Founder of Don’t Die - Bryan Johnson

A couple of years ago, I did this thought experiment where I imagined being in the 25th Century. You're hanging out with them in whatever capacity that intelligence exists, and they’re talking amongst themselves, grateful for Homo sapiens in the early 2020s for existing in this time where they were transitioning from Homo sapiens to giving birth to super-intelligence. 

It was such a precarious time; things could have gone terribly wrong, but Homo sapiens were wise enough to figure out how to keep intelligence thriving. I thought about what they would admire about us in this moment, and I think they would say that we figured out we were transitioning from death being inevitable to having some kind of expanded horizon of life extension. 

Not that we had arrived at immortality, but that we could incrementally extend our lives. We transitioned as a society from "die" to "don't die," which is the biggest shift in our history as a species. So, I wondered if I could become the most "don't die" person in human history. How would you possibly do that? 

I hired a team of 30 medical professionals. We went through all the scientific evidence, ranked everything according to effect size, and then we measured every organ of my body to get a biological age of my heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, and methylation patterns. Then we took the science and applied it to the body to see if we could slow down the speed of aging and reverse aging damage that had happened. That’s what we've been doing for the past couple of years, and it’s been remarkable. 

I started this when I was 43 years old after being pretty beat down in life. I was depressed for 10 years, chronically depressed, and raged as an entrepreneur after 15 years of building companies, and I felt beaten down. Remarkably, my biomarkers are now among the best in the world. I don’t know anyone with a better comprehensive set of biomarkers than mine. If you look at my markers, my speed of aging at 47 makes my birthday every 19 months.

I’m among the lowest in a competition of 23,000 people. My muscle composition is in the top 1%, my optimal fat is in the top 1%, and my total bone density is excellent. After being in a dilapidated state, my body has bounced back significantly. It’s interesting to see how science actually works when you measure and apply scientific interventions. It's been really bullish for me to say that no matter where you're at in life, you actually can bounce back in a very strong way.

Let me explain a few things that have changed how I experience and understand health, starting with sleep. It turns out sleep is the most important thing in our lives, there's literally nothing more crucial than sleep. I follow five habits to master it, and I'd encourage you to try the same.

You need to see yourself as a professional sleeper. You don’t sleep when it’s convenient, or after you finish watching a show, or after a social event. You sleep as your most important appointment of the day. Take it seriously, just like you take your identity as an entrepreneur seriously, you have to do the same with sleep. It's a profession. Sleep is your personal identity.

Start by eating your last meal at least two hours before bed, then experiment with pushing it to three, four, or more. Personally, my last meal is at 11:30 a.m., about nine hours before I sleep. I tested this a few hundred times to optimize sleep quality. I think I have the world’s best sleep score in human history. Eight months of perfect sleep wearing Whoop. My resting heart rate before bed is now around 40, eating closer to bedtime raises my heart rate would be around 56 or 57 and I would lose about 35% of my sleep quality.

It’s algorithmic: eating earlier and lighter helps your body prepare for sleep instead of spending resources in metabolic processes required to digest food.

During my eight months of perfect sleep, I went to bed within one minute of 8:30 p.m. every night. This strengthened my circadian rhythm so much that my body was ready to sleep at exactly the same time each night. Ideally, you should aim for consistency within 30 minutes of your chosen bedtime.

Light plays a big role in sleep quality. Avoid blue light from screens and typical house lights in the evening. Switch to warmer, yellow tones or, ideally, red light. In my home, we turn off all regular lights and switch to red bulbs within an hour before winding down for the day around 7:30 p.m.

As important as the time you eat, disconnect from the mental overload of the day by buffering that through a wind-down routine of roughly an hour. Many of you work intensely that when it’s time for bed thinking about what you missed, what you need to do, and reconciling all of reality from the day. You will be in this light sleep mode all night. You need to calmly acknowledge these thoughts, gently brush them aside, and keep doing this repeatedly.

By doing so, you can calm your nervous system, you've acknowledged the thoughts, and you can tell yourself, "Okay, I’ve heard you, we can handle these things tomorrow."

Never put yourself in a situation where you need discipline or willpower. Instead, create non-negotiable systems and let those systems guide you. Never give yourself an on-the-spot choice about things like food or sleep, just establish rules and apply them. You guys build systems all the time, right? You can do the same for your life. We know that willpower rarely wins; it fails every time. So don’t rely on it.

Audience member: I noticed you wearing sunglasses. I stopped using them to improve my circadian rhythm and sleep. Does that not affect your sleep?

I wear them to protect against UV damage from the sun. While sunlight can improve circadian rhythms and mood, the damage from UV rays is very serious to the eyes and the skin. It has all those good benefits but it’s not free. It comes at a cost. The game is to make a decision on those trade-offs and you can choose the game you want to play. I’ve chosen skin health. There’s no good technology yet to rejuvenate eye health, so I try to reduce the overall biological damage on a daily basis.

