch of intelligence. Yes. But I think that we've never needed wisdom more than this moment.
Yeah, but wisdom is more tilted into the crystallized part of intelligence and less into fluid intelligence. So I guess older people probably make better choices in any given situation than younger people, especially a large intellectual space, because they've seen... it's like a very powerful AI model that's been trained on very little data versus a not so powerful model that's seen a lot of data. The second model is going to do better because it's just seen a lot of data. So, I guess it's kind of maybe good. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but like it absolutely pays to be as smart as humanly possible now more than ever. Yeah. Though not from a survival perspective, from an enhancement perspective. Yeah. Back in the day, you were stupid, you died. Nowadays, you're stupid and you just continue to watch stupid TV and sit in your house. But I think that the wisdom of age counterbalances the cognitive decline from sheer neurological physiology somewhat. Do you agree with that or do you think like we got to do our best on all fronts?
The flip side of that is that knowing too much is a detriment, and that, you know, with age you've created your patterns of life and then you apply your patterns to all things, which is why this very common situation happens where younger people disrupt older people, where younger people have new ideas, they're open to new things, and older people who are more ingrained in their ideas are resistant to these new things which are inevitable, but their old patterns don't match. Sure. So it's definitely a tradeoff where I don't think that one side necessarily has an advantage. There's wisdom of seeing things having happened before. You don't have the naive contemplations, but when you're more open-minded and spry, you're more aware. You can create new discoveries of new patterns, new possibilities. Yeah. The other ones foreclosed.
And so yeah, I'd say like on this question, I was talking to this gentleman working in AI and he said I stopped applying sunscreen because AI is just going to solve it for me. And so this is like a pattern you were saying as well, that many people are thinking like they're basically YOLOing our way. Typically people say I might as well do this because I'm going to die anyways. Now people are saying I might as well do this because AI is going to fix it. I have a third take for you. It doesn't matter if I do it because AI is so much bigger than all of us. It's the show now and I'm a sideshow. Just to put that in the... I'm not saying that's a correct view, just something to add to the cauldron of. Yeah. It's almost like any way you squeeze the problem, humans are going to come up with a clever way of justifying not doing what they don't want to do. Justifying doing what they've already done and like... Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But like it's such a squirrelly situation.
Yeah. Well, Mike, I've really enjoyed hanging out with you. Again, a great time. We have so much more in common than I realized and really enjoyed hanging out. It was a lot of fun. And do you have any feedback for me? Like what do you think this podcast could do? So given what I'm trying to do in the world, what should this podcast be about? What should I talk about? What should be the angle? Why are we talking?
What is your goal with the podcast? What is your most general way to, in several or one sentence, state your goal with the podcast? If someone, let's say your media team was like, "Dude, the podcast takes a lot of editing throughput. We got a ton of other [ __ ], a ton of other collabs. Why are we doing this again?" What would you tell them? See, you need to work on that. I'm kidding.
Yeah. I'm trying to do information compression. Of course. I want a billion of us humans to band together and devote ourselves that we will not die, individually, as a species, with Earth and with AI, that we opt in and say yes to a future. We don't know if it's good or bad. We just opt in and say this could be the most extraordinary existence that's ever happened in this part of the galaxy. Yeah. And it could be ours, and there's no prize that is bigger than this, and that we reframe our entire existence and say we are doing this.
I can think of a lot of folks you could have on here and conversations you could have. I'll give you maybe like four classes that come to me instantly. One is helping people figure out how to live. Yeah. You're saying live like what is a good life to you? How to be productive in society, how to have deep personal meaning. You could talk to so many people about that. And have good psychological health, how to be motivated at work and think about what things are the things you really want to be working on. What are future career paths? Because a lot of people are like, if AI is the show, what the hell am I doing here? Well, you're a big part. Here's a way to do all these things. So, that's one thing for sure you can talk about till you're blue in the face.
