The tech mogul is trying to design the blueprint for defying death.

Aug. 13, 2026 (NYTimes.com)

By Ross Douthat

Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast. 

Was it cooler to take psilocybin

Video: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011079554/an-8-pm-bedtime-oxygen-chambers-blood-tests-galore-what-would-you-do-for-a-longer-life.html?smid=url-share

​The tech mogul Bryan Johnson is trying to design the blueprint for defying death. Credit…The New York Times

For my final episode as host of “Interesting Times,” I wanted a fitting finale — a conversation that encapsulates the ambition of this show: examining how seemingly radical ideas are steadily entering the mainstream of American politics, technology and culture. Few ideas are as radical as the hope of dramatic life extension and the quest to live forever.

My guest today thinks he can outrun death. After selling his tech company for hundreds of millions of dollars and experiencing a profound religious crisis, Bryan Johnson has turned his own body into the ultimate science project, centered on an explicit mission: Don’t Die.

But why does Johnson want to live forever, and what lessons can his algorithmically driven lifestyle bring to the rest of us?

It’s been an honor hosting this podcast and navigating these strange waters with you. “Interesting Times” will be back with new episodes and new hosts in the fall.

An 8 P.M. Bedtime, Oxygen Chambers, Blood Tests Galore: What Would You Do for a Longer Life?

The tech mogul Bryan Johnson is trying to design the blueprint for defying death.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Bryan Johnson, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Bryan Johnson: I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Douthat: I’m very glad to have you. You have the dubious distinction, or maybe the extreme honor, of being the guest for my last episode as host of this show.

And I think this conversation, I’m hoping, is a fitting finale because one thing we’ve been trying to do on “Interesting Times” is to explore how I think what seemed to a lot of people like strange and radical ideas have been entering more into the mainstream of American politics, culture and technology, and so on.

One of those radical ideas that has come up more than once in this show’s run is the hope of dramatic life extension.

Douthat: It’s part of the pitch for artificial intelligence’s potential benefits, and it is now your life’s work. It’s very explicitly: Don’t Die. And you have made yourself a personal guinea pig, in fact, for all kinds of potentially life-extending treatments, and even taking what some, though certainly not me, might call a T.M.I. approach to everything that’s happening with your own body.

You’re an internet character. There’s some mockery out there, maybe, but I take you to be extremely sincere about this. And so I just wanted to start with your motivation.

Why do you, Bryan Johnson, want to fight and maybe abolish death?

Johnson: I was building my brain interface company a couple of years back. I was working with this esteemed professor, and we were trying to define intelligence.

He had a definition that I thought was really interesting, which is that intelligence is to know what to do next. And right now, in this moment, it’s a tectonic shift in terms of: What will become of the human race? What will become of each of us, individually? What do we aspire to?

Those are the questions I’m really trying to tackle. In this moment, as we remap our imagination as a species, what do we do next?

My conclusion is we are now at peak human knowledge. Also we’re potentially at peak ignorance with what A.I. will unleash.

There’s never been a time when there’s been a stronger juxtaposition between what we know and what we may not know. And in all that contemplation, I say the only thing I can truly trust in this moment is: I don’t want to die right now.

So this is not about immortality. It’s not about trying to live a million years. It’s to say the one thing I can say with certainty is: I don’t want to die right now. And I think that’s true for almost everybody.

Douthat: I want to get into some of the philosophical ramifications of this view, but can we talk biographically for a minute?

I think most people would say: Of course, I don’t want to die. But there’s a difference between having that sense or sensibility and taking the study and remaking of the human body — or your own body, in this case — as a mission.

What was going on in your life when you decided that this should be your mission?

Johnson: It goes back to when I was 21 years old. I returned from working as a missionary in Ecuador. I had lived in mud huts, on dirt floors, and I understood the depths of poverty. I was struck by the opulence of the United States and the conditions where I was in Ecuador.

In that moment, I said: I don’t know what I want to do with my life other than I want to do something useful for mankind.

And so I said: I’ll become an entrepreneur. I’ll make a whole bunch of money by age 30. Then, with money, I’ll do something interesting — a very common thing people hear.

So I did that. I sold my company, Braintree Venmo, for $800 million. I made a few hundred million dollars. And at that point, it was: OK, now I’ve done that. What do I do?

The irony was I was absolutely broken. I had burned myself out. I was raising three young kids. I was separating from my religion. I was chronically depressed. I was getting a divorce. And I just sold my company and lost my identity as a professional.

