[introspective music playing]
[light clicks]
[Bryan Johnson] Talent is the ability
to hit a target no one else can.
Genius can hit a target
no one else can see.
And if we say in the early 21st century,
"What is the genius target for us,
for our time and place?"
I would put forward that it's the ability
to stop our self-destructive behaviors
and neutralize aging.
[music continues]
You must have heard
of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
A story where a man ages in reverse.
One man wants to achieve that feat.
His name is Bryan Johnson.
[reporter] Bryan Johnson is determined
to live forever or die trying,
and is putting his vast fortune,
and own body,
on the line to achieve it.
[introspective music continues]
As a species,
we accept our inevitable decay,
decline, and death.
I want to argue
that the opposite should be true.
I walked into this because
I was marching into an early grave.
And now, I've built an algorithm
that takes better care of me
than I can myself.
I think this is the first time
in the history of the human race
that it is not known
how long and how well I can live.
[exhales]
[director] Three, two, one, action.
This is the man spending millions
to become 18 years old once again,
Bryan Johnson.
My name is Bryan Johnson.
I've been spending millions of dollars
creating an anti-aging protocol.
Two dozen supplements and medicines,
exercise an hour a day,
plus high intensity three times a week.
[man 1] This 45-year-old millionaire
has reversed his age by five years.
[reporter] His doctors claim
he has the heart of a 37-year-old.
Using his life as a science experiment
to see just how long he can live.
[man 2] AKA Project Blueprint.
Hi, everyone. For the past three years,
we've tried to master the basics,
sleep, diet, exercise.
Today, we're doing the first
next level therapy, gene therapy.
Oh, shut up, Bryan. f*cking Bryan.
Anything taken to an extreme
can potentially be harmful to the body.
[woman] I don't think I particularly want
33,000 images of my bowels.
- [woman] You've got to have a bit of fun.
- When do you go raging?
Do we really believe that he went
from being old to young? I don't.
If I had 400 million dollars,
I wouldn't be doing what you're doing.
This is not an accessible method
of reversing the effects of aging.
This guy's in his own f*cking world.
It's not really reality.
[Bryan] If you look at all the discussions
about me, many times people will say,
"This is a rich person
trying to live forever."
"It's going to be so awesome
when they get hit by a bus. LOL."
Because these are really hard ideas
to get your head around.
And so, to me, the only relevant
thought experiment that each of us can do
is, "Do we want to live tomorrow?"
Most of us are going to say, "Yes."
If we feel healthy and well,
there's always something to do tomorrow.
And so, I want people
to embrace that day to day
until eventually we say,
"Don't die."
[music fades]
This is the gym, and it's my happy place.
Every morning I come in here,
and I exercise for roughly an hour.
I do about a 35-exercise circuit.
Everything we do, we measure it.
So we're able to see in a closed loop way,
is it working or is it not?
[director] What are you finding?
[Bryan] So, I had
a whole body MRI recently,
and I'm in the 99th percentile for optimal
for both muscle and fat
across my entire body.
[director] Have you ever been
this in shape before?
No, never in my life.
[chuckles]
It feels good. [chuckles]
[phone rings]
Hey, Ollie.
[Oliver Zolman] Hello.
Ollie, we'll do the blood draw real quick.
[Oliver] Let's do it.
[Bryan] Dr. Oliver Zolman and I
were connected by a friend.
Oliver had spent his entire adult life
scouring the literature
on anti-aging science.
[Oliver] When Bryan first reached out,
he seemed a bit lost.
Whatever he was doing didn't really seem
like it was working optimally for him.
So I showed him my longevity level one,
two, three protocol.
[Bryan] Level one is doing
the basic stuff, diet, exercise.
And then each layer you go up,
it gets more sophisticated.
His approach was,
in order to understand human aging,
you needed to look at the organ level,
because the heart is going
to age differently than the lungs,
and the lungs differently than the kidney.
Previously, I would use my mind
to decide what to eat.
So, at the grocery store, walking down
the aisles, looking at this thing,
and that thing, and put it in the cart.
Zolman flipped that on its head and said,
"What if I asked my organs
to speak for themselves?"
What if the heart, and the liver,
and the lungs
could actually speak what they need?
And then my responsibility is to do
exactly what the body tells me to do.
[Oliver] Blueprint is Bryan doing
this level one, two, three protocol
to the most that it's ever been done.
He's been the best guinea pig
anyone could ask for.
[upbeat music playing]
[Bryan] It's probably over
a hundred different things I do
any given day that the body
has asked for to be in its ideal state.
And that begins with
in the morning I wake up,
I turn a specific light on in my bathroom
that gives me sun-like exposure.
I take three pills.
I do my body temperature
with an inner ear measurement,
go downstairs, start HRV therapy.
So, I put a little electrode
here in my ear.
It stimulates my autonomic nervous system,
trying to make my body
more parasympathetic, more chill.
I take 54 pills
with a concoction
that I call "the green giant."
I put a cap on my head for hair growth
that has 312 laser diodes.
Then I work out for an hour,
come in, eat a few pounds of vegetables.
I do some high-frequency electromagnetic
stimulation on my abdomen.
I do 12 minutes of near and red-light
therapy to accelerate healing.
I do audio therapy
for my hearing regeneration.
I have my last meals to eat
before 11:00 a.m.,
34 more pills to take.
There's protocols
throughout the day here and there.
And then my nighttime routine.
By doing Blueprint,
one of the key objectives
is to achieve
the lowest possible biological age.
So just like a tree has rings,
we all have a signature
inside of our body of our age.
[indistinct]
After doing Blueprint now for two years,
I've reversed my biological age 5.1 years.
I have 50 perfect biomarkers,
I have 100 biomarkers where I'm less
than my chronological age.
And my speed of aging is 0.69,
which means for every 12 months,
I age eight months.
In terms of how far this goes,
it's open-ended, uh, we have no idea.
But I wanna take my speed of aging
to the lowest possible number.
[introspective music playing]
[Kate Tolo] Step back a little bit.
Yeah.
And then
a little bit closer to the bed. Mm.
Yeah. Great.
And then you can just literally
rattle everything off.
Okay.
So, today is a very exciting day for me
because for the very first time ever,
after tracking my sleep for four years,
I achieved my first perfect month.
So I have an average of 100%
sleep performance for 30 days.
I go to bed at 8:30 p.m.
I've averaged eight hours
and 34 minutes of sleep every night.
The body loves routine.
So, go to bed at the exact same time
every night, no excuses.
Sleep is not something
that can be dismissed.
So hopefully these tips help you, that you
can start inching towards better sleep.
It will change everything in your life.
[Kate] Wonderful. Okay. Good.
[director] Kate, what's your role in this?
I don't even know how to describe it.
[Bryan] Take a stab.
Um
I just am I am here on the mission,
trying to make whatever needs to happen
happen in order to get there.
That's my role.
Kate has been with me
from the very beginning
- of Blueprint, yeah.
- [director] Of Blueprint?
How do you feel? Are you converted?
[Kate] When I first started,
I was eating McDonald's.
So philosophically converted.
[whimsical music playing]
When I first met Bryan,
I was not healthy. [chuckles]
And we started talking
about the philosophy of Blueprint.
And all of a sudden,
I was, like, "Okay." [chuckles]
When I laugh about not being fit
and not being able to exercise,
that kind of stuff,
I'm kind of laughing
in the face of my future self.
Like, I don't wanna be that person,
you know, when I'm 60
and I'm unable to run around or yeah.
[clicks tongue]
So, it was a huge wake-up call for me.
[chuckling] Now, here I am, like,
the other person behind this mission.
I mean, like, you could beef it up
by saying, like,
"Every morning,
I do the same four-hour routine."
"And this is what starts it off."
That's good.
[Kate] When we first
started working together,
Bryan asked me to develop
the communication side of things.
His big ambition was to get Blueprint
out to the people
so that we can all learn
from what Blueprint is up to.
But it was like hitting our head
against the wall for a while
'cause it was just a bit
of an empty void on the Internet.
And then one day, I had this idea.
[indistinct]
What if we published
all of his biometric data online
and made it a thing that people
could witness and watch?
[Bryan] The protocols, the measurements,
the recipes, the supplements,
we published it all on my website.
And this journalist I knew, Ashlee Vance,
saw this and expressed an interest
in doing a profile on Blueprint.
[Ashlee] Bryan put
all of his stuff online.
I was like, "This guy's somewhere
between off and, like, very interesting."
I went to visit him at his house
with his own home laboratory.
