Why Sacrificing Your Health Doesn't Make You More Successful: Bryan Johnson, Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin on "Martyrdom Culture"
Bryan Johnson
In this episode of the Bryan Johnson Podcast, Bryan Johnson, Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo and physician Dr. Mike Mallin take on what they call one of the biggest myths of modern professional life: that you have to martyr your health to achieve epic success. Johnson's position is that ambition, wealth, status and power are legitimate goals, but that compromising your health is a bad strategy for reaching them. The hosts argue that prioritizing health produces better outcomes in success, happiness and status. They lay out the research they gathered, trade personal stories about sleep deprivation and burnout, argue over which mental models help people change, and end by admitting how hard some of this still is in their own lives, especially international travel.
Martyrdom Masquerading as Hero Culture
Johnson frames the problem as a culture that looks heroic from the outside but is really martyrdom. Late in the conversation the hosts settle on the phrase "martyrdom culture masquerading as hero culture." They choose it on purpose. Johnson doesn't want to call it "hustle culture" because he sees hustling as a good thing. Mallin suggests "just work culture," and Johnson objects that "work" is a positive word too. They want a term that signals an illusion.
Johnson describes the system in which people are expected to sacrifice health. It says to "sleep like this, eat like this, look like this, be like this," not because the data shows it works best, but because a system "designed by we don't even know who" says so. In entrepreneurship, he says, no amount of travel is too much and no amount of sleep is too little. Exercise gets sacrificed and junk food is fine as long as revenue, headcount and fundraising keep climbing. He calls this "a spectacular failure of our societal systems," harmful to individuals, their companies, and everyone around them.
Johnson's Own Case: Braintree and Venmo
Tolo brings up a common reaction to Johnson's story. He built Braintree (which included Venmo), sold it to PayPal/eBay for $800 million, and people assume he can only focus on health now because he has money. She notes that she recently heard him say, for the first time, that he would have made more money if he'd been sleeping better. Johnson confirms it without hedging: "Unquestionably, I would have made more money and been more successful had I made health my top priority."
Tolo also says that, as she understands it, he sold the company at a certain valuation mainly because he couldn't keep going. Johnson doesn't elaborate on the details. He generalizes instead: nobody reaches peak success when their health is in a bad place, and he says two people on the call went through that experience.
The Medical Version: Mallin's Burnout
Mallin agrees that he went through a similar path in emergency medicine and accepts the "B-word," burnout. In medicine, he says, physicians are expected to "just crush themselves," and it starts in medical school. He studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate and thought that was hard. Then medical school shocked him with the study load, residency added more, and professional life added more again. He describes it as "a step-wise function of increasing expectations" with no attention to personal health. Nobody teaches you how to be healthy and a doctor at the same time.
He stresses that the trade was never stated. No medical school interviewer asked whether he was ready to sacrifice his health and longevity for the profession. The motivation was "I want to help people," and it quietly became "I want to sacrifice my own health to help people." Johnson says he has seen a statistic that emergency physicians have the lowest life expectancy among medical professionals, something like 59, and asks Mallin to correct him if it's wrong. Mallin doesn't give a number but says it is "crazy low" and that if he'd known, he never would have gone into emergency medicine: nobody can sell you a career by saying you'll probably die about 15 years younger than average.
Mallin doesn't think this is unique to medicine or startups. He sees it as a society-wide expectation across professional careers that you crush yourself for some theoretical benefit, and he calls that misguided. Johnson goes further. In his view, the global system treats humans as disposable pawns for its own progress. Trophies like power, wealth and status are "a giant cope" for being martyrs to something bigger than ourselves. He connects this to his "Don't Die" idea: when existence itself becomes the priority, people are no longer pawns to be arbitraged for the system's gain.
Why Ambitious People Won't Let Go
Tolo, who is 29, describes the pressures she has faced. In New York's startup community there is social pressure to announce that you've been working hard and staying up all night on a project. From her time in fashion, she recalls a different pressure: going out, drinking, networking, more smoking, and a "cool person, debaucherous" image. Looked at soberly, she says, neither is a good situation.
Johnson describes his conversations with founders. He starts with an analogy they accept easily: you don't want to write inefficient code or run sloppy hardware, and you yourself are software and hardware, so not prioritizing health means running sloppy systems on yourself. Founders agree in principle. But when they see competitors willing to martyr themselves, they fear falling behind. That means fewer international trips, not sleeping three to four hours a night, and fewer hours worked even if those hours aren't productive. He finds it "incredibly hard" to make people feel safe prioritizing health. He compares it to hanging from monkey bars: if you let go, there's no safety net.
Tolo proposes a structure for the episode. Assume the listener is part of this culture and may not realize it or see how it affects their health. First lay out what happens to the body under sleep deprivation and burnout. Then address the harder question, which she thinks stirs up the real angst: "Do I have to choose between myself and my company?"
The Evidence: Overwork Will Kill You
Mallin organizes the evidence into four claims: overwork will kill you; working too much destroys your relationships; all-nighters and sleep disruption cause heart disease and diabetes; and sleep disruption and overwork make you a bad leader.
On the first claim, he cites a 2022 meta-analysis concluding that burnout increases heart attack risk by 78%. He emphasizes that this is larger than the effect of most things health discussions focus on, such as specific supplements or exercise, which he says generally shift risk only modestly. He also cites research attributing about 800,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016 to working more than 55 hours a week. People who worked over 55 hours had a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of death from heart attack. From this, Mallin concludes that both burnout and raw hours worked directly affect how long you live.
The Devil's Advocate Argument: "I'll Trade My Last Ten Years"
Johnson plays devil's advocate. Someone might say they don't care about living to 80, they're happy to give up their last ten years to be epic in their 20s and make a lot of money, and they'll reverse the damage in their 30s and 40s.
Mallin's rebuttal is that the cost doesn't just show up at the end of life. It lowers performance and quality of life during the years you're trying to optimize. The harder you push, the less you tend to sleep, the less time you spend with family and friends, the worse you eat, and the less you exercise. All of that reduces your ability to perform at your highest level. He says the research supports Johnson's claim that he could have been more successful with better self-care.
On relationships, Mallin describes a trial in Belgium where employees moved to a 30-hour work week and reported higher general well-being. He says the improvement came mostly from less conflict between work and family. He adds that studies repeatedly find people who work more have more trouble in family life and relationships and get less overall happiness from life.
Johnson steps out of the devil's-advocate role and reflects that his first reaction was "totally inaccurate." The real trade isn't losing some years at the end. It's a "much more sophisticated cascade" of second-, third- and fourth-order consequences that start right away in relationships, leadership and everything that follows. Mallin agrees.
Sleep, Decisions and Leadership
More statistics come up. Sleep-restricted CEOs make 29% more risky errors in lab simulations, which the hosts take to mean you become a worse leader immediately, not just decades later. Physically fit workers log two extra productive hours per week, so health decisions raise the productivity of both individuals and teams in the near term.
