On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Bryan Johnson: New SHOCKING Science on How to Reverse Your Age by 31 Years & The Damaging Impact of 1 Bad Night Sleep
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
Do you think one bad night of sleep can really harm your body? Would you try a routine that could help you reverse aging? Today, Jay sits down with Bryan Johnson, entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint, who is redefining human health and longevity. Dubbed "the world's most measured human," Bryan shares his extraordinary journey of reversing aging and improving biological performance through science-backed methods and a meticulously designed lifestyle. Bryan discusses how his $2 million-a-year protocol isn't just about extreme spending but about pioneering a blueprint for everyone. He explains the concept of "don't die," emphasizing the potential for humanity to extend life and improve health at unprecedented levels. From his diet of precision-crafted meals to his groundbreaking work in measuring microplastics and organ health, Bryan's insights challenge conventional norms about aging, health, and longevity. Together with Jay, Bryan dives deep into actionable takeaways, such as the five pillars of perfect sleep, the importance of building systems over relying on willpower, and how to minimize exposure to environmental toxins like microplastics. Bryan also addresses controversial topics, including the downsides of cheat days and the role of technology in managing health. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Reverse Aging Through Measured Health Metrics How to Optimize Your Diet for Longevity How to Manage Stress With Better Sleep How to Create a System for Healthy Living How to Rewire Your Taste Buds for Better Nutrition How to Lower Inflammation With Simple Daily Habits You don’t need millions of dollars or cutting-edge technology to start—just a commitment to making small, intentional changes. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Check out the On Purpose Merch! https://jayshettyshop.com. 100% of Proceeds are donated to National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 02:31 How Long Can a Person Live? 04:19 The Most Measured Person 06:34 Getting Sustained Hearing Impairment 09:57 Extending Life Before Conception 11:18 How Long Do We Have to Live? 14:22 Every Body I Highly Responsive to Change 16:50 Embryo Selection Through Genetic Markers 18:12 A Generation of Microplastic 20:42 Simple Ways to Minimize the Influx of Microplastic 23:05 Don’t Drink from Water Bottles 26:01 The Significant Health Threat of Air Pollution 30:11 How Capitalism Affects Health 32:28 5 Ways to Get Better Sleep 40:12 Don’t Miss Your Deep Sleep Window 43:37 The Ill Effects of Poor Sleep 45:48 Invest in Your Health 48:12 What’s Your Protein Intake? 51:22 Bryan’s Perfect Diet 56:11 Eating 3 Meals a Day in 5 Hours 58:21 Rewire Your Taste Buds 59:19 Sensitivity to Air Quality 01:02:36 Are You Scared of Dying? 01:05:58 Prolonging Longevity 01:08:07 Ways to Manage Stress 01:11:00 You Are not Your Thoughts 01:15:37 Health Can Lead to Happiness 01:19:37 Is Reverse Aging Possible? 01:22:25 Bryan on Final Five Episode Resources: Bryan Johnson | Website Bryan Johnson | X Bryan Johnson | Instagram Bryan Johnson | Tiktok Bryan Johnson | Youtube Bryan Johnson | LinkedIn Blueprint ProtocolSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What drives someone to spend $2 million to not die?
This week on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, Jay Shetty joins us.
The people who need the most love often ask for it in the most unloving ways. So when I see someone's behavior, the first thing I try and think of is how is that a plea for love? Whatever behavior you see from someone, it's them asking for love in some way. And I think we see it in children the most where when a child's throwing a tantrum, they're simply asking for presence, love, and connection.
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Chapter 2: How can we minimize the influx of microplastics?
Are you scared of dying?
No. Yet, that doesn't stop us from speaking with unbridled confidence on what we'll be. And to me, it really shows that we humans, we don't want to die.
He has spent millions of his own dollars to never die. Maybe even cracked the code that limits the human lifespan.
The king of longevity, Brian Johnson.
What drives someone to spend $2 million to not die?
