It's the bizarre story of a former tech entrepreneur on a mission to defy ageing and achieve immortality.
In this episode, we'll be talking about Bryan Johnson, his algorithmic lifestyle, and the broader vision for a global movement dedicated to extending human life.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:26] For the rock and roll fans out there, sorry, I don’t mean the lead singer of AC/DC, nor do I mean the controversial raw meat-eating influencer, Liver King.
[00:00:36] I am talking about Bryan Johnson, the former technology executive who decided a couple of years ago that he was going to make it his life’s mission to live forever.
[00:00:47] So, in the spirit of us mere mortals all having limited time, let’s get right into it and learn about the unusual plans of Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:59] Those of you with an encyclopaedic knowledge of The Bible might remember what is written in the Book of Psalms, Psalm 90:10.
[00:01:08] It goes like this: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
[00:01:27] “Score” means twenty in this case, so threescore and ten means three times twenty, and then 10, so 70.
[00:01:37] In other words, this psalm says “Humans live for 70 years, sometimes 80 if they are strong and healthy, but life ends, we all die”.
[00:01:49] Now, this was of course written thousands of years ago, when someone would have been pretty lucky to live to their 70th birthday, and even luckier to see their 80th.
[00:02:02] Fortunately for most people around the world today, we are living for longer, 70 is now 80, 80 is now 90.
[00:02:11] But progress has slowed.
[00:02:14] In Europe, for example, the life expectancy at birth went from a measly 42.7 years in 1900 to 70 in 1967, but thereafter it has only increased very gradually, and in fact has decreased in the past few years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:02:37] The point is, most people are living longer than ever before, but there is some kind of biological cap on life, the older we get, the more things start to go wrong, and if you are lucky enough to be within touching distance of your 100th birthday, statistically speaking you are in a minority and you will be incredibly lucky to see your 110th birthday, becoming a so-called “supercentenarian”.
[00:03:07] Life has a hard stop, so it seems, and try as we might, there is little we can do to fight this.
[00:03:16] There is, however, one man who does not believe this, a man who has made it his life’s mission to fight off ageing, and ultimately defeat death.
[00:03:29] His name is Bryan Johnson. You might remember him from an episode we made a few weeks back on Transhumanism, but I decided that his story deserves much more than a fleeting glance, to be mentioned in passing.
[00:03:45] His background before embarking on his mission of living forever was as a technology entrepreneur. He founded a company called Braintree, which processed payments for online businesses, and was then sold to PayPal for $800 million.
[00:04:03] Now, this technology background is important for three reasons.
[00:04:07] Firstly, the most obvious reason is that he sold his company for 800 million dollars, and he is thought to have personally walked away with something like 300 million dollars, meaning he never had to work again, and had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on this expensive goal.
[00:04:28] The second reason is related to the first. After becoming extremely rich, he followed the well-trodden path of the rich man throughout history - he realised that he could buy anything: houses, treasures, boats, even fame and power.
[00:04:45] He could wave his credit card and all problems would go away, everything had a price, all issues could be solved, for a fee of course.
[00:04:55] But, like many rich and powerful people throughout history, there was one thing he discovered he could not buy his way out of, one thing that no amount of money could solve: death.
[00:05:08] And the final, perhaps most important reason, has to do with his outlook on life and how the world works.
[00:05:18] If you are a software engineer, or you have a technical background, you will know that the world of computer code and programming is, on one level, blissfully simple. You write code, you give a computer instructions, and it executes them.
[00:05:35] Of course, knowing how to do this effectively requires a large amount of skill and experience but the point is that computers don't make mistakes; humans do.
[00:05:47] And the way Bryan Johnson views the world is more like how a software engineer approaches their work.
[00:05:54] There are inputs and outputs. The biological word, the world of atoms, is no different from the world of bits, of computer code.
[00:06:05] If a seed receives the right amount of water and is put in the right soil, it will grow into a small plant.
[00:06:12] If it receives more water and the right amount of sunlight, it will grow into a tree.
[00:06:17] Inputs and outputs.
[00:06:20] And of course, you need instructions to achieve the desired output.
[00:06:26] To Bryan Johnson, the human body is no different.
[00:06:31] We all sort of know this already. We know that eating processed food, drinking alcohol, not exercising, not getting natural light, smoking, and a plethora of other “unhealthy things”, we know that these are “bad for us”.
[00:06:48] And on the flip side, we know that it’s a good thing to eat fruit and vegetables, to drink lots of water, to exercise, to have natural light, and so on.