Mallin highlights a study of Israeli judges deciding parole cases that he finds especially striking. In the morning, when the judges were most rested, about 65% of people received parole. Right before lunch, the rate was 0%. He says similar effects have been found in leaders: sleep-deprived leaders not only decide worse but are more pessimistic and are perceived by others as less charismatic, and they lead their teams less well. He finds this intuitive. People pick up, even subconsciously, that you're less energetic, understanding and kind when you're tired.
"Night-Shifted": Personal Stories About Tired Selves
The discussion turns personal. Tolo says she now avoids hard conversations in close relationships after 5 p.m., because the chance of them going badly is much higher. If everyone's goal is to work things out together, it makes no sense to attempt difficult conversations then.
Mallin says he and his wife Britney had a term for this during his ER shifts: "night-shifted." They deliberately avoided difficult conversations after a night shift, because she noticed he was quick to cut her down, be pessimistic, or be "aggro" when he hadn't slept. They named it and changed their behavior around it.
He then tells what he calls an overshare from residency. After a 36-hour ICU shift, he was running his dog when another dog joined them and kept darting into the street, including in front of a car. The elderly driver stopped and said something he didn't really hear. He assumed it was rude and started cursing at her. She looked at him like "the worst human in the world" and drove off. Only afterward did it occur to him that she might have been trying to say something kind. He says the reaction was "so not me," and that it shows the pessimism and lack of empathy that come with sleep deprivation, which many people don't recognize in themselves.
Johnson describes a similar pattern from a previous relationship. The "6 or 7 p.m. Bryan" could manage little beyond bathing, feeding and putting the kids to bed, so he tried to set a rule against difficult conversations in the evening. His partner at the time felt she needed emotional reconciliation in the moment, which he describes as a real need of hers. She would break the rule, he would plead that it would go off the rails, and the result was "a train wreck." Tolo says she has been on the other side of that, insisting a conversation had to happen now. She reflects that consciousness makes you feel that who you are in the moment is simply you, and until you can step back from that, you don't see it. She now considers herself unreliable for emotional stability after 5 p.m. and schedules hard conversations with team members carefully. She suggests one takeaway is empathy: when you see someone lose their temper, ask whether they've slept.
Fitness and Diet
Mallin extends the argument beyond sleep. He describes a close relationship between fitness percentile and missed workdays. The top 25% in physical fitness miss about two days a year on average, and the bottom 25% miss about six. Being fit is an investment in simply being present at work.
On diet, he says this culture tends to choose food for convenience, meaning ultra-processed junk and fast food, and that cognitive performance tracks closely with diet. He cites the figure that each daily serving of ultra-processed food increases dementia risk by about 13%. He argues the effects appear both in long-term risk and in day-to-day performance and decisions.
"Do You Think We've Convinced Them?" — Health as Religion
After the evidence, Johnson asks whether they've convinced anyone. Mallin says probably not. Some things people have to live before they believe, and this may be one of them because it's so ingrained and everyone around you is doing it.
Johnson offers a religious analogy. People used to do almost anything to comply with religious obligations and earn an afterlife reward. He believes people are equally or more zealous about martyrdom culture, where the prize of status, power and wealth is so clearly defined that they are willing to kill themselves "even in a slow-mo fashion" to win it. People seem "transfixed in a zombie-like fashion." To them, statistics about heart attack risk are background noise, while they hear "this triumphant anthem" of the man in the arena. He connects this to his own experience. After 11 days of international travel, he felt his self-control drop dramatically and felt almost powerless to make his own decisions, stuck in what he calls "primitive brain land." He suspects people living this way are in a similar state of deficient wisdom where they can't make good decisions for themselves. Either they don't want to face it, or they see it and decide the trade-off is worth it.
Mallin adds nuance. He thinks future focus and delayed gratification are part of human nature, and we teach them to children for good reason. The problem is pushing them so far that they take you out of the present entirely. He doesn't mean this in a "woo" sense. He's asking whether you can be your best self now and still succeed later.
Tolo summarizes the argument. Religion has been replaced by status, wealth and money as the organizing framework, and the hosts propose putting health in that place. Their claim is that you can still earn status, money and wealth while making health your top priority, but the transition is painful and uncomfortable. She tells listeners who feel anxious hearing this that there is a way and it doesn't need to feel so scary.
Johnson points to what he sees as an easy bridge: athletes. Almost nobody argues that an Olympic or professional athlete should be sleep-deprived, eat poorly or over-travel, because their bodies are obviously their main asset. Professionals who compete with their minds, emotions and judgment somehow don't see themselves as subject to the same physical requirements, which he calls "a disconnect of cognition." Still, he believes "we are winning the war." He sees the culture shifting, and he says many of his friends, especially investors, now evaluate founders' health before investing and second-guess founders who aren't health-forward.
Three Mental Models for Making the Switch
Tolo asks for an easy on-ramp for someone with an intense schedule who can't spend five hours a day on health. The three hosts then describe very different mental models.
Kate: treat sleep like work. Tolo admits it may sound odd but says it works for people like her who absorbed the old mindset. She used to see sleep as a luxury, basically slacking off. Around midnight she becomes creative and wants to stay up. Now she tells herself that going to sleep is part of her job. It sits on her list alongside "I need to have this meeting" and "I need to have this call," and she goes to bed even when she doesn't want to because "that's my job." She describes this as tricking herself.
Mike: self-compassion by depersonalizing. Mallin says the frame doesn't work for him. He can get anxious about sleep, and that anxiety feeds insomnia, so calling sleep "work" adds another layer of obligation. His career has built up a lot of self-judgment, so what he needs is compassion. He gets there by imagining he's deciding for his child or someone he cares about. As an ER doctor, he would ask whether his patients tomorrow would want their doctor to go to bed now. Depersonalizing the choice lets him find empathy he can't otherwise find for himself.
Bryan: social permission. Johnson thinks the largest group of people already feels the pain of this culture and wants out but feels trapped by others' expectations. At a conference the week before, he met two founders from Australia who were making roughly one international trip every 30 days, to Asia, the U.S. and the Middle East. When he described the health toll of international travel from his recent Europe trip, one founder said he would tell his board that Bryan Johnson said he could only make one international trip a month. Johnson encouraged that. He said investors shouldn't want founders traveling more than once a month because it lowers performance, increases anxiety and depression, hurts relationships and disrupts biological systems. If needed, the founder could stretch it to something like two trips over 90 days, but there should be a budget. Johnson sensed the founder felt emboldened, and he concludes that most people want social permission to do what they already know they want to do.
Agency and Entrapment
From there Johnson widens the frame. He says he was thinking that morning that the peak form of existence right now is agency: freedom from entrapment. He sees the world as very good at trapping people in dopamine-driven addiction cycles through algorithms, foods, social feeds and porn. Losing sleep drains willpower, and then that entrapment tightens "to like this strangulation." People sense this and get angry when told to simply stop, because they have no willpower left and the addictions are too strong. That's why he thinks putting the burden only on the individual's willpower is "a really hard equation." It works better to tell people that those doing this to them need to stop, and to give them support from others.