Another one is having research scientists that are working deeply in the space of anti-aging, aging reversal, cosmetics, physique alteration through the scientific approach, like you know plastic surgeons and skin removal specialists and facial de-aging, and just talk to them about like what's in the pipeline, what are you working on, and what is currently empirically validated as sound. Because unfortunately our space of fitness and health is filled with an unbelievable amount of empirically validated awesome things and like a 10 to 1 ratio of just like [ __ ] fly-by-night dogma, insane schemes of people being like, oh, lay in this [ __ ] dumbass machine and have these raise blaster dumbass, it's going to cost $50,000, but there's one study out of like some lab in Denmark in 2003 that said it was good, and that's it. Like we can do better than this. So getting some legit killers research-wise to come in here and say what is the standard. And the thing is that's not a content area that ever ends because there's always updates and there's always more people. And with your, for lack of a better term, clout, you can have all kinds of, you know, head of whatever UCLA's whatever medicine come sit here and tell you all about what's coming, and also have a skeptical discussion or two about... people are like, "Look, here are the biggest myths in anti-aging that we have to abandon so that we can get to the right stuff, because there's so many of those." So, that's a content category you could for sure do.
Another one is like, I don't know if you want to dip into this, but like dealing with emotional difficulties in your life. Like you said, you were at some point, I don't want to use the word on here because YouTube doesn't like that, thinking that maybe there's no point to continue on. No doubt you learned a lot about yourself. And if you had to speak to someone who was going through that thought process, you could probably with your wisdom now tell them a lot about why to keep going, and talk to a lot of other people about... like have people on, psychologists and other people who have been through difficult things, veterans of war, to talk about like in the darkest times, describe the times. What is it that we can hold on to? What are the strategies to keep going? Because a lot of people end their lives needlessly all the time. Right now, you want a billion of us to make it. You're going to have to dip into that and be like, "Guys, listen, come through." I think those are some of the categories that you can lean into that are very, very fruitful and will help advance the cause maybe. Yeah. Very practical.
Yeah. So, the question was about aesthetics. Aesthetics is really interesting and actually I think can bridge the gap for many people with age reversal and anti-aging. This doesn't sound so nice. I mean in the best way, I promise. You tell people that are in their 30s, listen, you got to think about anti-aging and longevity, and they're like, you know, people quote unquote die in like their 80s now, I guess, 70s, 80s, whatever. That's so far off. It's almost sometimes too far off to really... like you said many times, our ability to comprehend what's in the future is just so dusty that there's nothing even there. And so you may not get much traction with people to convince them to really care in their 30s and even 40s about like, look, really, you have to care about this stuff, because I have so many relatives that are in their 60s and they're living a great life. Like they're still kicking. They don't do anything. They just drink and smoke all day and they're still alive. But aesthetics is kind of like a cheater way to get in there.
There are two types of people. The following is a joke with some grain of truth. Two types of women in their 30s. Ones that hope to God aging reversal comes soon, or liars. I'm kidding, but not so much. And much is the case with males as well. There are very few males in their 40s and 50s which don't want a smaller waist with a tight abdominal midsection and big bulging muscles, at least lean muscles. It's like, "Hey, do you want your 22-year-old body back?" Like, what the hell is that, like a trick question? Of course I do. And so a lot of the beautiful revelations that are going to be made in biology also have an incredible profit motive instant stream to be adopted by the plastics industry, plastic surgery, and the people that currently make cosmetics. As soon as they get wind of the fact that like we have new drugs now that mean you just have a 22-year-old girl face forever and makeup is just optional for the club, they're gonna buy shares in that [ __ ] so goddamn fast they'll trip to get there. Yeah. And so I think one of the ways maybe to reach a lot of people with anti-aging stuff that are a little too young to
really appreciate the finality of death as someone who's in their 70s or like anti-aging they're like yes where please God. Unless they, you know, resign themselves to be like I'm good. Yeah.
So I think with aesthetics you can really get to a lot of people and be like look like if you are biologically younger then it's going to reflect itself in how you move, how you talk, how you think, how you feel, the color of your hair, the thickness of it, your face. You get going enough on that and people are like, "What do you have on skin tightness?" And as soon as you're like, "Look, there's stuff in the pipeline that's going to make your skin as tight as you were in your 20s." They're like, "That I want that. I'm in." And all of a sudden they're doing fitness, they're doing health, they're working out, they're eating better, they're sleeping better.
Because if you tell somebody like, "Hey, you should get more sleep." But they're like, "I'm partying." Fun, right? What are you partying with? Your little rockstar 22-year-old body. Cute. I love it. It's great. How long you think you got that thing going? You smoking 18 cigarettes a [ __ ] night and drinking eight beers. That [ __ ] is wearing down. It's fun to use up when you're young. You're going to want to use it later. Right. Right.