[00:06:58] But we tend to know this on a general level.
[00:07:02] Bryan Johnson wanted to know the exact instructions.
[00:07:07] How much protein does he need to eat on a daily basis?
[00:07:11] How much water?
[00:07:12] How much sleep?
[00:07:13] What is the perfect amount of exercise?
[00:07:17] He wanted a blueprint for exactly what a human needs to do to keep their body in the optimum state, he wanted an instruction manual for eternal life.
[00:07:30] Of course, the world is full of fitness and lifestyle coaches, telling you how to exercise in a particular way or follow a certain diet, but these tend to be general.
[00:07:42] Bryan Johnson wanted exact instructions, he wanted the perfect recipe.
[00:07:48] There was none, so he decided to try to create it for himself.
[00:07:54] It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this interest and project started, but as early as 2019 he publicly declared that he was making some unconventional moves to optimise his sleep.
[00:08:07] On the second of February, 2019, he announced via Twitter, and I’m quoting directly: “For sleep optimization, I’ve been eating dinner at 4pm, not drinking alcohol, and going to bed at 9pm. Who knew that being the most boring person ever could feel SO GOOD”.
[00:08:28] A year later he then “fired Evening Bryan”, not allowing himself to make any decisions in the evening about what he consumed. He thought about his own decision-making and saw that in the evening he made poor decisions about what to eat. Instead, of thinking, “ok, I should make better decisions in the evening”, he simply said, “Evening Bryan is not allowed to make any decisions”.
[00:08:56] Fast forward a few years, and this lifestyle hobby has transformed into something even more extreme.
[00:09:05] Now it isn’t just “Evening Bryan” that is not allowed to make any decisions about Bryan Johnson’s food consumption; no Bryans can decide what Bryan Johnson eats or drinks. Everything he puts in his body is prescribed by an algorithm, based on the measurements of his body.
[00:09:24] Much like a patient in a hospital might be hooked up to all sorts of machines that measure their blood pressure and heart rate, so that a doctor can decide if they need more or less of a drug, Bryan Johnson’s body is constantly being measured so that an algorithm can prescribe him exactly the right type of nutrition: how many grammes of protein, how much fat, how much salt, how much water, and so on.
[00:09:50] He publicly announced this in October of 2021, and according to Johnson at least, it is working.
[00:09:58] Now, how do you define “working”, you might be thinking.
[00:10:03] Well, one data point that is given from these frequent measurements is the “biological age” of key organs.
[00:10:12] Last year, when he was 46 years old, he reported that he had the bones of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old.
[00:10:23] In other words, his body was a lot younger than it would have been had he been following a “normal” lifestyle.
[00:10:31] And this brings us to the question of immortality, of cheating death.
[00:10:37] Let’s remember Johnson’s almost algorithmic perspective on the world. There are instructions, inputs, and outputs, if something happens, then something else happens, it’s programming, but for the body.
[00:10:51] For most people, their biological age increases at the same or similar rate as their real age.
[00:10:58] I am 36 years old, I guess I have the heart and bones of a 36-year-old man. Next year I’ll be one year older, and my heart and my bones will also be one year older. That’s just how life works.
[00:11:13] But Bryan Johnson’s goal is for the biological age of his organs to increase at a slower rate than his real age, so instead of adding a biological year every 365 days, he adds less than a year.
[00:11:31] To be precise, his stated goal for 2024 is to lower his speed of ageing to 0.69, so he adds 0.69 biological years for every real year.
[00:11:46] But 0.69 years is still more than 0.
[00:11:51] Doing this slows the ageing process, but it doesn’t stop it altogether.
[00:11:57] His idea, his mission, is to slow down the ageing process to a sufficient degree that he’s able to live long enough for more breakthroughs to be made.
[00:12:09] And as you’ve seen, he is patient zero, publicly documenting everything from his annual intake of vegetables to the number of pills he has taken, from the number of hours of nighttime erections to the hours of exercise.
[00:12:23] His goal is to create this global movement of people who do exactly what he is doing.
[00:12:30] The ironic thing, or perhaps the sad thing, is that a lot of what he is doing is just plain common sense backed by decades of scientific and medical research.
[00:12:43] Sure, some elements of his routine have raised concerns from medical professionals, especially the more intrusive elements and the sheer number of pills he is taking at the same time.
[00:12:55] But a lot of it is stuff that you and I know already.
[00:12:59] We know that it’s important to get a good night’s sleep, to eat healthily, to limit alcohol, and to exercise frequently.