Practical Guardrails and Non-Negotiables
Tolo then gets concrete, noting that the answer always comes back to sleep, diet and exercise. First, block out a morning routine and don't schedule anything before a set time. She says Johnson's calendar starts after 10 a.m. and hers does too. Second, protect the evening the same way. Treat sleep time as already taken, so any social event has to be planned around it instead of sleep getting whatever the calendar leaves. Third, take travel seriously. She began preparing for their Europe trip about two months ahead. She used to fly red-eyes between New York and Los Angeles thinking she was saving time, and now finds that "wild." She books flights that fit her sleep and morning routine as much as possible.
Mallin praises Johnson's non-negotiables and jokes about a "40-step morning routine that takes three and a half hours." Johnson corrects him: "five and a half." Mallin makes the serious point that we're very good at talking ourselves out of things. Give yourself any acceptable alternative and you'll take it every time. He thinks this is especially true of type-A, successful people, who are skilled at persuasion and therefore at persuading themselves.
Johnson acknowledges the objection many listeners will raise: they don't have the luxury of a morning routine. They take late-night calls with Asia or the Middle East, have kids who wake early, or care for parents. There's no one-size-fits-all. That's why he likes resting heart rate before bed as a target: whoever you are, you can build life systems around it. His principle is to avoid in-the-moment decisions and let "morning Bryan," high in willpower, design the systems instead of the worn-down 7 p.m. version who wants to soothe himself.
He gives an example. The day before, while he was giving a tour of the clinic, a visitor said he had optimized everything, including red light and a last meal four hours before bed, but still couldn't sleep. Johnson probed and found the problem was rumination. The man is intensely ambitious and spends every night before bed thinking about how to change the world. Johnson told him that rumination would cost him five to 25 beats per minute, that bedtime isn't the time to solve the world's problems, and walked him through what rumination is and how to minimize it. The man is supposed to report back. Johnson suggests bringing guests like this onto the show, because hearing real people who think they're doing everything right, while one or two things undercut the rest, may persuade more than statistics.
A side exchange about the ER drama series The Pit (on Max), which Mallin watches, becomes another example. Mallin says his last episode "crushed" him and he's taking an extended break. He suggests a guardrail like not watching it after 6 p.m. His general advice is to pick the three to five things that matter most to you and make them non-negotiable. That might be no junk food, in bed by 10 p.m., or getting up an hour before the kids to meditate and journal. It will differ for everyone, but it's an easy place to start.
Johnson's Summary: Don't Give Up Your Power
Johnson closes the main discussion with three points. First, don't give up your power. People want power, status and wealth, and the best way to be powerful is to claim your agency. Anything that erodes it is bad for you, including a culture that demands martyrdom and traps you in a system you didn't choose. He lists what that martyrdom costs: willpower, cardiovascular health, charisma as a leader, insulin sensitivity, and weight gain.
Second, embody these habits. When others see you living this way, they respond, and that builds social permission. If everyone went to bed on time nobody would notice. He argues that a few loud outliers who claim three hours of sleep is the path to success create a cultural illusion that this is what it takes, and the more the zeitgeist shifts, the more cover people will have.
Third, once you cross the threshold you'll experience it yourself. You'll become a better leader, entrepreneur, professional, parent, child, friend and co-worker, without sacrificing success. Then you can speak about it with confidence.
Where the Hosts Are Right Now
The episode ends with personal updates. Tolo was sick the previous week. She's still a little congested and says illness is always a reminder of how much health matters. She's about to fly to Croatia for her cousin's wedding, which is important because she rarely gets to celebrate with her Bosnian family. She says she's dreading the travel. Mallin points her to the travel episode he and Johnson recorded the week before. Mallin says he's doing great: he isn't traveling much and isn't watching The Pit, both good for his sleep, though he expects the steady routine won't last long.
Johnson describes two experiments. The previous Friday he had a 1927-nanometer non-ablative Lutronic laser treatment on his face, aimed at rebuilding collagen and elastin and reducing wrinkles. He estimates it removed about 30% of his facial skin surface and says it was "pretty spicy" even with numbing cream. He has also started red light therapy before bed. By his team's estimate, the lights deliver 4 joules per square centimeter per minute, and at eight minutes that comes to 32 J/cm² of red and near-infrared exposure. On the first night, he reports, his sleep duration rose by an hour. He calls that a huge boost but says they'll see what happens over time.
He also says he's still recovering from the Europe trip: his sleep architecture isn't back on point and his body systems aren't fully back online. He knows some people call him a "snowflake." His explanation is that when you already feel bad you don't notice the damage as much, but when you feel exceptional and then go bad, "it stings." He describes himself as being in a "recoil phase" over how devastating international travel is for health. That leaves an open problem: Blueprint has clinics opening in China, the China team wants them there in the fall, and a Middle East trip was also planned. Johnson says he doesn't yet know how to do it and is still figuring out what to do about international travel.
People are equally, if not more zealous about this modern culture than people were in previous religious cultures where the prize they have to win is so intensely identified, right, the status, power, wealth, that they're literally willing to martyr themselves even in a slow-mo fashion to achieve that prize. It's just like people are transfixed in a zombie-like fashion. They don't have control over themselves.
Hi friends. Today we're going to talk about martyrdom culture that we masquerade as hero culture. Now I get it. You are ambitious. You are smart. You're talented. You have big dreams for life. You want to be rich and powerful and have high status. Those are all things everybody wants. Also, there is a way to go about doing it that does not require you to martyr your health. A lot of people have this bad idea in their mind that if they compromise their health that somehow it will help them achieve better success. Today we're going to highlight the evidence that shows that is a bad idea. You can in fact prioritize your health and achieve better outcomes in your success, happiness, and status. Let's go.
You know, I've always wondered like what if a branch started growing out of my head? Like it was like
Two nights ago I had this dream. I would turn and there'd be like a root growing out of my skin in the middle of nowhere. It was like
It's terrifying.
At some point, do you like start creating little seedlings and like dropping little Bryans all over the place?
Like plant them in the yard. This true fusion. Like we think about merging with AI.
It becomes this nightmare situation where you can't get away from these needy seedlings.
And all night long there's like "Bryan, Bryan," shut up. I swear I'm going to cut you down. You got to be quiet. What's happening?
Oh my god.
Are we ready?
Yes. Today we're going to talk about one of the biggest myths of modern life and that's the idea that you need to martyr your health in order to be successful. This has been so ingrained into the psyche of people who want epic professional success. We're going to get to the bottom of why this silly myth of martyrdom has made itself a mainstay in our culture and why it's wrong and how you can make the corrective actions to get yourself back to peak health and peak performance.
So you, you're coming from the other side too, like you're a convert in this new wave of looking after your health. So a lot of people, A, they don't realize that you built Braintree Venmo, sold it to PayPal, eBay, for 800 million and so made a ton of money. And people hear that story and they think, "Wow, Bryan, you are only doing what you're doing now because you had access to money and there's no way you could have been that successful." And recently, for the first time, I heard you say that you think that you would have made more money had you been sleeping better. Is that right?
Unquestionably, I would have made more money and been more successful had I made health my top priority.
Can you talk, because I think a lot of people don't realize, a lot of people aren't in the startup world. They're not building businesses. So specifically, from what I understand, you sold the company at a point where it hit a certain valuation but really primarily because you couldn't go on any longer.
