Creatine, Sleep Trackers, and AI Doctors | Don’t Die Podcast #1

Summary

In the first episode of the Don’t Die Podcast, Bryan Johnson and his co-founders discuss modern challenges and intersections of technology, health, and longevity. The engaging conversation covers various topics, including the inefficiencies of the ER, the validity of health supplements like creatine, and the significance of sleep on creativity and performance. Bryan emphasizes the importance of enhancing human intelligence in tandem with advancing AI, while co-founders share insights from their personal and professional experiences in health optimization.

Highlights

• Bryan shares a jarring experience of dining out and the reality of food processes in restaurants. 🍽️
• Dr. Mike discusses ER chaos and the importance of self-advocacy in healthcare. 🏥
• The team examines a study indicating creatine's nuanced effectiveness on muscle gain and cognitive benefits. 🧠
• Andre Kapathy supports Bryan's emphasis on sleep's impact on creativity and productivity through his personal study. 📈
• The hosts reflect on the body's adaptability in unhealthy lifestyles and the importance of measuring health metrics. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• Bryan Johnson highlights the stark contrast between his health-focused lifestyle and societal norms, emphasizing food toxins and ER inefficiencies. 🚀
• The co-founders discuss the potential cognitive and performance benefits of creatine, despite mixed muscle mass findings. 🏋️‍♂️
• Sleep trackers show significant insights, proving their value in measuring the impact of sleep on daily performance. 😴
• Advocating for oneself in medical systems is crucial, as advised by Dr. Mike and co-founders. 🏥
• Bryan emphasizes the parallel evolution of human and artificial intelligence for better decision-making and personal growth. 🤖

Overview

Bryan Johnson and his team embark on their first Don’t Die Podcast episode, aiming to share insights on health and longevity practices. Bryan starts by sharing a contrarian view of societal dining norms, highlighting the often-overlooked food toxin exposure. His colleagues, including Dr. Mike and co-founder Kate, express a similar focus on health consciousness, revealing the chaos and pressing need for self-advocacy within emergency rooms.

In a deep dive into health supplements, the co-hosts dissect a recent creatine study. Although creatine supplementation is questioned for its muscle gain claims, the team concurs its cognitive benefits remain promising. They emphasize the need for longer studies to truly determine its effects, both for general health and specific performance advantages. Their conversation paves the way for a broader look at how scientific studies often meet public skepticism.

Balancing health with technology, the podcast underscores the emerging intersection of AI and personal wellness. Andre Kapathy's revelation on sleep's profound impact, validated by his personal experiments, reinforces Bryan's message about intelligence evolution. The episode concludes with an appreciation for health metrics' role in personal development and a humorous call for audience feedback, marking a riveting start for the podcast series.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Background The chapter titled 'Introduction and Background' describes an experience of dining at a restaurant with a team. The narrator, who is not accustomed to such outings, expresses surprise at the way food is served across different tables, especially given their knowledge of food and toxins and how food is processed in restaurant settings. The team responds by highlighting this as a typical societal norm, indicating that the narrator's observations, while astute, reflect a deviation from everyday practices. The chapter sets the stage by introducing the narrator's perspective on food systems and society.
• 01:00 - 05:00: ER Experiences and Perspectives The chapter captures a scene from the 'Don't Die' podcast where the participants discuss their belief in the possibility of avoiding death. The speaker expresses surprise, likening their conversation to feeling as if they were transported back in time to the early 21st century, comparing the experience to watching a movie. The overall tone blends astonishment with a philosophical exploration of life and immortality.
• 13:00 - 23:00: Creatine Study Discussion In the 'Creatine Study Discussion' chapter, the conversation involves three primary individuals: Kate Tolo, co-founder of 'Don't Die,' Mike Min, a doctor, and an unspecified speaker. Their discussion focuses on their ongoing communication about protocols for improving a particular, unspecified context. They interact frequently, with the speaker talking to Kate about 150 times a day and to Mike around five or six times daily. The dialogue hints at a cooperative effort to enhance their protocols, with a mention that they are working through various issues on a weekly basis. Additionally, there's a light hearted exchange concerning Kate's background in a video call, revealing some aspect of her environment: fake vines as a backdrop.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Body Awareness and Health Measurement The chapter discusses the concept of integrating nature into modern environments to create a harmonious and aesthetically pleasing atmosphere. The speaker reflects on their experience of placing numerous plants in an office setting, aiming to mimic a forest or an arboretum. They acknowledge the challenges in finding a balance between natural elements and the mechanical aspects of modern life, but emphasize the positive impact plants have on creating a beautiful and natural ecosystem within man-made environments.