[00:13:07] On one level, what Bryan Johnson is proposing isn’t that complicated, most people just aren’t prepared to sacrifice “living life” to do it.
[00:13:17] To give you a simple and perhaps obvious example, over the Christmas break he posted a picture of himself at an American bowling alley.
[00:13:28] On the left-hand side of the picture was a menu with an image of fried chicken and cheesy tacos, on the right-hand side was Bryan Johnson with his own high protein and low fat nut-based pudding that he had brought along instead.
[00:13:44] We all know that eating the high protein nut-based food would be a healthier option than eating the fried chicken and cheesy tacos, and we all know that eating healthier foods is a good thing for us and will probably mean that if we do it every day we will live for longer.
[00:14:02] But do we bring along nut-based pudding to a social event?
[00:14:06] No, we order the fried chicken and cheesy tacos.
[00:14:11] The interesting thing that Bryan Johnson is trying to do is to get us to think about our relationship with food, drink, and our lifestyles in a very different way.
[00:14:22] Instead of doing what we want to do, what we think will make us feel good in that moment, we should outsource that decision to someone else.
[00:14:32] Bryan Johnson is outsourcing that decision to an algorithm that tells him what to eat and drink, based on the measurements of what is happening in his body. This is an expensive procedure, costing Johnson a reported 2 million dollars a year.
[00:14:48] But what he is trying to do is to create this blueprint, this system, for what people should do, so that, as a follower of Johnson’s Blueprint, you get your instructions and your inputs from his system rather than choosing them yourself.
[00:15:06] His publicly stated goal is to create this open source, free, system for how anyone can live their lives to ensure that they can live as long as possible.
[00:15:16] Now, this brings us to the million-dollar question, if you knew that you could add another 20, 30, 50, or 100 years to your life by following a very strict not just diet but an entire way of living, from going to bed at 9 pm to giving up all of your favourite food and drink, would you do it?
[00:15:39] To bring it back to the example of the picture from the bowling alley, would you forgo the cheesy nachos and fried chicken and instead bring along a nutty pudding if you knew that this would mean you would live to 150? Not just at the bowling alley, but would you apply this logic to everything in your life?
[00:15:58] Bryan Johnson certainly thinks that there are enough people in the world who would answer “yes” to this question, and he's been very busy for the past year or so shouting from the rooftops, doing interviews with hundreds of magazines and TV shows, to try to reach as many people as possible who might be sympathetic to this goal.
[00:16:17] And it seems to be working. No matter whether you agree with him or not, his message has been highly effective, his face splashed all over newspapers and magazines.
[00:16:29] Will he live forever?
[00:16:31] Who knows, but you certainly can’t deny that he’s trying.
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Bryan Johnson, The Man Who Wants To Live Forever.
[00:16:42] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that this was an interesting deeper dive into someone that we touched on a few episodes ago.
[00:16:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:54] If you could live to 150 but you couldn’t decide what to eat or drink for the rest of your life, would you do it?
[00:17:01] If you have made a drastic lifestyle change in your life, what was it, why did you make it, and how has it changed your outlook on life?
[00:17:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:13] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:27] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:26] For the rock and roll fans out there, sorry, I don’t mean the lead singer of AC/DC, nor do I mean the controversial raw meat-eating influencer, Liver King.
[00:00:36] I am talking about Bryan Johnson, the former technology executive who decided a couple of years ago that he was going to make it his life’s mission to live forever.
[00:00:47] So, in the spirit of us mere mortals all having limited time, let’s get right into it and learn about the unusual plans of Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:59] Those of you with an encyclopaedic knowledge of The Bible might remember what is written in the Book of Psalms, Psalm 90:10.
[00:01:08] It goes like this: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
[00:01:27] “Score” means twenty in this case, so threescore and ten means three times twenty, and then 10, so 70.
[00:01:37] In other words, this psalm says “Humans live for 70 years, sometimes 80 if they are strong and healthy, but life ends, we all die”.
[00:01:49] Now, this was of course written thousands of years ago, when someone would have been pretty lucky to live to their 70th birthday, and even luckier to see their 80th.
[00:02:02] Fortunately for most people around the world today, we are living for longer, 70 is now 80, 80 is now 90.
[00:02:11] But progress has slowed.