So, if you get lots of sleep on average and save the going out psychosis for every now and again, and you get lots of good food in you when you're 27 and some of your girlfriends you secretly didn't like have bags under their eyes and crow's feet and [ __ ] like that and all the Botox just makes them look like Barbie dolls instead of real humans, you are still in the [ __ ] prime of your [ __ ] Don't you want to be that? And a lot of people are like, "Yeah, hell yeah, I want to be that."
And so rearchitecting things away from like the finger wagging like you should get enough sleep because you know your parents are like you should get enough sleep and you're like why? Like because and then they slam the door and you're in the dark that doesn't work so well in adults, especially young adults. For those folks, I think it's the enhancement side that's going to work well. And you can start with aesthetics. Like do you just want to just straight up look better for just to look sexier? They're gonna be like yes. Like okay, you're gonna want to look at all this anti-aging stuff because it's gonna make you look better for longer. Yeah. Maybe it'll bite. What do you think?
Yeah, it's the sexiest path. It's the sexiest path, which is I think maybe where you and I can connect to a large extent is I'm on the aesthetic side purely, like my entire company's motto is get everyone closer to the physique they want to be in than otherwise. And then your side is the deeper anti-aging side. Oh man, those dovetail. Our folks that are clientele at RP who are in their 50s, they want both Kool-Aids and they want to mix together. Exactly. So, we got to get our Kool-Aid going. Yeah, we found it. Oh, there it is.
I really enjoyed the conversation. Like, I think initially we met because I think you were talking [ __ ] about me. Exactly. Yeah. And I made a nice comment in return. It was an incredibly awesome move. Yeah. And it could have gone completely differently.
Now, if you actually watch the video, I was respectful where respect is due. But you know what? I do struggle with that cuz like people love it when I'm a [ __ ] on the internet cuz I got that [ __ ] But then again, like I'm trying to make it over time more and more like everyone's laughing together, not against other people. And you're not a [ __ ] charlatan, so I have no problem giving you love when it's due. I do have a reservation in my heart for like people who are like Liver King type people. Bryan Johnson. Yeah, Bryan. So many Bryan Johnsons. I get you two confused. I'm like, wait a minute, you look almost the same. And wait, what?
I do struggle with the fact that where is my own personal line between, look, we're all flawed. Well, you're not flawed. I got to that joke really late. And so I said all of us. I didn't mean you, Lord, by lordship. And am I really going to alienate other people on a big platform and say they're charlatans and liars? On the one hand, on my bad days, I say, "Yeah, [ __ ] them." Because they're like literally bad actors. Mhm. But on my better days, I'm like, is there a way to bring them in or at least not talk [ __ ] about them and give them some love?
I do think there is a social value for exposing charlatanism. It's probably a big deal. Does it feel good for me to do it? No. Do I begrudgingly do it because I think it's important? Yes. I don't even know where I'm going with that. I just don't know how to parse that space. And that's one of those things I'm still learning how to do. Like, I love being a voice for positivity and inclusion more than I like anything else. But does the witty banter and the dogging on people who kind of suck also do well and is maybe valuable in itself?
I mean, you're basically acting like autophagy, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're trying to act as a cleanup mechanism. Exactly. Yeah. Which is a loveless job.
And honestly, like I remember I made some criticisms of Hollywood trainers when we first started the whole Friday show we do on YouTube. And on the one hand, a lot of these people just charge people obscene amounts of money, make believe various principles into existence, and just run away with the cash, so [ __ ] them. But on the other hand, like imagine being one of these guys that makes a living from training, and then some [ __ ] on the up and up who now everyone knows is a household name or whatever, household head, it's just talking mad [ __ ] about you that's damn near personal. Like, I would [ __ ] hate that. I don't like that I did those things.
And I'm still kind of dealing with how much positivity to call out culture am I willing to put up with in my own head, in my own action. Do you have any advice on that regard? You know what I mean? Cuz it's like imagine you'd be like, "Hey, like Vladimir Putin is toasting hundreds of thousands of people for nothing. Some kind of delusional grandeur aspiration that's completely off base." And then someone's like, "Look, like I'm an expert assassin paid well. I 100% pull a [ __ ] bullet in his head. We'll end this whole war." Would you be like, "Look, like we don't do that because even though Vladimir Putin's an evil man, he's a human like us and he's on our humanity survival team and we want him in." How do you parse that? Mhm. What do you think?