And we just kinda started talking.
[Bryan] When doctors
visit our clinic here,
they get pretty excited
because we have outfitted this
so that we can be a medical-grade,
uh, operation at every level.
[Ashlee] I started asking him questions.
He's, like, "Okay, I spent
2.5 million dollars on all this stuff."
This was not a professional athlete who
was spending this much money on his body.
It was just this random tech guy. [laughs]
It's just, you know, absolutely going
further than what anyone else had done.
And so that's when I really knew
this actually was a story.
I remember the day before
the article came out,
Kate and I were in my office,
and we both had this moment of crisis.
Like, "Oh no. Like, what have we done?"
[intriguing music playing]
[Piers Morgan] One man,
he spent two million dollars
to effectively reboot his body.
- Millionaire entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.
- Bryan Johnson.
Bryan Johnson.
Bryan Johnson
is on a quest to live longer.
All of a sudden, every spotlight
was turned on Bryan and the project.
And everything we worked on
was under intense scrutiny.
I think his rectum went viral,
his rectal biological age.
[Kate] There was so much online,
videos people were making,
and it's just kind of a blur.
[Bryan] We were inundated with interest.
Every single product that we published
on the Blueprint website
was sold out within days.
Nobody could get anything that we use.
We couldn't either. We had suppliers
calling, saying, "What is going on?"
It also unlocked
a colossal amount of hate.
I would say he doesn't look that healthy.
There's something super weird
about looking young forever.
He takes like 40 vitamins in the morning
and 40 more in the afternoon.
[Joe Rogan sighs] That seems tedious.
I know.
It's like, I'd rather just die sooner.
And the irony of this specifically is,
you're seeking more time
when you're not even living the time
- you've been given.
- [panelist] Yes.
- [audience cheers]
- And I find this so vapid and stupid.
[dialog drowns out]
[Ashlee] I think for most people,
the longevity field has always
been looked at skeptically.
It's just these rich Silicon Valley types
chasing the fountain of youth.
Jeff Bezos threw more money
behind an obsession
to become among the billionaires
on a quest to defeat aging.
- Space, Internet, and now live forever.
- Yeah, they're trying Jeez.
[Ashlee] It's, like,
seen as strange and fringe.
It just so happens
it is a real field of science.
There are proper doctors
and scientists that look at this.
[upbeat music playing]
[Andrew Steele] We're used to watching
our friends, relatives, and pets
age and die.
We think it's somehow natural
and, therefore, somehow good.
But I describe aging as our greatest
humanitarian challenge.
Aging causes cancer.
Aging causes heart disease.
Aging causes dementia.
Aging causes stroke.
It makes us more susceptible
to infections, more frail.
And actually, if you look at causes
of death across the world today,
the leading K*llers are these diseases
like cancer, dementia, and heart disease.
I think the real promise of this field
is that we have the opportunity,
by targeting the biology of aging,
to delay or prevent many,
maybe all, of the functional declines
and diseases that go along with old age.
And that's huge.
We're still, I would say,
at an early stage.
But there's been breakthroughs.
There's already a number of interventions,
including drugs, uh, and diets,
that in animal models
slow down the process of aging.
[Brian Kennedy] We have robust evidence
that we can extend
the lifespan of a mouse.
So if you're a mouse,
we've got you covered. [chuckles]
But what that also means is that we have
a lot of things to test in humans.
[Bryan] Testing Tuesday.
- Good morning.
- [Bryan] Let's get started.
[Andrea Maier] We are experimenting,
and we are trialing out,
and I think we will have a revolution
in the next coming ten years
of very specific interventions
we can apply to humans
to then lower the biological age.
You could get within four millimeters.
- That's a lot better.
- I know, that's really great.
I'm benefiting from decades of progress
that people have made
in the world of anti-aging science.
[machine clacks]
And the scientific interventions
are moving forward very fast.
And so it has a tangible sense
of "it's here."
And I want people to know about it.
[contemplative music playing]
- [man] I think we light him up.
- [Kate] Okay.
- [camera clicks]
- [man] I think a little more.
Yeah. I think I just need
a little bit of an angle
with your whole legs
and everything, if you can.
- Yeah. So we're gonna do another test.
- [Kate] Mm-hm.
[camera clicks]
[Kate] Wow, that's so striking.
[Bryan] Hopefully it captures
the new zeitgeist that we're after.
Yeah, I think, um, everything looks good.
I'll just go to different heights.
[camera clicks]
- [man] Chin up a little bit. Yeah.
- [camera clicks]
[Bryan] My poor son.
He comes home, and he never knows
what's gonna be happening here.
[man] That's great.
[ball clacking]
- [Bryan] You ready?
- [Talmage Johnson] Yeah, I'm ready.
[kisses]
[tranquil music playing]
Ahh! [laughs]
[director] How's Bryan as a dad?
- He's a pretty good dad. Yeah.
- [laughs]
[Bryan] When his mother and I split,
he was with her for the past couple years.
Then he decided to move across the country
and live with me for his senior year.
Ah, good job.
Talmage found his stride.
He's been smoking me.
[director] What's your take on Blueprint?
When the article came out, everyone's
like, "Oh! Isn't that your dad?"
So I got, like, so many texts from friends
and people at school asking me about it.
[chuckles] Worth it.
[director] Did people think it was cool,
or did they think you guys were weirdos?
- Both. Yeah.
- [laughs]
[Talmage] Even though I've been
at my school for months,
people are still asking me
questions every day about it.
[yelling] Oh no!
- You played so well.
- That was a good rally. That was good.
[Kate] I've been around Bryan
since before Talmage was here.
I remember thinking, "How is Bryan
gonna get used to having Talmage around,
like, another human being
in his space every day?"
'Cause he's such a private,
introverted individual.
Um, but now, it's, like,
he's completely restructured
his life around Talmage being here.
[cutlery clinking]
[Bryan] Today is an exciting day because
- How many schools did you apply to?
- [Talmage] Fifteen.
How many schools
have rendered their decisions?
- Twelve. Not including today.
- Yeah.
- These are
- So this is the last.
Now you're gonna have all the
information you need to make a decision
on what college you're gonna go to.
And then you're gonna leave me
in five months.
Yes.
[Bryan] I only have
150 days left with Talmage,
which makes me incredibly sad.
[somber music playing]
[Kate] We should get going.
We're gonna be late.
[Bryan] There is just never enough time.
- [intriguing music playing]
- [Bryan] Welcome. Nice to meet you.
Thank you so much for opening your house
and showing us everything.
- Next challenge.
- Let's go.
- Whoa!
- [laughs]
- [man] You're vegan.
- I'm vegan by choice.
Talmage and I eat
the exact same thing every day.
Every day. I've been working on splits.
We'll go do splits as we eat breakfast.
[man] Okay.
[Ashlee] I think if you really wanna live
the Bryan Johnson lifestyle,
the commitment to that is obscene.
- [Bryan] I do 2,000 calories a day.
- Are you ever hungry?
- I'm pretty hungry.
- Okay.
The saddest part of my day
is the last bite.
[Ashlee] Your entire day
revolves around this quite solitary,
very rigid kind of lifestyle.
[man] Wait, wait, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.
You can't see sunlight.
- [Bryan chuckles]
- [man] Do you go in the sun?
[Bryan] The UV index
is well below dangerous levels.
So we're good to go.
It seems sort of, like, depressing,
and what kind of life are you leading
if you're just giving yourself up to this?
[music ends]
[interviewer] It's interesting because
you have this extra level of discipline.
But we know, for instance, about
cigarettes, that people who smoke a lot,
like, if they smoke
three packs a day, on average,
you'll live 11 years less
than people who don't smoke.
So what you're saying
is almost, like, an advanced version.
Like, if I cut out smoking,
I'll live 11 years more than average.
If I cut out drinking, I'll live five
years more than average, and on and on.
Yet, people know this about smoking,
and they still smoke.
Mm-hm. Yeah. You're exactly right.
Our minds, which we think
are our primary tool of problem-solving,
is actually the source
of our self-destructive behaviors.
So, I would argue the mind is dead.
What the f*ck? Sorry. "The mind is dead"?
And the goal is to give complete control
of your well-being over to an algorithm?
You know who says stuff like that?
Algorithms.
[Bryan] The first reaction
most people have is panic.
Like, "Well, my free will
is the only reason I exist."
"If I can't eat what I wanna eat,
then I have no reason to exist."
- It tastes like nutrition. [chuckles]
- [Bryan] Yeah.
