Bodybuilding, Burnout, and "Don't Die": Jesse James West and Bryan Johnson on Work, Self-Worth, and Longevity
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson sits down with fitness YouTuber and natural bodybuilder Jesse James West to look past his viral videos. The conversation covers why West works as hard as he does, how he came through a period of serious depression in college, what his daily health routine actually looks like, and why he says he is now more interested in longevity than bodybuilding. Johnson uses the conversation to lay out parts of his own "Don't Die" philosophy, and pushes West on measurement, jet lag, and the hidden costs of a hard-charging life. West's position is candid throughout. He knows his habits are imperfect, he credits bodybuilding with wrecking his hormones, and he wants to improve gradually rather than turn into a copy of Johnson overnight.
A Schedule That Is Either 100% or Nothing
West describes his schedule as either completely chaotic or completely empty, with the empty stretches serving to recover from the chaotic ones. He lives in Maryland and doesn't come to Los Angeles often, so when he does he tries to "get every ounce of LA" out of the trip. On this visit he worked roughly 7 a.m. to midnight each day with about four shoots a day. On the day of the recording, his first shoot started at 7:30, the next ran from 9 to 11:30, he drove to Johnson's for noon, and he planned to fly home immediately afterward.
He says the filming doesn't drain him mentally. He may be physically tired from being on his feet all day, but because he loves filming, and it feels like hanging out and working at once, he gets energy from it rather than ending the day "like mush."
On planes, he buys Wi-Fi, puts on noise-cancelling headphones with music, scrolls social media, and writes down ideas. He says his best ideas come when he is "bored out of my mind" on a flight. He has been trying, without full success, to build a habit of writing ten ideas a day: video titles, possible businesses, anything that lets his creativity flow. He also daydreams through upcoming shoots, "almost filming them in my head" before doing them for real.
Work as Self-Worth, and the Discomfort of Nothingness
Johnson asks whether filling every moment feels obligatory. West answers that he loves the work, but a lifelong drive to work hard, going back to youth sports, has left his brain registering hard work as self-worth. He is comfortable doing nothing only when he is with his wife, friends, or family, because then his attention is on them. Sitting alone makes him feel guilty for not working, or restless "like a dog that needs to run around." The closest he has recently come to real nothingness was a 90-minute flight without Wi-Fi. At first he felt he needed to be doing something, and eventually he settled into daydreaming. Whether consciously or not, he says, he avoids that nothingness.
He compares it to a vacation. For any driven person, he says, the first two days feel itchy and in-between as you come off full speed. By day three or four he feels ready to retire.
Johnson says he has long wondered how much he chose the systems he lives in and how much those systems are "puppeting" him, and whether he then justifies everything with a nice story. West says he is definitely run by the system, but it's a system he built himself, not something imposed by social media. He still thinks his work balance is good. The moment he leaves home, he treats the time away as work time until he returns (while still protecting sleep), so that he doesn't waste time away from his wife, house, and animals. That's also why he batch-films. Flying to LA for a single segment wouldn't be efficient, so a single video might combine footage from an island, Florida, and another LA trip. He frames this as cost efficiency, "brain efficiency," and work-capacity efficiency.
What burns him out is the work he doesn't enjoy, mainly management. Training new editors is especially draining because, as he puts it, no one else sees his vision the way he does, and training becomes a second job on top of filming. He has a team of about three and is about to hire a second editor, then likely a producer or right-hand person. He thinks a team of around six would be the right size for a "very proper workload."
"My Personality Is My Mom. My Behavior Is My Dad."
Asked who he models his behavior on, West says his personality comes from his mother and his behavior from his father. He describes his mom as light-hearted, creative, a big dreamer, spiritually open, and "literally the best." His dad offers "tougher love," pushing West and his older sister to be their best. When West texts that he is being crushed by work, his father replies along the lines of "You're killing it. Keep going. Three steps ahead," his standing advice to stay three steps ahead of others and of yourself.
His father grew up very poor, on welfare, with parents who weren't really there, and concluded that he would have to work extremely hard to have any life at all. West describes him working a 40-hour job as an electrician and manager of electricians, being a landlord of five houses, and doing all the house work, car repairs, tree cutting, and toilet fixing himself. His father's sayings were "if you want something done right, do it yourself" and "never half-ass anything; if you're going to half-ass it, don't do it." West calls the first "correct, unfortunately" to some degree. He also says he has learned through business and managing his team that it can be self-sabotaging, because you can only get so far doing everything yourself. The "relentless" ethic he absorbed from his father is why he has "stay relentless" tattooed on him and uses it as his motto.
Advice to a 14-Year-Old
Johnson asks what principles West would give a 14-year-old building a model of the world. Thinking of his own younger self, West says 14 or 15 is the age for establishing interests, so time should go into trying many things: sports, instruments, theater, entrepreneurship. He wishes he had done theater, but was too afraid of being judged as a nerd. As a kid he ran a small business collecting neighbors' trash for a dollar, which he later saw as an early sign of an entrepreneurial streak.
His advice is to find what you truly enjoy, let it lead you, and stay level-headed about distractions like girls, partying, and trying pot for the first time. He discovered lifting at 14 or 15 and already knew he wanted to be on social media to inspire people. He believes other distractions that weren't his true passion helped lead him to "a very kind of dark place" in 2018, and that if he had listened to himself earlier, it might not have happened. He adds that he is grateful now that it did.
The Dark Place: Lacrosse, Lehigh, and a Breakdown in Target
West was a top-ranked lacrosse player who played year-round on travel teams in New Jersey, "literally every day." At 15 he committed to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania on a 90% scholarship, a Division I program at a school he describes as almost Ivy League. It was what he and his family believed was right for him. Yet he always "just knew" he would end up doing fitness and social media. He says that if his younger self saw him now, he wouldn't be surprised. Lacrosse left no time or energy for that.
At Lehigh he felt pushed down a path of "should" rather than "meant to," a distinction he says has shaped his decisions ever since. He has always been anxious, and he links his go-go-go, ADHD-like energy partly to managing that anxiety, but in college he became seriously depressed and felt constantly uneasy. He remembers telling his coach that it felt like "someone is holding me by the neck in like shallow water" while no one was touching him.
He kept this from his father at first, expecting to be told to suck it up. He says his father has since changed a lot through the experience. West describes being confused about whether he even wanted to be alive. Logically he knew he wouldn't harm himself and that there was a way out, and his mother had told him from her own experience to talk to someone. But he became genuinely scared that another year of this might lead him to do something dangerous to himself within six months. That fear, he says, was the turning point. He knew he loved life normally, even if he didn't at that moment, so he decided to make a change.
The break came during parents' weekend. After a scrimmage where he scored a few goals and his dad thought everything was fine, West started crying while checking out with his mom at Target. He told her he couldn't be there, that he was deeply unhappy and had lost interest in everything, including girls, whom he had always chased. The only things he still cared about were the gym and good music. His mother saw it on his face and said she would tell his father and that whatever he wanted would happen. His father accepted it.
Before telling his coach he was depressed, giving up the scholarship, and transferring, West psyched himself up with a heavy gym song, "Raised by Wolves" by Falling in Reverse. The coach was concerned, not angry. West describes it as the hardest choice of his life: an 18-year-old alone with a 45-year-old man whose program was paying about $60,000 a year for him to be there, saying he was quitting and wouldn't take any offer to stay. The lesson he took was that he alone decides what saves or breaks him, and that stepping off one path doesn't lead to a dead end, because another path is always waiting.
Mental Health at 25
Now 25, West says he sometimes feels imposter syndrome as his projects keep getting bigger. He reports almost no anxiety and currently no depression. The emotional "scars" took until about 2020 to fade, which is when his fitness and influencing career took off. He believes pursuing what he was meant to do was itself healing.
His remaining anxiety tends to appear after caffeine combined with a business "fire," which he calls typical entrepreneurial anxiety. His wife, whom he describes as very calm ("golden retriever, black cat"), "hits control-delete" on it. He has also changed how he handles anxiety. When he was younger it might turn into anger or saying things he shouldn't. Now he names it, zooms out to see himself in the third person, recognizes that nothing outside has changed, and either acts on it or sits with it for a while. Johnson says he went through a similar cycle with depression and learned to observe it as something other than himself.
AI, Self-Duplication, and the Uncertain Rules of the Game
Johnson mentions an essay of his on "the end of human greatness." He argues that AI models can now nearly become a person. There is a Bryan AI model trained on enough of what he has said and written that, in his telling, conversing with it feels close to conversing with him, with similar mental models and branches of thought. He asks whether there might someday be a Jesse James West AI that makes better videos and thumbnails than West himself, and how anyone can build mental models of themselves and the world when the rules are unclear.
West says he is "excited as hell." He has often wished he could duplicate himself as his next employee. Johnson points out that this assumes you control that version of yourself, and West concedes the point. West expects that learning to use AI well will become the next curriculum. He compares worries about AI making college pointless to the switch from horse and buggy to cars: people adapted, horses found other uses, and buggy parts went into cars. He finds it thrilling that AI may unlock things that don't yet exist, which he compares to trying to imagine a color that doesn't exist. He wants to hire an AI expert to build systems into his team's workflow. Johnson jokes that he could just hire an AI for that.
Johnson says he uses AI "non-stop." When West asks whether he is talking to AI Bryan right now, Johnson says it would probably do a better job. In his view, such an AI would have analyzed everything he has ever said, found patterns he can't see, and pushed questions further than he has in this conversation. He ties the question to his son Talmage, who just turned 20 and is working out how to shape his life. The usual way of mapping out a life, Johnson suggests, has become a curveball.
West's Daily Routine
West jokingly calls his routine "the Jesse James Greenprint" and worries aloud about getting sued. He says it has evolved further since he first met Johnson. He goes to bed between 10 and 11:30 on average and wakes around 8 to 9. He is on screens before bed. He tries to stop eating at least an hour before bed, ideally by 8 p.m. when dieting for a competition, simply because he runs out of calories. He loves evening snacks, especially rice cakes and Greek yogurt sweetened with a little stevia or honey, which he calls an obsession. He eats them on the couch in front of the TV, sometimes tossing his phone aside to avoid "dual stimulus" while hanging out with his wife.