Even though I had $300 million in my bank account, it didn’t matter — I was absolutely broken as a person. So I had to rebuild myself.

I set out to ask all the basic questions: Who am I? What do I care about? What do I want to do?

Then I read this book called “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.” I learned about the history of zero, how it has disrupted everything in history — physics and math and art and religion and philosophy — and I wondered: What is the zero in this moment? What is the thing that is hiding in plain sight that is so obvious but that no one is doing?

I thought about that question for several years, and then I did a second thought experiment that really did it for me. I imagined being present in the year 2500. There I am, conversing with whoever that is — human or A.I., or some combination of human and A.I. They’re reflecting on the early 21st century, and they say: We’re so grateful for Homo sapiens that existed in the 21st century because they did blank.

In a few hundred years, they will compress our century into two or three or four sentences. So I thought that compression ——

Douthat: Most of them will be about podcasting, I’m confident.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Unquestionably.

I thought they’d say two things. One is that’s when Homo sapiens gave birth to superintelligence, and that’s when they figured out they’d no longer die.

And I thought: That’s it. That’s the moment where it flips, where humans go from the inevitability of death to: Don’t Die. And that’s going to become my purpose for existence.

Douthat: You were a missionary. You were a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: Why did you lose your religious faith?

Johnson: I read a book called “Rough Stone Rolling.”

Douthat: Oh, yeah. A biography of Joseph Smith.

Johnson: That’s right. And I learned about the history of the church. When you’re raised in the church, you’re given a version of events that are obviously very favorable to the church’s disposition. Then when you learn the true history, you need to square with the new reality.

Like all things, humans are messy. History is messy. Once I started learning more, I thought: I just can’t quite make sense of this. And so, in my mid-20s, I read that book, and it just broke for me.

I still stayed in the religion because I was married to someone who was in there, my children were in the religion, my entire family was. It took me a while to get out, but, yeah, my faith broke in my mid-20s.

Douthat: Did it make you an atheist or just a non-Mormon?

Johnson: A non-Mormon.

Douthat: Just for my guidance, what’s your current position on God?

Johnson: [Laughs.] I’m excitingly undecided.

Douthat: OK. Good. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the conversation.

Let’s talk about what you actually decided to do once you realized that this was going to be the hinge of the 21st century.

Your project is called Project Blueprint. Blueprints show you how something should be built or structured. What are you trying to show with this project, with the work that you undertake?

Johnson: After that thought experiment of the 25th century, it was clear to me that we basically needed to build a new philosophy, a new value system, new ethics, new morals, new incentive systems.

My co-founder and I, Kate Tolo, decided to make this a project, and we said: We will make my body the philosophy.

If you look throughout time, the first story ever written was Gilgamesh, a story basically about life and death and eternal life. Over the centuries, there have been different archetypes that represent the grappling of the human race with the questions: What does it mean to live and die? And is there an afterlife?

A new archetype needs to exist that represents the quest to try to continue existence in this physical body through the means of science and technology, and there wasn’t an archetype that filled that role.

What we designed is, first, from a scientific perspective, I’m a cluster of trillions of cells, so we’re going to measure every one of those cells, as possible, including doing blood draws and imaging and measuring my body every way possible. Then we’re going to use scientific evidence and say: How do we either slow down my speed of aging and/or reverse it?

Basically, we have done a robust scientific project. We are performance artists trying to convey a new philosophy. Bryan Johnson is the first Don’t Die Homo sapien prototype — the first Homo sapien that tried to incorporate that.

Douthat: But by “archetype,” you mean a positive archetype? Immortality is associated with anyone from Dracula to Dorian Gray, let’s say. So you’re trying to make yourself an admirable archetype, right? Someone who people look at and say: This is not a bargain with the devil or something where I’m going to have a portrait that ages while I stay young. This is something that I would want to identify with.

Johnson: Not necessarily.

Douthat: OK.

Johnson: I am willing to shave off good and bad, desirable and undesirable. People make these connections all the time: It’s Dorian Gray, it’s Dracula, it’s Prometheus.

Basically, I say yes to all of it. The play here is that this is a fun game for everyone. You have people who are watching me, wanting to learn from me. You have people who want me to fail, and they want to laugh. You have this whole mixture ——

Douthat: [Laughs.] People betting against you. Yep.

Johnson: Yeah. There’s an intense interest in me failing. And you know what? That’s great. I support their viewpoints. I understand their viewpoints. I think irony is in their favor.