[Bryan] That's just a knee-jerk reaction.
It's the mind panicking because it feels
like its authority is in question.
- Ready?
- Ready.
[Bryan] The conscious mind is desperate
to hold on to power.
The catch is we can't trust our minds
because the way we've structured
society right now is insane.
[reporter] Every day, we eat millions
of burgers, pizzas, and French fries.
Now scientists say
we may not only be feeding ourselves,
we may be feeding an addiction.
[Bryan] We expect people on their way
to work to pass 20 fast food places,
20 places selling sugary drinks.
We ask them to navigate
the addictiveness of social media,
the world's most powerful algorithms,
trying to get them to spend
every waking second on the algorithm
[on video] What?
[Bryan] navigate alcohol,
and the smoking, and binge-watching,
and porn,
and every other form of addiction.
And then we look at the individual,
and say, "Why aren't we happier?"
[pensive music playing]
[Bryan] We have lost touch
with basic self-care.
We're inebriated. We can't see straight.
Even though we know
that eating the wrong kinds of foods,
or drinking, or smoking,
or not prioritizing sleep
accelerates aging, disability, even death,
we can't stop.
We're in a fight for our lives
with ourselves.
[music fades]
[light clicks]
[pensive music playing]
[Bryan] I have found more relief
in demoting my mind
and elevating my body
than I have in my entire life.
It feels so liberating to me,
because, my entire life,
I was desperate to be free from myself.
[music builds]
[music turns tender]
[Ellen Huff] From when he was young,
Bryan was a problem solver.
When he was in junior high, he knew
that we didn't have very much money.
And so there's times
like when Bryan would not eat lunch
and contribute his lunch money.
He was always coming up
with something to help the family.
[Richard Johnson] I remember
at some point,
Bryan took a job at a sandwich shop.
But that was short-lived.
Bryan said that he would
never work for anybody ever again.
You know, that kind of,
"I'm gonna do it by myself."
- Bryan, you're a lifelong entrepreneur?
- I am.
What do you learn more from,
the success or the failures?
I never dwelled on failure.
It didn't discourage me [voice fades]
[Bryan] In the beginning,
my entrepreneurial adventures
had little to zero success.
I had a baby. I couldn't pay the bills.
So I took the only job I could find,
which was selling credit card processing
door-to-door.
This experience got me interested
in the world of payments.
So I started poking around
and I saw that PayPal
was the dominant payment provider
that had grown up during the Internet.
But then once eBay had acquired them,
the development had discontinued.
So I started Braintree with the idea
of building modern software.
[Ellen] He had this little, tiny office.
He was working on a card table.
Please don't do that.
No. Please don't do that.
I I don't know when he got a desk.
[Bryan] I didn't take any outside capital.
We were one of the fastest
growing companies in America twice.
We acquired Venmo in year five,
and we became part of
the global payments infrastructure.
All right, everybody,
let's give it up for Bryan Johnson!
[all cheering]
[Ellen] It was so exciting.
So I don't think that I realized
that there was also that other side
that was haunting him.
I couldn't believe how much effort
people put into building the company.
It was amazing.
Um, staying there all night,
multiple nights in a row
When I was building Braintree Venmo,
I was just grinding myself into the grave.
[intriguing music playing]
It was a social norm that an entrepreneur
would go days without sleeping.
And if you told that story,
people would be in awe.
There would be mythology about you,
like, "Amazing that they did this."
Now, I view this as totally foolish.
I would wake up the next day,
ornery and not feeling restored.
And then having to muster up
the strength to walk in
and be, like, "All right, everybody,
we're gonna work hard."
"And we're gonna solve all these burning
problems that are going on."
I was stressed out of my mind.
- [music continues]
- [children exclaiming, laughing]
- [Bryan on video] Careful. Careful.
- [Ellen on video] Careful, guys.
- [Bryan] Careful. I'm turning this off.
- [child] Stop it!
[Bryan] Coming home at night
and dealing with three kids,
I'd be exhausted and unpleasant.
After a guaranteed fight with the partner,
I would turn to unhealthy food
as my soothing mechanism.
[Bryan] Pure sugar.
[Bryan] Of course, that made things worse,
because my sleep would then suffer.
It would just compound upon itself.
I was miserable.
[Ellen] I remember one particular visit.
He didn't say too much.
But, at the end,
I could tell that he
it was a really difficult time for him.
[voice breaking] And when he left,
I cried.
[director] Had you ever seen him that way?
Mm-mm. And I didn't know until then.
[soft poignant music playing]
[Bryan] Sundays were my hardest days,
because I would go to church.
And everything about being there
made me dissolve.
Growing up in the Mormon church,
my entire family was there,
my entire community was there,
and it gave me
all the answers to existence.
It had stories about
what existed before this life,
why we are here on this earth,
what's after life,
but with the intensity
of what life was delivering up,
I felt like those answers,
the only reality I knew,
didn't make sense anymore.
I was kind of just dropped
into this nothingness.
[Richard] I remember discussions with him
where he was having real problems
with the religion.
Not just like some kind
of philosophical dispute.
These were things
that were so integrated into him,
he was having physical symptoms.
[dark music playing]
[Bryan] I would come home from church.
I would lay on my bed.
My son, at the time,
who was seven years old,
he would sense something was wrong,
and he came up, and he would rub my back.
And I was not able to even move.
And the only thought that would soothe me
was the idea
of doing a deal with the devil
and ceasing to exist.
I didn't want an afterlife.
I didn't want this life.
I didn't want consciousness at all.
[music swells]
[music fades]
[thunder claps]
[director] What changed?
[Bryan] My mind was like a vicious storm
telling me to literally k*ll myself.
And it became clear to me that the mind
is not a reliable source of judgement.
I needed a different way of being.
[pensive music playing]
It took me several years
to rebuild myself.
In that time,
I sold my company, Braintree Venmo,
I got a divorce,
I left my born-into religion.
And, ultimately, I found strength
and liberation in doing Blueprint.
When I give my body authority, it doesn't
commit this self-destructive harm.
My heart doesn't deliver
these stinging insults.
My lungs don't do it either.
My kidney doesn't either.
Removing my mind has been
the best thing I've ever done in my life.
But leaving the church
fractured my life with my family.
[poignant music playing]
[Ellen] When Bryan decided
to leave the church,
it was very heartbreaking for me.
And I
I had to go through a process of
thinking about the person he is
and thinking about
what he's doing with his life
to find peace.
[Talmage] Family is a fundamental teaching
of Mormonism.
And when my dad left the religion, it felt
like it was violating that teaching
and that we couldn't be a family anymore.
So I definitely, as an eight-year-old,
I viewed him as losing his path.
[dog barks distantly]
[music fades]
Yeah, this book.
Oh man.
I went to a a church camp
last summer before I came out here.
And we had these booklets
to take notes in.
And while everyone else was taking notes
about, you know, feeling the spirit,
like, feeling, like, feeling good,
the community, scripture,
I was taking notes about
trying to decipher everything.
[tender music playing]
[Talmage] I felt like I was in this system
and I was trying to take it apart.
Prior to moving to California,
I was in Mormonism.
But ever since I was young,
it had never really been my thing.
And no one in there saw me,
or saw the situation I was in,
I couldn't talk to anyone.
Over the years, me and my siblings
would visit my dad periodically.
And I started to let my dad in a bit.
Talmage started inquiring me of certain
things, "What about this? That?"
And we established
this rapport with each other
where we were able
to have these honest dialogues.
He just saw me so clearly.
He knew the situation I was in.
It was wild, because when I would talk,
he would then
articulate what I was thinking.
And I slowly came to the realization
that I wanted to get out of the religion
in any way possible.
After multiple attempts,
I eventually managed to come out here
and spend my last year
of high school with him.
I know a lot of my friends,
or people in general,
feel like their parents
misunderstand them.
[Bryan] Mmm.
[Talmage] And it takes some experience
to unify them.
So it kind of makes sense with us
took leaving the church.
- And now with that shared experience
- Mmm.
- we can connect on so many deeper levels.
- Mm-hm.
[Talmage] Me and my dad,
we have the best thing going on.
But no one agreed with it.
I can't think
of a single person who was like,
"Talmage, you should do that.
That'll be good for you."
It was like coming to live with Satan.
[music swells, then fades]
- [Bryan] Should we do this?
- [Talmage] Let's do it.
I increased my weight on my curls.
[Talmage] I noticed.
- How's my hip on this, Dad?
- [Bryan panting] Let's see.
You can I'm impressed
you can do that after that many.