So the truth of the matter is that nobody is going to achieve peak success when your health is in a bad spot. And that is true for me and there's actually two of us on the podcast today that have gone through the same experience. Dr. Mallin also went through the same trajectory as me, I think. Is that right, Dr. Mike? With emergency medicine
To some extent. Yeah. I mean, do you mean like, are we using the B-word, burnout? Like
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
I mean, basically as well. Is it fair to say you and I were both introduced to a culture that sacrificed health for some kind of professional idea of success?
Yeah, I would say a professional ideal, like an expectation of how you behave in that profession. And I think both of us were subject to that maybe even without even realizing it for a while. At least I was personally.
That's exactly what I would identify, is that the systems that said, hey, we're going to tell you to behave like this, like, you know, sleep like this, eat like this, look like this, be like this, not because the data says it's the best for you or because it produces the best outcomes; do these things because the system designed by we don't even know who says to do these things. And so I know for me, it's very true in entrepreneurship culture. You are expected to sacrifice your health. So there's no amount of travel that's too much. There's no amount of sleep that's too little. There's, you know, you can sacrifice your exercise routines. You would eat junk food so long as your revenue is climbing, your employee count is increasing, you know, and you're raising more money. And so it just really is a spectacular failure of our societal systems that have us do these things that are extremely detrimental to our individual health, our company's health, and everybody around us. And I think it's so silly that we have bought into these notions.
So I say, you know, it's relevant here that I did this as an entrepreneur, Mike did this in the medical world. So it's not just one industry. Kate, you're in a fortunate situation where, I mean, you tell me, but you're 29 years old and so, you know, I guess I'm curious on what your experience has been in terms of the systems that you were introduced to in the world and how success was framed to you. But let me jump to Mike first. Like Mike, would you say your experience was similar to mine in terms of what the system told you to do and what it rewarded you to do?
Yeah, I mean in the sense that I got exposed to in medicine a world where physicians are expected to just crush themselves. I mean it starts immediately from medical school. So like, you know, I thought undergrad was hard. You know, I did chemical engineering undergrad and worked really hard and then I started medical school and was just blown away by the expectations placed on medical students in terms of how hard they had to study, and then that compounded within residency and then professional life, and it's just like a step-wise function of increasing expectations and a lack of focus on personal health. Like you never get taught how to be healthy and also be a professional in medicine at the same time. And it was just expected. Like there's no conversation. There was no me sitting down in a medical school interview and then being like, "Hey, are you ready to sacrifice your health and your longevity for this profession?" Like nobody ever asked me that, right? It's just like, "Oh, being a doctor sounds great. You know, I want to help people." And then next thing you know, it's like, "I want to sacrifice my own health to help people." And that was never explicitly said to me. And I think the same is true as an entrepreneur. I think
Is it clear, I think I saw this stat, correct me if I'm wrong, in terms of life expectancy for medical professionals, that emergency med doctors had the lowest. I think it was like 59 or something like that.
It's crazy low. It's very low.
I mean had I known that I never would have gone into emergency medicine. You know, it's like somebody can't sell you on a career when they're like, "Hey, you know, by the way, you're probably going to die about 15 years younger than the average human." Cool, right? No. No thanks.
Mike, you were saying also something else about this being applicable not just to the medical world or entrepreneurship world, but
Yeah, I don't think this is just unique to medicine or the world of entrepreneurship. I think that this is pretty much every professional career and almost like a societal-level expectation that we crush ourselves for the benefit of our... I don't even know what we're benefiting. Like theoretically I think there's this theoretical benefit that you have to crush yourself in order to be successful in life or in order to, you know, do good for mankind or humankind, but I think it's misguided.
Yeah. You know, I could not agree with you more. I think that in our global system, we are pawns for the system and we are disposable for the system's progress. But the insanity of this moment is the system is the priority of the species and we are disposable. And we compensate for that situation by trying to give ourselves trophies for success, you know, power, wealth, status, but it's a giant cope for the fact that we are martyrs for a system bigger than ourselves. And I think the opportunity here is to shift it to say we no longer... And this is like, when death is inevitable, that's kind of the only thing you can do to cope, or you can, you know, identify an afterlife and be like, actually there's a bigger system at play here and we're going to triumph over the system. But in practical terms, this is why I think that what we're doing with Don't Die is correct: that when existence itself becomes the priority, we are no longer pawns and will be arbitraged, you know, for the system's winning. But so it's such a big concept, but we play these micro games of the modern to try to earn our own status, power, respect within the circles we run.
Kate, what's been your... I mean, you're 29 years old. What's been your life experience in terms of the culture that you walk into as a professional and what pressures do you feel?
Yeah, I mean, being in the startup community in New York, you definitely feel the pressure to say, "Hey, I've been working so hard. I've been staying up all night working on this project." And then it's funny. I think in the fashion industry, there's a little bit more of a social pressure to go out, have drinks, connect with people. Smoking is a little bit more prevalent in that community. So there's a little bit more of this cool-person debaucherous behavior in the fashion community. So I think it's interesting being in both worlds of startup and fashion back in the day. But yeah, I totally agree. If you really step back and look at it soberly, it's not a good situation.
In my conversations, I primarily speak to founders, and when they're going through this process, I can tell when I enter this conversation and I try to persuade them, hey, let's just start with some baseline observations. You do not want to write inefficient code, right? Your goal is to write efficient code. Your goal is to run efficient hardware. You don't want sloppy hardware, you don't want sloppy software, you want efficient systems. You are software and hardware, and you do not want to run sloppy software and hardware on yourself, and that's what happens when you don't make health your top priority. Now in those basic terms they get it, but then when they see themselves competing against other people who are willing to martyr themselves, they feel like they're going to fall behind if they don't do it. So they don't take the same number of international trips, they're not, you know, sleeping three to four hours a night, they're not working that many hours in the day, even if they're not productive, it's the perception that they're falling behind. But I have found it is incredibly hard to get people to feel comfortable they can safely prioritize their health and not fall behind. And they just won't let it go. They're so attached to this ideology. It's almost like hanging from the monkey bars. You just can't, you feel like if you let go
There's no safety net. You're not going to be caught. What do you guys think that's about?
Do you think that they believe in the first place that this is bad for them? I mean, that's the first question, right? Like, do they even believe us?
So, I would like to hypothesize that the person sitting on the other side listening to us right now is part of hustle culture and may not realize, A, that they're part of hustle culture and, B, that it's impacting their health. So I would love to go through what it means, what happens to the individual when they are a pawn in the system, assuming that we believe that for a second. What happens when you don't get enough sleep? What happens when you are burnt out? The B-word. And then once everyone's agreed upon those terms, Bryan, that's when all of that angst kicks up because then you come face to face with, wait, do I need to make a decision between myself and my company? And we can untangle that, too.
Okay, cool. All right, let's jump into the evidence. We have a bunch of evidence prepared. Let's go over it and let's see what effect hustle... I mean I don't know if I even want to call it hustle culture because hustling is a good thing. So is there a word we can use that it's like almost destructive
Because people
It's just work culture. It's just current work culture.
Work is a positive word. We need something that captures that it's an illusion, like you.