You're taking money from Putin, aren't you? Braintree didn't grow itself. A lot of Russian developers. Yeah. And I'm not talking about killing people, but even being negative towards people in a way that is exclusionary. Making fun of them, not laughing with them.
Yeah. I guess like in a tribe, tribes are comprised of various personalities. And there's certainly a productive path of being cooperative and kind and dancing to the nuance of those things. There's also a value in not being beholden to the tribe.
And so oftentimes I know that many of my friends are, you know, in like very powerful positions in the world and they have to dance through these really challenging circumstances where they want to do a given thing because they think it's right, but then they have all these powers around them and they do need to work in a system of power. Sure. And so they become beholden to it. And it's not good or bad. It just is a reality of their system that they've built. Whereas other people basically say, I'm not going to be beholden to anyone under any circumstance and that's just who I am. And that's a choice they can make that has repercussions because then certain powers won't align with them, right? So it's like it's a path. So much money you can't make anymore because. But it's also like you lose some but then you also gain others because other partners will come into play and say this is the kind of thing we want and we align with. So in the end it maybe mixes out to be the same.
But I'd say like you're carving out a voice where I perceive you trying to be evidence-based and do the correct thing. I don't perceive you as having alternative motives. Maybe you do. I can't see it. I don't know what those would be, but you like you legit and I guess I view we're both in a similar place. I'm legitimately trying to do the right thing based upon evidence and results. Yeah. I don't really care what gets us there. I just want it to be right. Yeah. For the result. And so in doing that, I personally have chosen to not be beholden. Yeah. And so no one owns me and no one puppets me and no one can tell me what to say and nobody can. So I just do me in my own path and be that negative or positive depending on the context. Yeah.
And so I mean I think there's power. You have chosen a path where you're legitimately trying to parse the world and to speak what you think is accurate and you're sufficiently self-aware and self-deprecating where you know you're going to be right sometimes, wrong sometimes. You're going to correct yourself. So, like that's the proper balance where if you're in that position and you're assessing others, but then you're either overconfident or you have some lacking self-awareness, that's the danger zone. But I think you've got the skill sets to keep on doing you and letting the market respond and rebuild around your observations. But I think most people probably find refuge in an opinion they can trust. Genuine. Yeah. Yeah.
So, if I were you, I'd probably lean into it more. And like when you were talking [ __ ] about me, I was like fine. Like great. You know, it's just it's fun. It's play. Like you're messing around. I get it. And it's like, did you see my video of me talking [ __ ] about an older version of me? I know. I didn't. Oh my god. I mean excoriated myself. Yeah. There you go. So I mean I think that's a good signal to the audience.
But yeah, I think you have found a lane. You've got traction. You've got momentum. People trust you. And so like the most valuable thing you have is your trust. And so if you were to compromise what you say because you're worried about someone else reacting, that would compromise your value, right? Because now someone stepped on your trust. Yeah. Like stepped on your ability to tell me what I really want to hear because I want to trust you that you are going to tell me to the best of your abilities what is evidence-based and what was in my best interest, right? Like you're trying to help people out genuinely. So that was very valuable feedback, Bryan. Thank you so much, man. Yeah, I'm gonna noodle on that for some time.
All right. Should we arm wrestle? I don't want to lose or get hurt.
I challenged him to arm wrestle. I assign you the winner by me withdrawing. You know what? I did this the other day. Somebody challenged me to the arm wrestle. I did the same thing. I was like, "No way." Like absolutely the worst idea. And they gave me [ __ ] And I was like, "You're stupid." They prove it. You're like, "All right, let's arm wrestle."
When I was in undergrad, I was a competitive powerlifter. Yeah. And I was at a party and someone asked me to arm wrestle and I said yes. And I beat them. And I also like had a muscle pull. Yes. Like a very small forearm muscle. One of the muscles that allows you to supinate and it just bothered me for like the rest of the day and then a little bit in training the next day. That little of a downside. I was like, I'm never [ __ ] arm wrestling anyway. Because then you ask like what's the upside? What was the upside? Yeah. As soon as I beat him, I checked around. None of the females had any more of their pants pulled down than before. And so I was like, "Well, that was the only upside I was interested in." And then I never did it again. That or hooking up with any females. Yeah. One of those not according to my own choice.