Let's just say we fast forward a few hundred years. That's when humans figured out they were transitioning from die to don't die. One night of bad sleep reduces your NK cells by 70%. Your NK cells are what's killing cancer cells. I'd never heard that before. My grandfather was full of lead. My parents are full of asbestos and I'm full of microplastic.
We think they're causing very serious health problems. It may be worse than we think. I had this general idea that there must be some system in place in America to look watching out for us. Not true.
What age are you predicting to live to?
The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
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Chapter 3: What are the five pillars of perfect sleep?
And so what we did that was unique is when you're trying to do something to improve your health and wellness, it's important you can verify it does or doesn't work. Like if you hear a story about, you know, doing like drinking this kind of drink is good for your health.
It's a story until you can measure it and say, it has this kind of change in the body and either increases your biological age or lowers it or just something else. And so I became the most measured person in history and that's really expensive. So the really the expensive portions have been measuring every organ of my body. The actual protocol is a really low cost.
What was the most expensive thing to measure?
it really is in chasing the cumulative measurement across the entire body. For example, like I'm the most, I've spent more time in an MRI than anyone in the world. I think this new technology called DNA methylation, you're looking at these patterns in the body. I'm the most measured person with that DNA methylation in the world. And so like,
Doing this consistently, routinely, we do thousands of data points a week. And so I think it's just all these things adding up. It's just expensive to do the test, analyze the data, continually have that process. We need a large team to do it.
Yeah. Do any of the measurement tools have adverse effects on health?
Yeah, MRI we think is very safe. But CT, I've only done once. I just did a calcium score. And then we do blood draws. I've done a ton of blood work. We did ultrasound on my veins a while back to see if we had scar tissue that had been building up because I've done so much blood draw. We couldn't find any scar tissue.
So we do actively measure for negative repercussions of are we measuring too much to the extent of damage? So we're even measuring the measurement. So in every way we can possibly interrogate the body, we're trying to acquire data.
And how did you pick the areas to measure? Like, how were you able to say, these are the five, eight, I don't know how many there are metrics that I believe are the most important to longevity? How do we even know what are the things to focus on?
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Chapter 4: How does sleep impact our health and well-being?
that there is no point of no return at this at this moment i mean in this moment yes but like increasingly it's becoming this open question is there and i think that's the most interesting and exciting thing my dad is 71 i think most of his friends are just like we're getting close it's almost time but man he's got this ferociousness to live life that i'm really inspired by
Yeah, that's brilliant. What age are you hoping, or I guess you don't have to hope, predicting to live to?
I don't think that any human can say anything intelligent more than one year from now. We can say we think the Earth is going to continue to orbit around the sun with a certain degree of stability. In terms of how long are we going to live... How will cultural norms persist? What will be normal? What will not be normal?
I think given how fast AI is developing, we cannot say anything intelligent beyond a year.
Right. But your physical self, you still feel that?
Yeah. I mean, I think that if you look at some of the best AI companies, like Dario from Anthropic the other day wrote this blog post where he's imagining, and I agree with him, that it's possible we make 100 years worth of progress in the next five years. That when we bring up these new AI models, that we can do things that otherwise would take us 100 years to do.
Now, that does not mean that these therapies will be available overnight. We still have to go through the process. But I do think that we are looking at this possibility. So it's like, when I say things like, we may be the first generation to not die, people are like, stupid. Like, no. I get that from like this vantage point, we can't see how the pieces of the puzzle come together.
Like it's not clear to us which things do what and when, but that's not the point. It's really, you're trying to pattern match large macro scale trends. And if you say how fast is intelligence moving and when you acquire intelligence, what can that intelligence do on a macro scale? I think it really is a robust hypothesis that we may be the first generation to not die.
And what kind of compromise do you think that's going to take on a personal level or sacrifice? And you may not use those words, but if someone was looking at it and was thinking about it from that perspective.