Oh, it's like modern culture.
Yeah, but it's modern culture masquerading as hero culture,
Right?
All right, let's go through the evidence. We'll come back on the memetics. It's going to happen. It's coming.
Yeah, it's coming.
Okay, Mike, do you want to start us off with some of the evidence we put together as we evaluated this topic?
Yeah. So, as we went through this, I think there's like three or four statements that we can make around the evidence with regard to this type of culture whose word we haven't identified yet. But basically, one, overwork will kill you. Two, working too much destroys your relationships. Three, all-nighters and sleep disruption cause heart disease and diabetes. And four, sleep disruption and overwork make you a bad leader. So, let's break those down. So overwork will kill you.
This has been well studied. There was a meta-analysis in 2022 that basically came to the conclusion that burnout increases heart attack risk by 78%. Let that seep in for a second. Like burnout increases heart attack risk by 78%. That's huge. That's more than most of the things that we talk about when we're talking about taking certain supplements or exercising. All of these things have fairly minimal changes to your actual risk. 78% is massive. And then there was another study that showed the amount of work, so working beyond 55 hours per week, led to about 800,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016. And those people who worked greater than 55 hours per week had a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of death from heart attack. So, we know without a shadow of a doubt that working too much, whether that's just the sense of the B-word burnout or if it's just the number of hours you're putting in a week, actually has a direct impact on your livelihood and how long you're going to live.
So, Mike, let me be the devil's advocate in this. Okay, I just heard what you said and I'm thinking, you know what, Mike, I get it. I'm not really interested in living, you know, 80 years of life. I'm okay to trade off my last 10 years of life so I can be epic in my 20s, make a ton of money, and then I can just reverse the damage I did in my 20s, I can do it in my 30s and 40s. So, I'm willing to take this gamble and make the trade-off. What's your argument there?
Well, first off, there's a difference between making it up and then just having worse actual livelihood or life quality during the years that you currently have. So the counterargument to what you just suggested is that you're actually going to see lower performance the harder you're working. So when you're pushing yourself, you're likely not sleeping as much, right? You're likely not spending as much time with family and friends. You're hurting your social relationships. You're not sleeping, you're not eating appropriately, you're not exercising. All those things
actually reduce your likelihood of performing at the highest possible level. And this gets, I think, to what you were talking about, Bryan, in terms of like you feel like you could have been even more successful than you were had you been taking better care of yourself. And the research actually supports that statement.
So, if we look at, for example, relationships, working too much destroys your relationships. That was the second statement that we made. There was an interesting trial that was done in Belgium where employees shifted to a 30-hour work week and they actually found that they had generally higher well-being, just a sense of overall well-being. And that was mostly generated by lower work and family conflict. And we've seen this time and time again in research studies where people who work more have more trouble in their family life. They have more trouble in their relationships and they don't get as much general happiness from their life because they're just crushing themselves at work basically.
Yeah. Okay, cool. So my initial knee-jerk reaction to you would be lacking in awareness of the second and third and fourth order consequences, that if I begin this process and I have some level of health deterioration, I'm thinking that it may only affect end of life and/or that I can make it up in my 30s, 40s. But what I'm not accounting for are the other points you laid out in the beginning to say it's going to begin its ruinous effects on my relationships. It's going to begin lessening, it's going to diminish my abilities as a leader and it's going to have all these other following consequences. So my first reaction to you is totally inaccurate. That is not the trade-off I'm making. It's a much more sophisticated cascade of consequences than I'm anticipating and I haven't fully grokked what it really means. Is that fair?
Yeah, that's totally fair.
Yeah. And specifically, there's a couple other stats here. Sleep-restricted CEOs make 29% more risky errors in lab simulations. So like you're going to be a worse immediate leader. So, the trade-off of short-term to long-term falls flat when you're a worse CEO, leader, builder, ER medicine doctor. And fit workers log two extra productive hours per week. So, your productivity of either your team or yourself also increases with better health decisions in the immediate term.
You also make better decisions. Like that one study where they looked at Israeli judges. I find this one super impressive. So this was Israeli judges, judges that are determining whether someone should make parole or not. And they found that in the morning when they're most rested, 65% of people made parole, but right before lunch 0% made parole. It's like the timing of day actually turn— and this has been shown in CEOs as well, where not only are you making worse decisions, but you're actually more pessimistic and less charismatic when you're tired.
So there was a study looking at leaders who were sleep-deprived, and in those sleep-deprived leaders, people perceived them as being less charismatic and they made poor decisions and did not lead their team quite as well, which makes total sense when you think about it, right? I mean, how often have you been sleep-deprived and then felt like you had less energy? People pick up on that, even if it's subconscious. They pick up on the fact that you're not charismatic, you're not as understanding, you're not as kind. That stuff makes total sense.
Quick detour here, that in my personal life with really close interpersonal relationships, it's become so obvious to me now that I'm observing myself to have hard conversations before 5:00 p.m. If it's 5:00 p.m., the chance of a hard conversation going wrong is so much higher. So, just avoid it now. Because if we all have this goal of working things out together, then it doesn't make any sense to do things after 5 p.m. that are difficult.
My wife Britney and I had this term when I was working ER shifts called "night shifted," where we would specifically avoid difficult conversations after I was coming off a night shift.
Yeah. Because
100%. Because, and I recognized this too, but she picked up on the fact that I was just so quick to cut her down or say something negative or be pessimistic or just be aggro because I didn't get enough sleep, right? So we literally named it and changed behavior around it.
Like I remember this one time I was coming off of, this was actually in residency, overshare for a minute. So I was coming off of an ICU shift. It was one of those 36-hour shifts. So not only are you awake all throughout the night, but you're also working 36 hours straight. And I was walking the dog. Actually, I was running the dog. And this other dog came and started running with us. And I couldn't get it to go away. I was kind of shooing it away, right? It was just me and my dog running. I don't want this dog bothering us. And it's running in and out of the street, runs in front of this car. And this nice old lady stops and she says something to me and I don't really hear her, but I infer that she was saying something rude. And I just start cussing her out. Oh my god.
Like, she looked at me like I was the worst human in the world and just drove away. And then after she left I was like, maybe she was trying to say something kind.
I was so reactive and I was just night shifted, man. That's all there was to it. But it tells the story of this pessimism and this lack of empathy that happens when we're sleep-deprived. And I think a lot of people don't even realize it.
Yeah. Mike, if you really wanted to burn her, you'd be like, "You better hope you're not in the ER."
Oh, man. I was like, "F you, you effing." I mean, it was bad. It was so not me. But that's what happens.
Yeah. In my previous relationship, I tried to make this rule, you know, realizing that when 6 or 7 p.m. Bryan arrived, it was not a good situation for almost anything. Getting the kids bathed, fed, and put to bed was the only thing I could muster up. And so I tried to introduce this concept, but my partner at the time needed to do emotional reconciliation. She felt like it was a necessity of her existence. And so she would break protocol and I would just plead with her, like, we can't, if we do this, it's just going to go off the rails. It's going to make things worse. And she would persist. And so then it was just an absolute nightmare where I tried to set the rules, but then she needed to address this, like she had needs as well, but it was just this train wreck of a situation.