• 28:00 - 30:00: Anecdote about Food Awareness The chapter titled 'Anecdote about Food Awareness' seems to involve a conversation about caring for plants within a household. The speaker compares their plant care habits with those of their spouse, revealing that while they tend to water plants only when they show signs of wilting, their spouse is more proactive in maintaining them. There is a humorous suggestion that the speaker's reactive style might be influenced by their previous profession as an ER doctor, where they were used to responding to critical signs 'of leaving life'.
• 31:00 - 37:00: Andre Kapathy's Sleep Study This chapter discusses the topic of prioritizing tasks and focusing on critical issues, as explained through a metaphor of plant care. It captures the idea that unless a problem is urgent or life-threatening, it should not be given immediate attention. The speaker reflects on their past behavior and expresses a desire for change, aiming to focus more on future-oriented goals, particularly in areas such as aging and life extension.
• 36:00 - 37:00: Conclusion and Podcast Reflection The chapter discusses the stark contrast between working in emergency medicine versus other medical experiences, particularly focusing on the emotional and intellectual differences. Emergency medicine is described metaphorically as 'banging your head against the wall' due to the constant flow of issues that are often secondary to broader cultural problems.

Creatine, Sleep Trackers, and AI Doctors | Don’t Die Podcast #1 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 we went out to a restaurant The team was was all together I just so rarely do this I was just shocked at watching how the food arrived at various tables across the restaurant I mean it was just I was beside myself But I guess like knowing what I've learned about food and toxins and the way that food is passed through restaurant systems the team was kind of like Brian Yeah Like hey welcome to like normal society This is kind of what people do when it's like so we've built this system that's just so out
• 00:30 - 01:00 outside of that It was very shocking to me It almost felt like I was traveling back in time and viewing like early 21st century and like this is crazy watching a movie or something Today everyone welcome to the the what is this the Don't Die podcast Yeah that sounds great Yeah there we go So don't die podcast Uh we we believe we are the first generation who won't die and we are trying to practice that philosophy and we're trying to uh bring it to you as well So you and your family and your friends can also do it So with me today
• 01:00 - 01:30 uh Kate Tolo is my co-founder of Don't Die and Mike Min who is my doctor I mean Kate and I talk like uh 150 times a day Mike and I talk five or six times a day and we're always chipping away at the uh everything we can do to improve protocol So we're going to go through the various things we're working on on a weekly basis Also we'll fill some some of your questions in time as we create this dialogue Kate is that your real background it is Prove it You guys are killing me on the background Are those vines yeah they're fake Oh
• 01:30 - 02:00 no What does that say about me is this falsely alive or it's just convenient Yeah when we we pl we put a whole bunch of plants in the colonel office We wanted to make it like a a a forest or an arboritum but it's still it's a it's a gorgeous environment It just took us some time to find the the natural uh stable state for nature to coexist with the mechanical world Yeah the ecosystem Yeah It's amazing how much of a difference some plants will make which you can obviously tell based on my background Do you have plants in the
• 02:00 - 02:30 house i do Yeah In the other room not here I need to move them Do you do you maintain them uh sort of Not very well Does somebody in the family have the responsibility of taking care of the plants yeah I would say my wife does a much better job of taking care of the plants than I do I I wait until they wilt and then I water them She proactively waters them Signs of like leaving life Maybe that's like because you were formerly an ER doctor
• 02:30 - 03:00 you're basically waiting for the plants to show up and be like "I'm in urgent need of some care." Yeah Unless you're dying don't talk to me right and you just triage the plans Which one needs attention if you're dying at a certain rate like if if if death is imminent I'll talk to you That sounds about right That's uh I I'd like to think that I've I've changed hopefully I was going to say a little bit more a little bit more future focused these days I mean entirely No you spend I mean basically all of your time on uh on the frontiers of how to slow down speed of aging and reverse
• 03:00 - 03:30 aging damage pretty much Which is super fun Um it's a way different experience than emergency medicine That's for sure What uh what is that like emotionally and intellectually to u like if you just contrast a day in the ER with like a day in our life together oh wow Um it like couldn't be any more different to be honest Uh you know I mean like emergency medicine is just like banging your head against the wall all day long in the sense that you know you've got all of these issues in front of you that are secondary to a culture that doesn't
• 03:30 - 04:00 value health right and it's the the side effect of that is people get super sick and then at the very end of life or at the end of their disease process they come into the emergency department and they present to you like "Hey fix me." and you're you're stuck with uh all of these problems that are all you know ingrained in culture and now my day-to-day is thinking so future focused like years down the road you know um in