He has kept a strict nightly skincare routine since about 14: face wash, toner, hyaluronic acid, a little tretinoin, and moisturizer. His wife is a beauty influencer, and through her he previously used Korean-style products like snail mucin.
In the morning he sometimes checks his phone for business fires. His example is a video getting age-restricted the day after posting, which means lost views, contacting his YouTube rep, and an appeal. He says he now has a system to prevent this, and it hasn't happened in a while. On a good morning, which he estimates at 50–70% of the time, he skips the phone, brushes his teeth, rinses rather than washes his face to avoid dryness, applies moisturizer, and admits he has lapsed on sunscreen. He then drinks a large glass of water with an electrolyte pack from Derek of More Plates More Dates (about 750 mg sodium, plus potassium and magnesium), eats nearly a cup of Greek yogurt, has coffee, and lets his dog out. Depending on the time of year he may cold plunge, though he hasn't lately.
He does his decision-heavy creative work first: reviewing videos and pre-shoot scripts and responding to his team. He says his brain is freshest then, and he has tried doing that work at night and found himself slower. Around 11 he lifts in his home gym, which he describes as concrete walls with an accented black wall and dashed beam lights, "slightly futuristic but very modern and minimalistic." The rest of the day is more work, healthy meals, and walking his dog.
"Bodybuilding Destroyed My Hormones": Measurement and Testosterone
West gets about one blood test a year, mainly to check testosterone, and admits he is overdue. He says bodybuilding competition "crushes" testosterone, which he calls very unhealthy. At its lowest his level was 200, and he says he felt terrible. When he alternated competing with a year off, it ranged around 500. After a year and a half without competing, he says it reached about 700. He also credits eating more whole foods. He used to eat low-calorie products like zero-calorie syrup out of fear of calories, and his wife threw them out, calling them chemicals and insisting he eat real, local food.
He doesn't yet have a strict supplement protocol but plans to start using the Blueprint products Johnson is sending. He says anti-aging interests him more than bodybuilding now. He expects to do progressively less bodybuilding, keep a solid aesthetic physique, and focus on mobility, longevity, and health markers.
He used to wear a Whoop, partly because it sponsored him. It often reported low recovery (around 60–70) even after what it scored as perfect sleep, and on days at 60 or below he skipped training. The problem, he says, was that he felt great, yet he began to "feel what the measurement was."
Johnson says many people have that experience, then offers an analogy. We have a clear accounting system for money, where spending visibly lowers the bank balance, but no equivalent for aging. People look in the mirror, feel about the same, and don't see what is happening at the molecular level, so they "spend down their life" without realizing it. Measurement, in his framing, is the bank statement. At 25, people assume they're at 100% and nothing is being spent.
West says that when he was younger, older people seemed like "a different species." As his frontal lobe developed, he realized an 80-year-old man hobbling along was once a boy and still has a boy inside him. That's when health started to feel important. He describes his family as very fit. His dad runs a lot, and his mom, whom he believes is 58, is "jacked." She has become more health-focused after some of her brothers had health scares, and she has told him she doesn't want to be around for only 15 more years. He urges her to keep eating well, lifting, maintaining mobility, and getting blood work. When his father felt off and got tested, it turned out his testosterone was higher than West's, and Derek of More Plates More Dates advised him on other markers. West's view is that health should be the top priority at any age, but young people are short-sighted and assume they'll worry about it later.
What Blueprint Is Aiming For
Asked whether he'll ever look 80, Johnson says Blueprint's goal has been to slow the speed of aging, and he reports that he now ages about six months for every twelve that pass, which he calls the most striking result so far. In his view, slowing aging is possible to some degree and some damage can be offset, such as repairing worn ligaments or improving heart function, but true reversal isn't yet possible. You can't make a 47-year-old kidney or liver 19 again. He expects organ age reversal to start within the next 10 to 30 years, probably succeeding first with the liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart, with the brain the hardest. He allows that there could be a twist where the brain turns out easiest.
At 47, Johnson estimates his natural remaining lifespan at 30 to 50 years and thinks the necessary discoveries will likely arrive in that window given AI progress. He says he is "pretty bullish." He considers some form of societal collapse or catastrophe a bigger risk to him than dying of natural causes.
West asks about the idea of an earlier advanced human civilization, possibly with anti-aging or alien involvement, that was wiped out. Johnson's best guess is no, because evidence would likely appear in the fossil record. He finds a different idea more intriguing: that an alien species might live on Earth now, outside our perception, which would mean people dismissed as "wackos" for reporting paranormal experiences were right. Neither has had a paranormal experience.
Johnson traces the origin of his path to a much darker question. It began, he says, with the choice of whether to commit suicide or not. After reading Albert Camus, he took Camus's view to be that life is meaningless and the only question is how to play the game. Johnson concluded that existence itself is the highest virtue, and that everything after existing is a meaning-making story we invent. That, he says, is what started the idea that humanity may be shifting from death being inevitable to not dying.
Psychedelics as an Anti-Aging Question
West mentions Johnson's posts about psychedelics. Johnson says his team did a deep dive ranking psychedelics by anti-aging properties. As he recalls it, the top ones were psilocybin, ketamine, LSD, and ibogaine, while heroin, meth, cocaine, and fentanyl were clearly pro-aging. He says they are now planning a trial: for example, doing psilocybin somewhere like Mexico under a protocol while measuring brain age, body age, central blood pressure, and other vitals throughout. West is interested in joining, possibly on camera, but won't commit yet. Johnson also recalls measuring his brain on ketamine with a Kernel brain interface around four years ago.
Presence, Vows, and Family Plans
Johnson says he does breathwork and meditation twice a day, morning and night. West describes his own improvised technique. To focus on something or someone, he makes an internal "mmm" sound that blocks out all other thoughts and helps him "lock in." He used it at the altar on his wedding day because he had feared passing through the day without being present, and he says he has never been so present.
In his vows, West said he had never expected to find love and thought he'd be single forever, which he connects to insecurity about whether he deserved it. He described how his wife's empathy and kindness make him and everyone around her better, promised to give "110%" (Johnson notes that's mathematically incorrect), and said they are soulmates who will find each other in the next life and the ones after. He says she wrote nearly the same key points independently.
They have been together about four years and are at the stage of not actively preventing a pregnancy and letting it happen if it happens. After Johnson's comments about avoiding the sauna for fertility, West says he should look into it, since he has a home sauna and plans to get a wooden one. Johnson urges him to measure fertility markers with an at-home test covering count, motility, and morphology. Johnson says his own recent test found microplastics in his ejaculate, which he attributes to ordinary exposure that everyone has. He wears mainly cotton underwear and suggests West avoid polyester.
Johnson's Top Tips: A Mindset, Measurement, and Mental Health
West asks for top tips beyond sleep. Johnson's first is to adopt a "don't die" mindset. When death is assumed to be inevitable, he argues, people create a religion around dying and martyr themselves: staying up late, eating junk food, trading health for money, status, or power, and calling it living your best life or a strong work ethic. He calls this slow suicide. In his view, losing hearing, eyesight, or brain volume literally shrinks consciousness, and people celebrate while it happens. West jokes that it's more of a religion and asks if Johnson is a cult leader. Johnson says yes. West says he's in because "an honest cult leader is a better one," then asks when they drink each other's blood. Johnson calls that "initiation two."
The second tip is basic measurement. Johnson acknowledges that wearables can create a complicated relationship, like West's Whoop experience, but says he has gotten past that. Blood work and wearables reveal things like the sauna's effect on fertility that you'd otherwise miss.
The third is mental health. Johnson notes that West, as a hard-charging entrepreneur on social media, is constantly exposed to relative comparisons. Johnson says he never leaves social media feeling like a better person. It leaves him feeling unsettled and emotionally disturbed. He does it because he feels he has to play the game, he hates it, and he wishes social media didn't exist, though he says he does enjoy podcast conversations and sparring with trolls. West says he loves Johnson's "go to sleep" replies to critics. Johnson's advice is to realize that almost everyone is depressed, anxious, insecure, or hurting behind a pleasant face. Mental health is a lonely battle in which people can't admit they hate what they do, and it's okay to know everyone else is in pain too. He adds that corporations push infinite scroll and junk food, asking people to sacrifice their lives for profit, while simple advice like sleep and exercise seems too bland. Johnson stops at three tips.
Steroids, Genetics, and the Invisible Cost of Oreos
West, who stresses that he is a natural bodybuilder and takes no steroids, asks how harmful steroids are for aging. Johnson says he hasn't done the analysis and doesn't know the numbers, only that they come at a cost. West shares his own observation. Some bodybuilders on steroids in their 20s look 45, then appear to reverse ten years in the face after stopping. His example is Larry Wheels, who he says looked 40 at about 28 while "blasting gear" to become the strongest man in the world, then looked around 28 to 30 again after dropping to testosterone only. Johnson says Mike Israetel told him he knew he was paying that price and chose to. West calls this one of the main reasons he won't use steroids, and quips that bodybuilders are the only people who work out to be less healthy, though they choose that sacrifice out of love for the sport.
Johnson says he'd like to spend time with bodybuilders as hardcore experimenters. He recalls a dinner with one of the best NFL running backs and being shocked by how ordinary the athlete's diet was. West says many elite athletes rely on genetics. He considers himself genetically gifted, able to eat junk and still look shredded, and admits he sometimes wonders whether a few nights of snacks really matter when he looks the same. That, he says, is why good genetics can make healthy eating harder. Johnson returns to the bank account. The cost is happening at the level of telomeres and cellular interactions, so the mirror can't show it. West predicts real health "bank account monitors" someday and references the movie where people's remaining life is displayed as time. Johnson says he already has a fairly high-fidelity clock of his own aging.