[00:02:14] In Europe, for example, the life expectancy at birth went from a measly 42.7 years in 1900 to 70 in 1967, but thereafter it has only increased very gradually, and in fact has decreased in the past few years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:02:37] The point is, most people are living longer than ever before, but there is some kind of biological cap on life, the older we get, the more things start to go wrong, and if you are lucky enough to be within touching distance of your 100th birthday, statistically speaking you are in a minority and you will be incredibly lucky to see your 110th birthday, becoming a so-called “supercentenarian”.
[00:03:07] Life has a hard stop, so it seems, and try as we might, there is little we can do to fight this.
[00:03:16] There is, however, one man who does not believe this, a man who has made it his life’s mission to fight off ageing, and ultimately defeat death.
[00:03:29] His name is Bryan Johnson. You might remember him from an episode we made a few weeks back on Transhumanism, but I decided that his story deserves much more than a fleeting glance, to be mentioned in passing.
[00:03:45] His background before embarking on his mission of living forever was as a technology entrepreneur. He founded a company called Braintree, which processed payments for online businesses, and was then sold to PayPal for $800 million.
[00:04:03] Now, this technology background is important for three reasons.
[00:04:07] Firstly, the most obvious reason is that he sold his company for 800 million dollars, and he is thought to have personally walked away with something like 300 million dollars, meaning he never had to work again, and had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on this expensive goal.
[00:04:28] The second reason is related to the first. After becoming extremely rich, he followed the well-trodden path of the rich man throughout history - he realised that he could buy anything: houses, treasures, boats, even fame and power.
[00:04:45] He could wave his credit card and all problems would go away, everything had a price, all issues could be solved, for a fee of course.
[00:04:55] But, like many rich and powerful people throughout history, there was one thing he discovered he could not buy his way out of, one thing that no amount of money could solve: death.
[00:05:08] And the final, perhaps most important reason, has to do with his outlook on life and how the world works.
[00:05:18] If you are a software engineer, or you have a technical background, you will know that the world of computer code and programming is, on one level, blissfully simple. You write code, you give a computer instructions, and it executes them.
[00:05:35] Of course, knowing how to do this effectively requires a large amount of skill and experience but the point is that computers don't make mistakes; humans do.
[00:05:47] And the way Bryan Johnson views the world is more like how a software engineer approaches their work.
[00:05:54] There are inputs and outputs. The biological word, the world of atoms, is no different from the world of bits, of computer code.
[00:06:05] If a seed receives the right amount of water and is put in the right soil, it will grow into a small plant.
[00:06:12] If it receives more water and the right amount of sunlight, it will grow into a tree.
[00:06:17] Inputs and outputs.
[00:06:20] And of course, you need instructions to achieve the desired output.
[00:06:26] To Bryan Johnson, the human body is no different.
[00:06:31] We all sort of know this already. We know that eating processed food, drinking alcohol, not exercising, not getting natural light, smoking, and a plethora of other “unhealthy things”, we know that these are “bad for us”.
[00:06:48] And on the flip side, we know that it’s a good thing to eat fruit and vegetables, to drink lots of water, to exercise, to have natural light, and so on.
[00:06:58] But we tend to know this on a general level.
[00:07:02] Bryan Johnson wanted to know the exact instructions.
[00:07:07] How much protein does he need to eat on a daily basis?
[00:07:11] How much water?
[00:07:12] How much sleep?
[00:07:13] What is the perfect amount of exercise?
[00:07:17] He wanted a blueprint for exactly what a human needs to do to keep their body in the optimum state, he wanted an instruction manual for eternal life.
[00:07:30] Of course, the world is full of fitness and lifestyle coaches, telling you how to exercise in a particular way or follow a certain diet, but these tend to be general.
[00:07:42] Bryan Johnson wanted exact instructions, he wanted the perfect recipe.
[00:07:48] There was none, so he decided to try to create it for himself.
[00:07:54] It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this interest and project started, but as early as 2019 he publicly declared that he was making some unconventional moves to optimise his sleep.
[00:08:07] On the second of February, 2019, he announced via Twitter, and I’m quoting directly: “For sleep optimization, I’ve been eating dinner at 4pm, not drinking alcohol, and going to bed at 9pm. Who knew that being the most boring person ever could feel SO GOOD”.
[00:08:28] A year later he then “fired Evening Bryan”, not allowing himself to make any decisions in the evening about what he consumed. He thought about his own decision-making and saw that in the evening he made poor decisions about what to eat. Instead, of thinking, “ok, I should make better decisions in the evening”, he simply said, “Evening Bryan is not allowed to make any decisions”.
[00:08:56] Fast forward a few years, and this lifestyle hobby has transformed into something even more extreme.