I’m optimizing for “don’t die”, trying to minimize the rate of biological decay. It’s not about being right but about focusing on this goal. Others might have different objectives, but this is our focus.

Audience member: How have you seen the relationship between your productivity and your sleep evolve? Is there an optimal amount of sleep for productivity?

You’re probably familiar with first principles thinking, where you break down a problem into its fundamental truths and reason up from there. There’s also something called “zeroth principle thinking,” which goes a step further. As Schopenhauer said, “Talent is hitting a target no one else can hit, but genius is hitting a target no one else can see.” When you’re sleep-deprived, you lose the ability to think at this higher, zeroth-principle level. 

There’s a strong argument that investing in your sleep may be the highest-value investment you can make for yourself. It’s similar to what an investor might say: if there’s one key metric they want to track monthly, it’s your sleep score. Good sleep means you’re in a better state to make sound decisions. I’ve personally had better ideas and more clarity during the time I’ve focused on my health than I’ve ever had in my entire life. Investing in my health pays off in every capacity, creatively, cognitively, and physically.

I just wanted to know, what would you say is your daily time commitment to "not dying"? And at what point do you think you hit diminishing returns?

For me, it's a full-time job. I currently juggle the equivalent of three to four full-time jobs. My schedule is extremely busy. However, you can get most of the benefits by mastering sleep, diet, and exercise. I'd say to everyone here, don’t worry about the advanced therapies or extreme stuff, just focus on the basics. If you can consistently get those right, you'll achieve 80% of the benefits. But it has to be consistent, no sporadic efforts. 

Audience member:  Bryan, from your own health journey, you've reversed many biomarkers, but aside from accidents, what’s your biggest concern when it comes to achieving the goal of not dying?

Honestly, my biggest risk in life is irony. I’m the “don’t die” guy, so I’ll probably end up dying in the most ridiculous way possible, choking on broccoli or getting hit by a bus. I’m giving you permission to laugh when it happens!

Recently, I went to a music festival and warned my friends to be careful about uneven ground. Then, during my favorite song, I got excited, danced, and ended up twisting my ankle. I fractured it and had a high-grade sprain. Luckily, we developed a protocol to heal it 100% faster than normal and I was only out for 8 weeks. But that experience made me rethink my risk tolerance. Activities like skiing or snowboarding I used to grow up doing, now seem too risky. I’ve adjusted my lifestyle and risk profile to minimize injury because it’s such a disruption to my health goals.

Culturally, there is a tolerance to injuries that it’s just a part of life and these things just happen and the pushback is “You’re not really living life”. A lot of people underestimate the long-term impact of injuries. They create lasting asymmetries in the body. I’d argue that as a society, we tolerate injuries too much. They're not just part of life, they can have serious consequences.

We are very humble to say that the way we do things is not the only way to do it. We may even say it’s not the best way, it’s just one path. What you’re doing is great and I hope you win. For me, I’m vegan, consume 130 grams of protein daily, exercise an hour a day, and practice caloric restriction. People think this will make me frail, but I have better biomarkers than most. I have defied all cultural norms that this was a good thing.

There are multiple paths to good health, and we don’t know enough about health and biology to claim absolute certainty. My approach is open-sourced. It's one way, but do you. I’m happy to help anyone who wants to find their own way even if they beat me because then it will show an alternative path. It’s not a game about trying to be right, but it’s a game for us to figure things out collectively.

Audience member:  You mentioned that the human body has an incredible capability to bounce back to health. Why shouldn’t I, as a founder, just hustle for 10 years, become successful, and then bounce back like you did? It worked for you, right?

It's funny you ask that. I recently published a "genocide score" where I calculated the life loss from certain activities. For example, a cigarette costs you about 11 minutes of life. Fast food, like a burger, shake, and fries, also roughly costs 11 minutes of life. I looked at global sales of fast food giants like McDonald's and estimated the impact. But when people saw the data, they joked that it's a good deal because cooking a healthy meal might cost more time! That’s missing the point.

A lot of founders have looked at me and thought the lesson is to grind, make money, and then fix your health later. But reversing aging damage is really, really hard. Slowing down aging is much more doable. We’ve had successes, like reducing my thymus age by 7 years and my brain age by 9 years, but other parts of my body had no success. 

If you pay the price of accelerated aging, you don't know what long-term consequences you'll face, like heart, back, or brain issues that you can’t resolve. I would strongly urge you to prioritize your health now. I, for example, lost hearing between 4,000 to 12,000 Hertz in my left ear. That limits how I experience life. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self that you can be ambitious and healthy at the same time. You can be epic and healthy at the same time.

Audience member:  I used to sacrifice my health, but now I’m trying to figure out if I can really be epic and healthy. I’m still not sure I can say yes yet.