Jet Lag and the Pee Test
Johnson says his measurements show international travel "wrecks" him. West says Johnson's advice against red-eye flights convinced him to stop taking them. Johnson's rough budget is one international flight per quarter, because by his measurements the body keeps recovering for about 15 days afterward, with effects like disrupted blood glucose that compound over time. Asked about Gary Brecka's advice not to eat on planes, Johnson says he fasts on flights and drinks a lot of water, roughly eight ounces per hour on a ten-hour flight by his estimate. West says he pees two to four times on a five-hour flight and needs an aisle seat. Johnson suggests mineralizing fluids with salt or electrolytes to reduce urination.
He also recommends a "pee test": drink as much as you can, hold it as long as you can, then empty your bladder. This gives two data points, urine flow speed and total bladder capacity. Johnson says urine flow speed declines with age and can serve as a marker of biological age. The two joke about "pee-maxing" and "don't die maxing."
Living Forever Means Living for Tomorrow
Johnson mentions reading about a black hole 300 million times the size of the sun and says that, viewed soberly, the scale of reality makes human games and priorities seem absurd. West asks how anyone could want to live forever in that light. Johnson answers that living forever and living for tomorrow are the same idea: it's Thursday, you have plans for Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday. People reject not dying because their minds can't grasp it, he argues, and would rather accept death than accept that limit. Yet people are also resilient and fight hard when their backs are against the wall.
West brings up the story of a woman who cared for ALS patients and then developed ALS herself. People say they'd want the plug pulled, he notes, but when they're there, they fight to live. Johnson agrees: people assume they won't care how they feel at 80, and then at 80 they do. West adds that earlier that day, reviewing Gold's Gym, he met an 85-year-old who said he had no pain, kicked his leg into the air, did a full squat, and said he trained to show that fitness at that age is possible. West's first thought was that he had to tell Johnson.
West's Goal for the Next Year
Asked what will have changed if they meet again in a year, West says he wants to work on his "face markers," joking that he has to be "beautiful forever." He hopes to bring his wife to Johnson's skin therapies, partly so she'll justify his purchases. More seriously, his goal is to keep shifting the ratio of healthy food to snacks, from roughly 70/30 in the past toward 80/20. He says he won't suddenly become "Bryan Johnson 2.0." He plans to add a little each year instead: perhaps more supplements, more attention to sleep, maybe going back to the Whoop. For someone like him, he says, improving by percentages is the realistic path.
What are top five tips that I could go change today for anti-aging?
Change your mindset to don't die.
More of a religion.
It is.
I'm being for real.
Yeah. You want to be in?
You, cult leader?
Yes.
All right, I'm in then. At least you're honest. An honest cult leader is a better one.
Why deny it?
Cheers. But don't die, Jesse. I'm so glad you're in, dude.
I am in. So, when do we drink each other's blood?
Today, I'm joined by my friend Jesse James West. He is a household name in the world of fitness and bodybuilding.
I'm a natural bodybuilder. I don't take steroids. I'm not on anything.
Also, he does some of the coolest videos on YouTube.
What are the chances of this like causing death?
Today we're going beyond his viral moments and we're talking about why he does what he does, how he creates his own personal protocol.
The Jesse James Greenprint is quite crazy.
Greenprint. Okay.
Am I going to get sued?
And what's behind his motto of staying relentless?
I say my personality is my mom. My behavior is my dad. He would always say, "Never half-ass anything. If you're going to half-ass it, don't do it." That's why I hustle so much. It's just like ingrained in me.
Will there be a Jesse James West AI that is better than you? And you're like, "Bro..."
I'm excited as hell about AI. Is there an AI Bryan? Am I talking to AI Bryan right now? Yo, is he real?
He would probably do a better job.
So, your schedule's very chaotic.
Very chaotic.
Yeah.
I would say it's either 100% chaotic or it's literally nothing. And the nothing is to recover from the chaotic. For example, I came to LA, I'm trying to think, maybe a day and a half ago, and from 7 a.m. till midnight pretty much each day it's go go go, like four shoots a day. And I mean, I live in Maryland, so I don't come here all the time.
Yeah.
So when I'm here I'm like, okay, I got to get every ounce of LA out of it before I leave. So, like this morning, my first shoot started at 7:30. Then I had a shoot at 9 till 11:30, drove here for noon, and now it's like what? 2 p.m.
And we're just still going, and then I got to fly home immediately after.
Yeah. Does that wear you out at the end of the day? Are you toast or you feel like... Yeah.
Honestly, when I'm doing the filming, I really don't feel toast. Like, it would take a lot. Maybe I'm just physically tired, like, you know, I've been on my feet all day and I need to sit down. But mentally, I probably can just go go. I don't know why. I think I do love what I'm doing. Like I love filming and it's like we're hanging out and just working at the same time. It's awesome. So I get energy from that rather than exert all my energy and feel like mush at the end. But yeah, it takes a lot for me to be actually tired. I feel like I just genuinely have a lot of energy.
So you're high energy now. We did a great video together. You get on the plane, you sit down, then what happens?
First thing I do, probably buy Wi-Fi.
Yeah.
And then I'll have music on for sure just to kind of tune out everything, and with the noise cancelling so I'm not hearing a bunch of people. And then I'll be on social media. I'll write down random ideas. I get a lot of random ideas that come to me when I'm on planes. Like my best ideas I feel are just when I'm sitting there bored out of my mind and I just start writing random things. I've been trying to do a habit and I haven't been succeeding. I do it sometimes. I try to write down like 10 ideas a day, you know, different titles of videos, maybe what could I do if I made a business, just random ideas to allow my creativity to flow. And I definitely am doing a lot of that on the plane along with just kind of daydreaming of things that are going to happen and what it could look like. Like on the way here, I'm thinking through the multiple shoots that I have and I'm almost like filming them in my head and then I go do it. It's kind of weird.
Does it feel like work to you or does it feel obligatory? Or when you have a moment of nothing, of zero space, do you want to fill it with that or do you feel obliged to do so?
The reason I do what I do is, obviously I love what I do, but there was a driving force of working really hard my whole life, even when I was little with sports, that I definitely believe my brain registered as working hard as self-worth. So when I'm not working and doing nothing, the only time I'm very okay with that is probably when I'm actually just spending time with my wife or friends or family. Like when I'm just with them, then my attention's on them. But if I was to just sit and be alone, I'm probably guilty that I'm not working, or feeling like I got zoomies, like a dog that needs to run around. I have to either be really tired or just hanging out with my loved ones for me to actually be okay with doing nothing.
Yeah. What is the last time you encountered nothing space?
I was on like three flights recently. One of the flights was only like an hour and a half. It had no Wi-Fi and that was probably the closest to nothing. And at first I was like, "Oh my god, dude. I need to be doing something. I'm bored." And then eventually I just kind of fell into just sitting there and just kind of daydreaming. But I definitely, whether it's subconscious or by choice, I definitely have a lot of things going on and I avoid that nothingness.
Yeah. Over time, does it weigh you down to have to be this busy, with your schedule this tight, with every moment spoken for? So basically, if nothingness is the enemy, but then you find your play space, does that sometimes feel like it's too much?
I feel like I've had times where it's too much for sure. And I just want to do nothing, but then I have to kind of sit through the uncomfortability for a little. It's like going on vacation. I feel like any entrepreneur or someone that's just really driven understands this. You're on vacation for a week and you want to be on vacation, and you're ready. You planned everything. The first two days you're kind of itchy. It feels like you're in between. You're uncomfortable because you're coming out of what you were just going full steam on. And I feel that even if I want to do nothing, I still have to get through that little phase and then I'm good. Once I get to like day three or four on vacation, I actually am like, "Yo, I'm not going back. I'm chilling. I'm done working. I think I'm retiring."
Exactly.
And that's a great feeling.
Yeah. That's why I asked the question, because throughout my life, I've wondered how much I've chosen the systems I'm in and how much the systems are puppeting me. So, did I really sign up for this? And am I now justifying everything I do, like I'm doing this for this reason and this beautiful story, or am I being run by the system?
Oh, I can easily say that I definitely get run by the system.
Really?
And it's the system that I have put myself in. It's not like social media. It's literally me. I'm the system and I get run by it, rather. But there's also another version of me that can be run in a healthier way. But I think I do have a very good work balance. That's why I say it's a lot or it's not a lot. I try to really utilize my time. Like if I'm away from my wife and my house and my animals, I see it as, okay, the second I leave my house, I should be working until I get back. And yes, I'm going to get my sleep and stuff. We know it's good. Got to do that. We talked about that.
Yeah, we got to get that good sleep.
But I feel that for me, I don't want to be away from that comfortability and that relaxation and not utilize all of it. So that's why it's so go go go when I'm traveling, and I try to do kind of batch filming, 'cause it's one thing to go and film a video. Like if I came here just for this one segment, it's not really efficient. You know, there's a few other people that are in the video. I got to fly to an island, fly to Florida, another LA trip, and then add it all together for one video. So it's cost efficiency, my own brain efficiency, and work capacity efficiency I got to keep in mind, and that's why I stay busy. But I really do enjoy what I do.
I think the only things that burn me out are the things I don't enjoy, which would be probably management, you know, like when I have to actually manage the team. It's one thing, some people are very self-efficient. You just say, "Hey, can you get this done?" That's all I got to say. But then, you know, there were times where I was hiring new editors and I have to train them because no one else can see my vision the way I see it, and I got to do my job of filming. Plus, I have another role now of training, managing, checking in on people.
And I'm slowly expanding my team. Like I'm about to hire a second editor. Then I'm going to go for probably another producer, assistant producer slash just right-hand person, which I have one, but I think doubling the size of my team, which is a very small team, like three people. And if I can get it to like six, I think that'd be an awesome spot to just be really efficient and have a very proper workload.