• 04:00 - 04:30 terms of I you know optimizing health rather than trying to reverse these terrible trends or focusing on health like you know your health or someone else's health 20 years from now and yeah it couldn't be any more different um which is I think why why I enjoy it so much The the ER was tough It was tough on me What do you think percentage of people that end up in the ER how much of it could have been prevented oh at least um 90 plus% I mean eventually most of
• 04:30 - 05:00 that disease would eventually happen Uh but for for emergency medicine maybe maybe 90 is a little aggressive maybe 80% Because a lot of it is a lot of it is acute like you know trauma you're driving down the road you get in a car wreck or you get pendicitis you get gallbladder issues Those are those are hard to prevent right infections are hard to prevent Uh but the majority of what you see in medicine in general is chronic disease Chronic disease is the most prominent uh issue in medicine
• 05:00 - 05:30 these days And so much of chronic disease is preventable So quite a bit When I hurt my hand years ago I I was holding that five gallallon glass container and it shattered a water jug and it shattered in my hands and it just lacerated my both my hands It it severed the tendon on my left finger my pointer finger So I I was trying to assess the damage and it my hand was just filleted and I tried Yeah I tried to close my hands and this finger wouldn't wouldn't
• 05:30 - 06:00 go down I like "Oh boy this is this is a bad situation." And so when I went into the ER uh the nurse looked at me she's like "Oh yeah like we see like one of these situations a day it's typically from the scooters where people people come in." Yeah And she's like just like it's just like clockwork And so now every time I see someone on the scooter uh rolling around like "Please stop what you're doing right now Don't do this." And you know she was saying that the day before they had this 17-year-old girl beautiful girl and she just destroyed
• 06:00 - 06:30 her face with this terrible scooter accident So but when I went in there I was going to say on the ER um I looked up in real time what the ER procedure was for the conditions of an injury like my hand and it laid it out in something like a a 19st step process So when you're in the ER how much are you following on routine steps and how much are you following are you basically making the call oh that's a good question Um there is a lot of routine in
• 06:30 - 07:00 medicine In traditional medicine there are standard standards of practice that is very much routine So the the art of medicine comes in the diagnosis It's putting putting the person in the in the right uh seat for them to go on their Disney ride right so there's lots of different Disney rides that are that are pre-planned that are pre-organized and it's putting them on the appropriate seat Um so once you make the diagnosis so much of care is standard So very much
• 07:00 - 07:30 the majority of it the challenge not for a laceration of the hand like your case is that case Brian is like that's easy Like you I can close my eyes and take you through that journey no problem The the challenge is when someone presents with a very vague complaint that could be a thousand different things and trying to figure out which one of those things it is So like I have a headache or something or belly pain Yeah Yeah Or I feel weak and dizzy like the these things can be produced by thousands of different um ailments and trying to
• 07:30 - 08:00 figure out which ailment it is is the challenge Mike I don't want to just like spend the time interviewing you but I feel like people in the ER Yeah it's great Let's go there Um I feel like people like what is the secret source you show up in the ER how do you get [ __ ] done because I feel like most people show up in the ER and if you've never done it before it's a war zone you know especially in America right it's like how what are what's the protocol you're saying it's different than Australia i Well you know it's been 10
• 08:00 - 08:30 years since I've lived in Australia but Australia has a I would say a better better medical system than America And you're saying specifically in the ER my experience has been yes the ER here it's bad You show up and it's it's like people are dying you know and they're not getting seen That's how it feels I don't know if that's actually true but it's definitely it feels really disastrous in there It it is chaos Yeah And depending on which ER you you go to there's a variety of chaos but it's it's
• 08:30 - 09:00 generally chaos everywhere I will say like I I've never haven't worked in Australia but I did uh spend some time working in New Zealand in the emergency department there and it was extremely different uh mostly with the degree of um providers physician and uh nurses to patient ratio it was much different whereas you know in in the states on a regular shift doctors are seeing you know like 30 patients a day whereas you know in New Zealand you'd see maybe 10
• 09:00 - 09:30 So you know 3x 3x the level of effort over the same time frame So it's just it's chaos There's you know you're um not as much putting out fires as you are just trying to stop the speed of the burn And then there are some fires where obviously you have to that those fires require all of your attention The severe traumas the sick patients the people coming in cardiac arrest those the ones that require all the focus And then the people with the chronic illnesses that you're not really going to do much with you just try to make sure they're not dying and then you send them off to uh
• 09:30 - 10:00 go back and see their regular physician So it's yeah it's hard it's hard to describe but it is it is chaos for sure So like Mike if a loved one showed up in the ER what would you recommend to them i just had this my mom my mom just had an eye issue and showed up in the ER and uh it's like what do you do how do you advocate for yourself in the system when the system has its own procedures so what would you give a recommendation to people i like my ER friends are going to kill me
