Scott Galloway

If you're a gym rat, however, working out every day versus four times a week yields diminishing returns.

Brian Johnson, an entrepreneur whose philosophy is don't die, spends $2 million a year optimizing for longevity.

Each day, he tracks hundreds of biomarkers, adheres to a strict vegan diet where every calorie that enters his body must fight for its life, uses shockwave and red light therapies, and hangs out in his home sauna and hyperbaric chamber.

He ingests a stack of prescription drugs and dozens of supplements and exercises up to 90 minutes a day without rest days.

Bedtime is 8.30 p.m.

Sleep temperature is strictly regulated at 65 degrees to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and he wakes up between 4.30 a.m.

and 5 a.m.

without an alarm.

My Pivot co-host Kara Swisher, who interviewed Johnson for her CNN series Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, observed that Johnson has an obsession with measurement.

I'd add he has an aversion to L-I-V-I-N, as Matthew McConaughey famously put it in Dazed and Confused.

Our obsession with metrics, says journalist Derek Thompson, is akin to a modern religion that's making us miserable.

Modern life is awash in statistics, Thompson wrote in March.

Often the quantification of modern life makes us play the games we can easily measure rather than the games we deeply value.

When we do this, we're succumbing to value capture, according to University of Utah philosophy professor C.T.

Nguyen.

Value capture occurs when an agent's values are rich and subtle, Nguyen wrote in 2024.

They enter a social environment that presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of those values, and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning.

Some examples.

We adhere to dietary guidelines to improve our health, but fixate on BMI such that the metric replaces the original goal.

We pursue education to learn, but chase GPA at the expense of knowledge.