Do you draw lessons from your parents or from others? Like who do you model your behavior off of in life?
My behavior is definitely stemming from my dad. My mom, too. I say my personality is my mom. My behavior is my dad. And my mom's very light-hearted, dream big, creative, very open spiritually to the world and the universe and accepting of energy and love. And she's literally the best. And my dad is tougher love. Pushing me and my sister, I have a sister that's older than me, pushing his children to be the best version of themselves, staying on top of us to make sure we do everything correctly. His saying is, he'll text me this too, I'll be like, "I'm so busy. I'm getting crushed by work right now." And he's like, "You're killing it. Keep going. Three steps ahead." That's his saying: "Always stay three steps ahead of other people, of yourself, your work, everything."
He grew up very poor. He was on welfare as a kid and his parents weren't really there for him. So he kind of just fended for himself and only figured, if I'm going to have any life at all, I have to work my ass off. So it became very habitual to him to just be super relentless, which is why I have it tattooed on me. It's why it's my saying to stay relentless. Seeing him work a 40-hour job as an electrician, managing electricians at a specific place, I don't know if I could say it, but he's an electrician and manager there. And then also was a landlord of five houses. Also worked on everything on the house. Always worked on the cars himself. Trees need to be cut down in the backyard, he's the one doing it. Toilet's broken, he's the one fixing it. Mom's car's tires exploded, he's the one doing it. And he's very much the one putting his foot forward of doing it first, right? And he would always say, if you want something done right, you do it yourself, which is correct, unfortunately. There's people that can do things just as well, if not better in certain degrees, of course. But in some degree, it's somewhat true, saying if you want something right, do it yourself. But then again, it's also almost a self-sabotaging thing that you can only get so far with. And I've learned that through business and my own social media and team.
But he's always done things full force. He would always say never half-ass anything. If you're going to half-ass it, don't do it. And I feel like those things as a kid you absorb so much. And that's really why I hustle so much. It's just ingrained in me from growing up under his sort of habits.
Let's say that a 14-year-old is listening to this and they're trying to build out their models of the world. Like, how do they behave? What do they pursue? How do they spend their day from 6:00 a.m. to 10 p.m.? How would you distill life? What principles would you set out for them?
I feel like to answer this properly, I'm going to put myself in what would I tell 14-year-old Jesse, my young self? I feel that 14's young, even like 14, 15, same sort of vibe, but I would say at that point in life you're really establishing your interests. So, I think it's about trying a lot of different things and that's what time should be put into, like trying different sports, whether it's instruments, theater. One thing I wish I got into is theater as a young kid, but I was just too afraid. I thought I'd be judged and, you know, "Oh, you nerd" or whatever, but I truly wanted to do this. But I would say finding your interests and exploring different hobbies, sports, activities, entrepreneurism from a young age. You know, there's a lot of kids out there that are going to go make and sell things. When I was growing up and I was really young, I was collecting trash from the neighbors for money. I'd say I'll take your trash for a dollar. I'm like 10 years old doing this. But what I realized later on is I just always had an interest in some sort of entrepreneurial background, I guess, just by nature, you know.
So, I think I would tell them to find what they truly enjoy in their passions and to allow that to lead them on a path, and just try to stay levelheaded in that, where there's a lot of things when you're growing up you can get so distracted by. Girls, kids going out partying, smoking pot for the first time, all those things. And those are all distractions. And I feel like if you can just focus on the experiences of your passion and hobbies and things that you enjoy, that will take you so much farther earlier than anything else.
When I was 14, 15, I discovered lifting and I was like, I want to lift. I want to be on social media for this. I want to inspire people and help people. And I learned that from a young age. And I had so many other distractions that weren't my true passions that ended up leading me to a very kind of dark place in 2018 when I went to college for lacrosse. And if I would have actually listened to my own heart from a young age, maybe I wouldn't have had that happen. Now I'm grateful that happened.
What happened in the dark place?
So I was a top-ranked lacrosse player my whole life. I played out in New Jersey, played on the travel teams, played all year round, literally every day. And this is like the whole relentless thing of go go go. And from 15, I knew where I was going to college. Fully committed, had a 90% scholarship to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. It's almost an Ivy League school, very good academics, and the sports teams are really good. It's Division I. It was everything that me and my family ever thought was the right thing for me to do.
But I always had this passion of fitness and social media that I just knew for a fact that I was going to do what I'm doing now. Like if someone said, "If younger Jesse saw you now, would he be surprised?" I'd be like, "No." I literally just knew, something in my brain was like, "It will happen. It's just a matter of when." And when I got so deep in lacrosse and I'm trying to do
social media a little, but it's just nearly impossible. I don't have time. I don't have the energy to do this. I'm doing as much as I can, but it's not enough. And I go play at college, I play at Lehigh, and I'm kind of just being shoved down this path of should rather than meant to. It's very much you should be doing this rather than you're meant to be doing this. And I feel like those two words have separated my decisions so much since then, where things that you should do, okay, maybe you should do it, but are you really going to put all your effort in the things you should do, or what about the things you're meant to?
And I didn't know this until I started getting really, really depressed. And I've always been a really happy person. I've dealt with anxiety and stuff; I'm an anxious person. I feel like it's kind of why I'm all ADHD and go go go. It helps me feel better that I'm moving and doing things, but growing up I definitely started getting a little bit of depression, a little bit of just this feeling that I'm at unease at all times. And then when I was basically playing lacrosse every day, all day, it was the only thing I could think about when I was at college, I started really losing who I was and who I was meant to be. And I knew I wanted to be that, but I just wasn't allowed to. And that suppression just held me down so much.
And I always compare it. I literally remember telling the coach when I was quitting, he's like, "What do you feel?" And I said, "I feel that someone is holding me by the neck in shallow water, and I cannot get up, and it's just this trap that I'm under." And no one's touching me. I don't know how it's so clear that that's the exact feeling I felt. I could not get up.
And luckily, through a lot of talking to my mom and my sister... and I didn't really tell my dad any of it, because I was like, he's not going to accept it. Truthfully, he's changed so much through this whole story. But at first I was like, there's no point of telling Dad, he's just going to say you'll be fine, just suck it up, you can get through it, because that's all he knows.
So when I'm feeling these terrible feelings, I'm confused in if I even want to be alive anymore. In my brain, I'm logically smart enough to know that I'm not going to, you know, unalive myself or anything. I'm like, there's a way out. I know there's a way out. My mom's always told me when things are like this, she'd explain experiences of her own, that I need to talk to someone, that it's never that bad. And I'm trying to tell myself this, but it's hard. Logically I know that, but I don't feel that way at all. And my brain was set that if I'm here for another year doing this, I'm actually genuinely scared that I'm going to do something stupid. And maybe that's not the right word, but I'm going to do something dangerous for myself. And that scared the [ __ ] out of me, thinking that thought of, in six months I might think like that.
Triggered a change.
And I was like, I cannot have that. And that literally was the pure change. I was like, I'm not letting that happen. I do love life. I know I do. I normally do, but right now I don't. So I'm going to make a change.
I remember breaking down crying in Target. Like, you know... you didn't. I swear to God. I swear to God. I swear to God. I went to Target. It was parents weekend at college and my dad was in the car still. They just saw me play a scrimmage. I had a great game. I scored a few goals. My dad thinks everything's good. I'm in the Target. I'm walking to my mom to check out. I just start crying. I can't help it. Tears start going out and she's like, "What's going on?" And I just say, I'm like, "I can't be here. I'm so unhappy. I have no interest in girls lately. Just no interest in anything." And I was always chasing girls. That was a fun thing in life when you're young. I was like, why do I have no interest? The only thing I had interest in was going to the gym, truly, and listening to good music. Now anything else, you could have punched me in the [ __ ] face and I would have been like, all right, whatever, I'm bleeding from the nose now, you know?
So I remember that happened, and she literally looked at me and was like, "I'm going to tell your father. I don't care. Whatever you want, that's what's happening. If you want to leave, you're leaving." She saw it on my face. That was kind of the breaking of the ice in the family. And my dad, he had no problem. He was like, "Okay." He knew my mom was standing on business, like Justin Bieber says, you know. You already said... I'm joking [ __ ], but I shouldn't. Essentially, now it's time I got to tell the coach that I'm depressed. I'm leaving. I'm not taking the scholarship. I have to transfer schools. And I'll never forget, I put on a song, it was one of my hype gym songs.
Which one?
It was called Raised by Wolves by Falling in Reverse. It's this really heavy guitar riff. He knows. And it's fast. And I was doing this to literally prepare myself to go confront my coach. He's a great guy. He wasn't mad. He was very concerned. But when you're 18 and you're literally about to alter your entire life based on literally one sentence saying, "I'm quitting."
Yeah. One crying session in Target.
Yeah. And one crying, you know what it does to you? It's freaking powerful.
It's therapy.
Shout out Target.
Yeah. Shout out Target. They lure you in and they get you to cry.
It's emotional.
It's a self-discovery system. Yeah. That red dot. It's like...
Lowkey something about it, bro. And yeah, I went in and I explained myself, and I was so stern. It was one of the things where I remember thinking, you could offer me a million bucks and I'm not taking it. I'm leaving. I don't care what you offer. Spoke to him.
Got it done.
I ripped the band-aid off. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my... I've done hard things in my life physically, but as a choice in life as a teenager, that was the hardest thing. I'm not with my parents, no friend, no family. It's one-on-one with a 45-year-old man that's paying you $60,000 a year to go there, basically. And I'm like, I'm not doing this. And that exact day and experience altered my life forever, where I now know that I'm the only one that's going to make the choice to save or break me. It's up to us as a singular person to define your choices and take a path.
What was a great learning experience from this whole thing was that there is no one path that you have to be on, and that when you step off one path there's another one waiting for you, and there's no dead end. It's a constant new path that you're stepping on. And as a teenager learning this, I felt like I woke up from life. I didn't understand life fully. Still don't. But I was like, "Wow, this is different now."