[00:09:05] Now it isn’t just “Evening Bryan” that is not allowed to make any decisions about Bryan Johnson’s food consumption; no Bryans can decide what Bryan Johnson eats or drinks. Everything he puts in his body is prescribed by an algorithm, based on the measurements of his body.
[00:09:24] Much like a patient in a hospital might be hooked up to all sorts of machines that measure their blood pressure and heart rate, so that a doctor can decide if they need more or less of a drug, Bryan Johnson’s body is constantly being measured so that an algorithm can prescribe him exactly the right type of nutrition: how many grammes of protein, how much fat, how much salt, how much water, and so on.
[00:09:50] He publicly announced this in October of 2021, and according to Johnson at least, it is working.
[00:09:58] Now, how do you define “working”, you might be thinking.
[00:10:03] Well, one data point that is given from these frequent measurements is the “biological age” of key organs.
[00:10:12] Last year, when he was 46 years old, he reported that he had the bones of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old.
[00:10:23] In other words, his body was a lot younger than it would have been had he been following a “normal” lifestyle.
[00:10:31] And this brings us to the question of immortality, of cheating death.
[00:10:37] Let’s remember Johnson’s almost algorithmic perspective on the world. There are instructions, inputs, and outputs, if something happens, then something else happens, it’s programming, but for the body.
[00:10:51] For most people, their biological age increases at the same or similar rate as their real age.
[00:10:58] I am 36 years old, I guess I have the heart and bones of a 36-year-old man. Next year I’ll be one year older, and my heart and my bones will also be one year older. That’s just how life works.
[00:11:13] But Bryan Johnson’s goal is for the biological age of his organs to increase at a slower rate than his real age, so instead of adding a biological year every 365 days, he adds less than a year.
[00:11:31] To be precise, his stated goal for 2024 is to lower his speed of ageing to 0.69, so he adds 0.69 biological years for every real year.
[00:11:46] But 0.69 years is still more than 0.
[00:11:51] Doing this slows the ageing process, but it doesn’t stop it altogether.
[00:11:57] His idea, his mission, is to slow down the ageing process to a sufficient degree that he’s able to live long enough for more breakthroughs to be made.
[00:12:09] And as you’ve seen, he is patient zero, publicly documenting everything from his annual intake of vegetables to the number of pills he has taken, from the number of hours of nighttime erections to the hours of exercise.
[00:12:23] His goal is to create this global movement of people who do exactly what he is doing.
[00:12:30] The ironic thing, or perhaps the sad thing, is that a lot of what he is doing is just plain common sense backed by decades of scientific and medical research.
[00:12:43] Sure, some elements of his routine have raised concerns from medical professionals, especially the more intrusive elements and the sheer number of pills he is taking at the same time.
[00:12:55] But a lot of it is stuff that you and I know already.
[00:12:59] We know that it’s important to get a good night’s sleep, to eat healthily, to limit alcohol, and to exercise frequently.
[00:13:07] On one level, what Bryan Johnson is proposing isn’t that complicated, most people just aren’t prepared to sacrifice “living life” to do it.
[00:13:17] To give you a simple and perhaps obvious example, over the Christmas break he posted a picture of himself at an American bowling alley.
[00:13:28] On the left-hand side of the picture was a menu with an image of fried chicken and cheesy tacos, on the right-hand side was Bryan Johnson with his own high protein and low fat nut-based pudding that he had brought along instead.
[00:13:44] We all know that eating the high protein nut-based food would be a healthier option than eating the fried chicken and cheesy tacos, and we all know that eating healthier foods is a good thing for us and will probably mean that if we do it every day we will live for longer.
[00:14:02] But do we bring along nut-based pudding to a social event?
[00:14:06] No, we order the fried chicken and cheesy tacos.
[00:14:11] The interesting thing that Bryan Johnson is trying to do is to get us to think about our relationship with food, drink, and our lifestyles in a very different way.
[00:14:22] Instead of doing what we want to do, what we think will make us feel good in that moment, we should outsource that decision to someone else.
[00:14:32] Bryan Johnson is outsourcing that decision to an algorithm that tells him what to eat and drink, based on the measurements of what is happening in his body. This is an expensive procedure, costing Johnson a reported 2 million dollars a year.
[00:14:48] But what he is trying to do is to create this blueprint, this system, for what people should do, so that, as a follower of Johnson’s Blueprint, you get your instructions and your inputs from his system rather than choosing them yourself.