Yeah. A friend of mine, we were at a party and there was someone there, like a wrestler or jiu-jitsu or something, and this person was big, like muscular, and they're like wrestle him and I was like go go go. He did it and you know he hurt his back. And which one? The muscular guy that you just... Muscular guy. Oh, good. Yeah. Who? He was like, you know, I'm gonna jump in. But he's had two surgeries on his back now. And capital H hurt. It plagues him. Like it just... Can you imagine having to deal with that? So I always think of that. Yeah. I always think of that.
Like every time the smallest of things of like let's do this thing or that thing. I think should I... I still regret [ __ ] I said to like girls in middle school that I liked, I would not be able to live with myself like catastrophic injury for some dumb [ __ ] Again, when I was younger, I did [ __ ] like that. I got hurt low one time. Like when you're a powerlifter, you get strong enough for your body weight, you can actually jump really high off just being strong. And so like I would jump onto like three or 4 foot platforms just from a stand just when drunk with friends in college. And at one time I actually jumped up onto the thing, but I scraped my knee and I was like, "Ow." And then I never jumped onto anything ever again.
Yeah. And when people try to like play fight with me during video shoots, I just like curl up into a ball. You want a shot at the title? Throw on a gi. We can go no gi. Sign a waiver in a real jiu-jitsu gym with mats. We'll warm up. I'll sit to guard so no one gets hurt and we'll get it popping. Maybe he'll [ __ ] me up. It's unlikely. But you know that and really the question is why? What are we trying to ascertain? If we're just roughhousing for fun, I love that energy, but I'm not eight anymore. My [ __ ] and my body is a little too important for me to do stuff like that. I don't even throw on the helmet and ride the... like Crystal and I would love to ride bikes around. We have great places to do it where we live, but we're like we train jiu-jitsu so much and she's trying to become a killer and I'm trying to get my craft going. They're like if I hurt my elbow in a real serious way, just like hitting a [ __ ] stick on a bike, what am I going to tell myself? Yeah. So, I mean, it makes us so... real quick, it makes us so boring. Like, do you have anything to tell people about risk aversion that is exciting and fun? And so people are like, "Dude, these guys suck. They like... you stay the [ __ ] out of the sun looking like [ __ ] Dracula. I don't do anything with my body even though it does all these things. Like, Mike, do the thing." I'm like, "Nope, I'm just going to sit in the corner and cry." What the hell is our excuse? What do we tell people?
Yeah, I get this so much. I'm sure I get it all the time. It's like, bro, so maniacally focused on living forever, he forgot how to live. Yeah. And so it's like the knee-jerk reaction that probably 25% of people say in response to becoming acquainted with me. But this is how I feel about the future. Like so in the same way, like anything that would compromise your ability to do your craft, I feel like anything that would compromise my ability to live in the future... Living in the future is your craft. ...is not worth it. Yeah. Nothing is worth it. There's no trade-off that's worth it. Right? And that's what I'm trying to basically persuade the human race.
Nothing. There's no sensorial pleasure. There's no debauchery. There's no level of sensorial pleasure that is worth missing out on the future. Like that is my only thing I want to tell the world. It is self-evidently true. If you fast forward in time, only people that care about surviving into the future will be around. And so you'll be surrounded by more likeminded people the longer that you're kicking because all of the short-sighted people are short-sighted and not around anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Like they'll just be... Yeah. Memories. They'll be worked out of the gene pool. Yeah. I do think that well-intentioned, intelligent people would actually agree with this.
They just don't understand this moment. It's a different mind frame. Very big switch. They haven't been, they're not aware of it. They can't understand it. And so that's why I was saying this bridge, right? It's like, so when an AI researcher is stringing words together about matrix multiplication and about these reinforcement learning models and blah blah blah, that doesn't translate. But when someone who is much more practically relatable to them, like build muscle and work on your physique and sleep well, that's bridgeable.
And like also, friend, yes, take this one more step of like, we're doing this because these are building blocks for this much bigger thing we're playing. And that's why I like, it is reachable to a group of people that otherwise don't understand what's happening. There's no vector for them. It's very hard, and they intuitively, like, they interact with these models but they don't understand how they scale and applications in biology and molecules and engineer reality. And we have what we can do now, very relatable. We have a bridge of what's coming down the pipeline that's already worked on, that real scientists that have real jobs instead of just fantasizing about the [ __ ] can sit and be like, we are actually earnestly working on this. And like if you had the guy, Demis Hassabis, the guy who leads DeepMind at Google, if you... Of course, amazing. If you had him here and you were like, hey, what's coming with AI drug discovery, he'd probably give you like a wink, like, crazy [ __ ], don't tell anyone, but we're working on it.