So now at 25 years old, how is your mental wellness?
I honestly think about this often, and I think I have times of either impostor syndrome sometimes, because I'm constantly doing big things that are bigger than before, and I'm like, I know I belong here, but this is kind of hard to believe. So I feel like I'll deal with that a little bit. I definitely have the least amount of anxiety. I have almost no depression. I could say right now none, zero. I have not felt depressed. It took a few years after 2018. It took till 2020, basically, to get out of that. I felt like I had scars, emotional scars, and it took till 2020, and that's when my career in fitness and influencing started to take off. And I feel like when I was really doing my life pursuit that I was meant to do, I was healing myself doing that.
I would say every so often I have, you know, a little spike of anxiety. Most of the time it's near after having caffeine and then something negative in the business going on, like a fire that I need to put out, and it's typical, you know, entrepreneurial anxiety, like oh [ __ ], we got to fix this right now. That's where my anxiety stems, really.
And then outside of that, I feel like I've really built my life and surrounded myself with people that allow me to be calmer and a better version of myself. My wife absorbs all my anxiety and then deletes it. She hits control delete on it, and when I'm with her it's very calm. She's a really calm person. I'm kind of the spontaneous, over-the-top one and she's the calm one. It's like golden retriever, black cat kind of thing. And she's really calm, and it's amazing.
And I feel like as I've developed and gotten older, I've also just learned how to deal with anxiety, where when I was younger, it might have turned to anger. It might have turned to just, yeah, an out... like speaking out things I shouldn't have said, or yelling at somebody. And now I'm like, okay, I'm feeling anxiety in my head. Tell myself, you are feeling anxiety. If you zoom out and you see yourself in third person, nothing has changed. You're just feeling this internally. Accept that you're feeling it and do something either about it, or we're just going to sit in it and feel it for a little.
I had a similar cycle with my depression. Yeah. Just observe it, that you are not it.
Yeah.
Yeah. Once you can see it as a thing other than you. I wrote this essay, Jesse, about the end of human greatness. And in the essay, I was postulating that with AI improving at the speed as it is, and now that AI models can basically become you, like there's a Bryan AI model, there's enough that I've said and written that it is pretty close to being me. I can converse with it and it's pretty similar. You give it a question and it has very similar mental models, very similar branches of thought. And so we're really at this interesting time.
So you just articulated where you've been from an emotional journey of how you deal with maturing, dealing with hard life circumstances. We've walked through the pressures you feel on a day-to-day basis of the intense work schedule you have, maybe the slight discomfort of nothingness and how you deal with that, but you can overcome it in vacation. We're now entering this new era of being human where it's not quite clear what the rules of the game are.
Mhm.
Will we be working? Will we not? Will we have the same level of satisfaction? Will there be a Jesse James West AI that is better than you? And you're like, "Bro, you're stealing my thunder. I want to be me, but you're doing a better job, and it creates better banger videos that have better thumbnails," you know? So where are we at in time? And if we're entering this phase that's moving, how do you create mental models of yourself and of the world, given that this landscape is not quite certain where it's going?
You know, I'm excited as hell about AI. I know some people are probably like, "Oh, it's going to be bad." We have no idea, I guess, of what could happen. But for me, it excites me because, you know, how many times have you said, "I wish I could just duplicate myself and that would be my next employee. Why can't I just make another Bryan?"
The assumption is that you control that version of you.
Yeah.
That... Okay. Yes.
So I think that excites me, to think that I might be able to almost expand myself in a way of whether I'm working synergistically with them or they're doing some sort of task, or maybe they're the one. I don't know, maybe they're on screen. I don't know what the outcome will be. I think everyone's going to have to learn how to use it properly, and that's almost going to be the next courses, and that's going to be the next curriculum eventually. Because that's the thing: people are like, oh, college is pointless, people can just do these... not pointless, but college is less effective because of ChatGPT and you could just write essays in seconds. And it's like, okay, when a car was made and we first learned to put gasoline in it, someone might have been like, but what if the horse and buggy can't carry people anymore? It's like, well, then you adapt. The horse is for something else, it's for horse riding, and the buggy, we took the parts and made a car with it.
It's all about evolving with the game, I feel. And not knowing where the game's going to go is crazy. But also, if someone was to say, can you think of something that doesn't exist? It's near impossible. You're like, I don't [ __ ] know. It doesn't exist. Think of a color that doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. But the fact that we're going to be unlocking things that literally don't exist is so crazy. And I love it. That's one thing. I actually want to hire somebody that's an expert in AI and be like, I want you to either build a system within my team's workflow or teach me how to do it.
Yeah, you can just hire an AI for that.
That's what... like, AI, pretend you're an AI guy that I'm hiring. Teach me how to do this. Yeah, I guess so.
Do you use a lot of AI in what you do?
Non-stop.
Non-stop. Is there an AI Bryan? Am I talking to AI Bryan right now?
Maybe.
Is he real?
He would probably do a better job. Are we going to... are we AI? This AI would have run every word you've ever spoken, done a deep analysis on that, seen patterns that I can't see, offered up insights, you know, questions, and then penetrated the questions in a way that would even have surprised you. We've danced around a few topics, like this and that, but I would imagine that it's just going to be more robust, it's going to have better insights. This is the thing that I think is really on the front door. And as I think about the 14-year-old... so my son, Talmage, who's here, he just turned 20, and he's now trying to decide how to model out his life. And so this is why I asked the question for you: you're in the middle of it. You're in the middle of a societal system jamming out content. You're doing tons of videos. You have a lot of success behind you. When we were together two years ago, you were clearly climbing right into doing bigger and better things all the time. And so normally we'd say we take this and we can map out a life of, here's how it looks. Yeah. Whereas now it's a curveball of where do we go? What do we do?
So Jesse, over the past couple years, I've been really hard at work building my own protocol, but I'm curious, what is your protocol for health? What do you actually do?
The Jesse James Greenprint is quite crazy.
Greenprint.
Greenprint.
Okay.
Am I going to get sued? So it's definitely evolved. Honestly, ever since I met you, it's evolved even more. I've always been a very fitness-focused person. I've always, you know, woken up at a very reasonable time. I've never been somebody that's an extreme night owl.
You go to bed at what time?
I go to bed probably, I would say on average, between 10 and 11:30, and then I'm getting up at like 8 to 9, depending on if I stay up till midnight. If I'm up till midnight, it's a little later.
What happens before 10:00? Are you on screens?
Yeah.
Yeah. What time's your last meal?
I try to stop eating before 10 for sure, at least an hour. In a perfect world it's eight. If I'm on a strict diet it's eight, because I actually
If you're doing a competition or something.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I'm like I don't eat past eight because I just, I don't have enough calories left. I do enjoy my snacks at night. I really
What's your go-to move?
Let's think. I love, I love some sort of like rice cakes are pretty fire. Oh, I'm obsessed with Greek yogurt. Obsessed.
Do you combine the rice cakes with the Greek yogurt?
I haven't done that yet. Dip it. I, no. That sounds amazing though. I put like one stevia, you know, like I just sweeten a little sweet or a little honey. Yeah. That's like, that's lately my evening snack.
Is there a place in your house where you sit?
Definitely in front of the TV.
Yeah. So it's on a couch.
Couch.
Yeah. And what's your posture? You're like laying down. Yeah. All right. There you go. Sit back. And where's the phone?
Probably like it's either, you know, my phone is either I chuck it over there because I'm like I don't want to have that dual stimulus, it's ridiculous. I'll either like throw it over there and just be like hanging out with my wife or the show sucks and I'm like this and she's watching.
Yeah.
And then I would say that's like kind of like my night. I'll go to bed, let's say 11. Every night before bed, I've always been very strict on my skin care since I was probably 14. Yeah. Like even my friends, they know like I never skip a day. Wash my face. I wash my face. I do, what do I do? I do a toner. I do hyaluronic acid. I do tretinoin just a little bit. And then I do a moisturizer.
Yeah.
And that's like my nighttime, you know, little glass skin.
Yeah.
My wife is kind of like a beauty influencer. So, she has like a billion products that she either uses or just gives to me. I've learned through her. I used to use like snail mucin, like the Korean kind of look. Yeah. The Korean kind of skincare and stuff. So, that's my nighttime. Then I wake up at let's say 8:15 just to be like, you know, in the middle. Sometimes I check my phone and I get in the habit of like is there a fire in the business?
Yeah. Like give me an example of a fire.
If I would be like video got age restricted and I'm like [ __ ] me man. Like and it's, and I posted it yesterday and I'm like it's, it's
You miss out on all these views.
All these views are messed up. I got to hit up my YouTube rep. I got to go look at what it did. Appeal it. Try to figure it out. And it's like a whole chaotic nightmare. That's always like very... But I have a system now to not have that happen. And thankfully it hasn't happened in a while. But so let's just say there's no fire. The perfect morning I'm getting up, I'd say 50% of the time to 70% of the time depending on how good I am. No phone. Wake up immediately. Take a pee. I brush my teeth, mouthwash, rinse my face. I don't really wash it in the mornings cuz I get too dry. Probably put moisturizer on. Head downstairs. In a perfect world I know I'm doing sunscreen. I skipped a step.
I was doing it for a while. I haven't in a while. But I'll be honest. Yeah. There's no judgment from my side. I'm with you, man.
And then I go down. I chug a big thing of water with electrolytes just to get that hydration going.
How much sodium?
I think it's 750 milligrams
with the potassium and magnesium.