[00:15:06] His publicly stated goal is to create this open source, free, system for how anyone can live their lives to ensure that they can live as long as possible.
[00:15:16] Now, this brings us to the million-dollar question, if you knew that you could add another 20, 30, 50, or 100 years to your life by following a very strict not just diet but an entire way of living, from going to bed at 9 pm to giving up all of your favourite food and drink, would you do it?
[00:15:39] To bring it back to the example of the picture from the bowling alley, would you forgo the cheesy nachos and fried chicken and instead bring along a nutty pudding if you knew that this would mean you would live to 150? Not just at the bowling alley, but would you apply this logic to everything in your life?
[00:15:58] Bryan Johnson certainly thinks that there are enough people in the world who would answer “yes” to this question, and he's been very busy for the past year or so shouting from the rooftops, doing interviews with hundreds of magazines and TV shows, to try to reach as many people as possible who might be sympathetic to this goal.
[00:16:17] And it seems to be working. No matter whether you agree with him or not, his message has been highly effective, his face splashed all over newspapers and magazines.
[00:16:29] Will he live forever?
[00:16:31] Who knows, but you certainly can’t deny that he’s trying.
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Bryan Johnson, The Man Who Wants To Live Forever.
[00:16:42] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that this was an interesting deeper dive into someone that we touched on a few episodes ago.
[00:16:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:54] If you could live to 150 but you couldn’t decide what to eat or drink for the rest of your life, would you do it?
[00:17:01] If you have made a drastic lifestyle change in your life, what was it, why did you make it, and how has it changed your outlook on life?
[00:17:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:13] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:27] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:26] For the rock and roll fans out there, sorry, I don’t mean the lead singer of AC/DC, nor do I mean the controversial raw meat-eating influencer, Liver King.
[00:00:36] I am talking about Bryan Johnson, the former technology executive who decided a couple of years ago that he was going to make it his life’s mission to live forever.
[00:00:47] So, in the spirit of us mere mortals all having limited time, let’s get right into it and learn about the unusual plans of Bryan Johnson.
[00:00:59] Those of you with an encyclopaedic knowledge of The Bible might remember what is written in the Book of Psalms, Psalm 90:10.
[00:01:08] It goes like this: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
[00:01:27] “Score” means twenty in this case, so threescore and ten means three times twenty, and then 10, so 70.
[00:01:37] In other words, this psalm says “Humans live for 70 years, sometimes 80 if they are strong and healthy, but life ends, we all die”.
[00:01:49] Now, this was of course written thousands of years ago, when someone would have been pretty lucky to live to their 70th birthday, and even luckier to see their 80th.
[00:02:02] Fortunately for most people around the world today, we are living for longer, 70 is now 80, 80 is now 90.
[00:02:11] But progress has slowed.
[00:02:14] In Europe, for example, the life expectancy at birth went from a measly 42.7 years in 1900 to 70 in 1967, but thereafter it has only increased very gradually, and in fact has decreased in the past few years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:02:37] The point is, most people are living longer than ever before, but there is some kind of biological cap on life, the older we get, the more things start to go wrong, and if you are lucky enough to be within touching distance of your 100th birthday, statistically speaking you are in a minority and you will be incredibly lucky to see your 110th birthday, becoming a so-called “supercentenarian”.
[00:03:07] Life has a hard stop, so it seems, and try as we might, there is little we can do to fight this.
[00:03:16] There is, however, one man who does not believe this, a man who has made it his life’s mission to fight off ageing, and ultimately defeat death.
[00:03:29] His name is Bryan Johnson. You might remember him from an episode we made a few weeks back on Transhumanism, but I decided that his story deserves much more than a fleeting glance, to be mentioned in passing.
[00:03:45] His background before embarking on his mission of living forever was as a technology entrepreneur. He founded a company called Braintree, which processed payments for online businesses, and was then sold to PayPal for $800 million.
[00:04:03] Now, this technology background is important for three reasons.
[00:04:07] Firstly, the most obvious reason is that he sold his company for 800 million dollars, and he is thought to have personally walked away with something like 300 million dollars, meaning he never had to work again, and had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on this expensive goal.
[00:04:28] The second reason is related to the first. After becoming extremely rich, he followed the well-trodden path of the rich man throughout history - he realised that he could buy anything: houses, treasures, boats, even fame and power.
[00:04:45] He could wave his credit card and all problems would go away, everything had a price, all issues could be solved, for a fee of course.
[00:04:55] But, like many rich and powerful people throughout history, there was one thing he discovered he could not buy his way out of, one thing that no amount of money could solve: death.