And you have very aspirational ideas. You're saying the future is going to be amazing, and so amazing that we can't even comprehend it. Now to me, if I was a red team, I would say it sounds like another religion, that sounds like faith. How do you know? Maybe the future is really dystopic. A lot of people have tons of ideas about dystopic. So I think something I may be able to bring to the table, if we ever have one of these discussions again, which hopefully we get a chance to a few more times at least: I think a lot about that third pillar of what could the future look like in a reasonable take based on expected trajectories. Wacky stuff. If you get here the middle, but you get the what can you do now? What's in the pipeline? What's there to live for? If you do a lot of conversations between those, you get some people string along. They're like, "Yeah, okay, [ __ ] it. I'm long for this shit."
Yeah, I totally agree. Like, so Demis, to give him a shout out, he and I started hanging out 10 years ago. Also a fantastic human. That's awesome. I would love to see him in a position of power in the world. I think he has the right... Real power. I do. I think he has the right combination, and like he just has the... he's really well built constitutionally to, I think, navigate trappings of power, and I love him. So, but he was... let me say one thing. He was basically saying his whole thesis on existence was if you solve intelligence, intelligence solves all things. Correct. All tractable things. Yes. Yeah. And any debate about that is rendered null because you're not intelligent enough to debate with something much more intelligent than you. That has been his whole quest. He's just trying to solve intelligence, and like we humans are a certain form of intelligence and we have certain positive attributes or negative attributes. There's all kinds of externalities. A lot of limitations too. We do. Yeah. So I really admire, and he's just been maniacal in that pursuit, you know, from DeepMind through his days at Google. So, but I'm glad that he, you know, that is his objective.
So have you seen the Lord of the Rings situation, the whole trilogy? So if someone found the ring of power and it's more or less anyone else and they're looking at you and they're doing this, you're kind of like, "No, no, don't do that." But if it's like, "Do it, do it, put it on." He's like, "I don't know you. Do it right now. Going," and then he gets the [ __ ] eye, the whole thing. That's right. I agree with you entirely. Put on the ring of power. I think that's probably going to summarize our discussion. Frodo, don't be a little wuss. Put the ring on. Go to Mordor. Do that [ __ ]. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think the argument is that, I think the idea is there's a small number of people that are going to change the future of existence. I think it's actually a billion of us are going to, because I think that it's going to be... governments are going to make decisions on how to regulate. They're going to make decisions on what to build, what not to build. People are going to make cultural decisions on what to be and not to be. We're going to decide whether to go to war or not. Like we're going to make all these decisions as a species. And so I think we do need all of us engaged in this conversation. It's not a situation where we're on the sidelines observing. We are actually, all of us are in the game. And I think we're much more consequential than we give ourselves credit.
Thank you for raising my already high anxiety. I'm kidding. Is your anxiety down since you stopped taking the...? Substantially. It's down to nonclinical levels, as you can probably see. I don't know. I've never experienced anxiety, but I would imagine that's just bold. Awful. I would imagine... I've been worried about stuff before. Just imagine that extended out ad infinitum. That would be such a terrible state, to worry about something for a while. Yeah. I know it's like to be depressed. I barely know what that's like. I can be depressed for several minutes at a time and then I'm like, tada, like hamster wheel.
Yeah. Isn't it funny, because, and like I could never explain to you what it feels like to be depressed. I can give you words. Yeah. Like you never really truly could grok it. And like same with anxiety, where I guess I could probably imagine that, where like just the pulsating, incessant feeling of this... I can't get my mind off of this worry. That was a decent take, which is kind of like depression. Depression is the same thing. It's just like relentless annihilation of hope. I've heard powerlessness be described with depression, and I can't put that hat on in a way that fits for too long. You know, like some things you see and you're like, I can attest to that. There are parts of depression which I'm like, I've had depression before as a consequence of using Adderall for attention deficit disorder when I was younger. It's like pharmacologically induced depression, where I could always go back and that part of my mind was like, it's just the drugs. When it's not just the drugs, it hits different. Yeah, I'm sure. And so I think more people can probably... Everyone's been anxious somewhat, but there's a difference between sad and depressed. Depressed is a whole level beneath that. And I do mean beneath. I'm glad you made it through. What led you out of the darkness? Because we never talked about that and you mentioned it earlier and I was just curious.