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Chapter 5: Is reverse aging possible?
extremely destructive to health and wellness and so my entire life has actually been in this american culture and it's been really and i was consuming microplastics you know from like the earliest days like all of us have been and so i would say yeah i really wish it would have started before birth if not before then very early in my childhood i wish i wouldn't have been consuming sugar and things like that which really has those have long-term complications that uh we just i don't know i'm not sure we're fully aware of them
For those that don't know, walk us through the microplastics because I feel like that's been a trending term right now. People are becoming more and more aware. Walk it through for someone who's unaware of what's happening there.
On a large scale, my grandfather was full of lead, my parents are full of asbestos, and now I'm full of microplastics. Every generation has had their environmental toxin that has been a very a scourge in the world. Now microplastics have been this recent phenomena because plastics is a very low cost and high quality material. And so they're everywhere.
And so microplastic is less than five millimeters in length and we get them in our bodies either by inhaling them, by ingesting them or through our skin. Like in the average male testicle, there's 8.2 milligrams of microplastics. In the average brain, there's 50% more microplastics now than there was 10 years ago. So it's increasing really, really fast.
And so my company, Blueprint, we just launched the world's first at-home microplastics test. We were realizing this is a major problem. And the difficulty is we don't have any data. No one knows what these levels are in their life. And without that data, how do you know what things are working? If you stop drinking water out of plastic bottles, what happens?
What happens if you change the clothing you wear? What happens if et cetera, et cetera? And so, yeah, I have my levels measured. My whole team did it. Mine came back lower than anyone on my team. And we have reasons why we think that's the case, but we're not quite sure. So we're excited that we'll have the world's largest data set of microplastics in the next month.
And then as a community, we can start saying like, now let's all start running these tests and let's build therapies. So we can start doing things to minimize microplastics in the body.
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Chapter 6: What are the actionable steps to optimize health?
Walk us through the, what I was thinking about as you were talking is this idea of what happens to water in a plastic bottle versus a glass bottle.
Yeah, I mean, you're getting leaching from the plastic. And so I think the average plastic bottle has, I think, 200,000 microplastic particles, something like that. So it's a very large amount. And so generally speaking, so I've just made this rule. Like today, I brought my stainless steel. I just carry this around with me everywhere I go as my primary container for liquid.
But yeah, so just try to avoid plastic as a water bottle generally. And the thing is, on a bigger scale, the things which we can't see are now humanity's biggest threats. We're evolved to say, is there a lion in the bush or not?
know we can we sense it can we smell it can we see it whereas now the dangers of like co2 build up in the atmosphere we can't see it we can't smell it like we don't we don't know it exists so the only thing we know how it exists is we see a like a number on a screen that's like this is bad because this number we're like what does that mean we can't see it there's no real threat the same issue with microplastics it's like this unknown threat we can't see it we can't feel it
And so that's why like what I've been doing is I've been trying to say like, we, the reason why we measure everything is to basically give your body superpowers of awareness. It's like, now we understand like what's happening when you ingest fast food. We understand what happens when you ingest microplastics.
What happens when you ingest, when you don't sleep well, like you see the whole system effect. And so it's really cool in real time to see like, actually, yes, like for example, one night of bad sleep is, can, I think it's four hours or less, reduces your NK cells by 70%. Your NK cells are what's killing cancer cells.
So like your army of defense systems, like 70% of your army is wiped out after one bad night of sleep. And so it just has these really catastrophic effects.
I'd never heard that before.
Yeah, yeah. Or like there's this thing called S- And so you want these levels to be like in between 20 and 100, mine are 63.8. When you don't sleep well, it's a toxin that gets inside the brain because the blood-brain barrier breaks down. When you have a bad night's sleep, it's the same level as a traumatic brain injury.
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Chapter 7: How does capitalism affect health choices?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. And somehow we went away from that because I guess cost, it was cheaper to produce, cheaper to scale. I wonder how much human health has been sacrificed over saving and making money.