[Bryan panting]
[Bryan] Wow.
That's art.
I wish I had Talmage's legs.
He's kind of the perfect specimen.
[introspective music playing]
[director] But you've heard
that Bryan wants to become Talmage?
Yeah, so yeah, it's important
not to over rejuvenate,
because there could be side effects.
[director] Have you told that to Bryan?
Oh yeah, we discussed this at length.
in the mirror.
[Bryan] Up until this point, we've been
doing things people are familiar with,
diet, and exercise, and sleep.
And it's almost like,
"Okay, what's the next level?"
We looked at every healthspan
and lifespan study that's ever been done,
whether it be on humans or mice, and then
ranked them according to their efficacy,
their ability to extend life.
And now we're trying to figure out
how to do them.
We started a human growth hormone.
Then so you stab this in the leg
and then you press it.
[Oliver] Some of these therapies
can be very dangerous.
[Bryan] And it's a little, teeny needle.
You can see that.
But we err on the side of,
you know, extreme caution.
We're doing high-frequency
measurements across the whole body.
So if we do start seeing side effects,
we pick them up fast
and try some other therapy.
- How many pills do you take a day?
- Today, it'll be 130.
[Talmage chuckles in disbelief]
- What's yours?
- Twenty-six.
[Kate] We know that it's unrealistic
for a normal person to do this
wildly rigorous routine.
But I think what Bryan is trying to do
as the first prototype for Blueprint
is do the absolute extreme thing.
[Bryan] I absolutely acknowledge
that not everyone has the time,
and the resources,
and the life circumstances that can do it.
I'm trying to be
on the absolute outermost edge
of possibility for the science.
I'm trying to show what's possible.
[Oliver] It's pretty safe so far,
and maybe it'll work,
and maybe we can learn something from it,
and then take that out,
and everyone else can benefit
sooner rather than later.
[Bryan] Today is rapamycin day.
So rapamycin is a drug that people use
to suppress the immune system
when they're getting an organ transplant.
You get a new organ in the body,
you don't want
the immune system to reject it,
and so you take rapamycin
and it suppresses the immune system.
I take this because there's potentially
some longevity benefits.
It's the kind of thing in the longevity
community that people are excited about.
Outside the longevity community,
it's still kind of crazy.
Like, if you're, like,
"Yeah, I take an immune-suppressing drug,"
people are, "That's wacky.
Why would you ever do that?"
[exciting music playing]
Rapamycin was a drug
that was first discovered
in soil bacteria
that were isolated on Easter Island.
But what happened in 2009
was that a really rigorous study in mice
found that it can extend lifespan.
And it didn't just keep them alive longer,
it kept them healthier for longer as well.
And this has been demonstrated
in study after study
in loads of different conditions
in loads of different labs.
The only thing we're lacking
is human data.
[music continues]
Honestly, I think rapamycin is probably
still the most robust candidate
for something
that would affect human longevity.
But they have to be used with caution
because you can have bad things happen
when you take too much.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
11, 12, 13. 13.
[Oliver] Because it suppresses
the immune system role,
side effects can include
very dangerous bacterial infections.
Things like pneumonia,
or cellulitis, or pharyngitis.
[Bryan] To avoid negative effects,
we took a dosage
and measured the levels in my blood.
Two hours after taking the dose,
24, 48, 72, 96.
You can see if you get too high
or too low levels,
then adjust the dose based on that.
[Bryan] You know, with this precise
formulation, as far as we know,
we are on the most aggressive rapamycin
protocol of anyone in the industry.
[exciting music continues]
- [director] Do you follow Bryan Johnson?
- I've met him before. Mm-hm.
[director] What's your take
on what he's doing?
Uh
[smacks lips]
[chuckles]
Some of the interventions that he takes,
like rapamycin, they work in mice.
We don't know
if they would work in humans.
We need to have
properly designed experiments,
then we could make scientific conclusions.
But what Bryan's doing,
it's not a scientific approach.
This is the supplement,
uh, warehouse. [laughs]
[Andrew] He's taking hundreds
of different interventions.
That means it's very hard to identify
which, if any, of them are working.
What you really need to do
is a clinical trial
where you get thousands of people,
not just one,
and you give them all the same
intervention at the same dose.
[Matt Kaeberlein] I think there's value
in these individual N-of-1 experiments
where people are testing
different things on themselves,
but it's never going to be accepted
by the broader medical community
or regulatory, um, agencies.
We need the more rigorous clinical trials.
[Andrew] Bryan blocked me on Twitter
because I suggested
that he used some of his millions
of pounds to fund a clinical trial,
specifically the TAME trial,
which wants to find out if metformin
is actually an anti-aging drug.
Bryan takes metformin, so if he wants
to know if what he's doing is of any use,
it'll be of value to him and the longevity
community to fund this trial.
But I'd guess he didn't like me telling
him how to spend his money. [chuckles]
- [expl*si*n bursting]
- Whoa!
That's really good!
[Vadim] What Bryan does,
I guess, brings attention to our field.
This would be positive, but it has
almost no contribution to science, right?
It's not science, it's just attention.
So, yeah, we're gonna be filming
some shorts.
We've been playing around with doing that.
So we're upping our social media game.
[Bryan] Yeah, we had our first victories.
The past two weeks, we had two
of our videos get a few million views.
[Kate] Three, just on Instagram.
[Bryan] And one on TikTok is approaching.
I get messages all the time, like, "Can I
get connected with your PR firm?"
- [Kate chuckles]
- "Well, you're talking to it."
Like, "There's two of us." [laughs]
- Come on, Bry guy!
- [Bryan] I appreciate this.
- Let's go.
- [Bryan laughs]
[trainer] Is that all you got?
- I think you just aged a little bit.
- [Bryan chuckles]
YouTube sent us a box.
"Presented to Bryan Johnson
for passing 100,000 subscribers."
[laughs]
[Andrew] A lot of people are clearly
very interested in anti-aging.
We're all aging. We'd probably like to
know how to slow it down at least a bit.
Bryan Johnson, if you look
at the media that he's doing himself,
he's clearly intending to reach
as many people as possible.
The real question is,
what's his motivation?
Today I'm going to show you
about this device I use
to do the equivalent
of 20,000 sit-ups in 30 minutes.
[both laugh]
- [director] You sound like an infomercial.
- I was going to say, "Something's wrong."
[Bryan and Kate laugh]
If you buy right now,
the button lower right, $19.99,
four easy installments, free shipping.
[Kate laughs]
[Rebecca Watson] Bryan Johnson
is going to die one day.
Furthermore, it is my personal opinion
that Bryan Johnson is a grifter who,
regardless of whether or not
he actually believes
he's going to live forever,
is absolutely trying to make a quick buck
off of people who are terrified
of the idea of death
and who have more money than common sense.
[dark music playing]
Okay, I got something special today.
[director] What is this?
This is the very first
Blueprint product we have.
Bryan Johnson's Blueprint
ultra-premium extra virgin olive oil.
This is the oldest trick in the book
as far as self-help scams
and just plain old marketing go.
You convince people of the problem
and then sell them the solution.
Scene 1A, take one, A roll.
"Get me on your anti-aging routine
and do it fast, but make it simple."
That's the most common thing I hear.
How's that?
[Andrew] I think that Blueprint
is a commercial enterprise.
In his website,
every link on that Blueprint page
is an Amazon affiliate link.
If you click on it and buy something
on Amazon, he gets a cut of the money.
This whole thing I think has been
optimized as a money-making venture.
He's very rich,
a very talented businessman.
That's gonna be the way
that he looks at things.
Smells like olive oil.
I would say very similar
to most olive oils.
[Bryan] A lot of the hate
we get at Blueprint is interesting
in that I make products available
for people to also become healthy
and make the life changes they want to do,
and people hate on me.
Tastes like sh*t.
[Ashlee] I see some people on Twitter
giving him a really hard time
for all the merchandise.
I've followed him for years,
and I'm 100% convinced
this was not, like, the master plan.
I remember he was trying
to do Blueprint for a couple of years,
and it was this very personal quest.
That's a lot of volume.
Seven of these today.
[Ashlee] He turned to this hardcore
health regimen
as the solution
to these mental health problems.
Yeah, I think he believes
in what he's doing.
It's a huge difference.
[woman] I imagine this is, like, emotional
for you in a sense that, like,
it sounds like you weren't completely
happy with your past self.
No.
Uh
I feel like that person's gone.
[music fades]
Should I do this in portrait mode or
You should probably get better lighting.