[00:05:08] And the final, perhaps most important reason, has to do with his outlook on life and how the world works.
[00:05:18] If you are a software engineer, or you have a technical background, you will know that the world of computer code and programming is, on one level, blissfully simple. You write code, you give a computer instructions, and it executes them.
[00:05:35] Of course, knowing how to do this effectively requires a large amount of skill and experience but the point is that computers don't make mistakes; humans do.
[00:05:47] And the way Bryan Johnson views the world is more like how a software engineer approaches their work.
[00:05:54] There are inputs and outputs. The biological word, the world of atoms, is no different from the world of bits, of computer code.
[00:06:05] If a seed receives the right amount of water and is put in the right soil, it will grow into a small plant.
[00:06:12] If it receives more water and the right amount of sunlight, it will grow into a tree.
[00:06:17] Inputs and outputs.
[00:06:20] And of course, you need instructions to achieve the desired output.
[00:06:26] To Bryan Johnson, the human body is no different.
[00:06:31] We all sort of know this already. We know that eating processed food, drinking alcohol, not exercising, not getting natural light, smoking, and a plethora of other “unhealthy things”, we know that these are “bad for us”.
[00:06:48] And on the flip side, we know that it’s a good thing to eat fruit and vegetables, to drink lots of water, to exercise, to have natural light, and so on.
[00:06:58] But we tend to know this on a general level.
[00:07:02] Bryan Johnson wanted to know the exact instructions.
[00:07:07] How much protein does he need to eat on a daily basis?
[00:07:11] How much water?
[00:07:12] How much sleep?
[00:07:13] What is the perfect amount of exercise?
[00:07:17] He wanted a blueprint for exactly what a human needs to do to keep their body in the optimum state, he wanted an instruction manual for eternal life.
[00:07:30] Of course, the world is full of fitness and lifestyle coaches, telling you how to exercise in a particular way or follow a certain diet, but these tend to be general.
[00:07:42] Bryan Johnson wanted exact instructions, he wanted the perfect recipe.
[00:07:48] There was none, so he decided to try to create it for himself.
[00:07:54] It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this interest and project started, but as early as 2019 he publicly declared that he was making some unconventional moves to optimise his sleep.
[00:08:07] On the second of February, 2019, he announced via Twitter, and I’m quoting directly: “For sleep optimization, I’ve been eating dinner at 4pm, not drinking alcohol, and going to bed at 9pm. Who knew that being the most boring person ever could feel SO GOOD”.
[00:08:28] A year later he then “fired Evening Bryan”, not allowing himself to make any decisions in the evening about what he consumed. He thought about his own decision-making and saw that in the evening he made poor decisions about what to eat. Instead, of thinking, “ok, I should make better decisions in the evening”, he simply said, “Evening Bryan is not allowed to make any decisions”.
[00:08:56] Fast forward a few years, and this lifestyle hobby has transformed into something even more extreme.
[00:09:05] Now it isn’t just “Evening Bryan” that is not allowed to make any decisions about Bryan Johnson’s food consumption; no Bryans can decide what Bryan Johnson eats or drinks. Everything he puts in his body is prescribed by an algorithm, based on the measurements of his body.
[00:09:24] Much like a patient in a hospital might be hooked up to all sorts of machines that measure their blood pressure and heart rate, so that a doctor can decide if they need more or less of a drug, Bryan Johnson’s body is constantly being measured so that an algorithm can prescribe him exactly the right type of nutrition: how many grammes of protein, how much fat, how much salt, how much water, and so on.
[00:09:50] He publicly announced this in October of 2021, and according to Johnson at least, it is working.
[00:09:58] Now, how do you define “working”, you might be thinking.
[00:10:03] Well, one data point that is given from these frequent measurements is the “biological age” of key organs.
[00:10:12] Last year, when he was 46 years old, he reported that he had the bones of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old.
[00:10:23] In other words, his body was a lot younger than it would have been had he been following a “normal” lifestyle.
[00:10:31] And this brings us to the question of immortality, of cheating death.
[00:10:37] Let’s remember Johnson’s almost algorithmic perspective on the world. There are instructions, inputs, and outputs, if something happens, then something else happens, it’s programming, but for the body.
[00:10:51] For most people, their biological age increases at the same or similar rate as their real age.
[00:10:58] I am 36 years old, I guess I have the heart and bones of a 36-year-old man. Next year I’ll be one year older, and my heart and my bones will also be one year older. That’s just how life works.