• 10:00 - 10:30 Yeah exactly I would Exactly We need them behind the scenes Yeah I I would tell them to honestly I would I would throw your complaints into an LLM and ask it what should be happening and then make sure that that happens for yourself if I'm being totally honest like this feels like we should like uh blur Mike's face right voice and be like we just we just referenced a an anonymous source who's an ER doctor at some prestigious un you know center Doctors always talk about how much they hate it when their patients Google their problems and then come to them with with questions about
• 10:30 - 11:00 their Google problems But like that is such a an active form of advocacy for yourself and it and it's honestly so important in our system because our system is so broken So if you're not asking the questions you're just you're going to be placed on that easy path And it's going to be the easy path for the physician for the for the nurse for everyone in the system because they're getting destroyed They're getting like absolutely murdered on a day-to-day basis Chances are good that they're burned out And if you're not advocating for yourself you put yourself in a
• 11:00 - 11:30 challenging situation Yeah And I feel like that stigma around googling things is valid because we have this like cognitive bias toward catastrophe And so when we like research something and it has a possibility of cancer we like go down that path as opposed to I feel like chativ when I've interacted with it from a healthcare like um position it actually gives me really reasonable advice It's like well if you want to it's probably these things In the really rare cases it's these things So it's much more of a it feels more informed than obviously just googling something Yeah I think the
• 11:30 - 12:00 challenge is it's going to give you good advice based on how good you are giving it information right so the quality of which like if you're giving it like I feel like because I know the right questions to ask if I give Chach GPT all of the symptoms that somebody is presenting with and all of the positive negatives and all those things it's going to give me great responses I don't know if that's true for someone who doesn't understand physiology or medicine quite as well Are you going to get as quality of responses i I can't say that's true or not but we do know that you know chat GPD for example has
• 12:00 - 12:30 performed better than physicians now on standardized tests So in situations where things are quote unquote standard we would expect it to do well Life is rarely standard But um yeah interesting world Yeah What I ended up doing with my mom was I um had her on the phone and I had chat up and I said like treat me like a patient and do an intake with me like here ask me my symptoms and I just went back and forth And so on the phone with her I was just asking probably a hundred questions and eventually it came
• 12:30 - 13:00 back with like here is what I would do here are the exams I would do and then she went off on her way on her Disneyland ride And Kate did you get resolution to that yeah So um she so she didn't get seen in the ER by an opthalmologist and so she went then to an optometrist and got exams and yeah Chhatti essentially correctly diagnosed that it was some sort of inflammation of the eye scratching of the cornea She's now on I think steroid dropped eye drops to resolve it So yeah All right So we
• 13:00 - 13:30 have a topic of the week I don't know if you guys got to check out the study um it was essentially suggesting that creatine might not be as beneficial as what we thought it might be So let me let me read you a little summary So the study found that taking 5 g of creatine daily which is a standard dose did not lead to more muscle gain than training without it Over 12 weeks both groups with and without creatine gained the same amount of lean muscle 2 kg And any early weight gain from creatine likely came from water retention and not real
• 13:30 - 14:00 muscle So what does this mean for the Jim Bros out there that have been taking creatine for 10 years i think I think it's a broader group of people than than Jim Bro taking creatine I think I think creatine is one of the most commonly taken supplements across society Maybe the most Yeah maybe Wow Yeah It's I mean it's not just for muscle but for cognitive benefits There's it's has a very broad appeal Yeah And this study was just looking at muscle I believe right it was only measuring that Yeah So So what do you guys think it's
• 14:00 - 14:30 interesting Well what I'll tell you is I think the most interesting about the study is they they actually tested um the washin period which is what they call it So if you're familiar with creatine like the the classic gym style like gym bro style to use it is to do this like 20 gram um uh ramp up for like five or seven days right and during that time frame you um you basically like saturate the muscles with creatine And why that's important is because when you
• 14:30 - 15:00 when you increase creatine in your body you increase the amount of fluid in your body as well So what this study tried to do was account for that by measuring the the lean muscle mass or the lean body mass um at zero days and then 7 days in and they call that the washin period right because there's a a change in those people who are on creatine because they're holding on to more fluid right and then after that is when they started their study And then they did a 12-week study where um everybody did the same training plan And then one group did did creatine and one group did not take