Yeah, it's by Derek, More Plates More Dates, like the, you had them on your podcast. And so I have that one pack every day. Chug that down. Then I have my, I basically just have Greek yogurt in the morning lately. Like just probably almost a cup. It's quite a lot, but like I said, I'm addicted to Greek yogurt, man. And then from there, I will have a coffee. And then once I kind of have all that, I'll let my dog out and stuff. And then I'll most likely get into like the work that requires a lot of brain power. Depending on the phase of the year, I'll be either cold plunging and then working or just lately I don't cold plunge lately, but I'll get right into work. And most of the time the work that I do then is the creative decision-making. Like my brain hasn't made any decisions besides waking up and brushing my teeth. So, it's like I'm super fresh. I'll review videos. I'll review like maybe like the pre-shoot script of like what's coming up. I'll get back to everyone on my team. Kind of like all the computer writing and decisions. I do that all right away because I've tried it at night and my brain is a little slower by then. By 11, in a perfect world, I'm lifting, hitting the weights
At the gym or the house?
I have a home gym. Yeah. A little nicer than yours, Bryan. He should, you know, but
Do you have the forest?
I don't have the forest, man. I have
What's your vibe?
I'll give you the, the walls are like concrete, kind of like your bathroom, like that concrete brush look. Then we have a nice accented black wall with these like kind of like these beam lights like little dashes. So, it's kind of like slight futuristic but very modern and minimalistic.
S tier.
Yeah. Oh,
I mean like
That's god tier, bro.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I'll hit my lift and then honestly it's just more work, make some meals that are healthy, take my dog for a walk and that's kind of my, that's like my chill, that's like my at home, nothing really going on that much.
Do you have a routine measurement? Do you measure biomarkers, blood, do any imaging?
Typically I'll do like one blood test a year to make sure my testosterone and all is cooking. I need to get on that. I haven't in a while. I feel good though. I feel like my test is real high.
Yeah.
Like I feel like I haven't competed in bodybuilding in over two years and I can promise you my test is so much higher now. Like it gets crushed, which is so unhealthy and like bodybuilding is so
How low did it get?
200.
Wow.
Bro, I felt terrible.
But now that I haven't competed in so long, it's around 700. Like normally it used to be, I used to compete and take a year off and then compete and repeat and it would range about 500, but I took a full year and a half off of competing and I got all the way up to 700. That's also with eating more whole foods. I stopped eating low calorie things like the low calorie syrup. It's just chemicals. It's trash. My wife throws that [ __ ] out. She's like, "You eat the real shit." And I'm like, "Honestly," because I used to be afraid of the calories.
Yeah.
Like, "It's 150 calories wasted of sugar." She's like, "Yeah, but it's not chemicals. It's probably, it's like the organic one from the farm down the street, you know? We try to eat really healthy." Yeah. We just eat healthy, train a lot, work a lot. That's like the at home schedule. I would say I don't really have like a strict protocol on supplements yet. I do honestly plan. I know you're sending me some, the Blueprint.
We're going to start annihilating those things.
Good.
Hell yeah.
Never a better time than now.
Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me, like I really, the anti-aging stuff is so interesting to me and I know I'm like technically young to be really interested in it, but obviously I've seen what you've done. We did the video two years ago where you were showing me all the stuff. I tried it out. We tried some stuff today. To me, it's more interesting than bodybuilding for me. Like I feel that I will do slowly less and less bodybuilding and just maintain a nice solid aesthetic physique and be focused on pure mobility, longevity, health markers for the long term. I used to wear the Whoop a lot. They did sponsor me for a while. That was one of the main reasons I was wearing it. But the one thing, it was constantly telling me that I wasn't very well recovered.
Yeah.
And I was like, but my sleep was perfect. I had 100% sleep and then my recovery was like 70, you know, maybe sometimes, if it was 60 or below, I wouldn't work out that day.
But I was like, I don't feel that though. Like I feel great today. Why is it telling me that I'm 60 or 65 today? I started almost feeling what the measurement was.
Yeah.
Like I would look at it in the morning, be like, oh, it's a low day. I got to like, I can't do much.
A lot of people have that. The thing about health, about aging is that I realize, yeah, you're 25 years old and we have this really good system in capitalism where you have a certain amount of money in your bank account and when you spend money it lowers your bank account. You're like, "Oh, spending money lowers bank account or making money increases bank account."
But we don't have the same kind of accounting system for age. And so we basically look at ourselves in the mirror every day and we're like, "Yeah, about the same." Or like I kind of feel the same. And so we don't understand at a molecular level what's happening inside. So there's no accounting. So people spend down their life just like they spend down a bank account and they don't realize they're spending it down. And so that's what measurement does. It's basically like a bank account where you see either the numbers, are you increasing in wealth or decreasing in wealth. When you're 25 you think I'm 100%. Like there is no spend. Like I'm the same age and I feel the same every day. And so that's the trick, is people think it's too early to start, even in their teens. They think, "Oh, like good. I'm going to be a teenager for life."
Yeah. I think one of the crazy things about when you're young, per se, is you look at older people and it almost, I feel like I don't do it anymore, but I used to look at older people and it was almost as if they were a different species.
Like you're like, "Oh, that's, I am not, I'm not that species."
They're so far from reality. Exactly. You'll never be it.
But as I, as my frontal lobe has developed, I'm like, "Oh my god, wait."
Yeah.
He was once green.
Exactly. This 80-year-old man that's like just hobbling through the tree or whatever. Like he was a boy. There's still a boy inside of him, you know, inside of him. And it's so eye opening. And that's when I'm like, "Okay, that's where health matters so much." I have a very fit family. My dad runs a ton, super healthy. My mom's jacked as hell, like just like aesthetic shreds. It's where I get a lot of my genetics, I think. And I'm always on the phone and like some of her brothers are having like some health scares and stuff and I try to give my advice of what I think could help and whatnot. And I tell her, she's 58 I believe, I was like, at this point in your life your health is the number one priority. Cuz she's like, I don't want to only be around for 15 more years. I want to have so many more years. I'm not ready to deal. Cuz she's starting to, you know, it's starting to click like
that her family is having health struggles and maybe that could have a major problem and she doesn't want to have that. And I just tell her, I'm like, "Just keep eating healthy, keep working on weightlifting, keep your mobility, keep all like the basic things that people have always told us, like just keep doing it. Make sure dad's doing it and make sure you guys aren't just falling into the comfort and like get your blood work done." I always am trying to... My dad got his blood work done cuz he was feeling like a little off during some time. And it turns out he actually had higher testosterone than me, which was crazy. But there were certain markers on him that Derek from More Plates More Dates literally was giving advice on what he should take, what he shouldn't do, and he was working on his health. And I'm just like, guys, health at anyone's age should be number one. But I feel like you're very short-sighted when you're young to think like, "Ah, I'll worry about health when I need to." Like I feel like once you get a certain age, you have to actually put it first or it's just steadily declining and you will just fall into comfort.
Yeah.
Do you think you'll ever be an 80-year-old man that actually looks 80, or do you think your look will stop? What is the goal with Blueprint?
Yeah. So, it has been to slow down speed of aging. So, now I age half. So, 12 months pass, I age for six months of that. That's been the most stunning thing we've accomplished.
Crazy.
Yeah. And so, I think slowing down is possible to some extent, but we can't really reverse very well. And so, you can offset some damage, like you can repair some, you know, worn down ligaments, you can make your heart run better or try to chip away at some aging damage, but generally speaking, you can't reverse age yet. So like you can't take a 47 year old kidney or liver and make it 19 years old. The technologies that are being built are age reversal. And so I think, yeah, in the next like 10, 20, 30 years I think we will start reversing age of organs. I think we'll succeed first at things like liver, kidney, lungs, heart. I think the brain is going to be the toughest.
So we may have, we may be very
Oh my gosh. Everyone lives forever but they all got like dementia.
Exactly. The brain is going to be
That's a crazy world. Brain be tough. We need like AI in our brain.
Yeah. But like maybe there's going to be a twist in the discovery where the brain actually is the one that is the easiest because we figure out something. Yeah.
But I think, I'm 47 now. My natural lifespan would be like 30, 40, 50 years, you know, in that range. I think the discoveries that could happen to make this possible will most likely happen in that time window given AI progress. So I'm pretty bullish. I would say the biggest risk is probably societal collapse or societal catastrophe on some level, greater probability than me, you know, dying of natural causes.
Or like a second ice age.
Yeah. Like
You got to watch out, bro.
I mean like honestly this is
No, I feel like that would happen before we, like, of course that would happen. You know what I mean? Like some [ __ ] like that. Do you think that this is kind of like about aliens?
Yeah.
So we've excelled so far in this lifetime. Yeah, whatever. Let's just say from year zero to now or whatever the years were, it doesn't matter. Millions of years as human species, and you know how they discover like cities under these grounds and like the ancient technology that's not the technology we used. Do you think that there was an entirety of a different, let's just say human race, let's say if we're the human race now, there was an entire one before us that got wiped out that had technology, had anti-aging, had whatever the hell it was, or were part alien? Do you think that exists? Okay, my best guess would be no. That we would have discovered some evidence in the fossil record, if we could have pieced it together, like are there anomalies, like how did the pyramids get built? Like interesting. Like I think one of the weirder things that could happen is that we figure out that an alien species actually lives on this planet right now and they're outside our perception, like any of the paranormal things that happen, you know, where
The paranormal people are like I swear it's legit and then there's like an entire group of people who are like
That's crazy. You know, you
Have you ever had any like paranormal things? I
Haven't. No, but that's like the funniest outcome of that. Basically all the wackos of society
who we've called wackos, they actually saw it and everyone else is, yeah. So that
I had that conversation, dude. Oh my god. You're like, "Oh no, that guy that
guy's, he's got some problems. He's nuts. He says he's seeing things." Oh, he's in that dimension, bro.
The funniest thing is when the sane become the insane and the insane become the sane. That would be the irony I would love to see.
Damn. Have you ever done any sort of like brain altering substances for the purpose of anti-aging or like brain discovery?
Yeah.
Because I know you posted about like mushrooms or something or psychedelics being beneficial.
Yeah, we just did a deep dive and so we looked at what psychedelic drugs have the strongest properties for anti-aging, and we ranked them.
Oh my god.