But I think the value is that it’s a group conversation and a group journey. For those who hate me, those who love me, it’s all the same.

Douthat: How is your cause advanced through the haters?

Johnson: Whether it’s love or hate, it’s raw energy.

Douthat: OK. Tell me about the process then for listeners and viewers who are not fully familiar with the Bryan Johnson experience. In a typical day, what are you doing to defeat death?

Johnson: OK. I’ll give a couple of quick examples. I went to bed at 8 p.m., on the dot, and I’m extremely precise about my sleep because it’s the No. 1 thing I focus on. I’ve built my entire life around sleep.

Last night I nearly got five hours of restorative sleep. My resting heart rate was 40 beats per minute. My heart rate variability, H.R.V., was 13 percent higher. So my body got full restoration to clean out the garbage and to rebuild my body.

I woke up at 4 a.m. In the first hour, I get light in my eyes right when I wake up to say: Hey, body, I’m waking up. I then eat breakfast, which is protein powder. It’s hemp and pea protein, berries, nuts, seeds, extra virgin olive oil.

I then work out for an hour. I’m currently training to dunk a basketball. I then do 20 minutes of sauna. I then do some intermittent hypoxia and/or hyperoxia training, and then I have my first meal of the day.

Every single day, I do some version of that.

Douthat: The powder doesn’t count as a meal?

Johnson: [Laughs.] It does. I guess that’s my first real meal. You’re right.

Douthat: OK.

Johnson: By the way, every calorie fights for its life. I have extremely precise nutrition — every calorie gets in there. And that’s how my entire life is built.

So I’m doing this with you now. I’ve got some doctor appointments later this afternoon. I’ll do more measurements. But my entire life is regimented structure. This gives rise to people saying I live in a cage. That’s partially true. Also I’m a living experiment.

I’ll give you some quick examples for those who are unfamiliar. We try to measure everything. For example, I’m 48 years old, but my left ear is age 64 based upon some hearing loss I had as a kid listening to music too loud and shooting guns. So I’ve gotten hearing aids to try to correct for the deficiencies.

We aged the gums in my mouth — what’s the recession, etc.? Some data sets are very robust, some are emergent. We just take whatever data we have.

Douthat: My lower gums are ancient. I won’t show them to you.

Johnson: Do you know the measurement?

Douthat: No, no. I just can see them in the mirror, and they’ve clearly aged more rapidly than the rest of my mouth. This is just a rough estimate based on trips to the bathroom.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah.

We spent several months rejuvenating my gums because I have bruxism, which means I grind my teeth at night. I did that for about 20 years before I had a dentist saying: Hey, this is a problem. You need a mouth guard of this type.

The grinding caused my gums to recede and my pocket depth to increase. So we did a bunch of therapies where we restored my gums to roughly early 20s age. My left ear, we’ve made zero progress.

Sometimes you find a deficiency like where you’re older than your chronological age, and you can do something about it. Sometimes you can’t do anything about it. That’s why it matters so much to measure. You’re trying to find the oldest, highest-risk part of your body that creates the highest risk of all-cause mortality.

Douthat: You mentioned superintelligence earlier. You’ve sort of undertaken this project over a period where A.I. has become the focus of so much hope and fear and interest about measurement and analysis and everything else.

How are you using A.I. right now?

Johnson: This project would be stalled without A.I. We’ve acquired 1.5 billion data points. It’s impossible for any doctor to keep that in their memory, so we have built an A.I. system where we ingest all my data — my genome and my proteome — and every measurement we do, all my wearables. You name it, we do it.

Then we’re trying to make sense of it. The A.I. has been phenomenal in terms of identifying patterns we can’t pick up through manual processes.

The idea behind what I’m trying to do is: Cars drive themselves. Software now writes itself, to a certain degree. The next is health. Health is going to write itself, which means if I can measure my body and feed data to A.I., A.I. will know better what to do than me or my doctors.

I’m building my autonomous self. I’m building a self-driving body so it just automatically takes care of itself more robustly than I can.

Douthat: OK, but just to push on that analogy for a minute, as you describe your day, your body is not just taking care of itself while you go about your daily business. Your daily business is this project, and you are a wealthy entrepreneur, and — we’ll get into this in a minute — you’re also making money from this project. This is your business, so it’s not a passive thing where you’ve just trained your body to drive itself the way that a Waymo might drive you around San Francisco.

What’s the takeaway for someone who works a 9-to-5 job, during which maybe they can eat the protein powder or something, but otherwise, they’re not going to be dunking a basketball at 2 p.m. Pacific?