That’s a very honest answer. It's challenging to believe, especially when others are burning out and you're not. There's social pressure, questions of whether you’re doing enough or falling behind. They are very complicated social contemplations, but I firmly believe you’ll be a better entrepreneur if you take care of your health.

Audience member: I love hanging out with my friends after work, but they often work late, which affects my sleep. I know I need to create a system, but do you have any hacks for hanging out with friends during the day or before work?

If you make sleep a non-negotiable engineering requirement for your life, everything else will naturally adjust around it. By setting a fixed bedtime, you can backtrack and figure out when work needs to end, when social time can happen, and when your day should start. 

I’ve had friends who’ve been willing to adjust to my schedule. For example, instead of starting dinner at 7:30 p.m., they’ll now start at 6:30 p.m., so I can hang out with them from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Some friend groups are more flexible than others, but I’ve found that when it becomes the cultural norm to prioritize sleep, it becomes much easier for everyone to make adjustments. Recently, we’ve even been having “Don’t Die” summits, where we’ve organized morning dance parties at 7 a.m., so there are fun ways to shift social activities earlier. 

Ultimately, it’s about making cultural shifts rather than defying the laws of physics. Once your friend group gets on board and locks in, it becomes so much easier to maintain a healthy balance without compromising on social time.

Audience member:  How do you manage sleep and diet when you travel, especially with time zone changes?

International travel is biologically expensive. It took me 7 days to recover after a trip to Asia. A few things that help: don’t eat on the plane, try to be in a fasted state. It wrecks your ability to adapt to time zones. I also take most of my food with me, usually powders. The food system is dirty, and after years of testing, I’m horrified by how toxic it is. Only third-party lab results can tell you if food or supplements are what they claim to be.

I pack half of my needed calories and go to a market to get options there. Airplane food and restaurants become a lot harder to work with. When I travel I’m going into other people’s systems, and you have to anticipate that you are going to be in their environments, and they are not going to care about the things you care about. You have to plan ahead for each one of the markers. You have to be systematic rather than playing by ear otherwise you’ll be subjected to other people’s systems and that will be very unhealthy.

For sleep, I try to stay in at least 4-star hotels or higher because a thick duvet helps me sleep better. I keep my room as cold as possible, around 64°F, and I try to eat early, being in a fasted state helps me sleep better. Alcohol and late-night eating are sleep killers.

Audience member: I love my kids, but I don’t think I can do this because of my kids.

Kids are very adaptable. If I could go back and raise young kids again (mine are now 20, 18, and 14), I would sit my family down and tell them “We are a family of sleep”. I’d lay down the rules for everyone and we’d make it a family culture. Everyone would follow the same rules, and we’d reward ourselves when we stick to them.

Some of my friends' homes are pure chaos, no bedtimes, no limits on food or screens. I understand that in those environments, it’s probably incredibly hard for everyone. But if you create systems in your family and set clear expectations, kids will adapt and see it as normal. However, you’ve got to follow the rules yourself; it can't just be for the kids. Everyone has to commit.

Audience member: What about when you have a baby at home and they wake you up three times a night? Is there anything you can do to offset that?  

Yeah, that's tough. A baby crying at night is like that, you don’t know when or how long they’ll cry, so you’re always on edge which messes with your nervous system. My advice here isn’t great, but creating a system is key. Maybe allow the baby to cry it out and do its thing, teach them to self-soothe and create a system around that for whenever it happens.

One last thing. The reason I'm doing this is because I think we exist in the most consequential time in human history. We are giving birth to Superintelligence. Nothing else matters besides the question of “What do you do when you're giving birth to Superintelligence?” There's no existing model of human thought or of societal organization that answers the question. Not democracy, not capitalism, not Islam, not Christianity, not woke-ism. No existing form of human thought actually answers the question. 

I want to propose to you that Don’t Die is the only practically relevant framework that is equal to this moment in time. Don't die is a new philosophy. It's a new economic system. It's a new political system, new morals new ethics. It's a new computational model of existence that tries to reduce entropy. That's what you do when you acquire Superintelligence. 

So you're not going to understand this because I've learned for the past couple of years, that it takes two hours in a group conversation to even begin to understand what Don’t Die means. It has multiple layers. It's not just some clever frame that you're not going to die. It actually challenges everything you understand about existence. I do want to say that mimetically this is the right place, right thing, right time, for us to do as a species.

And it begins by going to bed on time, by having cultural norms that say we can prioritize health and life and do and be epic as a species. That's what Don’t Die is all about.

I hope you leave today with the slightest level of permission that you can safely prioritize your health and that getting eight hours of sleep is a stride of pride and not a walk of shame. That you can proudly be healthy and still be confident in your abilities to be an entrepreneur and be epic at what you're doing.