So yeah, if I remember correctly, psilocybin, ketamine, LSD, ibogaine, and then I think the ones clearly that did not have anti-aging, actually were aging, were heroin, meth, cocaine.
Fentanyl is not an anti-aging.
That's an anti-anti.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Anti everything.
So yeah, we're actually designing now. We're looking at how to trial an anti-aging drug. So like for example, it would be interesting to do. Yeah. So like do a psilocybin, go somewhere like to Mexico. Set up a protocol and then measure everything, like do brain age, body, like just measure the entire body and say what effect does that have on the body. So we're planning that out.
That's so cool. I don't want to commit to it, but if you maybe just let me know. Let me know. I'll decide on the spot.
Do you want to go?
Maybe. That'd be a crazy experience on video.
Exactly. Then you document. I was thinking about this this morning.
Oh my gosh.
But you document the entire thing. Right. So you're actually in there and you're like trying to explore it. You're also doing vital checks. So you're checking the central blood pressure and...
Dude, that's crazy.
Yeah. And so I measured my brain on ketamine. I did the ketamine. I wore Kernel's brain interface and I said, like, what happens to the brain when you do ketamine?
Really?
Wow. Did you make a video about that?
Yeah.
I got to watch that. Is it out?
It's like years ago.
Wow. It wasn't our recent video stuff. It was like four years ago.
What was the first thing that you did where you're like, that triggered Blueprint basically, like triggered the path? What was the first stepping stone of your path that you're on now, back in whenever, like where you see a wrinkle and you're like, no more?
No, it was probably like, do I commit suicide or not? Yeah, it was probably like that was a bifurcation of like, do you want to live or not?
Wow. You went from not wanting to live to literally wanting to live forever. What do you think changed there?
I mean, it's like I read the philosopher Albert Camus and, you know, what an incredible intellectual force, and he just said there's no meaning to life, like it's absolutely meaningless, and that if you reconcile with that, then the only question you have is, like, what do you do? And he said you just play, like you just play your game. And so I thought, like, in that moment the only answer is existence itself is the highest virtue. Everything else you do after you exist is a meaning-making game of some kind of story, which is all, like, we just make it up, but existence is the thing. And so that's what kind of started the whole thing of like, actually maybe we're changing from death being inevitable to not dying, and it's going to take us with us on this magical ride.
Dude, life is crazy, man.
This is like, the moment we live in is beyond our comprehension.
Do you have any practices for just mindfulness, like being present?
I do breath work and meditation twice a day.
Oh wow.
Yeah. Morning when I wake up and then before I go to bed.
Beautiful. I do this thing where, I don't know where I found it. I'll be looking at somebody, I kind of need to hone in on a thing, and in my head I'm going "mmm." I make the noise like I'm talking to myself. My conscious is going "mmm" and it blocks out everything, cuz all your brain is thinking is that, and I just look and I really lock in, and I don't know, I lock in, bro, and it helps.
Helps wearing my glasses too. Yeah. So you do this when you're talking to somebody.
Yeah. Like I was literally at the altar getting married and I would do it for like a second to lock in, and I swear to God I've never been so present in my life. I was so fearful of getting married, and I'm always just kind of passing through things, doing things and not always mindful and on to the next. I had a huge fear of going through my wedding day and being like, damn, I wasn't present. And I did a few of my, I swear, dude, I locked in and I was [ __ ] there.
Did you write vows?
We did.
What was your vow? What did you say in your vows?
In a summary, I stated how I truly never thought I was going to find love. Like I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I think it was like a self-doubt that maybe I was deserving of an actual love from somebody else. I just like, why would someone want to be loving me? Which kind of stems from like an insecurity or something, I guess. But so I started with that, and then I moved into how she makes me a better person because she's so empathetic and so kind, and I was saying how, you know, you're gorgeous, but that's not the best part about you. It's about how you make everyone else around you better, and your kindness rubs off on me and reminds me to always be empathetic to other people and really just be there for people. I made a list of promises to always give my 110% in the relationship and to always put our future family and our...
She tell you that that's mathematically incorrect?
What? 110%.
Did she tell you? Because you can't. Did she tell you?
She stopped me mid vows and was like, "Jesse, you be correct."
100.
Yeah.
Yeah. Just like promising to give my all in the way that I do with everything in my life. And then I wrote something about how we're not just husband and wife, but we're soulmates and that I'll find her in the next and the next and the next life. And you know what's crazy? She wrote nearly the same damn things. We did not read each other's. We didn't write them next to each other. We wrote them at different times. And there was a few key points that were probably big points for both of us that we both were on the same wavelength. So I was like, "Wow, that's beautiful."
Yeah. How long have you been together?
I think I could say four exact years now. Four full years. Four years and a little bit. Yeah. We probably will. Yeah. I think it's at the point where it's like we're just not going to not try, and just...
Oh, just let it go.
Maybe if it happens, it happens. I don't know though.
And you're icing in the sauna.
I got to start doing that. Yeah. After I heard that, I was like, that's a good... I actually, cuz I told you I had that at-home sauna thing, and I plan to get a wooden sauna.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, I got to get that.
Have you measured your fertility markers?
I have not. It's again one of those things that...
You should do. There's a few companies who have at-home tests.
They do. Really?
Yeah. I didn't want to have to go somewhere and, you know, bust one out real quick.
Yeah. And the rooms, like, yeah, they have magazines and...
I was going to have to ask one of the nurses, like one of the guy nurses. It can't be a woman cuz I'm married, but the guy nurses. I want to ask them to come help and I feel like they'd find that weird.
At home you can find out your count, motility, morphology. So it's really easy to do, but definitely know your numbers. I also did a microplastics test recently. I have microplastics in my ejaculate.
What?
Yeah.
From what?
I mean, just like, you know, going about in the world. All of us just have microplastics.
Do you believe in the whole, like, you can't wear a certain type of underwear, that it lowers test?
I mean, I primarily wear cotton.
I was going to ask, like, there's a certain material people avoid, like polyester.
Polyester. Exactly. Yeah.
Shoot. Am I? I think...
Yeah, you probably want to wear cotton.
Oh, my boys.
Yeah. Exactly. Like protect the boys.
Dude, I got to protect them, man.
Yeah.
What are top five tips that I could go change today for anti-aging or just health, being healthier? I mean, we know sleep. No sleep. You can't give me that.
Yeah. I'd say one, change your mindset to don't die. Like number one. So there's this idea right now that when death is inevitable, we basically create a religion out of die. So you actually martyr yourselves: you stay up late, you eat junk food, you're willing to trade life for financial success or status or power or something like that. It's a form of martyrdom. And so the first one on don't die is you're just trying to train your mind to be self-aware. You actively commit slow suicide and you call it, you know, living your best life or work ethic or, like, fill in your blank, but we basically glorify killing ourselves. So number one, it's like a mentality, really shift it. And when you do that, you see everybody around you basically practicing slow boil suicide.
That's crazy.
And they're dancing. They're like, this is flourishing. And while they're doing that, they're literally shrinking their consciousness. Like when you lose hearing, you can't experience consciousness as fully. When your brain shrinks or your eyesight gets worse, you shrink your consciousness.
Yeah.
I don't like that.
It's like, literally, reality is getting smaller, and then as it gets smaller, you're like, "Fuck yeah. You know, I was out there, we pounded, you know, we got drunk and then we blanked," and you're celebrating the stuff. So one is the don't die mindset.
Yeah.
Two is...
More of a religion.
It is.
I'm being for real.
Yeah. You want to be in?
You cult leader?
Yes.
You are.
Yes.
All right, I'm in then. At least you're honest. An honest cult leader is a better one.
Why deny it?
Cheers. So, don't die.
Jesse, I'm so glad you're in.
Dude, I am in. So, when do we drink each other's blood?
That's initiation two.
We'll get there. What's number two on the list?
Number two is just start with basic measurement. So just the intuition. So people have wearables. I know it sometimes can be a complicated relationship with wearables, because they can say you feel like this. You're like, [ __ ], I actually feel good, but you told me I feel bad. So I've got over that hump. I am at a good place with measurement. But just intuitively understand what to measure. Like blood work is really great. Wearables are really great. Yeah. That leads you to things like icing in the sauna is bad. Otherwise you miss these really big things in life and you're not aware of them. So measurement.
Three. So, this is what I was asking, what I was really trying to get at, is you're a hard-charging entrepreneur and you're playing social media. Like, you describe your day from 7:30 to 10:30. You get on the plane, phone's up, scroll, ideas, writing, like you're doing this.
That is tough.
And in doing that, you're naturally exposed to these relative comparisons. Like you see someone who has more views, or you see someone who... and it's like an absolute cluster [ __ ] of emotions, where I know when I engage online, it's never like I'm walking away feeling like a better human. I feel [ __ ] up. Right? I'm exposed to all things.
Life dysmorphia. It's like something dysmorphia. There's always something there.
Like there's something interesting, there's something educational, there's something totally [ __ ] up, there's something very emotionally disturbing, there's something that unsettles me. It just [ __ ] me up. I never ever leave social interaction feeling like I'm a better person, and I do it because I feel like I have to play the game, and it sucks. I hate it. I wish social media didn't exist.
Damn. Do you like doing it, like, we're on the pod, we're talking?
This is cool. I like playing the game, and I like sparring with trolls and hate. Like I like that whole game, but I really...
Dude, I love the, like, "bro" Bryan that you do, that's like, "You don't know what you're talking about. Go to sleep, you [ __ ]." I [ __ ] love that. It's so funny.
That's cool. That's good to hear.
Yeah, I think it's so funny cuz it's like the perfect amount of humor, but you're being dead serious, too. It's so good.