• 15:00 - 15:30 creatine Um so what's interesting is like they accounted for the extra water weight that you take on when you start creatine Um and the difference that that amounted to at least for this study as compared to other studies that have looked at muscle mass is they found no change in the creatine group as opposed to prior studies that found change but the the theory is they found change because they didn't include this washing period basically Um so that's that's interesting in my mind Um a couple of
• 15:30 - 16:00 caveats They did a 7-day washin period when it really takes longer than that like if you're not going to if you're not going to do the 20 grams a day and you only do five grams a day which is what this study did it really takes 3 to four weeks to saturate the muscles So they didn't really do a long enough wash in period in my opinion Um and then the other thing I'll say is that like um the data that creatine actually increases muscle mass was never actually that good Like there was always like the the prior studies that we have are like very small
• 16:00 - 16:30 changes in muscle mass the data that's good for creatine is actually the things that Brian was mentioning the longevity aspect stuff like the you know u cognitive function um the bone muscle mass um metabolic health that's the stuff to me honestly that's really interesting and then from a performance standpoint speed and power those are the things that change and those are mostly in already well-trained athletes not these untrained athletes that the study was in so what did we learn from the study we learned that people who are not
• 16:30 - 17:00 particularly trained who do a 12-week um exercise program that was a valid exercise program are not going to have significant differences in muscle mass whether they take creatine or don't take creatine But we didn't learn anything about their cognitive function We didn't learn anything about their recovery We didn't learn anything about their power or strength output Okay So when it's muscle mass specifically it's still an unknown how it affects it but there's plenty of potential upside elsewhere Sounds like Yeah And potentially like longer term you might see something 12 weeks isn't a long time you know 12
• 17:00 - 17:30 weeks for training and is is not much So if you took more highly trained people that are performing at a higher level and you studied them with five grams of creatine or not you might actually see a difference especially if you watch them for a longer time period 12 weeks is just not that long to perform a study Yeah I always struggle with these things because so as someone who is really on the the lighter side of science it feels like every week a new study comes out that debunks what was previously known
• 17:30 - 18:00 And I and it kind of paralyzes the average person cuz like I take creatine every day Should I stop should I keep going what does this mean headlines take it out of portion So yeah what what for those who are taking creatine or are not what would you say what would you recommend i wouldn't change a thing about your creatine intake based on the study to be honest with you I mean creatine has as Brian was mentioning earlier like more data backing it than I think almost any other supplement that we're aware of Um and the data is overwhelmingly positive Uh there are
• 18:00 - 18:30 certainly some studies that have shown no change no benefit but not studies that show harm And there's a lot of studies that have shown benefit and not just one area but multiple multiple areas of life So personally like I read the study and it doesn't change a thing for me in terms of how often I'm going to suggest that people take creatine or take it myself And this is a challenge Like we live in a society where the negative is much more interested than the positive So people like to publish headlines about um common things that
• 18:30 - 19:00 are accepted that are no longer accurate And whether you can actually believe those headlines or not is TBD until you get down into the research and really look at it Mike how how does someone know how much creatine to take a day so some people like for example in our longevity mix it's 2.5 grams a day and then uh many people do much higher doses especially when you're trying when you're trying to increase muscle mass People will you know doing very intense uh resistance training pro protocols But
• 19:00 - 19:30 how much should someone take and how can they measure the efficacy of the dosing protocol hard to measure the e efficacy of the dosing protocol But we do know we know a lot about creatine supplementation and the different doses and like if I were just to give you a specific number for general overall health I would probably actually do it weight- based and I would say something like 0.1 g per kilogram per day So that means if you're 70 kilograms which is the size of an an average male generally
• 19:30 - 20:00 that would be about seven grams a day Um so what like probably just like saying five or something like that is not really accurate because you know women may not need quite as much because they're smaller Um if you're larger have larger lean muscle mass you might need more And it also depends a little bit on like what you're getting in your diet already So if you're eating a standard American diet that's generally overall healthy you're probably getting 1 to two grams a day already So if you're getting that
• 20:00 - 20:30 you might only need 2.5 additional grams a day But if you're vegan for example and you don't get um you get very little red meat then you're probably getting less creatine And in that case you probably need a higher dose of daily creatine um in order to saturate your muscles because the goal here is to saturate your muscles at least for performance benefit So I would say if you had to if I had to throw a number out there I would say five grams a day seems adequate for the averagesized human um given what the normal diet generally includes and that's going to