Yeah. So I've been on the other side of that where I'm like, we need to have this conversation now, there's no way, right? But that's the crazy thing, that consciousness makes you feel like who you are in the moment is you. And so until you can separate from that, you just don't realize it. And so that's why I feel so liberated to be on the other side of that now and be like, "Okay, absolutely after 5:00 p.m. Kate is bad at having emotional stability, period. Any emotional... even with team members, when I'm going to have a hard conversation, I'm like, be careful when I schedule it, because I know I need to be my best self." So I empathize with that situation. I think this conversation is detangling who we are at different time periods and recognizing when you are sleep... It's like in the situation with Mike, you could totally witness someone losing their temper and be like, have they slept recently? Have empathy toward those situations, because people don't realize what's good for them.
Yeah. Okay. So, back to the evidence. So far, we've covered that you have dramatic increases in cardiovascular risk profile, 78% increased likelihood of heart attack. You're less charismatic. Your personal relationships become ruinous. Kate, you mentioned lessened sleep quality, I think.
Oh, no. Mhm.
Yeah. What other evidence do we have that suggests that this martyrdom culture masquerading as hero culture is bad for somebody?
Well, there's also the physical fitness evidence. So the more physically fit you are, the less sick you are. So there's a pretty close relationship between whether you exercise, what percentile of fitness you're in, and then how many days of work you miss a year. So not just in terms of how well you perform, but also are you even at work. So the top 25th percentile of physical fitness misses on average about two days per year, whereas the bottom 25th percentile misses about six days per year. So you're actually making an investment in how much you're able to work by being physically fit. So it goes beyond just sleep, gets into fitness and then also into diet. So if we roll into the diet realm, there's decisions around what we eat, and a lot of times this martyrdom culture makes poor decisions around diet out of convenience. And what we've seen is that cognitive performance tracks almost directly with diet in terms of the more convenient food that you eat. And by convenient, I'm talking about ultra-processed junk food, quick food, fast food, things like that. Basically, every serving of this sort of food, ultra-processed food, that you eat per day increases your risk of dementia by about 13%. So, not only do we see a long-term increased risk of dementia, but we also see a change in terms of your actual performance day-to-day and the actual decisions that you're making. So, it's fairly clear that not just in terms of sleep and exercise, but also diet, we're having direct effects on our ability to perform in these sorts of situations.
Do you think we've convinced them?
Probably not.
You almost have to live it. You know, it's one of those things where, you know, there's some things people just have to experience before they can really believe them. And I feel like because it's so ingrained in the culture and you see everybody doing it, this might be one of those.
Yeah, that was true.
It's also the case that for most people, I guess for a while religion was a very motivating force. People would do anything to be compliant with their religious obligations so they could receive the afterlife reward. And people are equally, if not more, zealous about this martyrdom culture than people were in previous religious cultures, where the prize they have to win is so intensely identified, right? The status, power, wealth, that they're literally willing to suicide themselves, even in a slow-mo fashion, to achieve that prize. It's just like people are transfixed in a zombie-like fashion. They don't have control over themselves. And that's what it seems like to me when I'm talking to somebody.
I think they can hear these stats of, you know, it's all mumbled, like heart attack risk, performance, but it's just background noise, but they hear this triumphant anthem of the victory of the man in the arena, you know, framework. And so, in the same way, I guess I really have reflected a lot on my own inability, the dramatic reduction of my self-control with 11 days of international travel, and basically feeling almost powerless to actually make my own decisions because my body is just destroyed. I'm now in primitive brain land. I think in many ways the people who are doing this are in some way, shape or form in some kind of deficient state of wisdom where they cannot make good decisions on their own behalf. It's a really weird psychological phenomenon. They just don't want to recognize it. They don't want to square with it, and/or they see it and they're rationally just saying the trade-off is worth it to me. I'd rather just play modern culture and pretend like it's not there.
It's kind of human nature to some extent to be this future focused, this sense of delayed gratification, which we even teach to children, right? We teach them delayed gratification and future focus and all these things, and it's taking them out of presence, right? It's taking them out of being in the present moment, living in the present moment. And that doesn't need to be this woo thing. It can also just be the idea of, can I be my best self and also still succeed in this future moment? Do I have to go so far that I'm sacrificing? And I think that's the issue, that it's just being pushed too far. There's nothing wrong with future focusing and delayed gratification. It's just, you don't have to go crazy about it, right?
So if we're saying that we're constantly future focused, and in the past we were some form of religion focused, we've now swapped that out for status/wealth/money as a religion or as a framework. And the argument that we're trying to make in this call is to swap in health as a religion. Make that your number one priority in life for this future thinking that Mike's talking about. And in this transition phase, one, you can still earn status, money, wealth in society and make health your number one priority. We're arguing that. And then two is, in this transition state, it's really painful and very uncomfortable. And if you're feeling internal angst hearing this conversation because you're like, you guys, that just sounds impossible, there is a way. It doesn't need to feel so scary. So, I think that's the thing that we need to tackle now as a group.
Okay, cool. Yeah, it's also the case that there's probably a few easy bridges here. For example, when you look at an Olympic athlete or even professional athletes, very few if anybody argues that it's good for an athlete to be sleep-deprived, to not have good nutrition, to, you know, travel too much. It's just an expectation. Clearly their bodies are their primary asset, and if they don't take care of their bodies they're not going to perform on the court and they're going to lose. But somehow, the fact that entrepreneurs or professionals generally compete with their minds and their emotions and their judgment, they somehow don't view themselves as subject to the same physical requirements. It's just really a disconnect of cognition
that we don't pair the two, that when you want ideal performance you need to treat your only asset with this kind of rigorous health approach. So yeah, I think in time, I do think we are winning the war. I think that the culture is shifting. I think that people increasingly see this martyrdom culture is really bad, it does produce bad outcomes, and I've seen many of my friends, and particularly investors, they really care about and evaluate the founder's health when making an investment, that if the founder is not health forward, they second-guess their decisions because they know it just compromises. So I do think we're winning the war. All right, cool. So let's jump to that. So Kate, you're saying that people are like, okay guys, look, I buy it, but you've got to give me an easy on-ramp. I can't spend 5 hours a day. So give me the argument that this is actually doable with my really intense schedule.
Yeah. And I would put forth first, this is how I transitioned between the two arenas of competition in today's world, is treating... this is going to sound up, but I think it works for people like myself who were indoctrinated into this previous mindset. Treat sleep like work. Treat it like it is a hustle in and of itself. So when 12 PM rolls around, my desire is to stay up and do things because I become very creative during that time period. I love spending that time awake. I have to delay gratification in that moment and
say you are working Kate, you need to go to sleep. Like that is part of. So in fact like people perceive this, at least how I perceived it, that sleep is a luxury and something that I can, that is slacking off, to be completely honest. That's definitely how I viewed it. Like I'm
I'm relaxing by sleeping. And so if you treat it, if you're the kind of person that works 24/7 like I do, I treat now sleep as work. So it actually factors into the, you know, I need to have this meeting today. I need to have this call today, while also I need to go to sleep today. And like even when I don't want to go to sleep, I have to go to sleep cuz that's my job to actually go to sleep. So like that's the bridge that I've played in this, tricking myself.