[00:11:13] But Bryan Johnson’s goal is for the biological age of his organs to increase at a slower rate than his real age, so instead of adding a biological year every 365 days, he adds less than a year.
[00:11:31] To be precise, his stated goal for 2024 is to lower his speed of ageing to 0.69, so he adds 0.69 biological years for every real year.
[00:11:46] But 0.69 years is still more than 0.
[00:11:51] Doing this slows the ageing process, but it doesn’t stop it altogether.
[00:11:57] His idea, his mission, is to slow down the ageing process to a sufficient degree that he’s able to live long enough for more breakthroughs to be made.
[00:12:09] And as you’ve seen, he is patient zero, publicly documenting everything from his annual intake of vegetables to the number of pills he has taken, from the number of hours of nighttime erections to the hours of exercise.
[00:12:23] His goal is to create this global movement of people who do exactly what he is doing.
[00:12:30] The ironic thing, or perhaps the sad thing, is that a lot of what he is doing is just plain common sense backed by decades of scientific and medical research.
[00:12:43] Sure, some elements of his routine have raised concerns from medical professionals, especially the more intrusive elements and the sheer number of pills he is taking at the same time.
[00:12:55] But a lot of it is stuff that you and I know already.
[00:12:59] We know that it’s important to get a good night’s sleep, to eat healthily, to limit alcohol, and to exercise frequently.
[00:13:07] On one level, what Bryan Johnson is proposing isn’t that complicated, most people just aren’t prepared to sacrifice “living life” to do it.
[00:13:17] To give you a simple and perhaps obvious example, over the Christmas break he posted a picture of himself at an American bowling alley.
[00:13:28] On the left-hand side of the picture was a menu with an image of fried chicken and cheesy tacos, on the right-hand side was Bryan Johnson with his own high protein and low fat nut-based pudding that he had brought along instead.
[00:13:44] We all know that eating the high protein nut-based food would be a healthier option than eating the fried chicken and cheesy tacos, and we all know that eating healthier foods is a good thing for us and will probably mean that if we do it every day we will live for longer.
[00:14:02] But do we bring along nut-based pudding to a social event?
[00:14:06] No, we order the fried chicken and cheesy tacos.
[00:14:11] The interesting thing that Bryan Johnson is trying to do is to get us to think about our relationship with food, drink, and our lifestyles in a very different way.
[00:14:22] Instead of doing what we want to do, what we think will make us feel good in that moment, we should outsource that decision to someone else.
[00:14:32] Bryan Johnson is outsourcing that decision to an algorithm that tells him what to eat and drink, based on the measurements of what is happening in his body. This is an expensive procedure, costing Johnson a reported 2 million dollars a year.
[00:14:48] But what he is trying to do is to create this blueprint, this system, for what people should do, so that, as a follower of Johnson’s Blueprint, you get your instructions and your inputs from his system rather than choosing them yourself.
[00:15:06] His publicly stated goal is to create this open source, free, system for how anyone can live their lives to ensure that they can live as long as possible.
[00:15:16] Now, this brings us to the million-dollar question, if you knew that you could add another 20, 30, 50, or 100 years to your life by following a very strict not just diet but an entire way of living, from going to bed at 9 pm to giving up all of your favourite food and drink, would you do it?
[00:15:39] To bring it back to the example of the picture from the bowling alley, would you forgo the cheesy nachos and fried chicken and instead bring along a nutty pudding if you knew that this would mean you would live to 150? Not just at the bowling alley, but would you apply this logic to everything in your life?
[00:15:58] Bryan Johnson certainly thinks that there are enough people in the world who would answer “yes” to this question, and he's been very busy for the past year or so shouting from the rooftops, doing interviews with hundreds of magazines and TV shows, to try to reach as many people as possible who might be sympathetic to this goal.
[00:16:17] And it seems to be working. No matter whether you agree with him or not, his message has been highly effective, his face splashed all over newspapers and magazines.
[00:16:29] Will he live forever?
[00:16:31] Who knows, but you certainly can’t deny that he’s trying.
[00:16:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Bryan Johnson, The Man Who Wants To Live Forever.
[00:16:42] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that this was an interesting deeper dive into someone that we touched on a few episodes ago.
[00:16:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:54] If you could live to 150 but you couldn’t decide what to eat or drink for the rest of your life, would you do it?
[00:17:01] If you have made a drastic lifestyle change in your life, what was it, why did you make it, and how has it changed your outlook on life?
[00:17:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:17:13] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:27] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