I think you nailed it. The biggest game in the world right now is capitalism. That's what drives the majority of what exists in the world today. Religious adherence doesn't really affect the effects of capitalism all that much, right? It's a very moderate effect. Capitalism is the absolute dominant effect in the world. It's more so than democracy, more so than any religion.
It's the primary game we're playing. So I think, yeah, and that's my primary objective in life is I'm calling it a question that the capitalism no longer answers the questions that are imminent for us as a species.
It's funny, though, because a lot of people will say that all of these new health trends are just disguised capitalism, but they're really simple and accessible, like you're saying. I loved how you started off by explaining that the $2 million isn't on the protocols, which we'll get to, but the $2 million is actually on the research and the measuring so that you can prove that the protocols work.
Exactly right.
And so it's actually accessible to everyone. But often people are like, like I remember when celery juice was the thing, which has helped me a lot in my life for sure, at least from a story anecdotal point of view. But I remember everyone being like, oh my God, they're just trying to make money off of celery farms. And I was like, I don't know.
I don't think everyone, I don't think there's one person that owns every celery farm. So I don't think that's working. What's your take on that? If that's making any sense.
Yeah, it does. Yeah. When I entered this world four years ago, I thought there's so many patterns that were similar to religion where like you take the King James version of the Bible and you can support a hundred different denominations, right? And they all fight like we're the true religion because of like this scripture, that scripture.
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Chapter 8: What does it mean to be a professional rejuvenation athlete?
I think for most people, they can get into bed, but then they sit there for an hour worrying and stressing and they're feeling anxious or nervous or overwhelmed. But you're saying that's going to happen. You just got to do that before you actually get into bed.
Exactly. Like, you have to go through this decompression time. You kind of have to let yourself, like, air out all of its grievances, all of its ideas, like, all of its reconciliation. And you have to talk through it with yourself. Like, hey, Brian, and be soft. Like, I hear you. Like, and it's okay. Like, tomorrow we're all right. But otherwise, yeah, you're right.
Like, you really – people – most people think – you lay down and that's the time to do the reconciliation and it just leads to disaster. But there's like, there's five metrics to pay attention to, or I guess four. Your sleep is good if when you, if your head is on the pillow, you're asleep within a few minutes. If you're longer than that, then you need some work.
Two is you want to be up less than 30 minutes per night total. So if you're up for one bathroom break, you know, back to sleep quickly. Three is like roughly two hours of REM, roughly two hours of deep. There's variants there. People are different on that one. But like those are roughly the sleep stats. If you're in that category, you're like early 20s like in your sleep quality.
As you age, it's harder to get sleep. And that's especially true for women. They have to spend much longer time in bed than men do. So it's really important that these habits you cement. Otherwise, like you're really fighting against multiple fronts.
and do you think that for people who are waking up often when they're asleep or and they're awake for longer than just a few moments what should they be looking at like what metrics should they be pushing towards to be like that's what's causing it how do they deduce that sometimes it's the last meal of the day so if their body's still robustly digesting then you have you basically you'll miss your deep because when you go to sleep you fall into a deep sleep window
very quickly. And then if you miss it, you can't get it. So last week I was at a conference and everyone went out for this big party and I wanted to try to accommodate, I wanted to be with everyone. So I went to bed at 7pm. I woke up at 9pm. So I got my two hours of deep sleep and Then I went out with everybody. We had a great time. I came back home. I went to bed, I think at one or two.
And then I got my remaining six hours of REM, you know, I'll get two hours of REM, but six hours of sleep. And I still had a great night's sleep and I felt wonderful the next day. But if you wait and go to bed, like at midnight for me, I would just miss my deep sleep. It would be gone. And so like, I'm trying to functionally be adaptive to societal norms while it was still logging those metrics.
But yeah, you have to be mindful of like, if you build your life around it, then you can make these adjustments. But you really have to make a professional effort to do this because it takes like structurally, just get it right and then you'll win.
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