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah. So two things on this. One is there are some parts of the project that are autonomous. For example, the bed I sleep in automatically adjusts temperature according to my body. It changes my temperature profile about 32 times per night, making sure I stay in deep sleep and REM sleep and I avoid wake events.

So yes, there are some advanced features where I get real-time data, real-time measurement and real-time adjustment. But you’re right that I’m basically in analog world. As much as I want A.I. to run my life, I have to physically take those actions. I have to buy food.

I totally agree with you, and we’re trying to ——

Douthat: I mean, you can get DoorDash.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Douthat: I’m also interested, watching you, because I spent a certain period of my own life treating myself as a guinea pig. I had a very severe chronic illness that had basically totally ruined my life for a period of a couple of years. Let’s just say there was insufficient medical data on how you would ideally treat it.

So I treated myself, to use the language of studies, as an N of 1. I was just trying things — things that people had recommended, things that had some science behind them. But this was an all-consuming process at a lot of times.

First of all, I was always treating it as a provisional thing to get me back to health. That was sort of how I understood it. In the end, it got me there — or close enough to there — so that I no longer live like that.

Second, I didn’t imagine that the things I was doing were going to be generalizable. If other people had the same illness, I would give them advice and compare notes and so on, but it just seemed so clear that whatever was going on in my own body was very, very idiosyncratic.

When I look at what you’re doing, I’m curious about two things. First, this is an open-ended thing. There’s no point where you’re like: OK, now I can relax and stop trying all these things.

Because you’re not trying to attain health. You’re trying not to die, and that’s an ongoing process.

Second, I really don’t completely understand how you think you can reasonably generalize from, again, one body, one set of measurements and monitoring and so on, to a wider population. Scientific studies are not based on one person’s experience.

You can take either one of those questions — or you can react in any way to that you want.

Johnson: You can think of this in the idea that capitalism means you learn how to make money. You learn the skill sets of how to make money. People do that in a variety of ways, but you’re choosing: I’m going to choose to devote 10 hours of my day to make money. Or: I’m going to choose to spend blank hours of my day trying not to die.

It’s really the exact same thing, and people don’t quite understand that. Right now we know how much coffee costs, and we know what it means when the bank account balance gets below $100. But we have no accounting ledger for life and death.

You don’t know what it costs you to stay up all night. You don’t know what it costs you to be 40 pounds overweight. You can look at some rough data tables, but we don’t have an accounting system. You don’t see your bank account balance change that frequently.

What I’m trying to do is be a prototype, an archetype, to say: There’s a new way of thinking and a new way of being that has this. The way I try to compress this for people is I say: Look, I understand health is complicated. Your life is complicated. Everything you have going on, it’s stressful.

And so I try to say: Focus on one thing. That is your resting heart rate before bed. If somebody focuses on that single biomarker, it helps them wrestle the bad cultural habits we have as a society, which means we go to bed way too late, inconsistently. We have our screens on our faces up until bedtime. We eat way too late. We have snacks.

That one thing really wrestles the majority of bad habits, and once a person can wrestle their sleep, then all of these positive things happen. So I do try to say: Of course I’m the outlier, but I can simplify this into basics.

Douthat: So you’re doing 100 things, and you’re saying that the person who watches you can do two of those things?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: But you’re also selling products, right?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: What do you sell?

Johnson: Everything I put into my body, I make available so other people can do if they choose.

Douthat: And is everything you’re putting into your body chosen based on some kind of scientific research or background?

Johnson: Exactly. Yeah.

Douthat: OK. So you’re basically selling products. You’re not saying: I, Bryan Johnson, have run studies on these things.

But you’re saying: I, Bryan Johnson, have looked at studies on these things, and they’ve persuaded me that I should be willing to ingest them.

Johnson: Exactly. And I need to be very clear: I am not doing this to make money.

I started this project, and I needed this ——

Douthat: Can I raise an eyebrow at that? And have one note of skepticism?

Johnson: Please. You can raise two if you like.

Douthat: OK. But really, you’re not trying to make money?

Johnson: Absolutely not. My premise is: I already have plenty of money. I don’t need any more money. And, in fact, if I wanted to make money, there are probably 10 to 20 businesses I would start way before this one.

The business that I’m in sucks. Low margin, pain in the [expletive], terrible logistics. It is not the business I would build. And sometimes I really regret having done it. My life would be so much simpler by not having to spend time on this business.

But basically, whether you believe me or not, I’m genuinely trying to do people a favor in doing this.