Okay. Three is mental health. I would say one is realize that most everybody, like literally most everybody, is depressed and anxious and insecure and is hurting, and it's a disaster in their own mind, and they put on a pretty face and they smile and they're telling you all the great things about their life; inside they're in pain. And so realizing there's that disconnect between what you feel and what you think others feel. And so mental health is just, it's a lonely battle, and you don't dare share with people, like, I'm in pain, I hate what I'm doing, I wish I didn't have to do it. You just can't say those things. So feeling trapped. Just know everybody else is also in pain and it's okay. But there's also things, of course, that are increasing pain, like corporations are basically saying scroll my app, you know, do infinite scroll, eat my junk food, do this thing, and they're asking you to basically sacrifice your life so they can have profit. It's such a [ __ ] up trade. It is such a weird thing, and that comes at the cost of your mental health, because otherwise if you say things like take pills or work out or sleep, whatever, no, those are too bland and...
But those three things are like the pillars of life.
You know, I don't think you need four or five.
Those, yeah, all just impressive. Impressive. Yeah, it's pretty impressive.
Bryan, so obviously bodybuilding, a lot of it correlates with steroids. I'm a natural bodybuilder. I don't take steroids. I'm not on anything. In terms of health and anti-aging, how negative are steroids?
Yeah, I haven't done the analysis. I know they do come at a cost. I don't know the exact numbers.
Cuz I feel, this is just my observation, there are bodybuilders that go on steroids in their 20s, and they look [ __ ] 45. And then they'll come off and literally reverse 10 years in their face. Like Larry Wheels is a prime example. Blasted gear to be the strongest guy in the world. Was like 28 or something. Looked 40. Stopped taking hard steroids, only took test just because his testosterone stopped working, and literally looked 28 again or like 30, and it was the craziest change, even in just his face and everything. It was wild.
Yeah.
Yeah. I was asking Mike Israetel about this as well, with his experience, and he knew that was the case. Like he was paying the price, but he chose to do it.
Yeah. I mean, truly that's one of the largest reasons I will not do it.
Yeah.
I'm like, your face literally just looks 10 years older within a year.
The bodybuilding community is pretty amazing, right? They're hardcore experimenters.
Dude, bodybuilders are the only people that work out to be less healthy. That's the truth of bodybuilding.
True.
But it's a sacrifice that they choose to make cuz they love it.
I haven't spent a lot of time in that community. I would really enjoy being there. Like I just understand, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? How do you do it? How do you learn? What's your measurement protocols? Like I was hanging out with one of the best NFL
running backs. And I was blown away at how normal his health regimen was. Like,
Wow.
Diet and your nutrition and whatever.
Dude, a lot of those guys are not eating healthy. They're eating like they're not.
They're like, I have candy every night.
We had dinner together. And
It's just genetics and like you're born with a skill, a gift.
And like what he put on his plate, I was like, bro, really? Like why are you doing that? Like you're in your 20s, your peak. Like don't do that. I think the hardest part as someone that I will self-claim good genetics because I can eat [ __ ] and still look great. But obviously I'm intelligent enough to know like you can't do that all the time. Like maybe I'll do that once in a while. But I genuinely probably could eat 800 calories of literal dog [ __ ] a day and the rest good and look shredded and get all the likes on social media and stuff. I don't do it. It's almost like when you have some extra snacks one night and then the next night and the third night you're like dude I look the [ __ ] same, like does it really matter that much? Like those questions I totally have had at some points and still do sometimes.
And I'm like that's why it's harder for someone with good genetics because you literally can eat the Oreos and [ __ ]
But here's the thing though. This is why I was saying this is why measurement is so important, is you think that's the case and you can't see it. So you can't see your bank account. You're
Right. So your life bank account is going down and you don't see it because it's happening at the end of your telomeres and in the way your cells are interacting. So you can't see the cellular level.
Yeah. So that's why you look in the mirror like yep,
I look good.
Yeah. That whole bag of Oreos like did nothing to me. That's really such a fallacy. I think in the future we'll probably have like legit bank account monitors for our health.
It's like that movie that has the minutes of the life.
Yeah. 10 minutes. Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's coming. Yeah. I mean with my stuff I have a pretty good clock, like we see with pretty high fidelity what is going on on a regular basis and what things, like I did international travel and we measured a bunch of stuff.
Does it wreck you?
Wrecks.
Dude, when I saw the whole like no red-eye thing, I was like I'm done. I agree. I'm done taking red-eyes.
Don't do that. And also like one international flight per quarter is like a pretty good budget.
Like okay.
Yeah. Back of the envelope, because it's not just during the trip. It's 15 days afterwards. Your body is still trying to recover its architecture.
Dude, I feel like I can agree just on the feeling.
Yeah, exactly. Your body fully doesn't restore. You know, blood glucose is messed up. So, it really has this compounded long-term effect.
Should you not eat on planes? I've heard Gary Brecka say that.
I don't. Yeah, I fast.
You drink water?
A lot of water.
A lot of water.
Yeah. So, in fact, if you do the math, it's something like on a 10-hour flight, it's like eight ounces per hour, something like that.
Do you pee a lot then? That's the thing, right?
Dude, I have to have an aisle seat if I'm not like anywhere else on the plane. Like, if I'm in the window, people literally be like, "Are you all right?" And I'm like, it's going through me, bro. It's all water.
Yeah. You know, if you mineralize the liquid, it has less of an effect. So, either if you have salt in tea or electrolytes.
Okay.
If you drink straight water, it's not as mineralized, then you will urinate more.
Okay. Good to know. That's what I figured. But yeah, I'll pee like five times on a flight. Like almost every
How long is the flight? An hour.
1 hour. How long is the flight?
If a flight's like coming to LA, like if it's like a 5-hour flight, I'm definitely peeing.
One time per hour. Yeah.
I'm definitely doing like two to four times.
One thing you could do is a pee test. Like you basically fill your bladder as much as you can. So you drink as much as you can and you hold it as long as you can and then you empty your bladder. So you get two data points. One, you get your urine flow, like what is your speed of peeing?
Yeah.
And two, you get total bladder size.
Oh wow.
And then those two things give you good baseline markers for your
Like how much you could take in and stuff.
Yeah. Just like your capacity, but also it gives you a biological age because you know urine speed
is biologically aged. So as you age
your urine stream decreases in overall CAX.
That's wild.
So yeah, if you're not pee-maxing, you know, you're not
There's looksmaxxing and then there's pee-maxing.
Exactly. Yeah.
You're the ultimate, you're a life-maxing.
Yeah. Don't Die maxing. Yeah.
Don't Die maxing. Yeah. Hell yeah.
I read the other day that a black hole was discovered that is 300 million times the size of our sun. And so when you
Yeah.
Deep.
Deep. Yeah. Like if we just pause for a moment and we
are sober about the insanity of our existence.
Oh, I know.
And then you start putting things in proportion of like black holes that size and galaxies that big and time this long and like all these relative comparisons of the enormity of just our little teeny part of reality, whatever this is, and then the silliness of our existence, like the games we play and the priorities we have, it's just like it breaks
Could you imagine wanting to live forever, bro, come on.
Yep. So here's this. I think people need to hear this. So living forever, like people hear that and they're like, don't want it. But what they don't understand is living forever and living for tomorrow
is the same idea.
So today's Thursday, you've got stuff going on tomorrow. So
Got to be around for tomorrow.
And then Saturday comes,
Got to be around for Saturday.
And Sunday.
You're right.
That's living forever. And so people don't realize that in this moment they literally kill the idea
of not dying because their mind can't understand it, and then they say therefore I accept death quicker than I'll accept that my mind can't understand it. We give up on existence so fast, but then also we're pretty resilient in that, like when people get their back against the wall, how hard they'll fight. So we're kind of like a
The story about that one woman that took care of ALS patients.
Yes.
And then she got ALS.
Yes. When I heard that, I was like, "Oh my god." Cuz everyone always be like, "No, like take me out." Like, "Pull the plug." Whatever it might be. Like, "I'm good." And then when you're there, you will fight to live.
Exactly. Nobody wants to die. That's the thing, is people think they want to die, but they think they're not going to care what they feel like when they're 80. And then 80 arrives, they're like, "I really care how I feel."
I met an 85-year-old today. I was filming a video at Gold's Gym reviewing the gym, and he comes up to me and he's like, "I'm 85. I'm showing that fitness at this age is possible, to motivate people." He goes, "I have no pain." He kicks up to the air. Literally goes, "I got no pain. I feel amazing." And I'm like,
Yeah.
I feel like my first thought was like, I got to tell Bryan. This guy is out there. We love you. But like he did a full squat, no pain. Crazy.
Yeah.
Bryan, thank you for having me, bro.
It was great having you. Like we got a good thing going, right? We have a cycle. So
Every two years, we got to shorten the cycle.
Exactly.
Let me know when you got to, not tonight. Obviously, you got that the Don't Die.
So if we get together in a year from now, what's going to happen? What's going to be up with Jesse?
My goal is the face markers.
Yeah.
I really want to fix those. I got to be beautiful forever.
Yeah. And your wife, like she
She would love this stuff, too. Okay. Hell yeah. Let's do it.
Yeah.
We'll both come to the Don't Die D.
She'll like, and like we all have all the skin therapies.
Yes. No, it'll be good. We'll show her. She'll be hooked and then it'll justify my purchases.
Yeah, exactly.
Otherwise, she'll be like, "What the [ __ ] are you doing? Why do we have 500k of stuff for this?" Like, trust me, zap yourself.
Exactly. Measure. Yeah. See this on the screen? Measure it.
But for real, I think in a year from now, I think my goal would just be to continuously improve on the ratio of, you know, how much healthy food versus, you know, some snacks. Like literally maybe years ago it was 70/30. Next year, let's get it 80/20. I don't think it's the type of thing for myself to just snap and be like I'm Bryan Johnson 2.0. But I think slowly every year just implementing little bits of things. Maybe I take a little bit more supplements this year. Maybe I focus on sleep a little. Maybe I get back on that Whoop. Like I think it's just the percentages of getting better, and that's a very realistic way for someone like myself to do it.
Yeah. I loved hanging out, man. It was fun.
Dude. Until the next time. Yeah,
I'll be back.
Yeah, my guy.
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