Mike, how does that frame land for you? If Kate says that frame, you know, treat sleep like work, does that increase, does that improve your
anxiety or alone?
Oh, yeah. Just like does that resonate with you?
Not really. Not really. Like for me, just for me it doesn't. I mean I think that it's great that it works for Kate, but for me personally it doesn't as much because I have to be careful with sleep. Like I get a bit anxious about sleep if I'm not getting the sleep that I need. And that leads to more lack of sleep, more insomnia. And that's just my own personal anxiety stuff that I got to work through. But like calling it work to me gives it another level of like requirement, you know what I mean?
So for me what actually seems to work better is this more compassionate approach where I kind of, for me, I depersonalize it, because there's so much self-judgment built up in my own personal expectations around my own career and success and all those things that I end up treating myself without any compassion. And what I truly need in order to take care of myself for sleep or for exercise or diet is just more self-compassion. And the way for me to do that is to imagine, rather than making a decision for myself, I'm making a decision for my child or for a cared one or for someone that I can easily find that compassion for. Like even when I was a physician working in the ER, how would I want my doctor to take care of themself, right? As opposed to like, should I go to bed right now? It's like, well, would my patients tomorrow want their doctor to go to bed right now? That sort of depersonalizes it for me and allows me to find the empathy and the compassion that I can't find otherwise, just when I'm thinking about what I should be doing.
I'd love that. Yeah.
So, if I've got this like brutal, you need to work 24/7, turn that into sleep mentality, and Mike has the empathy route where he's looking after himself as a parent would. How do you do it, Bryan? What's your mental model?
Yeah, I think, well, first of all, I think that there is a group of people who do really feel this. They feel the pain and discomfort of the modern culture and they want an exit path, but they feel trapped with the expectations of others. And so I think that's probably the biggest segment. And so I was at a conference, Kate, the conference we were at this past week, and there were two founders there from Australia, and they were talking about that they basically were doing one international trip, I think every 30 days or so, because I guess Australia is the middle of nowhere. No offense, Kate.
It's true.
So they, you know, going to Asia and the States, it was just a lot, and the Middle East. And so I was going through the devastating health effects of international travel and telling them what I had been going through from Europe. And one of the founders turned to me and said, "I'm going to tell my board that Bryan Johnson said I can only make one international trip each month." And I said, "That's right. Tell them that your investors do not want you to travel more than one time per month, because if you do, it's going to lessen your performance. It's going to increase anxiety, depression. It's going to hurt your relationships. It's going to mess up all of your biological systems. You will build a better company if you can create a limited budget of international travel. Now, if you need to make a break and do something like two trips over a 90-day period of time, okay. But just realize there's definitely a budget. It is not an infinite amount of time you have doing this." And I think he really felt emboldened in that conversation, that if he had cover, like if his investors wanted him to have that kind of limitation, you know, if they didn't want him to travel internationally, I think he would feel much more empowered.
So to me, most people want social permission to do the things they know they want to do. And right now, I feel like everyone is enslaved by modern society to various degrees. I was thinking about this this morning, that the peak existence right now is actually agency. It's the ability to be free of entrapment of various things. And the forces of the world are so good at entrapping us with addictive algorithms, addictive foods, addictive social feeds, addictive, you know, porn, like that. The world is so good at getting us into these locked-in dopamine addiction cycles. It's entrapment. And once you then are missing out on sleep and you lose more of your willpower, that entrapment becomes stronger and stronger to like this strangulation. And people intuitively feel it, and they're mad when they're told that they should just stop it. It's like they have no more willpower left and the addictions are too strong. And so I understand, like
and so I think it's just giving them permission of like, hey person, the people doing this to you need to stop. Like they're you up. This is bad for you, it's bad for society. But that's kind of like the wedge, because if you put it back on the person and be like, "Hey person, you must have the willpower to do it," it's a really hard equation. If you have cover from others who are like, "You know what? We support you in doing this," it makes it so much easier.
So, if someone's like, "Okay, fine. I'll figure out my mental model." I know we always say the same thing. It's sleep, diet, exercise, practically. So, I'll talk through a couple ways that I do this in my life.
So if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, how do I actually start to implement this? One is blocking out a morning routine to get things done. So saying like, I'm not going to do XYZ before this time period. So I think, Bryan, everything on your calendar is scheduled after 10 a.m., for example. Same thing for me. And then on the tail end as well. Same thing for sleep. So when a social event comes up, you've planned in your mind that time allocation, it's already taken up by default. And then if you are going to work around it, you have to plan otherwise, as opposed to the other way around, where it's like sleep will happen whatever your calendar allows for it. So I'd say those two things. And then for travel, being really, really sober about the fact it has, and treating it with that level of commitment. So, I know for Bryan and I, when we were planning this Europe trip, I was thinking about it like two months in advance, being, okay, got to get ready, got to get ready. Like, I need to be mentally in the right space for this, planning calendars accordingly. Like, previously, I would travel red-eyes when I was going back and forth between New York and LA a lot, because I was like, that's the best time to get my travel out of the way so I have the day to do things.
And now I look back on that, I'm like, that is wild that I thought that I was saving time by traveling overnight. And so same thing for travel, like booking the plane trip that aligns with your sleep and morning routine schedule as much as possible. So those are a couple things that have really worked for me.
I feel like Bryan does a really good job of this. Having non-negotiables, right? Like it is non-negotiable that I am going to do my whatever 40-step morning routine that takes three and a half hours, or whatever crazy thing it is right now.
Sorry, five and a half. Yeah. And my wind-down routine that takes, you know, another hour and a half or whatever it is. But no, all joking aside, those non-negotiables are extremely important, because one thing we're really good at doing to ourselves is talking ourselves out of things, right? So the minute you give yourself any leeway to convince yourself that there's an alternative that is acceptable, you're going to take it every single time. And that's especially true in type A people, who are the same people that are very successful in life, because they're very good at arguing and convincing you of something. And that means they're good at convincing themselves of something, too.
Yeah. And I think that a lot of people, when they listen to this, they're going to say, "I don't have the luxury of a morning routine, right? Like I'm on calls with Asia, you know, at this time of night. I'm on calls with the Middle East at this time of night." And I've got blank, like very seriously, I've got kids who wake up in the morning. I've got parents I'm taking care of. People have really serious life limitations. And so I get that. And so I guess the question is, how do you try to create a culture of health, given that people's lives are practically very complex and there's no one-size-fits-all? And so I guess if we review the things we've talked about, this is why I like resting heart rate before bed so much, because no matter who you are, that is the one thing you can build life systems around. So, like Mike was saying, I try to never let myself make decisions, because I know if I make a decision in that moment, like if it's just an on-the-spot, whatever-Bryan-feels-like decision, I will most likely make the wrong decision. And so I want morning Bryan, high in willpower, who wants good things for myself, to be making system decisions, not 7:00 p.m. Bryan, who's worn down, out of willpower, wants to soothe himself with whatever. And so the resting heart rate, you can go back and listen to a previous episode we did on this, on the ways you can focus on reducing your heart rate. But very simple things, like a lot of people report that rumination is their number one problem. So like yesterday, a guy came over to the house. I was giving a bunch of people a tour of the clinic, and he said, "I've done everything to optimize my health. Like I do red light. I eat my last meal of the day four hours before bed. I, you know, blank, blank." And he said, "I just can't sleep." And so I was like, okay, this is a puzzle. So I probed it around a little bit, and it's his rumination. He is type A, he is incredibly ambitious. Every night before he goes to bed, he's like, now how do I, you know, change the world in this way, one or the other. And so I was like, okay, so that rumination is going to cost you five to 25 beats per minute. And first of all, you have to reconcile that is not the moment to try to solve the world's problems. All right? You need to separate. So we walked through the whole routine of what rumination is, how you talk through it, how you minimize it, and he's going to report back to me.