I have an idea.
- [Talmage] Oh, I think that looks good.
- Mm.
Cool idea.
[Bryan] The morning rituals
that Talmage and I have together,
it's a big part of our lives.
Let's see. What do you think?
[Bryan] But soon, Talmage will be
doing this in his dorm in Chicago,
and I will be here by myself.
[director] How do you feel
about that, Talmage?
Talmage is not looking at this
from fear of loss.
Talmage is looking at this
from an opportunity of gain,
and particularly a girlfriend.
- Potentially.
- [chuckles]
Can I take my pills?
Yes.
[cutlery tinkles]
[Bryan] I remember
when I was going to college as well,
loss of anything in my family environment
was not even on my radar.
It was entirely about
all the new life experiences.
[Talmage] Yeah, I'm excited.
- I do view it as an opportunity for gain.
- [Bryan chuckles]
But there is loss too.
Yeah.
Going through this experience,
I guess it invites me
to have a lot more empathy for my parents
and what they may be going through,
like my dad.
If you think about him and age,
he said the other day he googled
what happens when you turn 70
or when you're over 70, and he said,
jokingly, "Don't do it." [chuckles]
Like, every morning you wake up,
and it's, like, "How am I doing?"
"Is there one more thing
that's broken or that hurts more?"
Like, I wonder what that must feel like.
[pensive music playing]
[Richard] I've always been a mental guy.
I've always thought that I could honestly
think about ten things at the same time.
But I got to the point
where I would write a paragraph
that didn't make sense.
That scares me to death.
[Bryan] One day
my father called panicking.
He said, "I would do anything
to continue with my mental acuity."
And I said, "Dad, I'm doing
this plasma therapy for myself."
"There are other people who are doing it
for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's."
I said, "if you're interested,
you can come to Texas with me,
and, like, I would love
to give you a liter of plasma."
- There it is. There's the plasma.
- All right.
[Steve Horvath] There are certain
interventions that truly reverse the ages.
For example,
this idea of young blood plasma.
The reversal effect
can be observed in this study
where researchers connect
a young mouse to an old mouse.
They literally connect
their arteries and veins,
so there's a blood exchange.
And you can see that young plasma
circulated through the old mouse
reverses the epigenetic ages
of multiple organs.
In one study we saw a reverse
of 50% in a rat.
Then in another study
more recently in mice, 30%.
[Bryan] When we're looking at plasma,
I guess, option one,
you know, sew me together with a [laughs]
with a young human.
That's not practical.
So we said we can't do that one.
So next case,
we look at these plasma exchanges.
[Richard] I didn't see
the vision at first,
but Bryan told me that this would be
someone doing something
for their loved one that mattered.
It was an investment in their health
by giving them some of your health.
[Bryan] So I tell Talmage, like,
"Hey, Grandpa's pumped about this."
So we start talking and, like,
we said, "What if you did it too?"
"You donate your plasma to me,
I will to Dad."
"It'll be this multi-generational thing.
What do you think?"
And he instantaneously said,
"Yes, I'm in." [chuckles]
We're at 34,000 feet.
We're flying to Dallas.
We just had some food.
Talmage is right behind me.
[resolute music playing]
I need to check in to see what he's eating
to make sure his plasma's okay.
[Ashlee] The plasma stuff
always sounds super creepy
to anyone who hears about it
for the first time. [chuckles]
But Bryan was not
the first guy to do this.
Years ago, there would be stories
about Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist,
one of the first investors in Facebook,
draining the blood
of some young healthy people.
I'm not sure that that's true,
but this all got out into the wild.
It sort of got parodied
in the show Silicon Valley.
- Everything okay?
- Uh, is Bryce your assistant?
No, of course not.
He's my transfusion associate.
[Ashlee] Most Silicon Valley people,
if they had a blood boy,
they didn't want anybody to know about it,
but Bryan being Bryan
[chuckling] kind of embraced all this
and was out there parading his blood boys
around on Twitter and taking photographs.
[photographer] You guys look awesome.
[Ashlee] It did have the elements of,
like, absurdity that I thought would come
with Bryan having the whole family show up
as if you were going to a ball game,
except you were just
all gonna swap plasma.
[gasps]
What? [chuckles]
The plasma bus got decorated!
"Love flows from the heart."
I guess it's really the vein,
but this is amazing.
Hey, look at that.
That's pretty plasma.
[director] So what's good about this?
[Bryan] The color is really nice.
It's pristine.
I'm actually honestly scared
that it's gonna be more clear than mine.
- [chuckles]
- [Talmage] It'll be embarrassing.
- [Bryan laughs]
- So I'm hoping it's good but I'm also
- [Bryan] I understand.
- It's competition.
I understand that. I mean this is the way
you can tell, am I a fraud or not, right?
- Like, "All right, haters."
- Absolutely.
- [Richard chuckles]
- Yeah. "What'd you say about this?"
[Brett Cooper] I have identified
the world's first vampire.
Anti-aging fanatic
who spends more than two million dollars
per year to retain youth
uses teen son as, quote, "blood boy."
- Bruh. [laughs]
- His son needs to watch out right now.
His son needs to run! [laughs]
- Oh, the Daily Mail's up.
- Yeah.
Okay. Some of the comments
of the Daily Mail
"What a weirdo. Disgusting and satanic.
What a waste of time."
[inhales]
Oh, humanity's so great.
[music continues]
[Richard] The plasma transfer blew up
on social media.
And, of course, the easy place to go is
is vampire, blood draw, blood boy.
And the mean-spirited,
uh, instead of drawing my my ire
and my absolute, uh, anger,
uh, really made me sad.
- [Bryan] All right, Dad.
- [woman] Pass the torch.
Let's get you a new pillow.
[Richard] One thing people don't get,
this was an event
that transcended the trial of a therapy.
You know how special this is.
You know, the connection and everything,
this is just like a manifestation
of all that commitment, everything else.
- [Bryan] Yeah, better than words.
- Better than words.
[Richard] When you become invested
in the other person
to the point that you step up
and you share biology,
having that kind of intimacy
with both Bryan and with Talmage,
for me, it was a chance to reconcile.
[tender music playing]
When I was early married,
you would never see a more serious MFer
in Mormonism than me.
But the problem was it was not my life.
[Bryan] When I was younger, my father
went through some difficult times
with professional challenges and drugs.
[Richard] His mom and I
separated and got a divorce.
At that time I wasn't sure whether to find
a girlfriend or have a line of coke,
to go to temple or go have a scotch.
When your life is so
screwed up to that point,
and you have no idea
what your moral standards are,
it all falls apart.
[Bryan] It was like a 95% likelihood
that he would fall through on anything.
Like, pick me up from school
help me with a homework assignment,
like, call me when he said he would,
it just would never happen.
[Ellen] That probably affected Bryan
the most of any of the kids.
He was the one
that wanted to go with his dad.
He's the one that waited for him.
I think it hurt him a lot.
[Bryan] He got arrested when I was 22.
And I went and saw him in jail,
and that was a moment for him.
Guess who came to see his dad?
And words of judgement like,
"God, Dad, clean up your act."
No. [voice breaks] "You can do it, Dad."
- [director] Did anyone else come?
- No.
[resolute] No.
[poignant music playing]
There we go.
[Richard] Me being at that point,
and being at this point,
I mean, have Bryan, uh,
holding on to me, having Talmage
what could be a better statement
of reconciliation?
- [Bryan] Love you, Dad.
- [Richard] I love you.
[Richard] What a great experience.
You feel the love?
It was one of the most precious
life experiences we've ever had.
It morphed into this multi-generational,
healing/bonding experience,
and was less about
the therapeutic benefit.
[poignant music continues]
[Ellen] I feel like a parent and a child
that maybe takes different paths
can find a place for a good relationship.
But it it has to be
a joint effort for both.
[director] Why are you having
that reaction?
[voice breaking] It's hard work sometimes,
and it's not without its heartache,
but it can be done.
[Bryan] Having this time with my father,
I reflected a lot on being a dad.
[children shouting playfully]
[Bryan] All right, here we go. Okay, guys.
- Hi, mister.
- [Bryan] Hey, Talmage. [laughs]
[Bryan] It's been one of the most painful
experiences of my life,
where two of my children
keep me at bay because I'm not part
of their religious organization.
So I feel like I missed out
on a meaningful part of their lives.
And it's been the most special
experience in my life
where one of my children
has fully embraced me.
I wish my other children would join me.
[indistinct chatter]
[metal clanging]
- [Bryan] All right, Talmage, all yours.