Yeah. V0 Blueprint was me trying to solve depression. So I basically went out and tried to find all the evidence on what things work for depression, and I tried everything with evidence and everything without evidence. Nice. I tried energy healers. What the [ __ ] is that? Yeah, exactly. What the [ __ ] is that? I mean, I tried TMS, I tried tDCS, I did medication, CBT. I did CBT. I did acupuncture. Whoa, you really did try. I mean, I was so desperate. The needle goes through the brain. I mean, anything. I mean, for 10 years I had like a chance, like if any treatment offered any possibility of relief, and I just systematically worked through every single one. And then in the end I think it really ended up being circumstantial more than anything else, where I was raised in a religion and I was still in that religion, and I think it boxed me into a degree that made me feel paralysis. And then I had a challenging personal relationship. I think the combination of those two things just broke me and I couldn't get out of those cycles. And so once I sold my company, I got a divorce, I left the Mormon religion, and I basically just tried to rewrite my entire life, and only in that moment did it start lifting. It started lifting. It wasn't an instant lift. Within one year I was fully out. Wow. Yeah. And it's never come back. I've never even dipped back in, even partially.
That's what... I've read some literature on depression, a lot on just general behavioral genetics, and it seems the two biggest factors for how happy you are at any one time is genetic proclivity multiplied by your current life circumstance. Yeah. So the genetic proclivity gives you a baseline, and then like people who are genetically engineered, or evolved by accident, to be very depressed, even when they're in extreme fame and wealth they're still kind of like maybe a little less happy than the average person in a regular life. And then at their lowest points, if they get into a car wreck and they hurt their ankle, I mean, they're in the dumps. Whereas someone with extremely high affect generally, yeah, even if they're dealing with cancer, they're still pretty reasonable about it. But if they're dealing with regular life, they're ecstatic. And if they get into some really good stuff, they're just like having a manic episode for 40 years straight. So I guess people discount the fact, it's sort of banal when you say it, like, yeah, like legit life, like being involved in a crap marriage is like really [ __ ] bad, and it follows you everywhere. Crystal. I underhand pitched that joke to myself. Oh my god.
Yeah. I think people actually underestimate the seriousness of the consequences of being in an unhealthy relationship. I mean, I knew, of course, like I experienced it on a daily basis and it was very challenging, but I didn't connect the dots that that was some meaningful amount of the contributor. That big of a thing. Did you engender ideas of like, things will get better in this relationship and I'm still in it to see that through? You always have hope of like, you can keep on grinding away. You hear stories of people like, you know, they've worked through their trials and they've been married for 45 years, and it's like, definitely there's that. It's just like when you're building a team and someone joins a team, you know they're not the right fit. Mhm. You know it. Never in my entire life has someone changed to become the right fit. It's always the right decision to just not be through me... but for a few pedantries and exclusions, I largely agree. It's like just very rare. Like most of us know what works, and that's the same true of someone who joins a team and they look at the team, they're like, this is not the right team for me, they should probably leave. Like, it's just rarely do those things sort themselves out over time.
Relief for the depression was like probably the coolest experience in my life, where I just got like, it was like obeic for hope, just like I just got infused, like it was just raining, and it was like sunshine of hope, just like absorption, where I just was back to existence after being in this dark cave for a decade. So like, what an amazing thing to come out of.
We all have to go our separate ways now because chronological time still exists, unfortunately. I'm very, very enthralled. I want to know... I hope that on your podcast, with me or without me, you dive in more to this kind of discussion about personal journeys and happiness and things like that. And I would love to hear infinitely more about your own take, because like I just thought you were the vampire guy on the internet. Obviously I know everyone's complex underneath, but I've just gotten none of this, and I think it's wonderful and I think you need to talk about it more.
Thank you. Yeah, I know that that's the perception. So yeah, but looks like you do have a legit thing going for you. So no worries. It'll be a different perception very soon. Yeah. I talked to you and people are like, "How was he?" I'm like, "Fucking robot, weirdo, vampire." Everyone's... Exactly. Exactly. I wouldn't expect anything less. Exactly. No, but now I can tell the true tale. Hi, friend. Great hanging out with you today. Likewise. Thanks for being here so much. Yeah.
Article published