• 20:30 - 21:00 get you to saturation You don't need to do the the loading phase where you're taking 20 grams a day you can just start at five and just do it consistently and then over 3 to 4 weeks you'll you'll get the load the load will happen naturally on its own Now if you're looking to take creatine for other reasons like cognitive performance um like for example if you are trying to offset poor sleep um there's some decent data to suggest that you improve cognitive performance especially in high metabolic demand like brain trauma or poor sleep
• 21:00 - 21:30 or if there's mild cognitive impairment like if early dementia those studies though look at more like 10 to 20 grams of creatine a day So much higher doses And the there is actually there was one study that looked at um total uh like what is the max dose of creatine you could take and we have studied up to 30 grams a day in people for up to 5 years with no significant downsides So as far as we can tell you take extra creatine you pee it out It's not a big deal Um so
• 21:30 - 22:00 it's not doesn't appear that like there is too high of a dose as far as we can as far as we can tell Kate you began taking creatine yourself just when you started Blueprint No Yeah I did I took five milligrams and then I micrograms Grams What is it what's the unit grams Yeah Um and then I switch to the longevity mix which has 2.5 And so then I take an extra half scoop of creatine separately to get my five But maybe Yeah I mean that sounds like a right amount
• 22:00 - 22:30 for me then because I think my my weight is around 57 Yeah Yeah So Mike in summary if if someone is approximating five grams a day uh for uh an average intake is there anything they're looking for in blood work that would help inform them about any about whether or not that dose is appropriate for them would they whether they go up or down not particularly You could look at your uh creatinine which will be um a little bit falsely elevated So creatinine is a measure of kidney function and that will
• 22:30 - 23:00 elevate with creatine supplementation Um I wouldn't necessarily use it to tell whether you're at adequate dosing or not because I think that like it can be confounded by other things like hydration or kidney function Um but you will likely see an increase in your creatinine if you start taking creatine Okay Your your creatine protocol is going to do what based upon this study and this response absolutely nothing That's what I will add Keep pushing forward Actually I was thinking I wish we had like a travel advisory equivalent
• 23:00 - 23:30 for health because these studies come out they go viral They influence society but there's not it's not contributing to some sort of like updated information platform So it's like you have travel advisory you know here's what's happening in the country here's what you should know before you travel to Japan Same thing for creatine like go onto the website It's like okay this new study came out shouldn't really impact because of these reasons Here's what you should know You know wouldn't that be cool that's true You're right Because they do they hit and then it somehow sits in the background noise of our conscious our health consciousness and it's like I
• 23:30 - 24:00 thought I remember something like it didn't really help on muscle and so like why are you doing it right it gets it becomes shorthand and then it somehow becomes uh truth yep yep it's like the latest thing to come out too is like it it has this bias toward that too which because it's new it's assumed to be better right when in reality this was a study in 60 people which is like so tiny such A small study Yeah After decades of research right Brian how much do you take five Five grams Okay Are you going
• 24:00 - 24:30 to continue yeah 2.5 and longevity Are you going to increase it based on your body weight now i'm 70 I'm 77 kg I'm experimenting with 10 And then I've been playing around with um like with travel increasing it because I naturally like where I live I basically have to get up at like 3:00 in the morning to get catch a flight So I always get less sleep So on travel days I'm experimenting with higher doses of like 20 grams to see if it makes me feel more cognitively fresh Have you noticed it makes a difference not yet but I've only I've only tried
• 24:30 - 25:00 that twice now So we'll see You say general body awareness of status of your body Uh making sure you're aware of of basically like a level of familiarity I know after doing my own health protocol for the past couple years I'm intensely body aware Like I I can feel my heart rate at any sec I can tell you how fast or slow my heart is beating at any second Um with pretty good accuracy and uh you know we get so many treatments that I've like carefully inspected every part of
• 25:00 - 25:30 my body Uh I know what to look for color tone function So it's been actually really cool and I it creates a nice contrast for me of how unbody aware I was before You know you just like kind of get up and do your thing and if you have a headache or don't feel great you just kind of like carry pu you know push through But yeah that's been really great that you really can like you can create intuitively really good sensors of your body They're just by pairing up measurement and that that emotion to see like see like you get to feel what the
• 25:30 - 26:00 measurement shows you and you create these really fine intuitions Do you guys ever feel like um Kate I don't know if you have had the same experience with body awareness since you started doing Blueprint but do you ever feel like there's a bad side of that as well like so uh my wife and I were recently in Vegas and um we were just like sort of looking around the casino and um we weren't actually playing at the casino We were going to a show I'm not a big casino guy but um we were going to a show and we were just we had this conversation like how are these people all upright you know like everybody's