- [Talmage] Cool.
[Bryan panting] Talmage, last night
I did a a phone call date
with somebody I met
on a dating app.
We're gonna go out on a date next week.
I wish her the best of luck.
- [Bryan] You wish her the best of luck?
- Yeah.
[Bryan laughs]
[Bryan] Relationships
are really important,
and, you know, with Talmage leaving,
I guess I need to rebuild my life.
I told her why I'd be a bad idea.
She seemed undeterred.
[panting, exhales]
Normally, when I engage with somebody
and we're contemplating being friends,
I make a list, and I say, "Here are
the ten reasons why I'm a bad idea."
"I have this protocol that is rigorous,
I'm impossibly hard to be with,
and, ultimately,
you're just gonna hate me."
And so I try to get in front of it,
and oftentimes people will laugh.
I'm, like, "No for real." [laughs]
"This is really what's gonna happen."
I don't know.
Maybe it's a really bad strategy.
[laughs]
Bryan deserves
to have companionship in his life,
and I think
he's always struggled to find that.
I feel like there's a conflict
within Bryan between family Bryan,
the one that wants a partner,
wants to just, like, hang out,
you know, be around loved ones,
and then the ambitious Bryan,
who says, like, "Every ounce of my energy
needs to be dedicated
toward this mission."
[blows strongly]
[playful music playing]
[inhales, sighs deeply]
[Bryan] I went on two dates
with this one woman and
we we got along fairly well,
but I think she basically was, like,
"You're so far outside the norms,
I just don't know if I if I can
make sense of this whole thing."
[director] Are you willing to change?
[laughs]
No. [laughs]
Let's just say relationships
have never been my strength.
I was married at the age of 24.
I didn't have any girlfriends before that.
So then, when I got divorced
13 years later,
I had no idea
how to deal with partnership.
Bryan is a complicated person,
and I remember we had a conversation
with some concerns,
"Am I ever gonna find someone
that will really fit with me,"
realizing that he was quite unique.
[Bryan] I guess I just kind of stumble
through social interactions,
and my first girlfriend
after getting the divorce
has ended up in a pretty ugly lawsuit.
Oh, that's a cool headline.
"Tech mogul who spends
two million a year for 18-year-old body
cheated and dumped fiance
after she got breast cancer."
- Lawsuit?
- [man laughs in background]
- [woman] What?
- How is that a lawsuit though?
"Johnson had agreed to provide
lifelong financial support"
Oh, this is where the lawsuit comes in.
"Then she got, um, breast cancer."
- "She became a net negative"
- [all laugh]
"and a bad deal for him."
- He described her as a business term.
- Oh my God.
[woman laughing]
Bryan's relationship with Taryn
I think was a very sweet relationship
for both of them.
I saw how happy it made them.
And so it was surprising to me
to hear some allegations.
[man] Taryn filed a lawsuit against Bryan.
Taryn claimed after the cancer treatment,
Bryan demanded that she move out
of the residence they shared.
[woman 2] He told her that he would
assist her with rent and expenses
but only if she signed
the separation agreement.
Almost like, "Hey, sign this NDA,
and I'll give you the money."
She had no independent
source of steady income.
She tried to resist,
but Bryan was manipulative.
[Bryan] Being labeled as this awful person
for all these things,
I was rattled, deeply.
We dated for a couple years,
and when we separated,
she hired one of the most
powerful law firms in the world.
They sent me this letter
demanding that I pay them
$9,000,000 that week
or they were going to make
these scandalous statements about me.
I felt like they were
all false allegations,
so I said, "I'm not doing it."
Okay, game face.
What is game face?
If someone were to put a game face on.
We were in arbitration
where everything's confidential,
but then the media found
the lawsuit in the California courts,
and published all of her allegations.
Facing the destruction
of my personal reputation
by my former girlfriend and fiance,
it's hard for me
to walk into a relationship
and trust that there's not
some alternative motive.
A lot of people of course say, "Boo hoo,
your rich person problems," whatever.
Okay, uh, sure.
Also, it stinks because
it does create a significant barrier
for, uh, meaningful relationships because
it just it complicates everything.
But with Talmage,
our relationship is rich and dynamic.
[Talmage] Game on.
[tender music playing]
Whoo!
That was amazing.
Where's Talmage?
I gotta find Talmage. There he is.
- [Talmage] Yes!
- [laughs] Did you see the time?
- [Talmage] What is it? I beat you.
- [Bryan] Oh no!
We can run it back tomorrow. [laughs]
[Bryan] I've never
had a relationship in my life
that has been this consistent,
and steady, and soothing, and fun.
It has all the characteristics
of everything I've always wanted
in a best friend.
- Yes!
- You're k*lling it.
[Bryan] And so I think,
yeah, there's a meaningful amount
of influence
that Talmage has on this project.
[man] Talmage Bryan Johnson.
[clapping and cheering]
[Bryan] People think
I'm fearful of death. I'm not.
I love life.
And I love living life with Talmage.
[director] Do you worry about him
or you think he'll be good on his own?
I do worry about him.
Like, yeah, we're gonna
really miss each other.
Happy birthday, Talmage. Yeah!
Previous generations, you have kids
so that you can pass the torch.
And now you have kids
so that you can journey with them.
Don't Die is real.
Like, I want to journey with Talmage
for some indefinite period of time.
I'm serious about this.
I really do want to have
multiple lifetimes
with Talmage,
and go through all the different phases.
Um, a hundred years
is not gonna be enough.
[music fades]
- Ready? Okay.
- [director] Yeah, whenever you're ready.
Hi. Today is one
of the most exciting days of Blueprint.
We're gonna travel to an island
just off the coast of Honduras.
And I'm going to be injected
with my first gene therapy.
[intriguing music playing]
If you look at the age charts of humanity,
humans have a 120-year ceiling.
So if we wanna say we're going to punch
through this limitation of human lifespan,
it's gonna be through gene therapy.
Underwear, socks, shorts, shirts.
Gene therapy is considered, you know,
taking it as far as you can at this point.
So, it's kind of the extreme measure
of treating biological aging.
[Andrew] The state of gene therapy
is that we are using it in the clinic,
but we're using it for serious conditions,
where we know that there is
a single gene that's causing the problem,
and we can say editing this gene
in this way would be successful.
The idea of using gene therapy
for aging is hugely exciting,
but, today, the science isn't ready.
In fact, there's a big risk because there
are things called "off-target effects."
This is where the gene therapy goes in
and it modifies not just the DNA
that you're trying to modify, but modifies
some other part of your genome.
[Steve] Many interventions
do rejuvenate cells,
but that incurs a risk that the cells
then turn into different cells,
malignant cells, cancer cells.
[Bryan] Gene therapy is dangerous,
and we have been evaluating
various gene therapies
for the past almost two years now.
This is the only one
that had the potential lifespan extenders
that we were looking for
that also met our safety criteria.
[director] In what Bryan's trying to do
in his journey,
is there any part of you that's nervous
for what he's trying to achieve?
Yes, yes.
I am nervous where Bryan's going,
because me, I'm I'm logical and smart.
When I get to the end
edge of the the ledge, I stop.
I'm never I'm never taking
the next step into the abyss.
[exciting music playing]
[Liz] Generally, a person would
get a gene therapy in a clinical trial,
and the problem with clinical trials
is they are limited.
Certainly there isn't gene therapy for
aging in clinical trials at this moment.
So other than that,
you would travel for medical tourism.
And one place that gene therapy
is being offered
is Roatn, Honduras.
There is a free zone there
called Prspera.
[Mac Davis] Prspera is
a special economic zone
that the state of Honduras
has licensed with the ability
to create new business laws
that are favorable to innovations
like our gene therapy.
Here, we're able to operate
under an ethics review board
and a committee that makes sure that
we're doing everything up to standard.
[Bryan] All this that you see is Prspera.
I'm on the lookout for dinosaurs.
- [Mac] We're working on it next.
- [Bryan laughs]
[Walter] We are planning
on doing trials in the United States.
However, it's a thing, it takes some time,
and it's not necessarily time
devoted towards laboratory work.
It's more of a thing of legal issues
and having lawyers
communicate on your behalf
with a very large
and very bureaucratic regulatory agency.
It's go-time.
[Mac] All right, this way.
[Ashlee] If I'm being honest,
Prspera is like a batshit crazy idea.
It's like you just take over a little bit
of land, set up all your own rules.
I like Mac and Walter very much.
They seem like nice guys.