Douthat: Do you pull products? Are you constantly pulling things in and out, taking things for a while and saying: Oh, that didn’t have any effect on the biomarker, and so I’ll stop taking it? What are you adding and subtracting?

Johnson: Mostly therapies. When you measure the body, and you say: OK, the biological age is blank. Can you reverse it? Then what therapies can you do?

And so we went down the list of the best therapies with the best evidence of showing age reversal, and we’ve done those. We did a hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We’ve done sauna. We did I.H.H.T.

Douthat: What’s the best? Again, let’s say I’m the person who says: Bryan, I can only do one thing out of your list of therapies. I’m a busy man. I’ve got a lot of kids. I have a podcast. I’m changing jobs. What do I do?

Johnson: Sauna. I would do dry sauna — that’s not wet, not infrared. Dry sauna between 175 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. And I’d do it about four to five times per week.

For you, because you’re a man, I would suggest you put ice on your boys, because otherwise it has negative effects on your fertility. So be sure they’re cold.

Douthat: I have five children. Honestly, Bryan, I’m not superworried about that specific issue.

What about reversal? You talked about the idea that you’re looking for things that actually reverse the age of an organ or a part of your body. What’s something that you’ve done that you think has the most promise for that?

Johnson: We’ve seen several. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was one of the most efficacious therapies we’ve ever done. The difficulty is that you need to be in this chamber for 90 minutes for 60 sessions in 90 days, so it’s a huge time commitment.

Douthat: That’s a commitment.

Johnson: It’s a huge one. It’s just not practical for people to do it. But we saw benefits in skin health, telomeres, microbiome, brain. We saw it across the board.

Douthat: Again, in any of these cases, you’re one person. Are you assuming that somewhere in your fan base there are people who are saying: Oh, this is really interesting that Bryan Johnson got these results. We’re going to set up a big controlled trial based on this?

Johnson: Yes.

Douthat: Again, to take this beyond your own experience, you need that kind of thing, right?

Johnson: Absolutely, yeah. I’ll give you an example where that has bridged. We did an experiment looking at psilocybin. People think about psilocybin either as an ancient medicine ceremony, or recently, for trials looking at PTSD and anxiety and things like that. We asked the question: Is psilocybin a longevity medicine?

We did the most quantified psychedelic psilocybin experience in history. We measured 250 biomarkers, and one of the things we found was there was this unique metabolic reset of my blood glucose. That was not in the literature before.

So in that sense, yes, there are several groups now who have petitioned, trying to get funding for a rigorous study to look at psilocybin more robustly as a longevity therapy. It would be a very big shift in how people think about this.

So we’ve had several wins like that, of reframing different topics in what we do. And again, it doesn’t answer it definitively, but it points in the direction of: Is this worthy of a study?

Douthat: Aspirationally, based on your knowledge right now, without some further dramatic breakthrough — just to put yourself in the hands of your haters for a minute — how many years of your life do you think you’re getting through this kind of regimen?

Johnson: Yeah, let’s actually amplify their argument and say the better argument for them is I’m shortening my life. Not only am I not doing myself good — let’s say I’m actually doing myself harm by intermingling with my body.

And you know what? I’m open to the criticism. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s better to just let my body do its thing without meddling.

We measure things as best we can. We try to look at all the data, and we say: How is my body doing? We look at hundreds of markers every month trying to say: Is it good or bad? But, ultimately, we don’t know.

So I think it’s really an open-ended question. This is early, early stages of science.

Douthat: I guess what I’m driving at is there’s a best-case scenario, where you do everything right, and the end result is you’re healthier in your 80s than you otherwise would be, and you avoid some disease you otherwise would get, and in the end, you get an extra one to seven years of life. And that’s a win for you and for everyone who ever watched you on a video.

But that’s not defeating death. That’s not: Don’t Die. Whereas actually defeating or, more realistically, postponing death, some people would say, is going to come from some big breakthrough that has nothing to do with the protein powder you take or anything. And everything that you do is going to look sort of like dieting advice before Ozempic.

What do you make of that argument? Does your work actually connect to the people who want to add not one to three but 50 to 75 years to human life spans?

Johnson: Yeah. I’m under no illusion that we don’t have the longevity drug that just makes death go away. But health is forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters.

I think your case is a good example that when you do have something wrong with you, it wrecks your life. And when you choose to do things that put you at risk of your life being wrecked, that’s bad.

Continue reading Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint for a 150-Year Life: Is It Worth It? →