• 26:00 - 26:30 drinking everybody's smoking everybody's eating like pizza and like corn dogs and like if I did that I would literally be on the ground I'd feel so bad Like it's like you you once you get healthy you create this body awareness that now all of a sudden like you you it's almost like you can't even allow yourself to mess up anymore right but like yet there are these humans who appear to be thriving Like they're walking around they don't have chronic back pain Like they they seem like they feel great when they're they're just like putting you
• 26:30 - 27:00 know trash into their bodies It's it's sort of an interesting it's an interesting situation that we put ourselves in which obviously I wouldn't choose anything else but but it's unique Yeah The body is incredibly adaptive That's what that tells me It's like we can push off big problems for a very long time and then they can come crashing down It also reminds me Brian of the study at Colonel where the inebriation study Mhm Where for a certain period of time your your mind your brain is able to make up for the deficit of cognitive function from
• 27:00 - 27:30 alcohol until it can no longer And that's how it feels um those people who are standing upright are making up for their body is working hard to make up for the deficit of health that is happening in that transaction That's how at least how is that accurate in that study they did uh they did no alcohol um see like low medium and then high And so what they found is that when someone is in the low medium state you could behaviorally appear non- intoxicated
• 27:30 - 28:00 right you could pass all the tests but the brain scan showed that you were in fact uh impaired and the brain was just compensating for it The brain pulled up and uh cured for the deficit but in the high intoxication uh scale that the brain could no longer have the compensation ability to do so And so you saw impairment both in behavior and the the scan And so this cool like that's why of course like cognitive decline begins a long time before symptoms emerge And you can in fact do early
• 28:00 - 28:30 detection of cognitive decline because your brain has impairment You just don't see it like in your daily life Your your your body awareness doesn't capture the impairment So that kind of granularity of measurements So that was cool to see that like these brain scans can significantly improve your awareness of how your brain is doing just beyond your own uh perceptive behavior You're more drunk than you are aware And so the the analogy would be you're you're more deathly than you're aware in those moments in the casino Yeah I don't know Yeah Actually it reminds me we we went
• 28:30 - 29:00 last night We went out to a restaurant The team was was all together and uh think 25 of us or so went out to a restaurant and I I just so rarely do this you know and I was just shocked at watching how the the food arrived at various tables across the restaurant I mean it was just I was beside myself This is a health restaurant too This is one of the like known health restaurants in Venice in California And it's like
• 29:00 - 29:30 yeah but I guess like knowing what I've learned about food and toxins and uh the way that food is passed through restaurant systems I just I mean the team was kind of like Brian Yeah Like hey welcome to like normal society This is kind of what people do And it's like so but yeah I guess I I really we've built this systems It's just so outside of that that um it was very shocking to me It almost felt like I was traveling back in time and viewing like early 21st
• 29:30 - 30:00 century and like this is crazy watching a movie or something I got a question Why how many years until we know whether or not Brian's like I know we know that Brian's protocol is working in the moment right like his fitness and all this kind of stuff but I imagine age is kind of like a cliff where you get to 70 or something like that and things really start deteriorate Is there a point where when Brian hits that chronological age we'll be like "This is for sure working." Uh that's a really good question I think that point is different
• 30:00 - 30:30 for just about everybody in terms of you know when you start falling off the cliff That cliff is just at a different location for for everyone depending on their genetics and their their lifestyle choices I mean I I think what we're doing now tracking Brian's biological age is probably the probably the best that we can do in terms of like watching you know how fast is he is he continuing to continuing to age and how much are we are we changing that Um so both the like the speed of aging and then his actual biological age um is probably that's
• 30:30 - 31:00 probably our best best metric right now and we're continuing to slow the speed of aging Um so down to like less than what uh 0.5 which is pretty pretty phenomenal Um but you know theoretically to at some point to not die at some point we have we have to continue to slow that process right so more still needs to happen in order to not have a cliff at some point in the future Okay so on body awareness what I loved seeing
• 31:00 - 31:30 the other day was um Andre Kapathy AI well-known figure in AI did his own end of one study at home which I feel like everyone loves to [ __ ] on you Brian for your end of one and it's so fun to see other people coming out and publishing their data and results Um so I'm going to read you this So over two months he tested four sleep trackers So Aura Whoop Eight Sleep and Apple And what he found was Aura and Whoop were top tier But what I was most interested in I think this links back to the body awareness was he said overall I say with