They didn't strike me as
as, you know [inhales]
[laughing] 20-year PhD-type scientists.
And so it was like
the first thing Bryan's done
where I really was, like,
"Is this a good idea?"
Hey.
[Walter] If there's anything
you have any questions about,
whatever information you need,
we will do our best to provide.
Any kind of diagnostic, anything,
we will do our best.
I appreciate that, Walter.
[Walter] When me and Mac started the
company, we wanted to make a difference
in people's lives.
You know, we're dealt
a certain hand at our birth.
We're dealt
with the genes we're we're given.
And we want to give people options.
[soft music playing]
[Bryan] This gene therapy,
which is follistatin,
has primarily been used in bodybuilding,
where you're looking
at increased muscle mass and strength.
For some people, bulking up is desirable,
but generally with age,
sarcopenia, osteoporosis,
and frailty are severe problems.
Our gene therapy treats that
either preventatively in young people,
or in a reactive way in older people
who are already experiencing it.
[Bryan] If you look at the mouse
lifespan studies where it was used,
they had a 30% lifespan extension.
So if I end up looking like
a Marvel character, all the better.
Can I get some help on this?
After the gene therapy, I'm not gonna
fit in this thing or maybe I'm just gonna
- Bulk up
- I'm going to Hulk out of it.
[Kate chuckles]
[Kate] He's so confident.
But I'm a little worried for him.
Like, we just don't know
how his body's gonna react.
And I would just Yeah, I would hate
for anything to happen to him.
[soft music continues]
[Ryan] It's important to note,
any gene therapy that integrates
into your existing genome
does "change your DNA."
Our gene therapy does not integrate.
Once you get injected,
it's not editing your DNA.
It's just giving you an added piece
of DNA that's parallel
and creates
a little export factory of follistatin.
Most gene therapies, because they
integrate into your chromosomal DNA,
once it's there, it's there,
and you can't turn it off.
Our gene therapy doesn't integrate,
and so we've introduced
the concept of a k*ll switch.
[Bryan] It's potentially safer
because if you want to turn it off,
there's a few methods
that we could use to make it reversible.
[woman] Okay, are you ready for this?
[Bryan] I'm ready for this.
[woman] All right, let's go.
[doctor] Here it comes.
Stings just a little bit.
[music fades]
Jeez, I wish we could
drag this out, but that's it.
[Bryan laughing] Thanks, doc.
It was clean injections.
[doctor] Yeah, good.
[Bryan] I am now officially
a genetically-enhanced human.
When people see someone like me
doing gene therapy,
many think of inequality,
or they see a divide
between rich and poor.
The way I think about it is,
if we can prove
that this gene therapy
is safe and effective,
and then, you know,
10,000 people are willing to do it,
that price is going to go down.
- [Bryan] Doctor, thanks.
- [doctor] You're welcome.
Yeah, really appreciate you.
[Brian] There are expensive interventions,
like gene therapy, that we need to test.
For academics,
it's prohibitively expensive
to do the human clinical studies.
And maybe longevity clinics
where people pay a lot of money
are places we can at least get some data.
So I'm not against
having clinics available.
But once we find out how things work,
we have to figure out how to scale them
and make them broadly available.
I don't know if we'll live forever,
but at least we absolutely
will buy the next guy some more time.
[Bryan] Mm-hm.
And I'd rather give my children more years
than I, uh, had the opportunity for.
- [Bryan] Mm-hm, mm-hm.
- So thank you for believing in us.
Thank you, both of you.
- Thanks, Bryan.
- Yeah.
[Kate] Wow. That looks
still enough to walk on.
[Bryan] If we If we put a camera on top,
I can walk on water here.
[both chuckling]
From h*m* sapiens to h*m* Deus.
Testing out whether the gene therapy,
if the effects have taken.
Be careful, Jacob.
Don't die. No one can die.
[Richard] Bryan, when he was young,
really lived from religion.
- [Bryan] Yeah.
- [Kate and Jacob laugh]
You know, I can remember a stage
that he went through,
where, I mean, he literally
wanted to be like Joseph Smith.
Joseph Smith, of course,
is the founding prophet in Mormonism.
And I think the thing that you see
as a continuing principle with Bryan,
he wants his life to be such that
he would stick out like a Joseph Smith.
His reward will be when he affects change.
Change to him is the aphrodisiac.
It is It is the drug.
Health and wellness
is a lot like religion. With the Bible
[Ashlee] It's not hard to make the
argument that he gave up on the church,
had to find a new religion, and has turned
health and himself into this religion.
And it's this very
narcissistic enterprise.
15,000 views in three hours, 585 comments.
[Ashlee] Receiving attention and
having people care about what he's doing,
I think he does care about that.
But I don't actually think
it, like, undermines what he's doing,
because it's so out there in the open.
[Bryan] I made a statement yesterday that,
"Jesus has had 2,000 years."
"I don't see any evidence of his work."
- "I've done more in two years."
- [director] How'd that go?
As you might expect.
[laughs]
He talks about himself as being kind of
Health Jesus with a little bit of humor
[laughing] but also, I think,
quite a bit of pride.
Hi, guys. Hey.
[Ashlee] He's embracing
the culty aspect of this all,
and it only seems to be building
more and more momentum.
[Bryan] How do you think
I appear to your friends?
I think the only way
for me to understand that
is if one of my friend's dads
was starting a cult.
- [Bryan] Mm.
- And how I'd look at that.
[Bryan chuckles]
I wouldn't think much of it
'cause you're doing it.
- [laughs] Am I starting a cult?
- Yes.
- Am I?
- Yeah.
It's not a bad thing. It just is.
[Bryan chuckles]
I know Bryan's tried
to force this to be a religion.
There's a part of me that thinks this is
almost the right religion for this moment.
In some ways, it is like this antidote
to the way the world thinks about health.
There are still serious concerns
about the nation's health care system.
The National Health Service is broken.
Why is the system
letting doctors and patients down?
[Matt] The approach to health
in pretty much every developed nation
has really been centered around waiting
until people develop a disease
and then attempting to cure that disease,
but in reality,
pretty much just treating symptoms.
One of the consequences of that
is that the prevalence of chronic disease
has increased dramatically
over the last 50 years.
We think, you know, "I'll go to bed at 90
and I'll die in my sleep."
That almost never happens.
If you go into a geriatric ward
and you see people incontinent, immobile,
if we do look at it, if we stare this
in the face, it's particularly unpleasant.
[Andrea] At the moment,
we are spending so much money
treating very sick individuals.
I think we have to ask,
"Why wouldn't you invest earlier in life
to keep them healthy, to not having
so many people with age-related diseases?"
[Brian] You know, in the US, doctors
are generally paid on procedures.
And I remember when I was at The Buck
doing research on aging,
there was a large hospital chain
that was thinking
about giving a donation to the research.
We talked about health span,
and the CEO looked at me and said,
"Well, if we do this, you're going
to cut our procedure rate by 60%."
"Why would I do this?" [laughs]
So, we need to think about
how we really wanna focus
on the health of the population.
[energetic music playing]
[Ashlee] That's the most admirable part
about what Bryan is doing,
it's the most proactive thing
you could imagine.
And if the medical system was wired
even just, like,
a little bit more this way,
I think it'd probably
be good for the rest of us.
[Bryan] If we can solve
this fundamental problem,
we may walk into a future
where all of us live healthier and longer
with the people that we care about.
[music fades]
[Talmage] Three days.
- That's so wild to me.
- I know, it's here. [groans]
Think of it, I've been acting all tough
guy, like, "I'm going off to college."
[Bryan groans]
- But when I start to think about it, like
- I'm defeated.
- Aw, sh*t.
- [Bryan laughs]
I'll get over it. I just
I just feel defeated.
It's like It's like you you got me,
but now you're losing me again.
Yeah. Yeah.
[tender piano music playing]
Yeah. [exhales]
[groans] Oh, no!
19-21, it's a close game, Dad.
I was down, then you were down.
Yeah, you came back
from a comeback. Good job.
- [Talmage] You too.
- Good game.
[Bryan] I've always been
the Talmage whisperer.
From the moment he came out of the womb,
I was the one who could quiet him.
I'd settle him.
And it was just my little Talmage.
And this week, he's ready to go.
Hi, mister.
Do you need help with anything today?
[Talmage] No.
My priorities
involve stuff I do by myself.
[Bryan] Mm-hm.
[objects clatter, water sloshes]
With Kate's help.
[tender music continues]
[Bryan] He's learned everything
he needs to learn from me.