I think what we should probably do is we should probably bring a few guests on here like that, so people can hear this dialogue of what they're going through, because in their mind they're doing everything right, and this one or two things just slips by and undercuts everything else, and the bad sleep leads to poor willpower, which has other cascades. So I'm guessing that we can say whatever we want, but we probably just need a few real-life examples.
Good point. Yep. Agreed.
Mike, by the way, how's your TV series The Pit going?
I've taken a break. I'm taking an extended break. I did another one after we had the last podcast and it crushed me, like, and I just, yeah, I took a, I'm taking a break right now. Maybe you get back to it like on Saturday morning or something.
On Saturday, I had a minute and I was going to watch the show or something, and I searched The Pit and I couldn't— What platform is it on?
It's on Max. Yeah.
Okay. All right. So, I was going to try to simulate a Mike Mallin experience and watching The Pit.
What happened? Did you do it?
No. So, I'll do it this coming weekend. I'll watch an episode.
So, that's something I need a guardrail around. My guardrail needs to be, I do not watch The Pit after 6 p.m. or something like that. You just create these guardrails of things that are just non-negotiables. And I think, you know, what's interesting is I think that's the main thing for me when it comes to stepping into this world of prioritizing health: just identifying the top three, five things that you feel are most important to you, and then create those guardrails, those non-negotiables around it, and just start there. Maybe it's, I don't eat junk food. Maybe it's, I'm in bed by 10 p.m. Maybe it's, you know, I'm up an hour before the kids so I can meditate and journal. Whatever it is for you that feels most important to you, and it's probably different for everybody. Just starting there seems like a really easy place to get going, you know?
Yeah. I think for people listening, I guess I would try to summarize this conversation. I would say this. Don't give up your power.
So true. You want to concentrate your power. You want to be as powerful as you can as a human. And the best way to be powerful is to claim your agency. And anything that steps on your power or agency is bad for you. And so that includes, if culture is telling you to do martyrdom, it's going to ruin your power, right? It's going to enslave you in a system that's not of your making, not your choice. And it's going to make you a lesser human being. It's going to destroy your willpower. It's going to increase your cardiovascular risk. It's going to make you a less charismatic leader. It's going to ruin your insulin sensitivity. You're going to become fat. It's just bad. And then just go down the list. Do not let the world take your power. And that to me is a very clean statement. People understand that people want power, status, and wealth. So don't lose power. And so that may resonate, you know. Then also, I'd say the second thing is, be these things, because when you are these things, other people will see this and they will respond correspondingly, and when they do, you have more societal permission to do it.
If everybody went to bed on time, nobody would think about it. But it's the fact that there are some outliers who are so loud, like, it's amazing and the only way to success is to, you know, sleep 3 hours per night. They create this cultural illusion that that's what it takes. And so the more the zeitgeist can shift to this, the more cover someone's going to have. And then three is, once you experience this, I think you will feel for yourself, you will become a better leader. You will become a better entrepreneur, a better professional, better parent, child, friend, coworker. You'll become better at everything you do. You will not have to sacrifice your success by doing this. You just have to cross over that threshold. You will realize that and experience it. Then you can speak to it with confidence. Okay. I guess as we wrap, Kate, just a quick roundup. You were sick last week. Mike and I missed you. Glad you're back. How are you feeling?
I'm feeling much better. Still a little congested, but yeah, definitely. Whenever you're sick, it's always a good reminder to be like, take care of your health, cuz when you're sick, you
realize how bad it is. So, I'm glad I'm back.
And then Kate is going to Croatia and so we are concerned about more international travel. Kate, can you tell us about that?
Yeah, what do I do about this? I'm going to Croatia for my cousin's wedding. It's a big deal. I rarely get to celebrate with my Bosnian family. So, it's a big big deal. I'm kind of dreading it. I'm just going to... I'm not going to get sick. I'm going to avoid that with all
get sick because you're going to listen to the podcast that Bryan and I recorded last week.
Yeah. What do I do? So, wish me luck.
Well, the good news, Kate, is you are very well prepared. You now know all the... you have all the evidence on what you can do to make the best of the circumstances.
It's true.
Yeah. Mike, how are you doing in life?
I'm pretty great. I'm not traveling a lot right now, which is amazing for my sleep, and I'm not watching The Pitt, which is also amazing for my sleep. So, yeah, things are good.
So, you're in a nice steady routine. You're feeling good.
Yeah. This will inevitably not last for very long, but going to try to enjoy it while it's here.
Yeah, those durations where you're at home in a routine consistency are the best.
That's the best, isn't it? Yeah.
Bryan, any observations lately about your health that you want to slip in? Like I'm just seeing red light therapy before bed experiment.
A few quick ticks. You can see on my face that my face is pretty destroyed. On Friday, I did a 1927 nanometer laser. This is Lutronic. So, this is a nonablative laser. So, we're trying to basically rebuild collagen, elastin, lessen wrinkles. And so this is like we shaved off maybe 30% of my face with this. I had numbing cream on, but it's still pretty spicy.
And then I started doing red light therapy before bed. This is the math. The approximation we have is the lights are 4 joules per centimeter squared per minute. So I increased my time to 8 minutes. I'm getting 32 joules per centimeter squared of red and near-infrared exposure before bed. My first night of experiment, it increased my sleep duration by an hour. So a huge boost. We'll see over time what happens.
And then I would say that I'm still recovering from travel. I'm still trying to get my sleep architecture on point. I'm still trying to get all my body systems back online. I think when I talk about this, people are like, "Oh, you're such a snowflake." And I think when you don't feel exceptional, you don't feel the shittiness as much. When you feel exceptional and you go to bad, man, it stings.
So, I'm in a recoil phase of just how bad and devastating international travel is for health. And we have a few clinics in China opening up and our China team is wanting us to be out in China this fall. And man, I don't know how to do it. But trying to figure out what we do on the international front. We were also going to do a Middle East trip. So yeah, trying to figure that out.
All right, you guys. Love hanging out with you.
Good to see you guys. Okay, guys. Be well. Bye.
This is the Bryan Johnson podcast. Special thanks to my co-hosts, Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin. For more science breakdowns and protocols, subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow the podcast on your favorite platform, or follow me on Instagram or X. Bryan
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