• 31:30 - 32:00 absolute certainty that bas that Brian is basically right and my sleep scores correlate strongly with the quality of work I'm able to do that day When my sleep score is low I lack agency I lack courage I lack creativity I'm simply tired When my sleep score is high I can power through anything On my best days I can sit down and work through 14 hours and barely notice the passage of time It's not subtle The effects are not a function of a single day sleep but the of the accumulated sleep depth across a duration of the last few days So in
• 32:00 - 32:30 other words a single bad night's sleep is usually okay but a few in a row is bad news and vice versa Listen to Brian I love that That's so accurate to how I've experienced sleep too And that's like the weird thing is if you're constantly getting bad nights sleep occasionally you can't detangle what does it feel like to have this accum accumulative good night sleep So I just thought that was really cool It really speaks to the value of of measurement right like and the the associations that we can start to create in our life once
• 32:30 - 33:00 we start actually measuring things And I think that goes beyond sleep as well Like you know once you start measuring things you start having this sense of your body like Brian was talking about earlier And without that objective measure it's hard to understand what all those sub subjective signals mean And once you can put those two things together now you're creating the knowledge and the wisdom to make the right decisions for your own health Yeah totally I always say to people um just start measuring cuz as soon as you know your data every morning even if you do
• 33:00 - 33:30 know interventions it starts to build that relationship of like oh I noticed this today What's my data say i've noticed this today And then once you've got that down you can start doing interventions But yeah Brian I made me think like you should challenge Andre to beat your eightmon sleep score The thing I I absolutely loved this uh write up Uh first I mean Andre is one of the most formidable intellects of our time He's a a founding member of Open AI He led he was a director of AI at at Tesla's uh
• 33:30 - 34:00 program for autonomous driving I mean he he has been on the forefront of the AI revolution And this is the the contemplation that I had after selling Brainree VMO was like we are at this incredibly interesting moment in this part of the galaxy of we're evolving into a new species And so my observation was that the most important thing we could do would be improving our own intelligence to see this moment for what it is and act wisely You know not
• 34:00 - 34:30 foolishly but have wisdom beyond our capacity And so my effort was primarily it was first around kernel which is if we can measure the brain and reveal the invisible things that happen in the brain and then pair that with AI that will give us a vector to begin improving our intelligence at speeds which we otherwise can't and not just intelligence in terms of IQ but you know all dimensions of intelligence like what if you actually could pair your mind with AI as you're working on emotional
• 34:30 - 35:00 development or on correcting your blind uh your blind spots or in trying to have a more well well-rounded thought process or not be you know sucked into these very narrow world views that get you in this tribal mindset So what I was really trying to do is say we need to augment ourselves And so what Andre is doing is Andre is building the future of intelligence in the form of AI And in doing this study he's actually building his own intelligence And that's what he's saying is like hey I did this experiment with sleep I see a
• 35:00 - 35:30 substantial improvement in my intelligence along the realms of creativity right and the elements he talked about So to me that was like the best representation It's the best outcome I could ever ask for which is an arch architect of super intelligence is leaning into what we're saying is it makes sense on all dimensions to invest in your own intellect and trying to acquire abilities beyond your your natural states by taking care of yourself So yeah I just it was so
• 35:30 - 36:00 fulfilling when like we man we we just take so much [ __ ] every day all day And so to have someone incredible like Kim come out and say you know what sleep works It dramatically improves my life You can measure it You can actually create life systems for it It just like man what what an absolute joy to read that So I appreciate him doing that I appreciate his kind words It's just like such a a great moment Uh like it's such a good reward for the efforts we do every day of like you guys let's stop doing stupid stuff Let's not eat junk
• 36:00 - 36:30 food Let's not drink alcohol Let's not go to bed late Let's prioritize sleep Let's like you know let's me exercise Let's measure ourselves So yeah I was I was really excited about that That's awesome Yeah I think that's a good place to wrap up How do we do you guys i mean I mean do you think people are actually going to enjoy this i don't know Okay Well if you're still listening put in the comments below like did this work what do you wish we did differently yeah let us know I'm excited I I I think it's a cool format to be able to talk about
• 36:30 - 37:00 what's happening this week Yeah So if you listen to the podcast and you enjoyed it let us know Uh we have like I think six or seven more topics we didn't even get to today that we had outlined that we had some stuff about um some embryo selection technology that uh is is uh currently in market and a bunch of other stuff Mike what was your take how was today that was great had fun That's how I measure the quality of a podcast is whether it was fun or not So that was a good time Hopefully people enjoy it All right Thanks you guys