And I was just going through
the typical parental process
of having, you know,
someone leave your nest.
Yeah, I like it.
- Cute.
- Yeah.
[Bryan] Talmage Bryan Johnson,
ready to go.
As soon as I step past this, I'm out.
[music fades]
The voyage begins.
[music resumes]
- [chuckles] Welcome, Talmage.
[Talmage] Thank you.
[music turns playful]
[Bryan] Talmage, happy college prep day.
Do we have a starting plan?
Are we going to kitchen stuff first?
Are we following you around?
Are we engaged in the process?
Do you know what you're going to do?
Linens over here.
Linens and a comforter.
What's your bed size?
Oh, so complicated.
[Bryan] Over here, Talmage.
[thud]
- [Talmage] Do you got me?
- [Bryan] Yeah.
[Bryan] Oh, God.
I confess, I just about started crying
when we walked by all the little toys.
- [Talmage] I saw you [gasps]
- [Bryan] Yeah, I lost my breath.
[Talmage] Kind of goes against
your emotionless thing.
[Bryan crying] Yeah. Huh.
[muffled sobbing]
[Bryan sobbing softly]
Why am I crying in Target?
[continues sobbing]
[sniffles]
So much going on inside of me,
I don't even know.
[Talmage] Mm-hm.
[clicks tongue] Okay.
Like, a blue?
Gray? Green?
[Talmage] I think I'm a green kind of guy.
[soft music playing]
[Bryan] These past 150 days,
Talmage has been this presence in my life.
I We just love each other.
And if we look at all the science
about humans,
that humans thrive in community,
they thrive in
in positive relationships.
Yeah, it's not a good thing to be alone.
So I I.. I wouldn't be so brazen
to think that I'm going to defy
what the science shows
on human connection and community.
- [director] Do you have a plan?
- No.
[soft music continues]
Welcome to the University of Chicago.
- Do you see it? Right there.
- [Bryan gasps]
- This is perfect.
- [Talmage] We have a fan. That's nice.
[Bryan] These are nicer than I have.
Do you have a preference on which side
you want to expose to your skin?
See, this is front face left.
[Talmage] I feel like
it's really gonna hit
once you say goodbye to me
when I'm in my dorm.
Yeah, I've never felt
more understood by anyone
than with you.
- So, yeah, I hope you don't die.
- [Bryan laughs]
[soft music continues]
[Talmage] I don't know,
I just keep reflecting
on all the the things
that have happened this year.
All of the life lessons.
Yeah, it's gonna be hard to rival this.
- [Bryan, muffled] I love you.
- I love you too.
[Bryan] All right, Talmage Bryan Johnson
Second version of you.
Let's get after it.
Yep.
[music builds]
[music continues]
[light switch clicks]
[music fades]
[sighs]
[objects clatter]
[Bryan] The house is awfully quiet.
I guess now it's real.
It never felt real.
And now it's quiet. It's just still.
I wonder how he's feeling.
[keyboard clacking]
- [Kate] Can I show you this solution?
- Yes.
[Kate] You wanna look at my screen?
So, let's say you're just,
like, on the Blueprint website.
You're just looking at food. There's this.
[director] How are you feeling today?
In many ways, I don't think
I could have gone to the next stage
until I got things settled with Talmage.
I really needed him
to be in a good place at school
or on his next stage of life.
And I think he's there, so I feel
emboldened to take my next step too.
[resolute music playing]
Ready, let's do this.
Hey, what's up, friends?
Today is Don't Die hike number four.
It was less than two months ago
that I messaged out on social media.
"Hey, I'm going on a hike. Join me."
And I had 11 people.
Today, there's over 400 people.
Oh, my goodness,
this is a lot of cars. Wow.
Wait, there's more people.
This is What? This is crazy!
- [Kate giggles] Hi, everyone!
- Hey, guys! Good morning!
[man] You look ten years younger
than last time.
[laughter]
Big group hug in the morning.
[all exclaim]
[Bryan] Come on in, everyone!
Over time, I guess
I've gone through different stages
[chuckling] of my feelings about Bryan.
At the very beginning,
his lifestyle struck me as quite solitary.
But as more people have bought into this,
he actually seems to be creating
these friendships I never expected.
[Bryan] Everyone, let's go up this way.
- [indistinct chatter]
- [whooping]
[Ashlee] For Bryan, I can tell
there's a lot of enjoyment from this.
And so I think
he's kind of flipped the narrative.
- You made it! Good job, everyone!
- [all cheering]
I'll confess. This is a cult.
[laughter]
- It's a sick and twisted cult
- [crowd laughing]
- to get you to go to bed on time.
- [laughter]
There's little bits and pieces
of that that are unnerving.
But I think I see him now
almost as, like, a philosopher.
I mean, he's sort of trying
to prove a point.
It's this, like, Don't Die thing,
which I really thought was sort of a joke
as I saw this evolving.
But there is some merit to it, I think.
Whether you believe in Bryan
or what he's doing or not,
it's an interesting question to ask
if society has just taken a wrong turn.
I think it drives some people crazy,
and it inspires others.
What's up, guys? I'm Talmage.
- I'm Charles.
- I'm Carly.
We're hosting the Don't Die event
in Chicago.
[all] Don't Die in Chicago!
[all] Don't Die from Cologne.
- [all] Don't Die in Dublin.
- Don't Die from Santa Fe.
- In Barcelona.
- In Hong Kong.
[all] Don't die from Dubai!
What we're talking about
is really a medical revolution.
If there's an opportunity to stay healthy
and stay functional
and see your grandkids,
would you rather have that
or wait until you get Alzheimer's
and take some drug
that slows the progression down by 30%?
Aging is not inevitable.
At least it can be delayed.
And you can do that right now
probably by changing your lifestyle.
Lifestyle factors are obvious,
but it's important.
From sleep quality, dietary modifications,
regular exercise, and social interactions,
we can get 10 years,
15 years of extra quality life.
And that number will probably get bigger,
as we develop
more effective interventions.
[Bryan] You can see right there,
that fluid is mesenchymal stem cells.
[Andrew] We haven't yet got any human
treatments that I'm happy to recommend.
But because I know that
these treatments are being developed,
and I think they're potentially going
to be available within our lifetimes,
I'm much more excited
by following basic health advice.
It means I'll hopefully
be alive and healthy long enough
to benefit from these first treatments.
What's even more exciting is that if
I benefit from those first treatments,
maybe I'll live another few years longer.
That then means
that gives scientists even more time
to develop the second
or the third round of treatments.
[Martin] Of course it's going
to take time to develop interventions,
but I'm certain that, at some point,
two teenagers will have
a conversation with each other.
They'll be looking at their history
books, and they'll be commenting,
something like, "My God, people just
withered and died. Isn't that so tragic?"
The same way as we look at,
you know, people just two lifetimes ago
and not having an anesthetic
or an antibiotic.
And, you know, we look back
and we go, "Jeez, that's horrendous." Um
When it happens, though,
is completely a product of what we do.
How much effort, and money,
and energy we put into this,
to create a movement
of people utterly engaged
in keeping people healthy
as long as possible.
Hi, everyone. I hope you guys feel
like you're among your people.
Like-minded people trying not to die.
[laughter]
- [Bryan] I'm happy you came.
- [crowd whoops, claps]
[Bryan] I love you.
[hopeful music playing]
[man] Are you happy?
Never been happier in my entire life.
I don't know if I could do it.
[Richard] I've never seen him happier
than he is now.
And just think about that.
When you're content with who you are,
and you're engaged in a project
that is everything that you want to do,
doesn't that set up as a happy place?
[all exclaim]
To hear him say to me,
"I've never been happier in my life,"
I think releases me from worry,
knowing that he can go on like this.
[Bryan] I've experienced
wanting to die intensely.
And now I'm in a situation
where I want to live
with everything that I am.
[music swells]
[Bryan] And so, yeah, I really I
I want to continue to exist.
[thermometer beeps]
And I don't feel any need
to justify myself.
[beep]
I'm a disaster
of an intelligent being, but
Hey, you know what? I'm trying my best.
[laughs]
[upbeat music playing]
[Bryan] Okay. I'm gonna go
try to pick up a car.
[woman laughs] I bet you can do it.
Love it.
Hey.
[music continues]
[music continues]
[music fades]
Welcome to our World! Where we serve you cookies to ensure you get the best viewing experience on our site.
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (2025)
Moderators: Maskath3, GabrielAlejo2341, sidolanters, Maskath3, sidolanters, GabrielAlejo2341